Filthy Presidentiad: Walt Whitman in the Age of Trump

Walt Whitman is two hundred years old in 2019—and the bicentennial of democracy’s bard falls in the shadow of a demagogic presidency.

John Marsh, in his book In Walt We Trust: How a Queer Socialist Poet Can Save America from Itself, has this to say about the poet and democracy:

For Whitman, democracy is a way of being; in particular, it is a way of being with others ... it has much more to do with how you approach your fellow men and women. Do you respect them? Do you acknowledge their dignity? Do you identify your interests with theirs? In short, do you love them?

Whitman expressed his vision of democracy as “a way of being with others” in #24 of “Song of Myself”:

Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son,
Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding,
No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from
     them,
No more modest than immodest.

Unscrew the locks from the doors!
Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!

Whoever degrades another degrades me,
And whatever is done or said returns at last to me.

Through me the afflatus surging and surging, through me the current
     and index.

I speak the pass-word primeval, I give the sign of democracy,
By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart
     of on the same terms.

Through me many long dumb voices,
Voices of the interminable generations of prisoners and slaves,
Voices of the diseas’d and despairing and of thieves and dwarfs,
Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion,
And of the threads that connect the stars, and of wombs and of the
     father-stuff,
And of the rights of them the others are down upon,
Of the deform’d, trivial, flat, foolish, despised,
Fog in the air, beetles rolling balls of dung.

Through me forbidden voices,
Voices of sexes and lusts, voices veil’d and I remove the veil,
Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigur’d.

Whitman gives the “sign of democracy”—and declares himself the advocate for those excluded from democracy’s embrace. Speaking for “the rights of them the others are down upon” is the poet’s way to electrify and illuminate American democracy with his egalitarian vision, the ideal of democracy as it could be and should be.

In so doing, Whitman confronts a history of silence, charging himself with the responsibility to “remove the veil.” If the alternative is silence, then the “long dumb voices” of the despised and the “forbidden voices” of the indecent 
must speak through him. The question, even now, is whether this country is ready for Whitman, open to his “way of being” when we need it most.

Here is Francisco Alexander’s Spanish translation of the same passage:

Walt Whitman, un cosmos, el hijo de Manhattan,
Turbulento, carnal, sensual, comedor, bebedor y procreador,
Ni sentimental, ni erguido por encima de los hombres y mujeres,
Ni alejado de ellos, ni modesto ni inmodesto.

¡Arrancad los cerrojos de las puertas!
¡Arrancad las puertas mismas de sus quicios!

Quien degrada a otro me degrada a mí,
Y todo lo que se dice o se hace vuelve al fin a mí.

A través de mi ser la inspiración divina se agita y se agita,
A través de mi ser el corriente y el índice.

Pronuncio la palabra pristina, hago el signo de la democracia.
¡Por Dios! Yo no aceptaré sino aquello cuyo duplicado acepten todo

     en las mismas condiciones.

Brotan de mí muchas voces largo tiempo mudas,
Voces de interminables generaciones de prisioneros y esclavos,
Voces de los enfermos y los desesperados, de los ladrones y enanos,
Voces de ciclos de preparación y crecimiento,
De los hilos que unen a los astros, de los úteros y de la simiente

    paterna,
Y de los derechos de aquellos a quienes los otros pisotean,
De los seres deformes, vulgares, simples, locos, despreciados,
Niebla en el aire, escarabajos que arrastran su bola de estiércol.
Brotan de mí voces vedadas,
Voces de los sexos y las lujurias, voces veladas cuyo velo aparto,
Voces indecentes que yo he clarificado y he transfigurado.

Flash forward to November 2018: there is a caravan of Central American migrants straggling through México on a pilgrimage to a place they pray will save them. The President of the United States promises to send thousands of federal troops to the border to halt what he calls an “invasion,” claiming, without evidence, that terrorists and criminals march with the families hauling infants. He authorizes these troops to fire on anyone who throws rocks, equating pebbles with bullets. The first troops have arrived at the border, rifles bristling, despite the fact that the caravan is hundreds of miles away. Meanwhile, migrant children taken from their parents at the border languish 
in internment camps.

