Writing for Dark Times: A Literary History of Human Rights
Hadji Bakara
Hadji Bakara’s Writing for Dark Times tells the story of the writer’s distinct place in the history of human rights. It argues that the relationship between the creative work of writing and the pursuit of universal rights is an important but misunderstood dimension of both literary and human rights history over the past century. Following a diverse cast of writers from the First World War through the end of the Cold War, including Bertolt Brecht, Anna Seghers, Archibald MacLeish, Albert Camus, Czeslaw Milosz, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Seamus Heaney, Nadine Gordimer, and J.M. Coetzee, Bakara shows how their efforts to theorize and support human rights were bound up with changing ideas about the place of their own work in the world––the work of writing. And across the twentieth century, the book reveals, two central ideas about writing took shape around the politics of human rights. Writing creates something new and inspires the will for change.
Boys Behind Glass is a cheeky documentary of contemporary masculinity through the lens of matchmaking, pop culture, scientific “progress” and female gaze. This third collection from Jennifer Sperry Steinorth continues a trajectory of genre-bending poetry, this time in collaboration with artist Jenny Walton, whose documentary series Match/Enemy creates a visual algorithm of her experience on OKCupid and explores how men-seeking-women represent themselves via anonymity. In the first half of the book, watercolor portraits of single men are paired with irreverent “sonnets” gazing into the mind of a fictional woman looking at the men, looking for love. The second half is a maximalist kaleidoscope, masquerading as elaborate end notes, a diagnostic of loneliness through a wiki-esque labyrinth of technology and iconography. The culmination is a carousal of sex, selfies, heroes, and techies, what we long for & the many ways we hide.
Fire is both destructive and regenerative; at times vengeful, at others cleansing. The first mention of fire in Genesis comes after Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden. In Greek mythology, Prometheus steals fire from the gods for humankind. Fire becomes metaphorically layered—as knowledge, as desire, as anger. The book entertains the many strands of this fiery lineage as it undertakes a poetic investigation into grief and sex, loneliness and restlessness within intimacy, and language’s ability to make, unmake, and remake things. Hoffer engages in questions of gender, anger, and nationality—how women are made subject to expectations of care and fidelity. How Americans are called into conflicts that defy sense, that defy humanist values. The voice is angry as she struggles with the limitations of her agency and further frustrated that “speaking directly” does not seem to furnish progress or power. The book, then, tries to speak otherwise—it moves sonically, associatively, obsessively.
Antediluvian engages with themes of the ecstatic, desire, mental illness, and spirituality. Written in part during the COVID-19 pandemic, the book’s speaker calls on an intertextual constellation of artists as they attempt to wade through agoraphobia, parse out their relationship with God, and navigate falling in love. Overall, the landscape of the collection is a deep dive into the speaker’s psyche, and what it means to push past the confines of one’s oppressive interior.
Interglacial, is an eco-poetic travelogue about the cultural, natural, and industrial history of the Great Lakes region. I investigate colonial environmental catastrophes like clear-cutting and species extermination, and industrialization after-effects like chemical pollution and bioaccumulation, both of which have contributed to current environmental problems such as invasive species, climate change, and declining biodiversity. Entangled in those histories and contemporary environmental problems are issues of power, race, and class. I use natural sites as fulcrums, bioregional windows into current interwoven environmental and social crisis taking place concurrently all over the globe. My writing attempts to decode landscapes into poetic grammars and forms to think through and illustrate ways to “stay with the trouble,” as eco-feminist theorist Donna Haraway writes, of living in damaged worlds.
