Imagining Iraq: Literature in English and the Iraq Invasion

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Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08

Imagining Iraq

10.1057/9780230298118 - Imagining Iraq, Suman Gupta

Also by Suman Gupta:

CORPORATE CAPITALISM AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY THE CULTURES OF ECONOMIC MIGRATION: International Perspectives (Edited with T. Omoniyi) ENGLISH STUDIES ON THIS SIDE: Post-2007 Reckonings (Edited with M. Katsarska) GLOBALIZATION IN INDIA: Contents and Discontents (Edited with T. Basu and S. Chattarji) INDIA IN THE AGE OF GLOBALIZATION: Contemporary Discourses and Texts (Edited with Tapan Basu and Subarno Chattarji) GLOBALIZATION AND LITERATURE MARXISM, HISTORY AND INTELLECTUALS: Toward a Reconceptualized Transformative Socialism V. S. NAIPAUL (Writers and their Work) NIGERIA AND GLOBALIZATION: Discourses of Identity and Social Conflict (Edited with Tope Omoniyi, Duro Oni, Segun Awonusi and Efurosibina Adegbija) THE REPLICATION OF VIOLENCE: Thoughts on International Terrorism After 11 September RE-READING HARRY POTTER SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONIST IDENTITY POLITICS AND LITERARY STUDIES THE THEORY AND REALITY OF DEMOCRACY: A Case Study in Iraq A TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE READER: Texts and Debates (Edited with David Johnson) TWO TEXTS AND I: Disciplines of Knowledge and the Literary Subject



AESTHETICISM AND MODERNISM: Debating Twentieth Century Literature (Edited with Richard Brown)

Literature in English and the Iraq Invasion Suman Gupta Professor of Literature and Cultural History, The Open University



Imagining Iraq

© Suman Gupta 2011

No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–0–230–27875–2 hardback ISBN 978–0–230–27877–6 paperback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne



All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.


To the memory of LALITA SUBBU




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Acknowledgements 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

viii

Making War: Introduction

1

Setting the tone Theme, text, reality

1 13

‘Laws’ for Poets: Poetry Anthologies

32

A special relationship Three anthologies

32 34

Exacting World: Individual Poetry Collections

66

Anger and poetry Side by side My readings

66 81 95

To Smash the Mirror: Theatre

96

Frontline drama Record of reality Domestic and national Classics Performance and statement

96 105 120 125 138

A Joint Enterprise: Fiction

141

Action thrillers ‘Literary fiction’

141 154

Windows into Life-Worlds: Blogs and Conclusion

170

Fear and two blogs Conclusion: in other languages

170 184

References

191

Index

204

vii



Contents

Numerous meandering conversations, more for the pleasure than to any purpose, have fed into this book, particularly with Bob Owens, John Seed, and Cheng Xiao. Purposeful exchanges, to sharpen ideas and obtain information, have played a more tractable part: Achim Brosch, Milena Katsarska, Sevdalina Rukanova, Tahrir Hamdi, Khalid Bekkaoui, Dilek Doltas¸, Oya Berk, Subarno Chattarji, and Sudhanva Deshpande have been wonderfully generous with their time and insights. My colleagues in the English Department of The Open University have been unwittingly exploited to allow me time for research: I hope they will forgive me in retrospect and continue to be exploitable. Roehampton University has put at my disposal space for reading and writing close to home, which was gratefully occupied to write this. Paula Kennedy of Palgrave Macmillan supported this project with heartening confidence, and the publisher’s assessors made splendid suggestions for improving it. If the result is not up to scratch I alone am to blame. Thanks are due to the following authors for permission to quote the passages that appear from their poetry in this study: Kim Addonizio, Sampurna Chattarji, Richard A. Falk, Sandra M. Gilbert, Tony Harrison, Dunya Mikhail, David Ray, Adrienne Rich, Todd Swift and Michael GouldWartofsky. And I am grateful to these publishers for permitting me to use quotations from books they have published: Alice James Books and Bloodaxe Books (for quotations from Brian Turner’s poetry), Carcanet (Dunya Mikhail’s poetry), Faber and Faber (Harold Pinter’s poetry, Seamus Heaney’s A Burial at Thebes, Timberlake Wertenbaker’s translation of Sophocles’s Antigone, Martin Crimp’s Cruel and Tender), W. W. Norton (Adrienne Rich’s poetry), Penguin Group USA (Robert Fagles’s translation of Sophocles’s Antigone), Random House and West End Press (Pablo Neruda’s poetry). The publishers wish to state that they have made every effort to contact the copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangement at the first opportunity.

viii



Acknowledgements

1

Setting the tone 2004 was a good year for poet Don Paterson. His 2003 volume Landing Light had won the Whitbread Poetry Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize. Paterson had also been awarded the latter in 1997; in 2004 it merely reconfirmed Paterson’s standing in the British poetry establishment. In the tradition of Eliot, Paterson’s place in that establishment was due both to his virtuosity as a poet and discernment as a publisher. As poetry editor Eliot had established the Faber and Faber poetry list as a repository of the elect, and Paterson has figured firmly there since 1993. At the same time Paterson has himself played an Eliot-like role as poetry editor for Picador publishers. The Eliot Prize was undoubtedly apt recognition for such standing. Drawing upon a donation from Eliot’s wife, Valerie Eliot; organised by the Poetry Book Society; judged by three peers with sufficient kudos in poetry circles; leading to events in London’s South Bank – the prize is redolent of success where it matters and pays. Unsurprisingly, the T. S. Eliot Lecture which Paterson went on to deliver on 30 October 2004 at the South Bank Centre, entitled ‘The Dark Art of Poetry’, came in the unmistakable tones of the voice of authority in matters poetic. Paterson’s assumption of authority was so unabashed that many of his admirers were taken aback. In brief, he announced that poetry should really only be pursued by true-born poets and that the ‘undemocratic idea of Natural Talent’ is inevitable in relation to poetry. He dismissed all ‘amateur’ poets in one fell swoop and was scathing about some category of intellectuals he designated ‘the postmoderns’. He maintained that the affirmation of serious poetry occurs through ‘publication’. He talked about serious poets being ‘apprentices’ first and, by implication, 1



