Excerpt from Chapter 6 (“Catastrophe and Hope: Art and Better Politics”)
Another contemporary example besides Pramoedya of the power of art to transcend tragedy is Czeslaw Milosz, the Nobel-Prize-winning Polish poet whom Joseph Brodsky called “one of the greatest poets of our time, perhaps the greatest.” Milosz wrote some of his most stirring poems from what he later called the Anus mundi of occupied wartime Poland, while the city of Warsaw was being systematically demolished by the Germans.
Shortly after Milosz defected from his diplomatic post in the post-war Polish dictatorship, he wrote a short rhetorical attack against oppressors
You who wronged a simple man
Bursting into laughter at the crime…
Do not feel safe. The poet remembers.
You can kill one, but another is born.
The words are written down, the deed, the date.
And you’d have done better with a winter dawn,
A rope, and a branch bowed beneath your weight.
Milosz wrote this from abroad where his native Polish was not spoken, while his works back in Poland were banned. Later, from America, he wrote how he had once believed his writing
would also be a messenger
between me and some good people,
even if they were few, twenty, ten
or not born, as yet.
Now I confess my doubt.
There are moments when it seems to me I have squandered my life.
He was unaware that his writings were keeping alive a spirit of resistance in Poland, so much so that when the Solidarity movement won in 1980 the right to erect a monument to shipyard workers killed a decade earlier, three Polish leaders were depicted: Lech Walęsa, Pope John Paul II, and Milosz. Above them was the triplet from Milosz’s poem “You Who Wronged”:
Do not feel safe. The poet remembers.
You can kill one, but another is born.
The words are written down, the deed, the date.
The monument, like the words on it, became part of a process in which Solidarity, in a non-violent revolution, eventually overthrew a government that did not represent the prevailable will of the people, by remembering its crimes.
— from Poetry And Terror: Politics and Poetics in Coming To Jakarta, by Peter Dale Scott and Freeman Ng, Lexington Books, all rights reserved.
