Poetry as a site of history education and exploration: learning history from and with poetry

Poetry as a site of historical engagement and learning: inside and beyond disciplinary history

We examine two published poems with different overt or implicit links to historical events and people. We analyse the poems for the potential for historical learning that they offer. We ask what the students can gain from thinking with and around the poem. We do this through thematic analysis (Alhojailan and Ibrahim, 2012), including creating theme tables for the poems that show historical engagement and resonance with the everyday realities of students’ lives.

Poem One

		for Miriam Tlali
		11.11.33-24.02.17
		

		You are a song
		Singing in the deepest
		Voice of my people
		

		A lullaby cusping tears
		An Amandla song
		To every child of the storm
		

		Someone said that you
		Are the wind beneath
		The broken wing of my people
		

		Another one said
		That women like you
		Are the mending season of our aching
		

		Women like you give and give and give
		Their last breath to ignite fires called revolution
		Even when they force fed you the rules of silence
		

		You fought for your story to be told
		In the season of your voice and inside your body
		Reside the memories of your people
		

		You with an uncontainable wall
		That grew louder and larger
		Than the tight grip of oppression
		

		With words that force open
		The doors of a world that was never
		And will never be ready for our kind
		

		It’s time now for the moon to night you
		With your secret conversations
		And moments of endearment
		

		The same moon that will welcome you
		On an orbit of black magic
		Women wonderments
		

		You will let this world know
		That you loved her more
		Than she loved you
		

		How do I thank you for your pain?
		Your banned and jailed
		And unacknowledged dreams?
		

		Your dreams are gifts to my bag of memories
		Through which I will craft songs
		

		For tomorrow’s healing.
		
– Natalia Molebatsi, ‘a mending season’
		

Natalia Molebatsi is a Black South African queer pan-Africanist and feminist poet. She has published two collections, as well as anthologies. Her poetry explores themes of gender, race, intimacy, identity, joy and oppression. Her writing particularly engages Black African women, and historical erasure. This poem, published in New Daughters of Africa edited by Margaret Busby (2019), is an intimate communication from the poet to the departed writer. In it, Molebatsi Daymond (2013) traces ribbons of history towards a future, connecting her and Miriam Tlali (2004): a Black South African woman writing and publishing during apartheid (she also contributed to the preamble to the Freedom Charter, an essential document in South Africa’s struggle for freedom. Read more about her in South African History Online [2014]) and tying her and Tlali into the country’s past, its revolution and eventual healing. The communication is gentle and reverential: ‘It’s time now for the moon to night you’, an invocation for both peace and a place for Tlali in this history of resistance in South Africa. Readers are granted an insight into a deeply personal relationship and an insight into how layered history is, and how social categories that are built to box people in can also become conduits for them to see and support each other, even through time and space.

In terms of historical learning, the poem can be tapped into in several ways: the poem mentions a historical person, one who is almost erased from the current literary and historical landscape. In elevating Tlali, Molebatsi reminds us to remember her work and her life. Through this lens, her work is woven into South African history in very specific ways. Referring to Tlali as a ‘song’ in the ‘deepest voice of my people’ is at once tying the poet to the author and venerating the author in an art form outside her own – it is saying that Tlali has deep connections to a ‘people’ (here probably referring to Black people, Black South Africans more specifically), and that that extends beyond the medium in which Tlali expressed herself. In terms of history learning, this can express several important things, both in the past and the present. One of these is about relationality, suggesting that we are all connected to a people, although how that is defined can shift and the people can also be defined by the oppressions against them. Here, we can think about intersectionality and how we reveal different parts of our identity in response to different, sometimes intersecting, struggles. Molebatsi does this in her poem. She positions Tlali from the ‘deep voice of my people’ to being ‘on an orbit of black/ Women Wonderments’. Here she is acknowledging Tlali not only as a Black freedom fighter, but a Black woman freedom fighter (Boswell, 2016). In acknowledging this intersection, Molebatsi is tying Tlali more closely to herself: ‘Your dreams are gifts to my bag of memories’. In this way, Molebatsi draws a direct trajectory from the dreams (both those accomplished and those dashed) of Tlali, as a history, to Molebatsi’s dreams and achievements as a Black woman author, born in Tlali’s lifetime, living and writing after Tlali’s death. So, the poem offers historical learning not only about Miriam Tlali but also about the ways in which histories connect to futures through people. Importantly, in a way that only creative arts can achieve, the learning is abstract and emotional. There is an invitation to students to look up Tlali and her works, rather than offering them fact-filled information about her life and her work. We are given impressions about her resonance and impact, an emotional telling that students may be able to relate to. There is a lesson in finding the histories that speak to and carry you, as an individual and someone in a community, because these histories exist even if they are suppressed. This could awaken a historical awareness, even a historical consciousness (Seixas, 2006) about threads of histories as we weave futures and presents.

