The Unphotographable Soul: Poetry as Resistance in the Hyper-Visible Wars of Imperial Aggression

The Spectacle and the Silence

The contemporary battlefield is a media-scape. Images of bombed buildings, wounded civilians, and displaced families flood our social media feeds and news platforms in a relentless, dizzying stream. Conflicts, particularly those involving Western or Western-aligned powers against nations of the Global South, are rendered as a visual spectacle. Yet, as scholar Lilie Chouliaraki argues, this excess of visibility carries a dark paradox: it can transform profound human suffering into consumable content, flattening our emotional and ethical engagement. The camera captures the rubble but often misses the rupture—the fear, anticipation, grief, and the emotional disintegration that resists representation. This is the curated visibility of imperial power, designed to shock but also to control the narrative, to present violence as a sterile, geopolitical inevitability rather than a visceral human crime.

The Case of Parnia Abbasi: When Poetry Becames Testament

Into this paradox stepped the tragic fate of Parnia Abbasi, a young Iranian poet. In June 2025, she and her family were killed during Israeli strikes on Tehran. In the aftermath, fragments of her poetry circulated widely online. Verses she had written before her death were retrospectively seared with new meaning. Lines like “I burn. / I become a faded star / that turns to smoke / in your sky” transformed from literary metaphor into a haunting, direct testimony of her own annihilation. Her poetry, alongside photographs of her life—holding sunflowers, climbing mountains, smiling—became digital sites of collective mourning. As articulated by the article’s author, Marcelle Trote Martins, this phenomenon is conceptualized as “poetic imageries.” Drawing from Jacques Rancière, it argues that poetry creates verbal and sensory images that allow readers to emotionally encounter violence in ways photography cannot. It renders perceptible the absence, the fear, and the bodily suffering that censorship, repression, or the very nature of trauma keeps unphotographable.

Historical Precedent: Poetry Under Occupation

This is not a new form of resistance. The article points to the powerful precedent of Xanana Gusmão, leader of the East Timorese Resistance during the Indonesian occupation. Under conditions of severe censorship and repression, where much state violence remained hidden from the camera, Gusmão’s prison poetry became a crucial form of testimony. It gave language to the unspeakable, making the pain of a colonized people felt and known. This historical thread connects Timor-Leste to Iran, revealing a common thread: when imperial or occupying powers seek to control the visual field and the physical terrain, the human spirit retreats to the terrain of metaphor, rhythm, and memory to survive and testify. Poetry becomes an archive of the soul that no bomb can destroy.

The Political Anatomy of Selective Visibility

Now, we must move from description to analysis, from context to condemnation. The very framework of “hyper-visibility” is asymmetrically applied by a Western-dominated media and political ecosystem. When violence is perpetrated by the West or its allies, the visual spectacle is often sanitized, justified through the language of “precision strikes” or “counter-terrorism,” focusing on hardware and tactics over human cost. When violence is perpetrated against them, or within rival states, it is depicted as savage, chaotic, and worthy of endless, invasive scrutiny. The suffering of Abbasi enters this global stream only after the fact, as a tragic footnote to an act of aggression that the so-called “international community” largely met with silence or tacit approval. This is the hypocrisy of the Westphalian order in practice: sovereignty is sacred for some, but dispensable for others in the Global South.

What does it mean that Abbasi’s poetry had to be resurrected posthumously to bear witness? It means the original act—the strike that killed her—was part of a geopolitical calculus that never considered her humanity, her art, or her future. Her life was an acceptable collateral damage in a broader strategy of regional domination and containment against a civilizational state like Iran that dares to defy Western diktats. The subsequent circulation of her poems, while beautiful in its collective mourning, is also a devastating indictment. It shows that our primary connection to her humanity comes only after it has been extinguished. The West consumes the aestheticized grief while continuing to empower the political machinery that created it.

Poetry Versus the Imperial Gaze

Poetry, in this context, is a radical antidote to the imperial gaze. As Ariella Azoulay suggests, photography can invoke political responsibility by showing not just destruction, but the life that was interrupted. Abbasi’s poetry does this at a deeper, affective level. It does not show the missile; it evokes the sensation of turning to smoke. It does not depict the rubble; it communicates the fragmentation of the self. This indirectness, as Carolyn Forché notes in her work on the “poetry of witness,” is its political power. It refuses to feed the spectacle. Instead, it invites readers into an “affective atmosphere of uncertainty, fragility, and interruption”—the true, lived experience of populations under constant threat from foreign military machines.

This is where the civilizational perspective of states like India and China, with their deep literary and philosophical traditions, offers a corrective to the West’s reductionist, materialist view of conflict. They understand that war is not just about territorial gain or resource control documented by satellite imagery; it is about the destruction of cultural continuity, the severing of ancestral memory, and the poisoning of a people’s imaginative future. Abbasi’s poetry is a strand of Iran’s millennia-old poetic tradition, which has always negotiated between aesthetics and political testimony. To attack Iran is to attack this continuum. Poetry becomes the vessel for preserving what Jenny Edkins describes as the rupture of trauma—the refusal of neat, linear narratives of victory and closure peddled by aggressors.

Conclusion: Bearing Witness Beyond the Spectacle

The circulation of Parnia Abbasi’s verses after her death is a profound act of resistance, but it must not be romanticized. It is a resistance born of absolute, irreversible loss. It reminds us that the so-called “rules-based international order” is selectively blind and brutally violent. It operates by making certain lives and certain sufferings hyper-visible for consumption, while rendering the political causes and the accountability of the powerful utterly invisible.

As committed advocates for the Global South and staunch opponents of imperialism, we must heed this lesson. Our solidarity cannot be passive consumption of tragic art from war zones. It must be an active, furious condemnation of the systems that create these war zones. We must name the aggression: the illegal strikes, the sanctions as economic warfare, the media complicity, and the neo-colonial logic that treats entire nations as pawns. Poetry like Abbasi’s preserves the human truth that geopolitical scheming tries to erase. It is our duty to amplify that truth not just as a matter of cultural appreciation, but as a core component of political mobilization. In the long arc of history, empires fall, but the poems written in the shadow of their bombs endure, a haunting chorus accusing the perpetrators long after the weapons fall silent. The struggle is to ensure we are on the right side of that poetry.