Poetry Is Not a Luxury
Famed poet and scholar Audre Lorde spoke of poetry as the medium for meaningful existence. In Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, she defines a new genre of writing -biomythography- which is a hybrid of biography, mythology, and history, and in which she relates how, from a young age, she preferred to articulate herself with poetry as opposed to prose. As a proud outsider all of her life, and as a self-defined Black, lesbian, feminist, socialist, poet, mother of two including one boy and a member of an interracial family (1), who sought to defy stereotypes and expectations at every turn; poetry had been a fitting choice of self-expression. Unable or unwilling to define herself, and most likely from a conflation of both, Lorde found a way to exercise her thoughts, expressions, and unique perspective through the purposeful ambiguity of poetry. In The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House, a collection of essays that I’ve revisited annually since a serendipitous Amazon purchase four years ago, the purpose and significance of poetry that I sensed in my father’s writings were extrapolated through the wisdom of Lorde:
“...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 towards 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 that it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.
As they become known to us and accepted by us, our feelings and the honest exploration of them become sanctuaries and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas. They become safe-house for that difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action.”
Through a process of mutation, from fantastical thought into tangible sentiment, poetry enables creativity of the most necessary sort. For marginalized people and cultures, popular reason can be dangerous -even fatal. If the logic of the majority is that you, the minority, are vile and worthless from no doing of your own and that similarly, those related to you are likewise damned and unsuitable for society, then creative, fantastical thinking is necessary to survive. Poetry provides that sanctuary. The ability to think freely and encourage the imagination to document its wildest dreams and intentions, including but not limited to a sense of recognition in that documentation, seeds the power for action and significant change. For my father, an outsider like Lorde, poetry provided an escape from the narrative his parents had unwillingly accepted, a narrative that decided us as unworthy of decency, as Filipino immigrants. In poems like “Canciones,” possibilities are formed from what was once a dearth of opportunity. In his lifetime, Papa was unable to reach a point of confident affirmation through poetry, but his poems have enabled me to affirm for him, and for other Filipino Americans, the significance of our life and contributions in this country.
Through free thinking informed by a variety of sources -most especially our own fine-tuned, critical analysis- we can realize ourselves beyond any agenda other than our own. The formation of our best selves, especially for People of Color, includes what Lorde refers to as an “ancient, non-european consciousness of living as a situation to be experienced and interacted with,” to which she credits the ability to “learn more and more to cherish our feelings, and to respect those hidden sources of our power from where true knowledge and, therefore, lasting action comes.” Through true knowledge and lasting actions, such as the experiences, poetry, and substantiated arguments created and furthered through three generations of my family -grandparents, children, and grandchildren- the narrative and thus the course of our humanity has changed for the better. The abjection we were once subjected to out of necessity is now fully comprehended and confronted as a choice that we can choose not to satisfy. Hard as it may be to be bold, to dare to be otherwise even at the cost of targeting; having the freedom, and the ability, to both decide and enact who I want to be, is not a blessing I take lightly. I therefore nurture and maintain myself as I would a loved one, I encourage and validate my thoughts and dreams just the same.
If it is possible for the Damacion family to transcend oppression, depression, self-sabotage, and horrific death, toward omniscience, empathy, peace, and confidence, then the same is possible for Filipino America as a whole. Through creative thinking, and poetry most especially, we can, in the words of Ms. Lorde, “pursue our magic and make it realized.”
1. https://uuliveoak.org/pdfs/worship_9-04-09_excerpts_no_hierarchy_of_oppressions.pdf
2. https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/undergraduate/modules/fulllist/first/en122/lecturelist2019-20/lorde-poetry-is-not-a-luxury.pdf