Historical thinking (although a contested concept [Cutrara, 2018; Thorp and Persson, 2020]) is visible in this poem, in both its historical significance and historical perspectives. The poem also engages the ethical dimension. Molebatsi acknowledges both the individual and the group aspects of who Tlali was, and what she gave, in the stanza: ‘Women like you give and give and give/ their last breath to ignite fires called revolution/ even when they force fed you the rules of silence.’ Here, Molebatsi connects Tlali to the revolutionary work she did in her writing, but also acknowledges both that she was part of a group of women who did this and that they did this despite being silenced in different ways. Tlali was silenced, for example, by being denied entry to Wits University to study and by the delays in publishing her work or the banning of her books in South Africa. This offers a particular historical perspective, as well as speaking to the previous point on intersectionality and relationality, and would hopefully broaden the potentially individualistic focus often taken by history curricula and textbooks, which tend to focus on ‘big men’ history (Wills, 2016). Even when women are mentioned, they are often exceptionalised and read out of their context. Tlali, in this poem, is made both exceptional and part of a cohort, a ‘women like you’ group. Her historical significance is at once recognised and excavated.

What is also acknowledged in the above stanza is that Tlali’s role in the revolutionary movement was her ‘last breath to ignite the fires called revolution’. This links both historical significance and ethical thinking, as well as historical narrative. The stanza describes the sacrifice and the groundwork that needs to be done for revolution to be possible. These historical realities, and how we understand them historically, are important lessons for students of history: that sacrifices occurred outside the bounds of going to war or imprisonment, and that sacrifice sometimes looked different to the people who stayed at home, especially for women. Furthermore, revolution does not (often) simply spring up. It takes years, decades of groundwork, education and organisation for movements to be able to implement plans of resistance.

The criteria in Table 1 about a poem being ‘compelling’ are, of course, subjective. However, we would argue that this poem is indeed compelling due to the delicacy and strength of the language used, the way it treats Tlali as powerful and deserving of recognition, and at the same time treats her with a gentleness that is almost reverential. ‘It is now time for the moon to night you’. The way in which themes are woven throughout the poem makes a case for historical complexity. There are moments of one theme emerging with strength to later be interwoven with another theme, with themes recurring for emphasis but also being explored individually. This interweaving points to the complexities of cause and consequence in history. The poem holds relevance for South African students because it engages with themes of struggle in, and the contemporary nature of, South Africa. The poem also explores themes of exclusion and marginalisation, as well as power, of (Black) women, which gives it international weight. In terms of writer positionality, the voices brought into the learning, both Molebatsi’s and Tlali’s, represent a demographic that often remains silenced, specifically when history adopts a Eurocentric lens; however, marginalisation can also occur when a revolutionary history is written in which (Black) women’s contribution is ignored.

We have analysed this poem in terms of the possibilities of historical learning. There are aspects of the poem we did not analyse here, choosing specific themes to unpack that relate to our article.

