Poetry and Grief

What might a poem about grief and the immediate shock that precedes it look like? I’d like to imagine a long meditation, something about a collective hurt and shared pain, empathy and a call to a renewal to faith. But I find myself more drawn, in the wake of what is happening in Kenya, and in particular to the 148 lives lost in the Garissa attack, to a poem that should be short, a brief poem, almost to the point of not existing at all. Perhaps my initial reaction should not be to rush into poetry. In September 2013 I was supposed to be sitting next to Kofi Awoonor on a panel about the distinctions between East and West African poetry. At the same time, or moments before, a number of gunmen had taken the Westgate mall hostage. Awoonor was among the people in the mall at the time. By the end of the panel we learnt that he had died. This was the first time I was old enough to experience the shock that follows a terror attack. I remember later at Awoonor’s vigil I held a candle in my hands and I’d never seen how dark and quiet the sky above Nairobi can get. I mean I experienced something heavy in and around it but could not name it, did not know how to think about it. The Wall Street Journal later published one of Awoonor’s last poems:

And death, when he comes
to the door with his own
inimitable calling card
shall find a homestead
resurrected with laughter and dance

Such is the scene in the street I live in; always laughter and dance from children four floors down, even at the moment the Garissa attack is happening, when Death is in the living room. I am surprised by this joyous laughter from the street, and the panic and fear streaming live on TV, by the resilience in the Awoonor poem, and in my lack of understanding about how a poem can be so founded in the human psyche, how the poem does not break or end but seems to be going on and on. More surprising though is the laughter of the children. Maybe children know more about public grief than I do. In spite of the laughter something heavy still lurks in the air, the sunset has changed colour, blackouts now seem to signal the end of time, the rains have come late. Isn’t poetry supposed to be restorative, have powers that move and console?

Today, as I write this, people are in a morgue minutes from where I work trying to identify their beloved. This time the gunmen took an entire university hostage, killing 147 people. I am also surprised by my saying "this time." I know there will be a next time. Pictures appear online of the bodies of students in lecture halls, dead, unmoving, and you can sense the desperation of the kind of flight that is impossible due to shock. An immobile flight, if such a thing were possible, like the bodies in Szymborska’s "Photograph from September 11." A poem about grief might be short and immobile in the same way the bodies are unmoving. It must not move.

I can do only two things for them—
describe this flight
and not add a last line.

I am drawn to these last three lines in Szymborska’s poem, how haunting and halting that last line sounds, asking what I can do, how I am stuck some place in Nairobi immersed in empathy but unable to voice much, unable to voice anything really, thinking perhaps what I should be doing is something more practical, maybe donating blood and time. If such an attack can leave one so paralysed should a poem then offer a way to move?

I was walking down Moi Avenue on the day of the ambush and I could sense the grief in the air, in the faces of strangers, in that peculiar way Kenyans have learnt to share these national griefs, knowing, now, that a definition of Kenyan identity has to have in it our continuous state of mourning. I tried to write a poem about those moments of fear and grief and could not bring myself to it, shocked at how all my words and rhymes sounded meaningless and shapeless on the page. I turned to the poetry in my kindle. Ashbery’s Three Poems was open.

Because life is short
We must remember to keep asking the same question
Until the repeated question and the same silence become answer.

What might a poem about grief look like? Does the shape of it on the page matter? Might it compare still, unmoving blood on a lecture hall to a flame tree blooming out of season? What might it do for those who have lost kin? I find that anything I read and write has no answers, and I am not interested in asking the same question. In fact the question itself loses shape and I am no longer sure what I am asking. Maybe time and silence will become answer. Maybe a poem with no time and space in it will become answer. For a brief moment in a bar on Kaunda Street I am shocked by the realisation that poetry cannot exist here. I find that the only thing to do on the Easter weekend is lock myself up in Moi Drive and watch reruns of a comedy on a computer, avoid at all cost the TV and the papers and social media, to repress all emotion, an art I have learnt well whenever the question of grief comes up.