Truth, Poetry, and Power, or Said Samatar and the Sayyid
“Now it’s fine if the truth is real to you. But if it’s not, it’s you that’s left out, and not the truth. If you really believe that your sense of reality is the criterion of truth, as many people under 30 have believed recently, because they misunderstood their mothers who misunderstood Dr. Spock – if you believe that the truth of the truth depends on your sense of reality, that the world has to come to you to be accredited, then you’re in trouble.” –John Howard Yoder[1]
Truth – again?
I was a callow junior at Goshen (Ind.) College when the newly famous and not-yet-disgraced Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder made these remarks (The Politics of Jesus, his most influential book, had appeared just a year earlier). I found his words troubling, not just personally but philosophically. What did he know about how people like me thought about “the truth,” anyway? My mother had a copy of Dr. Spock, but she had no trouble letting us know what the truth was when it was time to gather eggs.
By now I understand, better than I did then, that refusing to acknowledge the actual nature of things creates many huge problems. But the other problem remains: If we can’t depend on our own “sense of reality,” well, what then? Don’t we still have to choose some version of the truth? Was Yoder demanding that we accept a truth that did not seem real to us, knuckle under to what seemed wrong just because some authority claimed it was so? At another extreme, the great, eccentric poet William Blake insisted, “I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s.” Even if we find that task too daunting, how do we choose what system we accept as truth? The loudest voice? Majority rule? Tradition? But which tradition? Mennonites couldn’t even agree on much of anything amongst themselves. And Mennonites were a laughable minority, even among Christians. Yoder had also it made it clear that no good Christian would be an ordinary American. Presumably I could read his books and follow his advice; would he allow me an occasional question, or would I need to accept his views whenever my petty young sense of reality found something troubling or difficult?
As is now well known, Yoder himself was hardly the nearly infallible guide to truth his most ardent disciples believed. On the contrary, his particular “sense of reality” and perverse theories about sexual boundaries led him to do incalculable harm to the many women he abused over many years. This outcome, tragic as it is, has eased my anxiety about his warning, somewhat.[2]
Still, we don’t need Yoder to convince us that what we accept as truth matters. Along my own way I found other guides, generally not theologians, with their own versions of such cautions. There was Thoreau: “Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous. If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life, to compare it with such things as we know, would be like a fairy tale and the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments.” There was William Stafford’s “Lit Instructor,” with its great finesse and humility:
Day after day up there beating my wings
with all the softness truth requires
I feel them shrug whenever I pause:
they class my voice among tentative things,
And they credit fact, force, battering.
I dance my way toward the family of knowing,
embracing stray error as a long-lost boy
and bringing him home with my fluttering.
Every quick feather asserts a just claim;
it bites like a saw into white pine.
I communicate right; but explain to the dean—
well, Right has a long and intricate name.
And the saying of it is a lonely thing.[3]
In an unpublished essay (and, I suspect, an unguarded moment), Yoder calls for “a renewal of the missionary arrogance (arrogance need not be a pejorative term) that dares to claim that Jesus, proclaimed as Messiah and Kyrios, transcends rather than being transcended by each new cosmos as well.”[4] This, no doubt, answers my question about where we are to find the truth . . . yet posing Jesus as Messiah and ultimate Word hardly resolves all the questions, as more than two millennia of strife and turmoil among Christians and their neighbors demonstrates.
Really these are questions of power. Throughout his work, Yoder insisted that his Anabaptist tradition, however minor historically, need not apologize or shrink from proclaiming its truth claims as relevant to the entire world. Stafford’s more diffident stance, his insistence that “Right has a long and intricate name” and sense that truth requires a “soft” approach, a “dance” toward knowledge, attempts to apply nonviolence to method as well as meaning. So should we, I believe, even in the name of a nonviolent ethic.[5] And yet it is not so easy, is it, trying to wield power without doing violence?
Half a century of searching and scrounging through the wildest, weirdest mystics, teachers, and poets I can find, has led me to certain voices that I trust as guides to whatever it is we mean by the word “truth.” Almost without exception, those voices testify in the most impassioned and intense ways about the largest, most important questions, and yet maintain an underlying humility, a recognition that what they can know and wrestle into human language is always limited, partial, through a glass darkly. Like the early Anabaptists, they know that attention to many voices and communal discernment is essential, yet resist accepting any communal judgment as final or universal. The traps and snares here are many – I suspect that even John Howard Yoder thought he was doing the Lord’s will and aligning his arguments with Jesus Himself. But these questions are indeed questions of power, and it is time to consider an analysis of poetry and power in a very different situation.
