The individual responds to his environment and experiences through writing in differing ways. Ironically, writing as therapy usually achieves its best effect and is most ‘inspired’ when it is unconscious - as in the case of a non-writer in crisis, who end up being a writer as a result of those crises – but not when it is contrived and artificial as in so-called ‘inspirational poetry,’ written as a panacea to all kind of ailments of the mind or weaknesses of character. Moral outrage can be an unconscious well-spring for powerful poetry as we see in the case of Wilfred Owen. He went to battle practically with a pen in one hand and a gun in the other. The professional necessity of killing further complicates, in this case, the poet’s ruminations. The horror of war made a poet out of Owen. In a planned foreword to a future collection he wrote:
In other words his book would contest “The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est /Pro patria mori.” Other individuals, the sensitive child, the outsiders and non-conformist, the oppressed and the ill become writers, through an accidental discovery of the therapeutic activity of writing, while those who are already writers even thrive more from returning to the soothing spaces between words. Enter St. Genet.
Jean Genet’s case is a quintessential example of the liberating power of writing. He was born to a prostitute mother, who gave him up for adoption; and progressing through an adoptive home as a child, a penal colony at fifteen, and an infamous stint with the French Foreign Legion from age eighteen, Genet seemed destined for a life of crime and dissolution.
He was a prostitute, petty thief and vagrant, revolving through the doors of Parisian prisons, where he discovered writing or writing discovered him and reached out its therapeutic possibilities. His writings were autobiographies in a literal and literary sense. In Paris he was severally jailed for petty thieving, identity fraud, public indecency and other offences. The privacy of prison resulted in the poem, "Le condamnée mort," and the novel Our lady of Flowers (1944). His life in Europe as a petty thief, homosexual prostitute, and vagabond is recorded in The Thief’s Journal (1949).
As an adult even though still in the grip of kleptomania, he rose to become one the foremost French playwrights and leftist activists of the twentieth century, who supported the Algerian independence movement, subscribing to Negritude in his play, The Blacks (1958)–according to Aimé Césaire. His conversion and healing through writing was catalytic after the intervention of leftist Parisian intellectuals like Jean Paul-Sartre, Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau, who, in 1949, saved him from the certain life-sentence of a repeat-offender by petitioning the French president. So promising a literary voice had Genet become.
He went on to help define and shape, with Samuel Becket, what has become twentieth century Absurdist Theater. Although his writings borrow from his dark life, they saved him from the gutters. The darkness that would have enveloped him was transferred unto characters in plays and novels. Genet’s life is reminiscent of the words of the character, Cecil Graham, in Oscar Wilde’s, Lady Windermere's Fan, Act III: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
Oscar Wilde was another tempestuous individual whose writing saved him. In his own words: “God knows; I won't be an Oxford don anyhow. I'll be a poet, a writer, a dramatist. Somehow or other I'll be famous, and if not famous, I'll be notorious. Or perhaps I'll lead the life of pleasure for a time and then–who knows?–rest and do nothing. What does Plato say is the highest end that man can attain here below? To sit down and contemplate the good. Perhaps that will be the end of me too” (Sheridan Morley, Oscar Wilde 1976, 31).
Writing delivers the individual from private demons in different ways. It helped William Styron battle depression, and the War poets like Siegfried Sassoon live trough the daily dismemberment of friends and foes on the battlefield. Poetry has fuelled liberation movements and given succour to the down-trodden. W. H. Auden’s quip that poetry makes nothing happen is merely a pessimistic reflection of a poet in a moment of disillusion. Even the ability for him to make that assertion, write it down and disseminate it in book form, is itself an ironic testimony to the liberating act of self-expression. It is a kind of ‘talking cure’ in this case the ‘writing cure.’
Amatoritsero Ede is a peripatetic, internationally award-winning poet and ex-Hindu monk born in Nigeria. He has been a Book Editor, was Editor-in-Chief of Sentinel Online Poetry Journal from 2005-2007, and Writer-in-Residence at Carleton University’s English Department from 2005-2006, where he is now a Doctoral Candidate.
The whales leap, the sport of giants.
Flippers, huge tails smacking water,
joyful, cutting across the bay.
The play on the title of Joseph Brodsky’s essay, “Footnote to a Poem”, is deliberate.
December 15, 2008
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December 15, 2008
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