This is not a novel. This is not a dystopian fantasy. This is our country under the regime of  Donald J. Trump.

Trump announced his candidacy in June 2015, with the pronouncement that Mexicans crossing the border brought with them, like the plague, a range of criminal tendencies from drug smuggling to rape. That August, two brothers, Scott and Steve Leader, took him at his word, attacking a homeless Mexican immigrant as he slept outside a subway stop in Boston, urinating in his face to wake him up, then breaking his nose. It was the first, but not the last, hate crime committed in the name of Trump. Scott Leader told police: “Donald Trump was right. All these illegals need to be deported.”

Four years later, millions of people believe that Donald Trump is right about everything. And the Trump regime bombards Facebook with more than two thousand ads warning of the invasion from the southern border.

I invoke Whitman in Spanish for the sixty million people of Latin American origin or descent in this country. I invoke Whitman in Spanish for the fifty-two thousand migrants now incarcerated by ICE and the Border Patrol. I invoke Whitman in Spanish for the ten thousand migrant children in detention centers across the country. I invoke Whitman in Spanish for the caravans from Central America with bleeding feet. I invoke Whitman in Spanish for the dead and wounded in El Paso, shot down by a white supremacist with an assault rifle and deluded dreams of stopping a “Hispanic invasion.” I invoke Whitman in Spanish because the poet of democracy said: “Whoever degrades another degrades me.” I invoke Whitman in Spanish because, here and now, Whitman is their  poet.

I invoke Whitman in Spanish because Donald Trump is our president. Trump has now declared a national emergency along the southern border, demanding untold billions for his wall, his White Whale. Keep in mind that this foaming at the mouth over immigration is nothing new: the Chinese Exclusion Act passed back in 1882.

Six years later, in 1888, Horace Traubel recorded Walt Whitman’s reaction to the restriction of immigration:

America must welcome all—Chinese, Irish, German, pauper or not, criminal or not—all, all, without exceptions: become an asylum for all who choose to come. We may have drifted away from this principle temporarily but time will bring us back.... America is not for special types, for the castes, but for the great mass of people—the vast, surging, hopeful, army of workers. Dare we deny them a home—close the doors in their face—take possession of all and fence it in and then sit down satisfied with our system—convinced that we have solved our problem? I for my part refuse to connect America with such a failure—such a tragedy, for tragedy it would be.

Whitman’s passionate defense of what our president today would call “open borders” reflects an evolution in the poet’s consciousness about a polyglot national identity. Claudio Iván Remeseira cites an 1883 essay from Whitman’s November Boughs called “The Spanish Element in Our Nationality,” and writes:

Key to the establishment of that society is what Whitman calls “the composite American identity of the future.” National identity is for him an inchoate formation, the image of a nation on the move, located not in the past—as the national essence conceived by all ethno-nationalisms—but in the future, a dynamic entity in which all the lines of force of past and present will come together to generate something new. Among those forces, says Whitman, one that will supply some of the most worthy ingredients of the mix is the “Spanish character”—in today’s terms, the Latino or Hispanic element.

Clearly, this goes beyond the descendants of the Spanish; in the same essay, Whitman specifically includes “the Aztec in the South.”

According to Whitman historian Ed Folsom, the poet had President Franklin Pierce in mind when he wrote “To the States, to Identify the 16th, 17th or 18th Presidentiad.” Pierce was a political ancestor of Trump, an inept ruler notorious for his enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act. Says Whitman:

Why reclining, interrogating? why myself and all drowsing?
What deepening twilight—scum floating atop of the waters,
Who are they as bats and night-dogs askant in the capitol?
What a filthy Presidentiad! (O South, your torrid suns! O North, your
    arctic freezings!)
Are those really Congressmen? are those the great Judges? is that the
    President?
Then I will sleep awhile yet, for I see that these States sleep, for
    reasons;
(With gathering murk, with muttering thunder and lambent shoots
    we all duly awake,
South, North, East, West, inland and seaboard, we will surely awake.)

