I was standing there, looking at the murals, stuffed animals, poems, paintings, prayers in so many languages, and I felt chills run down my body.
This happened three times in three different places across theTwin Cities. Before me were the memorials for George Floyd, Renée Good and Alex Pretti whose stories reverberated across nations.
I had of course covered and followed the news stories, demonstrations, and social movements as they started in Minnesota, then spread from state to state and nation to nation. But seeing them was, as is often the case, a full-body realization that touches one on whole other level.
Memorial in the style of Banksy for Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.
While standing before those places, I was reminded of a story, published around 70 years ago, but one that can still offer a reflection pool for our modern world.
The poem “Howl” by Alan Ginsberg opens with the now-famous lines “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, / starving hysterical naked” before going to describe how people rebelled against the unequal and suffocating society around them.
I was reminded of this poem for three reasons. First, its words echo the rage, resentment, disillusionment, and sense of otherness felt by so many disenfranchised people here in the United States and in so many other nations. The wider society is failing them, in some cases leading to their deaths, as demonstrated by Floyd, Good, Pretti and countless others.
Memorial for Renée Good in Minneapolis.
When killings such as these happen, rage boils over — sometimes violently, often peacefully.
When the surrounding power structures, and culture are — and most importantly feel — alienating, people struggle and fight to find ways of creating the reflections of their inner worlds. But we must remember that it was the power-structures that drove them to this Ginsbergian madness in the first place and not all of them survived it.
The prominence of community organizing on all levels after the three killings was vast. They also led to the creation of new art, new communities and political awakenings for people who might have had so far stayed away from such things.
Secondly, the poem reminded me of the similarities between the worlds Ginsberg lived in and ours. The United States had emerged from World War II as an economic and cultural powerhouse backed by the full might of its military and intelligence agencies.
Then, as now, the nation was on all metrics the only true superpower on our planet.
However, some people, or as Ginsberg puts it, “the best minds” saw this prevailing system for what it was: one of oppression.
Outwardly the United States was without equal, but its culture on home soil was largely one of repression and restrictions. Racial, gender, and class equality were only starting to be widely thought of as a possibility that might be reached sometime in the future. Maybe.
No one except the “mad” thought that being queer, female or racialized as valid as being white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP).
In the 1950s people needed these “outsiders” to speak the truth, whether they knew it or not.
They needed someone from outside the monoculture of white suburbia, Wall Street or Washington, D.C. to create connections and to express the underlying rage felt by the innumerable mob. We still need to hear and raise those voices in our society. And we need texts such as Howl that force us to reconsider our own (mis)conceptions of the culture so we may fight to better it.
The whole point of art is to comfort the disturbed and to disturb the comfortable.
The third reason why I’ve been thinking about the poem is the freedom of speech issue it raised.
With its explicit descriptions of drugs, homosexuality and use of profanity “Howl” shocked the post-war United States so much that the booksellers were prosecuted for breaking obscenity laws according to the BBC.
At the heart of the case, per the BBC, was whether or not the poem “Howl” “was devoid of social value, promoted juvenile delinquency and that [the bookshop owner and manager selling the book] Ferlinghetti and Murao acted with lewd intent.”
Ultimately, the court ruled in favor of the two, loosening the censorship laws and opening the way for what can be considered as the unhinged, maddening freedom of the Beat Generation.
It’s an interesting thought experiment to transplant “Howl” into today’s United States. How much of an outcry would it cause and in which social groups? And would the courts still deem it worthy of publication?
