Lived and imagined in/securities through poetry

View correction statement:

Correction

Poetry is a light through which we can scrutinise and trouble Security Studies. Building on Audre Lorde, poetry can work ‘as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are – until the poem – nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt’ (2007 [1984], 36). Thus, as a methodology, poetry invites us into the affective lives of everyday people, offering nuanced ways to conduct research on complex matters such as conflict, peace, and in/securities. This is relevant for Security Studies because the abstractions of security theorising and the traditional forms of writing in the discipline usually hinders our approximation to and interpretation of people’s senses of in/securities, with intellectual and public policy consequences. As many Black, Critical, Decolonial, Feminist, Indigenous, Postcolonial, Queer and Trans scholars have shown, academic writing tends to erase and depoliticise people’s experiences with in/security to the detriment of our understanding of how in/security works, for whom, for what, when, where; how much violence is at stake; and how in/security and violence are resisted, where, when, for what, for whom.¹

Within the discipline of International Relations, the poems in the special issue on ‘Poetic World Politics’ in Alternatives revolutionised our thinking about the functions of poetry and linguistic habits/disruptions, and invited us to think about our lack of poetic imagination to puzzle where international security starts and ends and could start and end (Bleiker 2000). After this inaugural special issue, multiple scholars have crafted their own takes on writing poems for studying, critiquing, and transforming international in/securities.² This collective intervention problematises the boundaries of the discussion on poetry in International Relations by centring the poetics and politics of radical poets, activists, artists, and scholars independently of their relation to a specific academic discipline or institution.

Summarising, poetry can do something for IR and poetry is already in Security Studies. Inspired by this realisation, we decided to make a ‘call for poems’ under the general inquiry of what can poetry illuminate/do to/for/in Critical Studies on Security? By doing so, we did not seek to draw new boundaries around definite answers with authors’ poems, but rather to continue the opening of the discipline to transnational dialogues across activism, academic disciplines, art-making, and everyday practices. Our definition of in/securities in this special section was broad and included ideas of dangers, pleasures, and vulnerabilities of/in/across borders/boundaries, households, homes, bodies, states, and public/private spaces; restrictions and death/life economies about/through mobilities and immobilities; violent collective and governmental forms of managing life and death; and war and global (armed/environmental) conflicts.

Of all the possible paths, our inspiration to illuminate in/security through poems for this special section were two intertwined forms of writing: from the lived and from the imagined. As we will demonstrate in what follows, these forms of writing are informed by intersectional feminist and queer approaches/politics to poetry editing and writing and our experiences as queer scholars of colour researching international security while living the consequences of (capitalistic, cis-hetero-patriarchal, colonial, and white) regimes of in/security. It is through spoken and written poetry that those living in the margins of societies and under gendered/colonial/imperial in/securities express their rage, pain, revolutionary ideas and solidarities. The twenty poets writing from or on Afghanistan, Canada, India, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Italy, Kurdistan, Ladakh, Lebanon, Mexico, Palestine, Russia, The United Kingdom, Ukraine, and Uganda meditate, and at times theorise, on lived and imagined in/securities, artistically and across borders. They name affects, bodies, ideas, religiosities, social movements, and territories that interrogate and transform the discipline across different axes of oppression.

J’s take on writing in/security poetry through the lived and the imagined

The first time I came out to a friend was through a poem, by accident, and late at night. I shared one of my love poems with my roommate via a Facebook message and I forgot to change the pronouns of my lover. Once I realised my overlook, I asked her to take a walk with me. During the walk across usually busy Mexican City’s sidewalks but tranquil at night, I talked openly for the first time about my love affairs with men. Our friendship grew tremendously from there, as did the frequency of our nightly walks.

The work of poetry writing is not linear,

it is messy and unexpected,

at times extremely painful,

most times relational.

For me, poetry was first a venue to be honest

with myself?

when I was closeted in many ways.

