american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

74 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
hardship, murder, or oppression in anecdotal detail, Espada links his
justification and representation to his witness, to what he has seen,
which suggests a distance between himself and those he represents—
seeing something is fundamentally different from experiencing
something. The witness, even one working and living amongst a community,
is separate; though he may not be a tourist, he can still leave
when the others cannot. He tries to mitigate this distance with work,
charity, and poetry. Espada works to close the gap inherent in representation
by implying: I am here working with and among the people;
I am not a tourist and my advocacy is authentic.
In John Beverley’s and Georg Lukacs’s terms, where Beverley
discusses the testimonio tradition, Espada and Forché create “problematic
heroes” in which the speaker-poet “lives with or alongside
others” in a difficult socioeconomic situation (27). “The Meaning of
the Shovel” includes both: the “problematic hero” foregrounds his
own agency and selfless dedication to uplifting (whether it is efficacious
or not) an impoverished community in which the narrator lives
and works, even if temporarily. More problematically, however, is the
notion of the poet as a professional writer who represents the poor as
a form of “class privilege” the poor do not have (Beverley 29). The
poem ends with the speaker-poet “digging until the passport / in [his]
back pocket saturates with dirt, / because here [he] work(s) for
nothing / and for everything” (my emphasis). The U.S. passport,
Espada suggests, is a silver bullet, a ticket out of this neighborhood
of extreme poverty; even though it is permeated with the dirt of
Nicaragua, on some level joining his identity with that of the poor
there, it reveals his status as an outsider who represents these people in
an international forum specifically as a writer and aid worker, not as a
Nicaraguan living in solidarity with the poor. In my reading, then,
Espada’s “shovel” and Forché’s “Country Between Us ” ultimately
represent or symbolize international aid, which is always complicated
(and compromised) by the privilege of the aid givers. As such, its
“meaning” is mediated by those who give aid, but through the lens of
what they witness and by their attempt—at least in the cases of
progressive international aid organizations—at solidarity with the
poor and the pursuit of justice for them.
Esapda’s and Forché’s justifications, finally, with all their bravado
and swagger, are bettered by Robert Hass’s response to a similar
question; if I were to redo my thesis defense, I would use his qualified
claim for a political poetry of witness in lieu of Forché’s. 20 Hass has
often said that presenting images of justice is the best way for poetry
to be political. In an interview with The Iowa Review, Hass said that