Bearing Witness

The e-book I am about to launch, Tales from My Teachers on the Alzheimer’s Unit, describes elders at an intersection of aging, illness, and inadequate social solutions. It can be called poetry of witness, a category of writing that reveals human pain and can allow an understanding, and sometimes, a transcendence, of tragedy. Carolyn Forché (See her anthology, Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness) describes poetry of witness as writing that does not distinguish between personal and political. It emerges from concerns that cannot be defined as exclusively private or public.

The theme of witness came to my mind again last night, when I heard Medea Benjamin of CODEPINK speak on the U.S. use of military drones. Benjamin showed slides of witness in her presentation, and it was her personal witnessing around the world that startled me into understanding— how drones are a weapon of collective punishment, and how our country’s drone use promotes a Playstation mentality toward war.

It was the same day I finished reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior, a novel addressing the issue of climate change through a lens of personal story. I realized the power of Kingsolver’s novel came from witnessing the characters’ (and our own) motives for denial and belief about this contentious subject.

The company I wish to keep is with those such as Carolyn Forché and Medea  Benjamin and Barbara Kingsolver, those who bear clear witness to our precarious world. It is my hope that my own writing of witness, Tales from My Teachers on the Alzheimer’s Unit, may help caregivers allow their heartbreak to break open their hearts to the wider world.