Poem Two

		I want to speak to my children,
		Those who have been forced out of their homes in the middle of the night
		And those who remain sleeping, warm, in comfortable beds
		Those who walk barefoot towards uncertain futures
		And those who have been swept under Exile’s carpet
		I want to speak to the youth of ‘76
		The children of Sierra Leone,
		The Lost Boys of Sudan
		I want to hold each one of them in my arms
		Whisper courage into their ears
		Tell them that they will spark revolutions
		Stand as a constant reminder of our need to repent
		I want to assure them that God has not grown tired of them
		That their homes, though broken, are not beyond repair
		

		Come to me my little ones,
		My beautiful ones, come to me
		Ours is the bond of mother and child
		Deeply rooted in the Cradle of Humankind
		You, little Anathi’s and Adewale’s
		Need to be told the Nubian truth
		Of how the Kush decorated our homes
		Filled them with art and knowledge and architecture
		And walls that were books
		You need to know that you come from a people who spoke with stars
		Long before they were sold astrology
		

		Bring me my children
		Let them come and sit at my feet. Ndiza kubabalisela iinstomi
		I want to tell them tales of magnificent battles where their fathers were heroes
		Paint them a portrait of Isandlwana
		Take them to El Obeid and Shekan
		I want to journey with them to the beautiful forgotten land of Adwa
		Where Menelik and Taitu won a colossal victory
		Against the dark forces of colonialism
		I need my children to know that we have our own epic stories
		That they are then lions’ historians
		Lions who have left many scars on the face of the audacious hunt
		

		And when my children sleep
		I want them to dream
		Dream of the courageous Yaa Asantewa
		The beautiful Queen Makeda
		Dream of Kemet and Songhai and Timbuktu
		Of Nkrumah and Nyerere and Garvey =
		Then I want them to awake!
		And to write!
		I want my children to write for Gaddafi and the South Sudan
		For Zimbabwe and the DRC
		For the Pan African Movement
		And the hypocrisies of the International Criminal Court
		Tell our tales through fresh discerning eyes
		Imagine us on our behalves.
		Tell us what is to be
		My young lion scribes!
		

		Call all my children to me
		Tell them to come home
		Tell them youth is purpose
		Tell them to learn and to remember
		That although history has already been told
		They are the authors of our tomorrow
		Rooted
		Triumphant
		Beautiful
		

		As we have always been.
		
– vangile gantsho ‘I want to speak to my children’
		

vangile gantsho is a South African Black queer feminist and pan-Africanist poet and healer. She has published two collections and is co-founder of the pan-Africanist feminist press impepho press. She writes about African history and present from a spirit-lens, from a Black-woman lens, and from a pan-Africanist lens. She attends to inter-generational harm from the perspective of both gender and race. This is a poem explicitly about history, historical narrative, the historical lens, historical erasure, and historical revival. In this poem, gantsho is explicitly calling on historical narratives to be unearthed, revisited and rewritten from a pan-Africanist perspective. In this way, the poem engages specifically with historical perspectives, suggesting that the histories of Africa that have been written show the continent and its peoples as victims, rather than as full humans possessing all the complexity, all the light and the dark, of other peoples.

gantsho uses the trope of describing herself as mother to all young Africans, stressing a pan-Africanist relationship between people throughout the continent. She specifically chooses children as children both have the capacity to learn and represent the future, the ‘authors of our tomorrow’ that she invokes. In this, students have the opportunity to learn from the historical events and people gantsho mentions, but also to see themselves as possible historians, and to become aware of the different historical and future worlds that are opening up by learning about different historical narratives. Again, this learning happens partly in the poem, and partly outside of it. We are invited to follow the poem to learn about the anti-colonial struggles fought by Yaa Asantewaa, for example, who led the Ashanti rebellion against the British (the colonial rulers of Ghana at that time) in 1900–1901, or the battle of Isandlwana where the amaZulu warriors defeated the British in South Africa in 1879. gantsho consciously evokes a history that pulls away from the ‘dark continent’ trope or the history that is exclusively about colonial powers defeating Indigenous peoples. This history exists, but it is not the history often cited in history classrooms or textbooks. gantsho wants African children to know that their histories are more glorious, powerful and provocative than the ones often told, and especially those often memorialised in the West, or even in South Africa, where the curriculum remains Eurocentric (Maluleka, 2021). The way that anti-colonial struggles are historicised in South Africa often minimises the resistance of Indigenous peoples. For example, the ‘Xhosa Frontier Wars’ are named as such, rather than as the ‘100 year war’, which gives a much greater scope to the strength and duration of the amaXhosa resistance (Gqola, 2015).