(Characteristically, Whitman would later write a poem also called “To the States,” wherein he advises: “Resist much, obey little.”)

Whitman’s jeremiad may refer to Pierce, but his words of outrage resonate as if he penned them last night. So, too, do the words of hope in that same poem: “We will surely awake.” And they did.

And we will. These are times when despair beckons. We see ourselves as an occupied nation, defeated by a president who delights in taunting his enemies, real and imagined, with his favorite word: loser. This, too, calls Whitman to mind, as the poet reminds us that we must reject the false dichotomy of winning and losing, redefine the notion of failure, and remember the unsung heroes who show us a way to survive, and even transform, the historical moment. This is from #18, “Song of Myself”:

Vivas to those who have fail’d!
And to those whose war-vessels sank in the sea!
And to those themselves who sank in the sea!
And to all generals that lost engagements, and all overcome heroes!
And the numberless unknown heroes equal to the greatest heroes
     known!

Indeed, Whitman was a poet of hope in seemingly hopeless times. With his nation even more divided than it is today, with democracy in crisis even more than it is today, with racial animus even more intense than it is today, Whitman writes, in the foreword to the first edition of  Leaves of  Grass in 1855:

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.

Again, there is language here that anticipates the rise of contemporary demagoguery and resistance to it. “Despise riches?” Check. “Hate tyrants?” Check. “Dismiss whatever insults your own soul?” Check. Above all, however, this poetic prose insists upon sympathy, from “love the earth” to “give alms” to “devote your income and labor to others.” And this is the great void Whitman fills in the Age of  Trump: sympathy is the essence of  Whitman, and that is the human quality so sorely lacking in this sociopathic president, his authoritarian regime and its legions of supporters.

Poet and critic Gregory Orr, in Poetry as Survival, calls sympathy “the moral center of Whitman’s world.” He cites two uses of the word from “Song of Myself.” From #22: “I am he attesting sympathy,/(Shall I make my list of the things in the house and skip the house that supports them?)” Orr says:

One thinks of the long lists of people and things Whitman celebrates in “Song of Myself.” These extensive catalogs are “lists of things in the house” of the world, but the house itself  is not only the material, physical world but also the moral world of sympathy.

That word crops up again in #48: “Whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral, drest in his shroud.” Orr calls this image “a terrifying vision of Thanatos ... Death-in-life. Utter, desolate isolation from all others and complete forlornness.” Whether we read “without sympathy” as referring to a lack of sympathy for others or from others, this is clearly the poet’s concept of damnation.

In fact, Whitman grounds “Song of Myself” in an ethos of compassion. The motif of identification with “them the others are down upon”—especially prisoners, prostitutes, thieves, and slaves—gallops through the poem. In #15, he says:

The prostitute draggles her shawl, her bonnet bobs on her tipsy
    and pimpled neck,
The crowd laugh at her blackguard oaths, the men jeer and wink
    to each other,
(Miserable! I do not laugh at your oaths, nor jeer you;)

In #33, he says:

I am the man .... I suffered .... I was there.

The disdain and calmness of martyrs,
The mother condemned for a witch and burnt with dry wood, and
    her children gazing on;
The hounded slave that flags in the race and leans by the fence,
    blowing and covered with sweat,
The twinges that sting like needles his legs and neck,
The murderous buckshot and the bullets,
All these I feel or am.
I am the hounded slave .... I wince at the bite of the dogs,
Hell and despair are upon me .... crack and again crack the marksmen,
I clutch the rails of the fence .... my gore dribs thinned with the
    ooze of my skin,
I fall on the weeds and stones,
The riders spur their unwilling horses and haul close,
They taunt my dizzy ears .... they beat me violently over the head
    with their whip-stocks.

