A Perspective of War
Poetry, like art, often displays a perspective of war that most accurately reflects the human cost of war; the effects of war on the human condition. It is this very perspective that is ignored or hidden by those with hearts of war. An example of this occurred when Powell went to the UN on February 3rd to persuade them to accept our conditions of war against Iraq. Prior to his speech, Picasso's mural Guernica was shrouded. Guernica, stated author and art critic Russll Martin in an article by Common Dreams.org, stands for "the horrors that humans have visited on each other for millennia." Its famous features include a screaming horse which has fallen, pierced by a lance; a wailing woman holding a dead child in her arms; another woman, her clothes on fire, attempting to escape from a burning building; the severed head of a soldier, to name a few.
[Moreover,] Guernica has become for people around the world visceral, visual evidence of the true nature of war, a perspective very unlike the heroic and optimistic one so often presented by politicians who have never seen war close at hand.
Regarding the meaning behind this symbolic work, Laurie Brereton, a delegation member from Australia stated:
There is a profound symbolism in pulling a shroud over this great work of art. For throughout the debate on Iraq ... there has been a remarkable degree of obfuscation, evasion and denial, and never more so than when it comes to the grim realities of military action. We may well live in the age of the so-called `smart bomb,' but the horror on the ground will be just the same as that visited upon the villagers of Guernica .... Innocent Iraqis — men, women and children — will pay a terrible price. And it won't be possible to pull a curtain over that.
It is with this in mind that I introduce you to a poem I discovered while reading through a Google search for war poems. The Guardian published this poem to introduce the the publication of the anthology 101 Poems Against War, published by Faber and Faber on March 3. It is most fitting at this moment in time because it is written by an Iraqi and written to America.
from America, America
translated from the Arabic by Khaled Mattawa
I too love jeans and jazz and Treasure Island
and John Silver's parrot and the balconies of New Orleans.
I love Mark Twain and the Mississippi steamboats and Abraham Lincoln's dogs.
I love the fields of wheat and corn and the smell of Virginia tobacco.
But I am not American.
Is that enough for the Phantom pilot to turn me back to the stone age?
. . .
America:
let's exchange gifts. Take your smuggled cigarettes
and give us potatoes.
Take James Bond's golden pistol
and give us Marilyn Monroe's giggle.
Take the heroin syringe under the tree
and give us vaccines.
Take your blueprints for model penitentiaries
and give us village homes.
Take the books of your missionaries
and give us paper for poems to defame you.
Take what you do not have
and give us what we have.
Take the stripes of your flag
and give us the stars.
Take the Afghani Mujahideen beard
and give us Walt Whitman's beard filled with
butterflies.
Take Saddam Hussein
and give us Abraham Lincoln
or give us no one.
. . .
We are not hostages, America
and your soldiers are not God's soldiers ...
We are the poor ones, ours is the earth of the drowned gods,
the gods of bulls
the gods of fires
the gods of sorrows that intertwine clay and
blood in a song...
We are the poor, ours is the god of the poor
who emerges out of farmers' ribs
hungry
and bright,
and raises heads up high...
America, we are the dead.
Let your soldiers come.
Whoever kills a man, let him resurrect him.
We are the drowned ones, dear lady.
We are the drowned.
Let the water come.
Saadi Youssef
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