Making War: Introduction

Imagining Iraq

‘professionals’ eventually in the same way as plumbers and roofers. He bemoaned the lack of serious poets and castigated all other would-be or occasional poets. He threaded these sentiments around a muddled theory of poetry – too muddled and distant from the concerns of this study for me to dwell upon. The passage in his lecture that both summed up his attitude and particularly drew attention at the time went as follows: The way forward, it seems to me, lies in the redefinition of ‘risk’. To take a risk in a poem is not to write a big sweary outburst about how dreadful the war in Iraq is, even if you are the world’s greatest living playwright. This kind of poetry is really nothing but a kind of inverse sentimentalism – that’s to say by the time it reaches the page, it’s less real anger than a celebration of one’s own strength of feeling. Since it tries to provoke an emotion of which its target readers are already in high possession, it will change no-one’s mind about anything; more to the point, anyone can do it. Neither is ‘risk’ the deployment of disjunctive syntax, innovatory punctuation or wee apropos-of-nothing allusions to Heisenberg and Lacan; because anyone can do that, too. Risk, of the sort that makes readers feel genuinely uncomfortable, excited, open to suggestion, vulnerable to reprogramming, complicit in the creative business of their self-transformation is quite different. (Paterson 2004, emphases in original) Irrespective of how Paterson proceeded to define ‘risk’ in poetry, this passage made listeners pause – and journalists prick up their ears – because it brought in an overwhelming preoccupation of the time. Paterson’s entire argument was momentarily and inevitably crystallized with reference to the invasion of Iraq and the passionate debates surrounding it. It is obvious in retrospect that the argument was designed to draw away from the prevailing immersion in those debates, and yet, simply by mentioning Iraq, the argument was drawn into those debates. It didn’t seem to matter what Paterson thought ‘risk’ means or whether his apparently authoritative voice made sense. What did seem to matter was that his lecture gave an opening for the preoccupations of the time and those preoccupations bore in upon his views. The ‘big sweary outburst about how dreadful the war in Iraq is’ by ‘the world’s greatest living playwright’ was immediately recognized as a reference to Harold Pinter’s brief collection of anti-war poems War (2003). The deliberate placing of Pinter, so conscious of literary stature, among the ranks of the ‘anyones’ who were writing such poetry at the



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time was troubling on two counts. First, it seemed to make a particularly big deal of the biogenetically implanted authority of the serious poet (not just any exalted literary figure but a poet), and a hackneyed conflict of genres was provocatively reiterated. Second, along with Pinter’s anti-war poetry Paterson had in the same breath dismissed all the ‘anyones’ who had written anti-war poetry as if some deep norm of poetry matters and war doesn’t. Indeed, as if concern about the invasion had obstructed poetry. The first suggestion worried those who keep accounts of literary statures, ultimately a small number of cultural capitalists. The second implication worried those who were concerned about the invasion of Iraq at the time, and had sought to express their anxieties through various means – including poetry. The latter were a numerous and variegated constituency, and dead serious in their contemplation of the invasion. Naturally it was those linked implications with regard to the ‘anyones’ who write anti-war poetry, who are concerned about the Iraq invasion, and the reference to Pinter in their midst that mainly drew such comment as Paterson’s lecture excited. A report in The Guardian on the lecture came with the title ‘Pinter’s Poetry? Anyone can do it’, and quoted Pinter’s response: ‘You want me to comment on that? […] My comment is: “No comment”’ (Higgins 2004). This also noted with some pride that many of Pinter’s anti-war poems had appeared in the pages of The Guardian. Among the letters that appeared in response to the report there was one from Todd Swift, editor of a timely e-anthology 100 Poets Against the War (2003), complaining that Paterson’s ‘terribly small-minded positions can only damage poetry at the start of the 21st century’, especially in seeking to ‘oppose Pinter’s – and by extension, most – anti-war poems for their simplicity’ (Swift 2004). Soon after, poet Andy Croft reported on the lecture in the New Statesman in an article entitled ‘Pure Doggerel’ and observed that: ‘a great many poets – “professional” and “amateur” – have written powerfully against the invasion of Iraq […] That “anyone” can write about such a necessary subject is precisely the enduring appeal and significance of poetry’ (Croft 2004, p. 43). The year before Andy Croft and Andy Mitchell had edited a volume of socialist poetry, Red Sky at Night (2003), which was definitively at the other ideological pole from the neo-conservative initiators of the invasion of Iraq and which contained a selection of anti-war poetry. George Szirtes won the T. S. Eliot Prize the following year with Reel (2004), and used the podium of the 2005 Eliot Lecture to ‘quarrel with my immediate predecessor, Don Paterson’. He particularly took issue with Paterson’s dismissal of amateurs and the distinction



Making War: Introduction 3

Imagining Iraq

made between amateurs and serious poets, and observed that the popular perception ‘that poetry is not simply a decorative way of speaking but something with a function’ is not to be taken lightly (Szirtes 2005). As it happened Szirtes was the chairperson of the three-member panel which had awarded the Eliot Prize to Paterson the year before. The poetry establishment of Britain is a small one. Interest in Paterson’s views was low key at best and passed soon; the overwhelming preoccupation with the Iraq invasion that they had appeared amidst continued. Paterson’s comments were noted, as observed above, primarily because they seemed to be momentarily relevant to that context and finally were left aside as superficial and unworthy of notice in that context – unworthy, as Pinter said, of comment. And rightly so: as far as the context of the Iraq invasion or the place of literature therein went its direct implications were insubstantial. However, in an indirect fashion, the juxtaposition of Paterson’s views on the Iraq invasion context was revealing. Perhaps they were more revealing than Paterson intended or apprehended. Something of the fraught environment of the time, and more importantly of the place of literary production and reception – of literary writing and the dissemination of literary works and the reception thereof – in relation to that environment, was effectively conveyed. In many ways the implicit issues that arose there are germane to understanding the condition of literature at large now. Some of the less obvious nuances of the above-quoted passage from Paterson’s lecture are therefore worth noting. Let me return then to Paterson on Pinter, to that phrase: ‘even if you are the world’s greatest living playwright’. The emphasis on ‘are’ (it’s there in the text as it was in Paterson’s modulation) is interesting; it is a categorical ‘are’, with an affirmative ‘yes, of course you are’ air about it, without leaving any space for qualification (it is not phrased as ‘one of the world’s greatest …’ or ‘possibly the world’s greatest …’ or ‘widely regarded as the world’s greatest …’ etc.). There is no tentativeness behind that extremely tall claim, merely the subtle assertion that despite that Pinter is no more than an ‘amateur’ poet. Indeed, it is because that tall claim is so categorically accepted that the denigration is all the more telling. In discussions of matters literary such unquestionable acceptance of global status is rare and seldom taken seriously. It’s the sort of thing that a literary agent or a publisher’s blurb writer or a memorial speaker may come out with and that few literary critics take seriously. But as it happened Paterson’s superlative appraisal of Pinter’s literary status drew no comment, and those who might have commented on it merely took umbrage that even his poetic credentials were being questioned.



4

In a fundamental way Paterson and the critics of his lecture were on the same wavelength. And that had something to do with the context. In the context of the invasion of Iraq such pat attributions of status did matter. It did matter who was taking what position with regard to the invasion, and the news media constantly marked the status of commentators as such. In fact, ‘the world’s greatest living playwright’ sounds like exactly the sort of newspeak which proliferated and circulated abundantly alongside quoted or cited opinions about the invasion which took over the news media at the time. Just as political and legal and theological ‘authorities’ and ‘experts’ and a vast array of ‘celebrities’ and ‘role-models’ were constantly named as such, so too a hierarchy of literary celebrity and authority – of status – was marked in reportage about the invasion of Iraq. It was news if a ‘Nobel laureate’ of literature or a ‘poet laureate’ or a ‘cult novelist’ or a ‘bestselling author’ or ‘the world’s greatest living playwright’ could be quoted as coming out for or against the invasion. In newspeak such quick attribution of status works often in lieu of arguments and rationalizations, and is used constantly. But these quick attributions of status are not entirely constructed by news media themselves. In this regard the news media shadow a political economy of literary productions and circulations that already exists, or rather the structures of a dominant literary industry and establishment. The latter incorporates publishers and agents and award makers and influential persons from other cultural institutions in concert with coteries of celebrity authors and in-writers who are as much the managers of literary markets as products of literary markets. Here the words of literary agents and publisher’s blurb writers and award ceremony speakers count as a kind of official rhetoric of the literary industry. Insofar as literature was called upon in the media during the Iraq invasion it was in the terms of that official rhetoric, and in the flow of debates at the time that otherwise little regarded and always doubtful literary hierarchy passed momentarily into broader public discourse. Paterson’s ostensible reasons for singling Pinter’s anti-war poetry out for special reference also digs into broader literary and contextual matters: ‘Since it tries to provoke an emotion of which its target readers are already in high possession, it will change no-one’s mind about anything.’ In 2003–4 this was apt to be taken as an art-for-art’s-sake poet’s impatience with the immediacy of propagandist or utilitarian poetry. That Paterson was obviously well aware of this underlines it contextspecific nuances. Apropos the propagandist, Paterson asserts the futility of making poetry subject to a strong political imperative that is, so to speak, out there: in this case, to change the minds of war-mongers and




