Light against the darkness: Poetry and social movements

Abstract

This paper grows out of a public talk and poetry reading that Dr. Budd Hall delivered in New Delhi in February 2006 and examines the deep historical relationship between poetry and social movements across cultures and centuries. The paper traces how, through history, people fighting for change have utilized poetry as a tool of resistance, solidarity, and political expression. Hall moves across languages, continents, and centuries to show this, bringing in voices from Canada, Chile, Iraq, Bangladesh, Somalia, and the Indian subcontinent, from Neruda and Atwood to K'Naan and Mallika Sengupta. The paper does not argue that poetry wins wars or rewrites policy. Instead, it argues something quieter and perhaps more lasting that in the darkest political moments, poets keep showing up, and that this itself means something.