Wars today are relentlessly visible. Images of bombed buildings, wounded civilians, destroyed homes, and displaced families circulate continuously across social media feeds, livestreams, and news platforms. Contemporary conflicts are increasingly encountered through visual spectacle. Yet this apparent excess of visibility can also obscure forms of suffering that resist photographic representation. Fear, anticipation, grief, displacement, and emotional rupture are not always fully captured by the camera. As Lilie Chouliaraki argues, repeated exposure to images of suffering can transform violence into consumable spectacle, flattening emotional engagement rather than deepening it. The recent death of the young Iranian poet Parnia Abbasi during Israeli strikes on Tehran illustrates this tension. After Abbasi and her family were killed in June 2025, fragments of her poetry circulated widely online, transforming her verses into collective sites of mourning and remembrance. In this context, poetry emerged not as an alternative to images of war, but as another mode of witnessing violence and loss.
In my recent article in Poetic Imageries: Remembering Through Poetry in Timor-Leste, I conceptualised this through the notion of “poetic imageries”. Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s work on aesthetics and spectatorship, I argue that poetry produces verbal, sensory, and symbolic images through metaphor, rhythm, repetition, and fragmentation. Poetry does not simply describe suffering. It creates affective scenes that allow readers to imagine and emotionally encounter violence differently.
The concept emerged from my analysis of the prison poetry of Xanana Gusmão, leader of the East Timorese Resistance, during the Indonesian occupation of Timor-Leste, where much violence remained unphotographable due to censorship and repression. In such contexts, poetry became a form of testimony capable of rendering absence, fear, bodily suffering, and rupture perceptible through language itself. Poetic imageries, therefore, intervene in the politics of visibility by enabling readers to “see” what cannot always be photographed or directly represented.
In one of the verses circulated after her death, Abbasi evokes burning, disappearance, and transformation into smoke, creating an imagery of fragility and dissolution that became especially haunting after the strike that killed her and her family: “I burn. / I become a faded star / that turns to smoke / in your sky” (Abbasi quoted in Torbati, 2025). Read after her death, these lines acquire a haunting emotional and political force. The poem does not explicitly mention war, military violence, or destruction. Yet its imagery of burning, disappearance, smoke, and fading presence evokes sensations of fragility, rupture, and loss that resonate profoundly within the context of contemporary conflict. The transformation of the self into “smoke” creates an imagery of dissolution and absence, where the body becomes fragmented and unstable.
What is particularly striking is how the poem acquired a radically different meaning after Abbasi’s death. A text likely written before the strikes was retrospectively transformed into a form of testimony of her own death. The lines “I burn” and “I become a faded star / that turns to smoke” guide us (the readers) into the scene. Like a movie director, these lines prompt us to imagine the moment of the attack, and it also became inseparable from the images and reports surrounding the destruction of her apartment building in Tehran. In this sense, the poem now exists simultaneously across multiple registers: as literature, as mourning, and as political memory.
This circulation also reveals how contemporary witnessing increasingly occurs through fragmented digital encounters. Online, Abbasi’s verses appeared alongside photographs of her daily life: holding sunflowers, travelling with friends, climbing Mount Damavand (Iran), smiling in ordinary moments suddenly interrupted by war. These images did not simply document death; they reconstructed a life. As Ariella Azoulay suggests in her discussion of photography and political responsibility, images of suffering are never only about destruction itself, but also about the relationships, histories, and forms of life that violence interrupts.
Poetry contributes to this process differently from visual documentation. While photographs often capture the immediate event of destruction, poems can evoke emotional and temporal dimensions of violence that remain difficult to visualize directly. Abbasi’s verses are filled not with explicit depictions of military conflict, but with disappearance, fading, exhaustion, and transformation. The imagery of smoke and dissolution gestures toward forms of absence that exceed the visible scene itself.
This is precisely where poetic imageries become politically important. They do not merely illustrate suffering; they invite readers to inhabit affective atmospheres of uncertainty, fragility, and interruption. As Jacques Rancière argues, spectators are never passive recipients of meaning. Readers actively compose emotional and imaginative associations from what they encounter. In this case, Abbasi’s poetry became entangled with collective grief, allowing readers to connect the abstraction of war to the vulnerability of an individual life.
What makes these verses politically significant is precisely their indirectness. Rather than reproducing graphic scenes of destruction, the poem approaches suffering through metaphor and emotional atmosphere. As Carolyn Forché (2011) argues in her discussion of the “poetry of witness”, poetry often registers violence not only through direct testimony but also through affective and sensory traces. Here, suffering emerges through fragmentation, fading, and disappearance.
The circulation of Abbasi’s poetry after her death also transformed the poem itself into a site of collective mourning. Shared repeatedly across social media platforms, the verses became intertwined with photographs of her life: images of sunflowers, mountains, friends, and ordinary moments suddenly interrupted by war. In this movement between poetry, memory, and digital circulation, the poem became more than a literary text. It became part of the affective landscape of war itself.
This dynamic reveal something important about contemporary visual politics. Even within hyper-visible conflicts, poetry continues to preserve dimensions of violence that exceed visual spectacle. While photographs document destruction immediately, poems often evoke slower emotional textures: anticipation, silence, interrupted futures, grief, and emotional disorientation. As Jenny Edkins reminds us, trauma resists neat closure and linear narratives of time. Poetry can preserve this rupture by keeping absence and loss emotionally present within collective memory.
Iranian poetry has long occupied this space between aesthetics and political testimony. From revolutionary poetry to exilic and diasporic writings, poems have repeatedly engaged themes of censorship, mourning, displacement, and violence. In this sense, poetry continues to function as a form of witnessing capable of rendering perceptible what remains emotionally or politically difficult to represent directly.
The circulation of Parnia Abbasi’s poetry after her death reminds us that war is not experienced only through images of destruction. Poetry remains politically significant because it preserves affective traces of violence that frequently escape visual representation. Through metaphor, fragmentation, rhythm, and silence, poems can evoke fear, disappearance, mourning, and rupture in ways that resist the flattening effects of visual saturation. In this sense, poetry does not compete with photography or digital media. It intervenes differently in the politics of witnessing. Even in today’s hyper-visible wars, poetic imageries continue to create spaces where suffering can be imagined, felt, and remembered beyond the spectacle of violence itself.
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