Through experience,

Security Studies gets invited to the multiple and multiplying regimes of in/security

co-existing

in one life,

in one body,at different times and places,

all at once.

Insecurities become securities,

securities turn out to be insecurities,

in/securities are moments in between,

becoming and turning.

We get to know sex, pleasure,

and spiritual orientations,

all usually exhumed from in/secured bodies

of knowledge.

Beyond rendering service to Security Studies, poetry can be a tool for the transformation of wor(l)ds. It can allow marginalised scholars to imagine and build communities that challenge capitalist, colonial, and white supremacist cisheteropatriarchies. In doing so, poetic interventions resonate with previous efforts to write in/security based on compassion (Ling 2019), cultivation (Shilliam 2015), love (Díaz Calderón 2021), and transnational solidarity (Hall 2020).

Who follows poetry?

What follows you?

In the streets, in verses,

how do in/securities sound, taste, and move?

I incorporated poetry for the first time in IR through a response to Aida A. Hozic after a class in the University of Florida, USA. I wrote it while crying in one of the libraries, and thinking about the epistemic violence happening every day in IR classrooms. At the time, I was researching auto-ethnographic methods, but poetry was not something security scholars wrote on the (white) articles I was reading or the (white) panels I was attending, as Jenny Edkins explained (Edkins et al. 2021). After the exchange with Aida, she invited me to a panel on storytelling at the Millennium Conference 2020. That was the first time I read poetry in an IR Conference. The conversations, panels, and publications that followed created forms of holding (space for) trans/feminisms and queer/cuir-ness in and against the discipline (see Calderón et al. 2023).

Qais’s take on writing in/security poetry through the lived and the imagined

For those of us whose first queer kiss is on broken foreign military tanks, first dance to machine-guns and first fuck on nameless graveyards, security is a tale from faraway lands where drones are made, where one homonationalist queer is sent down to kill us in the name of freedom. Living under state surveillance, imperial rule and cis-hetero-patriarchal violence, poetry becomes safety, holding our pieces together until the next morning, next kiss, next life.

In the late hours of 9 October 2004, I started to write a poem that was supposed to remain as my last one. I was surrendering to death as the Kabul autumn wind was blowing in from cracks of windows and walls into the room, flirting with the candle flame next to my bed. Chants of the so-called democracy on the eve of the first ever presidential elections in Afghanistan were filling up my room and disappearing into the far away distances. My young in-love body wanted to sleep, wanted to masturbate one more time, wanted to pray two more rak’at of namaz, wanted to write one last poem for him. A loaded borrowed made-in America gun lying next to me, ready to blow my heart out. But before that, I needed to finish the poem, I did not want him to receive an incomplete poem as my last one. In that dance between an exhausted body and a wanting heart to write, I fell asleep. I woke up to another day till today.

Poetry in times of in/securities becomes a rhythm of survival, a voice for all the chaos one lives with. Wolayat Tabasum Niroo analysing poetry of Afghan Uzbek women argues that during war, poetry becomes the means to express one’s pain, longing for return and grieving the lost loved ones (2022). Like everything else, war affects poetry. What was once about love is replaced by separation, loss and death during war. Renowned Arab poets such as Nizar Qabbani and Mahmoud Darwish, both with lived experiences of in/securities, speak of the (im)possibilities of poetry during/after war and imperial and colonial violence (Gana 2010). They also use poetry as methodologies not to only express one’s pain but revolt against injustices and insecurities (Gana 2010). Poetry is also used to make fun of the empire’s military fragility and flawed sense of security (Munhazim 2020).

For those of us who are queer, trans, nonbinary, murat, hijra, women, sex worker, displaced, invaded, colonised, partitioned, jailed, made-poor, racialised, bordered and bombed whether through imperial violence or promises of ‘liberation’, poetry provides us the possibility to revolt, rebel, and, at times, escape- violent places, histories, families and systems even if imaginary, momentarily. Poetry also becomes the means to dream decolonial securities, horizons where we are nurtured not tortured, loved not killed and trusted, not theorised.