Agonies are one of my changes of garments;
I do not ask the wounded person how he feels .... I myself become
    the wounded person,
My hurt turns livid upon me as I lean on a cane and observe.

In Whitman the Political Poet, Betsy Erkkila focuses on #33 and the poet’s empathy as the force that exposes “national paradox and American tragedy”:

Whitman’s reflections on the American past lead him not to moments of national triumph but to moments of social injustice and internal contradiction. Feeling and suffering as the condemned witch and the hounded slave persecuted not from without but on native ground, the poet begins to suffer the sins of the nation. “Agonies are of one of my changes of garments,” he says, assuming the agonistic garment of America itself.

As a sign of contradiction in the national ideology, the hounded slave undermines the poet’s democratic faith and acceptance, unleashing the demons of hell and despair.... As a hounded slave pursued and beaten not by a foreign power but by American marksmen and whippers, the poet suffers firsthand the contradiction of slavery in the democratic republic.

Though we see what Erkkila calls “a momentary loss of self in empathetic identification with others,” note that Whitman resists the impulse to speak in the voice of the slave, or the accused witch, or anyone else. Rather, he articulates the imagined experience through the senses, through the body—and he is a deeply committed poet of the body. We see the same approach in #37:

For me the keepers of convicts shoulder their carbines and keep watch,
It is I let out in the morning and barred at night.

Not a mutineer walks handcuffed to the jail, but I am handcuffed to
    him and walk by his side,
I am less the jolly one there, and more the silent one with sweat on
    my twitching lips.
Not a youngster is taken for larceny, but I go up too and am tried
and sentenced.

Not a cholera patient lies at the last gasp, but I also lie at the last gasp,
My face is ash-colored, my sinews gnarl .... away from me people
    retreat.

Askers embody themselves in me, and I am embodied in them,
I project my hat and sit shamefaced and beg.

I rise extatic through all, and sweep with the true gravitation,
The whirling and whirling is elemental within me.

Whitman takes on the anguish of the infected and the incarcerated, becoming “extatic,” “whirling,” even transcendent. Yet, sympathy is necessary, but not sufficient. Poetry is necessary, but not sufficient. Thus, Whitman would roll up his sleeves—literally.

In December 1862, Whitman received word that his brother George had been wounded at the Battle of Fredericksburg, and searched for him in the army hospitals of Washington, DC, where he saw the devastation of the Civil War for the first time. George’s wound was minor, but Whitman remained to volunteer as a nurse, tending to the wounded and the dying. “The Wound-Dresser” represents his ethos of compassion in action:

3
On, on I go, (open doors of time! open hospital doors!)
The crush’d head I dress, (poor crazed hand tear not the bandage
    away,)
The neck of the cavalry-man with the bullet through and through I
    examine,
Hard the breathing rattles, quite glazed already the eye, yet life
    struggles hard,
(Come sweet death! be persuaded O beautiful death!
In mercy come quickly.)

From the stump of the arm, the amputated hand,
I undo the clotted lint, remove the slough, wash off the matter and
    blood,
Back on his pillow the soldier bends with curv’d neck and side-falling
    head,
His eyes are closed, his face is pale, he dares not look on the
    bloody stump,
And has not yet look’d on it.
I dress a wound in the side, deep, deep,
But a day or two more, for see the frame all wasted and sinking,
And the yellow-blue countenance see.

I dress the perforated shoulder, the foot with the bullet-wound,
Cleanse the one with a gnawing and putrid gangrene, so sickening,
    so offensive,
While the attendant stands behind aside me holding the tray and pail.

I am faithful, I do not give out,
The fractur’d thigh, the knee, the wound in the abdomen,
These and more I dress with impassive hand, (yet deep in my breast
    a fire, a burning flame.)

