Peace Quote of the Day

“To establish a more fundamental intercultural understanding, the foreign partner must acquire the host culture language.  Having to express oneself in another language means learning to adopt someone else’s reference frame.  It is doubtful whether one can be bicultural without also being bilingual... Without knowing the language one will miss a lot of the subtleties of a culture and be forced to remain a relative outsider.” (Hofstede)


I posted this on my "faith and culture" blog site.  I'm posting it here in response to a comment by AmelMag, "I think this is also a peace quote, in its way. Because, without learning to adopt each other's frames of reference (and languages) how can there be peace?"

The heresy of bumper stickers (or why Abd el-Kader is not like George Washington)

It's been a while.  And while there are many thoughts on peace and Otherness floating in my soul (thanks to the writings of Helene Cixous, Virginia Woolf, and so many other feminist writers), I am between lectures, so the thoughts will have to ruminate a while longer.

If you have a minute, however, here's a link to some food for thought: "No Christ.  No Peace.  Know Christ.  Know Peace?" a short reflection by Peace Catalyst International.  While I generally agree with the thoughts expressed, I have to say that my ambivalence with the original statement goes beyond that of the blog's writer.  It isn't that I disagree that Jesus is "God's Comprehensive Peace Plan," it's just that while the Church (or those who label themselves in the name of the Church) continue to be perpetrators of conflict and supporters of war -- some of the loudest voices in the battle to eradicate "Otherness" from our midsts -- toting such bumper stickers is not just reductionist, it's heretical.  And as someone who doesn't actually believe in heresy, let me define my usage as meaning a mis-representation of the call of God in our lives, and our witness to that call.  If we can't live the call to peace, writing it on our cars (while simultaneously positing a position that labels "us" as the only possessors of that peace) seems somewhat blasphemous.  If we believe that peace is sacred enough to have required the death of God to achieve, doesn't it deserve a bit more respect, as a concept, than being used as a tool for further dividing "us" from "them"?

And on a different note, why, pray tell, would a 19th century Algerian Muslim, responsible for saving thousands of Syrian Christians from massacre, be compared to George Washington?!  Who exactly did our first president prevent from being slaughtered?  Seems like an example of our overt privileging of Western stories, despite evidence that non-Western histories might supersede them . . . but who wants to admit that an Arab Muslim might have achieved more than one of our illustrious founding fathers?

"The Opposite of War isn't Peace, it's Creation": Computer Games and the Interactive Process

My brother is a game designer and critic who believes that computer games are the next great artistic frontier.

There are many reasons why this concept fascinates me. As someone who's interested in the power of creation as opposed to destruction, there is something deeply intriguing about a medium that is by default interactive, requiring both the maker and the player to engage in the creative process.

In literary criticism, we often discuss the idea of the reader as a co-creator with the author, for the reader's interpretation shapes the imaginative reality of a text, some would argue, as significantly as the author's words. Interactive art, however, takes this idea to the next level, creating a reality that is blatantly dependent on the involvement of both the designer and the player.

In some senses, there can be no passive game players. Such a paradox defies the rules of the game's own medium.

What is the point of all of this in the context of peacemaking? I'm still trying to figure that out.

But I think there are hints in Esquire's 2008 article on game designer Jason Rohrer, titled "The Video-Game Programmer Saving Our 21st-Century Souls," the subscript of which reads, "Jason Rohrer's solitary and stubborn quest for a future in which pixels and code and computers will make you cry and feel and love."

And there are hints in Adam Cadre's 1998 interactive fiction, Photopia.

And perhaps there are hints (though I'm sure he would deny it) in my brother's recently developed game about terrorist hunting. A game which ends with Noam Chomsky's words, "Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it."

Haikus for peace?

As strange as it may seem -- seeing as many, if not most, of these posts have something to do with poetry -- poetry has never really been my passion. It's not that I don't like it, per se, it's just that I tend to find more meaning, and more power, in novels, essays, and short stories. The exceptions to this are epic poems (which I love) and the work of my three favorite poets: Naomi Shihab Nye, Eavan Boland, and Kohleun Seo Adamson.