gantsho also speaks explicitly to the future, through directing the piece at African children: ‘Then I want them to awake!/ And to write!’ She is speaking directly to the power that history has over identity, belonging and self-esteem. In this, she is also speaking about historiography and ethical thinking around the histories that have been written, and how those portray Africans in a particular light. Even if the futures of the children are ‘uncertain’, gantsho wants to ensure that these African children know that their pasts are ‘triumphant’. And she wishes that for their future. She draws the link between the future and the past in the last section of the poem ‘They are the authors of tomorrow/ rooted/ beautiful/ triumphant/ as we have always been’. With these lines she affirms the presence of the positive histories she points towards throughout the poem (while not denying the existence of the negative histories) and ties all the children she is addressing in the poem into a pan-African community with the ‘we’ in the last line.

gantsho is writing to different communities of youth, drawing on a pan-African framing, to address a collective experience of youth in Africa, of hardship and heroism. Above all she is affirming the preciousness of the youth of Africa, up and down the continent. This writing is affirming a belonging denied by some Euro-Western historians (like Trevor Roper) who wrote that Africa had no history and did not belong to history. Thus, this claiming and inscribing of belonging is important. gantsho writes to ‘tell them!’ that their importance must be known to the children so they can embrace their belonging. In this, she is also telling each of the students who may be reading this poem to take and claim their own importance, in the present and in the history their present is making. This shows how poetry can be a site of learning about historical significance and historical perspectives, tying in with historical thinking (Seixas, 2017). Beyond this, it presents history as a way to understand the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion.

gantsho is also writing about a very broad span of history, ranging from Kush and Nubia (referring to Ancient Egyptian history and earlier) to relatively recent historical references to Nkrumah (the first prime minister and president of Ghana when it gained independence from Britain, and a famous pan-Africanist) and the International Criminal Court (which is sometimes critiqued for prosecuting African and not Western leaders). While there is not space here to unpack each of her historical references, she traverses both the continent and millennia to draw a map of historical Africa that challenges some current historical narratives. These mentions can inspire students who are interested to conduct further research and trace these historical narratives. Mostly, however, the poem is an offering to African children, a narrative that shows that they are so much more than they are aware of. It offers them this beautiful, proud history that they are part of, and seems to command them to know it, and live from it. This has the potential to make the poem very compelling to young African students or young Black students in other parts of the world. In this way, it connects with relevant themes of identity and belonging for the students.

The poem, importantly, should not be seen as rewriting history. All the histories gantsho references are historically documented, just often not included in mainstream histories of the region, or of the world. gantsho is also writing from a South African perspective, where there are deficiencies in South African engagement with histories from the rest of the African continent. So, while Yaa Asantewaa is well known in Ghana, her struggle is not well documented in South Africa. This also offers the historical nuance of engaging author positionality.

This poem is explicitly a site of historical learning, and more than that, it is an invitation for the students to write their own histories. This offer serves to draw students into the process of writing history. It teaches students not only about historical narratives but also about historical knowledge production. It shows students that knowledge also comes from them and as the poem alludes to African histories existing in oral format rather than written (Field, 2007), it urges them to take up their place as historians. This demonstrates the concept of history as unfolding and challenges existing or not-yet-existing histories of Africa.

Poems as a site of historical discovery

In this section, we analyse two poems written by students from university history courses as a response to an assessment prompt to understand poetry as a site of historical discovery. These poems came out of historical content courses (the first from a course titled ‘Columbus and the USA: Themes of Belonging’ and the second from a course on the Haitian and French Revolutions, working with themes of freedom). The students have requested to be named as the authors of the poems, and this is per the provisions in the ethical clearance for this research project. These poems will be analysed in terms of what they potentially display about historical connection, historical engagement and historical learning. It is important to note that these poems (like the poems above) show a particular historical perspective and historical argument, which can be contested, and may show positions considered problematic. The point of the poems and the analysis below is to assess historical engagement, not historical ‘correctness’. The poems are moments of historical connection and learning for the students which can be jumping off points for contesting historical argument and critical engagement.