4
Thus in silence in dreams’ projections,
Returning, resuming, I thread my way through the hospitals,
The hurt and wounded I pacify with soothing hand,
I sit by the restless all the dark night, some are so young,
Some suffer so much, I recall the experience sweet and sad,
(Many a soldier’s loving arms about this neck have cross’d and rested,
Many a soldier’s kiss dwells on these bearded lips.)

Consider the president’s quasi-religious invocations of patriotism, his flag fetish, his rage at a certain quarterback kneeling in protest—and then consider this poem. Rather than the abstraction of glory, we have a “gnawing and putrid gangrene”: glory smells bad. Rather than the abstraction of patriotism, we have the “clotted lint” and “the bloody stump”: patriotism is an amputated hand. The poem carries us cinematically through those 
hospital doors.

The poet-nurse, who carries out and describes his work with acute 
sensitivity, cannot save the dying—and he knows it: “the yellow-blue countenance see.” Medicine is not enough; sympathy is not enough. Yet, the poem closes with images of intimacy, a physical and emotional closeness between 
caretaker and patient. The poet becomes our guide to the secret world of the veterans’ hospital, then and now.

Says Marsh:

By writing letters for them, by finding them something to read, by giving them spending money, by sitting by their side when they were frightened and alone, Whitman treated soldiers with dignity and respect. He loved them, and they loved him back. We have difficulty speaking of, say, the need for love as a right, but those unspeakable needs do not matter any less because of that.

We can only speculate as to what Whitman would say about people who still wave the Confederate flag; what Whitman the wound-dresser, Whitman the nurse, Whitman of Drum Taps, would make of those who romanticize the Confederate cause as their “heritage”; what Whitman would think of a president who called Confederate statues “beautiful” and their removal “foolish,” who praised the “very fine people” among the white supremacists chanting slogans in Charlottesville.

In her groundbreaking essay, “For the Sake of People’s Poetry: Walt Whitman and the Rest of Us,” African-American poet June Jordan celebrates what she calls “the inevitable, the irresistible, simplicity of that enormous moral idea” behind part #7 of “I Sing the Body Electric”:

A man’s body at auction,
(For before the war I often go to the slave-mart and watch the sale,)
I help the auctioneer, the sloven does not half  know his business.

Gentlemen look on this wonder,
Whatever the bids of the bidders they cannot be high enough for it,
For it the globe lay preparing quintillions of years without one animal
    or plant,
For it the revolving cycles truly and steadily roll’d.

In this head the all-baffling brain,
In it and below it the makings of heroes.

Examine these limbs, red, black, or white, they are cunning in tendon
    and nerve,
They shall be stript that you may see them.

Exquisite senses, life-lit eyes, pluck, volition,
Flakes of  breast-muscle, pliant backbone and neck, flesh not flabby,
    good-sized arms and legs,
And wonders within there yet.

Within there runs blood,
The same old blood! the same red-running blood!
There swells and jets a heart, there all passions, desires, reachings,
    aspirations,
(Do you think they are not there because they are not express’d in
    parlors and lecture-rooms?)

This is not only one man, this the father of those who shall be fathers
    in their turns,
In him the start of populous states and rich republics,
Of  him countless immortal lives with countless embodiments and
    enjoyments.

How do you know who shall come from the offspring of his offspring
    through the centuries?
(Who might you find you have come from yourself, if you could trace
    back through the centuries?)

Jacob Wilkenfeld, in an interview with Yusef Komunyakaa for the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, asks the Pulitzer Prize-winning African-American poet about this same passage:

In the recent PBS American Experience program on Whitman, you single out the auction block scene in “I Sing the Body Electric”as an example of Whitmanian empathetic identification with others, regardless of their cultural origins. In your words, “For some reason I feel like he has the capacity to imagine himself on the auction block as well.... It really enters his psyche.”

