Using Your Grief to Decorate Newspapers
MERLIN BETTS
Salena Godden
The title here is a line that sticks with me, especially as election time comes round, and don’t worry – the irony is not lost. When you’re struck dumb by the weight of madness that flushes down from our politics and permeates the essential fabric of daily life, arguments start to seem trivial, complaints become impossible. You enter the twilight zone where the only thing that can pierce the murk and mire to express how you’re actually feeling … is poetry.
At least that’s how I feel (as much as I’d like to throw a Molotov from time to time). Hastings poet and now national treasure Salena Godden recently re-released a piece she wrote for Black Lives Matter and performed with the movement’s co-founder, Patrisse Cullors, in 2020. My title comes from that poem, While Justice Waits.
It feels like the horror and frustration expressed through social movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo are now drab, unremarkable, as though British citizens no longer have the luxury of sexism and racism. They’re losing water, home, health, education – we are all losing the essential ingredients of life while the politicians sit by and re-elect themselves time and time again, just as racist, just as sexist, better at hiding, better at manipulating. We are all part of the same festering grey soup the political parties have abandoned on the stove.
there they go again
suffocating light and hope
like a pillow held fast over the face
of the kicking and struggling truth
And so Salena’s poem can now access another audience and give voice to fresh frustrations. The latest release is accompanied by video and music from filmmaker Wolfgang Dubieniec, which complements its stark portrayal of betrayal made commonplace. A hand floats and weaves from an arm stretched out of a car window, flying the slipstream – playful, childlike in another context. But as the poem progresses it becomes the obvious falsehood, the faceless operator, the politician, the policeman, feeding us all an infantile lie that we accept, that we are forced to swallow as the scene goes on. Cellos establish a sombre mood, and a chanting or droning becomes a wail:
how can it be?
that when you wake in the night
wailing and mourning and hurting
they are marching on your tongue
they are renting your insomnia
The hand adopts a life of its own, its movements embodying the refrain “there they go again,” its gliding a mockery and a sideshow, its innocence subverted into the careless “theatre of performative cruelty”. And then, we glimpse a face, a body. The hand becomes once again part of a human, a puppet master. Perhaps, for a moment, the sense of naivety is restored. Perhaps we imagine a face on “them,” a humanity… which they don’t yet understand, which they might never understand.
Express your grief, feel some solidarity, find the poem and video @salena.godden on instagram. And check out @wolfgangdubieniec for his other excellent work.Salena’s own comments: salenagodden.substack.com. Her latest books: Springfield Road (about her childhood in the eponymous road here in St Leonards);With Love Grief and Fury, a new book of poetry befitting these times.
We hope you have enjoyed reading this article. The future of our volunteer led, non-profit publication would be far more secure with the aid of a small donation. You can also support local journalism by becoming a friend of HIP. It only takes a minute and we would be very grateful.
Leave a Reply