Imagining Iraq

arouse the indifferent against the invasion of Iraq. The evidence of this political imperative occupied at the time innumerable public statements, websites, media features and active protest gestures ranging from the individual (such as Brian Haw’s protest outside the British Parliament) to the collective (such as the worldwide marches of 15 February 2003). The evidence of the imperative was also felt powerfully at an interpersonal and everyday level, in day-to-day informal conversations and exchanges. In the heat of the debate, taking a position and opposing the counter-position appeared of paramount interest wherever the invasion was registered – particularly in guilt- and doubt-ridden Britain. To try to ‘change the minds’ of those espousing the other view was a pervasive preoccupation in a deeply polarized politically aware populace regarding a deeply contentious issue. Picking the measure of ‘changing minds’ thus allowed Paterson to immediately tap into immediate anxieties, and gave immediate clarity to the notion of propagandist poetry. In seeking to draw away from such poetry to a kind of art-for-art’s-sake view, Paterson then shifted the grounds for employing that measure. In art-for-art’s-sake, Paterson seems to maintain, it is also ‘changing minds’ that is at stake but in a deeper, less worldly, and more profound way: ‘the sort that makes readers feel … vulnerable to reprogramming, complicit in the creative business of their self-transformation’. Effectively the idea of ‘changing minds’ is transposed from its immediate political relevance to a contained aesthetic sphere, and appears nevertheless to make sense because of its immediate political relevance. Another way of saying that might be: Paterson used an urgent preoccupation with ‘changing minds’ to denigrate poetry that is instrumentalized for some end and champion poetry that actuates its ends. ‘Instrumentalized’ and ‘actuate’ are rather fuzzy academic-sounding words which, nevertheless, have a self-evident and useful succinctness here. Paterson didn’t use the rather quaint terms ‘propagandist’/’utilitarian’ or ‘art-for-art’s-sake’ and may well quarrel with them, but that doesn’t matter. They have the merit of being familiar to those interested in literature, and place Paterson’s comments within a line of long-drawn debates that have occupied much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Paterson’s lecture makes reasonable sense as a contribution to those debates about poetry, and about literature in general. When seen as such, though, the strategy adopted by Paterson and described above does appear unusual. It is unusual in espousing an art-for-art’s-sake position to use the political imperatives of the time, and thus tangentially acknowledge the pervasiveness of those political concerns. Of course, the political complicities of those who assume an art-for-art’s-sake position have often



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been noted in the line of long-drawn debates mentioned. Influentially, for instance, the Marxist theoretician Sergei Plekhanov’s Art and Social Life (1912) had argued that art-for-art’s-sake writers are products of their social and political circumstances, however vehemently they may deny it (incidentally, unlike some of his intellectual descendants, for Plekhanov this was an argument for not making utilitarian demands of art). Quite possibly though, no art-for-art’s-sake proponent has conceded the hold of the political to the extent that Paterson does here. In itself that seems to me to reveal something of the pressure of the environment, something of the palpable political tension in the air when Paterson took the podium. In a way, he was unable to escape the contextual frame which he was flailing against as a poet. Then there is Paterson’s further objection to Pinter’s kind of ‘big sweary outburst’ in verse: ‘more to the point, anyone can do it. Neither is “risk” the deployment of disjunctive syntax, innovatory punctuation or wee apropos-of-nothing allusions to Heisenberg and Lacan; because anyone can do that, too.’ It would surprise almost anyone that she is considered invariably capable of coming up with allusions to Heisenberg and Lacan. But let’s leave that ‘anyone’ aside – it seems to be a different ‘anyone’ from the sort who writes ‘big sweary outbursts’. The latter ‘anyone’ comes in for a good deal of flak from Paterson: Our problem is that the roles of poet and reader have become blurred; on the one hand we have the populists, who have made the fatal error of thinking that feeling and practice form a continuum. They infantilise our art: chicken-soup anthologies full of lousy poems; silly workshop exercises where you write a poem in the voice of your socks; ultra-‘accessible’ poetry programs, where the general public text in poems to be read out on the show. Poetry is a wonderfully therapeutic thing to do at amateur level; but amateur artists and musicians don’t think they should exhibit at the Tate, or play at the Wigmore. (Serious poets, I should say, don’t start off amateurs, but apprentices – just like any other vocation.) The result of the inadvertent democratisation of the art has been many people feeling that armed with a beer-mat, a pencil, and a recent mildly traumatic experience they are entitled to send 100pp of handwritten drivel into Faber or Cape. This is a little bit rudely expressed, but clarifies Paterson’s objections to the ‘anyone’ poets – and that too is of the moment. Paterson is simply doing what an established poet cum publisher in his position is expected




Imagining Iraq

to do: defend the exclusive institutional spaces of the establishment against any foray from alternative democratic spaces. Paterson appoints himself doorkeeper of institutional reputation as other kinds of established artists might: as for the Tate Gallery or the Wigmore Hall so for the Faber and Faber or Jonathan Cape offices. Fair enough, his somewhat maligned readers might say, but why bother? After all, the reputations of these publishers rest on what they endorse by publication and none can stop them from rejecting unworthy aspirants. So why bother to humiliate them with invective into the bargain? The obvious answer is in Paterson’s words: because he feels threatened by those alternative democratic spaces, because they attract readers too, because (heaven forbid) they even have an impact upon ‘our art’. Instead of simply kowtowing to established poets, readers are daring to write and listen to readers who write. And sometimes that kind of thing even appears within the doors of the establishment, with august institutional sanction. After all, Pinter’s ‘big sweary outburst’ was published by Faber. What is in evidence there is the anxiety of the literary establishment about losing control of literary production and circulation and reception, or of having some of the keys to mediation between authors and readers taken away. This is symptomatic of the fast-changing condition of literary production and circulation in general of recent years, and in particular of how that condition was manifested during the invasion of Iraq. The condition of literary production and circulation has recently seen rapid changes in the direction of challenging the hold of conventional modes of publishing. The more consolidated and centralized the conventional modes of publication have become the more energetically have alternative spaces appeared and unorthodox critical attention been garnered. Until quite recently, say the 1970s, the mediation of literature between author and reader was comprehensively conducted in the print form by a somewhat variegated publishing industry, ranging equally between corporate and independent. Through the mixture of corporate and independent publishing, through the freedoms and competitions of a variegated industry, certain norms of what is high or mass literature and of what is regarded as valuable in literature – of ‘literariness’ – were substantially maintained. There are numerous accounts of the manner in which the industry changed from roughly the 1980s to the detriment of independent publishing and in favour of conglomerated multinational publishing corporations. Publishers such as André Schiffrin, in The Business of Books (2000), and scholars such as John Feather, in Communicating Knowledge (2003), have presented valuable insights into



