Slaughter-House Five

This is another reflection I wrote almost two years ago, for my Modern Novel class.

The book, Slaughterhouse-Five, is rather indescribable. It's part autobiography (based on Vonnegut's experiences in WWII, particularly during the Dresden firebombing), and part fantastical science fiction. The book's main character, Billy Pilgrim, is unstuck in time and abducted by aliens. Juxtaposed with these events, however, is the more intense absurdity of humans' actions against each other - death marches, death camps, and cities boiled in flame.
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Slaughterhouse-Five, or the Children’s Crusade: a Duty-Dance with Death, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., is less of a novel than a parable. A parable marked by its dreamlike attention to detail, and complete absence of any traditional plot. A parable that is not story, but interwoven bursts of history, nonsense, and character study. Bursts that are strung together into an overarching commentary on the presence, or absence, of meaning.

And that, it seems, is the book’s ultimate question, for itself and for the world — is there a point, or isn’t there? Is Slaughterhouse-Five a commentary on the deep significance of life, or the ultimate absurdity of it all? Is Vonnegut combining these fragments of truth and fantasy into a collage that celebrates meaning, even amidst the madness, or a shattered mural that undermines it? He tells us that the Trafalmadores believe that individual moments, seen all at one time, can “produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep” (84). Is this what Slaughterhouse-Five accomplishes (or attempts), or does Vonnegut intentionally fall short? Is the moral of the parable that meaning can be wrested from the ashes, or simply that it cannot? — and no amount of artful deception will ever turn the Dresden firebombing beautiful. This is a question for which there are no simple answers.

Slaughterhouse-Five is heavy with its recognition of humanity’s attempts to trivialize life and death. To minimize atrocity by building walls between “us” and “them". The good guys and the bad. Those who deserve to die, and those who don’t. But as Vonnegut writes in his preface, “the corpses could have been anybody, including me” (xii). His book cuts through the lines of separation, and presents humans as simply that, human. In all of their odd frailty. Creatures, who, if shown in the right light, make less sense than Billy Pilgrim’s aliens from Tralfamadore. Aliens who understand that death is irrelevant, not because people are irrelevant, but because time is. And in this way, the book is laced with irony. A calm, self-aware absurdity (in the form of flying saucers, time travel, and other fantastical non-events) that calls the reader’s attention to the more hysterical absurdity of actual reality. Firebombings. Girls boiled to death in water towers. Candles made from human fat. A man shot for stealing a teapot. British POWs performing Cinderella. Billy crying for a horse in pain, amidst the wreckage that once was Dresden. All so much more unbelievably ridiculous than time travel, and green Martians. Vonnegut writes (once again, in his preface) that Slaughterhouse-Five is meant to be a “nonjudgmental expression of astonishment” at what he experienced in Dresden (xii). And that it is. An astonishment that is mirrored through science fiction and the recounting of the fantastical.

But none of this really answers the question of meaning. Of hope. Billy recounts that the Tralfamadorians believe every moment to always exist — in the past, present, and future. And if every moment exists, always, then there is no potential for change. Billy sees his death, but never tries to stop it, just as the Tralfamadorians will never try to stop destroying the universe. It has already happened, always has happened, and always will happen. This fatalistic attitude is hardly heartwarming. Hardly conducive to transformation. So the question becomes, is Vonnegut’s work a tribute to that view (at least its power, if not its morality), or a violent mockery of it? Far from condoning this attitude of detached acceptance, Slaughterhouse-Five may be placing judgment on all who embrace it by viewing war as a necessary evil. Something that is hardly worth striving to abolish. Or Vonnegut may simply be recounting what he saw. What he experienced. And what, realistically, the world may always be — the absurd process of destruction. Us, against them. A truly “nonjudgmental” account (xii).

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

I wrote this reflection for my Modern Novel class in university. The book was highly engrossing, thought provoking, and — perhaps — profound.

The story is about Oskar, a precocious child who lost his father in the Twin Towers. The message, however, is about unity, healing, and the possibility of a wholeness that transcends hate.

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Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is a beautiful book. It is a book to be experienced, rather than just read. Blank space, color, photos, and small black words all combine to create a holistic picture that is greater than the sum of its parts. A metaphor for life. It is a book about pain, and loss, and the distance between people. But it is also a book about hope, and the journey back to wholeness. Back together.

By combining the story of 9-11 with Hiroshima and Dresden, Foer takes an American event and makes it universal. Rather than allowing his story to become a political or national commentary, he writes about the human experience. And by so doing, he demonstrates the power of art to bring healing. I would argue that Foer, by writing this book, allows us to see the events of September 11th with a new clarity. Perhaps not the clarity George Bush would have us posses. Not "us" versus "them". Not division. Not enmity. But unity. Pain and loss and death. The great levelers. The horrible monster under the bed that leaves us all equal. All human. All broken.

