Would You Give Your Life for Your Art?

People often tell me that my poems are brave, that reciting them publicly takes courage. I understand what they mean by that, and I thank them for the compliment they intend, but it also always makes me cringe. I think I’ve been writing and publishing long enough that I can say honestly about my own work that it often insists on the visibility of, among other things, sexual violence in a way that makes some people uncomfortable and that others find affirming, liberating, and even motivating. I would be lying if I said that the struggle with myself that writing what I write often involves did not force me to confront some of the darkest parts of who I have been and continue to be. Still, I wonder what it means when someone praises me for the courage it takes to do what is at bottom a very private thing which does not really put me in any immediate danger; and I wonder as well what it means to call bravery my decision to read that work out loud in front of an audience, when the struggle is over. I guess I am wondering what precisely we mean in this context by the words courage and brave?

Not too long ago, I attended a reading and panel discussion about poetry and violence with Cynthia Dewi Oka, Sevé Torres, Vanessa Mártir & Rajiv Mohabir at Bluestockings–a bookstore about which, if you live in New York and you don’t know it, you should make it your business to find out. Cynthia–whose book, Nomad of Salt and Hard Water you should also definitely know about (I reviewed it here)–introduced the panel by talking in part about the bravery of her co-panelists’ work, each of which takes on in very powerful ways intimate and political violence. During the Q&A, I pushed back at that characterization, not because I think it is untrue, but because I think that courage(ous) and brave(ry) are words that get tossed around very easily, sometimes way too easily, when we talk about the qualities we see in writing and writers whom we admire. How, I wanted to know, did each panelist think her or his work earned the label courageous?

I wish I’d been able to record their answers, because they were moving and persuasive. The one element they all had in common was to claim the courage it takes to write against one’s own invisibility–racial, ethnic, national, gendered, sexual, religious, personal–especially in situations where that visibility is actively sought by others. Dewi Oka gave this thought its most extreme expression when she talked about how, after surviving a particularly brutal and violent attempted murder, she had come to love poetry–as a way of never being silent in the face of violence–more than her life. I think that’s more or less a direct quote, and while it is a statement worth unpacking quite a bit further, for my purposes here, I want to leave it unexamined as a simple assertion of what it means to write against one’s own invisibility.

As a survivor of sexual violence whose art is largely animated by that experience, I understand that when people call me courageous for having written, they mean some version of the answer those panelists gave, and I do not fundamentally disagree with them. Why, then, does it make me cringe? Because I am very aware of how little danger I am actually in. Even when I write about antisemitism–the violence and depredations of which I have also experienced–and I am far more likely now to be a target of antisemitic than of sexual violence, the fact is that I write and publish and give readings in an environment where my safety is if not 100% guaranteed, then certainly secure enough that I can almost entirely take it for granted.

This is not to deny the possibility of violence against me, or that there are places in my own country, my own state, even my own city where that violence is more likely to happen. It is simply to acknowledge that, right now, no one is systematically employing violence, implicit or explicit, literal or figurative, to silence me, to render me invisible; and that makes me suspicious when people use the word courage as praise for my work and of the agenda that motivates its use. In Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry, Louise Gluck articulates this suspicion for me:

Poets [in the United States] have something to gain by giving currency to the idea of courage…. That courage animates a body of work seems, as an idea, immensely attractive. It dignifies the materials, infusing them with qualities of urgency and danger. In the ensuing confrontation, the poet becomes Perseus slaying Medusa. Equally appealing is unconscious, helpless courage: Cassandra who cannot help but see. This alternative carries the additional benefit of suggesting that truth and vision are costly, their purchase secured by sacrifice or loss. The glamor of these, and related, images stimulates the aspiring visionary, who need simply reproduce the outward sign to invoke the spiritual condition: in this instance, need simply arrange to have paid. (23-4)

Earlier in the essay, Gluck points out that the term “courage” is, in her experience, “much more likely to be used…by poets themselves than by critics,” and she suggests here that there is a certain amount of self-interest, if not self-aggrandizement, in one poet calling a fellow poet’s work courageous. After all, if having a vision and speaking the truth of it is enough, then all poets everywhere are to some degree either Perseus or Cassandra, and if everyone’s work exhibits that kind of courage, then courage as a descriptor, as praise, becomes relatively meaningless. Gluck goes on:

In its local use, the term “courage” responds to poetic materials felt to be personal: in so doing, it concentrates attention on the poet’s relation to his materials and to his audience, rather than on the political result of speech. Its obligation as analysis is to suggest analogues for exile and death: to name what is at risk. (24)

I am thinking in particular of the most recent time when someone called my work courageous. I read “Working the Dotted Line” a poem from my book, The Silence of Men. The poem is about the first time I used a condom, which also happened  to be the first time I had sex with a woman who was a virgin, and how awkward it was, how difficult it was for me to deal with the fact that the sex would bring her, at least at first, some pain, and how ashamed I was that I’d had no idea if there was a way for us to have sex so that she wouldn’t feel pain. (The poem is too long to quote in the post, but you can read it here.) After the reading, a woman came up to thank me for that poem, saying it was very brave and that it had made her think of her own first time. She laughed knowingly with the friend who was with her and walked away.

Where, I asked myself, was the risk for me in reading that poem? Maybe you could argue that because the poem implicitly disavows a certain kind of male stereotype about having sex with a virgin that I risked being seen, by some people, as less than a man, but so what? Compared–and now I’ve gotten to what started me thinking about this topic in the first place–compared to the risk that some women in Afghanistan take to write their poems, to read them before an audience, to share them with the world, whatever courage it might have taken for me to read what I read is as nothing. The article, called “Why Afghan Women Risk Death to Write Poetry,” was written by Eliza Griswold, and it tells the story of some of those women.

“I can’t say any poems in front of my brothers,” [Meena, one of the women the article is about] said. Love poems would be seen by them as proof of an illicit relationship, for which [she] could be beaten or even killed.

And then a little later, about another woman:

Rahila was the name used by a young poet, Zarmina, who committed suicide two years ago. Zarmina was reading her love poems over the phone when her sister-in-law caught her. “How many lovers do you have?” she teased. Zarmina’s family assumed there was a boy on the other end of the line. As a punishment, her brothers beat her and ripped up her notebooks, Amail said. Two weeks later, Zarmina set herself on fire.

Some years ago, the poet Nadia Anjuman was killed because she wrote poetry.

Every time I hear stories like these, I ask myself whether I would have that kind of courage. Would I, given a similarly oppressive circumstance, risk death to say what I had to say? And every time I am confronted with the same answer: I’d like to think so, but I just don’t know. It’s an honest answer, one I am not embarrassed to give, but it does make me wary when people call me or my work, or any American writer’s work, courageous. I want to know what their agenda is and whether it does justice to the courage and bravery of writers like these women poets of Afghanistan.