Komunyakaa replies:

I think what he basically believed is that one is not really human until he possesses the capacity of empathy through the imagination. Also, there are so many references to the body, as if language enters the body and becomes tactile and physical. So when Whitman speaks of the black man, such as the passage where he sees this black man driving a horse-drawn wagon, he seems to be sitting there beside him. He is not, at that moment, merely of compressed belief and passion. In the woven language of the poem, Whitman may even be that man. I think this is really an amazing kind of epiphany. Likewise, for this poet, the auction block seems more than a physical dimension: a part of his psyche.

Whitman runs both North and South—and “South” here does not refer to the old Confederacy. José Martí—poet, translator, critic, journalist, and revolutionary leader in the Cuban War of Independence—introduced Whitman to the Spanish-speaking world in April 1887 when he published an eloquent and influential essay, “El poeta Walt Whitman,” in El Partido Liberal, a Mexican newspaper.

After years of exile in New York and Tampa, Martí had no illusions about the United States as it loomed over Latin America. In a letter to Manuel Mercado, dated May 18, 1895, Martí famously says: “I have lived in the 
monster and I know its entrails; my sling is David’s.” He never finished that letter; Martí died at the Battle of Dos Ríos the next day, shot from his white horse at the age of forty-two.

Half a century earlier, Martí’s hero had vociferously supported the Mexican War and Manifest Destiny in a series of cringe-worthy editorials. (He even presumed the eventual annexation of Cuba.) In this sense—and others—he was no different, no less limited, than most European-Americans of the mid-nineteenth century.

Yet, Charles Shively notes that, “in later poems, journals, letters, and reminiscences, Whitman seldom mentioned the Mexican War and rejected his anti-Mexican rhetoric.” David Hudder adds:

The poet complains about attitudes of foreign governments towards the United States “with the single exception of Mexico—
Mexico, the only one to whom we have ever really done wrong” ... Contritely, after the Civil War, Whitman secures the border, making the nation’s neighbor to the south exempt from continental Manifest Destiny after all.

Notwithstanding this profound historical irony, Martí embraced Whitman, fiercely. Los poetas rebeldes, a book Martí planned to write featuring Whitman, was one of the many brainstorms snuffed out by Spanish bullets. To this most poetic of Latin American rebels, Whitman was a rebel too. In “El gran viejo: Walt Whitman in Latin America,” Josef Raab writes:

The young Cuban poet shared Whitman’s belief in the poet as liberator and mediator, and he extended Whitman’s all-embracing attitude from the United States to the Western Hemisphere, highlighting those parts of it that—like his native Cuba—were still struggling to gain independence from colonial rule.

In the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman’s impulse to make common cause with revolutionary uprisings would express itself in “Liberty Poem for Asia, Africa, Europe, America, Australia, Cuba, and The Archipelagoes of the Sea.” Urging the rebels to have “courage!” and “Keep on!” he says of the struggle for democracy:

What we believe in invites no one, promises nothing, sits in calmness
    and light, is positive
and composed, knows no discouragement,
Waits patiently its time—a year—a century—a hundred centuries.

The battle rages with many a loud alarm and frequent advance and
    retreat,
The infidel triumphs—or supposes he triumphs,
The prison, scaffold, garrote, hand-cuffs, iron neck-lace and anklet,
    lead-balls, do their work,
The named and unnamed heroes pass to other spheres.

In the 1871 edition, Whitman created a section called “Songs of Insurrection,” taking its title from his revision of the same poem:

(Not songs of loyalty alone are these,
But songs of insurrection also,
For I am the sworn poet of every dauntless rebel, the world over ... )

One poet could well have been writing for, and about, the other. However, the poem that stirred Martí, above all, was not a song of insurrection, but a “mystical threnody” for a slain president and martyr for democracy: “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” According to historian Philip S. Foner, who edited a collection of Martí’s literary criticism (translated by Elinor Randall), the essay “was written following Whitman’s lecture on Abraham Lincoln in New York City which Martí attended.” In Whitman’s body of work, Martí sees the affirmation of his faith in the necessity of poetry:

Who is the ignoramus who maintains that people can dispense with poetry? Some persons are so shortsighted that they see nothing in fruit but the rind. Whether it unites or divides the soul, strengthens or causes it anguish, props it up or casts it down, whether or not it inspires a man with faith and hope, poetry is more necessary to a people than industry itself, for while industry gives men the means of subsistence, poetry gives them the desire and courage for living.