And in this way, I think that Foer’s book is truly profound. He has written about something horrible and real. A turning point in American history. A tragedy. A landmark. A rallying cry. But he has done so in a way that brings cosmos out of chaos (as Madeleine L’Engle might put it). A way that helps us be more human. Helps us feel more. Helps us see more. Replaces destruction with creativity. Focuses on love, rather than hate.

I love that Oskar’s journey passes through so many people’s lives. As he struggles to stay connected to his father, to feel and not feel, to make some sense out of anything at all, he touches and touches and touches. All the Blacks with all of their individual pains and joys. His grandmother. His grandfather. His doorman. The cab driver. The limo driver. His mother. The child, with all of his quirky habits, brilliance, and pain, is so very much alive. And without knowing he is doing it—without really trying to do it—he brings that life to others.

And this is why Foer’s narrator must be a child. For the overabundance of life. Of feeling. For the honesty of pain. Oskar’s “heavy boots.” Foer contrasts this perspective, and the new pain, with Oskar’s grandparents, and their old pain. Oskar believes the world can somehow be alright again if he can just find a lock that matches a key. Or dig up an empty grave. For his grandparents, life is more complex. They live in a world where nothing will every be alright again. Where words have run out. Or the space in which to write them. And without the words, how can gaps be bridged? And yet, they too journey with Oskar towards hope. Towards healing. Towards each other.

Interview with Naomi Shihab Nye

Melissa Tuckey | September 16, 2008

Naomi Shihab Nye was born on March 12, 1952, in St. Louis, Missouri, to a Palestinian father and an American mother. During her high school years, she lived in Ramallah in Jordan, the Old City in Jerusalem, and San Antonio, Texas. She is the author and/or editor of more than 20 volumes.

Her father, Aziz Shihab, passed away this year. His memoir Does the Land Remember Me? was published by Syracuse University Press in 2006. It traces his longing for home and his attachment to the place of his birth, through the family's forced removal from their Jerusalem home in 1948, to his immigration to the United States, and many returns home to Palestine.

At the Split This Rock Poetry Festival in Washington, DC in 2008, Naomi received a standing ovation for her poem "Wandering around an Albuquerque Terminal," a poem about a chance meeting in an airport that begins with airport security and ends with a picnic and the declaration that "not everything is lost." Among other things, her poems are resilient and full of hope.

Melissa Tuckey: Your father, like many Palestinians, was haunted by the loss of his family home in Jerusalem, which was taken by force during the Nakba of 1948. He explores this loss in his memoir Does the Land Remember Me? How did it affect you, growing up, fully American and with family in Palestine and aware of their struggles and their loss? How did this kind of "double consciousness" shape you as a person and as a writer?

Naomi Shihab Nye: One's mind was always "reaching out" to another place – with concern – and trying to figure out why the spin on that place, in the United States, didn't fit the true story. Always trying to put pieces together, figure things out. Wondering. A great thing about being the child of an immigrant is: one grows up with a very potent sense of the wider world. My father taught us to ask questions about the news. "Well, maybe," he'd often say, in response to a news story, "I'll bet there's another side to that story." Because of course, the story he was living did not fit the spin.

Melissa Tuckey: You've mentioned that writing for both you and your father was how you kept your worlds alive. Can you explain that further – both personally and politically? How does/has writing served you in this way?"

Naomi Shihab Nye: Writing requires paying attention, tipping the head for various perspectives, asking oneself continual questions about what one remembers or cares about – this is a rich and lively life of mindfulness – filtering through the muchness and finding some significant images or threads to hang on to. I honestly wonder, sometimes, how people live without this. I guess people do it in all sorts of different ways. My father often sat down to write when he was feeling frustrated by the unfair spin of news – always treating Palestinians as aggressors, the "bad guys" – he would heal himself by focusing on something precious he remembered, or something eccentric – particular stories and scenes. I've been reading Raja Shehadeh's amazing book Palestinian Walks recently and know how deeply these essays, about being out on the beloved land, would have meant to my dad. Everyone should read this book.

Melissa Tuckey: How important is poetry to Palestinian culture and more recently to Palestinian resistance, and in creating a new state?

Naomi Shihab Nye: With the shocking death of our beloved poet Mahmoud Darwish this past weekend (weirdly in my own current state of Texas), I think the answer is clear – a voice may also be a country of a kind. And the words of Darwish gave thousands, millions of people gravity and comfort and hope. I hope people read his poems together even twice as much as usual and find more ways life on the ground could live up to hopes in the poems. I think poetry is huge for all culture, even though sometimes it feels discreet, subtle, somewhat underground. Where are we without our voices?

