I was fortunate to grow up in peacetime in America, a generation born of parents who had seen the Vietnam War and before that endured school drills instructing them how to hide under desks to brace for an atom bomb. I went to a high school with Model UN where we learned diplomacy is how you solved problems. We only read of the horrors of the trenches, lived through a Cold War with few concerns for our safety. We read The Song of Roland, Homer, Catch 22, Housman and Kipling and I think most of us believed the epic battles were over. We were “We Are The World.”
And then I wizened up. Rwanda, the Congo, Bosnia and Croatia, ongoing ethnic conflicts around the globe became the focus of the day and they became my passion in terms of how they were reported and being studied. In 2000 I found myself in Belfast studying all of this but also how art is impacted/made from war or conflict situations. And it saddened me to no end when two weeks into the US invasion of Iraq, massive looting and burning of museums and centuries old literature meant the destruction of many centuries of culture. A crisis of cultural identity, I fear, will only make things worse while groups claim ownership of the past.
And while all of my passion and education surrounding this topic has been useful and informs what I do for a living, I hadn’t thought about art and culture and war in a while, which is why I was truly moved to see someone actually write about this topic in my Sunday newspaper. Philip Kennicott’s commentary “War is Hell (On Art Too)” focuses on a new exhibition featuring contemporary Lebanese art shown at American University. The point of his well written article boils down to this: “Art doesn’t make sense of war. It’s the other way around.” In other words, if you’re an artist in (insert any war-torn conflict zone in its heightened state here) you either create art about the conflict or the way in which the conflict affects your society/people/country, or you’re irrelevant.
Think about Yeats. He was a poet who, after chronicling and eulogizing his society’s problems and martyrs started writing poems about twisting gyres and mysticism and got criticized for moving into a “crazy period.” I think he was sick and of writing about Ireland’s problems. He was a brilliant writer, he probably should have gone to Europe with James Joyce.
Would Salman Rushdie be famous or as well known today if he hadn’t written about the very minute at midnight when children like him (aka his country of India) was partitioned in 1947? Perhaps, but it’s doubtful that a novel about anything else would have caused the Supreme Leader of Islam to declare a fatwa against him.
Throughout history artists have chronicled events and perhaps influenced the way in which history is written and interpreted, which is why artists living in countries of war are deemed irrelevant if they don’t produce art reflecting that very conflict. The most touching and sad part of Kennicott’s critique of the Lebanese exhibit comes from an artist named Chaouki Chamoun who says “During the war, I stopped painting. I never wanted anyone to live off my pain.” In the end, his works turn out to be the least appealing, losing out to the edgier, more visually stunning works of his countrymen.
While art outlasts war, war overpowers the era in which art is created. Here are two poems that, while distinctly different in tone are viscerally and visually brilliant and could perhaps be applied to any war. I find them equally brilliant.
Redeployment
By Howard Nemerov
They say the war is over. But water still
Comes bloody from the taps, and my pet cat
In his disorder vomits worms which crawl
Swiftly away. Maybe they leave the house.
These worms are white and flecked with the cat’s blood.
The war may be over. I know a man
Who keeps a pleasant souvenir, he keeps
A soldier’s dead blue eyeballs that he found
Somewhere—hard as chalk, and blue as slate.
He clicks them in his pocket when he talks.
And now there are cockroaches in the house,
They get slightly drunk on DDT,
Are fast, hard, shifty—can be drowned but not
Without you hold them under quite some time.
People say the Mexican kind can fly.
The end of the war. I took it quietly
Enough. I tried to wash the dirt out of
My hair and from under my fingernails,
I dressed in clean white clothes and went to bed.
I heard the dust falling between the walls.
It is Dangerous to Read Newspapers
By Margaret Atwood
While I was building neat
castles in the sandbox,
the hasty pits were
filling with bulldozed corpses
and as I walked to the school
washed and combed, my feet
stepping on the cracks in the cement
detonated red bombs.
Now I am grownup
and literate, and I sit in my chair
as quietly as a fuse
and the jungles are flaming, the under-
brush is charged with soldiers,
the names on the difficult
maps go up in smoke.
I am the cause, I am a stockpile of chemical
toys, my body
is a deadly gadget,
I reach out in love, my hands are guns,
my good intentions are completely lethal.
Even my
passive eyes transmute
everything I look at to the pocked
black and white of a war photo,
how
can I stop myself.
It is dangerous to read newspapers.
Each time I hit a key
on my electric typewriter,
speaking of peaceful trees
another village explodes.
"War" by Ahmed Nussaif of Iraq, 2006.
(Part II of this post to come)
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