Poetry and power: The case of the Sayyid
I was only vaguely aware of Said Samatar when we were both students at Goshen College in the early ’70s, and didn’t follow his career as he went on to earn a doctorate and become a leading scholar of Somali history. Many years later, after I got to know his daughter Sofia Samatar amid her rather sudden emergence as a leading writer of speculative fiction and memoir, I discovered Said’s 1982 book Oral Poetry and Somali Nationalism: The Case of Sayyid Mahammad Abdille Hasan. A revised dissertation, the book focuses on a warrior-leader of Somali tribes during a long-sustained but finally unsuccessful resistance effort against the British colonialists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The twist is that the Sayyid Mahammad was also a poet. According to Said Samatar, he used words brilliantly and with very few scruples, killed without apparent compunction, and was, it seems, devoted to his own personal power even above the nationalism he espoused. Samatar describes hearing the Sayyid’s poems recited aloud around a campfire as a young herdsman, in a culture that was still mainly oral:
[A]lmost every evening after the camels had been milked and secured in the kraal [Abdille Ali Siigo] would, by the fireside, chant the poetry of Sayyid Mahammad late into the night before a captivated audience of men, women and children. He was a dramatic chanter who deemed to command even the attention of the camels which sat nearby, lazily chewing their cuds. So the fire crackled, its red flames casting a hazy glow over his silvery bear, giving the elder’s expression a pale, ghostly aspect. Outside the kraal fence the winds howled monotonously, pierced by the occasional roar of a hungry lion. . . . Meantime, elder Abdille chanted ecstatically, seemingly oblivious of everything but his rhymes. (x)
For Americans accustomed to thinking of poetry as a highbrow, boring form that normal people abandon as soon as they are free of their high school English teachers, Samatar’s account of its place in Somali culture is startling. Poetry, he says, plays a “pre-eminent” but “sometimes sinister, role . . . Somali oral verse is central to Somali life, involved as it is in the intimate workings of people’s lives” (2):
Poetry has the force of ritual among the Somalis and it is resorted to in the formalization and execution of almost every public act of importance: a man explains hie behavior toward others in poetic oration; marriages are contracted and terminated through the use of verse; verse is chanted to fight wars and perpetuate feuds as well as to put an end to wars and feuds; and blame and praise are spread most rapidly through this medium. In short, poetry for the pastoral Somalis is a principal vehicle of political power. (56)
Because the pastoral Somalis are both “egalitarian and lacking an impartial authority to compose differences,” with meager resources, Samatar notes, their “conflicts are frequent and pursued to virulent ends. . . . Force is exercised not only in action but also in words” (26). The Sayyid was especially gifted at both politics and poetry, and Samatar argues that his poetic gifts were inseparable from his political success. By his account the Sayyid was a great man, and an artful man, the sort of man his birth culture taught Samatar to admire. He was also a cold-blooded killer, ruthless with his many enemies, entirely unlike the pacifist heroes and martyrs of the Mennonite faith Samatar had adapted.
Given all this, Samatar has good reason for the radically conflicted feelings about the Sayyid that one senses beneath his duly academic prose. Clearly, he also believes the curve of the Sayyid’s career reflects the larger story of the Somalis – people of great dignity and deep culture who, then and now, had yet to find their way to anything resembling a stable and peaceable society.
The Sayyid’s political poems are not terribly different from American political oratory of a certain mode: they are full of eloquent insults, craftily worded manipulations of history and truth, lavish slanders, innuendo, and downright lies. They engage in no High Modernist obscurity, much less the church-bulletin sentimentality we sometimes dismiss as “just poetry”; they were effective in ways that Eliot and Pound only dreamed of being. Samatar believes that these poems truly did change the course of the rebellion and the history of the region.