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this process and its effect on literature. In brief, the giant corporations were able to substantially oust competition and operate an economy of global scale to mould markets and maximise profits by focusing on the most saleable literature. This meant narrowing down the access to literature that they provide in terms of certain formulae of saleability, or, in other words, narrowing down the variety of published and available literature itself in significant ways. ‘Literariness’ was inclined towards market-friendliness by a more consolidated and centralised publishing industry. That is a significant aspect of what may be regarded as a topdown and very ‘advertent democratization’ of literature, but that is not what Paterson – well ensconced in that industry himself – rails about. Paterson gestures instead toward the ‘inadvertent democratization’, or rather the emergence of alternative spaces of literary production and circulation, outside the hold of the increasingly consolidated publishing industry. This happened more or less simultaneously and, to some degree, in response to developments in the industry, and it was successful enough for the industry to make occasional overtures to it. There are two sides to this ‘inadvertent democratization’ that can be usefully noted here (doing so gives more substance to Paterson’s anxiety about it than he managed to convey). First, technological developments in electronic media, communications and networking facilities have had a significant impact on literary productions and circulations. The form of the hypertext has developed since the 1980s both in terms of increased user-friendliness and in terms of the possibilities of linkage across media and mobile access. In the course of the 1990s those have converged with technological developments enabling a simply enormous access to information (especially through the Internet), and presenting unprecedented possibilities for global networking (through blogging and web chat rooms from the mid-1990s and through social networking websites post-2000). All sorts of conventional establishments, not least publishers, have had a troubled relationship with the more or less unregulated zone of creativity and communications thus brought about. Some have sought to impose regulation on it, and others have sought to buy into its advantages and reach. The literary industry has attempted both with varying degrees of success; but it has not been able to control the extraordinary surge of literary and creative writing networks, blogging, fan fiction, electronic publication, and so on. Since both authors and readers now actively participate in these developments, the ability to guard the doors of ‘literariness’ that an established literary industry exercised in the past has been considerably weakened. The key elements of literature – including the nature of texts, the maintenance




Imagining Iraq

of archives, the degrees to which authors and readers can interact or even be regarded as distinct – are in the process of being reconsidered as these processes take hold. Paterson’s remark on ‘accessible’ poetry programmes and poetry being ‘texted’ is not a frothy ironic moment, it is a real concern where he speaks from. Elsewhere it appears as a rather thrilling opening up of the possibilities of literature. Second, another establishment institutional space which has a symbiotic relationship with the literary industry – in that each feeds upon and props the other up – has taken an interest in these emerging alternative spaces of production and circulation and in the ‘inadvertent democratization’ of literature. I mean the academy, and literary studies therein. The interest that literary studies have taken in the above-mentioned developments has grown through a process itself. To some extent it has to do with the political aspirations of what is thought of as Theory (with a capital T) in literary studies circles, which gathered momentum particularly from the 1970s and had a considerable impact on institutional pedagogy and scholarship thereafter. One of the fallouts was the emergence of cultural studies within literary circles as precisely that area which questions conventional norms of ‘literariness’ and pays attention to mass market texts and ‘new’ media texts. The latter tended to be regarded as largely unworthy of serious academic examination before the 1980s, but became not only respectable but in vogue within the literary academy in the course of the 1990s (with some allowances for the decadal looseness of these summary periodizations). Naturally bestsellers and mass market texts and other media texts attracted research and study. Moreover, the emerging forms of literary production using electronic means and facilities for networking have been exposed to serious analysis, and university courses encouraging both the study of these and engagement with such creativity were instituted. These few sentences are necessarily cursory pointers towards an extremely complex process. I do not dwell on the complexities here; I have discussed these developments in literary studies at greater length elsewhere – in Social Constructionist Identity Politics (2007) and Globalization and Literature (2009b), and to some extent in the second edition of Re-Reading Harry Potter (2009c). It is sufficient to note here that the academy has also worked to some degree with the ‘inadvertent democratization’ of literature that Paterson descries. Perhaps that explains his hostility to those vaguely defined intellectual sort of persons, the ‘postmoderns’. The movement from the general to the particular is more germane to this study. The two paragraphs above describe literary processes that unravelled over several decades; of particular interest here is how those



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processes worked in the context of the Iraq invasion, which Paterson inevitably has in view. A constantly remarked two-way interaction is significant here. On the one hand, public interest in the unfolding events of the time was such that there was a great demand for and consumption of all kinds of information – any kind of information. News reports and opinions were immediately picked and unpicked, rumours abounded, ‘facts’ of doubtful legitimacy were contested, support for moral qualms and convictions was sought wherever possible. Significant increases were noted in sales of newspapers, viewings of political broadcasts and discussions, hits on information websites. Perhaps more importantly, the resources of social networking were abuzz with commentaries, blogs, chat room discussions and every kind of advocacy for action – especially anti-invasion protests. The principal organizations opposed to the invasion, such as the Stop the War Coalition (STWC), Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER), United for Peace and Justice, and the Not in Our Name Project, conducted their operations largely through electronic media and networks. On the other hand, such exchanges and communications through new media, which are usually registered as a kind of constant background murmur or white noise in the mediascape, were actually allocated a distinct character in the mainstream. Just as the established media highlighted the opinions of the great and good (the appearance of a literary hierarchy that I noted above), so too they constructed a sort of voice of the ‘person on the street’, ‘the common person’, ‘citizens’, ‘the people’. Venerable broadcast media (e.g. CNN, VOA, BBC) and prestigious broadsheets (e.g. The Guardian, The Times, New York Post) had perfected techniques for representing this voice around the time of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 in the USA, and it appeared frequently as the invasion of Iraq was planned and undertaken. This consisted in such conventional methods as interviewing the ‘passerby’ or some representative of the many and tracking crowds in protest marches, and also in keeping tabs on popular blogs and networking sites and co-opting from these at times and using amateur mobile phone images and so on. In this environment the alternative modes of literary production and circulation described above, which are usually drowned in the ceaseless and uncontainable traffic of global communications, also acquired an unusual public visibility. Such literary production and circulation as turned to the political concerns of the time drifted out of closed circuits of networking coteries and scholars and became part of a larger public scrutiny. This happened in various ways. The statements of established literary authors used by the mainstream media were immediately picked




