Deposits Made by History

A poem for Antonio Gramsci (with commentary)

Gramsci during the 1920s, looking into the camera through wire-rimmed glasses. For a critical discussion of this photo, see David Forgacs, “Gramsci undisabled,” Modern Italy (2016).

Deposits Made by History

for Antonio Gramsci

You drink languages and eat histories as if words were substitutes for food. Mussolini spilled your blood while life coursed through your pen.

You posed the Southern Question unswayed by defeat, perpetually postponing victory, living not for yourself but for truth.

You made prose into poetry, breaking with Hegel, you surpassed Croce. Your fragile wrists poured over notebooks in a staccato more rigid than the bars of your cell.

You are particles of shivering light on the crossbars of smoky windowpanes.

You receive the deposits made by history without the benefit of an inventory. The task, you said, is to make that inventory.

You are the politics the state rejected. Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.

You are eyes-wide-open despair, hope plus seeing, will plus being. Vico’s son, made by history, the “we” born into poetry.

You are the name on the lips of everyone hungering to be free. Agitator of peasant visionaries, mobilizer of dreams forged in factories, democratizer of beauty.

You led the Communist Party to question itself. You led the state to its necessary ruin. You incited revolution around the globe.

You agitate for the destruction of Western democracy says the US Senator testifying to the House Ways and Means Committee. You expose their corruption.

The jottings your sister-in-arms quietly removed from your prison cell merge with eternity as you journey to the underworld.

You saw your son once in the airport before he vanished from your horizon.

You directed his education from prison. Your family was torn from your arms.

Even your mother named you enemy number one.

You told the executioners of their folly. You showed a dying nation its salvation.

To the working class, you showed victory. Anti-utopian of universal equality, theorizer of the new society.

I once thought you were no martyr back when I rejected martyrdom. Then I learned that history has no mercy and justice no kingdom on this earth.

Commentary

Like many of the poem I share here, this poem was drafted long ago. In its eaerlier version, it is much clunkier and the line breaks are less intuitive. Then I asked Iranian poet Kayvan Tahmasebian for advice. Poet that he is, he made it much better. He gave me the courage to break free from formal constraints and to let the poem flow more organically.

I hope that the poem speaks for itself. Nonetheless, a few textual details may help clarify what it says about Gramsci.

The formula “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will” was coined by the French writer Romain Rolland (1866–1944), who used it in an essay from 1920. Antonio Gramsci later cited and disseminated this phrase in his Prison Notebooks (1929–35), from where it entered Marxist and political discourse.

In the Prison Notebooks ( Notebook 11, §12; sometimes cited as Q10 II, §54), Gramsci writes that the starting point of critical thought is “knowing oneself as a product of the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory.” He adds that the task of critique is precisely to draw up that inventory.

I was introduced to this aspect of Gramsci through Edward Said, who invokes this passage, most notably in Beginnings (1975) and Culture and Imperialism (1993) to describe the work of intellectual self-scrutiny within inherited cultural and historical formations.

For more reflection on Gramsci in prose, see my discussion of his relevance to Egyptian prison writings.

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