Sam Hamill is a poet and essayist who lives in Port Townsend, Washington.

“The Necessity to Speak” is from A Poet’s Work: The Other Side of Poetry, a collection of highly personal essays in which Hamill speaks openly of his difficult childhood, his experiences during the Vietnam War as a Marine (and later, a conscientious objector), and his subsequent years as a writer, editor, and activist.

— Ed.

 

One must understand what fear means: what it implies and what it rejects. It implies and rejects the same fact: a world where murder is legitimate, and where human life is considered trifling. . . . All I ask is that, in the midst of a murderous world, we agree to reflect on murder and to make a choice. After that, we can distinguish those who accept the consequences of being murderers themselves or the accomplices of murderers, and those who refuse to do so with all their force and being. Since this terrible dividing line does actually exist, it will be a gain if it be clearly marked.

— Albert Camus, Neither Victims nor Executioners

 

And yet we go on living closed lives, pretending we are not each personally responsible for the deaths we buy and sell. We go on living our sheltered lives among the potted plants and automobiles and advertising slogans. We don’t want to know what the world is like, we can’t bear very much reality.

The man in prison remembers. The man who’s been in prison remembers. Cesare Pavese brings the message home most forcefully: “The lonely man, who’s been in prison, goes back to prison every time he eats a piece of bread.” The woman who was battered remembers. The woman who was raped will never forget. The convict and the ex-con, the rape victim, the battered child — each, reading these words, will remember.

I teach creative writing in the prisons because I have been in prison. Writing is a form of human communication expressing ideas regarding the human condition. Because writing creates emotion in the audience, the writer’s responsibility is enormous. Arousing passion, exploring the grief of loss, making another person laugh, showing someone how to care — these are the concerns of the writer, and they do not come free of responsibility. But the creative writing itself is only a by-product. What I teach cannot be simply stated.

The women I have escorted to shelters where they can be protected from the rage of sick men have also been my friends and my students and my teachers. Three of every four of these victims — men and women — will return; the men will go back to prison, and the women will return to battering relationships. The battered child will grow into the child batterer.

There are presently more than two thousand men on death row in the United States. There are more than two hundred in Florida alone, and they are let out of their cells twice each week for a quick shower, and once each week for one hour of exercise. Ninety-two percent of these men were battered children. They have had a lengthy schooling. But they are beginning to understand how we as a society establish acceptable levels of violence. We pay the bill for murder in Nicaragua. We say the twenty-seven million dollars we send there this year, like the forty million dollars we sent last year, is for “humanitarian purposes,” and we tell ourselves the money is not for murder. We weep for the battered woman, but we are stingy when it comes time to pay for groceries and bandages at the shelter. The victim of rape earns our sympathy. But we discipline our children with a belt or a stick or a fist. The battered woman learns that violence is one of the forms love takes. The battered child learns that there are two possibilities in human life: one can remain the victim, or one can seize power and become the executioner. The mother who was battered typically understands that the only condition worse than being a victim is to become an executioner.

The convict writes himself out of prison, he writes his brothers out of prison. The battered woman makes peace in the world with tender words chosen with deep care.

 

A true poet, someone once said, is often faced with the difficult task of telling people what they already know and do not want to hear. We can’t bear very much reality. When the rape victim cries out for help, we are frozen. Our emotions are mute. We are seized as though we are catatonic. We have not been taught how to express our feelings properly. We find poetry embarrassing.

A critic writing of Kenneth Rexroth’s love poems in The New York Times declares, “Rexroth has issued a volume of breasts-and-thighs poems. What would I say, should I chance to meet his wife in public?” The poet Deena Metzger makes a beautiful, joyous poster of herself, naked, arms outstretched, following a radical mastectomy of her left breast. We are embarrassed by her naked body and by her joy, but mostly we are embarrassed because we do not know how or what to think, confronted by that long, ragged scar. Our vocabulary of the emotions has become critically impoverished.