Melissa Tuckey: I love this quote from you that "Darwish is the essential breath of the Palestinian people, the eloquent witness of exile and belonging." What happens to that breath now? Do you have a favorite line or stanza of his poetry or quote to share?

Naomi Shihab Nye: I hope the breath keeps billowing, like wind. I hope more people breathe it and speak it – the exchange we make with the atmosphere, as poets, as citizens concerned about the twists and turns of justice and injustice. My favorite Darwish quotes are, of course, many, but here's one from "State of Siege":

You there, by the threshold of our door
Come in and sip with us our Arabic coffee
(you may even feel that you are human, just as we are!)
you there, by the threshold of our door
take your rockets away from our mornings
we may then feel secure
(and almost human)

I loved his frequent attempts to "balance" in poetry, to call attention to what remains out-of-balance in our world...

Melissa Tuckey: Can you say something more about how it is that poetry gives balance to what's out of balance in the world?

Naomi Shihab Nye: Poetry reminds us what our hopes were, what our visions held, before clutter and complication and too much chatter distracted us. Poetry reconnects the broken pieces. Poetry refreshes the eye. And spirit.

Melissa Tuckey: Politically conscious poetry, poetry that fully engages human experience in the real world where we live, is full of challenges. What are the challenges you've faced in your own politically engaged poems?

Naomi Shihab Nye: Just to keep writing them. Never to feel they're "enough" but only the best little bit that I, as a writer, can do. How to keep listening, reading, absorbing, all the muchness there is to think about, and continue to find little handles to hold on to – images to contemplate – a way to enter the fray and think about it.

Melissa Tuckey: You wrote in an email that Barack Obama needs to evolve in his positions on Israel/Palestine. What course of action would you recommend for the future president (be he Obama or McCain)?

Naomi Shihab Nye: Balance. Respect for all human beings. All stories. All pain. Recognition of what the Palestinian people have been through in the last 60-plus years. Honest recognition that the violence has hardly been a one-way street.

Melissa Tuckey: Do you believe peace is possible? What are your hopes for Israel and for Palestine? Do you support one state in Israel/ Palestine or two?

Naomi Shihab Nye: Yes, I believe peace is possible. As my father kept saying toward the end of his life, people will have to become exhausted enough with fighting to embrace peace. From what I hear, many, on both "sides" have been exhausted enough to try something better for quite a long time. My hopes are for a one-state cooperative solution (because the territory is simply so small) in which Palestinian and Israeli citizens may share their strengths and resources in mutual respect. I don't see, at this point, how a two-state solution could work as well. The wall must go down. Don't bring it to Texas, either, we have enough problems with our own stupid wall!

Melissa Tuckey is a poet and activist involved in DC Poets Against the War. More of Melissa Tuckey poems can be found at Beltway Poetry Quarterly Wartime edition at http://washingtonart.com/beltway/tuckey.html.

Literature, Conflict, and Peace: Israeli and Palestinian Writing

Those who have known me long, since I first began to speak of Palestine, and my ache for the abandoned children of Lebanese refugee camps, are slightly baffled by my recent interest in graduate school, not in peace studies or development, but in literature.

Perhaps, if my passion was post-colonialism, rather than the obscure work of an amateur British theologian and novelist, it would be easier to justify my interest.

As it is, I find myself attempting to describe the strange, powerful, and ambiguous connection I feel, like a trembling thread, holding life and art together.

Of course, some writing is more easily identified as applicable. I found this article (by Heather McRobie, on guardian.co.uk) to be an excellent introduction of Palestinian and Israeli poets and novelists. It's a bit dated (from January of this year), but still relevant.

Amichai to Darwish: Palestinian and Israeli Writers on Conflict

(After an Israeli air strike in Rafah, southern Gaza)

"I learnt all the words and broke them up
To make a single word: Homeland"

I Come From There by Mahmoud Darwish

Our newspapers and televisions are filled with two different versions of the same story; two conflicting narratives of the current conflict in Gaza. In the first days of the offensive, like many others, I spent the evenings switching between Al Jazeera's and CNN's coverage; between unrelenting war footage with threadbare analysis, to the American networks, with little footage and a permanent drone of commentary and theorising noise. Between the two, there seemed to be no way to get to the core of the reality, with Gaza so hermetically sealed that even its current tragedy loses some of its power in transmission, if only because it feels so locked, untouchable, even from less than 100 miles away here in Amman. It was with this sense of failure already established that I began re-reading Israeli and Palestinian novelists and poets, hoping these writers could begin to give voices to the current statistics, particularly since access to one side of the conflict has been almost completely cut off.