Intersectional writing in practice

This special section weaves many threads of intersectional experience and imagination. For example, in many texts, we will encounter the (im)possibilities of translation and different forms of refusing translation. There are shared in/securities across different temporal and geographical spaces, whether living under wars, state violence, and military occupations in the Global South or navigating life as a racialised, gendered migrant/refugee in European cities. At the core of multiple poems lies an intersectional approach in engaging with global in/securities through a radical feminist and de/colonial queer lens.

In what follows, we unpack six dialogues taking place between the poems. We argue that these dialogues are reflective of the intersectional sensibilities of these poets and of the multiple systems of oppression acting in, upon, and against the imagined and lived wor(l)ds emerging in and through the verses. Naming these dialogues is an invitation to pursue further critical interrogations in Security Studies of the bodies, emotions, images, pleasures, and themes introduced in the poems.

The tenderness of war(m) bodies

There lies a tenderness of war(m) gendered bodies in Nwa Abdullah Karim, Ramin Mazhar and Ahmad Qais Munhazim’s poems. The poems narrate feelings of deep love, loss and longing for friends, lovers and communities that are wounded and separated by violence. Against the terror of war, the poems unfold that young people continue to live playful pleasures and find possibilities for transgression, whether it is dancing against the masculine demands of war or kissing queerly on landmines or military tanks.

Nwa Abdullah Karim (2023) cuts through the intimate spaces that violence disrupts, the body, home, and the in-betweens. Karim eloquently voices the pain of Kurdish struggles against violence, against statelessness. Mazhar (2023), writing in the aftermath of the international community’s betrayal of Afghans that paved the way for the return of Taliban in 2021, echoes pain of having lost home, friends, and lives. Mazhar’s poems expose the delicate entanglements of life and death, guns and flowers, hope and despair.

Ahmad Qais Munhazim (2023), auto-ethnographically lays bare lived experiences of war through a queer body, a lens that oftentimes remains invisible or in the margins in Security Studies. In these poems, one can sense the haunting ghosts of insecurity, lingering on the streets, memories of the poets, penetrating through their flesh and bones and filling up spaces whether it is their apartment they had to leave behind, orchards, hillsides, or their exiled bodies. Yet, one can also witness the tenderness in their words, in the love they hold among all the lived in/securities.

Silent resistance, trauma, and grief: critiques against (liberal) loud responses to violence

How do people live in and against the aftermaths of violence? To family members, close friends, and classmates, Aytak Dibavar, J. C. D. Calderón, and Ronny Saeed Hasan wrote their poems. The poems illustrate the continuities of violence and care through the poets’ personal, familial, and social processes of trauma, grievance, memorialisation, and the naming of or silence about their intimate experiences with the terrible (events).

Ronny Saeed Hasan (2023) defies the colonial gaze, the academic experts’ curiosities, and the masculine efforts to control; and, instead, crafts an approach to violence built on attentiveness to (the) memory (of other-ed people) and softness. Through this approach, Ronny invites us to pause, enter, and question each memory, object, and space that remains after death. Aytak Dibavar (2023) carefully weaves in her poem different threads of silence across all the seasons of the year, day and night. Rebelling against the demands to tell stories, Aytak reveals the polymorphic character of being, the contradictions of one’s perceptions of places, people, one’s selves, and invents a journey to people’s silences so the travellers are never found. J. C. D. Calderón (2023) continues the puzzling of liberal claims to speak out to critique structures of dominations. Their poem illuminates the rituals of critical performances in academia, the pedagogies of losing one’s selves in one’s rememberings of friends and violence, and the (im)possibilities of standing up from kneeling positions.

These poets wrote against (neo)liberal therapeutics and research methodologies to combat, explain, and rule the debris of violence. As alternatives, these poets showed their tools of/for survival, through the imagining of homes, people, and places in exile, their experiences with silences, rememberings, and prayings (in) unexpected places, and the following of the ghosts of their pasts that they refuse to move on from.

