Call for papers: Understanding Bonhoeffer Today

The Oxford Centre for Religion and Culture is hosting a one day conference on the theological legacy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer as it pertains to contemporary mission and ministry. We are calling for abstracts of 250 words outlining theological approaches to various aspects of Christian mission and ministry that are informed by the theology, activism and example of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Dismantling Whiteness: Critical White Theology
A day conference to be held online

Dismantling Whiteness symposium

Exploring faith responses to relativism and pluralism in a secular world.

Thursday 3rd November 2016, 1:30-5:30pm.

Poster/Programme

In times of crisis poetry speaks into matters of enduring concern, the great themes of life and death. At the same time poetry speaks directly into our current context where the use and abuse of words, miscommunication and incomprehension, can be a matter of life and death. In many spiritual traditions, words have power to bring life but also to pronounce death. These reflections are drawn from a series of poetry readings hosted by the Oxford Centre for Religion and Culture in September 2020, in association with Sarum College, which talked about matters of life, death and poetry, exploring how words can bring life and hope to a fearful and divided world.

Poster/Programme

Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan is an educator, writer and poet from West Yorkshire. Suhaiymah was the runner-up of the Roundhouse National slam 2017 with her viral poem, This is Not a Humanising Poem. In 2018-19 she was a Nicola Thorold Fellow at the Roundhouse and is currently an Associate Artist at Freedom Studios. She is the author of a poetry collection, Postcolonial Banter (Verve, 2019), co-author of the anthology, A FLY GIRL’S GUIDE TO UNIVERSITY: Being a woman of colour at Cambridge and other institutions of power and elitism (Verve, 2019) and hosts the Breaking Binaries podcast, a series of conversations around the dangerous dualisms in our language.

Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan’s poetic style is one of straight-talking. It is the voice of challenge, critique and protest, through asserting the right to self-expression. It is a voice that leaves little ambiguous and little undisclosed. As she writes in the introduction to her recent poetry collection: ‘I’m not interested in writing poetry for people to puzzle over or feel intimidated by – I’d rather you puzzle over your reactions and responses.’[1]

For Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan the poet is prophet and educator. She uses what she calls ‘context boxes’ in her collection, which contain explanatory information about the background to the poems. This is a way of adding into the text the kind of asides that a poet would often deliver in performance. The implication is that a poem is best understood in relation to its position in history or in life. Many of these boxes go beyond providing background information to explaining the poet’s subjective response to the events they describe. One of these, for the first poem in the collection, ‘This  Poem is Not For You’ , explains her response to the experience of Poetry Slams where ‘poets often perform our identities and trauma for an audience to consume … [which] reproduces many problematic dynamics of people of colour “performing” for white voyeurism.’

Her poetry has an explicit political agenda, addressing issues of Islamophobia, postcolonialism, race and gender, but more generally directed against ‘systems’ and systematic thinking. Her podcast, ‘Breaking Binaries’, calls out damaging and dangerous uses of language in contemporary culture, calling for a language that better reflects cultural realities. This aspect of the poetry of Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan raises the question of whether the best way to combat oppression and to change modes of thinking is simply to call a spade a spade. Poems such as ‘This is Not a Humanising Poem’ contain a lot of direct statements and direct addresses to the audience, attempting to shine a light on realities hidden in plain sight, to expose the ridiculous, the illogical and the ideological.

Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan is also a poet who wears her faith on her sleeve. One of the poems of the collection is written in response to the case of Shemima Begum: ‘A Prayer For Those who Jeer at the Death of a Baby whose Teenage Mother you Feel Did Not Show Enough Remorse.’ It is an ironic prayer of blessing not for the sufferers but for those who ignore their suffering, a prayer that exposes cruelty and sits in judgement on those without compassion.

At points it can feel like the poetic tone sets up the very binaries it is seeking to break down, but behind this lies a confidence in the truth of feeling and a commitment to sincere self-expression. This is reflected in the several poems that Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan has written ‘about the difficulty of writing [a] poem’. ‘A Story For Ourselves This Time’, about the experience of women in Pakistan, begins, ‘I do not know how to write us’, but ends: ‘I want to write us/even if I do not know how to begin’. The difficulties of language are exposed in this poem, but also the poet’s own struggles with communication and identity, revealing the  commitment to write as a courageous act.

‘A Prayer For Those who Jeer at the Death of a Baby whose Teenage Mother you Feel Did Not Show Enough Remorse’:

[1] Note from the Author, Postcolonial Banter (Verve Press, 2019).