 

Veterans returning from Vietnam often found it impossible to discuss what transpired there. Delayed Stress Syndrome has probably taken as many American lives as Agent Orange. And yet, in high schools today, no one has heard of My Lai. Unless we learn to articulate our own emotions, we cannot prevent other My Lais and other Vietnams from recurring, nor will we ever properly address the domestic violence so common in the American home.

“All wisdom,” Kung-fu Tze says, “is rooted in learning to call things by the right name.”

I became a conscientious objector while serving in the U.S. Marine Corps. I am proud of my decision to practice noncooperation, and I am shamed by my complicity. In the vocabulary of human emotions, the terms “guilt” and “innocence” are insufficient. Like “right” and “wrong,” they reject compassionate wisdom.

Once each month the recruiters for the business of death are permitted into our high schools to recruit more cannon fodder. There is no voice for nonviolence inside those same institutions. The children who listen and enlist are being trained to become both victims and executioners. And we are all co-conspirators. Our silence grants permission to the military to establish all critical vocabulary pertaining to the armed forces. The armed forces are precisely what that name implies: a resort to armed force, a complete collapse of compassionate communication.

The battering of women and children is the most common felony committed in the United States. No one knows how often it happens because it is so rarely reported. But every cop on a beat will tell you that the most feared call of all is the domestic dispute. One never knows what to expect. It kills more cops than dope dealers and bank robbers combined.

When James Cagney shoves half a grapefruit in a woman’s face, we all laugh and applaud. Nobody likes an uppity woman. And a man who is a man, when all else fails, asserts his “masculinity.” It is easy to learn to be a man. I learned to be a batterer without ever thinking about it. That’s the way we learn. When I was an adolescent, it was taken for granted that real men sometimes had to slap their women around. Just like John Wayne did to Maureen O’Hara in the movies. How very often in our movies and popular fiction the assaulted woman falls in love with the assaulting “hero.”

The man who slips off his belt to spank his naughty child is about to commit felony assault. If he behaves like this toward any other human being but those of his immediate family, he is locked up for the protection of society. The child is about to get a practical lesson in adult behavior when reason breaks down. This incident, repeated over the years, will help to form the growing child’s sense of justice; it will inform the definition of compassion. The father will say, “I’m sorry I have to do this. It will hurt me more than it hurts you.” This father believes himself a good man, a kind and compassionate father. But the child won’t believe a word of it. The child fears the wound. The child has learned that might makes right, that parents sometimes lie, and that there are acceptable limits of violence.

If a belt is acceptable, why not a stick? If a stick is acceptable, why not a baseball bat? If broken bones are unacceptable, what about cuts or welts or bruises?

 

The first duty of the writer is the rectification of names — to name things properly.

“The names of things bring them closer,” Robert Sund wrote. This applies to the terrible as well as to the sublime. The writer learns from the act of writing. “I write to find out what’s on my mind,” Gary Snyder once said. What the writer invents is its own reality.

The writer is aware that verbs show action and that precision in the use of nouns and verbs frees one from the muddiness of most modifiers. The writer accepts responsibility for every implication derived from what is stated. The writer is also eternally vulnerable.

The writer is the battered woman in her blossoming pain; the writer is the lonely face behind the steel door; the writer is the good man with the belt wrapped around his fist. Before the first word is written, the writer is a witness who struggles not to flinch, not to look away.

We hear all around us our language being devalued. Our president tells us that a missile with one thousand times the power of the bomb we dropped on Hiroshima is a “peacekeeper.” We remember the bitter irony with which Colt named its pistol the Peacemaker. Our president tells us that twenty-seven million dollars is being sent to aid one side of a civil war in Nicaragua, but that the money won’t be used for military purposes. The writer is in the service of the language. The writer is accountable.

