On Writing a Poem I Resisted Writing
I sat down to write it in 2015, over a decade after the fact.
It is not lost on me that it has been another decade since.
(7 Ways Writing Heals Us Even After Terrible Trauma.)
The talk among the candidates was immigration control via border walls. That’s what I remember. According to the Pew Research Center, the talk among the people was “economy,” “terrorism,” and “foreign policy.” Next was “healthcare,” “gun policy,” and “immigration” in descending order.
Writing the poem felt askew of appropriate: I was a white American who had visited Palestine with my Christian College in the early aughts. The trip was formative, but not because I enjoyed it. I was what I then called “spiritually depressed,” going through the shift from faith to doubt to whatever liminal space that would happen after. But I hadn’t told anyone.
That silence is telling–a closeted crisis of faith for a closeted person who was also shy.
I had been embarrassed by how young and American my group was, how loud, how obviously out of place. I was embarrassed by how much space we took up, unapologetically, as if we belonged wherever we went. So many layers of privilege.
But what is more, I believed I would die on that trip, that class–a geography and history of key Biblical moments we’d visit in real time and space–traveling from Egypt to Jordan to Israel and Palestine. Places of holy movements and centuries of war, oppression, genocide, disease, famine, death, often at the hand and/or blessing of a god I no longer wanted or could not get myself to believe was real.
What made this worse was I did not believe enough in God to say I believed in God, but I believed enough to be afraid of hell and to think I was destined for it because of my unbelief.
This could be the beginning of a poem from that time: “Oh mind fuck, of swirling circle of hell, oh tight-lipped moment of my own undoing…”
* * *
I was pacing. I was in the Santa Cruz mountains at a self-made retreat, surrounded by the A-frame gorgeousness of the cabin I had rented for far, far below the going rate. The impulse I had was to start something new, something I hadn’t planned, something that would articulate the images that had been knocking around my head for years about that trip I’d taken with my college class.
I had resisted the allowance because of sheepishness and shame: What did I have to say about a religious and political conflict not my own? If I did have something to say, who the hell was I to say it? I didn’t want to take up any kind of space–airspace, pagespace, worldspace, or otherwise on a topic that felt so out of my daily life and half a world away–like my American college class had done.
If I wrote some of the images–the headphones in Yad Vashem, the sculptures outside, the Dome of the Rock built on the Temple Mount, the monastery at the base of the “holy mountain”–wouldn’t I also have to write something insightful? Something clear? And how could I edge towards something political and not implicate myself in the process?
Bingo.
I’ve had enough therapy–and spent enough time with the book this poem is in, When I Say the Bones I Mean the Bones–to see that making peace with self-implication was the key to releasing my ability to write and write it as well as I could. I felt guilty about traveling because it was, in fact, guilt-ladened. I felt guilty for my silence around so many subjects of race and religion because I was, in fact, guilty. I felt ashamed of my shame. Oh mind fuck, indeed.
Another poem in the book has a line in it I added very late, and after I allowed myself to write it the rest of the poem finally fell into place.
The poem is “Spermaceti,” and it began as a hater poem for the men of the whaling era–the 18th and 19th centuries in America–and also cryptically to white western “expansion” and “exploration” from Europe of the warmer oceans and the Americas from the 15th century on. The line is just past halfway, and it visually and thematically acts as a barb for the speaker, who has just finished a rant on how destructive the men were, environmentally, relationally, and sexually, and then it hooks: “This is the moment I become truly afraid/I am hardly doing any different. Often silent/when I need to speak. All logic lost at a woman’s touch.”
The barb was implication. This is one of only a few references to sexuality in this book, and it shows how I was feeling about it when I came out and was finishing the poem: I felt like the cisgendered straight men of centuries and millennia past who I’d been annoyed and harassed by–and navigating–my whole life. I did not speak up when I saw injustice, and I was as susceptible to my own desires as any other human, male or otherwise.
That was how I found peace to finish “Americans at Yad Vashem.” I allowed the implication that was implicit in my story. Of course the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was not my experience. Of course it also was: I was raised on stories of Ishmael and Isaac, and the spiritual lineage was my own. Of course the Israeli occupation of Palestine was and is not my experience, but I saw the walls with my own eyes. I just had to land on the shape of the connection, which, as it turns out, is and was not declarative and loud. It was something else more humbled.
Isn’t that how we write? We ask ourselves what story we must tell, where our stories brush against other stories that seem so far apart? And I also ask what it means to risk, to risk being wrong, to be ok with that implication.
For me, and for the poem–and for the book as a whole–the permission and call to speak is central to its themes. As a shy person, I have sat in many seminars incapable of jumping into the mix.
What is interesting though is how my resistance to speech continues still. I had a very hard time sitting down to write this essay when Gaza is under rubble, when people are barely surviving, when my knowledge and action is wildly incomplete. I struggle like many to know how to be of service, to speak or act against this hulk of war and genocide and hate.
Before the election I took an op-ed writing class with Megan Mayhew Bergman. She’d offered it for free to encourage more people to write political articles on topics that might make a difference for who was elected and what measures and laws were voted into place. The big takeaway: It doesn’t have to be huge. Write what is nearest your heart. Write from your actual experience. People listen when they hear authenticity. People change over wide swaths of time. Just speak. Just write. Maybe try humbleness. The rest will fall into place.
Check out Amanda Hawkins’ When I Say the Bones I Mean the Bones here:
(WD uses affiliate links.)