In times of crisis poetry speaks into matters of enduring concern, the great themes of life and death. At the same time poetry speaks directly into our current context where the use and abuse of words, miscommunication and incomprehension, can be a matter of life and death. In many spiritual traditions, words have power to bring life but also to pronounce death. These reflections are drawn from a series of poetry readings hosted by the Oxford Centre for Religion and Culture in September 2020, in association with Sarum College, which talked about matters of life, death and poetry, exploring how words can bring life and hope to a fearful and divided world.

Poster/Programme

Harry Baker is by his own confession a ‘World Poetry Slam Champion and amateur butterfly-stroke swimmer’.[1] A long-established regular at the annual Greenbelt Festival, his 2019 Edinburgh Fringe Festival show had rave reviews and he is soon to resume his national tour, while his recent podcast series, ‘Something Borrowed’, has explored with friends and fellow poets how poetry can sustain people through difficult times.

Comedy, music and (often maths-related) wordplay have an important role in Harry Baker’s poetic style and during lockdown he has brought his particular brand of uplifting optimism to bear on the challenges facing our world. From a bedrock of pure joyful silliness such as a music video on the beauty of the German language emerge more poignant expressions of hope in the light of the frustrations, disappointments and griefs of the current time.

‘When this is Over’ speaks to the pain of physical distance from the ones that we love. Rather than dwelling on the present it looks forward to the time when we can come together again and give each other a big hug. There is no facile positivity in this poem but a fundamentally pragmatic realism: ‘When the future’s all we’ve got well that’s got to be enough’. The poem takes the unnatural feeling of separation to come to an insight about the interconnectedness between all people and the natural instinct to love: ‘When the heart is given space it will forever tend to tender’. The embrace that is longed for will not erase the separation of the past but forge a new way of being and loving.

Written in preparation for the resumption of live performance, ‘A Rescheduled Poem’ speaks to the frustration of plans put on hold, ambitions postponed, and the fear that when we finally get where we wanted it won’t be what we hoped for. The fact that this retrospective on the pandemic has been written in the midst of it reveals a confidence rooted in an affirmation of human grit, determination and ingenuity. Pathos is decorated with touches of humour that don’t just lighten the mood but provide a conduit for the deep joy that the poem taps into: ‘the joy of not doing it then/is that we get to do this now.’

One of the great challenges for the lyric poet is how to speak with sincerity without appearing facile or over-earnest. After all, the greatest lines in poetry often express things that everybody knows, but do not routinely articulate. It can be especially difficult for the poet speaking in the first-person ‘I’ or ‘we’ to avoid seeming self-important or dogmatic. Through the deft use of wordplay, inverted maxims and colloquialisms, the hip-hop rhymes and rhythms of Harry Baker’s poetry avoid becoming declamatory or overbearing, opening up a space that gives the audience permission to appreciate what is good in human nature, to revel in joy and to feel what it means to hope.

‘Impossible’:

‘When This is Over’:

[1] Something Borrowed, Episode 20.

In times of crisis poetry speaks into matters of enduring concern, the great themes of life and death. At the same time poetry speaks directly into our current context where the use and abuse of words, miscommunication and incomprehension, can be a matter of life and death. In many spiritual traditions, words have power to bring life but also to pronounce death. These reflections are drawn from a series of poetry readings hosted by the Oxford Centre for Religion and Culture in September 2020, in association with Sarum College, which talked about matters of life, death and poetry, exploring how words can bring life and hope to a fearful and divided world.

Poster/Programme

Dr Martin Glynn is a poet and criminologist, with over 35 years’ experience of working in criminal justice, public health and education. His numerous poetry books are now accompanied by a debut album, Article St (2019). His academic research follows his social activism, covering the areas of black masculinities and black men in the criminal justice system. His book Beyond The Wall: Black Art and the Criminological Imagination will be published in 2021.

First and foremost a community activist, Glynn’s poetic form focuses on accessibility, memorability and relevance for his audience. This concern also comes out in his academic work. Speaking Data and Telling Stories: Data Verbalization for Researchers, published by Routledge in 2019,  describes how research can be made accessible to the communities that it is produced about and for, through translation into music and spoken word – something that we have seen elsewhere in the work of George the Poet.

