Mud, Poetry and Political Imagination

The poets (by which I mean all artists) are finally the only people who know the truth about us. Soldiers don’t. Statesmen don’t. Priests don’t. Union leaders don’t. Only poets.

– James Baldwin, “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity”

“Poetry can break open locked chambers of possibility, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.”

– Adrienne Rich, “What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics

This thinking about the politics of mud started in Clamour, a group of young people in Barcelona who decided to clamour for the rights of living beings and against genocide and ecocide, and to clamour against all forms of dehumanisation and despoliation of nature. But how can we clamour? With what language can we speak when language is increasingly dominated by stifling algorithms, by the addling quantification of almost everything? One answer was given by two Clamour members, poets, one fifty and the other in his early twenties. And the clamour happened in a bookshop, Librería Fahrenheit 451, which has recently opened in my street, a marvellously crazy project in the age of AI and gentrification and Airbnb, which has killed most social life in the old market neighbourhood of El Born. Librería Fahrenheit 451 is a cooperative that began as a mobile bookshop in Sitges. Its focus is independent publishing and good, non-bestseller titles, and it aims to encourage kids and everyone to read. It has a music room, a workshop space, and invites visitors “to dive into the smell of paper, get swept away by mysterious sounds, disconnect from the digital world, and embark on a sensual journey in search of lost senses”. What better place for the two Clamour poets, David Casassas and Neil Sabatés to offer a poetry recital?

And that’s what they gave in November, a poetic dialogue between two men of different generations. Everyone, a weeknight audience of about twenty, loved it and there was even some talk of producing a chapbook of the poems they offered. The young people of Clamour have lamented their “Braindead Generation” and a “lack of life”, which is in great part due to the killing of imagination, the abolition of dreaming. How can a head stuffed with useless, increasingly false information bundled in a numerical straitjacket be free to dream? But it isn’t just a personal matter. It’s political, for imagination is essential for political thought and action. My area is human rights and, here, poetry infuses universal feelings like grief and freedom with possibility instead of despair, and it brings numbers to life. The small audience in the bookshop heard the power of poetry to transform things, felt that we don’t have to be captives of hopelessness, even when normalisation of genocide and hatred is our daily bread, even when we’re obsessively trying to make sense of the “news” or to block it out, which are both ways of killing our own imagination, when others are busy killing it for us.

Palestine was with us that night in Librería Fahrenheit 451. Although David and Neil were reading their own poems, Mahmoud Darwish’s poem “The Prison Cell” was also present and resonating in their words, telling us, “It is possible especially now/ To ride a horse/ Inside a prison cell/ And run away”. In Darwish’s poem, it’s easy to understand why “The prison guard grew so sad . . ./ He begged me to give him back/ His freedom.” Our listening minds saw the chance to ride away with a freedom that prison guards or enforcers of minds can never have. That chance was also held out by Darwish’s two Catalan brothers in poetry and their kindred poetic dialogue.

David and Neil titled their recital “Poetry and Imagination in a Time of Mud”, a reference to the Catalan poet Jacint Verdaguer (1845 – 1902) who once wrote that he tilled mud like a poet, wrote like a tiller of mud, and did each task well. The son of farmers, Verdaguer revelled in the small and large details of the beauty of his rural surroundings, knew mud’s creative power and how close we humans are to it, physically and even emotionally close, a state of being that is very different from what some 25% of UK teens find when a chatbot becomes their best friend, a despot behind a cold glass screen that’s “accessible 24/7”, feeding them answers they want to hear, but noli me tangere, smell me not, taste me not, feel me not, just do as I say.

Mud is much more than a simple metaphor. It demands respect for the natural rhythms of nature and, as part of nature, behaves in ways that are not always desired, obliging humans to use their imagination and adapt to new circumstances, to be part of nature. No wonder AI is destroying nature, destroying the mud that answers back and has its own ways. Moreover, for AI, mud and its elements are simply there to be plundered as the source of its burgeoning existence and, since AI is amoral, it comes with horrible environmental and human rights abuse, especially in the Congo which holds in its mud 70% of the world’s coltan reserves. Mud expresses the realities of political power. Poor people, child miners in the Congo, Palestinians watching their babies die of cold with tents collapsing into the icy mud of what remains of Gaza, landslide victims, Indigenous people displaced when forests are flattened, know through suffering what mud can be and what mud can do when abused and misused.

