Respect and Indignation:The Performance of Poetries as an Opposition to Attritional Violence

Gräbner, Cornelia (2023) Respect and Indignation:The Performance of Poetries as an Opposition to Attritional Violence. Cahiers de Littérature Orale. ISSN 2266-1816 (In Press)

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Abstract

This paper explores poetry performances as an opposition to the effects of attritional violence as it is perpetrated in the necropolitical regime of contemporary Mexico and in the austerity regime of contemporary Britain. Focusing on the corrosive, silencing and stifling psychosocial effects of attrition, it looks at four different poems that enact a ‘redirection’ of social energies, drawing on the ability of the poetry performance to join poetic verbalization with the capacity of sensibilitá as defined by Franco Berardi: the ability to communicate what cannot be verbalized. Poems by the Liverpool-based band She Drew The Gun and the Mexican poet María Rivera, counter the abjection of victims of violence and reclaim what Paulo Freire has referred to as the capacity to ‘give testimony to the respect for the Other’. Poems by Bristol based poet Pete the Temp and by the Mexican poet Pájaro azul enact the ‘anger at the acceptance of fatalistic docility before the destructions of peoples’ (Freire) as a creative force that reclaims the future as possibility.