Wars nowadays are relentlessly seen. Pictures of bombed constructions, wounded civilians, destroyed houses, and displaced households flow into regularly throughout social media feeds, livestreams, and information platforms. Fresh conflicts are increasingly more encountered thru visible spectacle. But this obvious far more than visibility too can difficult to understand types of struggling that face up to photographic illustration. Worry, anticipation, grief, displacement, and emotional rupture aren’t at all times totally captured via the digital camera. As Lilie Chouliaraki argues, repeated publicity to pictures of struggling can transform violence into consumable spectacle, knocking down emotional engagement somewhat than deepening it. The new loss of life of the younger Iranian poet Parnia Abbasi all the way through Israeli moves on Tehran illustrates this pressure. After Abbasi and her circle of relatives have been killed in June 2025, fragments of her poetry circulated extensively on-line, reworking her verses into collective websites of mourning and remembrance. On this context, poetry emerged now not as an alternative choice to pictures of struggle, however as some other mode of witnessing violence and loss.
In my fresh article in Poetic Imageries: Remembering Through Poetry in Timor-Leste, I conceptualised this in the course of the perception of “poetic imageries”. Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s paintings on aesthetics and spectatorship, I argue that poetry produces verbal, sensory, and symbolic pictures thru metaphor, rhythm, repetition, and fragmentation. Poetry does now not merely describe struggling. It creates affective scenes that let readers to believe and emotionally come upon violence otherwise.
The concept that emerged from my research of the jail poetry of Xanana Gusmão, chief of the East Timorese Resistance, all the way through the Indonesian career of Timor-Leste, the place a lot violence remained unphotographable because of censorship and repression. In such contexts, poetry was a type of testimony able to rendering absence, concern, physically struggling, and rupture perceptible thru language itself. Poetic imageries, due to this fact, interfere within the politics of visibility via enabling readers to “see” what can’t at all times be photographed or at once represented.
In one of the crucial verses circulated after her loss of life, Abbasi inspires burning, disappearance, and transformation into smoke, growing an imagery of fragility and dissolution that was particularly haunting after the strike that killed her and her circle of relatives: “I burn. / I turn out to be a pale megastar / that turns to smoke / to your sky” (Abbasi quoted in Torbati, 2025). Learn after her loss of life, those traces gain a haunting emotional and political drive. The poem does now not explicitly point out struggle, army violence, or destruction. But its imagery of burning, disappearance, smoke, and fading presence inspires sensations of fragility, rupture, and loss that resonate profoundly inside the context of modern battle. The transformation of the self into “smoke” creates an imagery of dissolution and lack, the place the frame turns into fragmented and volatile.
What is especially placing is how the poem obtained a radically other which means after Abbasi’s loss of life. A textual content most probably written prior to the moves used to be retrospectively reworked right into a type of testimony of her personal loss of life. The traces “I burn” and “I turn out to be a pale megastar / that turns to smoke” information us (the readers) into the scene. Like a film director, those traces advised us to believe the instant of the assault, and it additionally was inseparable from the pictures and reviews surrounding the destruction of her condominium development in Tehran. On this sense, the poem now exists concurrently throughout more than one registers: as literature, as mourning, and as political reminiscence.
This circulate additionally finds how recent witnessing increasingly more happens thru fragmented virtual encounters. On-line, Abbasi’s verses gave the impression along images of her day by day existence: conserving sunflowers, travelling with pals, mountain climbing Mount Damavand (Iran), smiling in peculiar moments unexpectedly interrupted via struggle. Those pictures didn’t merely file loss of life; they reconstructed a existence. As Ariella Azoulay suggests in her dialogue of photography and political responsibility, pictures of struggling are by no means best about destruction itself, but in addition in regards to the relationships, histories, and types of existence that violence interrupts.
Poetry contributes to this procedure otherwise from visible documentation. Whilst images incessantly seize the fast match of destruction, poems can evoke emotional and temporal dimensions of violence that stay tricky to visualise at once. Abbasi’s verses are crammed now not with particular depictions of army battle, however with disappearance, fading, exhaustion, and transformation. The imagery of smoke and dissolution gestures towards types of absence that exceed the seen scene itself.
That is exactly the place poetic imageries turn out to be politically necessary. They don’t simply illustrate struggling; they invite readers to inhabit affective atmospheres of uncertainty, fragility, and interruption. As Jacques Rancière argues, spectators are never passive recipients of meaning. Readers actively compose emotional and imaginative associations from what they come upon. On this case, Abbasi’s poetry was entangled with collective grief, permitting readers to glue the abstraction of struggle to the vulnerability of a person existence.
What makes those verses politically important is strictly their indirectness. Slightly than reproducing graphic scenes of destruction, the poem approaches struggling thru metaphor and emotional environment. As Carolyn Forché (2011) argues in her dialogue of the “poetry of witness”, poetry often registers violence now not best thru direct testimony but in addition thru affective and sensory lines. Right here, struggling emerges thru fragmentation, fading, and disappearance.
The circulate of Abbasi’s poetry after her loss of life additionally reworked the poem itself right into a web page of collective mourning. Shared many times throughout social media platforms, the verses was intertwined with images of her existence: pictures of sunflowers, mountains, pals, and peculiar moments unexpectedly interrupted via struggle. On this motion between poetry, reminiscence, and virtual circulate, the poem was greater than a literary textual content. It was a part of the affective panorama of struggle itself.
This dynamic divulge one thing necessary about recent visible politics. Even inside hyper-visible conflicts, poetry continues to keep dimensions of violence that exceed visible spectacle. Whilst images file destruction straight away, poems incessantly evoke slower emotional textures: anticipation, silence, interrupted futures, grief, and emotional disorientation. As Jenny Edkins reminds us, trauma resists neat closure and linear narratives of time. Poetry can keep this rupture via retaining absence and loss emotionally provide inside collective reminiscence.
Iranian poetry has lengthy occupied this area between aesthetics and political testimony. From innovative poetry to exilic and diasporic writings, poems have many times engaged topics of censorship, mourning, displacement, and violence. On this sense, poetry continues to serve as as a type of witnessing able to rendering perceptible what stays emotionally or politically tricky to constitute at once.
The circulate of Parnia Abbasi’s poetry after her loss of life reminds us that struggle isn’t skilled best thru pictures of destruction. Poetry stays politically important as it preserves affective lines of violence that often get away visible illustration. Via metaphor, fragmentation, rhythm, and silence, poems can evoke concern, disappearance, mourning, and rupture in ways in which face up to the knocking down results of visible saturation. On this sense, poetry does now not compete with pictures or virtual media. It intervenes otherwise within the politics of witnessing. Even in nowadays’s hyper-visible wars, poetic imageries proceed to create areas the place struggling will also be imagined, felt, and remembered past the spectacle of violence itself.
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