The reading had originally been advertised as a celebration of International Women's Day, which is one of those holidays that capitalists do not recognize. Seriously, the first time I heard about it was in a class on Soviet history. I was interested in the reading mainly because of the idea of feminist or woman-centered poetics. It intrigues me: the poem from a female voice. I think of my own voice as gender-neutral; at least, when I write, I am not consciously doing so from a female perspective. Much more narrow than that. I am writing from the me perspective. Me is a holistic concept; it cannot, it shall not be divided into its parts: a female perspective, a white perspective, a middle class perspective, a college-educated perspective. I'm a bit self-absorbed that way. But I know other readers are consciously trying to bring an element, like femaleness, to the fore, which automatically forces them to define it. That interests me.
But somehow, the reading became a women on war reading. Women, apparently, have only one point of view on war. They think it is bad. This quickly became annoying, seeing as how the reading featured around 15 individual poets saying that war is bad. It is not that I think war is good; it is that "war is bad" just doesn't advance the conversation very far. Moreover, it's so one-sided as to seem disingenous, or self-indulgent. It raises far more questions than it answers. What if you think war is bad, but the other guy thinks its very good indeed? How do you feel about the failure to address root causes of war? Does the fact that a war could have been prevented relieve you of the obligation to fight it?
Partly my pique is because I come from a military family. Literature that relies for its heft on the supposed sinister machinations of generals whose aviator glasses, like Himmler's monocle in the caricature, reflect hangmen, simply doesn't convince me. Plus, I think, "e.e. cummings did this first, and far better." The two world wars resulted in a wealth of convincing, genuine, and alarming anti-war poetry that impresses me more than anything I heard at this reading.
Not that the reading was wholly bad. Individual readings were very good indeed. Many of the poets opted not to read their own work, but to read poems from an anthology called "Women on War." One of my favorites of these poems was one by Al-Hansa, a pre-Islamic Arabian poet, who complains to Death, saying, "you take the valiant ones, most deserving of life, and leave blunderers behind."
I'm still parsing my reasons for not being overjoyed by this reading. Coming from a military family, yes, the relative simplicity --wall-like and unnegotiated-- of the message, yes, and maybe, to some extent, this feeling of self-indulgence: let's all read about how war is bad, and none of us believe in it, and let's feel a manufactured solidarity with the experiences of others whose experiences we cannot hope to understand -- whether soldiers, victims, or both. Some of the poets indeed understood this gap, and understood the lack of legitimacy a well-bred western woman has in speaking of the pain of third-world wars, of decrying soldiers when the only soldiers they've known existed in newsreel footage. Alicia Ostriker read a poem that spoke to this, and some of the poets had actually lost husbands, brothers, etc due to war and so had a real and genuine connection.
It's not that I think you must experience something to write about it, far from it, but there has to be some greater attempt at understanding an experience, a historical artifact, as sordidly common as war. It cannot merely be turned away with a poem stating your distaste for weapons or for the men who wield them. There is an attitude, almost universal, that wars can be prevented. It is obvious, from looking around, that we are miserably bad at preventing them. So, sitting around in a dark coffee house giving one another approving nods as you take the mike, one by one, to say just how "awful" you think it all is seems rather horrible: insufficient to the task, if you've really set yourself up as a pacifist, and almost a mockery of the real questions that must be confronted, and of the real work there is to do.
I understand that many of these women were wholehearted "peace activists," as they called themselves. But I still found the reading left a bad taste in my mouth. But like I said, still parsing.
posted by Reen |link| 0 comments
