#didierleclair

She was beautiful, the poet who delivered her words during the inauguration of the new president of America, Joe Biden. I have no intention to denigrate the literary qualities of Amanda Gorman’s poetry. But what should we say after that? Maybe that the value of youth should not bother with the wait of maturity. But sometimes, it should.

Poetry, when respected, gives you back the same respect you gave to it. I remember Maya Angelou’s reading during Bill Clinton inauguration, January 20th, 1993. Her poem was called On the pulse of morning. In this enticing text, Angelou says “I am the tree planted by the river/which will not be moved”. It is an homage to Langston Hughes (I’ve known rivers) and to James Baldwin (The Fire, next time).

I won’t attempt to compare the work of Maya Angelou to the poetry of Amanda Gorman. I’d rather speak of her experience. Maya Angelou walked beside Martin Luther King Jr., she knew Malcolm X. This woman was shoved around, brutalized, insulted during the worse period of the Civil Rights Movement in the sixties. When Angelou recites her poetry, in her imposing voice, and she mentions Ashanti people, it is because she knew them when she lived in Ghana.

How a poet born in 1998, like Amanda Gorman, could ever encapsulate the same experience? As brilliant as she may be, there are literary prerequisite forged in people’s wound. I don’t blame the young poet who was asked for the impossible. I denounce politicians and their entourage. Joe Biden himself, if he had a real respect for literature, would have known that next to him, it should have been, the voice of the oppressed, the scream of marginalized and the soul of the trampled on.

Poetry is a serious business, and each word has its golden value. There are many poets in the tranches carrying the scars of their battle who would have given every word, the truthful sound of poetry. Poets like Sonia Sanchez, Jessica Care Moore have books describing the feeling of being Black in America. Quincy Troupe, Ishmael Reed and the list is endless.

Yet, that was not the choice. Some decision makers decided to pick someone whose bibliography does not exceed three lines. What we can conclude from this choice is that youth is used as some kind of serum to heel all wounds. The media influencers attempted to bandage society’s deep racism, misogyny with the innocent voice of a young poet.

These media gurus are doing it on purpose. One would never find such youth represented in governments, in multinational round tables or at the head of boards of directors. Inside the powerful corridors, you’d find only old white men, no women or maybe a few and not a single young minority representative.

Let’s talk about Greta Thunberg, the teenager from Sweden who appeared a few years back as the face of the environmentalist activists. This was a new face who had the task of convincing politicians like Vladimir Poutine of the necessity of fighting global warming. Let me reiterate that I don’t doubt Greta Thunberg’s struggle for environmental causes. But who could convince me that she can put her point across and get Vladimir Poutine on board? Better than Al Gore, David Suzuki or Vandana Shiva who wrote books on the subject? I doubt it vehemently.  

Western society is stuck in an illusion of progress and whenever youth is involved, it accentuates the fantasy of turning a new leaf. Under the pretext of giving a chance to a new batch of young people, we end up with new faces and extraordinarily little content.

The excitement for youth is concentrated in the art industry. Take a look at who are on our billboards. Many of these new kids on the block have one album, two books or four paintings. The importance is no more in the body of work but in the badly written book called “Fifty shades of Gray” or something to that effect.

The literary propaganda infected places of power and during the inauguration, we were entertained with what we must admire with no questions asked. This attempt to dictate our literary aesthetics is present in our TV and radio shows, driven by the need of being controversial, not relevant. The consequence of this manipulation is a considerable number of artists turned into lapdogs who would never dare to bark.