TAKEDOWN STATEMENT

We have done our best to name and acknowledge the poets/creators with the information available to us. If you have any concerns about attribution, please email us info@freedomarchives.org.

THE ROLE OF POETRY IN RESISTANCE

*Please note that some of the poems in this collection may contain confronting language or content. None of the language has been edited or censored. 

Poems addressing the questions, concerns, and demands central to liberation resound across nearly every collection in the archives—spanning borders, decades, and political movements. I became curious about the role of poetry within these movements—what can poetry uniquely offer those who endeavor to create social change? What about the power of poetry allows it to travel across temporal, cultural, and linguistic boundaries? 

The role of poetry is not always direct or quantifiable. Its power is not measured by how many people read it, nor is its success determined by whether a political prisoner is freed, or a petition passes, or a corrupt leader is held to account. Poetry subverts linear and direct channels of knowing and communicating, instead, it reaches the listener’s (or reader’s) senses and emotions through figurative, invocational, and imaginative means. Poetry operates in the site of the body; it moves, activates, inspires, calls out, calls in, honors, remembers, reflects, critiques, disrupts, envisions, witnesses.

Audre Lorde, the revolutionary “Black, lesbian, feminist, socialist, mother, warrior, poet,” wrote famously in her essay “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” that

for women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action…poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.¹

Poetic expression is not a cultural frivolity then, but an existential necessity. Poems are woven from hope and dreams, from fears and pain. Poems are living and vital materials in a movement toward realizing social change. Poems serve as a channel for direct action, a testament to daily experience, an artifact of witness.

And yet, poetry’s role in resistance is limited. Language pushes against, makes demands of, and confronts oppressive structures, but words are neither bulldozers, nor bullets. Poet Danez Smith speaks to the inherent tension within the form—the simultaneous power and powerlessness of words—during times of urgency in their piece, “my poems.²” Smith writes,

my poems are fed up & getting violent. // i whisper to them tender tender bridge bridge but they / say bitch ain’t no time, make me a weapon!

In her poem “For Saundra,³” poet and activist Nikki Giovanni confronts the contradictions and limitations of writing during revolution as they confess

i wanted to write / a poem / that rhymes / but revolution doesn’t lend / itself to be-bopping… // so i thought again / and it occurred to me / maybe i shouldn’t write / at all / but clean my gun / and check my kerosene supply.

From bridging, to be-bopping, to intervention beyond words, resistance requires all the tools at our disposal. Art is often at the heart of resistance movements, creating a stark contrast between the language of the oppressor and the creative spirit of the people. Poetry, an ancient form passed down orally, belongs to the people. Sung out from occupied streets, written from prison cells, spoken from hospital beds, poems insist on survival and invite us into possibility. The revolution won’t be televised, but it will be rhymed, set to rhythm, versified, spoken out, and sung about. 

Poetry in The Freedom Archives

Throughout the poems nested within the archives, a few common threads emerge. Some poems paint futures free of colonization and imperialism, some speak intimately and supportively to friends and comrades who were imprisoned or murdered by state violence, some directly voice opposition to repressive political conditions. The poems also range stylistically and tonally—some authors draw on metaphor and image to engage their audiences, some rely on repetition to create captivating rhythm, some are tender and somber, some are raw and rioting. From better known revolutionary poets like Assata Shakur and Mahmoud Darwish, to the lesser known, but nonetheless brilliant, culture makers and activists, this project merely scratches the surface of the rich depths of poetic voices housed in the archives. Through this exploration, I found poetry interwoven in six key ways, reaching:

• Toward Future Visions / Alternative Narratives
• Toward Self Determination / Self Definition
• Toward Defiance
• Toward Calls to Action
• Toward Solidarity
• Toward Tribute / Dedication

The poems featured in this project span twenty-one unique Freedom Archives collections: Programs produced by Kiilu Nyasha, Reflecciones de la Raza (RP), Independent Collections, The Real Dragon, Human Rights in Palestine, Chuy Varela Collection, Freedom is a Constant Struggle, Comunicacion Aztlan Collective, Materials Recorded and Gathered for “Wild Poppies”, Assata Shakur, Asian American Struggles, Indigenous/Native American Struggles, Weather Underground Organization (WUO), Women Political Prisoners, Real Dragon Prison Project, Chile, Various Black Liberation Movement Publications, Gay Liberation Movement/LGBTQ Community, Breakthrough, Pontiac Brothers, Resistance Conspiracy.

To engage further with the historical context and content contained within any of the featured poems, please visit these archival collections – search.freedomarchives.org. 

May these poems, the revolutionary ancestors who created them, and the cultural producers and stewards who preserved them, keep you company in times of darkness.

1.  Lorde’s essay first appeared as “Poems Are Not Luxuries” in Chrysalis: A Magazine of Women’s Culture (Vol. 3, 1977), and was later published in her collection Sister Outsider in 1984 under the title “Poetry is Not a Luxury.” ↩︎
2. Smith, Danez. “My Poems.” Poetry London, Issue 95, Spring 2020. poetrylondon.co.uk/my-poems. ↩︎
3. Giovanni, Nikki. “For Saundra.” Hello Poetry, May 12, 2013. hellopoetry.com/poems/373459/for-saundra. ↩︎