By Andrea Loewen
@ms_andreajoy
Can poetry be an act of resistance?
Sue Goyette banking on it with her poetry anthology Resistance: Righteous Rage in the Age of #MeToo.
The collection has its roots in 2016, in the wake of the Jian Gomeshi accusations, when Goyette brought people together to discuss their experiences of sexual assault. “The air in the room thrummed,” she says in the introduction to Resistance. “The trauma, violence, and wounds of those experiences were exported from silence and individual bodies into a space that held the pain collectively.”
This collection grew out of those meetings. It, like all acts of resistance, speaks truth, lifts up the voices of the oppressed, and unmasks oppressors, challenging the power structures that maintain the status quo.
“Reading through the large pile of submissions,” says Goyette in the introduction, “it became clear to me how each voice is a crucial reclamation of power.”
This is absolutely true. Each poem in Resistance represents not only one person’s silence broken, one more person who stepped out of their fear or darkness to declare their truth, but whole worlds cracking open, as an assault is never against just one person.
So, yes, a book of poetry can absolutely be an act of resistance.
On the other hand, however, what does an anthology of poems actually do?
Usually, when I look for people and events to cover in this column, I seek out protest movements, support organizations, educators. People who are trying to reach beyond their own circles and influence society at large. Those who are actively campaigning to change laws or public attitudes.
Resistance does not quite fit that bill.
This book offers a collection of potent images, of moments that slice through you and fill you with rage, sorrow, emptiness, plus a little bit of hope. But for whom? Who is actually going to pick up a book of poems about rape? Is it the supreme court judges who set precedents for sexual assault cases? Is it the police officers who receive reports of assault and then make their own judgments as to whether or not a crime has occurred? Is it the lawyer who suggests a victim consider her attacker’s future? Is it the teenage boy who doesn’t know how to tell if a girl likes him so looks online and finds a ‘pickup artist’ youtube channel?
No.
The likely audience for a book of poems about sexual assault are survivors.
If an act of resistance isn’t directly reaching those it opposes, what is it doing, really? How can it make change?
The answer seems to be that the kind of change offered by an anthology like Resistance is on the individual scale of empowerment. It is for each poet who transformed their experience into art and for each person who reads it and, perhaps, feels something unlocked inside them.
In terms of individual works, they are as varied as a person’s experience might be. While many paint a picture of the writer’s own experience of assault (hence the aforementioned rage, sorrow, and emptiness), others speak to different aspects of assault: a mother learning of her daughter’s rape; a survivor facing their assailant in court; and a particularly disturbing poem from the perspective of a man who assaults his neice.
While the lines that take your breath away might be different from mine, here are a few that stuck with me:
From “Normalized” by Jesse Hoth, where she describes all the ways her male friends, who were “good people” felt entitled to her body: “What are you doing? / My brain is foggy / I think my eyes are closed / yes, they’re closed / he thinks I’m asleep.”
From Jill M. Talbot’s “A Metaphor”: “I played dead because no one really dies / in a dream, and he nodded that he’d play the boogeyman because / horror movies only live on the screen.”
From “Five Parts Rape Poem and One Part Self Care” by Kyla Jamieson: “plus I’ve been / such a bad / bad girl / like already / I’ve used the words / rape & rapist / too many times / in this poem / it’s 2016 / & jian’s not guilty / but my / credibility’s shot / hey / let’s take a break.”
Will this one poetry anthology change the world? Of course not. But it is one in a growing collection of public, bold statements of truth that have been popping up around the world, some artistic, some political, some legal.
We will always need the kind of resistance that marches the streets, that stands in front of riot police, that pushes our leaders to change. But we also need this kind of resistance, the internal kind that resists silence and, more importantly, resists shame.
Resistance: Righteous Rage in the Age of #MeToo is available from the University of Regina Press and many other bookstores.
Andrea Loewen is a writer, theatre-maker, and choreographer in Vancouver, BC. She writes for a variety of online publications, including Loose Lips Magazine and Vancouver Presents, as well as her own site, The Receptionist Blog. Her first book, Feeling Better: A Field Guide to Liking Yourself is available from Amazon and Chapters Indigo. www.andrealoewen.com.