Speaking/Calling out: fighting against epistemic and bodily erasures and systemic violence

Alexandra Oancă, Ana Ivasuic, Rosie Bergonzi and Erin Troy speak out against Western securitisation projects and liberal institutions that inflict violence on gendered, racialised, classed and bordered bodies while claiming otherwise. As the poems reveal flawed promises of legal and justice systems for the victims of sexual violence, racism, and border regimes, one can sense the rage in these poems that come from a place of vulnerability and experiences of betrayal. By reading the poems, one can feel the rage against Western powers, Western borders and liberal performative solidarity theatre.

Alexandra Oancă (2023) eloquently narrates the various ways gendered and racialised lives are categorised as unworthy of life, unworthy of justice in life and in the aftermaths of death. Ana Ivasiuc (2023) takes us to Rome where state security regimes are set up to terrorise the Roma communities or anyone who is Other – in terms of class, racialisation, gender and sexual orientation. In this ethnographic poem, we witness the everyday activism of people writing on walls, defying the false promises of security discourse.

Rosie Bergonzi (2023) powerfully criticises the wave of liberal solidarity performances that emerged in 2020 during the Black Lives Matter protests across the world, against the police killing of George Floyd. With a protest tone and irony, the poem calls out the temporality of care and the racialisation of solidarity. Similarly, Erin Troy (2023) brings to light the problematics of transitional justice systems that expect victims of armed conflict to translate their trauma into a foreign language, to make their trauma intelligible to the courts that then fail to provide them with justice. The poem captures the violence of language, tying tongues, and silencing victims.

Imagining bravery, change, freedom, and security otherwise

While insecurity and violence seem at times inescapable due to existing structures of power, the imagination can be a way to move past determinism and into new horizons of security. In their poems, Devika Bahadur, Itziar Mujika Chao, Mina Jawad, and Nancy E. Wright imagined forms, objects, places, and temporalities of bravery, change, freedom, and security otherwise. Itziar Mujika Chao (2023) introduced in her poem a place of life called the cracks. It is a place for people enduring gendered and racialised violence at Athenas, a psychologist’s office, or the streets on their walk home. Constant acts of care create the cracks, allowing the stitching, cultivating, and watering of life.

Devika Bahadur’s poem is a powerful guesswork showing the potentials of daydreaming and the functions of everyday objects of love (2023). Through her poem, we are invited to reflect on the meanings of living after/despite (an event of) violence and the work of repair. Written in August 2022, Mina Jawad’s (2023) poem shifts the social imaginaries attached to the provinces of Afghanistan, once places she called home, but now forever tainted by war, the Taliban, and the feeling of cyclical temporalities (2023). Through the poem, she is also re-imagined, a migrant scholar contending the life-wor(l)ds of imperial security analysts, self-proclaimed human rights activists, colonial agents, and the Taliban.

In her poem, Nancy E. Wright (2023) takes us on a journey from outer space to Earth and back … and back and forth again. Without the compulsion to prove anything, the poem interrogates how we construct our desires, expectations, and reluctances to watch massive explosions of stars light-years away, but also how we are unable to see the supernova of our own making here, on Earth. Overall, these four poems force the scholars of international security to lose their well-rehearsed scripts to instead concentrate on the possibilities of guesswork and the imagination.

The un-making of places in conflict through the telling of colonial stories

Stanzin Lhaskyabs, Catherine Charrett and Arinda Daphine’s poems take us from Ladakh (India) to Palestine to Uganda where colonial and State violence have rendered these territories into sites of perpetual insecurities. The poets scream against the ongoing surveillance technologies and oppressive structures that make everyday life a struggle, a slow death.

Stanzin Lhaskyabs (2023) highlights the state of vigilance in the lives of minoritized ethnic communities that experience violence and discrimination from both the state and public. The Indian State’s control of Ladakh today is a colonial project, shaped by the legacy of British colonial rule. Bringing another colonial project into our attention, Catherine Charrett (2023) ethnographically critiques security technologies that have become tools to segregate, rule and perpetuate violence in Palestine. The poem exposes the structure of global colonial order that maintains Palestinians under occupation.