In the poetic myths of origin of the ancient world, mud was the primordial material for creating life and especially human life. In Eden, Adam was made of mud. And, in Jewish folklore, so was his first partner Lilith. Thus Adam’s equal, Lilith was free and rejected subservience to him, so a more compliant Eve had to be produced from his rib. Scholars may argue about authenticity of the source of the story. But imagination’s another thing, and the important point is that Lilith’s freedom came from mud, the material of which she was made. In Greek mythology, Prometheusmade humans from clay. The Chinese goddess Nüwa made men and women from mud. In the creation myth of the Ainu people of Hokkaido, the kamuy spirit made the world from mud with the help of a water wagtail. The Indian deity Ganesha is said to have been made from mud, and so were the moon (Gondi people) and all humanity (Garo people). In Vietnamese, Laotian, Central Asian, Sumerian, Egyptian, Yoruba, Efé, Malagasy, Songwe, Dinka, Dogon, Madagascar, Hawaiian, Polynesian, Norse, Indigenous American, Alaskan Inuit, Inca, Aymara, and other mythologies, humans are made from malleable mud, which can also be shaped into many forms ranging from houses and everyday utensils to beautiful figures.

Until quite recently, scientists have postulated that Earth’s first cellular life emerged in warm, slimy mud, heated by volcanic steam, a version of Darwin’s “warm little ponds”. If mud didn’t actually produce life, it seems, at least in the findings of Cambridge geologist Neil Davies, that it least encouraged life, as he and his colleagues have found that, “the expansion of land plants between about 458 million and 359 million years ago coincides with a more than tenfold increase in mud on land” not to mention “a significant shift in the ways that rivers flowed”, so the appearance of the first plants and then mud “fundamentally changed the way the world operates”.

There is the mud we literally or metaphorically come from, source of creation and life, and the mud wantonly produced as a side product of destruction, the dangerous—or let’s say (from mud’s perspective) vengeful—mud humans make which, as recent images from Gaza show, can be deliberately put to work as a murderous power. At the end of November it was reported that in Sumatra, some 900 people had died, hundreds were missing, one million homeless, and three million affected in floods that buried whole villages in mud. It was described as a disaster caused by “monsoonal rains” but it was a human-caused catastrophe and, needless to say, the poorest people are the hardest hit. “Monsoonal rains” aren’t the bad guys. They’re a source of life for about 20% of the world’s population. They sustain water supplies, cool temperatures, nourish crops, keep wetlands, grasslands, mangroves, and rainforests and their biodiversity alive, thus keeping a natural balance. Without a good natural balance, they can’t do their job. When natural systems are destroyed, “natural” disasters are the consequence of power abuse and injustice.

Indonesia’s war criminal president, Prabowo Subianto perfidiously commented in response to the Sumatra tragedy, “We must prevent deforestation and forest destruction”, describing forest protection as “crucial”, even while he designated yet another 560,000 hectares of primary forest, grasslands, woodland, and wetlands, for sugar cane plantations alone, to be cleared with military support. In total twenty million hectares of rainforest in Indonesia and occupied West Papua are to be cleared for monocropping. When rainforest vegetation is cleared, the soil is left bare, ending the generative cycle when there are no leaves or plants to replace nutrients in the soil. Creative mud becomes barren mud where no one can live, with effects that spread to destroy life further and further away in what is called the “climate crisis”, which is really a crisis of human greed.

In January 2019 in Brazil, mud became killer mud when the Córrego do Feijão dam of the mining company Vale (meaning Value in Portuguese) collapsed in Brumadinho, spewing out around 10 million cubic meters of tailings, laying waste to settlements, destroying a railway bridge, spilling toxic mud into the Paraopeba River. The immediate death toll was more than 270 people. Then there was the 1999, Vargas catastrophe in Venezuela, where the Los Corales neighbourhood was buried under three metres of mud, where whole towns like Cerro Grande and Carmen de Uria disappeared, and where as much as 10% of the population of Vargas, as many as 50,000 people, died in mud, produced mainly by human mistakes, “by poverty and by the lack of governmental policies on territorial planning of new urban zoning”.

In 1987, some 20,000 cubic metres of mud and rock, fell from the deforested, and hence unstable slope of the Pan de Azúcar hill onto the Medellín slum settlement of Villatina where a children’s first communion party was being held. Some 500 people were killed. It was really upsetting to read about in Barcelona, when the city was celebrating the announcement that it had won nomination as the venue of the 1992 Olympic Games, in a supposedly fitting salute to the achievements of Christopher Colombus, which, through a long chain of events included the Villatina tragedy. I wrote a poem, an attempt to link the events that led from Columbus to the dead children of Villatina, from pomp to poverty, from royal crowns all the way to mud that, once rashly dislodged, could only destroy. Only two people have seen this poem but somehow mud has bubbled it up almost forty years later.

Spoils of Empire
(For the people of Villatina, 27 September 1987)

                        A half millennium: the history makers rode it rough,

                        Columbus to Olympic Games,

                        Christopher, Christbearer, sailed for gold, lost a fleet,

                        Made his monarchs gasp at savage slaves

                        For modesty decked out in skirts of leaves and teeth of jungle beasts,

                        Flesh of El Dorado.