“Martí believes that Whitman’s writing reveals,” says Raab, “a champion of liberty and equality and thus a potential model for Latin American writers.” Thus, Martí focuses his lens on the same empathy in Whitman that would engage Spanish and Latin American writers for generations to come:

He loves the meek, the wounded, the downtrodden, even the wicked. He feels no scorn for the great, for he considers great only the useful. He throws his arms around the shoulders of truck drivers, sailors, and farmers.... He is the slave, the prisoner, the fighter, the fallen, and the beggar.

Slavery in Cuba had been abolished in October 1886, less than a year before the publication of this essay. Martí, who agitated against slavery in his poetry and other works, invokes the scene in #10 of “Song of Myself”: “When a slave comes to his door hounded and sweaty, he fills the bathtub for him and offers him a chair at his table. In the corner is his loaded gun ready to defend him.” Furthermore, for the multilingual Martí, Whitman’s use of many languages testifies to the presence of an internationalist vision:

At every step we find these words of ours in his writings: viva, camarada, libertad, americanos. But what is a better indication of his character than the French words he puts into his poetry with obvious delight, and as if they enlarge his meaning: ami, exalté accoucheur, nonchalant, ensemble; he is especially captivated by ensemble because he sees heaven in the life of nations and worlds. One word he has taken from the Italian: bravura.

Bravura indeed. The poet in Martí—best known for the verses that would become the lyrics of the song “Guantanamera”—revels in the musicality of Whitman, the way he “hears a concert rising from the scenes of the creation and the work of man, music flooding him.” Ultimately, Martí implores us: “listen to Walt Whitman.”

To hear that concert, to hear Whitman, we must listen, and, across the political spectrum, we have ceased to listen—to each other and to the world. Collective deafness is but a symptom of pandemonium in the Age of Trump, the deliberate bedlam of the twenty-four-hour news cycle dominated by the demagogue. Again, Whitman may offer an answer.

In #26 of “Song of Myself” he writes: “I think I will do nothing for a long time but listen,/And accrue what I hear into myself.” Notably, his ear tunes itself to “the sound of the human voice .... a sound I love,” so often lost in our contemporary cacophony:

Talkative young ones to those that like them .... the recitative of
     fish-pedlars and fruit-pedlars .... the loud laugh of workpeople at
     their meals,
The angry base of disjointed friendship .... the faint tones of the sick,
The judge with hands tight to the desk, his shaky lips pronouncing a
     death-sentence,
The heave’e’yo of stevedores unlading ships by the wharves .... the
     refrain of the anchor-lifters .... 

Says Whitman: “I hear the chorus .... it is a grand-opera .... this indeed is music!”

In his essay “The Poetry of the Future,” Whitman speaks of the need for “bards in the future ... to dauntlessly confront greed, injustice, and all forms of that wiliness and tyranny whose roots never die—(my opinion is, that after all the rest is advanced, that is what first-class poets are for ...).” These poets must “counteract dangers, immensest ones, already looming in America” from those “prosperous and fat with wealth of money and products and business ventures.”

Somehow, poets must accept Whitman’s challenge to “confront greed, injustice, and all forms of that wiliness and tyranny whose roots never die,” made manifest in the Age of Trump. Yet, our words must also sing. “I hear America singing,” says Whitman. “I, too, sing America,” says Langston Hughes. “I, Too, Sing América,” says Julia Alvarez:

Ay sí,
(y bilingually):
Yo también soy América
I, too, am America.