But the Sayyid wrote many and varied poems. Samatar sees them as representing three types of poetic power: First is “elemental power,” sheer physical ferocity and imagery, especially in the “boast sections” of poems (190). Second is mystical power, ability to curse enemies “as a poet and a man of God” (191). Finally, there is spiritual power, “a martyr-champion defending the cause of God against an audience of infidels and apostate Somalis.” (191)
Seeing “mystical power” defined as “ability to curse enemies” made my eyes go wide. I have long thought of poetry as a healing force, above almost all else, an environment where the world was taken as one seamless web to be tended and preserved as best we can, its mystical elements turned toward peace and reconciliation, inner and outer. But even mysticism, it seems, must be pulled into violence in the Somali vortex.
Samatar acknowledges that these elements do not fit neatly together. “The Sayyid’s mystical imperatives clashed with his pastoral guile and pragmatism, to produce what one source called the ‘tempestuous personality’ which he came to manifest at times.” (194) Indeed the Sayyid played a complicated, contested role at the heart of two decades of warfare and struggle. The British colonialists called him the ‘Mad Mullah,” and derided him as “a monomaniac, a libertine, a profligate, and a cut-throat tyrant” (182). On the other hand, Somali leaders and historians saw him as “’a visionary, the father of the modern Somali nation,’ blocked at every turn by imperialist machinations in his attempts to unify the Somali nation.” (182).
All the Sayyid’s maneuvers and poems, violent and otherwise, failed to drive out the infidels, though Samatar gives him some credit for “expand[ing] the literary frontiers of the Somali language” (197), and broadening many Somali’s perspectives beyond the tribe. Still, the war he embraced took a terrible toll, including at least 200,000 deaths and great social disruption, and led the British to cease most economic development in the area and to dismiss Somalis as the “bad natives” (200). Still, Samatar concludes, “If he failed in his objective of ridding his country of alien rule, his failures are regarded by Somalis as ‘failures of the tragic hero’ – at once sad and inspiring.” (201)
These conflicting views led me to remember another controversial leader. My wife’s grandparents, of sturdy Mennonite Brethren stock, escaped from what is now Ukraine in the 1920s, following the chaotic violence of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath. They married in Canada, and when I met them they were comfortably retired in Vancouver. I heard them speak several times about a terrible anarchist named Makhno and how his roving army had robbed, raped, murdered, and generally terrorized peaceful Mennonite villages.[6] My wife’s grandparents were relatively lucky; still, they lost almost everything they owned, had to borrow money to emigrate to Canada, and left some family members they never saw again.
Only recently did I learn that in other circles Nestor Makhno is considered not a murderous terrorist but a revolutionary hero. In the introduction to his recent Makhno and Memory, which gathers historical documents, diaries, and other narratives on both sides of this divide, historian Sean Patterson describes these views:
This book seeks to tell a difficult story from two sides. The historical memory of Makhno is especially contested between today’s Mennonites and the global anarchist community. To the former, Makhno is a sadistic character who perpetrated extreme violence against their parents and grandparents during the Russian Revolution and the ensuing civil war period in Ukraine. By contrast, many contemporary anarchists understand Makhno in heroic terms as the revolutionary leader of a movement that liberated workers and peasants from capitalist exploitation. Furthermore, Makhno is often celebrated in Ukraine as a regional hero. In his hometown, public statues, memorials, museum exhibits, and even a limited edition coin minted by Ukraine’s central bank, all hail Makhno as a populist hero. Mennonite and pro-Makhnovist assessments of history could not be further apart. (1-2)[7]
As Patterson carefully traces these two utterly divergent views, it becomes apparent that neither is “the truth” but both contain truths; Makhno and his men did indeed brutally terrorize Mennonite villages, even while they fought boldly for their people’s freedom. Such incommensurable narratives persist, alas; as I wrote this, those on either side of the horrific October 7 [2023] attack by Hamas and the also horrific Israeli invasion of Gaza were mourning their dead and bewailing the atrocities committed by the other. The only thing I can say for certain is that, as is nearly always true, the suffering and heartbreak on all sides are real, and seem intolerable. Surely we can make this stop, I write, and then know how foolish that sounds. Who is this we? I am quite sure that my likes and clicks, the posts I have reposted, the dollars I’ve given and my occasional waving of a sign on a street corner have changed nothing.
And so we return to an old question – among all the forms of activism, does poetry matter? Can poems really do something in the world? The Sayyid surely thought they could, and Samatar seems to agree. The Sayyid was not alone in embracing poetry as a weapon. One poet prayed that Allah bring death or insanity on the Sayyid, and Samatar notes that locals who believe in the power of such curses “are quick to make a mystical link between this and similar invocations of evil” (178). There were other factors, of course, including British military power might and a smallpox epidemic which killed many among the Dervishes. Yet Samatar notes that without ruling out other factors, some still “point to the curse as a contributing cause. . . . Through their intemperate use of power, these sources would argue, the Dervishes incurred a curse – therefore, catastrophe came upon them.” (179)
I struggle to untangle such complicated events and claims of causality. The poetic curse comes from breaking the rules, killing too many innocent people. But the “mystical” power of poetry is for cursing enemies . . . so when your enemy goes too far, that power will come into its own. How, then, to avoid a disastrous spiral, a feedback loop that can only end in extinction or exhaustion? I have read so many compelling, heart-rending, anger-generating, brilliant poems about the disastrous things we do to each other. Powerful¸ we say about these poems. Moving. They change us, we think, and we pass them on to others when we can, when we remember. I have tried to write such poems myself, and read many more, and been moved.
But I have a terrible feeling that the power of these poems is too often merely to console those of us who are not suffering, to let us feel sad and angry and then turn back to whatever else we were doing, while the wars go on, a long way away or not far away at all. This is not nothing, but it is not much, either. And the most powerful poets are the ones without scruple, like the tyrant Auden described, whose poetry may be easy to understand but leads to disaster and little children dying in the streets.
Paul the Apostle knew something about all this when he wrote that “the tongue is a fire.” And yet, Charles Wesley’s hymn proclaiming the desire “for a thousand tongues to sing” is beloved across the church and among Mennonites, even quoted in German in a celebratory moment at the end of Patrick Friesen’s great poem The Shunning. For Mennonites, the fire and the tongue have both been modes of witness, sometimes simultaneously. Martyrs Mirror, the celebrated gathering of Anabaptist martyr stories, is an elemental book in this way, a binding together of the fires of martyrdom with the voices of the martyrs, with the waters of baptism, with the waters of drowning, with the earthly bodies breathed into life and burned or drowned out of it.
We would not exist as human beings without the tongue, without language – and yet its power is decidedly unstable, open to not only good and evil, but to a thousand gradations and variants. Truth has something to do with it, but it’s not just about what is “true” or “false,” either, as anyone entranced by a novel can testify. What we testify, what we proclaim, what we claim as we tell our own stories and those that seize us, has an always unstable relation to what we call the truth.
Poetry and power, 2
I also have a better feeling: that poetry, the artful use of language, does have power to move us in beautiful, even wondrous ways. This is perhaps even more true words when sung; I learned long ago that I can readily sing things I could never simply speak aloud without wincing. The other night I found myself playing a lovely neo-gospel song by Julie Miller, “All My Tears,” most notably recorded by Emmylou Harris. The tune is so gorgeously sad that despite its pie-in-the-sky view of the afterlife I still find myself carried off, consoled by its insistence that all will be well:
When I go don’t cry for me
In my Father’s arms I’ll be
The wounds this world left on my soul
Will all be healed and I’ll be whole
Sun and moon will be replaced
With the light of Jesus’ face
And I will not be ashamed
For my Savior knows my name
The chorus shifts from minor to major chords, reinforcing the message of the glories to come:
It don’t matter where you bury me
I’ll be home and I’ll be free
It don’t matter where I lay
All my tears be washed away
The next song I picked out, not quite randomly – I have many saved on my tablet – was “Denver Girls” by Gill Landry. It’s less pious, to say the least – it tells of an erotic encounter with a wild, witch-like woman who seems to favor BDSM and scorn orthodox religion. Yet I take equal pleasure in playing it – not because it’s “true,” certainly not of my own experience, but for its eloquent account of intense experience, remembered with pain but without regret:
She wore a silver talisman and always spoke in flames
Found me on the road half dead, looking for a change
She said Hey, broken hearted man quit standing in the door
If it’s not paradise now, tell me what you’re waiting for
Don’t you know?
