Kanyinsola Anifowoshe

On poetry and the ethics of complicity

The couch in the basement is white and suede and smooth. From the couch, I face the television, which is playing a film called The Swimmers. The Swimmers is the true story of two teenage sisters who are training for the Olympics in Syria. The sisters live in the before of Aleppo’s cobblestoned, winding streets, in a bedroom painted yellow, alongside a small bright bird who flits around their room and sometimes poops on their bed—a fact that they may remember fondly in the after. After the violence that kills the elder sister’s close friends, after soldiers threaten and harass them on the street, after the bomb that tears through a swimming pool during one of their qualifying meets, they flee Syria. In their flight, the sisters end up on a boat crossing the Aegean Sea, from Turkey to Greece. The boat is crammed with parents and children and young women and their dreams. It is so crammed that it stalls in the middle of the sea and begins to sink. So the swimmer-sisters do the bravest thing that anyone can imagine, which is to tie their waists to the boat and jump out. Roped like this, they swim all the way to Greece. I watch them submerged in blue water, salt ringing in their ears, from my couch, in my basement, in New Haven.

Where are we located when suffering takes place? In W. H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts,” we are “at the edge of the wood,” or “turn[ing] away quite leisurely from the disaster.” Meanwhile, in “some untidy corner,” tragedy unfolds. A farmer busily plows, a shepherd leads his flock, and a boat “sails calmly on,” not noticing, or simply ignoring that in the sea behind them, two legs jerk panickedly in the water as a boy drowns. Suffering, Auden tells us, is compositional. It “takes place while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.” It is a network of relation, a taut web.

For Auden, this web of relation is weighed down by inevitability. He writes of the martyrdom that “must run its course,” the sun shining on “as it had to,” and the ship that “had somewhere to get to.” The poem offers no moral directive. It does not tell us why suffering exists, or what we ought to do about it. It simply marks the distance between those who are suffering and those whose lives go on.

In my basement, I am tracing the distances between Yusra and Sara’s lives, and my own. When they flee their country, they are a few years younger than me. Our homes are 5,500 miles apart. I almost never think of war, of my home or community destroyed by shelling. There are other violences and other terrors that shadow my life; but from day to day, I attend a prestigious university which is the largest landowner in the city it occupies. On the campus of this university I live, eat, study, and embrace my loved ones. I am more or less certain about what tomorrow will look like.

In exile from Nazi Germany, Bertolt Brecht writes a poem for these “dark ages,” entitled “To Posterity.” Having narrowly escaped the Holocaust that would ravage Europe and claim the lives of many of his friends and loved ones, he wonders, Why have I been spared? Which is to probe: what is the distance between here — his own temporary position of security; and there—the precarity and ruin of those who would not survive evil’s reign?

“They tell me: eat and drink. Be glad you have it!

But how can I eat and drink

When my food is snatched from the hungry

And my glass of water belongs to the thirsty?”

Brecht’s answer is definitive: there is no here without there. And what are we to make of this most fundamental, devastating fact? The stanza concludes, “And yet I eat and drink.” Life inevitably continues. But he has tugged on this thread of distance a little harder, to say that we are not only destined to live while others suffer, but that our very living is made up of suffering itself.

I should be specific. Why am I guaranteed the documents needed to travel to nearly any country in the world? Why can I be sure that my American dollar will be “stronger” than most global currencies? Why can my Yale University ID card grant me access to as much food as I want in a city where nearly a quarter of the population is food-insecure?

Most of us reckon by terminally forgetting. It helps the food and the glass of water go down easier. On my couch, where I am trying to stay awake to what I see and feel, the sense that spreads through my bones is not shock, but recognition, as in knowing, again. It is a failure of forgetting. How many times do we recognize the face of terror, do we know, again, the torture it inflicts? And how many times do we forget? I am remembering something that I had forgotten. I am putting back in mind something that I have put out of my mind. And I have put it out of my mind a million times, to get on a plane from Chicago to New York and on a train to New Haven. To buy apples that appear miraculously at the grocery store. To wake up this morning, and think first of the orange light through my curtains, and breathe deeply, and wonder what I’ll have for breakfast. In these dark times, Brecht writes, “forgetfulness passes for wisdom.”

There are many ways to forget, some sweeter than others. In the first lines of Jericho Brown’s “Shovel,” the speaker announces: “I am not the man who put a bullet in its brain, / But I am commissioned to dispose of the corpse.” Living in a country secured by borders, chains, and bullets in this dark 21st century, it is not hard to imagine this man. As he throws the body over his shoulder, as he loads it into a stolen truck, as he drives the truck to the gravesite, as he digs earth into a hole that he “will not call a grave,” and as he lowers the body in, he sings. He sings love songs from the radio, or tunes that he himself has made up, knowing “The value of sweet music when we need to pass / The time without wondering what rots beneath our feet.” Our proximity to horror, its embeddedness in our life, stains us with guilt, discomfort, pain, a stench. And we sing sweet music to help ourselves “ignore the stench.”

But what if we felt our complicity to be more than a stench? We might treat complicity as an ethic—a way of being together. It means that we are folded into (complicare) the lives of others. It suggests that there is no me without you, and it asks us to make our lives responsive to that fact.

In those moments when the ground turns up rotting bodies beneath our feet, we have to find a way to resist turning away. We have to be able to remain with the vertiginous questions: What is happening “here”? And how is it shaped by what is going on “there”? To not turn into solutions that let our lives go unexamined. To not be immobilized by the guilt, discomfort, or pain that complicity brings on. Rather, to feel them deeply, to live in them with respect, because they remind us that we are bound up in each other’s lives.

Throughout this essay, I’ve described a world in which our freedom is secured by unfreedom, and our peace is secured by terror. I use these words for the sake of moving forward in a line of questioning. Really, I should speak of the illusion of freedom, the premise of peace. Privilege and domination are not the same as freedom and peace. This world operates on the illusion that what some of us enjoy is natural, and independent of what others suffer. Complicity draws the lines between “here” and “there,” reminding us that what passes for prosperity in our country does not exist without exploitation, extraction, and expulsion. But there are many other worlds to be made.

“There’s a place between two stands of trees,” writes Adrienne Rich, opening her poem “What Kind of Times Are These.” This poem calls back across a half century to Brecht, who asked, in “To Posterity,” “What kinds of times are these / When to speak of trees is almost a crime / For it is a kind of silence about injustice!” In an age of terror, what can a poem about trees do? Rich lived and worked out of the belief that poetry could chart our tenuous grasping at a different world. From this position, she wrote of a stand of trees in a “dark mesh of the woods,” shadowed by the persecuted and the disappeared.

“I’ve walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don’t be fooled

this isn’t a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here

our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,

its own ways of making people disappear”

Rich has caught us looking away, looking for the terror elsewhere. Even the war on the screen, though it presumes to bring us close to the suffering, reinforces the elsewhere of that suffering. It asks not about the profits being reaped in that war here or the geopolitical dominance maintained by that war here. Yet in Rich’s poem, the act of turning away from injustice is precisely what turns us back to it. The place in the woods is already threatened by those who “want to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.” We find that the pastoral idyll we sought to escape into might be the face of terror itself.

On my couch, I am trying to stay awake, to not look away—not with my eyes, but with my bones.