Poetry and Crisis: Cultural Politics And Citizenship in The Wake of The Madrid Bombings by Jill Robbins (review)

In the words of prolific Argentine poet María Negroni, art and poetry are equal to a question minus the answer. Such a question does not settle for the comfort of resolution, but signals instead the constant interpellation of what we deem as real, an insistence of on-going social reconfiguration. In the aftermath of the 2004 11-M bombings in Madrid, poetry played a crucial role as one the foremost expressions of mourning circulating in memorials, memory sites, monuments, and archives. The poems in these specific sites, however, revealed in its circulation and varying poetic approaches the different cultural and political conflicts of past and present Spain. Still lingering were the rhetorical phantasms of the unatoned for atrocities of Franco's dictatorship, the uncomfortable forgetting of post-dictatorial transition, the standstill two-party political impasse between official right-wing Partido Popular (PP) and the left-leaning Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE). Poetry became a space of collective memory that evinced an undercurrent of tensions kept at bay for too long in the name of Spanish unity, Hispanidad, identity. However, poetry, or the poetic text itself, was also at a crossroads as newer forms of lyric sought to evoke and unsettle in order to promote debate through the fleeting vitality of experience and expression allotted to them by way of affect and memory, all the while, more orthodox forms of verse were calling for an abstract national unity which elided uncertainty and debate in favor of consensus. In this sense, Jill Robbins' Poetry and Crisis: Cultural Politics and Citizenship in the Wake of the Madrid Bombings (2019) deems it very telling that the public sphere qua memory sites commemorating the lives lost became political purveyors—spaces of perspective.

Structured in two parts, the book begins by detailing the conservative ruling party's Partido Popular's (PP) media campaign to falsely inculpate the Basque separatist organization, the Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (Basque County and Freedom, ETA) for the bombings despite evidence to the contrary that pointed to the authorship of Islamist groups. The mishandling and manipulation of the accusations made by the PP days before the presidential elections instigated a negative wave of reactions, especially from the left, which claimed Aznar's government was trying to distract the public from the fact that their support of the United States' "war on terror" fueled the Islamist terrorist groups attack on Spain. Robbins' contextualization clearly establishes the political and cultural struggles to come in the public sphere stemming from these narrative and ideologically-charged battles.

One could argue that, despite the title, her object of study, especially in the first part, is not so much poetry but memory sites in the public sphere as she first probes grassroots memorials, official monuments, media sites, archives and grassroots anthologies. Such sites provided a space for lyric response, as Robbins calls it. The poetry in itself, studied more in depth in the second part, is "one that includes, not only the texts written and published by accomplished and recognized poets," but also "the performance and performativity of lyric texts in grassroots memorials, monuments and archives; popular texts song; poems written by non-poets; and the institutions (particulary anthologies, concerts and public schools) that contribute to the constitution and transmission of cultural memory in the poetic field" (Robbins, 5). In short, this study contends that the bombings represent a watershed moment for Spain from which poetry emerged as a cultural and political instrument that probed and contested the limits of the country's postdictatorial transitional frame. Furthermore, it circulated through unorthodox networks of commemoration prioritizing a new affective and embodied sensibility that stressed relationality over positivistic knowing. This burgeoning poetry also found a voice in the new media technologies which eluded the institutional settings of remembering so prone to the consensus discourse that effaces marginalized communities by promoting a de-politized identity founded on "sameness" and "unity."

This book...