As with all writing on the topic, it's hard to know where to start. There are so many caveats to place at the beginning of any discussion of Palestinian literature that it can become another eternal preface that prevents us ever reaching the heart of the matter, the core of the writing. In the 1960s Ghassan Khalifani coined the term "resistance poetry" in reference to the work of Palestinian writers such as himself and Tawfiq Ziad , but it is a term that Palestinian writers have at times resisted, or at least sought to rewrite on their own terms. The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti also spoke eloquently of the pitfalls of being reduced to a totem of a lost people, and refused to sacrifice "aesthetics for your readership", pointing out "we're not one-theme poets. A moment of joy or misery is juxtaposed by its opposite."

There's the danger that the concept of "resistance poetry" becomes another way that Palestinian culture is colonised, in placing Palestinians again in terms of their relationship to Israel. Conversely, attempts to make a post-resistance literature seem to ignore the reality of the situation, as though there could be an "after-occupation" literature while the political occupation remained present. Another layer of loss is losing the ability or right to trace the subtle stylistic dialogues between Israeli and Palestinian writers – as long as noting the influence of Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai on Mahmoud Darwish's work runs the risk of seeming to place Palestinian culture as subordinate to Israeli culture, some critics prefer to leave the line undrawn.

But still, at the core of it, after all the caveats, there is the writing. Most striking is the breadth of Darwish's humanity, intellect and voice: even amid his frequent allegorical references to the lost Edens and biblical exiles, the poetry remains at the same time personal and exploratory. In poems like Psalm 9 and Homing Pigeons, he uses the language of the Song Of Songs without losing the specificity of the very real figures involved. Just as startling are the novels and short stories of Sahar Khalifeh with their sudden bursts of defiant humour and Nabokovian skill for drawing out characters within the space of a few sentences.

Emile Habibi, an Arab-Israeli writer who died in 1996 and was commemorated on Israeli postage stamps in 2003, also mixed humour with pathos and fantasy, as if the reality had to be approached from many angles at once. But his famous novel The Secret Life Of Saeed: The Pessoptimist is not fractured by his approach, so much as it broadens itself to let in many voices and experiences simultaneously: the pessimism and optimism that sit together in the title. Contemporary Jordanian-Palestinian writer Ibrahim Nasrallah writes a different kind of "comedy": his reworking of Balzac's Comedie Humaine into his Palestinian Comedy novels reflects how the varied experiences of occupation and exile in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and the diaspora have made "Palestinian peoples, and not a single Palestinian people."

It goes without saying that Israel's premier contemporary writers such as David Grossman have also produced some of the greatest feats of sustaining the multiple narratives and voices of Israel and Palestine. As well as works such as Sleeping On A Wire, which focus on the Palestinian experience, Grossman's 1986 novel See Under: Love threads stories of both memory of the holocaust and 1950s Israel alongside the alienation that comes from a lack of memory, as one character dreams of finding an ever-elusive "White Room" in the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum that would lead to an entrance into understanding.

But it is the late Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai who still seems most able to stretch enough to encompass the suffering on both sides. As much as they dreamed of peace, both Darwish and Amichai rejected the sterile language of the peace treaty, playing with the paper-white terms of conventions and constitutions, converting them into something touchable and everyday. In Wildpeace, Amichai's vision of peace is not the technical "peace of a cease-fire", but a living thing:

"Let it come
like wildflowers
suddenly, because the field
must have it: wildpeace."

Elie Wiesel's Night

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.

Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my Faith forever.

Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.

-Elie Wiesel, Night, 32

[Wiesel] had seen his mother, a beloved little sister, and all his family except his father disappear into an oven fed with living creatures. As for his father, the child was forced to be a spectator day after day to his martyrdom, his agony, and his death.

It was then that I understood what had first drawn me to the young Jew: that look, as of a Lazarus risen from the dead, yet still a prisoner within the grim confines where he had strayed, stumbling among the shameful corpses. For him, Nietzsche's cry expressed an almost physical reality: God is dead, the God of love, of gentleness, of comfort, the God of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob, has vanished forevermore, beneath the gaze of this child, in the smoke of human holocaust. . . . On that day, horrible even among those days of horror, when the child watched the hanging of another child, who, he tells us, had the face of a sad angel, he heard someone behind him groan: " 'Where is God? Where is He? Where can He be now?' and a voice within me answered: 'Where? Here He is--He has been hanged here, on these gallows.' "