There is no evermore
She told me of her new religion to the sound of passing trains
She tied me to that motel bed
Left me to call her name
And you know
I’ve never been the same
Now, I have just about exactly the same amount of direct experience with “Denver girls” as I do with the version of God the Father in “All My Tears.” If I “believe” in them, it’s because I find the words somebody found for them, and the way they delivered them, believe-able. And, I suppose, some part of me (different parts?) yearns for both of these sorts of experience, which are at least indirectly available through the songs.
The power that makes me not just enjoy but truly savor both of these songs is not their lyrics, strong as they are, or their chord structure (both have plenty of minors, which I love). It’s one of the phantom powers, one we call by many names. “Do you believe in magic?” the Lovin’ Spoonful asked, and though I do not entirely, a little part of me wants to, and another does indeed. We could call this power magic, but I think I prefer “beauty.”
Beauty, again?
I did a whole careful lecture on beauty not long ago, for first-year scholarship candidates at my school. I offered artwork and poems and songs as examples, and besides the usual beauties and sublimities, flowers and mountains and such, I spoke of the awful beauty of texts like Apollinaire’s war poems and songs like “Strange Fruit” – about lynchings of the Jim Crow era.[8] I realize now that I was talking about beauty as a phantom power, too, one with its own strange effects and attributes.
We tend to think of beauty as something only humans recognize, but Carl Safina’s Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace cured me of that error. Safina insists that animals have cultures, for a starter, and that these cultures mold and shape both individual creatures (he focuses on sperm whales, scarlet macaws, and chimpanzees) and their species.[9] “The natural does not always come naturally,” Safina writes. “Many animals must learn from their elders how to be who they were born to be.” (xiv) “[T]he whales, parrots, and chimps we will visit represent three major themes of culture: identity and family, the implications of beauty, and how social living creates tensions that culture must soothe.” (xv)
For now, we will focus on the macaw section. Red macaws are common in Peru and other regions of South and Central America. Safina points out that it “makes no sense” that these birds should be so brilliantly, profligately colored: “Why would birds evolve such beauty? The human in me wonders: Do birds see beauty in their plumage, hear it in their songs? Why does so much that is not intended for us seem so beautiful to us?” (126)
I am especially intrigued by that last, biggest question. Macaws mate for life, and Safina explores how their plumage might have evolved with some care. He points out that in many ways “the animal world is a female’s world,” and so it follows that “Male beauty is the result of millions of generations of female selectivity.” (190) Thus, he argues, “Sexual selection leads to the conclusion that females, by the power of their mate choosing, have created essentially all of the beauty in the animal world. Living beauty is largely the manifestation of millions of years of female imaginations exerting arbitrary preferences.” (192)
If this is so, Safina continues, it leads to the profound conclusion that birds and other animals share a sense of beauty with us, and “the world appears beautiful so that the living may love being alive in it. . . . Beauty is not superficial, or ‘mere,’ or a luxury. Beauty is the birthright of living beings.” (203)
Some would surely see this drive for beauty as evidence of a Creator. Safina remains determinedly agnostic, but where he writes “Life” we could say “God”:
This is radical. And the radical preference of Life is: beauty. Not only that, the hormones and the bonds show us that many other animals are capacitated not only to experience beauty but also to feel love. . . . If anything is more miraculous than the existence of life, it is that Life has created for itself a sense of beauty.” (205)
On a recent trip to Costa Rica, we stayed for a few days along the Pacific coast, and saw and heard many red macaws perching in the palm trees, exchanging their loud squawks and shrieks, flying in pairs or little squadrons like brilliant, feathery, unarmed fighter planes on patrol. Only an amateur observer, I gathered no rigorous data and reached no verifiable conclusions, but they seemed to take great delight in these flights and in the general flavor of their lives. They seemed entirely comfortable and at home roaming among the hundreds of people at a beachfront resort, though they kept their distance, unlike the squirrels and sparrows that snuck into the open-air restaurant. And they were surely, extravagantly, powerfully beautiful.
The strong poet must and cannot be a killer
Safina’s last section is on chimpanzees, where his main concern is a darker one – the persistence of violence in chimpanzee bands, especially among males. “Hierarchy is the preoccupation of male chimpanzee life,” he observes,” “For them as for us, status seeking is an impulse, dominance its own reward” (218). This obsession leads them to “make their lives much more unpleasant than necessary” as they struggle for rank and status: “Caught in a social web of inflicted ambition, suppression, forced respect, coercion, intergroup violence, and episodic deadly violence within their own community, chimps are their own worst enemies” (236). Even so, after sustained observation and conversation with the researchers he is visiting, Safina comes to recognize that he was wrong to focus so strongly on their violence, instead noting that such outbreaks are actually quite rare. “I am absorbing the realization that, on an hour-by-hour basis, life for them is peaceful, most of the time. . . . The same social system that costs them in tensions and upheavals pays dividends of community and relationships” (323). In this, also, they resemble humans, who also sometimes manage to “quell our worst impulses and to connect – even imperfectly, even temporarily, but occasionally radiantly” (323).
Let us then turn back to the human, and to poetry. There are whole reams and volumes of anti-war poetry. Carolyn Forche’s vast anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (1993) gathers hundreds of poems documenting and protesting the many wars, genocides, and atrocities of that turbulent century. There are others, and thousands more poems since then. Sam Hamill’s “Poets Against War” website (no longer online) attracted over 20,000 poems during the post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Imagine Peace, an anthology edited by Larry Smith and Philip Metres, continues to sell for Smith’s Bottom Dog Press. Among many individual volumes, Brian Turner’s Here, Bullet memorably traces his combat experience in Iraq, while also invoking the rich, deep literary and cultural legacy of that country. Palestinian-American poets Naomi Shihab Nye and Philip Metres have written particularly strong, often wrenching poetry and prose on the struggle toward peace. There are too many more examples to mention, and this is so even if we keep to a relatively narrow definition of “peace” poetry; it now seems clear that the term should be expanded to include women’s rights, LGBTQ+ issues, racism, and ecological crisis, just for starters, as compelling peace and justice issues.[10]
So rather than attempt a catalog of “peace poetry,” let us briefly contemplate some poems and texts that offer not peace but dreams of redemptive violence. We might begin with a famously violent poem by Emily Dickinson, whose poetic output spiked during the agonizing Civil War. In 1862, Dickinson wrote in horrified terms about a family friend, Frazer Stearns, who had been killed in battle: “Austin is chilled—by Frazer’s murder—He says—his Brain keeps saying over ‘Frazer is killed’—‘Frazer is killed,’ just as Father told it—to Him. Two or three words of lead—that dropped so deep, they keep weighing—”[11] Her well-known correspondence with Col. Thomas Wentworth Higginson began during the war, when Higginson commanded the First South Carolina Regiment, which was comprised of African-American soldiers.
“My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun,” probably written in 1863, claims a phallic and male identity that even in fantasy both troubles and illuminates:
My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—
In Corners—till a Day
The Owner passed—identified—
And carried Me away—
And now We roam in Sovreign Woods—
And now We hunt the Doe—
And every time I speak for Him
The Mountains straight reply—
And do I smile, such cordial light
Upon the Valley glow—
It is as a Vesuvian face
Had let its pleasure through—
And when at Night—Our good Day done—
I guard My Master’s Head—
’Tis better than the Eider Duck’s
Deep Pillow—to have shared—
To foe of His—I’m deadly foe—
None stir the second time—
On whom I lay a Yellow Eye—
Or an emphatic Thumb—
Though I than He—may longer live
He longer must—than I—
For I have but the power to kill,
Without—the power to die—[12]
Dickinson seems to revel in this fantasy of violence and potency, not just possessing but becoming the deadly rifle, taking on a bold, loud voice that echoes in the mountains and an overwhelming, volcanic visage. The sensory imagery becomes more intimate with the “emphatic Thumb” striking down foes with deadly accuracy. The poem is often read, justly I think, as a feminist claim to a form of power – the gun as pen – that Dickinson did not have in her everyday life. And yet in the last stanza Dickinson undercuts her own imagery, recognizing that the gun’s power is severely limited. It is loud and deadly, but also rigid and without agency. It does not lead to sex or even intimacy – the weapon merely “guard[s] My Master’s Head” rather than sharing his pillow. The Master chooses who dies and who lives; the weapon has only “the power to kill,” not “the power to die.”