Glynn brings his experience in the various spheres of activism, social work, criminal justice and academia to bear in his poetry, but its form and content is highly lyrical. His poetry resonates with the voices of various identities: from the activist dub-poet of the 1980s to the prisons worker, to the husband and grandfather of later years. Amongst and between these voices emerge themes of personal angst, doubt and self-discovery, of concern for the youth of the community and for expressions of black masculinity. In all of this a political advocacy for freedom of speech and a commitment to bringing minority voices to prominence becomes inextricably intertwined with sometimes raw personal reflection and sincere self-expression. ‘Pacing’ and ‘I Need Space’, for example, simultaneously address experiences of incarceration, existential angst and a crisis of masculinity, which appear in these poems as almost interchangeable.

As Glynn describes it, lockdown was a particularly prolific and creative time for him as a poet, but the development of the debate around Black Lives Matter has also had the surprising consequence of bringing back into consciousness and relevance work originally produced 30-40 years ago. The reggae style of 1980s dub poetry was in Glynn’s words, ‘the language of my father’, but in reperformance it has found contemporary relevance. The ‘uncompromising’ performance style of dub, designed for declamations on street corners, has proved remarkably adaptable to the setting of the academic seminar. Glynn’s style may not have changed but age and context have perhaps lent his words a greater optimism about the human spirit and hope for the future. In this vein, ‘Love Dub’ is a playful and affectionate take on dub style that celebrates distinctive aspects of Jamaican culture and language while addressing universal themes of mutuality and human connectedness.

‘I Need Space’:

‘Pacing’:

‘Love Dub’:

This series of events brought together poets from a variety of backgrounds, perspectives and poetic schools to speak about matters of life, death and poetry. These are universal discussions, but perhaps heightened by the ongoing crises currently facing our world.

In the final session we welcomed the Irish poet Pádraig Ó Tuama, who led the conflict resolution organization, the Corrymeela Community, from 2014-2019. Informed by this work and by his own experiences, his poetry and theology reflects on violence, power and religion, and the importance of language in human relationships. He is now Theologian in Residence for On Being and presents their podcast series, Poetry Unbound . He has published his own poetry (Readings from the Book of Exile and Sorry For Your Troubles, Canterbury Press 2012 and 2013), and recently a collection of essays and poetry on the Book of Ruth, Crossing Borders: Challenging Barriers with the Book of Ruth with Glenn Jordan (Canterbury Press).

During his reading Ó Tuama spoke of the paradoxical power of language to shock, to subvert and to disrupt as well as to comfort and heal. It is a power that is often not held equally, and in situations of conflict and colonization can be used to reject or ignore the experiences of others. The contribution that poetry makes into these situations is its capacity to bear witness, which is a form of truth-telling. This may be a witness to death, but even out of despairing words hope emerges simply from the knowledge that a story has been told.

‘Postcards to the Centre’ is one such poem where the words of the marginalised are presented not in measured discourse but as brief missives ‘from the edge’ – short telegraphs, words squeezed into the small available space, abridged communications for the short attention span of the comfortable. These are at once reminders of existence, appeals for recognition and challenges to oppression: ‘If you drown out all our voices you will not drown out your fear, we’re still here’. The urgency and relevance of these words was given particular focus as we reflected on the the upcoming centenary of Irish partition and the impact of Brexit on the island of Ireland,[1] not much more than 20 years after the groundbreaking achievement of the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.

Ó Tuama’s poetic style is one that delights in the craft, exploiting established forms and making strong use of structures of rhythm and rhyme. Against this orderly backdrop the subversions of paradox and contradiction stand out more prominently, as a cause of both delight and disturbance in the hearer. ‘The Potato Famine’ is the story of Ó Tuama’s grandfather’s grandfather, the only survivor in the family of the famines of the mid 1800s. It takes the form of a villanelle with two repeated lines that draw a connection between the present and the past, the habits learned from ancient trauma: ‘My father likes his spuds piled high upon his plate … My great great grandad was the only one who made it’. The challenge presented by such poems is one that works simultaneously within and against the structures and strictures of form, a poetic tone that in some ways reflects an approach to conflict resolution. There is not always peace to be found here, and reconciliation may feel a long way off, but there is the beginning of a long but necessary journey towards empathy and understanding.

‘Postcards to the Centre’:

‘The Potato Famine’:

[1] On the complexities of naming, see “[the] north[ern] [of] ireland”, Pádraig Ó Tuama,  https://onbeing.org/poetry/the-northern-of-ireland/