And I, who believe that God is love, what answer could I give my young questioner, whose dark eyes still held the reflection of that angelic sadness which had appeared one day upon the face of the hanged child? What did I say to him? Did I speak of that other Jew, his brother, who may have resembled him--the Crucified, whose Cross has conquered the world? Did I affirm that the stumbling block to his faith was the cornerstone of mine, and that the conformity between the Cross and the suffering of men was in my eyes the key to that impenetrable mystery whereon the faith of his childhood had perished? Zion, however, has risen up again from the crematories and the charnel houses. The Jewish nation has been resurrected from among its thousands of dead. . . . We do not know the worth of one single drop of blood, one single tear. All is grace. If the Eternal is the Eternal, the last word for each one of us belongs to Him. This is what I should have told this Jewish child. But I could only embrace him, weeping.

-Francois Mauriac, foreword to Night

I read Elie Wiesel's Night for the first time this past week. The autobiographical account of his survival (or destruction) in the Nazi death camps. Winner of the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize.

Once more, I am shaken and undone.

For the first time, in a long time, I begin to believe that maybe, maybe, the Holy Land is a gift. A miracle. Where else would we have had them go, the survivors, those turned to ash, yet still breathing? What else would we have had them do? I have always wished them peace, but maybe peace is more fervent than that. Do I wish them well-being? Life, and laughter, and happiness, in their own land? Away from fear and torment? Do I wish it as fervently as I wish it for the Palestinians? -- those who wear the star today, made of identification cards, ghettos, and violence ["'The yellow star? Oh well, what of it? You don't die of it. . . .' (Poor father! Of what then did you die?)" (Night 9)]. My heart can maybe feel two kinds of pain (the Holocaust has always torn my soul apart), but can it breathe two kinds of joy? The Arab earth of olive trees; the Jewish homeland. My foundations shift, crack, crumble. And I long for peace. An end to humanity's destruction of itself. An end to our continual murdering of God. The Eternal may not be held by any grave, but that does not make the death any less real. The death of God. On a tree, a cross, a gallows. In the ovens. How many times have we killed the Divine? How many times will we do it again? When will we stop?

Gandhi and the Dialectic Process of Nonviolence

"I am prepared to die, but there is no cause for which I am prepared to kill. I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent."
-Mohandas Gandhi

I was reading something recently that discussed different ways of knowing truth, or coming to an understanding/decision about what one will believe to be true. The article looked at several different "truth finding" techniques or mediums. One such technique was rhetoric—not the art of rhetoric, but the setting/environment. The idea being that when rhetoric clashes with different rhetoric (in a courtroom, for instance) the truth comes into focus (at least to a greater degree): "skilled adversaries trying to be persuasive will generate powerful light on the truth." This process is, of course, an example of dialectic discourse: a thesis opposed by an antithesis, merging into synthesis (which, hopefully, is closer to truth than either the thesis or antithesis on its own).

The reason I bring this up here (as random as it seems) is that the author used Gandhi as an example of this technique. He argued that Gandhi was a proponent of active nonviolence because he viewed reconciliation as a way to achieve synthesis between the two sides of a conflict. In other words, it was the most "truthful" way to resolve difference — a path that would actually lead humanity forward into greater reality: "Gandhi advocated nonviolence in large part to avoid succumbing to the temptation to destroy one's opponents and thus remove the creative tension so crucial to the dialectic process."

I find this interesting, for though I'm incredibly committed to nonviolent resistance for multiple ethical reasons (and believe that Gandhi was too), I like the idea that it's also the path for those of us seeking intellectual integrity. Those of us searching for the truth amidst the madness.

(The article, which was part of a larger work, was "Knowing the Truth: Rhetoric" by Ron Mock)

"The Novelist in Wartime"

Japanese author, Haruki Murakami, recently received the Jerusalem prize, Israel's highest literary prize for a foreign author.

In "The Novelist in Wartime," Murakami's reflection on the experience, the author wrestles with his decision to accept an award from a country so mired in controversial military tactics. He states that he does not support any war, and yet, he does not believe that disengaging from communication is the answer: "I chose to come here rather than stay away. I chose to see for myself rather than not to see. I chose to speak to you rather than to say nothing."

However, Murakami goes on to give a passionate plea for the downtrodden and oppressed. For the egg thrown against a wall:

Please do allow me to deliver one very personal message. It is something that I always keep in mind while I am writing fiction. I have never gone so far as to write it on a piece of paper and paste it to the wall: rather, it is carved into the wall of my mind, and it goes something like this:

"Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg."

