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Zohran Mamdani’s victory speech at winning the race for the Mayor of New York was everything I would have wanted. Inspiring, grounded, courageous, and yet, there was something niggling. This niggle only expressed itself fully the following morning, while I reflected on his words over my first cup of tea. In a speech which by any account was a remarkable testament to political oratory, he affirmed, “You campaign in poetry, and you govern in prose”, a maxim attributed to former New York Governor Mario Cuomo. A moment of poetic justice, perhaps, for Mamdani to quote the father to the vanquished son, Andrew Cuomo, his primary opponent in the race for Mayor, but to me, the idea itself is not self-evident and deserves a deeper examination, at the very least, by poets.
An ideological partition
Mamdani, to be fair, did qualify his quote with, “Let the prose we write still rhyme,” perhaps as a tacit nod to an unbroken continuity between promise and delivery. However, the concept itself, that poetry and prose occupy separate domains and that the scope of verse is contemplation, while prose handles the necessary and material work of the world, represents an ideological partition that, in my view, fragments both individual and revolutionary consciousness. This binary seems to align with the same colonial epistemology that separates thought from action, as if one were simply potential and the other solely kinetic. The divide seeks to remove aesthetic experience from political engagement, and the imaginative from the practical.
The evidence, however, presents a contrary perspective. Consider Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1939), Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. His surrealist torrents were not decorative window dressing on anticolonial theory; they constituted the theory itself. The poem’s volcanic syntax, its refusal of linear argument, performed négritude’s fundamental challenge to European rationalism’s assumed claim to universal validity.
“At the end of daybreak, life prostrate, you don’t know how to dispose of your aborted dreams / the river of life desperately torpid in its bed / neither turgid nor low, hesitant to flow / pitifully empty, the impartial heaviness of boredom distributing shade equally on all things / the stagnant, unbroken by the brightness of a single bird.”
For Césaire, poetry became the instrument for demolishing the very architecture of colonial thought. What makes his example instructive is that he maintained this position while serving as mayor of Fort-de-France for 56 years, drafting legislation and managing municipal services. He moved between drafting budgets and writing poems that explored “the great black hole” where liberation gestates, never accepting that these were contradictory activities. Both were necessary for decolonisation.
Rabindranath Tagore embodied this refusal earlier. He composed Gitanjali’s devotional verses while founding Visva-Bharati at Shantiniketan, a university where my mother studied philosophy and dance, in the shade of its many trees, a space explicitly conceived as an alternative to colonial education’s administrative imperatives. His essays on nationalism dismantled imperial logic with argumentative rigour, yet this critique emerged from the same imaginative source as his poetry and his poetic prose.
When Tagore renounced his knighthood after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919, the gesture resonated because his poetry had already been a conduit for his politics for decades. For Tagore, poetry wasn’t an escape from the problem of colonised existence but a method for thinking beyond its constraints. His novels, like Gora and The Home and the World, worked through questions of nationalism, tradition, gendered roles, and modernity in prose, but the thinking happened through poetic consciousness – through image, symbol, and what he called ‘the surplus in man’ that exceeds utilitarian calculation.
In a 1922 letter to fellow revolutionary poet Kazi Nazrul Islam, he rouses him to action: “Come, O Shining comet! Blaze across the darkness, with your fiery trail. Upon the fortress-top of evil days, let your victory-pennant sail” and in the quintessential anthem for the lone warrior, the poem “Jodi Tor Dak Shune” (If No one Listens to You) he exhorts the truth seeker: If everyone is frightened into silence, make sure you open your heart and say whatever it is that you want to say. This again is a framework of action grounded in a philosophical framework, not toothless poetic abstraction.
When I reflect on my own work, in advocacy and community building, in peacebuilding and my vocation as a poet, while far more limited in scope and impact, I find no extant boundaries. Each flows into the other, each essential in some way to the full expression of my curiosities and impulses. It is often on days that are most filled with external compulsions that I feel fuelled to surrender the night to poetry, in a way, to recalibrate to the essential. While the opening quote that led to this exploration was in the realm of governance and public rhetoric, seemingly at opposing ends, the political and the personal are deeply entwined in the business of life itself.
Thomas Sankara’s practice in Burkina Faso (1983–87) demonstrates this synthesis in a revolutionary context. His speeches moved fluidly between poetic cadence and economic specifics because he recognised both as revolutionary instruments. When he renamed Upper Volta to Burkina Faso, the “Land of Upright People,” the act was simultaneously poetic and governmental, bringing new political reality into being.
Sankara’s government planted ten million trees, vaccinated 2.5 million children in two weeks, achieved food self-sufficiency, and banned female genital cutting. Some may consider these merely administrative activities, a necessary triangulation of plans, budgets and logistics. Sankara, however, insisted they also required “a certain amount of madness” and the capacity to imagine what seemed impossible, which meant “the courage to turn your back on the old formulas”. That madness is poetry’s domain. Sankara wouldn’t choose between them.
Che Guevara’s Guerrilla Warfare operates as a tactical manual and a poetic vision simultaneously, providing practical guidance while insisting “the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love”. This isn’t sentimental posturing but recognition that revolutionary consciousness requires emotional transformation that perhaps poetic language can catalyse in powerful ways. His Bolivian diary alternates between ammunition inventories and descriptions approaching mystical intensity. The prose catalogued material conditions; the poetry maintained the vision that made suffering endurable.
