WHEN faced with overwhelming and catastrophic events such as the suicide bombing in Manchester last Monday night, we struggle to catch hold of words. Our initial reactions are visceral, not linguistic. Flooded by feelings, our repertoire of descriptors contracts to the usual verbal suspects: slaughter, murderous, heinous, evil, tragic, horror, monster.
But even these are not enough. Time and again, many of those interviewed in the media in the days following the atrocity, capitulated with one common refrain: there are no words. And yet, we need words to try to assimilate such events. Without words, it is hard to feel that what happened, actually happened. Without words to wrap around them, such awful events hover in the limbo of a waking nightmare from which there is no escape.
It was Tony Walsh, Mancunian performance poet, who, the day after the bombing, gave us words with the public reading of his poem, This Is The Place. The poem is an ode to Manchester – past and present – hewn from blood, sweat and tears, ingenuity, resilience and creativity. Walsh wrote the poem a couple of years ago, but because it’s essentially about transcendence, the triumph of our humanity over bad stuff, it was just right. It offered the prospect of solace and recovery but did not skirt around the bleak reality of pain and graft. The poem reminds us that everything changes, nothing stays the same and that loss is survivable.
The power of good literature – especially when we, ourselves, feel powerless – is often underrated. Its capacity to heal, to give succour and offer hope, is nothing short of miraculous, magical even. Often we think that in reading novels or poems, we are taking a psychic holiday (away from ourselves and the mundane reality we inhabit). In fact, good writing brings us closer to ourselves and encourages us to explore the interior of who we really are, in all our complexity. It helps us to be curious about ourselves and others and to think about how we think. Franz Kafka nailed it when he said that "art breaks the sea that is frozen inside us". Music, visual art and literature reach bits of us that we never knew were there, or that we are too confused or afraid to see and feel. The task of a good writer is to see (as opposed to look), to observe the world and then share those observations with us. Good writing engenders courage in the reader to think the unthinkable, to find and attach meaning to events and experiences that appear meaningless.
As a child at school, learning poetry by rote every Friday afternoon was, at best, soporific; worse though, was the fact that it made me reject poetry well into adulthood. To my shame, I remember being quite blasé about it, dismissing all things poetic with: “I really can’t be bothered with those lonely clouds.” Poetry was for nerds, for dreamers, for losers and loners. Little did I realise that it would be poetry – at the worst and best of times in my life – and only poetry, that made any sense at all. Now I love Wordsworth and his daffodils and wholeheartedly agree with his description of poetry as “the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge”.
I am not suggesting that poetry and literature are curative. The killings of innocents in Manchester, the brutal cancellation of lives that had barely begun, have carved out a unique space in the lives of those who live on, the mums and dads, brothers and sisters, grannies and grandpas. Right now, that space must be searingly, inconsolably painful. There is nothing more life-changing than the death of your own child. It turns the world on its head.
Loss of such enormous dimensions can be dangerous for those who are left to carry on. The bereaved withdraw. Muted by pain and anger, unable to summon words to share their loss, they can become invisible after a while. Stranded on a remote island of grief, others lose sight of them. When the outrage quietens, when the funerals and memorials are over, when there are no more minutes of silence in the supermarket, then, and only then, does the hard work of grieving and acceptance begin.
It’s a long and winding road. Good poetry and writing are sometimes the only voices we can bear to hear on such a singular journey.
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