Carl August Sandburg, the American (of the United States) poet, biographer, journalist and winner of three Pulitzer Prizes (two for his poetry and one for his biography of Abraham Lincoln) wrote a book-length poem celebrating resilience, wit and the democratic spirit of ordinary fellow-citizens during the Great Depression. The book, titled ‘The people, yes,’ has the following line: ‘suppose they gave a war and nobody came.’ It would become a famous anti-war slogan during the protests against one of the many wars that ought to have been called ‘American (of the United States) War’ or simply ‘US War’: on Vietnam.
Wars are seldom deserving of that interesting and disingenuous uttering of Lincoln in his much talked of Gettysburg Address, ‘of the people, by the people, for the people.’ Wars are of course fought ‘by people,’ but rarely out of conviction. They are not ‘for the people.' Wars are about profit. About land theft. Control or seizure of resources (like oil). Securing markets.
It would be lovely if war was declared but no one came. I can’t think of an example of that happening. People do, at times, abandon wars, but typically only when warmongering leaders (kings, tzars and presidents) lose their grip on power. Happened in Russia. Could happen in the USA.
We are not there yet. I am talking about the raging US-Israel War on Iran, which is simultaneously a war on civilisation, international law and humanity. There are many ways to cut that bloody cake, but let’s offer a nutshell: ‘Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, both deranged and both representing countries whose history is all about land-theft, enslavement, genocide and war-waging, attacked Iran to a) destroy nuclear capabilities that they (Trump and Netanyahu) claimed they had eliminated less than a year ago, b) prevent Iran from bombing Isreal when Israel bombs Iran (!), and c) engineer regime change.’
Well, we might add, ‘to bring democracy to Iran’ and ‘emancipate Iranian women.’ Now laugh.
Now let’s be sober. The two genocidal egomaniacs gave the entire world their middle fingers and brought us all to the edge of a precipice. A chasm. We can choose, here in Sri Lanka, to think ‘it’s all happening far away,’ except that we are not exactly an island in the global economic order. If that were not the case, we wouldn’t be worrying about oil reserves. There wouldn’t be rationing.
There is a chasm, whether we acknowledge it or not. And this is why I remembered Mahmoud Darwish’s poem, translated by Fady Joudah, from the volume, ‘The Butterfly’s Burden.’ It’s titled ‘I have a seat in an abandoned theatre.’ It’s structured as a conversation between two people in ‘an abandoned theatre in Beirut.’ Yes, Beirut. You can flip the metaphors any which way you like. And let's not forget that 'Beirut' is all over the Persian Gulf.
Darwish writes:
I have a seat in the abandoned theater
in Beirut. I might forget, and I might recall
the final act without longing ... not because of anything
other than that the play was not written
skillfully ...
The scripts played out in theatres of war are hardly ever written skillfully. In this instance, the script writers, Trump and Netanyahu, are incorrigible and illiterate. Well, they can read and write, so technically they are literate, but then again their grammar is awful and they simply cannot structure coherent sentences.
Anyway.
Darwish ends with the following exchange:
He says: No spectators at chasm’s door ... and no
one is neutral here. And you must choose
your part in the end
So I say: I’m missing the beginning, what’s the beginning?
The beginning is a library full of books on empires, empire building, enslavement, exploitation, slavery, profit, greed, deceit etc., etc. Worth a visit. But here, at the chasm, with two trigger-happy thugs with massive egos and unburdened of shame, there’s no place to hide, nowhere to run.
Darwish writes (in ‘The horse fell of the poem,’ again translated by Joudah):
There is no margin in modern language left
to celebrate what we love,
because all that will be ... was
Wait. Was? Perhaps. Then again, there are no laws against re-writing, in re-creating a language where love can be celebrated and where that which was made to be ‘was’ can be recreated. There are no spectators at 'chasm’s door.' At 'chasms’s door,' we stand. We are both player and spectator. We know the lines and don’t need a prompt. We are playwright and producer. We handle lights and props.
This is a genre of theatre where we can speak out of turn, deconstruct narratives and with wit and wisdom make more robust our hearts and resolve. We can choose to breathe or submit to enforced asphyxiation. We can be silent and count the dead until we walk into or are buried in rubble as a statistic.
The privilege of being a spectator at chasm’s door has been withdrawn. Simply put, it’s ours to make sure that the poem doesn’t fall off the horse.
Malinda Seneviratne is a freelance writer. malindadocs@gmail.com.
0 comments:
Post a Comment