14/30: Hate, Outlived

Our Host

Dr. Padma Venkatraman (she/her) is an Asian American author who immigrated from India on her own at age 19, studied oceanography, taught and directed a school and led diversity efforts at a university before writing 4 award-winning novels for young people (THE BRIDGE HOME, A TIME TO DANCE, ISLAND’S END and CLIMBING THE STAIRS). Most recently, her poems were published in Poetry magazine. Her next novel, BORN BEHIND BARS, which is loosely based on the true story of a boy who grew up in an Indian jail and struggled to free his incarcerated mother after he was forced to leave on his own, is available for pre-order from Nancy Paulsen Books, Penguin Random House. One of the characters from THE BRIDGE HOME has a cameo appearance, as an adult, in BORN BEHIND BARS! Follow Padma on Twitter @padmatv or Fb/ Instagram venkatraman.padma.

Inspiration

During the past year, every person on earth has been affected in some way by the pandemic. And this year, in our nation, we’ve unfortunately already witnessed terrible hate crimes; most recently a wave of hate crimes against Asians. But as a writer who cares about young people, I feel compelled to preserve hope in the face of all this. 

What does hope mean to me? How do I see it?

These are the questions that inspired me – and I hope my poem might inspire you to discuss both hate and hope with your students in an honest manner; and that you will be inspired, through the process of introspection, to write your own short poem dedicated to hope in defiance for hate. 

The first poem that comes to many minds when you think of hope is Emily Dickinson’s Feathers – but this resource (#DiverseVerse padlet) has several poems that encapsulate hope and speak to surviving and outliving hatred, that are written by BIPOC poets. 

If you enjoy creating a poem today, or if you encourage your students to write poems on this theme over the next few days, I’d also be delighted if you’d share it on social media on Tuesday April 20th, and tag #AuthorsTakeAction and #DiverseVerse. Both are initiatives I’m involved with, and we’re hoping, this April, to bring attention to the power of words by encouraging educators and authors to amplify the words of BIPOC poets and verse novelists who’ve written about this topic and also to invite teachers to discuss the horror of hate crimes with young people while preserving their sense of hope. We’ve created resource lists of BIPOC poets and poems on this topic, and suggestions on how to take anti-racist action,  and act as allies, as well as other ideas and activities around this theme for you to try if you wish as well. If you participate on April 20th, do please just keep in mind the safety and privacy of your students and respect copyright. Thanks, and onto my process! 

Process

It was a challenge to come up with a metaphor for hope that felt real to me but also, I hoped, was creative and fresh. So I tried not to think of words, but rather to think in images. If I closed my eyes and thought about surviving hatred, what images did I see in my mind? 

Here’s the first draft of the poem I wrote about the way I visualized hope.

Hope – Take 1 

Hope is the twisting flame that glows
while all around it crumbles and falls away.
Hope is the thread-thin shoot that grows
after thirsting in darkness day after day.

First thing I did after putting this down on the page was to read this aloud. As soon as I read it aloud, I could hear some clunkiness – some lack of rhythm. So I revised it for flow, although I did like the images of a flame and of the shoot. 

Hope – Take 2 

Hope is the twisting flame that glows
while all else crumbles and falls away.
Hope is the thread-thin shoot that grows
after thirsting in darkness day after day.

I was happy enough with this draft that I felt I could share it and invite feedback and suggestions from two respected friends: Laura Shovan (co-author of A Place at the Table) and Renee M. LaTulippe (poet and author of the No Water River blog, which has many poetry prompts and activities you might like to try with your students, too).  

Both of them, individually, responded that while they liked the idea of a short poem about hope, and importantly, the rhyme didn’t feel forced, the images had potential but weren’t working too well, because hope hope felt more fragile. So I revised again, keeping in mind the point they made that I agreed with – hope is fragile (and yet has its own immense strength, because it can survive hate).  

Hope – Take 3

Hope is the flickering flame that glows
and sparks a fire, warm and bright.
Hope is the thread-thin shoot that grows
after thirsting for days with no water or light.

I liked this. It was short and simple. But there’s no sense of something I was feeling as I wrote – about how hope, in its way, is far more important than hate. So I decided to make the title of the poem work for me as much as I could. The working title I’d used was – guess – yes, hope. Not too innovative or interesting. 

After a lot of thought, and rejecting many ideas that came up, I decided on Hate, Outlived. I also gave some thought to switching the place of the flame and the plant. Which metaphor did I want to start with and which one did I want to end with? 

At some point along the way, I also tried starting with the botanical metaphor (switching the first two and last two lines). But I decided to keep it the way it was and end with the sense of a shoot growing into a plant, which felt  like a more permanent and peaceful ending. 

Padma’s Poem (Final form)

Hate, Outlived

Hope is a flickering flame that glows,
and sparks a fire, warm and bright.
Hope is a thread-thin shoot that grows
after thirsting for days without water or light.

Your Turn

So there’s the final form. Or that’s it for now. I’m not thrilled with the title, but at least it’s one step better than the original title, which was redundant. If you have suggestions for me, I’d love that. 

But first, try writing a poem of your own. Either a quatrain (4 lines) or shorter or longer, on the theme of hate, or hope, or both. Thank you so much for participating and for everything each of you do as teachers every day, and especially all that you have done this past year to overcome so many of the challenges posed by the pandemic.