International Journal of Servant-Leadership
Abstract
One day somebody "identified" me. Beside me, in the queue, there was a woman with blue lips. She had, of course, never heard of me; but she suddenly came out of that trance so common to us all and whispered in my ear (everybody spoke in whispers there): "Can you describe this?" And I said: "Yes, I can." And then something like the shadow of a smile crossed what had once been her face. -Akhmatova (1985, p. 87) Anna Akhmatova places her great elegiac poem, "Requiem," in the years of the Yezhov terror, during Stalin's purges, when she spent seventeen months in prison queues, trying to see her son, Lev. Out of great fear, which relegates people to suspicion of one another and a depraved anonymity, comes this face-to-face expression, the giving of oneself in relationship to another. The openness expressed here in speech is not yet a conceptual act based on the will, but an attitude in response to the other person. Akhmatova responds to the woman's turn to her with the word, spoken and poetic. In so doing, she takes responsibility for her own presence and acknowledges the other, as well as the vulnerability of the woman before her. She then moves to the knowing, moral act of using the word in a particular form. She leads through her poetic response, as a voice for human dignity in the midst of mass terror. As a poet, she fuses this need to speak out with the fullness of language.
Recommended Citation
Chapman, Nadine
(2006)
"A Poetics of Servant-Leadership,"
International Journal of Servant-Leadership: Vol. 2, Article 22.
DOI: 10.33972/ijsl.304
Available at:
https://repository.gonzaga.edu/ijsl/vol2/iss1/22
Copyright Information
Copyright © 2006 The Author(s). All rights reserved