 

We live in a culture in which “real men” don’t often touch and often don’t even like to be touched. Touch is a primary language in the discourse of emotions. There are eighteen square feet of skin on the average human being, and that skin holds about five million sensory perceptors. A University of Wisconsin study determined that denial of touch in young monkeys resulted in deformation in the cerebellum. D.H. Lawrence, in a story called “You Touched Me!,” describes how simple human physical contact can restore one’s health. Our president is a tough guy. He shakes hands, presumably with a firm grip, but he doesn’t hug the foreign dignitaries. John Wayne didn’t hug. Sylvester Stallone, Hollywood’s male role model for our children, doesn’t touch much.

We are embarrassed when the poet weeps publicly during the recitation of a poem. The physical expression of emotion makes many people uncomfortable. I was taught as a child — like most of my contemporaries — that men should not express emotion.

Men envy women their friendships with other women. Men secretly wish they, too, could have friends like that. Men have learned that ours is a lonely and insular country. We think poetry is about emotions. We are dead wrong. Poetry is not about. Take the rhyme out of poetry, and there is still poetry; take the rhythm out of it, and there is still poetry; take even the words themselves away, and poetry remains, as Yang Wan-li said a thousand years ago. The poet identifies a circumstance in which the poetry reveals itself. The poet is the vehicle used by poetry so that it can touch us. From the inside out. The words are only the frame which focuses the epiphany we name poetry. We say the poem touches us, sometimes even deeply. We often say the poet is a bit touched.

 

In the language of violence all argument is solipsistic. Those who pay tithing at the altar of violence are afraid: they fear the here and now and they fear the hereafter, but most of all, they fear the truth of knowledge. Knowledge is the loss of innocence. How desperately we want our innocence! How desperately we protect the innocence of our children! Our children don’t know what has happened. They have never heard of Auschwitz or Treblinka, they have never heard of Canyon de Chelly. They do not know that it was their European immigrant great-great-grandfathers who invented scalp-taking; they have never dreamed of the tortured flesh that has subtly informed our attitudes since those long-ago trials in Salem. They do not know that German death camps were modeled on the U.S. camps, our own nineteenth-century Final Solution to “the Indian problem.”

 

The past we name History. Out of it, today. Every day there are people who die to know. Every day, people die because they know. In El Salvador, in Chile, in the Philippines, in Korea, Nicaragua, and Lebanon. In the U.S.S.R. and in the U.S. of A.

And the murderers, the dirty little dictators who order the heads brought in upon a platter? Our money sustains their power. Just as our indifference permits gangs to run our prisons where men also die for knowing and for speaking up. Just as we continue to permit the deaths of twenty-five hundred women each year at the hands of their “lovers,” one every three-and-a-half hours, and just as we permit a woman to be battered senseless every eighteen seconds of every day in this country.

And our money brings us television to distract us from what we know we are responsible for but do not want to know. It is difficult to explain things to our children. It is convenient to declare international conflict too large, too ugly, or too confusing to explain. And we likewise declare the personal too embarrassing. How else do we account for the fact that 10 percent of all teenage girls get pregnant? We perform abortions on one out of every twenty-five girls each year. One in three sixteen-year-old girls is sexually active and knows almost nothing about birth control. Her seventeen-year-old lover knows nothing, typically, or doesn’t care. Our silence contributes to the shame and misery of these girls and to the deaths of millions of unborn children.

We warn our daughters not to become “loose” with their affections. We don’t want them to care for the wrong people. We don’t want to wound them with the knowledge that womankind has been singled out for special suffering throughout history, so we protect them from her-story. We persuade ourselves that perhaps, if we don’t talk about sex, sexual involvement won’t happen too soon. And perhaps, if we don’t think about our daughters loving a batterer, that won’t happen either. Our silence grants violence permission. We sacrifice our daughters to protect our own beloved innocence. In the language of violence, every speech is a solipsism and silence a conspirator.

 

The true poet gives up the self. The I of my poem is not me. It is the first person impersonal, it is permission for you to enter the experience which we name Poem.

