The Power of Words & the Words of Power

There is a dramatic poem of Léopold Sédar Senghor in which a white man is so overwhelmed by Chaka’s power and mastery over language that he exclaims: ‘my word, Chaka … you are a poet … a politician.’

The poet and the politician have certainly many things in common. Both trade in words. Both are created by the same reality of the world around them. Their activity and concern have the same subject and object: human relationships. Imaginative literature, dealing with a people’s consciousness, and politics, with the operation of power in society, are reflected in one another and they act on one another.

There is no area of our lives including the very boundaries of our imagination which is not affected by the way that society is organized, by the whole operation and machinery of power: how and by whom that power has been achieved; which class controls and maintains it; and the ends to which power is put. The class in power, for instance, controls not only the productive forces in the community but cultural development as well. The means of life, and how they are produced, exchanged and shared out, and the social institutions that the whole process gives rise to do move men, do profoundly affect the very quality of their lives: how they eat, laugh, play, woo and even make love. They constitute a universe of moral significance, of values and determine the quality of human life and are what imaginative literature is about. The universe is itself simultaneously a product of and a reflection on the material process of living. Its method may entail a refraction of the material process in order to reveal its inner vitality. Thus literature and politics are about living humans, that is to say, actual men and women and children, breathing, eating, crying, laughing, creating, dying, growing, struggling, organizing, people in history of which they are its products, its producers and its analysts.

The way power in society is organized can affect writers and their writing in several ways.