"Do Not Be Ashamed" by Wendell Berry - Why this?

  

 I chose this poem for this brief in part because I'd been revisiting an old project in which I created a video montage in Canva of Mary Oliver's poem "Wild Geese":

 Having spent a day with young people discussing bullying and its effects in a Social, Personal and Health Education class,  I was looking for something in a similar vein - something hinting at personal challenge, pointing to inner strength, perhaps offering a nod to the natural world. 

  "Do Not Be Ashamed" by Wendell Berry was published in June 1967 - one of a number of poems in Berry's collection Openings intended as a critique of American government. 

Scigaj (2014) suggests "the hard-hitting directness of these poems does not wear well outside its historical moment" (p. 149). For me, however, it shares some of the power of Oliver's poem in its "defiant and compassionate stance of self-assurance in the face of whatever force would want to shame a person into compliance" (The Dewdrop, March 2020). 

"Do Not Be Ashamed" stood out to me in my search as I felt it shared important aspects of tone and mood with "Wild Geese", while adding additional features which might prove useful to explore as part of this brief - striking images,  a hint of menace and a narrative core that can be interpreted literally and also more metaphorically.

For me personally, the poem brings to mind a time in life when I was really caught up in seeking approval and masking aspects of my own identity and history in order to belong to a group that only barely tolerated me - I am moved when I read it by the wisdom it contains relating to how such dynamics often play out for people, and how these might be best approached.

How many of us pursue people who will never accept us or "forgive" us for simply being who we are:  how rules for "being us" in the world or in relationships can be set that are undesirable or impossible to us to follow, often leading us to internalise the constraints of these unfulfilling connections in unhelpful and self-critical ways. "Why can’t I just be more...?", "Why do I always..?", "Why can't I just..?". "Why do I never..?" 

For some of us, these negative self-stories we tell of ourselves reflect experiences of being judged and told negative stories about ourselves by others. Beyond reflects our own assessment of our place in the world and what is and can be possible for us -  mediated by how much (or how little) contact we have with our inner core, our more spiritual sense of ourselves across space and time, as lived from behind our own eyes. 

I think when I read this poem of what it's like when the judgements of others take precedence over contact with this abiding sense of self - how it can be lived out through the acute sharpness of social anxiety, lf-consciousness in the midst of rejection or just feeling "not good enough" in some relationship or another. 

For me, the words "you will know they they have been there all along" evoke that sense of being "found out" (and judged to be somehow deficient): the haunting, sinking feeling that somehow it was always doomed to fail: "you are not a member, you lost your card or never had one".

More broadly, the poem's iteration of these experiences of judgement and alienation brings to mind intersectional themes of "being on the outside"- young people facing bullying, LGBTQIA individuals coming out of the closet, survivors of institutional and interpersonal violence reclaiming their time and those individuals adopting the posture of "fierce compassion" - honouring their inner "candour" and "light" in the face of intrusion and judgement.

When I approach this brief with respect to this poem, I want to capture some of the above and a sense of a shift from darkness to light - beginning somewhere deeply entrapped and oppressive, moving towards contact with a wiser self who is somehow aware of these internal constrants and yet as free as a bird, basking in a sure horizon of self-acceptance, disavowing shame.  

Scigaj, L. M. (2014). Sustainable poetry: four American ecopoets. University Press of Kentucky.

https://thedewdrop.org/2020/03/05/wendell-berry-do-not-be-ashamed/