Although the poem itself is often a “given” thing, in the justice of poetry we often earn the gift in some way. The disciplining of the self helps the poet clarify the experience so that the experience itself may be yours with as little superficial clutter as possible. The true poet asks for nothing “in return” because the poem itself is given to the poet who, in turn, gives it away and gives it away again. The poet is grateful for the opportunity to serve.

The poet wants neither fame nor money, but simply to be of use.

I am not the I of my poem. But I am responsible for the poem and, therefore, for that I. The poet invents a being, and that being, man or woman, stands before the world, naked and feeling. Thus, the poet who invents the persona of the poem is reflected similarly “undressed,” and we say, “This poet takes risks,” because there is neither false modesty nor the arrogance of exhibitionism, but the truth of human experience as it is, all somehow beyond the mere words of the poem.

The poet may speak for the speechless, for the suffering and the wounded. The poet may be a conscience, walking. The poet honors the humble most of all because poetry is gift-giving. The poet adores the erotic because in a world of pain there is charity and hope and because the poet aspires to a condition of perpetual vulnerability.

But there are poets who murder and poets who lie. Dante placed the corrupters of language in the seventh circle of Hell, and there are poets among them.

 

I was strapped belly-down with webbing ripped from beds in a prison for the young, my face in a pillow to muffle my screams, my mouth gagged with my own socks, gang-raped by I-don’t-know-how-many boys, ice-picked in the face, and left, presumably to die, alone all night before the guards discovered me, bloody and crazed. Fourteen years old and in the custody of the State. It has been thirty years, and I remember it like yesterday at noon. Out of my own guilt and shame over having been raped, out of my own guilt and shame over having been a batterer, out of my own silence over these terrible events, I began to articulate needs; out of defining my own needs, I discovered a necessity for believing that justice is possible; out of a commitment to a sense of justice, I found it necessary, essential, to bear witness.

 

Some of my students are women who begin writing because a writing class is permission to speak, which they do not have at home. Some of these women are battered because they have taken my class. Some have been battered when their “lovers” discovered that I talk about violence and responsibility in class. One of the kindest women I have ever known was murdered by her husband because he feared she would tell the truth. Our last conversation took place over a leisurely brunch; we discussed the origins and history of Kuan Yin, bodhisattva of compassion.

We are all impoverished by our silence.

 

There are more men in prison in the United States than there are people in South Dakota — more than a million in all. Many of these men are eager to work, eager to learn, and dream of learning another way of life. They exist in a moment-to-moment despair that is utterly beyond the comprehension of anyone who has not been there.

The history of our prisons is a study of cruelty and stupidity so savage and so constant that almost no one wants to know a thing about it. Poor men go to prison. Men from minority races go to prison. But batterers come from every station, even from Reagan’s administration. The rich are as likely to commit sexual violence as are the poor. The batterer cannot name his fear, the thing inside that makes him strike out blindly at the very things he loves. It is his own inability to articulate his needs, his own speechlessness, that makes him crazy. Because he has been denied his language, he cannot name things clearly; because he cannot name, he cannot see what frightens him so terribly; therefore, the fear is invisible and is everywhere and consumes him.

Only when those of us who have overcome the terrible cycle of violence bear witness can we demonstrate another possibility. Because I have been both victim and executioner, I am able to speak from the bleak interior, and, perhaps, bring a little light into a vast darkness. An apology from a reformed batterer means nothing. The only conceivable good that can come from my confession is that of example for other sick men, a little hope for change amidst the agony of despair.

 

She took a class in creative writing. There was much talk of naming things correctly: objects, feelings, acts, deeds. And each time there was talk, there was also responsibility. “You will be held accountable,” she was told, “just as you will be expected to hold others accountable.”

And then one night it happened. She got home a little late from class. He was drunk. She tried to be especially nice, she tried to calm and soothe him. But his voice got louder and louder. He screamed. He grabbed her by the throat and shook her like a rag. And then he hit her. He hit her hard.

And then he apologized. He begged her not to leave. She was crumpled in a corner, her lip bleeding, her whole body trembling out of control. He got her a wet towel and tried to touch her face. She turned her face away and held up her hands for protection. Tears streamed down his face. He begged her not to go, he swore he’d never do that again, he swore he’d gone crazy. She knew it would happen again. It had already happened again.

She went that night to the shelter. She spent weeks talking to a counselor every day. She was lucky. She didn’t have children. He didn’t find her. She was lucky to be alive. For a while, she hated men. She hated being a victim. But she made friends in the shelter. Later, she made more friends outside. And through friendship, learned to love. True love is not without its own accountability.

 

The violence we learn at home we take with us everywhere we go. It shapes the way we look at a man or a woman, it colors our foreign policy and our tax structure. It is outright theft to pay a woman fifty-eight cents on the dollar we pay a man for doing the same job; it is economic violence.

In Vietnam, the soldiers, those young men conscripted or enlisted from our high schools and colleges to do our killing for us, called the enemy “Gook,” an epithet first used in Nicaragua in the 1920s, China in the 1930s, Japan in the 1940s, and in the Philippines since the 1940s, because that removed an element of the enemy’s humanity, making it more like killing a thing than murdering a man, a woman, or a child.

I see them every day, the wounded women in the supermarket or in the bookstore, the children beaten to a whimper until all life has grayed in them. I’ve learned to recognize Fear’s signature scrawled across their faces, the way one learns to recognize a man who walks with a “prison shuffle.”

It is essential to make it clear that these things are personal. Our nuclear arms have 180,000 times the blast of the charge that leveled Hiroshima forty years ago. Our ability to deliver death is so unspeakably potent that it is far beyond the range of all human imagination. And we add to that arsenal every day. Nothing will change until we demolish the “we-and-they” mentality. We are human, and therefore all human concerns are ours. And those concerns are personal. “Everywhere we go,” George Seferis said, “we walk on the faces of the dead.”

Children in our public schools are paddled, whipped, slapped, locked in closets, lockers, and bathrooms — all quite legally. Every fourth homosexual male in a U.S. high school is the victim of a major assault before he graduates. Virtually all of them are victims of harassment. Homophobia is so rampant in our culture that it is common to see people fly into a rage over the mere sight of a gay couple holding hands in public. We excuse racism, sexism, homophobia — all the mindless violence of others — by refusing to make a personal issue of the problem.

We lend a helping hand to the mugger when we don’t educate our children (of both sexes) about self-defense; we lend a hand to the rapist when we don’t readily discuss rape. Our silence grants permission to the child molester. Because we have not learned how to name things properly, the batterer beats his child or lover in public, and we stand to one side, crippled inside, fearful and guilty.

If we really do believe that felony assault has no place in the home, we must encourage all victims to name names, to come forward and bear witness. We must find a way to save the victims. And we must find a way to save the executioners, as well.

There is a way. I know. Poetry has been a means for me, a way to find my way out of hell. But it takes an iron will or a deeply spiritual conviction not unlike that of many poets toward poetry, the way James Wright spoke with compassion for drunkards and murderers, the way Richard Hugo testified on behalf of the dying farm towns and lonely saloons of the Northwest, or the way we might learn from Denise Levertov how to accept the loss of our mothers or to accept responsibility for our own violent realpolitik or for a marriage that was “good in its time” after that time has passed.

There is a third way. It begins with the articulation of one’s truest and deepest response to a world where, as Camus said, murder is legitimate and human life is considered trifling. It begins with the end of lies and silence about violence. It begins with accepting responsibility for our own words and deeds. It begins with searching one’​s own heart for the compassionate justice which is located only there.

We’re thankful to Broken Moon Press for permission to reprint this. A Poet’s Work is available for $19.95 postpaid from Broken Moon Press, P.O. Box 24585, Seattle, WA 98124-0585.

— Ed.