The continuity of colonial legacy is evident in Arinda Daphine’s (2023) poem that powerfully intertwines environmental violence with everyday insecurities that Ugandans, particularly the LGBTQIA+ communities, face. The colonial violence did not only affect the environment but also left behind anti-homosexuality laws that later became the legal systems. A bonding thread among these poems is also a history of colonial violence that continues in these territories to the present day. It is a history of occupation, oppression, and killing, through direct and through slow violence in the name of freedom, rights and democracy.

Critical commentaries on contemporary forms of security, violent politics, and racism

At times, poetry is grounded on the present. Some contemporary moments of in/security make spectators, including scholars and poets, break long held (white) stories of what in/security is, how in/security institutions, regimes, and processes work, and how those moments and in/security are racialised. As a consequence, participants start seeking answers beyond the ones offered in academic theories and political discourse, that usually reproduce rather than puzzle whiteness. Poetry is one of those sites offering novel ways to interpret, engage, feel, translate, and transit contemporary forms of security, violent politics, and racism. The poems by Barbara Saunders, Phil Knight, and Francesco Sani are good examples of how this can be done.

Barbara Saunders’ poems problematise the international political economies of shooting (2023). First, we become witnesses of the horrors of the police shooting against Mark Duggan, a 29-year-old black man in London in 2011, and the snipers’ shooting in Israel that took the life of Mark Hochstein and Yossi Moh’il in 1983. After situating the readers in the violence of those lived examples, we are then re-explained the riots and looting across England that took place between the 6th and the 11th of August and the long-standing Israel-Lebanon conflict. Francesco Sani’s poem brings into the conversation multiple and insightful voices and theories of war (2023). His poem is ironic and critical about the expert’s and State’s attitudes and discourses on the war in Ukraine and its relations to Europe, NATO, and Russia. Beyond intellectual work, the ethical questions introduced in the poem will forever haunt the reader in conversations of aggression, capital, victimhood, thirsty throats, and oppressed bodies.

Finally, Phil Knight (2023) plays in his poem with the metaphor of the ‘Big Brother’, a reference to the anonymous authoritarian dictator in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984. The poem evokes through repetition the ways governmental policies, such as the British government Prevent strategy, enters our everyday lives, making citizens impose racialised norms of surveillance and policing in their communities.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article was originally published with errors, which have now been corrected in the online version. Please see Correction (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21624887.2024.2359799)

Additional information

Notes on contributors

J. C. D. Calderón

J. C. D. Calderón (they/them) is a trans/feminist activist, poet, public educator, and scholar. J. has been published in different peer-reviewed journals about International Relations, Gender Studies, and Literature, including Millennium: Journal of International Studies, International Feminist Journal of Politics, Revista Interdisciplinaria de Estudios de Género de El Colegio de México, and Latin American Literary Review.

Ahmad Qais Munhazim

Ahmad Qais Munhazim (they/them), a murat Afghan, Muslim and perpetually displaced, is an assistant professor of global studies at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. As an interdisciplinary scholar, de/colonial ethnographer, and artist, Munhazim’s work troubles the borders of academia, art, and activism while exploring everyday experiences of war and displacement in the lives of queer and trans Afghans. Currently, Munhazim is preparing their book manuscript based on a de/colonial ethnography of queer and trans Afghans in Afghanistan and Afghan diasporas.

Notes

1. For example (Agathangelou and Ling 2009; Darby 1998; Delatolla 2023; Díaz Calderón 2021; Doty 2004; Grovogui 1996; Hall 2020; Krishna 2001; Parashar 2013; Stern 2005; Sylvester 2001; Weerawardhana 2018).

2. For example (Corso 2007; Calderón et al. 2023; Edkins et al. 2021; Jackson 2014).