War

I was the Sydney Convener of Poets Against the War.

How easy it is to make a ghost. (1)

Why poetry at a time of impending war?

[Speech at a reading benefit for Iraqi children, 16 February 2003]

There already is war in Iraq.

There are daily bombing raids in the no-fly zones and crippling effects from the sanctions. According to Unicef, 4,000 more children under five are dying each month in Iraq than would have before sanctions were imposed. As a result, 550,000 extra children under five are estimated to have died. Compare this with aproximately 55,000 north Americans who died at Gettysberg and the same number killed in Vietnam. If only we could ask them their opinion. Or the millions of dead Vietnamese, both civilians and combatants.

No, better still, compare these figures with the Iran-Iraq war. Though after the number ‘one’, how exactly does death’s arithmetic exactly work? A million people died, many more were wounded, and millions were made refugees. The resources wasted on the war exceeded what the entire Third World spent on public health in a decade. On September 22 1980, Iraqi troops invaded Iran. They were eventually pushed back by waves of soldiers, many of them kids, (it was slaughter much worse than the Somme). At which point, Iraq responded to Iranian victories on the ground by using chemical weapons and launched attacks on civilian targets.

That disgusting war lasted very nearly 8 years. Both regimes were to blame, particularly Iraq, the clear aggressor. Yet the US supported Saddam and later, with utter hypocrisy, supplied arms to Iran. But note that over sixty years earlier, following the Iraqi revolt of 1920 (against the British, (2) T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) wrote to the London Observer, ‘It is odd that we do not use poison gas on these occasions.' (3)

We must think now what our responsibilities are. But we think with our bodies, imagination and memories. Afterwards it is too late, poems don’t make up for the death of a unique human being who will never laugh, or sweat or play again. Not even the finest elegy and memorials certainly don’t. Todorov alerts us to the fact that in the Peace Park memorial, Hiroshima, there is a memorial for the 176,964 victims of the bomb but the 20,000 Koreans who were killed there go unmentioned. The memorial to these forced labourers is not on official land. He writes, ‘In fact, in the modern world, the cult of memory has rarely served good causes, and we should not be surprised at this.' (4)

It is easy to criticise without constructive alternatives. But what is clear is that there are alternatives to this bloodthirsty ambition of Bush which Howard and Blair are supporting to the hilt. So what to do? We are responsible for thinking about the issue of going to war as citizens of a nation state. We need to think not only in terms of foreign policy, aggression, oil, budgets and hi-tech weaponry, but of its effect on people. We must keep in mind the effects of a war on our communities and ourselves. Currently, democratic nations are failing to continue to work towards the original democratic ideals, which we tend to name - individuality, liberty, equality, and fraternity. These terms shift and atrophy meanings but basically reduce to ‘Participation’ in a ‘Community’.

Democracy is not voting with a pen by marking X once every four years. Democracy is not an institution. Democracy is a thirst for a way of living with other people and is an ongoing process. We have to be open and creative in our personal lives, for democracy, for peace and for an ecologically sustainable future.

We need to think carefully about going to war. We’ve no excuses. We all know how bestial war is, vicariously from the news, documentaries, movies, or for a few, through experience. Poetry energises words to alert our sleepwalking selves to what’s important, outrageous, beautiful or sad - just by using words, words that we use, carefully or carelessly, everyday. A line in a poem can hone in as accurately as a falcon on an image, emotion, or thought and a poem can help understand events in the world, their resonance and significance.

We use poetry in times of personal and public crisis, both as catharsis but also as a space for reflection and understanding. Poetry works with the inner, emotional, and subconscious mind which language usually lightly touches, being more concerned with gossip, chatter, sales and argument. Few poets become public intellectuals, few can articulate sensibly in sound bites. ‘Poetry makes nothing happen’ wrote W. H. Auden but, either way you read that line, that’s not what poetry does. We use poetry in times of crisis, reflection as well as wonder. But we listen to poets for a different reason - poets write poems so that we can listen to poetry.

So what can poets tell us? It is more a matter of what we can ask the poem.

The Nobel Prize winning poet Joseph Brodsky wrote, ‘The social function of a poet is writing, which he does not by society's appointment but by his own volition. His only duty is to his language, that is, to write well. By writing, especially by writing well, in the language of his society, a poet takes a large step toward it. It is society's job to meet him halfway, that is, to open his book and to read it.' (5)

[1] Keith Douglas, a poet who killed and was killed in 1944.

[2] If only people had listened to Captain Arnold Wilson, the British civil commissioner in newly captured Baghdad 1918. He believed that manufacturing a state out of the Sunni, Shia and Kurds communities when there were such deep differences between them was a recipe for disaster.

[3] Churchill also favoured using poisoned gas ‘against unvilised tribes.’

Patrick Cockburn ‘Britain's role in shaping Iraq’ BBC.com Monday, 3.2.2003

[4] Tsvetan Todorov ‘TheUses and Abusers of Memory’ in Howard Marchitello, Ed. What Happens to History: The renewal of Ethics in Contemporary Thought, Routledge 2001, p14, 17. Todorov also points out that Hiroshima was a military city but nothing commemorates the Nanking massacre of 1938 where 300,000 are estimated to have been killed by soldiers mostly from garrisons stationed in Hiroshima

[5] ‘An Immodest Proposal’ in On Grief and Reason; New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995