Speaking Truth Through Verse: A Panel Discussion on Poetry and Activism

We’re tired of praying and marching and thinking and learning / Brothers wanna start cutting and shooting and stealing and burning / You are 300 years ahead in equality / But next summer may be too late to look back,” wrote Gil Scott-Heron in Evolution (And Flashback), one of his lesser-known poems written in the wake of the Civil Rights movement. In the poem, Heron urges his fellow African-American citizens to follow the footsteps of pioneers like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, to resist injustice and fight for a better future.AdvertisementPoetry has long been the precursor to resistance efforts. From Makhdoom Mohiuddin to Mahmoud Darwish, poetry has been the frontrunner to collective action, beyond geographical borders. It was this need for solidarity that convinced poet and educator Sabika Abbas to put her pen to the paper — the country’s shifting socio-political status further deepened the urge. “I think I started writing poetry when I was four years old. I used to write gibberish and everyone called it poetry but this is the form where I get all of my articulation,” she reflects. “It’s the questions that I ask, the systems around me, and the answers that I give to the systems.”It is this angst and dissent towards the system that Abbas seeks to capture, alongside her peers Vedi Sinha and Tess Joseph, in Asia Society India Centre’s upcoming panel discussion Speaking Truth Through Verse. Hosted in partnership with TARQ, Mumbai, and presented alongside And the Trees Sing Resistance Songs by Rah Naqvi, the discussion will oversee the three contemporary musician-poets reflecting on culture’s instrumental role in strengthening the struggle for justice.Pen as a weaponFor Abbas, the systemic marginalisation of religious minorities in the country is central to both her art and activism. “As a Muslim poet, with the change in the sociopolitical fabric of our country, I think it became even more clear how marginalized my community is. There were regular lynchings of our people,” she says poignantly. “I thought that if they can spill our blood on the streets, I’m going to spill our words on the streets and talk about the marginalisation we are facing, and how it is never going to be silenced and forgotten.Questioning the status quo becomes crucial to Abbas’s art. “Everyone has different ways of bringing the system down. Poetry is the only weapon that I have. For me, the poetry started off as just a written form, and then it became more of a performance in public spaces.”Love through activismSinha, founder of storytelling and folk music collective The Aahvaan Project, sees her artistic calling as a means to unravel the notion of love. “The Aahvaan Project began as a young person’s need to understand the idea of love. But as you start trying to unpack these things, you come face to face with the reality of society — love becomes an act of activism on its own,” she explains. “We should all be artists, we should all be activists, we should all stand for each other. That’s what being wholly human would be.”Through inclusivity and solidarityFor Joseph, co-founder and curator-in-chief of Kommune’s Spoken Fest, her artistic pursuit came with a sense of solidarity with undiscovered artists. “It was this case of people who had stories and poetry but didn’t have a space to come together and share them,” she recalls. “I went to the first Kommune event and became a part of it. I’ve helped grow the team for years. It’s unbelievable that in a room of strangers, you would have had so much resonance and so many stories — not just anecdotes but incidents that you play back, something that has been life-changing for you.”Joseph particularly heaps praises on her co-speakers Sinha and Abbas, both of whom she recounts meeting at her fest. “I remember the resolve and strength of Vedi’s voice — people flocked to the stage when she started singing,” she recounts. “And Sabika did a fantastic piece, called Tum Kaun Rang Ho. She took different colours, like red, green, gray, black and white, not just presenting them in classical metaphors of these colours, but looking at them through the lens of history, memory, law and justice.”The stories that Joseph particularly admires come, not from celebrities or established names, but from friends and community. “A random audience member could grow into being a voice or a story that will find a space right next to someone who they may have admired all their life,” she continues. “For me, inclusivity is not a choice, but a decision.”