Yes, no matter how right the wall may be and how wrong the egg, I will stand with the egg. Someone else will have to decide what is right and what is wrong; perhaps time or history will decide. If there were a novelist who, for whatever reason, wrote works standing with the wall, of what value would such works be?

What is the meaning of this metaphor? In some cases, it is all too simple and clear. Bombers and tanks and rockets and white phosphorus shells are that high, solid wall. The eggs are the unarmed civilians who are crushed and burned and shot by them.

This is not all, though. It carries a deeper meaning. Think of it this way. Each of us is, more or less, an egg. Each of us is a unique, irreplaceable soul enclosed in a fragile shell. This is true of me, and it is true of each of you. And each of us, to a greater or lesser degree, is confronting a high, solid wall. The wall has a name: it is "the System." The System is supposed to protect us, but sometimes it takes on a life of its own, and then it begins to kill us and cause us to kill others -- coldly, efficiently, systematically.

I have only one reason to write novels, and that is to bring the dignity of the individual soul to the surface and shine a light upon it. The purpose of a story is to sound an alarm, to keep a light trained on the System in order to prevent it from tangling our souls in its web and demeaning them. I fully believe it is the novelist's job to keep trying to clarify the uniqueness of each individual soul by writing stories -- stories of life and death, stories of love, stories that make people cry and quake with fear and shake with laughter. This is why we go on, day after day, concocting fictions with utter seriousness.

I have only one thing I hope to convey to you today. We are all human beings, individuals transcending nationality and race and religion, fragile eggs faced with a solid wall called the System. To all appearances, we have no hope of winning. The wall is too high, too strong -- and too cold. If we have any hope of victory at all, it will have to come from our believing in the utter uniqueness and irreplaceability of our own and others' souls and from the warmth we gain by joining souls together.

I find it hard to believe that the metaphor of a wall, in a country that has surrounded itself with concrete and barbed wire, is just coincidence.

Father Joe: a look at war and peace, love and hate

My older brother (giver of good books) recently entrusted me with a copy of Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul -- one of his favorite texts. The book recounts a powerful journey of faith, but most of all, it demonstrates the awesome, subtle, and transforming power of love.

About halfway through the book, Tony Hendra (the author) and Father Joe discuss militarism and the destructive power of hate. Hendra is a teenager at the time, and filled with a teenager's black-and-white conviction. I think I hear myself (a little too much) in his anger and his judgment:

"Father Joe, I believe that war is not just some neutral thing that happens, like the weather. War is sin committed by certain people. A certain kind of person will always try to find ways around the Fifth Commandment because of their terrible need to kill. These men are called 'soldiers.' They exist in any tribe, nation, empire, or superpower, and wherever they're found, they're the same murderous parasites. People whose lives can only be fulfilled by crushing the life out of another. They call themselves heroes but they're actually diabolical lunatics who arrogate to themselves the power that belongs to God alone -- the power to end life."

"You could be right, Tony dear, about military men and their motives. But you must remember: military men too are children of God, loved by God, candidates for salvation. Even mass murderers, if they want forgiveness and reach out for it, can be forgiven."

"They don't want forgiveness, Father Joe. They hate forgiveness. It prevents war. They're a brotherhood that cuts across all beliefs, all causes, all interests, all politics, all patriotisms. Their greatest enemy is not, as they argue, another nation's military, for it is another nation's miliary that gives them their raison d'etre. Their true enemy is us, people of peace, like this boy called Piggy in The Lord of the Flies who resists death and embraces life, who doesn't want to murder or to die. And whom the soldiers of the tribe therefore murder . . ."

"Tony, dear, you sound angry. Very angry. Like a military man speaking with hate of his enemy. War involves terrible sins, and it arises more often than not from hate. But you can't conquer one sin with another, hate with more hate. It only makes hate stronger. Love alone can conquer hate."

He took my hand between his. The usual warmth flowed into me, and as I relaxed I realized how pumped up I'd been, how cold and hard and alien I had made myself to get my point across. How in some way I could not discern, dishonest.

". . . Remember: God's grief at the unspeakable things we do to one another is beyond measuring, but so is his mercy. It might seem a terrible thing to say to people who've lost and suffered so much at the hands of hatred and violence. But true courage is not to hate our enemy, any more than to fight and kill him. To love him, to love in the teeth of his hate -- that is real bravery. That ought to earn people m-m-medals."

Both Sides Now: Introduction

Here is the introduction from Rev. Maria Shepherdson's From Both Sides Now: Poems for the Journey -- Auschwitz to Palestine:

The peoples of the Holy Land are held very close to my heart and in prayers before God. The situation they face is complex in the extreme and all peoples, Israeli, Palestinian, Arab, Jew, Christian, and Muslim, suffer.