That said, I've been teaching poetry in my classes this week: Paradise Lost to my seniors, Sappho's work to my 9th graders, and haiku writing to my 7th graders. And I've been struck -- no, awed -- by the power of concrete images, line breaks, and 5-syllable lines. Sweet apples turning red, silver moons setting, ambiguous clouds threatening rain.

I'm not sure what relevance this has for peace writing exactly, other than renewed faith in the power of understatement, simplicity, and the God of small things.

So I thought I'd share some haikus with you. These are Gimble's, not mine.

White has many shades.
Shadow blue, sunlit gold, grey
of approaching storm.

I burn candles and
incense. Maintain silence. Find
myself in nothing.

Sleep gently takes you,
like the lethal injection
you cannot resist.

Her breath sounds like the
whistle of distant trains bound
for lands beyond dreams.

Days grow longer like
smiles that stretch wider as one
greets a long lost friend.

Hills like cut paper
black against tissue blue skies.
Through poked holes, stars shine.

She curls around the
baby like a spiral shell
protecting its snail.

TERRORIST: The Dehumanizing Power of a Word

Being a student of literature (and therefore language), I'm fascinated (and horrified) by the way that war/conflict is perpetrated and encapsulated in the way that we speak and write. In the way that we use words. Perhaps the most powerful contemporary example of this practice is our use of the term "terrorist." I've commented on this fact (or at least hinted at the idea) in a few of my different postings (Belfast Murals, Domestic Violence, Iraqi Deaths).

What's so deeply disturbing about the label "terrorist" is that it robs a human being of all legitimacy (whether of action, cause, or ideal). Sometimes this is done innocently enough (someone commits a "terrorist" act and is labeled accordingly), but I think it is always a harmful practice. After all, what truly separates a terrorist group from a militia? You may say, "killing innocent civilians," but that's rhetoric, not truth. In this war on Gaza, where one side was so clearly labeled a legitimate force, and the other was a "terrorist" army, it was the Israelis who killed hundreds of civilians. Likewise, when Israel attacks Lebanon (which it seems to do periodically), they are waging a legitimate war, sanctioned by our government, even though the casualties are civilians and the Lebanese government is not even involved. However, when Hezbollah attacks Israel, regardless of the status of the casualties (whether soldier or civilian), Hezbollah is not waging a war, but engaging in terrorist action.

Anyway, what sparked this rant was the Christianity Today article about Philip Rizk's detainment. In that article, Rizk mentions that he was accused of working for Hamas, and that another university activist, currently being held without trial, has similarly been labeled a terrorist. Because, obviously, if they're terrorists they have no rights, no need for a trial, and no legitimacy on the world stage (America has effectively proved that point). They have been silenced, irrevocably, by a label.

Belfast Murals

I just got back to Oxford (where I'm currently residing) after spending the weekend with a friend in Belfast. She's in Northern Ireland for the year, working with a local church toward reconciliation and community building. While it was wonderful to see her, and beautiful to see Ireland, I was a bit shocked by the overt support of paramilitary groups still evident in murals throughout the city (particularly on Shankill Road, where I spent over an hour -- just wandering). Though "the Troubles" may be simmering down, it was eerie to see so much hatred and one-sided remembrance of pain. And I had to wonder, how can peace and true healing occur when one side still remembers themselves as heroes, and labels their enemies terrorists?

"He will wipe every tear from their eyes. Revelation 21:4"

"IN THE NAME OF LOVE. 1 John 3:16-18, Eph. 5:1-2, Mark 12:30-31"

"hope. love. forgiveness."

The friend I was visiting has an interesting, and succinct, description of the Troubles on her blogsite.

The Words of Jenny Holzer: Visual Art and Exhortation to Scream

The following is by American artist Jenny Holzer, and is part of a display of alternating statements found in London's Tate Modern (which I recently had the pleasure of visiting). While I find her medium (that of words) a fascinating choice for a visual artist, I find the actual words just as interesting. Much of her work (in this particular display) focuses on power, violence, strength, weakness, freedom, and hatred, but it was this piece that I found the most gripping (though not, perhaps, the most jolting). I think it goes hand in hand with some interpretations of the Sermon on the Mount (found in Matthew 5-7) -- an exhortation to force tormentors to recognize the humanity of those they tread on, and the significance of their own actions.