Poem Three (from the course ‘Columbus and the USA: Themes of Belonging’)

		My fellow people ask
		Do I belong to those I gave sand to and they nourished it?
		Do I belong to those I gave land to and they made a home out of it?
		Do I belong to those that appreciated what my hand had to offer?
		

		My fellow colonizers,
		How could I belong to you when you took what my sand had to offer?
		When you destroyed the beautiful garden my land had turned into?
		When you grasped with every inch what my hand had offered?
		My fellow colonizers,
		How could I belong to you when you came into my home
		And dilapidated the walls of my people?
		How could I belong to you when you disintegrated the peace I had offered to my people?
		How could I belong to you when you sailed with boats and ships through the ocean,
		With your Columbus master and landed in the gates of my home,
		Then fooled my people into thinking you came bearing gifts?
		But all you bared was hearts made of stone,
		When all you bared was pain,
		Pain you intended on inflicting on my people
		How could I belong to you when you took the food out of my children’s mouth?
		When you shamed my people by enslaving them in their own home?
		How could I possibly belong to you when your master
		Commenced the colonisation of my land without ever setting foot in my land?
		When you disfigured me?
		How could I belong to you when you had packed a suitcase of diseases
		For the purpose of extincting my people?
		Finding laughter in making them watch as your burn their home into ashes.
		In your hands I bled almost to death.
		In your hands I was crushed.
		How could I belong to you when you never showed respect to my people?
		Calling them names “Red Indians”
		Instead of putting some respect on their indigenousness
		When you called my adopted children Negroes
		Instead of respecting their African-Americanisms.
		

		My fellow children
		My indigenous people
		How could I not belong to you when you were the first
		The first to always make sure my sand was watered everyday
		When you took good care of me
		And was never greedy about what I had to offer.
		When you celebrated me.
		When you fought for my independence when the colonizers tried taking me away.
		When you experienced a bloodbath of your brothers and sisters in your own home.
		But still remained resistant and unshaken
		How could I not belong to you?
		

		My fellow African Americans
		How could I not belong to you even when you were brought to me,
		Uninvited, Unannounced but also Unknowingly.
		When you landed in my sand scared and stranded,
		Taken away from your home with no compass to get back,
		Sold like things that do not matter and about to be made slaves
		But I became your home
		But I became your hope.
		How could I not belong to you when you wore the heart of bravery of a honey badger
		And also for my Independence,
		Even when I never gave birth to you?
		How could I not belong to you when you fought battle after battle?
		The battle of my Independence,
		A country you’re a stranger to.
		A battle of your Freedom within that Independent country.
		

		Well then my fellow people I believe it is wise for me not to ask
		Who do I belong to?
		But rather Who belongs to me?
		Well here’s my answer,
		

		Those that belong to the USA
		Are those that were fortunate to amble first in my world
		Are those that nourished the sand I gave them.
		Are those that made a home out of the land I gave them,
		Are those that appreciated what my hand offered,
		Those that landed in my home positively unaware,
		Those that cared for my heart
		And like an elephant were very much protective of my wealth
		Those that fought for me,
		Those that endeavor to be fair and true
		Those that don’t judge others according to their skin colour
		But understand our differences make us peculiar,
		Those that belong to Me
		And those that never gave up on me even when the going got hard,
		Are those that even after fighting tooth and nail for Me
		Still live in poverty in their own country holding on to the hope,
		And those that are my Indigenous People,
		And those that are my African-Americans.
		
– Ntokozo Gcwabaza, ‘Who do I belong to?’
		

