So I Refuse
Redirecting attention and bearing witness.
“Because our status quo is self-expression, sometimes the most effective mode of protest for artists is to refuse.
I can’t write about poetry amidst the "reasonable" tones of those who aim to acclimatize us to this unreasonable suffering. No more ghoulish euphemisms. No more verbally sanitized hellscapes. No more warmongering lies.
If this resignation leaves a hole in the news the size of poetry, then that is the true shape of the present.”
— Anne Boyer in her resignation as Poetry Editor of The New York Times
Like many, I have spent the last few months feeling at a loss for how to move forward in the world. What role do words play when bombs are being dropped, what importance does poetry hold in a world turned to ash? Online I consume post after post of violence all across the world and then close my phone and am asked to return to work, to school, to what we have deemed the conditions of normal life—conditions we have been living through for the last three years as we reckoned with a global pandemic and hardly paused to recognize the situation we were in. I have been studying the end of the world for years, have directed much of my academic research around it, and yet if it has come the end of the world has come slowly and seeping, dragging itself into everything. And we are incapable of moving beyond it.
Within that space lies refusal and the power in choosing to divert attention, or at least a power in refusing to go on as if any of this is acceptable. What world emerges if we accept this? If we believe death to be reasonable as long as it continues to happen in other places, to other people, in other countries we have been sold stories about for decades in order to manufacture the conditions for this acceptance? In a poetry class in college, I once wrote, death is another country, and I find that holds true today. Death is distant, a past and a future but never a present. But, in Boyer’s words, let our refusal show the true shape of the present.
So yes: I’m angry. I feel powerless and incapable in equal measure. Within that, I am also afraid for those I know in the Middle East, aching for the place I called home, however briefly. I am angry about the American portrayal of the region, which could not be further from the truth, and I am angry about the dehumanization that has occurred in that media space. I am angry about the artists and the writers and the nonprofits and institutions that want to promote critical thinking and capitalize in on their liberal nature when it benefits them and yet have said nothing of substance on Palestine or worse, nothing at all. If our job as artists is to interpret the world, then what happens when we fail to do so? We must refuse the conditions of acceptance but we must not refuse to do the work. We must not let art fail.
“I’m not interested in heaven unless my anger gets to go there too. I’m not interested in a happy eternity unless I get to spend an eternity on anger first. Let me speak for the meek and say that we don’t want the earth, if that’s where all the bodies are buried. If we are resurrected at the end of the world, I want us to assemble with a military click, I want us to come together as an army against what happened to us here.”
— Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy
If my life as a Southerner and my work in Southern and rural studies has taught me anything, it is how easily a narrative can be built up around a place—and how easily that narrative can be weaponized to create what we refer to as “national sacrifice zones,” a term that Naomi Klein unpacks well in her excellent piece on Edward Said, Israeli environmentalism, and the “violence of othering in a warming world.” Words have power. When we craft a narrative about a region that paints it as “backwards” “redneck” and “hillbilly”—and then give all of those terms negative associations—we enable the “good liberals” to condemn the South as the root of most problems in America, as a place that anyone who can leave should, and as a region that is so outside of the ideals of a “good” American that we ought to sacrifice it entirely.
Then, of course, you have the flipside. Many conservatives in the South—and much of rural America—tell themselves the same story about those they feel disagree with them. They are saving America, they believe, preserving the true values that they feel are at risk of being lost. From a folklore perspective, this drive speaks to the very origins of the field, where early folklorists went out into the field (mostly rural places in Europe and the UK) in search of what they deemed “survivals”: practices, rituals, behaviors, and traditions they feared were at risk of being lost. Humans have been focused on preservation for almost as long as we have been alive. We think little about what will survive, choosing to tell our story through the lens of protection, keeping things afloat because that is the way we have always done it. We pass down the stories of places through generations rather than interrogate our beliefs and look critically at the world around us. We would rather survive as we have always done rather than find new ways to live.
That’s a broad generalization, but it holds true. And we see it playing out in real time all across the country, which feels to be on constant cusp of an ideological civil war, if not already embroiled within one. Everyone in America right now is convinced we are protecting something. We are convinced that we are in the right and that there is a moral opposition to do so. We are convinced that those we have deemed “other” are in the wrong. We see this both on a national and global scale and there is nothing that scares me more about how we move forward with empathy and community than this.
I am not interested in a world with binary ideologies. Those binaries teach hate, and that gets us nowhere. When I was a kid growing up in the South, reckoning with the things that made me different, I was told that I could not be who I was here, and within that, I learned to hate both myself and the place I called home. It took a long time to get back here, to begin to see the story differently. I will be unlearning this othering of myself for the rest of my life.
I want a different story. I want pause. I want to think critically, to redirect my attention away from the easy narratives I am given and instead towards the ones that encourage multiplicity. That allow for anger as much as joy, resistance as much as resilience, healing as much as hope. The full spectrum. It requires attention, and I believe that we cannot pay proper attention unless we first refuse acceptance: of the stories we are provided, of the understanding that this is the way the world works. It might be now, and it might have been for a long time, but it doesn’t mean it has to stay that way. There are always new possibilities of worldbuilding where we are willing to see them.
In a post on my Instagram, I reshared a quote from the incredible writer Hala Alyan, which reads: “To witness is to steward the truth. It is using the self—what it sees, what it knows—as evidence. This is how we build our capacity in this moment: by devoting ourselves to truth-seeking. It is to say: I will witness and I will be the proof. I will consider myself evidence of what is happening. I will remember what others have endured. I will speak of it. I will let it change me.”
I remain deeply inspired by the capacity of Palestinians for joy, care, community, and resistance in this moment. I am inspired by their willingness to stay in the place they call home—by their refusal to leave or walk away. Bearing witness in this moment should change all of us. For those of in the South, it should showcase what I have come to wholeheartedly believe: another world is possible. It is in reach. We must build it together.
No prompt this week, but instead a task. Walk outside and bear witness. Set a time for fifteen minutes and pay attention to the world around you. No headphones. No technology. Do not write anything down until after the timer is up. Look closely and pay attention. What does the song of the birds sound like? The noise of traffic? What color is the world? What is is telling you?
We’ll be back in January (with new episodes of the podcast!) after our team takes a well-deserved break. I hope you all have a great holiday season and are able to surround yourself with those you love. That’s all that matters, in the end—our capacity for love against all the odds.