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up and recirculated and hyperlinked and dissected in a variety of ways. Pronouncements by Pinter, poems by Seamus Heaney or Andrew Motion in newspapers, plays by David Hare etc. which seemed directly relevant to the invasion were instantly noted, commented on and analysed, in an extraordinarily diverse and dispersed way on the Internet, for instance. Further, electronic texts which may be regarded as literary (just as diaries and journals may be regarded as literary texts) from unknown persons who were in ‘hotspots’ or simply made noteworthy arguments surfaced through the chain of blog and discussion forum watchers into the mainstream media and sometimes into mainstream publication. Thus various blogs by persons in Iraq describing their daily lives and thoughts as the invasion proceeded caught the attention of mainstream news media and made it into international book publishing, such as Salam Pax’s The Baghdad Blog (2003) and Riverbend’s Baghdad Burning (2005). Some blogs by American soldiers in Iraq were similarly successful: Colby Buzzell’s My War (2005) and Matthew Currier Burden’s The Blog of War (2006) come to mind. More significantly for this study, a great deal of literary writing was produced and circulated by known and unknown writers with no known connection to Iraq directly on the Internet, through a variety of electronic forums and networking sites. There was a particular proliferation of anti-invasion poetry. Some of these were engineered into anthologies by anti-invasion litterateurs – those ‘chicken soup anthologies full of lousy poetry’ that Paterson sputters about. Todd Swift, who had written the bitter letter about Paterson’s lecture quoted above, edited an electronic anthology 100 Poets Against the War (2003) – announced at the time as the fastest anthology ever put together (within a week). Sam Hamill set up a resoundingly successful Poets Against the War website (www.poetsagainstthewar.org) and also put together a published anthology, Poets Against the War (2003). In the midst of this effervescence the most revered arbiter of the poetry establishment, Faber and Faber, felt called upon to come up with a topical anthology also, 101 Poems Against War (2003) – albeit of a very different sort. I return for a closer look at such texts in subsequent chapters. At this juncture here’s the point of these observations: in the heat of the lead-up to and invasion of Iraq, the distinctions between mainstream literary publishing and alternative modes of literary production and circulation, established and celebrity pen-wielders and unknown ‘ordinary’ litterateurs, the great news-hungry public and the select literature-reading constituency, literary authors and activists and political commentators seemed to merge and separate and blur in unexpected ways. Something about the current condition of literary production and circulation and



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reception, and about the current shape of ‘literariness’ itself, was forced into wide attention against the grain of established traditions and distinctions during the invasion of Iraq. Such a blurring of distinctions can hardly be received without anxiety by those who appoint themselves guardians of literature and literariness. Don Paterson was one such.

Theme, text, reality That longish preamble uses bits of Paterson’s 2004 T. S. Eliot Lecture to illuminate some aspects of literature during the Iraq invasion period. The context is recent enough to be still relevant and its aftermath ongoing. Whatever can be observed about the condition of literature then (roughly 2003 to 2005) is likely to obtain as this is written (in 2009– 2010) and for a while to come. In the preamble I have made no attempt to determine what Paterson’s views about the invasion itself may have been, whether he was for or against it. That is the spirit in which this study is conducted. The literary texts that are addressed below are not taken up with a view to identifying pro- or anti-invasion positions, or dwelling on the political choices of their authors, or trying to reach a moral consensus on the invasion. The point here is not to discern what literature and literary authors have contributed to our understanding of the invasion of Iraq, but to analyse how the environment of the invasion revealed something about the recent and current condition of literature. No one is held to account for his or her position regarding the invasion. In a general way I try to desist from normative judgements here, moral or political or aesthetic. I choose the phrase ‘condition of literature’ advisedly, with an aspiration to the analytical balance which carefully charts the influences on and workings of the corpus of literature now, rather than to exert a diagnostic gaze and pronounce sickness or health, greatness or mediocrity. The idea here is to examine how certain literary texts (not authors, texts) appeared within and ‘spoke’ to a specific socio-political context, not so much to reckon with that context but to understand the nuances of contemporary literature. Having said that I might as well note straightaway that most of the texts discussed in subsequent chapters are either explicitly against the invasion of Iraq or against war in general. There are significant differences within their anti-invasion expressions: some are bitter interventions, some are pensive ruminations, some are intellectual probings, some seek to universalize from the particular moment and some to give flesh to the particularity of the Iraq invasion, some look back and some forward.




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The anti-war attitude, where that is explicit, is a given position which can scarcely be neglected – but the matter of interest here is what can be discerned in the texts beyond that. A literary text can be expected to convey more and be open to more than simply the political position it espouses, which is apparent really even before it is read (is probably announced on its dust jacket, or mentioned in a review, or simply inferable from what’s known of the author’s allegiances). That most of the texts in question are anti-invasion is not down to my selection. There simply were more such literary texts which reached a wider circulation or were more widely accessible at the time. Relatively few literary texts addressed to the invasion could be regarded as pro-invasion or sympathetic to it. Some may perhaps think of Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005) as such: it gives a close-up view of an eventful day (against the backdrop of the 15 February 2005 anti-invasion marches) in a London surgeon’s life. This humane and reasonable protagonist, whose thoughts are described in detail, finds himself more or less in favour of invasion on moral grounds. I give a fuller account of the novel in Chapter 5. Some of the action thrillers discussed in that chapter are more unambiguously proinvasion. But whatever the explicit or implicit positions taken, there are invariably ambiguities and slippages and connotations and allusions to be discerned which don’t necessarily bear specifically upon the context of invasion but fold in on the broad relationship between literature and world. That’s my thing here. It might also be prudent to declare that I was unambiguously opposed to the invasion of Iraq at the time, and continue to regard the episode (far from over) as an extraordinary violation of rational political and ethical principles. I had conducted such research into the matter as I was capable of, and have detailed my reasons and misgivings insofar as I could in The Theory and Reality of Democracy: A Case Study in Iraq (2006). I don’t intend to repeat those arguments with a somewhat different inflection here. I have chosen to delimit this study in certain practical ways. To begin with, I have confined my attention to texts that came into circulation primarily between 2003 and 2005, occasionally straying beyond. A great deal of relevant material has become available since, including much that was written before. Since I am concerned here as much with the manner in which the context impinged upon literary writing as with the manner in which texts circulated and were received then, I generally stay within the demarcated period. Where motifs or strategies were followed up in some way after 2005 I note and at times discuss them. The period between 2003 and 2005 is chosen as one during which the nuances, processes and aftermath of the invasion of Iraq drew maximum public



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interest and were passionately debated, and remained constantly ‘hot news’. From early 2002 the US government under President George Bush, with staunch support from the UK government under Prime Minister Tony Blair, had reiterated a desire to disarm Iraq or bring about a regime change by military means with increasing vehemence. When, on 7 September 2002, Bush and Blair met in Camp David, Maryland, and jointly reiterated their determination to prove that Saddam Hussein’s regime was harbouring ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ (WMD) and act accordingly, invasion seemed like a foregone conclusion to many. It duly happened, amidst widespread anxiety and often outrage. The escalating spiral of violence in Iraq during and after the reign of the Coalition Provisional Authority under Paul Bremer until 30 June 2004, and the numerous scandals and iniquities that continued to come to light, figured significantly in global political and public forums through 2005. I expect the main points of interest in this period are still fresh in the memories of many readers. The literary texts examined in subsequent chapters were written in English and directed towards readers proficient in that language in the first instance. My limitations are largely to blame for this. Naturally, numerous literary texts on the invasion of Iraq were penned in Arabic, French, German and other languages. To a small extent these are noted in Chapter 6. My limitations aside, focusing on English language texts, and examining them as an English Literature researcher might, has a few resonances which are to the purpose for this study. The English language is now, contentiously but unquestionably, the dominant language of international politics, commerce and mass media and communications – and as such has the widest reach. English language cultural products, particularly texts of various sorts, are likely to reach a larger and more dispersed readership than texts in other languages. Insofar as the invasion of Iraq generated ripples in an enormous number of political and cultural areas, texts in the English language are likely to have had something like a concordant reach. At the same time, however, contemplation of literature in English immediately brings to mind institutional spaces, first and foremost to do with education (in schools and universities) and scholarship, and also to do with the book industry and various levels of cultural politics. In recent decades the institutional spaces of English Literature have been fraught with various ideological conflicts, to a great extent arising from its geopolitical associations with the former British Empire and latterly with North American neo-imperialism and its current proliferations through the global dominance of English. In particular, former colonies where the English language has maintained