Thematic analysis

Ntokozo Gcwabaza is Black South African woman, a history teacher at Highlands North Boys High School, and an alumna of Wits School of Education, where she completed her Bachelor of Education with distinction. She is the first born of three girls and embodies a deep sense of determination and leadership. She is an avid lover of poetry, finding solace in its creative expression. This poem looks overall at the theme of belonging. The poet is writing from the perspective of the country, the USA, that she has personified. She then goes through different major population groups in the USA to contend with the theme of ‘belonging’ for each of them. Rather than conducting an in-depth analysis of this poem, we will draw out some points to show this poem as a site of historical learning.

The student has engaged with the violence of colonisation, which will resonate with a South African student, but has also engaged with the nuances of different population groups on the question of belonging. She makes a controversial argument for the USA belonging to Indigenous people and African Americans, rather than colonisers. In this she is going against the mainstream US view of history, but she is also relating her course to her home context, where the question of belonging, and specifically land ownership, remains unresolved.

After having clearly denied colonisers’ belonging, she gives a historical context for this view. Citing violence, claims of ownership, and treachery that can be read into the history of the USA, she allows a broader belonging at the end of the poem. She qualifies this: ‘those that endeavor to be fair and true/ those that don’t judge others according to their skin colour/ but understand our differences make us peculiar’. She allows for a belonging qualified by behaviour and relationships, rather than historical claim. In this, she has used the poem to explore the concept of belonging and the histories she had explored in class from different perspectives. What we consider important is that the poem is historically grounded and presents a historical argument that is nuanced, however controversial.

We claim that this shows the poem as a site of historical discovery because the student was able to creatively embody the histories she had been exposed to and creatively respond to a question put to her. Rather than a historical essay, this poem shows a response that allows an emotive exploring to achieve a historical argument. This can then be taken as a point of provocation for further learning, probing the claims made in the poem and presenting different historical evidence to challenge different aspects of the poem.

We understand that this poem is controversial. There are elements open to historical engagement and challenge. We are not analysing this poem for its historical accuracy or what the historical argument suggests but rather looking at it from the perspective of analysing the historical connection and discovery that were evidenced in the poem. We also consider what historical relationships are explored in the poem. The student explores the relationships between different historical population groups and their historical (and current) relationship to the USA. This displays an engagement with history. The poem also shows a historical argument presented in a way that allows an emotive as well as historical engagement, and hints at how this student might relate the histories learnt to her own lived experience. To hone this, further guidance would be necessary, and this demonstrates poetry as a site of learning, like any other, that is in itself incomplete. It suggests that historical learning outside the classroom needs to be multiple and layered. We argue, however, that the perspective-taking of poetry writing necessitates a grounding in historical knowledge and thus facilitates historical learning. In addition to this, poetry makes space for personal viewpoints and emotive experiences.

Poem Four (from the course ‘Social Science I: Freedom in the French and Haitian Revolutions’)

		You
		You hid from all of us a scheme
		To give the French groom the wrong bride
		Oh Son of Breda, how did your great mind manifest such?
		A beautiful sly and freeing trick
		He had his mind set on another time
		

		Oh Son of Breda, how dare you be so free?
		How dare you be so unruly, so –
		Heavens above saw you bite the hand that flayed you
		Their unparched scarlet tongues wagged ‘Rights of Man’
		But only you heard that tighten the iron round our dry ankles
		Knit more years onto our toil
		Bury deep into their soil
		Ah wa right to expressions and access to the world as equal to the sons
		Of our Masters
		He had his mind set on another time
		

		Fi yuh nuh betray wi;
		

		Un,
		We cud neva forget di day it happen
		Those to whom our lives were owed galloped in,
		T’was the early hours of the morning when the dew hung fresh from the head of the shuga cane
		The memories of Breda did not make you flinch the master’s roar.
		Instead you rested calming in the memory of your hidden wife,
		You had that calm mien upon your face.
		Oh,
		But our knees buckled not only from the
		Guerilla training last night but from the anger and the fear we felt for the master;
		We were like a hungry lion waiting for the click to go in and attack
		For we could not be tamed any longer
		The cunning fox was now a weak pig
		The wind shook as the sun scorched as our ancestors frowned at the
		Faux-compromise
		Rocks for bread they say.
		For our liberty was nothing to them but a bitter tea.
		He had his mind set on anticrime and not unpaid overtime.
		

