The Ethics of Bearing Witness in Poetry to Violence and Trauma

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In the mid-1980s, when I was a graduate student in Syracuse University’s Creative Writing MA program, a common topic of debate was what it meant to write “political poetry.” I’m sure my memory has reduced the positions people took in this debate to their lowest common denominators, but there were, as I recall, two basic lines of reasoning. One argued that poets had an inherent obligation to write about the political and cultural concerns of the day—that the vocation of poet, essentially, demanded it. The other asserted that the debate itself was a red herring, because poems were political by definition. The linguistic, formal, and expressive choices a poet made were inescapably and ineluctably already embedded in the poet’s politics. I was just beginning back then to figure out what I had to say as a poet, but my sympathies were with the first group from the start. I knew I wanted—that I needed, actually—to write about my experience as a survivor of childhood sexual violence, but I wanted to do so by locating that experience within a larger cultural and political context.

My touchstone for this desire was June Jordan’s “Poem About My Rights,” in which she connected the fear of sexual violence that kept her from walking alone whenever and wherever she wanted not only to the systemic nature of sexual violence itself, but also to other systems of oppression like racism and colonialism. I don’t know if I could have said it this way then, but making those kinds of connections seemed to hold out the possibility of healing in a way that nothing else did. The sexual abuse of boys was barely recognized as a phenomenon at that time. No one was talking about it because it was assumed to be so rare that it didn’t merit much attention at all; even the therapeutic wisdom in those years was grounded in how uncommon this kind of abuse was believed to be. I didn’t learn this until decades later, but therapists were trained back then to assume that when a boy or man revealed he’d been sexually abused he might very well be reporting a fantasy of some sort, not something that had actually been done to him.

The feminist strategy of making the personal political, in other words—which is fundamentally an ethical stance rooted in the assumption that people do not lie when they relate their own experience, and which “Poem About My Rights” embodied—offered me a way to give meaning to what the men who violated me had done to me beyond the simple fact that I had been their victim. Still, it took me a long time to figure out how to do in my own work what June Jordan did in that poem, primarily because bearing witness to violence and trauma in poetry inevitably confronts the poet with an ethical paradox. A poem, by definition, is a beautiful thing made of words; trauma, on the other hand—in my case the trauma of sexual violence—is anything but beautiful. How can you ethically use the former to represent the latter without in some way falsifying what the person who experienced the trauma went through?

When I say beautiful in this context, I am not using the word as a synonym for loveliness, the straightforwardly pleasing appearance of a well-constructed surface. Rather, I am using it to name that quality in art that puts us in touch with the full depth of what it means to be human, that does not force us to choose between loveliness and ugliness, or between the impulses towards compassion and dehumanization, but that instead allows us to experience those oppositions as they always already exist simultaneously within us. Since there is nothing simultaneous in this way about being violated, however, or about the shame that follows it, or about the fact of survival, or, most especially, about not surviving, the answer to the question I asked above is that it is impossible. A poem that attempts to bear witness to trauma and violence will inevitably falsify, or at least misrepresent, both the violence itself and the victim’s experience.

Since this paradox is inescapable, and since I am not going to choose artistic silence when it comes to my own experience, what I try to do in my poems is work with the distance that aestheticizing my experience puts between the poem and the reality of the experience itself—or, perhaps more accurately, with how the aesthetic shape the poem gives to my experience, as long as I have rendered that experience as accurately as possible, can foreground in the reader’s imagination the horror of what actually happened. Here, for example, are lines from “Clean,” the second poem in my second book, Words For What Those Men Have Done:

She smiled,
bent between my legs,
and as she fumbled my zipper open
nothing, nothing as I
hardened against her tongue
came to me of the man
pushing himself between my teeth,
pouring into me
out of who he was
who he was…

There’s an awful lot of fictionalization in that poem, so I do not want to say that the speaker is me. The experience the poem relates, however—a sexual encounter that unexpectedly did not conjure an earlier moment of violation—was mine, and so I struggled in composing this poem with whether using those last three lines to turn what the man did to me into a metaphor was too poetic, whether it made what happened “stomachable” for a reader in a way that it should not have been. In the end, I decided to keep the lines as I wrote them because they capture an aspect of that particular form of sexual violation, at least as I experienced it, that he forced his penis into my mouth and ejaculated—or some other specific, factual, clinical description of what he did—does not. I decided, in other words, to trust that the distance between the metaphor and the reality would highlight rather than mask the trauma I experienced.

It’s one thing, though, to make this kind of executive creative decision when the experience you’re bearing witness to is your own and therefore is one that you have the right to interpret metaphorically in any way you choose. The ethical quandary I’m talking about becomes a good deal more fraught when that experience belongs to another person and the creative decisions you make therefore represent that experience to the audience, shaping any and all interpretation that follows. In that situation, even with the best intentions, you run the risk of falsifying what that other person went through by centering your own imagination in ways that are diametrically opposed to what it means to bear witness. By way of example, consider another poem from Words For What Those Men Have Done: “Because I Can’t Not Know What He Saw.”

Because I Can’t Not Know What He Saw

— remembering a photograph from Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking

This month, Harper’s “Readings” brings
from the people of Boro in eastern India
a list of verbs impossible in English:
khonsay, to pick an object up with care;
dasa, not to place a fishing instrument;
asusu, to feel unknown in a new place.
Some sound like Yiddish curses:
“You should ur,” dig soil like a swine,
or “May your children gobray,”
fall in a well unknowingly.