SHRIEK WHEN THE PAIN HITS
DURING INTERROGATION. REACH
INTO THE DARK AGES TO FIND A
SOUND THAT IS LIQUID HORROR,
A SOUND OF THE BRINK WHERE
MAN STOPS AND THE BEAST
AND NAMELESS CRUEL FORCES
BEGIN. SCREAM WHEN YOUR
LIFE IS THREATENED. FORM A
NOISE SO TRUE THAT YOUR
TORMENTOR RECOGNIZES IT AS A
VOICE THAT LIVES IN HIS OWN
THROAT. THE TRUE SOUND TELLS
HIM THAT HE CUTS HIS FLESH
WHEN HE CUTS YOURS, THAT
HE CANNOT THRIVE AFTER HE
TORTURES YOU. SCREAM THAT HE
DESTROYS ALL KINDNESS IN YOU
AND BLACKENS EVERY VISION
YOU COULD HAVE SHOWN HIM.

-Jenny Holzer, "Inflammatory Language" (1979-82)

Death Bullets Kill

I am a pacifist. What my father might describe as an "aggressive" pacifist. I do not believe in using something as ugly, terrible, and destructive as war. Ever. Not even for the "greater good."

That kind of oxymoron, I think, is akin to blaspheme.

I believe there is always a better option. A more creative option. An option that may demand more of us -- may require sacrifice and humility and love -- but will ultimately create life, rather than death. And will therefore reflect the nature of God, and what it truly means to be human.

For Mohammed Zeid of Gaza, Age 15

There is no stray bullet, sirs.
No bullet like a worried cat
crouching under a bush,
no half-hairless puppy bullet
dodging midnight streets.
The bullet could not be a pecan
plunking the tin roof,
not hardly, no fluff of pollen
on October's breath,
no humble pebble at our feet.

So don't gentle it, please.

We live among stray thoughts,
tasks abandoned midstream.
Our fickle hearts are fat
with stray devotions, we feel at home
among bits and pieces,
all the wandering ways of words.

But this bullet had no innocence, did not
wish anyone well, you can't tell us otherwise
by naming it mildly, this bullet was never the friend
of life, should not be granted immunity
by soft saying -- friendly fire, straying death-eye,
why have we given the wrong weight to what we do?

Mohammed, Mohammed, deserves the truth.
This bullet had no secret happy hopes,
it was not singing to itself with eyes closed
under the bridge.

-Naomi Shihab Nye

Go here to hear the author read her own poem.

more on poetry, and the power of words

Here are some excerpts from a 2002 interview with Naomi Shihab Nye on PBS. She talks about the power of language, and the significance of life's small details -- those everyday activities and objects that remind us of our shared humanity.


BILL MOYERS: Eight years ago, recovering from heart surgery I found deep comfort in poetry, especially the poems of Naomi Shihab Nye. Her poems speak of ordinary things -- things we take for granted until it's almost too late. In her new book, 19 VARIETIES OF GAZELLE those are again her subject. Even when war, politics, and terrorism put them in jeopardy.
Naomi Shihab Nye, is an American, an Arab, a Poet, a parent, a woman of Texas, a woman of ideas. The daughter of a Palestinian father and an American mother, she's lived in old Jerusalem, in St. Louis, and now with her own family in San Antonio, Texas.
* * *

BILL MOYERS: Poetry is a form of conversation is it not?
NAOMI SHIHAB NYE: Absolutely: conversation with the world; conversation with those words on the page, allowing them to speak back to you; conversation with yourself.
I think for many of us, language [is the fuel that feeds us] in the sense that language can carry us to understanding, and connect us to things that matter in our lives. For those of us who trust poetry and the power of linkage that poetry gives us, it's a way of sitting quietly with words and letting them lead us somewhere.