		Deux
		They had come to fight us not save us,
		‘Gainst the French you made us to come to blows
		T’was grotty and not up to snuff’ f’ya
		For we had seen you the night before,
		Haha forgive us for we looked through the window of confusion
		And mistrust of your divine and phrenic capability.
		You dined with the Spanish but you did not fill your belly,
		In lieu
		You filled your cheeks with irony,
		And like the true bearer of freedom you spat the truth into our mouths.
		And we locked horns with French
		And you had us pull in the direction of our manumission
		Alongside our Spanish imprisoners like brothers and friends
		And not like master and slave
		And we thwarted the
		Almighty and inconquerable mountain
		Of the French four thousand
		

		Trois
		Son of Breda,
		You never once took your eye off them.
		Les rats espagnole
		Covered in a jumbuck garment
		You were a black man in sheep’s clothing.
		You were a conquerer with the face of a black man
		A black Napoleon.
		Born a slave but nature gave you the soul of a free man,
		He had his mind set on another time,
		And Freedom called him first.
		May the words of the history books paint and sculpt you as the man who had his mind set on
		Another time.
		A man who had his one hand on freedom and the other one on
		The slasher
		You breathed collective freedom, you revolted for future freedom.
		You craved the day black slaves would walk side by side,
		Hand in hand
		With our backs straightened,
		Alongside our white brothers and sisters
		Your desires contradicted by your class,
		You didn’t dream in colour and chains
		You dreamt in freedom
		

		For you always had your mind set on another time,
		Patron Saint of the soil,
		Son of Breda
		Mother of our Freedom!
		Freedom has come, freedom we say,
		Freedom Freedom Freedom
		The black man finally gets to eat.
		
– Stephanie Mangapa, ‘You’
		

Stephanie Mangapa is a Black African woman, currently a fourth-year Bachelor of Education student at Wits University. She is from Zimbabwe, and her identity as Zimbabwean is important to her. She enjoys engaging with decoloniality. She felt passionate upon learning about Haitian revolution leader Toussaint Louverture and his life, and felt compelled to write this poem, which shows a deep historical understanding of a complex character. By writing the poem almost in the form of a praise poem (a form of oral poetry, and oral history, in South Africa), the poet is able to express her admiration of the historical character of Toussaint Louverture. This is important because it shows an aspect of historical discovery as she explores his life through the poem. She refers to him as ‘Son of Breda’ alluding to his time as a slave, and his employment at the Breda plantation from which he became involved in the Haitian revolution. She refers consistently to his heroism, and how he ‘had his mind set on another time’ – suggesting he was able to foresee a freedom that was far from given when he became involved in the Haitian revolution, a few months into it. She chooses to frame his choices around heroism and not engage in the complexities of his life: his love for France, the complexities of the constitution he legislated in Haiti, and the possibility that he owned slaves at one point. This is a historical decision, and again, one afforded by the form of poetry. She can explore to its fullness one aspect of Toussaint’s character, highlighting his commitment to freedom, and his skill as a strategist (how he was able to be victorious against three different colonial powers by playing them off against each other).

Her expression draws on different linguistic heritages, including Haitian creole to express a sense of authenticity, as the poem is from the perspective of Haitians who see Toussaint as the ‘mother of our freedom’. This sentence is in itself interesting, describing Toussaint as ‘mother’ rather than ‘father’, presumably referring to the fact that liberty is generally portrayed as a woman. It shows the numerous connections that students can explore historically and linguistically in the form of poetry, whereby links can be made across words, across thoughts, across temporalities and realities. In the poem these connections are expressed via allusion rather than a clear argument, although they do contribute to historical argument.

The author also locates this history temporally and in terms of argument with the last line of the poem ‘the Black man finally gets to eat’. This positions the Haitian revolution in the trajectory of Black liberation movements. Although chronologically it is prior to many histories that Mangapa would have been exposed to in her history curriculum in South Africa, she is alluding to ‘eating’ linked to Black liberation history more broadly, as well as the ‘eating’ that came with the relative freedom of Haiti. This again shows the flexibility of poetry to explore different temporalities together and in relation to each other.