The poems offered in this book are those written at two significant moments of discovery. The first at Auschwitz, tracing a Belgian family lost in the Holocaust, when I discovered the true meaning of God with His people and what it means to be part of God's family in Christ. I also understood more fully the 614th commandment and determination to survive that prevails amongst Jews in Israel: a determination strengthened by anti-Semitism through the ages and the Shoah in particular.

The second was during a visit to the Holy Land, teacher training in Gaza, where I witnessed the fear and pain of the Palestinian people, their suffering and their wish to survive and thrive. A wish that echoes that of their Israeli brothers and sisters.

Most of all I understood the deep hurt caused to Christian Palestinians, forbidden the right to travel and worship at the Holy Places of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

These poems reflect one person's journey of discovery. As you read them I ask you not to take sides but to hold all the pain of all peoples in the Holy Land up to God. Hold them before Christ who weeps over Jerusalem still and pray earnestly for peace.

Anthology of Middle Eastern Poems and Paintings

I am currently on spring break, visiting my beautiful older brother and his beautiful wife. Jordan has been my best friend for many many years, and we have had many discussions about pacifism and Israel and feminism and life. He has challenged me in ways that have been painful and powerful -- always needed and good.

Anyway. The point is that he just gave me a beautiful collection of poetry, selected (and sometimes translated) by Naomi Shihab Nye. The authors are all Middle Eastern (or North African) ranging from Turkey to Tunisia, and back again. It also includes some Israeli authors. There are beautiful illustrations accompanying the text, and information on all the poets in the back. The anthology is called The Space Between Our Footsteps: Poems and Paintings from the Middle East.

In her introduction, Nye writes that the Middle East is possibly the most negatively stereotyped place on earth. "I can't stop believing," she states, "that human beings everywhere hunger for deeper-than-headline news about one another. Poetry and art are some of the best ways this heartfelt 'news' may be exchanged." She goes on to recount her gradual exposure to the world of Arab poetry, and the vast heritage art and literature have in the Middle East. She concludes, "This is what I want a book of poems and paintings to be -- a surprising spring waking us from our daily sleep. A feast of little dishes. An unexpected walk along the rim of a majestic city. Ahlan Wa Sahlan -- You are all welcome!"

As she has mentioned elsewhere, if we read each other, we won't kill each other.

Refugees, Afghani and Otherwise

While I'm on the subject of children, and my experiences in the Bourj-el-Barajneh camp, I thought I might as well include this excerpt from a paper I wrote this February. The essay was for a class on the modern novel -- specifically, a response to Khaled Hossini's The Kite Runner (a book about Afghanistan that I would HIGHLY recommend). My paper's first several sections dealt with migraines and Tunisian friends, and were otherwise irrelevant to the present topic, so I've excluded them. The text in italics is from Hosseini's book.

Fragments of a Broken Life:
Intersections with Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner
The Talib, looking absurdly like a baseball pitcher on the mound, hurled the stone at the blindfolded man in the hole. It struck the side of his head. The woman screamed again. The crowd made a startled “OH!” sound. I closed my eyes and covered my face with my hands. The spectators’ “OH!” rhymed with each flinging of the stone, and that went on for a while. When they stopped, I asked Farid if it was over. He said no. I guessed the people’s throats had tired.

∞

I’d never seen the children so happy. So engaged. For days they had sat at tables. Moved little. Smiled less. Now they were dancing. Twirling tiny fingers to the sound of an Arab drum. The darbooka.

I sat watching. Stunned by what I had seen. The remnants of the puppet show still stood behind them. The background bloody with tanks and dying Palestinian martyrs. Small pieces of crushed paper littered the floor. I could hear the man cheering. “Throw the rock! Throw the rock!”

It wasn’t violence. Not really. Asking children to throw paper at cloth puppets. No one had died. And they deserved a game. Had enjoyed it.
Why, then, did I feel so sick?

∞

I felt a presence next to me and looked down. It was Sohrab. Hands dug deep in the pockets of his raincoat. He had followed me.

“Do you want to try?” I asked. He said nothing. But when I held the string out for him, his hand lifted from his pocket. Hesitated. Took the string. My heart quickened as I spun the spool to gather the loose string. We stood quietly side by side. Necks bent up.

∞

It was just a little boy and a glue stick. Hardly what I expected my life’s climax to entail. I was there to make a difference. To change the world. Instead, I watched a child refuse to touch me. Talk to me. Smile. Day after day.

I always hoped they’d place me in a different room. Somewhere where I wouldn’t see his eyes. Dead. Flat. Empty. The eyes no three-year-old should ever look through.

