Poetry and the Language of Oppression, Essays on Politics and Poetics

Poetry and the Language of Oppression, Essays on Politics and Poetics, by Carmen Bugan. Oxford University Press, 2021. 197 pp. $25 (paperback)

Carmen Bugan is a Romanian born poet and an academic. In her book of thematic essays, Poetry and the Language of Oppression, she begins with a poem, followed by this introductory sentence: “To my knowledge, no poet ever changed the course of history, but many dictators did.” Of course, it depends what we mean by “change” and “history,” but I take her point. Stalin changed Russian history in a way that Mandelstam and Akhmatova did not. Like the czars, he ruled and controlled the fates of millions—imprisoning millions, starving millions, and leading them into a horrendous war as short-lived allies of Hitler. Stalin imprisoned Mandelstam, who died or was killed in prison, and members of Akhmatova’s family, though not the poet herself. Still, both poets bore effective witness to the reality of life in the Soviet dictatorship, as did Mandelstam’s widow, and many other writers and artists; while other writers and artists abetted or embraced the regime.

So, when it comes to influencing the quotidian of our lives or the political, economic, or cultural direction of a nation or empire, it is hard for a poet or any artist or ordinary citizen to match the impact of some asshole vested with absolute power and full control of a state’s police and military, with an intimidated bureaucracy and population of informers at his disposal.

So, what is a poet, an artist, a journalist, teacher, doctor, lawyer, grocer, truck driver, cook, tailor, or anyone supposed to do? We can try to quietly resist, maintaining our integrity while doing our best to avoid being chewed up by the amoral villainy of a Putin or Xi or Kim or Khamenei or Erdogan or wannabes like Trump or Bolsonaro. Or we can fully risk ourselves in active resistance, and live or die with the consequences.[1]

As did Carmen Bugan’s father, a courageous resister to the communist dictator of Romania, Nicolae Ceausescu. Ion Bugan was imprisoned and tortured in the 1980s, his family’s life wholly disrupted and relentlessly spied upon by state police and informers, including friends, neighbors, and strangers—all of whom are an essential part of the surveillance apparatus in any authoritarian regime, past or present. In short, Carmen Bugan knows whereof she speaks. In these essays, she uses her family’s experiences as survivors, her scholar and poet’s craft, and her experiences as a grateful American citizen, who continues to wrestle with her past while also looking on with growing concern at the threat of rising authoritarianism here and abroad.

 The essays provide an academic monograph on how poetry, a poet’s voice and craft, can and should approach questions of politics and justice. Some of this is technical and overly touched with academic jargon and mannerisms (the announcing both what you are discussing and what you are not; and treating common terms like specialized ones, finding it necessary to define what she means by “government”) are distracting, but her family’s story and her own attempts to make sense of the experience and apply it to her work as poet and scholar are the most compelling and rewarding parts of Poetry and the Language of Oppression.

The Bugan poem that starts the introduction, one of sixteen full poems that are integrated into the essays, is called “Visiting the country of my birth.” The first part of the poem, a single three-line stanza reads:

The tyrant and his wife were exhumed
For proper burial; it is twenty years since
They were shot against a wall in Christmas snow.

The third part begins:

I am searching for prints of mare’s hooves in our yard
Between stable and kitchen window, now gone
With the time my two feet used to fit inside one hoof.

We sit down to eat on the porch when two sparrows
Come flying in circles over the table, low and fast, happily!
‘My grandparents’ souls’, I think aloud, but my cousin says:

‘No, the sparrows have nested under eaves, look
Past the grapevine.’ Nests big as cupped hands, twigs
And straw. Bird song skids in the air above us.

The section and poem end:

‘The earth will remember you’, my grandparents once said.
Here, where such dreams do not come true, I have come
To find hoof-prints as well as signs from sparrows.

If Bugan’s trip of return finds that the Romanian earth doesn’t remember her or her family, it does reveal that the Securitate (secret police) files do—in startling detail. Tapes, transcriptions, confessions, interviews, and criminal case documents are voluminous, even old copies of private papers and class assignments by the children have survived in Securitate’s files. Hoof prints and sparrow signs are the lyric poet’s refuge for imposing meaning on the past, but the metal filing cabinets housed in anonymous government buildings have their own reality to impose.

Thus begins a personal and professional journey where she not only seeks to find a way back to understanding and forward from her family’s and her birth country’s suffering, a way to use poetry to write herself free of oppression and repression. She considers how language and its uses — the adaptability of the lyric form, adjusting to and leveraging an adopted language, creating artistic distance and managing the challenges of turbulent times with integrity and a rigorous commitment to speak truth — allow the poetic “I” to find a voice that is true to one own’s experience but true also for others, a voice of witness. The essays make the case for “poetry as a form of salvation”—a form or a means to salvation. But more, Bugan makes the case for integrity and truth, describing, “In the silent country,” how a writer begins his work  

When the hens climbed the tree to sleep and the dog was let loose in the yard,
When their children went to bed, she covered the windows
In the doors with towels and hung the yellow blanket over the curtain rod.
He went outside, around the farthest corner of the house, dug the typewriter
From its hole, then from the garage brought a stack of papers hidden
Behind tools in a box. They locked the room.

The work here involves pamphlets, not poems, to be sneaked into mailboxes in the pre-dawn, but the aim, pamphlets or poetry, is the same, truth. “They whispered into the sleep of others, in the silent country.”

Bugan, across these essays, also takes the reader on an engaging and informative scholar’s tour of other poets and artists—Saint-Exupéry, T.S. Eliot, Czeslaw Milosz, Jack London, Whitman, Wole Soyinka, Neruda, Da Vinci, John Stuart Mill, Dante, Mihai Eminescu, Giacomo Leopardi, George Szirtes, Aristotle, Rebecca Loncraine, Hisham Matar, Isaiah Berlin, Carolyn Forché, Borges, George Steiner, among many others—to look at language, resistance, grief, theory, struggle, perspective, and freedom.

For me these and the parts that give center stage to Bugan and her family’s personal experience are what makes Poetry and the Language of Oppression not just timely but necessary reading. As I write, the rise of authoritarianism throughout the globe is being resisted, but has not yet been checked. Perhaps it will, perhaps it won’t. Whether it does or doesn’t, we have the same fight for the truthful, effective use of language in poetry and prose; language that is factual, clear, and resistant to oppression in all its many ugly forms.

[1] There are, of course, other options: jump on the vile bandwagon or pretend to, but I prefer to ignore those options as morally untenable.

—Reviewer Rick Larios is a retired educator living in Brooklyn. He frequently reviews books for The Manhattan Review.