This poem demonstrates poetry as a space for historical discovery, the collation of historical argument, and the creation of personal relationships with historical characters. The linguistic creative allowances foster an emotive exploration that is difficult to achieve in a standard history essay. For these reasons, we argue that these poems written by students show poetry as a site of history learning.

Poetry and disciplinary history education

Disciplinary history is an approach to history that focuses on teaching historical skills, or the skills used by historians (Seixas, 2017; Wineburg, 2001). This has been taken up among many Western countries over the past few decades as a much-needed move away from rote learning and memorisation. However, it has recently and increasingly been critiqued for its alignment with settler colonialism (Cutrara, 2018; Keynes, 2021; Thorp and Persson, 2020). We argue that poetry has a function both within and beyond this space.

To understand poetry as a site of history learning outside the classroom, we need to explore poetry as a site of learning for history as disciplinary education. We have alluded to this earlier: poetry is often used as a historical source, although this has not been thoroughly theorised. There is little literature on poetry in history education, but where it exists, it is mostly written around the topic of historical literacy and empathy. Poetry, as used as a historical source, is also touched upon (Lopez, 2014; Ribeiro, 2018). We note that this is useful, and the first two poems we have explored offer ways in which disciplinary history can be taught: they offer historical content and historical argument, and can be analysed as historical sources (with all the criticality brought to each source). Thus, poetry is an under-theorised element that can be used in the exploration of historical perspective, the use of evidence, and even ethical thinking. Poems can challenge established perspectives, or present provocative perspectives for engagement. The reception of this relies on the students’ own knowledge of historical fact and thus could be challenged as it requires a factual learning (teaching the ‘right’ facts) for it to be successful. However, this could be true of much of history education; its success requires contextual knowledge. Poetry, even in disciplinary history, offers a space for the engagement of perspective that can be used to both present and challenge various historical narratives. It also offers this with the potential of an emotive engagement that can move beyond disciplinary history, into a space where history lives in the present, and inside us. This emotive engagement needs to be carefully approached: criticality and contestation need to be held as an essential part of this engagement, and this must be rooted in historical knowledge. However, the emotive – often too big, or difficult, for the history classroom – is an aspect of our own relationship to, and engagement with, history.

Poetry is a potential tool, outside of formalised learning spaces, through which we can explore our connection to histories: both those close to us and those removed in time and space. The poems we analysed showed the connection of the poets with history: whether this was through a conversation between the author and a historical actor (poems one and four), a treatise on marginalised histories (poem two), or taking a historical perspective written in the first person (poem three). The poems examined expressed historical arguments with a personal and emotive element.

Somers (1999) points out that well-selected poetry can allow discussions, seek out pupils’ views, and listen to their interpretations. This is done through engaging with the nuanced language and symbolism in poetry. Students are encouraged to share their perspectives, articulate their understanding, and listen to the diverse interpretations of their peers. This process not only helps to explore different viewpoints but also deepens critical thinking and analytical skills. We argue that beyond this, and beyond the history classroom, poetry has a deep connection to human engagement with the world and with others (Creely, 2019).

The poems above show historical connection, themes of belonging and marginalised histories, and historical knowledge production. They also show historical thinking (in a broader sense than the disciplinary). Each of these poets, both students and published poets, would, if asked, be able to find historical sources to back up the historical arguments made in the poems. Historical engagement, historical connection, and historical thinking happen in the writing.

Through engaging with carefully selected written poetry and engaging in writing historical poetry students can engage with history outside a formalised education space. In this way the learning is not narrowed by curriculum or assessment procedures that govern school learning. By integrating carefully selected poetry into history education, history teachers can create a transformative learning environment where the pain and trauma of the past are not only discussed but also felt and expressed on an emotive, personal and nuanced level. Poetry allows history to live and be explored outside of the history classroom. While it can be a useful source in the history classroom, poetry is bigger than this and can be a site of learning in and of itself, in terms of both reading and writing.