                        The travellers told of llama trains strung from coast to coast

                        Laden with metals and precious stones,

                        Treasure for the coffers of Spain and Christian enterprise.

                        The horsemen held the Saviour high,

                        The new world standard red in pools of death and cries of rape and birth,

                        Children for remembrance.

                        Riders of Spain still pound in veins and boots on stairs,

                        And torture blows,

                        Where Toledo steel for history inscribed

                        Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada

                        Who spawned Colombia, famed for killings, kingdoms of cocaine,

                        Landslide terrain.

                        Five centuries were equalled in the mountain’s toll of poor

                        That Sunday of the party.

                        Ravished ground, despoiled of trees and water-gorged, spewed liquid clay

                        With sounds of distant horses’ hooves

                        To murder children at the feast, five hundred from the Villatina shanties,

                        Heirs of El Dorado.

                        “Olympian is Columbus’ fame!”

                                                                        The children are dying

                        “Raise the flags and light the flame!”

                                                                        But the children

                        “Stretch out the hand of brotherhood!”

                                                                        Are screaming

                        “All are equal to compete!”

                                                            They

                                                                        Are

                                                                                    Drowning

                                                                                                     In

                                                                                                            Mud.

And now, mud has been deliberately produced by the razing of Gaza where cold and mud “hurt more than bullets”, where water is contaminated with mud (“Water, water, every where,/ And all the boards did shrink;/ Water, water, every where,/Nor any drop to drink.”) There are dozens of photos and videos that give an idea of what it’s like to live in freezing cold, engulfed in mud. What they don’t show is the leptospirosis transmitted in running water by the urine of infected rats, causing in severe conditions, liver, lung, and brain damage and failure, especially when medical aid is denied. Managed by genocidaires, mud is a deadly weapon.

In the age of ecocide, the word “ichor” vividly tells one story of mud. Once described in The Iliad as the pure blood of the gods (“Blood followed, but immortal; ichor pure”), attacked in the second century by the Christian theologian Clement of Alexandria in the Protrepticus (“For the ichor of the poets is more repulsive than blood; for the putrefaction of blood is called ichor”) because, for him, art works were “deadly toys”, the word has now been appropriated by oil companies like Ichor Oil LLC and Ichor Energy, LLC. The poetry of ichor was partly restored by the word “petrichor”, coined in 1964 by the Australian scientists Isabel Joy Bear and Richard Thomas, to describe the heady fragrance released into the air by raindrops dancing on dry ground to make mud. “The name… refers to the liquid extracted from… stone… [and] the essence or fluid — ‘ichor’ — which in Greek mythology was the ethereal fluid flowing in the veins of the gods.”

Extractive zeal is destroying everything, even words, with promises of progress—at least for the 0.0001% who hold three times the wealth of the bottom 50% of humanity—sucking up petroleum containing the essence of the divine and human dead of ancient times, leaving wounded mud behind, deadly mud that kills the poor. It’s a matter of justice and the only language that can really capture, from the victims’ standpoint, this politics of injustice is poetry. The 0.0001% in their high-rise airconditioned offices have their depleted language of algorithms, which kills human earthiness and its smell of petrichor. Extractivism requires no art. Just machines. Only poetry has the power of imagination to express what humans are doing with their ecocidal madness. Seamus Heaney describes this power: “And then in the foggy midlands it appeared,/ Our mud vision, as if a rose window of mud/ Had invented itself out of the glittery damp,/ A gossamer wheel, concentric with its own hub/ Of nebulous dirt, sullied yet lucent. […]/ What might have been origin/ We dissipated in news. The clarified place/ Had retrieved neither us nor itself – except/ You could say we survived. So say that, and watch us/ Who had our chance to be mud-men, convinced and estranged,/ Figure in our own eyes for the eyes of the world.”

It took a poetic imagination to produce a “rose window of mud”. But estranged humans, how did they figure in their own eyes “for the eyes of the world? They concentrated crass financial power and, trying to go beyond their condition of creatures of mud, invented a machine brain, a quantitatively possessed algorithmic brain called AI, perched on the shoulders of what is still a sensual fleshy body. Yet, as Melanie Challenger writes in her brilliant How to Be Animal: A New History of What it Means to Be Human, “It’s to the computer we look to make sense of what we are and what the body does. But these kinds of ideas may one day be viewed in the same light as those of leading physicians of Europe, who used to cut apart frogs to establish the workings of the soul” (p. 135).