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a place in official and everyday life, and where noteworthy literary contributions to and scholarly productions on English Literature are legion, have been loci for interrogating some of the conventional geopolitical assumptions of English Literature. More generally, the sheer spread of English in non-Anglophone contexts is also necessitating a wide-ranging reconsideration of the geopolitics of those institutional spaces. Where English Literature can be located and what are its representative texts, how the field should be engaged and in what manner may its texts be analysed, how the history of the field should be mapped, what sorts of values are ensconced in its institutions – these are all questions which have been and continue to be inconclusively debated. In many ways, the context of the invasion of Iraq chimed in with the political retrospections and dissensions which have characterized the pursuit of English Literature from the latter part of the twentieth century. The key agents of the invasion were the governments of the United States and Britain, Anglophone centres of past and present geopolitical dominance; by association, the politics of the English language and of English Literature acquired a particular resonance in this context, both within those countries and perceivably elsewhere. That the texts I examine below are in English, and very largely produced in Britain and North America, allows for active consideration of that resonance. In many ways, English Literature during the invasion of Iraq is an area that is troubled by its own history and by differences that are within its fold. On a related note, the global dominance of the English language and English language cultural products also means that their relationships with other languages are in a constant state of being negotiated. Crossings from and into the English language and English Literature are more the norm than otherwise. At the most obvious level, this means that translations of literary texts into and from English and texts crossing into Anglophone contexts from without can be regarded as part of English Literature. Indeed, the institutional spaces of English Literature mentioned above – academic spaces, for instance – now often incorporate texts from other languages and non-Anglophone cultures as within their remit, and seek to engage the consequent problems productively. In the context of the invasion of Iraq, people in North America and Britain naturally evinced a heightened interest in voices and cultural products from Iraq specifically and the Middle East or (with somewhat different nuances) the ‘Arab World’ generally. Consequently translations of Arabic poetry were inserted seamlessly amidst the antiwar poetry in English featured in the above-mentioned anthologies. A timely anthology of Iraqi Poetry Today (2003), edited by Saadi



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Simawe, appeared to capitalize on this interest; as did a volume by one of the contributors there, Dunya Mikhail’s The War Works Hard (2005 [2003]). Insofar as some of these can be regarded as works in English for circulation among an English-reading audience I pick them up below (Mikhail’s volume is discussed in Chapter 3). Others of similar interest have appeared in English after 2005, notably Algerian novelist Yasmina Khadra’s The Sirens of Baghdad (2007, from the French Les Sirènes de Baghdad, 2006) – those are outside the analytical scope of this study, but are briefly registered in Chapter 6. From a different direction, English language readers had the extraordinary advantage of being able to read blogs kept by Iraqi authors in Iraq through the period of the invasion. Some of these were narrative records and constructions (not fictional constructions but constructions in the sense of evoking personae and locales, and deploying stylistic devices) in the English language (itself a matter that was debated in their pages) which rightly attracted considerable attention at the time and eventually passed into print circulation. I have mentioned such volumes by Salam Pax and Riverbend above – their volumes are discussed in Chapter 6. I have stuck somewhat conservatively with texts available in print for this study, not because that is any assurance of ‘quality’ (in my experience that is not the case, even if we accept some unambiguous markers of quality) but because print texts still enjoy a stability in archiving which electronic texts do not yet. In terms of practical delimitations for the following, I have also chosen to focus primarily on literary texts derived from and addressed to the civil and civilian sphere rather than the military. Some of my reasons for this decision are elaborated later in this chapter, when I dwell on the nuances of ‘war’ apropos the Iraq invasion. In an immediate and simplistic way, the explanation lies in my perception that the civil and the military were largely recorded and narrated and presented in distinct ways for the Iraq invasion particularly and generally by historical convention. Even the count of casualties was maintained separately: Iraq Body Count (www.iraqbodycount.org) kept a record of civilian deaths in Iraq, while the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count (www.icasualties.org) maintained records of dead US and UK military personnel. Accounts of the invasion – including literary ones – given by US and UK soldiers in Iraq were often framed in terms of distinctive presuppositions (in terms of nationalistic agendas, heroism and cowardice, the technicalities of warfare) and given to readers as expressive of a kind of truth or from the moral high ground of lived professional experience. The presumptions which enable engagement in military action as military personnel, the




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realizations and traumas that may follow, the social norms surrounding contemplation of military personnel were all deliberately held apart from the civilian sphere. Powerfully ensconced conventions now accord to ‘veterans’ a somewhat sanctified status which seems to me questionable: often more to do with perceptions of having served and suffered for the state than to do with evidence of human and intellectual insight. As distinct from such military accounts which tell civilians what’s what or are sanctified by experience, literary texts addressed from and to the civil sphere during the Iraq invasion circulated in a seething network of debates and uncertainties. In these mostly the nature of reality and truth was under duress and the prerogatives of civil society at large were in issue. The latter are predominantly discussed here. It would, however, be simplistic to push such a distinction too emphatically. To begin with, the person and the profession do not necessarily coincide. There were undoubtedly US and UK soldiers in Iraq who engaged the civil and civilian sphere sensitively in literary texts – the poetry of US soldier Brian Turner in Here, Bullet (2005), for instance, often does so and is discussed in Chapter 3, and so does some of the ‘frontline drama’ examined in Chapter 4. More importantly, to understand literary engagements with the invasion it is necessary to grasp the particular ways in which the military was presented to and figured in civil discourses – insofar as the military was distinctively constructed in the public imaginary during the invasion period. Along with the frontline writings mentioned, action thrillers (or combat novels) of the period are useful for this purpose and taken up accordingly in Chapter 5. Accounts of fighting in Iraq, on-the-ground memoirs, reports of various sorts from the battlezone, voices offering the insights of veterans as such, are however not taken up in this study. These pragmatic decisions and explanations do not answer a more fundamental question: are there sound reasons for expecting literary texts addressed to the invasion of Iraq to clarify something significant about the current condition of literature rather than simply having contributed to debates and concerns of the time? Why should I suspect that this could be a useful exercise from that perspective? This is naturally a question I asked myself before undertaking this study, and I persuaded myself to proceed with three broad considerations in mind. These considerations were not inferred from specific texts; these are preliminary notions which seemed to cut across my prevailing sense of literature and literariness, and spur a closer examination of the texts in question. These have to do with the manner in which that context encouraged, even impelled, attention to the relationship of literature and world. In brief,