I want that kind of verb
for the way whoever-it-was
pulled the woman’s robe
up over her head,

for how the men
the man who did this to her
forced to watch — brother,
father, husband, son,
neighbor — for how each of them
invades my sleep;

and for the way I felt
when I first saw it,
what I feel now
remembering it,
the way I kept taking Iris Chang’s
The Rape of Nanking off the shelf
and crouching in the corner
of Borders’ lower level
to stare, and to stare —
for that too I want a verb;

and I want a verb as well,
and it’s not rape,
though certainly he raped her,
for the sword hilt rising
from between her parted thighs,
and for the way I hate myself
for hoping she was already dead
when he buried his blade in her.

The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, published in 1997, is about the mass murder and mass rape of Chinese civilians in the city of Nanking, now known as Nanjing, committed by the Imperial Japanese Army in 1937–1938. Just as it says in the poem, I came across the book in the lower level of a Borders bookstore in Manhattan. I don’t remember why I decided not to buy the book, nor do I remember the process by which this poem came into being. I do recall, however, that I tried and failed for quite some time to write about the photograph to which the poem responds and that I only succeeded after I read the item in Harper’s that gave me the poem’s through-line. I also know that the sword that appears in the final stanza was firmly lodged in my memory as an accurate representation of the photograph I saw in the book.

At some point after I considered the poem finished, however—I don’t remember where or when—I came across another copy of Chang’s book. Turning to that picture, I was surprised to discover that I had misremembered it completely. There was no sword. What actually emerged from the dead woman’s vagina was a bent metal rod, probably a piece of rebar. I should have responded immediately to this discovery by revising the poem to make it more accurate. Instead, in an act of intellectualization that frankly embarrasses me now, I chose to add the epigraph by which the poem is currently framed: “remembering a photograph from Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking.” I told myself that framing the poem in this way, as a “narrative” of remembering, would deepen the experience of any reader who bothered to find the original photograph by raising the question of why I had unconsciously replaced the rebar with the sword.

Ironically, if you do not know what I have just told you—meaning that you take the poem at its word, that the image of the sword represents the photograph more or less accurately—the poem works just fine. It’s powerful; it moves people; and I think it says something worth saying about patriarchy in general and, more specifically, about men’s collective responsibility and accountability for sexual violence against women. For just that reason, in fact, some of you may think I am being too hard on myself here. To take as an out, however, that the change I made did nothing to alter the fundamental nature of either the poem or the woman’s fate is to avoid confronting the way I privileged my own imagination over what was documented in the original photograph, precisely the opposite of what I should have done in presuming to bear witness to that woman’s trauma and suffering.

I’m not going to try now to parse the degree to which the fact that it was a Japanese man who impaled the woman led to an unconscious association in my mind with the stereotypical image of the samurai and his sword. Not because I think that association played no role in how my imagination worked when it came to this poem—I’m sure, in fact, that it did play a role—but because for the purposes of what I’m talking about here, it doesn’t really matter why I “remembered” the sword instead of the rebar. Taken on its own terms, independently of any racial association, the sword introduces a level of theatricality into the poem’s version of the photograph that is not in the original. As a result, by implication at least, both the woman’s body and the traumatic suffering she endured are fetishized within the poem in a way that I absolutely did not intend.

The man who used the sword was most likely an officer, someone with rank and status who would have been unlikely to leave his blade inside the woman once the picture was taken. At the very least, this suggests a far more deliberate, performative staging of the woman’s body than was evident in the original photograph, and the possibility of that staging adds another layer to how the image of her body can be read, one that centers the officer’s motivation and ultimately distracts from the specific violence he did to her. Conceivably, for example, the officer could have impaled her with his sword for an audience of his subordinates, as a way of authorizing similar behavior in them, which is a very different kind of performance than the one I explicitly interpolated: the all-too-common practice of perpetrators forcing others, especially a woman’s male relatives, to watch as they commit the kind of atrocity that we know preceded what the original photograph captured.By adding this additional context, even if it is not at first obvious, the sword thus frames the poem more as my personal indictment of the man who wielded it, and of the patriarchy he represented, than as what I intended it to be: the act of bearing witness both to what that woman must have endured and to what her violated corpse, taken on its own terms, might be understood to signify.

Words For What Those Men Have Done is out of print, and I have not read “Because I Can’t Not Know What He Saw” publicly for quite a few years, but if I ever have the chance to republish the poem, or if I ever start again to include it in readings that I give, I will rewrite the epigraph to remove the reference to “remembering,” and I will replace the sword with the original metal rod:

and I want a verb as well,
and it’s not rape,
though certainly he raped her,
for the bent metal rod rising
from between her parted thighs,
and for the way I hate myself
for hoping she was already dead
when he buried it in her.

This revision does not resolve the paradox I spoke about earlier— it still aestheticizes the trauma that it contains—but the fact that it is more accurate means that the reality to which the poem leads the reader’s imagination is more accurate as well. That kind of accuracy is perhaps the first thing that anyone who presumes to bear witness in poetry to violence and trauma should strive for.