• Astonishingly poetic literature is produced in societies under duress.
Image: STAR ILLUSTRATED
Poetry is the sublime universal language of human experience. Through poetic arts, we manage to distil the pathos and bathos or peak and pith of our time and space in history.
In fact, each season of angst and anxiety in the timelines of various societies has handed down to generations its own poetic manifestations. Through poetry, individual and collective emotions merge to produce the memories of our times that can reach future generations as histories of now.
Take the example of the poems that arise as a result of war and conflict in modern times. Some scholars classify such poems as part of a genre called war literature. This genre rose to prominence after the Great War, a major and life-changing event in the history of the 20th Century that occurred a century ago and is commonly known as The First World War (1914-1918). It commonly associated with loss, anxiety, desolation, alienation and mass stress.
A famous poem of this era and literature is no doubt In Flanders Fields by the Canadian John McCrae. Its oft-cited first stanza goes like this: In Flanders fields the poppies blow/ Between the crosses, row on row/ That mark our place; and in the sky/ The larks, still bravely singing, fly/ Scarce heard amid the guns below.
This piquant verse with its imageries captures in clear terms the vagaries of war and desolation of societies that experience it. The persona stands in a philosophical time as s/he questions the profound sense of loss. With picturesque diction, s/he attempts to locate it all with emotions that resonate with our corona times.
The times we live in today bear an uncanny resemblance to a season of war or warfare. The glaring difference is that the enemy this time uncannily visits our shores and ports invisibly but with chillingly visible consequences.
Besides news of fresh cemeteries across the world, this war atmosphere reaches our ears in normal medical words now turned sinister. Lockdown, social distance, quarantine, curfew, self-isolation are current buzzwords in a repertoire of pathological vocabulary, describing social reactions to the pandemic spreading across the globe.
Psychologists are already warning against the socio-pathological impact of the various strategies expressed by the concepts above that governments are adopting to fight the coronavirus. Some underscore the importance of exercise, both physical and mental. Others insist on the need to remain in communion with family members and friends and society at large through social media and interactive technologies.
Yet another group cautions against addiction to the news outlets and advocate for health breaks that can help us all avoid despair, anxiety and depression. Be it as it may, the overriding atmosphere of the moment bears semblance to that in societies that have undergone acute conflict or loss or deprivation: societies after war or in a state of war.
This moment of precarity naturally is a fertile breeding ground for creative imagination and sinister narratives of conspiracies. Is this the end of the world? Is the Second Coming at hand? Is Covid-19 a laboratory weapon of mass destruction? Whodunnit? Such narratives reveal the mythopoetic consciousness in us, which drives us to make myths in order to explain our feelings in the wake of pandemics or unrest.
The desire to understand disruptive episodes in the daily routines of the life we live, leads us to moot gossip, rumours, myths and conspiracies. This negative creativity can lead to social unrest and instability, if not well-managed or challenged by facts and figures. Governments are aware of this primordial creative energy that arises out of mythopoetic imagination demanding explanations for pandemics or conflicts. Stringent laws are being enacted or activated to manage the spread of such untruths and half-truths and sensational claims in various countries.
Yet that same mythopoetic impulse to search for meanings of disasters through imagination is what contributes, in part, to astonishingly poetic literature produced in societies under duress. Whether it is the poem of the soldier in a theatre of global war or that of a persona in the wake of a global pandemic, writers rely on the profound human emotions of a moment, such as the one we live in today, to make art.
Before the coming of Covid-19, the other great pandemic of global magnitude ever recorded is the 1918 influenza, which broke out in Europe a century ago. Some call it the worst pandemic ever recorded and attribute this to the approximately 80 million people it claimed as its victims. Known also as the Spanish Flu, and just like the Great War out of which it arose, it inspired many poets of that time and beyond. Just three years ago, that old pandemic stirred the American poet Melanie Faith to pen her amazing collection, This Passing Fever: 1918 Influenza Poems.
As the coronavirus pandemic unfolds, poetry is a time-tested vessel to curate the zeitgeist of 2020. We are in a potentially defining moment of our lifetimes, and the lives of our countries. Let us seize the pen and document it all, thoughts and emotions of now within the confines of our tranquil homes. Kenyan poets should capture the emotional evidence of the current uncertain time of corona for future generations.
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Dr Makokha teaches Literature and Theatre at Kenyatta University