SHEEMA KALBASI

The Witness

Language is often approached as one approaches a map, as a means of orientation, a way to move through experience without being altered by it. This expectation is sharpened in moments of travel, and more sharply still in exile, where movement is not chosen but imposed, where one crosses borders without arrival. We expect language to take us somewhere and to arrive intact, to guide us through unfamiliar terrain without itself bearing the marks of passage. Yet history repeatedly demonstrates that language is neither a transparent route nor a neutral passage. In moments of extreme pressure, war, exile, mass violence, or moral collapse, ordinary speech falters. Words designed to explain begin to obscure. Vocabulary hardens into slogan or command. What remains unsayable does not disappear. It accumulates, demanding a form capable of bearing what instrumental language can no longer sustain.

Human beings do not live by facts alone. They live by meanings, and meanings rarely submit to direct statement. Wherever language is asked to carry more than information, wherever experience exceeds explanation, poetry emerges as a necessary response. It does not compete with empirical description or political analysis. It operates in a different register, one concerned with perception, interiority, and ethical orientation.

This function becomes especially visible in war. War generates an excess of reality that overwhelms conventional discourse. Violence produces experiences that cannot be absorbed by official language without distortion. Prose in wartime tends toward report, justification, or instruction. Verse persists because it can remain with what resists assimilation.

Wilfred Owen’s trench poems from the First World War dismantle the rhetoric surrounding combat by insisting on bodily immediacy. Breath, mud, and choking lungs replace abstraction. Without advancing a formal argument, his writing exposes the distance between public language and lived experience. In doing so, it performs a philosophical task. It refuses the moral comfort that euphemism provides.

Paul Celan’s work after the Holocaust confronts a deeper crisis of language itself. Writing in German after its moral devastation, Celan fractures syntax and rhythm to register damage not only to bodies but to speech. His work does not seek coherence. It asks whether ethical utterance remains possible after catastrophe. Here, poetry becomes the site where wounded language attempts to remain accountable.

A similar dynamic appears in the work of writers shaped by occupation, dictatorship, or prolonged displacement. Mahmoud Darwish sustains a metaphysical register of loss that political categories cannot contain. Anna Akhmatova’s poems composed during terror and waiting preserve interior life against historical erasure. In each case, this mode of writing functions less as testimony than as refusal. It resists the reduction of experience to administrative or ideological form.

This refusal is not limited to modern contexts. Long before contemporary frameworks of resistance emerged, women were already using lyric expression to assert interior life against political constraint. Jahan Malek Khatun, writing in fourteenth-century Iran as a royal woman navigating dynastic violence and instability, composed verse that articulated desire, loss, and selfhood without appeal to authority. Her lines do not announce resistance, yet they preserve a space of ethical autonomy that survives the erasure of her political world. That her work endured while her power did not is not incidental. It reveals poetry’s capacity to outlast governance.

This continuity situates the poetic alongside philosophy rather than in opposition to it. Philosophy concerns itself with truth, ethics, and being. The poetic approaches the same questions obliquely. It does not define what is. It discloses how existence is felt and endured. It preserves ambiguity not as confusion, but as a condition of thought.

Ethical life depends on this preservation. Moral certainty is often mistaken for moral clarity, yet certainty is easily mobilized for domination. A poem does not demand agreement. It demands attention. This attentiveness sustains ethical autonomy by keeping judgment responsive rather than fixed.

This form of language also resists instrumentalization. In contemporary life, words are increasingly valued for speed, efficiency, and persuasive force. The poetic interrupts that economy. It insists that language can be contemplative rather than directive. Meaning is not extracted or consumed. It is inhabited.

This inhabitation requires time. It frustrates immediacy. It demands a mode of reading that is slow, recursive, and receptive. Such demands place it at odds with cultural conditions that equate clarity with authority and speed with relevance. This refusal of efficiency is not a failure to adapt, but a refusal to collapse thought into function.

Women have been central to this endurance, particularly in contexts where access to public discourse was restricted. Across cultures, women preserved such traditions through memorization, recitation, and informal transmission. Language circulated through voices rather than institutions, sustained by care rather than recognition. This labor ensured the continuity of ethical and aesthetic thought when official channels proved hostile to it.

Beauty plays a critical role in this continuity. Beauty arrests attention and interrupts habit. It invites contemplation without coercion. This mode of expression employs beauty not to soften reality, but to render it perceptible when perception itself is under strain.

Metaphor enables this work. Through metaphor, one thing is allowed to appear through another without collapsing difference. Distance is preserved even as relation is created. To think metaphorically is to acknowledge that no single frame exhausts meaning. This acknowledgment is essential to freedom, which depends not only on rational deliberation or institutional guarantees, but on the capacity to imagine otherwise.

In an era saturated with images, opinions, and explanations, this form of language may appear marginal. Yet this marginality is precisely what allows it to function. It does not compete for authority or consensus. It preserves the space in which thinking remains possible when collective language hardens.

When this language disappears from a culture, the loss is not merely literary. A society loses its tolerance for uncertainty. It loses a means of holding complexity without coercion. The erosion of such language often accompanies the rise of moral vocabularies that mistake finality for truth.

What remains is not closure, but openness. Meaning stays available for revision. Beauty persists without justification. Ethical autonomy survives even when history becomes restrictive.

As long as poetry endures, human life retains a dimension that cannot be fully administered or exhausted, a way of moving through the world that resembles travel not as arrival, but as attention, where language becomes the passage rather than the destination.

Sheema Kalbasi is an Iranian Danish American poet, humanitarian, and historian. She is a Pushcart Prize–winning poet, a nominee for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, a recipient of a United Nations humanitarian award, and a grantee of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands. Her books include Echoes in Exile (PRA Publishing, 2006), which was listed in Stony Brook University’s Women and Gender Studies curriculum; Seven Valleys of Love (PRA Publishing, 2008); The Poetry of Iranian Women (Reel Content, 2008); Spoon and Shrapnel (Daraja Press, 2024); and Jahan Malek Khatun: The Princess Poet of Fourteenth-Century Persia (Daraja Press, 2026). Her writing has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Black Lawrence Press publications, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology, and has been featured by PEN America, Writer’s Digest, PBS, and NPR. Her poems have been set to music and visual art, adapted into short films, and performed internationally at venues including the Smithsonian National Museum, The Writers Studio, the Tribute World Trade Center, the United Nations World Food Programme (UNWFP), and the Canadian Parliament.