From Love Poems to Revolutionary Words: A Writer’s Duty

How My Pen Learned to Fight: From Teenage Verse to Revolutionary Voice

"An artist's duty, as far as I'm concerned, is to reflect the times." — Nina Simone*

I didn’t start as a revolutionary. My earliest poems were scribbled in the margins of notebooks, trembling with the raw, unpolished ache of first love and heartbreak. They were safe. They were personal. They were mine.

But something shifted.

The world kept burning—police brutality, systemic racism, wars waged in silence, the erasure of histories, the suffocation of voices like mine. And I realized: writing that only soothes but does not challenge is a disservice.

James Baldwin once said, "I can’t accept Western values because they don’t accept me." That refusal—that defiance—became my compass. My words could no longer just be pretty. They had to disturb, to question, to demand.

The Evolution: From Personal to Political

1. Elementary Whispers – My first poems were about crushes and loneliness, the universal teenage currency. They were necessary—they taught me how to feel on paper.

2. Ancestral Awakening– Then came the voices of my lineage, the stories buried in my blood. The realization that my writing wasn’t just mine—it belonged to those who came before me, who fought, who resisted.

3. The Uncomfortable Truth– Now, I write to unsettle. To mirror the world’s fractures. Because, as Baldwin warned, "Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced."

Why I Can’t Stay Silent

Nina Simone didn’t just sing—she screamed in melody. "Mississippi Goddam" wasn’t a song; it was a Molotov cocktail of sound, hurled at complacency. That’s the power of art: it forces confrontation.

I refuse to be a writer who only decorates reality. If my words don’t make someone shift in their seat, if they don’t pry open a mind or crack a heart, then what’s the point?

The Fire Next Time

Baldwin wrote, "We know that the fruits of this system have been ignorance, despair, and death, and we know that the system is doomed because the world can no longer afford it."

Neither can I.

So I write—not just for myself, but for the silenced, for the furious, for the ones who still believe in a world that could be. Because writing is not just art. It’s survival. It’s rebellion.

And if that makes people uncomfortable? Good.

Let it burn.

What about you? How has your art evolved? When did you realize your voice was a weapon?

(Drop a comment—let’s talk revolution.)

Citations & Further Reading:

- James Baldwin on revolution, exile, and truth

- Nina Simone’s unapologetic rage in "Mississippi Goddam"

- The artist’s duty to reflect the times

(This post is part of my ongoing series, Writing as Resistance. Stay tuned for more.)