'I am haunted by this history but I also haunt it back': two poetry collections

Abstract

This article explores what it's like to live through the unravelling of a political settlement, and reflects on its complicated relationship to resistance. To do so, it discusses two young people who live thousands of miles apart and looks at some of the threads which bind them together. Kamal lives in Cairo, and was an activist in the Egyptian revolution. He now lives with the despair of a crushed generation. Kyle, from Greater Manchester, has a suffered from a lack of social care support - directly related to austerity - that caused him to become homeless as a teenager. Each life has been irrevocably marked by the impossibility of sustaining the settlement that existed before the financial crisis. Each young man lives under a government that has no intention of addressing their needs. Each continues, despite everything, to believe in politics. The new landscape of political struggle contains both emancipatory and deeply revanchist possibilities. Understanding its contours will help us to find within it the people, communities and the stories that give cause for optimism.