Another memorable fantasy of power and weaponry is Jorge Luis Borges’ “Ragnarök.”[13] In the dream the story describes, the gods return, but though people applaud at first, they soon become wary. The gods seem unable to speak, and look subhuman: “Very low foreheads, yellow teeth, stringy mulatto or Chinese mustaches and thick bestial lips.” The mood swings abruptly:
Suddenly we sensed that they were playing their last card, that they were cunning, ignorant and cruel like old beasts of prey and that, if we let ourselves be overcome by fear or pity, they would finally destroy us.
We took out our heavy revolvers (all of a sudden there were revolvers in the dream) and joyfully killed the Gods.
Who are these proto-gods who now seem to have fallen so low? They seem more like Jungian archetypes than identifiable deities from any particular tradition, despite the title’s reference to the apocalyptic Norse epic of the great battle in which many of the gods perish. In Borges’ dream version the gods are nothing like Odin, Thor, Loki, and the rest. Instead they are described in ways that mingle overtly, shockingly racist stereotypes with “bestial” images that make the joyful, emancipatory brutality of the final explosion of violence seem a triumph – although its terms and aftermath, in the best dream fashion, are left unspecified.
Carl Jung’s The Red Book is the fascinating, intricate account of interior experiments, “encounters with the unconscious,” that he undertook starting in 1913. Much of it is also shadowed by the stress and misery of World War I, though Jung makes no direct gestures toward any sort of activism and only a few oblique references to world events. His writing is radically interior, as the Sayyid’s is radically exterior, and aspires not at all to worldly power. Even so, Jung claims that “You can reach your God only as an assassin, if you want to overcome him.” (Jung 162). The “beautiful wild Gods” of the Germanic barbarians had to be betrayed, Jung muses: “Think of the blond savage of the German forests, who had to betray the hammer-brandishing thunder to the pale Near-Eastern God who was nailed to the wood like a chicken marten. The courageous were overcome by a certain contempt for themselves.” (163).
Nietzsche’s influence on Jung is clear here. But what I suddenly remember is Herr Risser, my middle-school German teacher – he was a real German, echt Deutsch as Eliot has it. I have no idea how he made his way to rural Illinois in the mid-’60s. But along with grammar and verb tenses, he told us that the Romans made Christians of the Germanic tribes by simply driving them into the river wholesale and then pronouncing them baptized.
When I retold this story recently, a biblical scholar in the group noted quickly that there would have been a priest involved, which is surely true. And I must also admit that my memory of those days is hazy. But I am pretty sure that the priest’s words weren’t important to Herr Risser, nor, I suspect, to a fair number of those who found themselves in the river while words were chanted over them in a language they likely did not even understand. Power echoes and resounds in unpredictable ways, like the sound of Dickinson’s loaded gun, like the sound of her poems echoing, echoing, all these years now since she died not knowing what would become of them.
The Romantics dreamed that poetry could and would change the world too, especially the radicals like Blake and Shelley. “I shall not cease from mental fight,” Blake writes, “Till we have built Jerusalem / In England’s green and pleasant land.” “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind,” claimed Shelley. But personally they had no political authority to speak of, and did not seek it. A few people noticed their radical views, but the dark Satanic mills persisted. And yet some of us still remember, and take strength from their words. Their poetry remains a phantom sort of power, immeasurable but still present.
*
I remember Said Samatar only distantly, as a figure that someone pointed out to me across the cafeteria. We never had a class together, and I don’t believe we ever spoke. He was married already and must have been crazy busy – he graduated in two years, while working as well, so it’s not surprising that he didn’t make it to the parties I attended. Still, his fascination with this poet-warrior intrigues me. I can’t imagine, myself, feeling so connected to someone who killed so many people, but I didn’t grow up in a pastoral culture, live rough for two years on the streets of Mogadishu, or find my way to a Mennonite mission and fall in love with a young white woman who helped me learn English. I didn’t first meet my father by introducing myself to him as he played a chess-like game, as Samatar describes in a fascinating interview:
SS: I stood near him and said to him, ‘Father.’ He looked up assuming that I was one who had some legal problem. He said to me, ‘Son, if you have a legal problem, why don’t you come to the office tomorrow?’ Well, he doesn’t recognize me, I said to myself. The reason I recognized him is that his visage resembled strikingly that of Ismail, my brother. That’s the only way I knew it was him.
