Awaiting Deluge of Artistic Refuse from Iraq Occupation
Gandalf Grey
By Pierre Tristam
Created Jan 30 2007 - 8:43am
Besides the dead, the maimed, the fractured and the fractures they inflict,
wars' other inevitable effluent is art. The comparison to waste is, I think,
appropriate despite the resulting work. That war art can sometimes be
sublime (Beethoven's Seventh, "All Quiet on the Western Front," the Vietnam
Veterans Memorial in Washington) can't diminish the fact that we'd have been
better off without any of it. We ought to be better off because of these
works' existence. We ought to know through them that war is ultimately
nothing more heroic or Homeric than murder-suicide on a massive scale. As
the English poet Edmund Blunden wrote of war, "I still regard murder as
murder no matter how boldly hidden up in steel helmets and rolls of honour."
But we don't know. Nor are we compelled to know, if we look at the other
mass of artistic production out of war, the glorifying kind. In the war
between those who think wars give us meaning and those who think wars just
give us hell on Earth, the best we can hope for is stalemate.
So wars and their art go on, although American art since the end of World
War II has been for all its peaks surprisingly less war-addled than you'd
expect from a country that hasn't managed to go more than a few years
without a war. Outsourcing wars to distant locations must have something to
do with it.
Perhaps Richard Hooker's "M*A*S*H" aside, the Korean War hasn't, to my
knowledge, produced an American novel more powerful than Ha Jin's "War
Trash," the 2004 fictional memoir of a Chinese prisoner of war held by
Americans. (Ha Jin is a Chinese-born American). Vietnam produced a few
literary gems, most of them nonfiction. The best out of Gulf War I so far is
Anthony Swofford's "Jarhead," a memoir that should have been warning enough
not to get enmeshed over there again: "If colonialism weren't out of style,"
Swofford wrote then, "I'm sure we'd take over the entire Middle East, not
only safeguard the oil reserves, but take the oil reserves: We are here to
announce that you no longer own your country, thank you for your
cooperation, more details will follow." The details have obviously followed.
It's a matter of time before the Iraq war produces a mild flood of books and
art. The war has lasted too long and victimized too many not to yield its
artistic refuse. But I venture to predict that, from American writers and
artists, the work's depth will be limited to the American experience, an
experience segregated by nature from the Arab experience it upended. That
wasn't true of World War I or II, at least in the European theaters, where
Americans' experiences weren't that foreign from the Europeans'. There was a
cultural understanding across trenches and front lines that transcended
enmity. The understanding enabled the quick mending of wounds and
reconfiguration of western Europe as a subsidiary of American power.
That understanding is non-existent in Iraq. So what artistic work will be
produced by veterans of Iraq cannot possibly be about Iraq and Iraqis except
in the Orientalist sense of Edward Said -- as a projection of what it ought
to be, rather than a reflection of what it really was. It'll be about a
version of an Iraq already distorted by the deception that got Americans
into Iraq in the first place, leaving the authentically Iraqi story of the
Iraqi experience under American occupation up to Iraqis to produce, should
they ever have that freedom. In that sense, the art and literature yet to
bleed out of Iraq can't be significantly different from the art that bled
out of Vietnam, a country that few Americans connected with from within,
beginning with its language. There, as in Iraq, alienation was the founding
chasm of the occupation. Self-reflection is not empathy, and without empathy
the kind of understanding that may prevent another war is non-existent.
Self-referential art is no substitute.
"Who can bear the weight of war?" Ha Jin writes in "War Trash." "To witness
is to make the truth known, but we must remember that most victims have no
voice of their own, and that in bearing witness to their stories we must not
appropriate them." When all is said and bombed in Iraq, it could well be
that we will have managed, as an occupation force, to witness nothing of the
victimization of Iraq except the reflection of our own limitations, that
Iraqis won't have the means or the conduits to bear witness to themselves,
let alone appropriate the stories they should. And isn't that how wars are
lost all over again, in a dimension less physically catastrophic but equally
so in human terms -- when even memory is denied, letting war's perpetrators
get away with their crime?
_______
About author Pierre Tristam is a Daytona Beach News-Journal editorial
writer. Reach him at ptri...@att.net [1] or through his personal Web site
at www.pierretristam.com [2] .
--
NOTICE: This post contains copyrighted material the use of which has not
always been authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material
available to advance understanding of
political, human rights, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. I
believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material as
provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright
Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107
"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson