The Politics of radical love in Leonard Cohen's poetry

Dyab Abou Jahjah​

It is a bit odd to me that Leonard Cohen passed away few months ago without me writing about it. The man has composed a significant part of the soundtrack of my life. But above all, more than his music—at times overly harmonic to be truly enjoyable—it is Cohen the poet who interests me the most. Alongside Mahmoud Darwish and Nizar Qabbani, his poetry has shaped me both politically and spiritually.
Cohen was deeply political, and I am not referring to that brief moment in his life when he performed for Israeli troops during the 1973 war in Sinai. The Cohen who sought to rediscover his Jewish identity by posing for a picture with a mass murderer like Ariel Sharon was merely a fleeting phase in the life of a far more complex and profound soul.

I will gladly disregard that moment and focus on the fact that he himself distanced himself from any association with Zionism later in life. What remains significant is that one of the first political poetic texts to intrigue me as a boy was his song "First We Take Manhattan." As a young teenager, already deeply politicized, I was fascinated by its coded symbols and revolutionary undertones.
  The song opens with this epic line:

“They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
for trying to change the system from within
I'm coming now, I'm coming to reward them
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin”

For a 16-year-old teenager already reading Trotsky, Ismat Sayf al-Dawla, and Mao—mostly in the trenches of the Lebanese civil war, with death lurking around every corner—the debate on change was vital. I constantly asked myself: is change worth fighting for? And if so, how do we change the system? Should we infiltrate it, climb within its structures, and then transform it from within? Many who claim wisdom suggest that this is the way forward, yet I always had the sense that those who attempt this are more often changed by the system than capable of changing it.
Cohen seemed to agree with this view, articulating the failure and senselessness of long-range attempts to change the system from within, and instead embracing the necessity of striking back with a different strategy. At that time, as a young militant, that message resonated deeply with me. But what exactly is the system that Cohen wanted to change?

“I don't like your fashion business mister
and I don't like these drugs that keep you thin
I don't like what happened to my sister, first we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin”

To me, this poem uses the fashion industry as a metaphor for capitalism and the normative, assimilationist mechanisms of power. It is a protest against how the system exploits people, transforming them into production units that must conform to specific standards—both in form and in content. The system not only dictates our consumption and production patterns but also generates its own values and norms, imposing them upon us in ways that are both oppressive and destructive.
Under capitalism, the working man and woman, as well as the consumer, resemble both the fashion model and the fashion consumer—not just controlled and manipulated economically, but also shaped morphologically, psychologically, and physically.
The theme of a journey through struggle and revolution—starting in the United States and then moving to Europe—connects to another significant political poem by Cohen: Democracy. In that poem, he explicitly states that change must come from the United States.

“It's coming to America first
the cradle of the best and of the worst
it’s here they got the range
and the machinery for change”.

This is clearly a position based on the hypothesis that change must occur at the center of the system, not at its periphery. For the system to truly transform, its core must be altered—and that core is the United States. Whether this analysis was accurate at the time, and whether it still holds today, is debatable.
However, what I find more significant is Cohen’s bold assertion that Democracy has yet to arrive in the United States. It is something missing, something still unfulfilled. In this, he takes a radical stance—one that I believe is entirely correct.
The essence of the complete democracy that must be achieved is encoded in the following lines:

“It's coming from the sorrow in the street
The holy places where the races meet
From the homicidal bitchin'
That goes down in every kitchen
To determine who will serve and who will eat
From the wells of disappointment
Where the women kneel to pray
For the grace of God in the desert here
And the desert far away:
Democracy is coming to the USA”

Racial inequality, gender inequality, and social inequality are at the core of democracy’s absence. These three fronts of struggle form the foundation of any true democratic movement. There can be no liberation without an agenda that prioritizes racial equality, gender equality, and social equality—together, and at the same time.
However, Cohen’s optimism about a revolutionary democratic future seems to fade as he begins to fully grasp the nature of globalization. In his song The Future, he offers an extremely pessimistic—yet strikingly accurate—vision of what the global reality would become after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

 “..Things are going to slide, slide in all directions 
won’t be nothing 
nothing you can measure anymore 
the blizzard, the blizzard of the world 
has crossed the threshold 
and it has overturned 
the order of the soul”.

In this almost apocalyptic—yet remarkably accurate—account of the crisis that globalization would bring upon the dominant Western order, Cohen articulates a political sentiment as early as 1996 that would only fully materialize after 2008. It is the sense of decay—the unraveling of Western hegemony and the erosion of the old matrix of values and certainties from the pre-global era.
The world has crossed boundaries like a blizzard, driven by globalization, tearing through the foundations of Western dominance and shaking its very spiritual core.

“   There'll be the breaking of the ancient 
western code 
your private life will suddenly explode 
there’ll be phantoms 
there’ll be fires on the road 
and the white man dancing “.

“I have seen the future brother, it is murder” This is the alarming message of doom, and Cohen does not necessarily seek to address it by endorsing a counter-strategy. He is simply a prophetic poet, describing his vision. Yet, in the process, he seems to outline a clear reaction to the globalization blizzard and impending apocalypse:


“Give me back the Berlin wall 
Give me Stalin and St Paul 
Give me Christ 
or give me Hiroshima “

The answer appears to be a return to the ancien régime of pre-globalization, with all its hazards and problems—an acceptable price for stability, even if it means retreating behind walls of nationalism, identity, and social control. This, in essence, is the political foundation of the rise of populism in our time.
And yet, by presenting the past through the prism of its horrors, Cohen seems to suggest that the past was also marked by murder and injustice. Perhaps the blizzard—and the violence that accompanies it—is not just destruction, but a transition, a twilight that brings forth abominations yet holds the potential to lead to something better. The past, on the other hand, was static in its oppression and horror.
That is an interpretation I would gladly endorse.

As a final note, Cohen consistently makes it clear in every passage of his political poetry what the answer is. Even in The Future, his most pessimistic poem by far, he states:

“You don't know me from the wind 
you never will, you never did 
I'm the little jew 
who wrote the Bible 
I've seen the nations rise and fall 
I've heard their stories, heard them all 
but love's the only engine of survival “

That love—the engine of survival—is a complex concept in Cohen’s poetry. It carries a spiritual dimension, one that is almost religiously rooted, as evident in this passage. But it can also be a revolutionary love—the love of justice, of the struggle itself—one that is equally grounded in a deep sense of spirituality, as expressed in this passage from First We Take Manhattan:

I'm guided by a signal in the heavens
I'm guided by this birthmark on my skin
I'm guided by the beauty of our weapons
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin
I'd really like to live beside you, baby
I love your body and your spirit and your clothes
But you see that line there moving through the station?
I told you, I told you, told you, I was one of those
 
And it can be a fusion of romantic and hedonistic love—one that transcends reality, plunging into a mix of lyrical passion and debauchery, both elevating and toxic. Even such a love ultimately touches upon spirituality, as Cohen expresses in this passage from Democracy:

“It's coming from the women and the men
O baby, we'll be making love again
We'll be going down so deep
The river's going to weep,
And the mountain's going to shout Amen”

Love, in all its forms—whether romantic, hedonistic, or revolutionary—is always spiritual and religious to Cohen, intrinsically tied to a mystical sense of divinity. This kind of love, in all its dimensions, no matter how intoxicating or even toxic, is the only path to liberation. It may sound soft, but in reality, it is a profoundly radical approach—one that positions love as the spiritual force driving revolution.