Like Julia Alvarez, I sing América with an accent. I sing of Puerto Rico after Hurricane María.

The official government death toll as a result of Hurricane María stood at sixty-four by the end of 2017. A Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health Study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, estimated the actual death toll at over three thousand. This was a colonial catastrophe, obliterating the shaky façade of infrastructure and democracy.

Demagogues act out metaphors. Trump tossed paper towels to hurricane survivors, a gesture of megalomania and contempt for the subjects of empire. Trump was born in 1946; a New Yorker of his generation grew up cherishing certain stereotypes of Puerto Ricans. I grew up with the same stereotypes in the same city, the difference being that Trump internalized those racist caricatures, and I saw those caricatures demolished in my activist household. My father, Frank Espada, was a leader of the Puerto Rican community, a photographer who created the Puerto Rican Diaspora Documentary Project.

When Trump tweeted that Puerto Ricans “want everything to be done for them,” he was invoking the old myth of Puerto Ricans on welfare, lazily shunning labor. Now, however, this myth, lacking only the sombrero and cactus of its drowsing Mexican counterpart, has formed the foundation of lethal social policy. Thousands of Puerto Ricans, well aware of Trump’s sneering, organized themselves into “brigadas,” work brigades clearing away the wreckage left by hurricanes and colonialism. They bring to mind another uprising, the Nationalist rebellion for independence in 1950, when warplanes bombed a mountain town called Utuado.

My father was born in Utuado. My grandmother was born in Utuado. My great-grandfather was the mayor of Utuado. Jon Lee Anderson, writing about Hurricane María in the New Yorker, says: “The municipality of Utuado ... has become a byword for the island’s devastation, an equivalent to New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward after Hurricane Katrina.”

I wrote the poem “Letter to My Father,” which appeared in the March 2018 issue of Poetry, in the fall of 2017—yet my father died three years earlier. The poem evolved from the practice of talking to my father’s ashes in a box. If he were here, he would say: This is not Puerto Rico’s first hurricane. Colonialism is a hurricane. Debt is a hurricane. Trump is a hurricane.

After Hurricane María, a sign rose in Utuado: Campamento los Olvidados: Camp of the Forgotten. The sign expresses an ethical imperative not to forget, to bear witness, to tell whatever we know with urgency. This is from “Letter to My Father”:

Los olvidados wait seven hours in line for a government meal of Skittles
and Vienna sausage, or a tarp to cover the bones of a house with no roof,
as the fungus grows on their skin from sleeping on mattresses drenched
with the spit of the hurricane. They drink the brown water, waiting
for microscopic monsters in their bellies to visit plagues upon them.
A nurse says: These people are going to have an epidemic. These people
are going to die. The president flips rolls of paper towels to a crowd
at a church in Guaynabo, Zeus lobbing thunderbolts on the locked ward
of his delusions. Down the block, cousin Ricardo, Bernice’s boy, says
that somebody stole his can of diesel. I heard somebody ask you once
what Puerto Rico needed to be free. And you said: Tres pulgadas
de sangre en la calle: Three inches of blood in the street. Now, three
inches of mud flow through the streets of Utuado, and troops patrol
the town, as if guarding the vein of copper in the ground, as if a shovel
digging graves in the backyard might strike the ore below, as if la brigada
swinging machetes to clear the road might remember the last uprising.

I know you are not God. I have the proof: seven pounds of ashes in a box
on my bookshelf. Gods do not die, and yet I want you to be God again.
Stride from the crowd to seize the president’s arm before another roll
of paper towels sails away. Thunder Spanish obscenities in his face.
Banish him to a roofless rainstorm in Utuado, so he unravels, one soaked
sheet after another, till there is nothing left but his cardboard heart.

“I am the man .... I suffered ....” Walt Whitman was there.