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these considerations are with regard to ideas of theme, text and reality – all seminal in matters literary. The theme seemed to be war. That poetry pamphlet by Pinter that Paterson alluded to had it in the title, simply War (more on this in Chapter 3). Almost all the texts I pick up below refer to the Iraq invasion as ‘war’, and seek their resources for engaging with it in terms of ‘war’. The invasion of Iraq has now become the ‘Iraq War’, following from the ‘Gulf War’, in everyday parlance as in specialist verbiage. In terms of any conventionally rigorous understanding of war it wasn’t at all clear that what happened in Iraq was war, either between 20 March 2003 to 30 April 2003 (when ‘war’ was announced and concluded) or from 21 April 2003 to 28 June 2004 (when the Coalition Provisional Authority was in place with the Iraqi Governing Council amidst escalating carnage) or thereafter (as carnage continued). By a conventionally rigorous understanding I mean understanding when a condition of conflict can be recognized meaningfully as war, rather than explaining how and why and with what effect war happens. The former usually harks back to the classic work of Carl Von Clausewitz, On War (1873 [1832]), or perhaps looks to Quincy Wright’s A Study of War (1942), or perhaps – and more bewilderingly – to the many publications from J. David Singer’s Correlates of War project. The latter had identified a state of ‘civil war’ in Iraq in 2006 (according to his colleague Juan Cole 2006), but by any of these approaches it is difficult to recognize the invasion of Iraq as it got underway from 2003 as ‘war’. In this the difficulty that a rigorous understanding faces is not dissimilar to one that a clear-headed common-sense understanding should face too, and it is easiest to briefly present the difficulty here in common-sense terms. If a large, powerfully built man goes up to a slightly built, frail man and starts beating him up without active provocation, and if the weak man puts up his arms to ward off the blows but is beaten to pulp and dies, we probably won’t call it a ‘fight’. Perhaps we can think of it as an ‘assault’. Analogously, thinking of the so-called ‘Iraq War’ as ‘war’ is suspect. To recognize a condition of armed conflict as ‘war’ some sort of irreconcilable difference, some equivalence in the intent to engage each other, or some parity in the capacity to engage each other should be discernible in the warring parties. The military action in Iraq was clearly, however, an ‘invasion’ in the first instance and all that followed (including ‘civil wars’) were the consequences of invasion – and in this study I use ‘invasion’ deliberately as distinct from ‘war’. It is necessary to keep this distinction foregrounded because both those promoting invasion and those opposing it deployed a subsuming rhetoric of war.




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In a variety of ways, the jargons, ideas, frames, associations, sentiments, imaginations and anxieties of war were brought to bear on the build-up to, and undertaking and aftermath of the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The invasion, in brief, was surrounded so comprehensively by talk of war that it appeared to become war. For champions of the invasion this involved, to begin with, applications of the technical jargon of war: there was constant technical-sounding discussion of military capabilities, strategies, terrain, war-time provisions and budgets, technology, intelligence, publicity and propaganda, precision-bombing, collateral damage, friendly fire, etc. The language of the machine-like character of modern warfare was applied; a language that was succinctly summarized by Daniel Pick – in his historical analysis of the development thereof – as follows: The ‘unstoppable engine of war’ has become something of a modern truism. As though in answer to the question ‘Why War?’, the answer finally might turn on the insatiable and irresistible drive of the ‘military-industrial complex’ – that ambiguous phrase crucially begging the question of human agency or responsibility. Or as though war today might not only involve the deployment of new technologies, but be essentially redefined by them: satellites, television, computers and video games after all have occupied centre-stage in the representation and military news management of the Gulf War. Are we not so often caught in the fascination and massive distortion of this ‘high-tech’ image of conflict today – as though war is decreed and exclusively played out by high-precision automata? (Pick 1993, p. 11) On the ethical front, champions of invasion brought back the concept of ‘Just War’, usually by referring to and updating St Augustine’s principles of just cause for and just conduct of war. Numerous statements and discussions and tracts were produced to debate the just causes and conduct of the invasion, and ‘war’ slipped in and stayed with these as a natural base of Augustinian principles, by lexical association more than anything else. And, even more tenuously, those promoting invasion continued to play with a loose ‘war’ of abstractions – the ‘war on terror’ – which had been put together after 11 September 2001, and which, by dint of repetition, seemed to acquire a reality of its own. Among early commentators on the construction of the ‘war on terror’ after September 2001, in The Replication of Violence (2002, ch. 4) I had charted some of the ways in which the notion of ‘war’ was being applied then to a range of abstractions which could obfuscate a large variety



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of realities according to convenience. ‘War on terror’ was designed to exacerbate implausible ideological polarizations, and signify both an internal conflict within the so-called West and an external one with those espousing ‘other values’. All those moves had come to pass before the invasion of Iraq, and in a way the ‘war’ perceived therein was really a metaphorical war of values and ideologies translated simplistically into material and visceral realities. Predictably, that was done for agendas with little investment in either values or ideologies. On the other side, those opposing the invasion responded to the champions of invasion accordingly, and took up the significations of ‘war’ accordingly. Where the terminology of the war machine was deployed by agents of invasion, opponents of invasion sought to highlight the human suffering of war. Where proponents of invasion presented arguments in terms of ‘Just War’ theory, opponents engaged them on their own ground and denounced their injustice. The particularities of motives and responsibilities and the specificities of actions and conducts were pored over to determine their normative implications as much by one side as by the other – all in terms of ‘war’. The various flexibilities of the war of abstractions were exploited for the opposing purposes of taking for or against positions regarding invasion. In effect the idea of ‘war’ was superimposed on the invasion of Iraq by both those in its favour and those vehemently opposed to it, in a kind of concord on the terminology of war while being diametrically opposed on how it should be perceived and evaluated. At both ends of these poles, the invasion of Iraq was associated with a range of past conflicts which can more uncomplicatedly be regarded as wars. Insofar as the resources of literature were brought to bear on the invasion, it was naturally the literature of war in a general way that was thoroughly ploughed and variously evoked. Poets looked back to war poetry in various contexts, particularly in the context of the Vietnam War and the First World War. ‘War poetry’ was understood as a received tradition to which the context of invasion called for further contribution: a reiteration of both contemporaneity and tradition, to echo Eliot’s formulation of modernist poetry. These appeared variously through poetry that alluded to other wars and the poetry of other wars, or that engaged human suffering as a universal condition which spurs a universal poetic sensibility, or that often made of war an allegorical monster with another hydra head stirring in Iraq. Such poetry also appeared amidst new canonical constructions of ‘anti-war poetry’, a way of both registering a tradition and confirming it by participating in it. Thus, Hollis and Keegan’s anthology 101 Poets Against War (2003) – that’s the Faber and