But every day, I’d go to the Bourj-el-Barajneh camp, in Beirut, Lebanon, and have him waiting for me.

No. Not waiting. Sitting.

By the end of two weeks, I didn’t care anymore. Not about Palestine. Not about Israel. And certainly not about the living-dead that inhabited that preschool. There was no hope there. Not for them. And not for me, as long as I stayed with them.

So I decided to leave. To go home. To do the sensible thing, and preserve my sanity. To scour my memories until I saw no child’s eyes. Watching. Accusing.

My feet were skipping that last day. Counting the seconds in my head. To oblivion. To freedom. We were helping the children make a craft of some sort. Gluing something to something else. The boy was looking down at the table, dazed as usual. I barely noticed. Offered him a glue stick. Because I was supposed to. Preparing to do his craft myself.

I wasn’t even looking. My hand held out to him. Prepared for nothing.

I felt fingertips. Brushing my palm. Moving the unwieldy yellow block. Attempting to lift it.

I went back the next day. And the next.

a last thought on perfection

And one last thought, before I call it quits for the evening. I went to see Penelope last night, with a few roommates. It was light and fun—a fairytale story about a daughter born cursed, and bearing a pig's snout. Her family (most notably her mother) spend their lives trying to protect her, and living for the day when the spell will be broken (supposedly on the event of her marriage to a "blue-blood"). Penelope, on the other hand, goes on a journey of self-discovery and acceptance. Acceptance of herself for who she is, nose and all (she is continually reminding her mother "but it is my nose").

The disturbing thing about all of this, is that even as the movie is attempting to spread the message that beauty is not about society's standards, it ultimately buys into the system and presents us with a perfect Penelope. Because perfect is the only way to be beautiful, no matter what we may want to believe.

Grrrr . . . .

I'm not sure how well I'm saying this, or how much sense I'm making.

In The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver (a book I'd definitely recommend for its fascinating look at/critique of culture, missions, gender, and Africa), Adah, a one-time cripple who's been healed by modern medicine, puts it this way:

"If you are whole, you will argue: Why wouldn't they rejoice? Don't the poor miserable buggers all want to be like me?

Not necessarily, no. The arrogance of the able-bodied is staggering. Yes, maybe we'd like to be able to get places quickly, and carry things in both hands, but only because we have to keep up with the rest of you, or [bear the consequences]. We would rather be just like us, and have that be all right.

How can I explain that my two unmatched halves used to add up to more than one whole? In Congo I was one-half benduka the crooked walker, and one-half benduka [two dots on the "e"], the sleek bird that dipped in and out of the banks with a crazy ungrace that took your breath. We both had our good points. Here there is no good name for my gift, so it died without a proper ceremony" (p. 493).

Does anyone understand what I'm driving at?

Reading List

Recommended Reading on the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict:

• Ateek, Naim. Justice and Only Justice: A Palestinian Theology of Liberation. Orbis Books, 1989. ISBN 088344545X
• Burge, Gary M. Whose Land? Whose Promise?: What Christians Are Not Being Told About Israel and the Palestinians. Pilgrim Press, 2003. ISBN 0829816607
• Carter, Jimmy. Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. Simon & Schuster, 2007. ISBN 0743285034
• Chacour, Elias. Blood Brothers. Chosen, 2003 (1984). ISBN 0800793218
• Chacour, Elias. We Belong to the Land: The Story of a Palestinian Israeli Who Lives for Peace and Reconciliation. University of Notre Dame Press, 2001 (1990). ISBN 0268019630
• Chapman, Colin. Whose Promised Land? Baker Books, 2002. ISBN 0801064414
• Harlan, Mark. “A Middle Way in the Middle East: A third theological path through the Israeli-Palestinian thicket.” Christianity Today, April 2003.
• Lutz, Charles P. and Robert O. Smith. Christians And a Land Called Holy: How We Can Foster Justice, Peace, And Hope. Fortress Press, 2006. ISBN 0800637844
• Maalouf, Tony. Arabs in the Shadow of Israel: The Unfolding of God's Prophetic Plan for Ishmael's Line. Kregel Academic & Professional, 2003. ISBN 0825431840
• Morris, Benny. Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001. Vintage, 2001. ISBN 0679744754
• Munayer, Salim J., ed. Seeking and Pursuing Peace: The Process, the Pain, and the Product. Musalaha, 1998. (http://www.musalaha.org/books.php)
• Sizer, Stephen R. Christian Zionism: Road-Map to Armageddon? InterVarsity Press, 2005. ISBN 0830853685
• Weber, Timothy P. “How Evangelicals Became Israel's Best Friend.” Christianity Today, October 5, 1998, pp. 39-48