A little girl said to me, last year, "Poetry has been eating all my problems." And I said, "What do you mean by that?" And she said, "It just makes me feel better when I read it, or when I write it." And I think that's been true for many people in this country.

* * *

NAOMI SHIHAB NYE: Well I had written so much about [my Palestinian grandmother], both in poems and in a novel called HABIBI that I thought to myself a couple of years ago, "I probably won't write about her anymore. I've said all there is to say." But after September 11th I felt her poking me again saying, "No there's more you need to say for the women who believe in peace, for the children who want to live together. For all of us who would never, never believe anything like that could be a good representation of our religion, or our culture."

One of her final lines she ever spoke to me was, "I never lost my peace inside." And I think through living very sensibly, calmly, close to home, paying attention to what was right around her, she was able to maintain an equilibrium. Although she had lost her home and everything she had. She still maintained a sense of humor too. And an interest in other people. She was fascinated by other people's stories.

* * *
BILL MOYERS: You write in here about what it means to be half and half, where love means you breathe in two countries. Help me to understand that.
NAOMI SHIHAB NYE: Well I think whenever you love something or somebody it means that you have to extend yourself, you have to grow -- get a little larger. You can't stay in your little comfortable spot. It's a risk, and whether it's loving another culture far away that suddenly has been represented by an act of violence, or whether it's loving another person -- and that always involves all kinds of growing -- we're challenged.
And so every time you care about something or somebody that relates to a different place in the world, then your empathy grows. And for example, for all Americans who have friends from Iraq, I'm sure they're thinking about it not only in political terms, but in human terms. You know, what will that mean for their friend's families, or what will that mean for all the children of Iraq?
You know during the Gulf War I remember two little third grade girls saying to me -- after I read them some poems by writers in Iraq -- "You know we never thought about there being children in Iraq before." And I thought, "Well those poems did their job, because now they'll think about everything a little bit differently." They'll feel closer to that place in a different way.

[After September 11th] life became more difficult in that way. And I think we all needed to work harder to maintain a feeling of openness to anyone we might identify as the "other." Now, that's what interests me. How can we keep bridging the gap that sets someone apart from us and finding a way to know them that will help us all.

* * *
BILL MOYERS: You write this one line in which you talk about "The men who have so much pain, there's no place to store it." Who are you writing about?
NAOMI SHIHAB NYE: I was thinking about Palestinian refugees, and the people of my Grandmother's village when I wrote that. And my father in his own life. And all the people of different countries in the world who have lost things that many other people can never understand.
You know those of us who leave our homes in the morning and expect to find them there when we go back -- it's hard for us to understand what the experience of a refugee might be like.
BILL MOYERS: But how do people deal with such immeasurable loss in their life?
NAOMI SHIHAB NYE: How do they maintain any shred of dignity and balance? You know those are the courageous people to me. All the simple people of the earth who don't lose their sanity in the face of constant disease in the world they live in. Who keep sending their children to school, who keep combing their children's hair. How do they do that?
BILL MOYERS: I assume [that's why] that so often in your poetry you are taking small and ordinary words -- words about ordinary things -- and holding them close.
NAOMI SHIHAB NYE: Because they have a weight that I recognize that helps me stay balanced. And I think other people too.
BILL MOYERS: Is that why you write about button-hooks and onions and all kinds of things like that?
NAOMI SHIHAB NYE: Those little things?
BILL MOYERS: The tea that your grandmother drinks?
NAOMI SHIHAB NYE: Yes. That's why. It keeps me focused on things close to us. The material world that gives us a sense of gravity. And that we'd all like to be free to enjoy in our world.

Arabic

Once I get going with Nye, it's hard to stop . . . :)
This is just a portion. Snippets from her poem called "Arabic."
If you've never spoken a second language, you may not understand. How the world changes with the words you use. How "Insha'allah," breathed with every sentence, ushers in a world where nothing but God is certain. "Salaam alaikum." In a region of conflict and war, praying peace upon your neighbor's life is more than a nicety. It is a necessity born out of urgency and need.

