Poetry of Protest as Narrative Tools in the Age of Social Media

Abstract

Our memory, thought and personality are incomplete without unrestrained expression and for all practical purposes verse has been our succour. Our linguistic memories and the language in which we express them serve not just to narrate our tales but also empower us to give voice to our dissent or acceptance. From time immemorial, language has served to contextualise and narrate not just need and thought but imagination and thus paved way for possibilities of progress for the world at large. Language, through poetry, its most potent tool, language has invoked the spirit of resurgence, resistance and awakening of many a people.  When the participants of the 2019 World Poetry Conference recorded their deliberations, they declared in the preface thus “…things are not be read out or recited, they are to be discussed and debated too. Poets are unacknowledged legislators of the world but nobody takes us seriously because legislatures are made for parleys not for transient recitations. We envision an activist role for the poet to understand his calling intellectually, socially, psychologically and spiritually” (Anand, 2019). The keynote speaker of the conference Brad Modlin noted “poetry announces change through what it says and what it doesn’t say, poetry allows us to see what is happening in the world around us and informs us of what is present and what is absent, poets help us understand events and why and how they happen, they help us navigate through collective joy, dissent and bear witness to the world as it happens” (Modlin, 2019). True to these observations, poetry serves as an instrument of protest and reaches the most primitive of listeners and makes inroads into their opinion formation apparatus. This paper has chosen to elaborate upon the theme of  awareness, language and media while narrowing it down to explore how poetry has served to protest in the age of social media and has ushered in an era of art based protest. This is done using the broader framework of social media activism and literature. The researcher has used secondary data from journals, newspapers, poetry anthologies and social media links to support the claims of the paper. The paper will also attempt to enquire into the nature, structure and motivation behind such poems and the resulting impact. The scope of this paper is restricted to protest poetry as narrative tools and its role in generating conversations on social media.