AS: So his face gave him away?
SS: His face and my brother’s face! So then I said, ‘You are my father.’ And he said, ‘Ah, which wife?’ I named the wife, my mother, and then he said, ‘What’s your name?’ And I said, ‘Said.’ He said, ‘Ah, there was such a child.’ People in the West will find this very strange. They would say, ‘That is incredible!’[14]
Samatar’s grief and concern for his now-distant home country is apparent throughout this long interview. A passage near the end seems especially relevant not only to Somalia, but to these United States as well:
My despair, Ahmed, is that as far as my understanding and experience are concerned, Somalis have not learned how to create a program greater than themselves that addresses the larger questions. Look, I don’t have to like you, you don’t have to like me, but our destinies are interwoven. For our own survival, even though we might hate each other – of course, you and I like each other [laughs] – our destiny hangs on the two of us cooperating for a larger cause.
Whatever powers poetry may possess, clearly it has not brought either Somali or American society to anything like the glorious millennium. Said Samatar, a man whose life brought him into and through multiple cultures and value systems, never found his way clear to a coherent, workable way of being peaceably in the world. But then, who has? His wrestling with the Sayyid’s strange, troubled, finally failed life and career has widened and deepened my sense of the possibilities and limits of poetry as a power. For that I am grateful, even as the wrestling continues.
Notes
[1] Goshen College convocation address, Oct. 22, 1973. Quoted in Maple Leaf 1974, Goshen College, 5.
[2] The definitive account of Yoder’s abusive behavior is Rachel Waltner Goossen’s lengthy essay “‘Defanging the Beast’: Mennonite Responses to John Howard Yoder’s Sexual Abuse,” MQR 89 (January 2015). See https://www.goshen.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/75/2015/01/3YoderWaltnerGoossen.pdf.
[3] William Stafford, The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems, Graywolf, 1998, 87.
[4] “Postscript” to “That Household We Are,” typescript of address at a conference at Bluffton (Ohio) College, 1980, p. 8. For access, contact the Bluffton University Archives.
[5] For a more detailed, similarly skeptical view of Yoder, see my essay “The Rule of God and the Ruby: The Theopoet Talks Back” in Songs from an Empty Cage: Poetry, Mystery, Anabaptism, and Peace (Cascadia, 2013), 182-203. I am also tempted to add this classic passage from Through the Looking Glass: “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – that’s all.” https://www.gutenberg.org/files/12/12-h/12-h.htm#link2HCH0006
[6] For those unfamiliar with the story, the Mennonites had come to southern Russia, now Ukraine, beginning in 1789, at the invitation of Catherine the Great. Many had become prosperous, but they continued to speak German as their first language, clustered in their own villages, maintained their religious separatism, and were avowed pacifists. They were tempting targets when the Revolution came and in the chaotic period that followed; some eventually took up arms in mainly unsuccessful attempts to defend themselves, and many emigrated as soon as they were able.
[7] Sean Patterson. Makhno and Memory : Anarchist and Mennonite Narratives of Ukraine’s Civil War, 1917–1921. University of Manitoba Press, 2020.
[8] Written and composed by Abel Meeropol and recorded by Billie Holiday in 1939. A live version is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DGY9HvChXk.
[9] Safina, Carl. Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace. Picador, 2020.
[10] For an argument along these lines in a Mennonite context, see my “Toward Post-Peace Poetry: or, What to Do with the Drunken Soldier,” Songs from an Empty Cage: Poetry, Mystery, Anabaptism, and Peace (Cascadia, 2013), 143-165.
[11] Emily Dickinson to Samuel Bowles, late March 1862 (L256) https://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/emily-dickinson/biography/special-topics/emily-dickinson-and-the-civil-war/
[12] The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition, ed. by Ralph W. Franklin (Harvard University Press, 1999)
[13] Dreamtigers (University of Texas Press, 1964), translated by Mildred Boyer and Harold Morland. https://thefloatinglibrary.com/2008/07/28/ragnarok/.
[14] “Interview with Professor Said Sheikh Samatar at the 2005 Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association,
Washington, D.C.” Ahmed I. Samatar. Bildhaan: An International Journal of Somali Studies, V. 1, 2006: 1-24.