A weapon in the struggle: contemporary anti-fascist poetry

Ahead of the CPB Artists Against Fascism conference this weekend, ALISTAIR FINDLAY recommends a new anthology whose diverse poems segue into a sense of international solidarity and interconnectedness

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THE introduction by its editors, Francis Combes and Andy Croft, who brought Smokestack out of retirement to publish this anthology, goes straight to the kernel of the need for anti-fascist poetry: “The far right may like fighting culture wars, but they have no artistic culture of their own with which to entrench their gains in society. They do not understand — and therefore are afraid of — the democratic potential of art.

“Because poetry is primarily a mass and amateur activity, it is outside the ideological apparatus of the state, and well below the radar of far-right insurgencies. It therefore has the potential to isolate the enemy, imaginatively, emotionally and intellectually, contesting their common sense, documenting their violence, mocking their stupidities, and dividing them from their potential allies.”

That could not be better said, and the anthology demonstrates exactly that in the 100 poems from 61 international poets from 46 countries, including six poets from the UK and Ireland, and is due to be published simultaneously in Paris, Athens, Lisbon and Madrid.

The range, diversity and sheer girth and quality of the topics, styles, local and international references is almost overwhelming for a solitary reader but, in combination and reach, they all soon segue into one, infused by the sense of solidarity and interconnectedness through which this collection works, and offering readers — perhaps feeling isolated and overwhelmed themselves — an invaluable feeling of support: political, intellectual, emotional, social.

I confess to worrying at the outset about the first poem The Barbarians by the Iraq poet, Chawki Abdelamir, four pages long. Reared in the “old school” that anything over one page has to fight for the privilege, I alighted, on the second page, on this depiction of what the West calls the neoliberal oligarchic ruling-class:

“Their sky is so high/ that no law, no science can reach it./ They have conquered it through their incantations and rituals,/ and built Edens for it where they have placed everything they desired:/ vineyards, wine, women, and favourites./ And they have stoked flames and terrors for us.”

The remaining pages are filled with similar treasures depicting and nailing these modern “barbarians”: “They have neither present nor future./ They were born and raised/ like fat worms in the graveyard of our past.” If this is not Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg and Trump then I don’t know a simile from a Starmerite.

Nearly every poem in this anthology could be chosen for the Morning Star’s weekly Thursday Poem slot — no greater praise. As for the British and Irish poets, the Scot WN Herbert does a sonnet with 14 lines all rhyming on “oon” on Trump and his “gangster” Capitalist administration; the Welsh bard Mike Jenkins does a trio of poems in Welsh punter dialect which stand comparison with Tom Leonard’s Glaswegian classics, especially Fash Up-a Gurnos, which probably means “Fascists up a sink estate now being groomed by Faragists.”

The English Alan Dent does a brilliant cold-steel unsmiling riff on Brecht’s trope, Questions For A Worker Who Reads, by using his own set of questions in What Is An Immigrant, the first response to which is “Why not a new arrival?”, followed later by “Do asylum-seekers have two legs and arms, one head?” and 52 lines of insouciant satire, ridicule and mockery unspool.

Sean O’Brien, English despite the name, attacks the rise of the AfD in Germany with remarks about their roots in the 1930s in two poems and a third, Old School, deals with England’s crypto fascist nurseries thus: “I know you of old, my friends. We were at school./ I know what was said and I know what was meant/ about the Irish and the wogs, about the Jews.” And that’s just for starters.

Michael Rosen is typically popular and brilliant in his three poems and I have recommended his I Was Listening To A Pogrom On The Radio Today to accompany this review, because I suspect/hope it is a deep satire on the BBC (which Rosen seems rarely absent from) and of the BBC not asking the awkward kind of questions Alan Dent does so memorably.

The Northern Irish award-winning poet Sinead Morrissey is also asking questions in her Painting Vs Photograph and suggesting some of the answers thereby: “I’m only asking a question. A lie is still a lie,/ even if everyone believes it.”

The Irish poet Gabriel Rosenstock begins his poem not with a question but a statement in I Don’t Know Many Fascists which ends 22 lines later with I Have Known Many Fascists, a poem which is perhaps performative of this anthology as a whole, a powerhouse of ongoing reflection and revisiting the past on behalf of the present and the future — not through “a glass darkly” but a mirror glinting from every corner imaginable in today’s global politically revolving and spinning stratosphere and atmosphere, as Morrissey ends her poem: “The sky’s the limit.”

This anthology should come with a health warning, however: do not try to read it all at once. The contrasts between poems written in the West under the rubric “fascism” is not necessarily applicable across the various nationalities represented — Ukraine, Russia, the Nordic countries, the Balkans, Puerto Rico and so on — which is part of the fascination for the reader to wrestle with, interpret, understand and relate to. That would take another review altogether.

All in the Same Boat can be purchased from inpressbooks.co.uk

Artists Against Fascism will take place on October 10, at Newington Green Meeting House, London, 11am-11pm. For tickets and information see: artistsagainstfascism.art

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