Poetic encounters with war’s ‘others’

Abstract

‘Home’ is a word soaked in feeling. It calls forth memories, emotions, attachment to a place that one belongs. For me, home feels warm; I am lucky. When a poem tells of home’s destruction, that poem stirs colder feelings. Sadness, but not tears – my home is still intact, and the loss is not personal enough. Anger at ‘you who’ve destroyed’, and at the drones and tanks that blast away the homes of others. A sense that longing for justice, or more darkly, revenge, might under such circumstances feel irrepressible or overpowering. War art, like poems spoken by Pashtun women in Afghanistan, can tell our emotions things we did not know about war. For some time, this piece was titled ‘The other side of Western war’. I’d wanted to express an attempt to move beyond soldier-centric understandings of the recent war in Afghanistan, to imagine how it might be lived by Afghans. Eventually, I changed the title, unsatisfied with my designation of the war as ‘Western’ and thus belonging to ‘us’. The question I wish to pose, clearer now than it was when I started, is this: can art, poetry, in this case, break down the binaries that cleave apart the humans of war into separable categories like ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘self’ and ‘other’, and ‘grievable’ and ‘un-grievable’ (Bulter 2010)? My posing this question follows eight years’ critical study of veterans’ stories. During this time I’ve interviewed dozens of British veterans and heard tales of trauma and injury. I’ve watched films and documentaries, and read memoirs by veterans narrating their wartime experiences. I’ve listened to podcasts, seen theatre productions, and heard veterans-as-researchers telling auto-ethnographic stories about war and its aftermath. Whatever understanding of war and its legacy I have cobbled together over the duration of this work has been grounded in the experiences and perspectives of military veterans. Despite my immersion in stories of war, in particular of the UK’s longest and most recent war in Afghanistan, I feel ignorant of how war has effected the people who are subjected to our military violence. Afghans do, of course, feature in British soldier narratives of the war, but rarely if ever do they appear as fully rounded characters with needs, desires, and stories of their own. Instead they are ‘flat’ characters in the Western war narrative,