Writing Under Fascism: On Poetry and Creative Expression

We live in a moment of authoritarian takeovers happening around the world. In such times, we turn to the creative arts. We turn to poets.

Margaret Randall has lived and written in the United States, Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua during years of great social change. Her own home country ordered her deported for her writings; she won her case, and her citizenship was restored.

Here, Randall explores how poets in other times and other places have responded to forces that would diminish or destroy them. She draws on Bertolt Brecht, Carolyn Forché, Nâzım Hikmet, Roque Dalton, Gioconda Belli, Juan Gelman, Raul Zurita, and Zeina Azzam to understand, as she says, how ＂a poem works by virtue of its ability to lift us out of complacency, to let us see and feel through the smoke screen intentionally erected to keep us in line.＂