Drowning in algorithms, we try to understand quantities like the million million dollars of Elon Musk, but if UN Special Rapporteur, Francesca Albanese is quoted as saying that the real death toll in Gaza is about 680,000, which would mean that 380,000 of the dead are infants under five, can we feel the difference between 200,000, 300,000, or 400,000 small dead children? Not feeling anything about all those murdered children is the dehumanising armour worn by the Madeleine Albrights of the world for whom half a million dead Iraqi children was the price required by US interests: “the price, we think, the price is worth it”.

But take this poem by Khaled Juma, written in 2014. His children are real. We almost know them. We don’t know how many there were but these lost children are our children too.

Oh Rascal Children of Gaza
Oh rascal children of Gaza,
You who constantly disturbed me
with your screams under my window,
You who filled every morning
with rush and chaos,
You who broke my vase
and stole the lonely flower on my balcony.
Come back –
And scream as you want,
And break all the vases,
Steal all the flowers,
Come back,
Just come back…

Chinua Achebe sums up a vital aspect of poetry. It’s about power and justice, about humanity and the planet. “The emperor would prefer the poet to keep away from politics, the emperor’s domain, so that he can manage things the way he likes […] But you and I don’t have to agree with the emperor. We have to say no. Our business involves the peace, happiness and harmony of not just people but the planet itself, the environment.” Now I want to return to Librería Fahrenheit 451, its smell of paper, its “sensual journey in search of lost senses”, and its rebellion against emperors. It was here that David Casassas could transform a sound we all know well, so that those of us who heard the poem will always hear in the mournful call of the Eurasian collared dove (Streptopelia decaocto) the sorrows of violence and war, and also the injustice of the original myth of the servant girls named Dekaotaó who was so grieved when her master refused to pay her wage of eighteen coins that the gods set her free by turning her into a dove. David’s dove, the original Dekaotaó clamours against war and all its injustice.

ROMANCE OF THE GREEK DOVES

Eighteen gone!

Eighteen gone!

Eighteen gone!

(In modern Greek:

                                                            Dekaoktó!

Dekaoktó!

Dekaoktó!)

– cry the fretful doves, decaocto,

impassive the sound of wind

in courtyards and weathervanes of archipelagos as it buffets the coast,

of limestone falling away from fountainheads to the crust of the beach,

that beach,

the one

where heads and trunks roll

and it is sand and metal shards,

and wetting your toes,

you raise up rust and marble dust.

Dekaoktó!

Dekaoktó!

 Dekaoktó!

Eighteen children I had

and savage war came

and war slaughtered them all

one by one, one by one.

Eighteen children I had

and I call, I shout for them,

firmament of ripped-open gold

from which not even embers fall.

I well know it is putrid gold,

and my children are pushing up daisies

but I look up at the sky

at the wavy lines of trees

and stay there stunned

by weathervanes gone berserk in the breeze,

wind-thrashed fate.

and the stripes of my body,

black spots, white shading,

have wounds that are you

eighteen, sharp and clear, burning,

rooted deep in my throat,

and I count and count you in your eternal peace

Dekaoktó!

Dekaoktó!

Dekaoktó!

There’s something numbing about political texts that speak of numbers of dead children, whether eighteen or five hundred, or of child slaves, or of forests destroyed, or of injustice done, or of freedom robbed, and reading the “news” is a paralysing, desensitising exercise, as young people who speak of burnout well know. But poetry can be rousing. It can stoke the political imagination. It can hold out images of ideas that are worth fighting for. In his poem “Foc d’ocell”, the Catalan poet Blai Bonet writes of freedom.

Fire of Bird

Freedom is a cantata to freedom.

If believed, or it makes you believe it is more than a song,

it is because it is not only a hymn.

Freedom must be sung by the people as well.

Freedom there is not, for it lasts just the time in a reaper’s poppy.

What sets aflame the bird of desire is mystery.

The mystery of love is time,

like the mystery of freedom is the time span of its song,

because love made and freedom are the same hymn.

                        The joy of love made is a cantata to love.

                        It is not love. Freedom is just a praise song to freedom.

                        It is not freedom. I see you do not believe it. Do you know why?

                        You want to be free, but wish nothing to befall you,

                        and nothing is not enough, just as all is too many things …

Emperors will always try to snatch and imprison freedom, but horses to ride away on still gallop in free minds. Zealots will call works of art “deadly toys”, but pieces of red, green, black, and white cloth in the form of the Palestinian flag keep flying even as their bearers are beaten and arrested in civilised cities. The bright flare of a poppy in a golden field, even when soon to by scythed by a reaper’s blade, still expresses the joy and heartbreak of fugacious freedom as something worth fighting for. Librería Fahrenheit 451 is fighting. Poets are fighting, and their words cradle the humanity of free spirits and, in doing so, they clamour.

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