ADVERSOLOGY: witness notes
A Searing Poetic Manifesto Against Global Injustice
In a time when silence becomes complicity, "Adversology: witness notes" emerges as an unflinching chronicle of conscience under siege. Through visceral poetry, avalok transforms witnessing into revolutionary art.
From bulldozed homes to burned villages, from children in Gaza to poets in prison cells, from communal riots to institutional oppression, avalok bears witness to the systematic erosion of democratic ideals across the globe.
The Unconstitution
The collection opens with the "Unconstitution"-a mirror of democratic founding documents reflecting betrayals rather than promises. Where constitutions pledge justice, liberty, equality, and fraternity, the Unconstitution catalogs their opposites. This reversal sets the tone for documenting how constitutional promises have been abandoned.
INJUSTICE: The Weight of Broken Promises
Protesters jailed for holding placards demanding freedom for occupied territories. Children in Gaza-missiles destroying not just lives but the poems written about their suffering. Politicians who exploit the vulnerable through sexual violence while claiming to "serve the people," then win re-election. Families whose homes are bulldozed during riots, left only with papers proving ownership of vanished property.
Economic policies render savings worthless overnight. Religious minorities erase their identities to protect families-only to be identified by their bodies during violence and murdered anyway. Democratic rights become transactions. If votes weigh kilograms of ration, what is the weight of freedom?
Poets write from jail cells about freedom while imprisoned for exercising it. Lives reduce to rope lengths, stopped fans. Arranged marriages escalate through dowry demands to kitchen burnings. The rope that takes one life reused for another.
UNFRATERNITY: The Fracturing of Collective Conscience
The second section examines how communal hatred, caste divisions, and religious nationalism have shattered shared humanity. Educated professionals explain that riot deaths are statistically insignificant, offering ratio analyses of genocide. Identity politics weaponizes belonging, turning neighbors into enemies.
Yet avalok offers moral clarity, invoking figures who embodied truth and nonviolence-increasingly radical positions in authoritarian times.
Structure as Argument
By opening with the Unconstitution and closing with the actual Constitutional preamble, avalok creates a journey from betrayal to potential redemption. The two sections work in devastating tandem: injustice documents violations of human dignity; unfraternity reveals how these violations are enabled by the breakdown of solidarity.
The poems accumulate like evidence-witness testimony pointing toward a verdict about democracies under strain. The ideals haven't failed; they've been abandoned.
A Necessary Reckoning
"Adversology: witness notes" stands in the tradition of politically engaged poetry that refuses to separate aesthetics from ethics. The scope is global-from Gaza to bulldozed villages, from occupied territories to marginalized communities. Each poem grounds abstract concepts in lived human experience.
This is necessary reading-urgent, unflinching, and uncompromising. Avalok's witness testimony stands as evidence of what happens when constitutional promises collide with political realities, when the weight of injustice becomes too heavy to carry alone-and must be shared.