The man with laughing eyes stopped smiling
to say, "Until you speak Arabic,
you will not understand the pain."

"Once you know," he whispered . . .
"Music you heard from a distance,

the slapped drum of a stranger's wedding,
wells up inside your skin, inside rain, a thousand
pulsing tongues. You are changed."

I thought pain had no tongue. Or every tongue
at once, supreme translator, sieve. I admit my
shame. To live on the brink of Arabic, tugging

its rich threads without understanding
how to weave the rug . . . I have no gift.
The sound, but not the sense.

-Naomi Shihab Nye ("Arabic," 19 Varieties of Gazelle)

Iraqi Civilian Deaths

Along the lines of language, and the power of words on peace and war, here are just a few lines from one of Naomi Shihab Nye's poems:

But I cannot pretend
a scrap of investment in the language
that allows human beings to kill one another
systematically, abstractly, distantly.
The language wrapped around 37,000,
or whatever the number today,
dead and beautiful bodies thrown into holes
without any tiny, reasonable goodbye.
-Naomi Shihab Nye
("Why I Could Not Accept Your Invitation," You and Yours).

The actual body-count now, for documented Iraqi civilian deaths from violence, is between 82,249 and 89,760. As of 16 February 2008.

Language, the Weapon of War

Here's a link to one of Kohleun's poems, A History of Domestic Violence. Again, I think it says a lot about where conflict comes from -- what fuels it. And what needs to change if we're ever to get anywhere on this long road to peace. The way we talk and think. Only then will it matter how we act. Only then can anything change.
The poem uses explicit language (the reason I'm not posting it here), but then, as I once told Megan, real life has content. So just be warned.

the POWER of the written word

What is the point of writing in the midst of conflict? Why do I, who care about peace, bother with a degree in writing and literature? It's a question that rages with validity, and will take a lifetime to answer.
Naomi Shihab Nye, in an interview conducted by Robert Hirschfield ("Naomi Shihab Nye: Portrait of a Palestinian American Poet" for the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, August 2006), said this about the importance of what she, and other writers, do:

[Nye] writes about the Southwest, a lost parrot, an old love, Mother Teresa and other subjects, as well as about Palestine and the Palestinians. She sees her words as her contribution to Palestinian resistance.
“Many people would say that words do nothing,” she noted. “Others, like myself, believe that language, whether it be poetry, like [Mahmoud] Darwish’s poetry, or song, can fortify and rejuvenate the spirit.”
What poetry can do, Nye believes, is to transport people “across the gap,” beyond tribal borders. Israeli poets Yehuda Amichai and Dahlia Ravikovitch are long-time residents in her pantheon of poets who matter. “Presence and truth” were the checkpoints they had to pass through to get there.

The article continues:

In her open letter “To Any Would-Be Terrorists,” written after 9/11, Nye begins by saying how very much she hates using the word “terrorists.”
“Do you know how hard some of us have worked to get rid of that word, to deny its instant connection to the Middle East?” she writes. “And now look. Look what extra work we have. Not only did your colleagues kill thousands of innocent, international people in those buildings and scar their families forever, they wounded a huge community of people in the Middle East, in the United States and all over the world. If that’s what they wanted to do, please know their mission was a terrible success, and you can stop now.”
A scolding mother, she mentions her own American mother, who has worked so hard in her life to undo people’s poisonous stereotypes about Arabs.
In tones of an exhausted friend, Nye ends her letter by saying, “We will all die soon enough. Why not take the short time we have on this delicate planet and figure out some really interesting things we might do together? I promise you, God would be happier.”
She suggests they read Rumi, even American poetry, and quotes the Arab-American writer Dr. Salma Jayyusi: “If we read one another, we won’t kill one another.”
Nye detects an edge of rage in some of her own post-9/11 poetry. It doesn’t please her. She likens poetry to a lever that keeps trying to flip up a lid so one may discover what lies beneath it. Rage, she knows, kills wonder.

Rage kills wonder. May we, who aspire to art, always remember that.