Synechedoche! The smaller (particular) relates to the whole (universal)

One thing I dwell on when engaging poetry is whether or not the narrator is writing something as a testimony or if they are bearing witness to the events they detail. Something unique about poetry that protests (that demonstrates, that remonstrates) is that it narrativizes the witnessing of events or issues BUT also, especially in the case of Poetry and Protest, narrativizes the horizontal traumas of events and experiences. We’ve been tapping into that re-fashioning of political landscape since the beginning of this semester. Beginning with this thought, I found that (similar to how smaller or single event/issue can impact whole groups) that many of the poets use the particular (the smaller or single event/issue) to speak to the universal (the ways it impacts a whole people or all people, for that matter).

Such a Boat of Land roots us in the particular, of Pennsylvania (situating us in several landscapes through the Amtrak train, the city of Philly, the unique attributes that can be ascribed to both landscapes). I can’t help but think of a previous Elmaz where we spoke about synechedoche (speaking to the larger nature of an person, place or thing by focusing in, almost cinematically, on the smaller part of it). Pennsylvania becomes a way to speak to the country, which debatably also transcends into the universal. The crime, hardship, the niggervilles and gookvilles and spicvilles are the particular landscapes that become relate to cityscapes themselves (a merge of and segregation of the displaced and relocated, and in these instances to the countries and cities that are hostile towards them).  

In Malcom X, I find a similar focus on place (the physical place, the site of the particular, and place as it relates to memory, which to me is held within the universal). I feel as if many of the poems we have read craft and zero in on place as it relates to memory as a way to connect with their readers. Especially the poets who wrote about the lands they left, the ways in which they had to keep it in their memory, the ways in which lands change or that we as people change. Here, I find so many universal themes: how we relate to things over time, how we feel isolated or sense a loss as an effect, the lens we carry when we witness (which shape not only place but time itself, the unraveling and pacing of our witnessing, and the ways the particular inform the universal in that its where the particulars must merge). This make me think back to one of my first post about the inherent nature of blackness to make the “present” or the “happening” part of our history, part of our narrativizing and understanding and defining of blackness. 

Lil’l Kings held the prompt for me this week. The challenge of NVDA (nonviolent direct action) within the confines of, again, the particulars conversing. That being, 1) MLK and NVDA within its times (which never gets the kind of criticism that would best inform how movements could re-approach the anti-blackness we face today) and 2) MLK and NVDA within contemporary protest, to which pacifism and respectability still reigns over movement work. What makes this universal, for me, is that the particular descriptions used to define contemporary blackness (within a class context) did exist in MLK’s day. The aesthetics have changed but Huges and Dubois and Baldwin have written lengths on that kind of black (and many writers for their peoples) to shatter the illusions crafted by countries and by history-writers. 

Perhaps the universality is felt more for me because of this lens. What is more universal than this struggle the entire resisting world must face around violence against our oppressors? What would Gandhi do (the man who nicely hated Afrikans)? I find it extremely important after much of the radical or left leaning world watched the videos that came out of Syria. Where a strong part of the narrative was around resistance, to die resisting or to die not, that is the question. That things such as tweeting on twitter, a (now highjacked) protest space, was criticized by Syrian resisters as the only way to truly get support abroad. That is a contentious subject. But I feel it in my gut. When Israel says Palestine is attacking them, weaponizing resistance as a powerful threat and violence against innocent colonizers, it is used to delegitimize movements for freedom there and everywhere. In a way, stirring up these hard emotions around these issues, rooted in discussing MLK and NVDA as it relates to black resistance (aesthetics and politics) of today, gets to these universal conversations about resistance globally, perceptions of resistance and of bodies and of uprisings against domination.