This pattern sees parallels across revolutionary contexts. Kerala’s communist government under EMS Namboodiripad (1957) pursued land redistribution while nurturing writers like OV Vijayan and the feminist icon, Kamala Das. An interesting example is Nicaragua’s Sandinista literacy crusade (1980), where reading was taught through both Rubén Darío’s poetry and agricultural pamphlets, with the understanding of these as complementary technologies of consciousness. In “To Roosevelt”, a poem against American expansionism, he is unequivocal: “You’re the United States, / you’re the future invader / of the guileless America of indigenous blood / that still prays to Jesus Christ and still speaks in Spanish.”
Kenyan author and activist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s decision to write in his native Gikuyu after 1977 exemplifies how form itself becomes resistance. His novels employ oral and poetic structures as decolonial practice since standard prose in English, shaped by colonial administration, carries within its syntax the assumptions about causality and agency. When Ngũgĩ writes that “language as culture is the collective memory bank of a people’s experience in history”, he describes how poetic resources carry revolutionary potential that administrative prose cannot access. However, this is the same potential that is intrinsic to political action, and not removed from it.
Private vs political
The schism protects power and the status quo. Prose becomes associated with reason, administration, law, essentially the language of legitimacy. Poetry gets relegated to private feeling, rendered politically impotent as a safety valve for dissent. This allows governance to proceed as “realistic” management, free of emotions, and unchallenged by imagination’s “dangerous” propositions.
To take the argument further, the systematic erosion of humanistic studies in business and scientific education produces graduates who can optimise systems and deploy sophisticated learning models but lack the capacity or training to question the ethics of AI. When engineers learn thermodynamics but never read Frantz Fanon, when MBAs master financial modelling but never encounter the humanism of James Baldwin, they acquire technical competence without an ethical framework or historical consciousness. This produces what Tagore called “the modern mentality,” a truncated rationality that mistakes technical problem-solving for thought itself.
But resistance poetry worldwide refuses this quarantine. Soweto’s poets during apartheid, the Committed Poets of Tamil Nadu, Palestinian resistance poetry from Mahmoud Darwish to Dareen Tatour (imprisoned by Israel in 2015 for her poem “Resist, my people, resist them”), all demonstrate poetry as a concrete threat that states prosecute. Cuba’s Nicolás Guillén served as president of UNEAC while writing poems mapping Afro-Cuban identity, demonstrating how aesthetic innovation and political commitment could be mutually constitutive.
Tagore understood that poetry creates the psychological conditions for freedom, not as private consolation but as a precondition for collective action. His celebrated poem “Where the Mind Is Without Fear” describes specific mental dispositions necessary for anti-colonial struggle: fearlessness, unclouded reason, tireless striving. These aren’t natural attributes but cultivated capacities, and poetry is how they’re cultivated and sustained. To confine poetic sensibility to “campaigning”, and leave it at the door during revolutionary action is to be a poor judge of the possibilities of both.
Not in Mamdani’s context, who by all accounts is a feminist, and has announced a transition team led solely by women, in popular imagination, this schism reflects a patriarchal notion that matters of the heart (as poetry is often viewed) are inherently feminine, while the world of action is decidedly male. This gender-led binary is predicated on several interlocking assumptions. At its most reductive, women equals emotion equals poetry. Conversely, if Newt Gingrich, the Former House Speaker, is to be believed, as he claimed in a 1995 lecture, “Males are biologically driven to go out and hunt giraffes.” Equally telling was Rush Limbaugh’s ill-advised lament regarding women voters: “When women got the right to vote is when it all went downhill. Because that’s when votes started being cast with emotion and maternal instincts that government ought to reflect.”
Conservative commentator Ann Coulter, proving patriarchy is a gender-agnostic offender, takes the interlocking assumptions a step further. In a 2007 interview with the New York Observer, Coulter said: “If we took away women’s right to vote, we’d never have to worry about another Democrat president.” So now, not only is poetry feminine, it is also evidently a democrat. In the sphere of poetry, an interesting critique of liberal interpretations of Robert Frost centred on how a poem “teaches us to value relationships over autonomy, compassion over economics, and feeling over thinking.” Therefore, when we need to appeal to a voter’s sense of community, to their relationships, their compassion, it is in the language of poetry, and when it is time for hard economics, the masculine leads, presumably by hard-nosed thinking, devoid of the feminine weakness of “feeling”.
However, there are striking examples of contemporary governance that incorporate synthesis. Venezuelan communes, Bolivia’s 2009 plurinational constitution recognising indigenous cosmovisions, the Zapatistas’ communiqués, all draw on epistemologies where poetry and prose were never sundered, where proverbs carry legal weight and creation myths structure land tenure. Subcomandante Marcos writes communiqués indistinguishable from prose poems because he understands that “poetry makes revolution irresistible” by articulating desires that neoliberalism cannot or will not accommodate.
To separate poetry from prose is to accept a lesser reality; that the world can be managed but never reimagined, described but never truly transformed. It reproduces the unimaginative division of labour that capitalism imposes: conception separated from execution and mental from manual labour. Revolutionary traditions refuse this division because transformation requires both accurate analysis of existing conditions and radical hope, long-term planning and prophecy, both materialist rigour and the boundlessness of imagination. Prose can map the prison with precision. Poetry remembers we were meant to fly. It remembers that these walls are constructed by men; they do not exist in nature and that if we built them between people, we can unbuild them too. Neither poetry nor prose will suffice by itself. Together, they co-create revolutionary praxis – the unity of theory and practice, analysis and vision, critique and creation that makes liberation possible.
Nandini Sen Mehra is the co-author of Unburden. Two of her poems were included this year in The Penguin Book of the Indian City. Her debut poetry book is titled Whorls Within. She is also the winner of the Reuel International Poetry Prize, 2020, for Best Upcoming Poet. She currently serves as the Policy and Communications Director in a human rights organisation in Australia that works against systems of discrimination and oppression.
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