Poetry versus colonialism: holding onto pedagogies of love and justice, despite everything

In his essay that which is held (1992) emigré writer John Berger wrote that “in every form of love a past and a future are grasped as if present. The momentary “holding”, seized by the imagination through the energy of love, realises a whole, which is outside time”. As Berger reflected, “what is ahistorical is the need to hope. And the act of hoping is inseparable from the energy of love, from that which “holds,” from that which is art’s constant example.”
Defining, contextualising and applying the intersectional theoretical frameworks of Berger, Hannah Arendt, Freire and bell hooks’ “ethics of love,” across their shared focus on the arts, this chapter’s method is an arts-practice based, qualitative, conceptual analysis of an educational initiative called Poetry versus Colonialism that works with museum, gallery and educational settings to explore British colonial history through creating poetry.
Decolonising pedagogies are necessarily contentious and emotional, high in tensions and cultural cracks, requiring both Frieire’s dialogue-based encounter of love to overcome oppression through knowledge, self-knowledge and empowerment and Arendt’s notion of self as an endless becoming- through doing, rather than being. Critically analysing ‘doings’ of the pedagogic process and poetry (as creatively constructed data) produced within the project, the chapter will explore what Poetry versus Colonialism ‘holds’ under hooks conviction that there can be “no love without justice” in Bhanot’s decolonising context of “radical resistance, love, healing and the demand for justice” when “navigating the cracks between worlds is difficult and painful” (2021).