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Faber one – put together poetry from antiquity to the present, including poems penned against the invasion of Iraq, to make a topical intervention which was also an act of canon formation. At the same time Todd Swift’s 100 Poets Against the War (2003) and Sam Hamill’s Poets Against the War (2003) recalled for many the kind of anti-war ‘collective action’ anthologies that appeared during the Vietnam War. These are discussed in Chapter 2 below. A number of classical Greek plays were translated or adapted as the Iraq invasion progressed (by Seamus Heaney, Tony Harrison, Martin Crimp and others) to deliberately make the classical perception resonate with the contemporary concern – Chapter 4 examines some of these. Past literary strategies for thematizing and disposing war for public attention were extensively recalled in the literature of the invasion of Iraq. War surfaced as the theme through these, a thematic horizon and the theme of the moment. Along with literary resources of the past those of more current provenance played amongst them. The metaphoric possibilities of the background war of abstractions gave way to literary explorations of culture-clashes – interestingly between the USA and UK (e.g. in plays by Tamsin Oglesby and David Hare), and of course more obviously and numerously with regard to the so-called Western culture and Islamic culture. At the same time, the ethical debates about ‘just’ and ‘unjust war’ – the ethical rhetoric surrounding the invasion of Iraq – facilitated incisive psychological portraits of internal schisms and personality clashes (e.g. in novels by Noah Cicero, Nicholson Baker and Ian McEwan which are discussed in Chapter 5). More recently, there has been an increased production of narratives, styled with literary verve, which renders the invasion as war from a microscopic perspective. ‘Embedded’ reporters and soldiers ‘on the ground’ have employed the frames of war reportage, life experiences and technological jargons to tell their stories of invading Iraq as war stories, as a record for posterity. Thus, there has taken place a sudden proliferation of broadly literary texts which do not so much thematize imminent or ongoing war, as issue after the fact of accepting that war has happened and is done with in Iraq. These are in a way confirmation of the invasion of Iraq as war after the fact, and include narratives by soldiers – such as Hartley’s Just Another Soldier (2005), Crawford’s The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell (2005), Fick’s One Bullet Away (2005), Bellavia’s House to House (2007), Campbell’s Joker One (2009) – and by correspondents – such as Parenti’s The Freedom (2004), West’s No True Glory (2005), Pritchard’s Ambush Alley (2005) and Filkins’s The Forever War (2008). In keeping with my decision to stick with the civil sphere and primarily the period 2003–5, these are outside the remit of this study. The problems of constructing



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the invasion as ‘war’ in literary terms are of moment for this study of literature. The narratives which take the invasion as war in terms of pre-applied media or military frames are not. In brief, and sticking to my focus and period, the point here is that even as literary texts drew upon the stabilities and instabilities of rendering the invasion of Iraq as ‘war’ – of thematizing ‘war’ – that effort rebounded into the processes of literature. The modes through which literary traditions (canons) are thought about, the manner in which themes are constructed, the extent to which themes provide linkages between texts, the slipperiness of what texts say or represent – such matters of literary import bubbled up and drew attention, and certainly deserve attention. To move on: literary engagement with the invasion of Iraq was also a reckoning with what it means to write or read a text. This wasn’t simply a result of focusing on the theme of war in that context; the nature of texts was actually under constant and searching investigation through the invasion period, and put pressure on the most self-consciously textual of activities: literary reading and writing. In academic circles naturally the nature of texts has long been under constant discussion, and not just in literary studies. History, linguistics, jurisprudence, anthropology … indeed the entire range of human studies has at different stages sought to clarify the nuances of constructing texts. In literary studies particularly this has been an ongoing preoccupation, from attempts to get to the bottom of literature by rigorous attention to language inaugurated in the nineteenth century (the philological tradition of hermeneutics associated with Wilhelm von Humboldt and Friedrich Schleiermacher) to perceptions of the slipperiness of texts and of their relation to ideological inclinations in discourse (the turn to Theory in the late twentieth century, particularly strongly associated with the influence of Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, Edward Said and others). Increasingly since the 1970s these preoccupations of the literary academy have both drawn upon and encroached upon other fields of knowledge. The kinds of inadvertent and advertent democratizations that Paterson, as noted above, seemed uneasy about are largely to do with such questioning of the nature of texts – of how clear or multiple their meanings are, of the overt and covert agendas they have, of the shifts between what their writers intend and what their readers infer, of the presumptions they work with, of the manner in which they fit specific contexts, of the uses they can be put to by institutions, and so on. Unquestionably though, these academic concerns have apparently been, in a typically academic manner, locked into a rather precious and removed domain. Literary studies may have been addressing the




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substance of the world and may have hoped to influence how the world works, but at the same time it hid behind dense language, forbidding abstractions, and walls of professional specialism. Poets, novelists and playwrights who have a symbiotic relationship with the literary academy, and hope for its notice while aspiring far beyond it, usually know this – hence Paterson’s scorn for ‘postmoderns’. In the context of the invasion of Iraq, however, the nature of texts became a matter of popular or mass concern. In a way, anyone interested in political developments at the time (and it was a simply huge number) started doing in a practical common-sense fashion exactly the sorts of things that literary and other humanities scholars constantly beat their brains about. Everyone started worrying about the meanings, implications, presumptions, contexts, and reliabilities of texts. And at the same time, a large number of texts which are normally regarded as straightforward and transparent carriers of information – such as political reports and statements, strategy documents, minutes of meetings and assemblies, press releases – acquired a kind of literary character, or attracted a sort of literary attention. The style, contexts, connotations, interpretations, presumptions and ambiguities of such texts were intensively examined, more and more searchingly as the invasion approached and then got underway. Literary writers and literary scholars unexpectedly found themselves in a context where democratization, advertent or inadvertent, of their domains was not merely mooted or desired but actually and explicitly obtained momentarily. It seemed possible to expand outside their usual domains. Let me pause a moment to emphasize the sheer range of texts that received a sort of literary attention in a public way. At one level, this was a matter of ploughing the connotations of phrases in terms of who was saying it and where and why. Phrases coined by politicians – such as George W. Bush’s ‘axis of evil’ in his State of the Union address of 29 January 2002 or Donald Rumsfeld’s ‘old Europe’ in his press briefing of 22 January 2003 – or those used to identify operations and tactics – like ‘shock and awe’ or ‘Operation Infinite Justice’ or ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’ – were dismantled and appropriated way beyond their immediate purposes. The impact of the apt phrase is a daily concern for propagandists and publicity agents; it is doubtful whether their resonances are usually as consistently and interrogatively approached as during the Iraq invasion. But phrases are not quite texts, and texts are the issue here. A range of ‘dossiers’ were intensely scrutinized. The so-called ‘Strategic Dossier’ of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (9 September 2002); the National Security Strategy document that



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Bush put to the House of Representatives (20 September 2002); the Iraqi government’s dossier declaring weapons holdings to the United Nations (7 December 2002); and especially the three dossiers produced by the British government to make the case for invasion (Joint Intelligence Committee 2002; Foreign and Commonwealth Office 2002; Iraq 2003) – all were subjected to prolonged examination. Questions of authorship, sources, selection and juxtaposition of information, presentation, rhetorical strategies, interpretive clarity and doubt, and ideological and normative underpinnings were raised. The nuances of every word of a range of United Nations Security Council (UNSC) texts were weighed: of every draft of the Resolution 1441; of every statement on weapons inspections issued by Hans Blix of UNMOVIC and Mohamed El Baradei of IAEA; of all the minutes of UNSC meetings, and particularly Colin Powell’s presentation to that body of 5 February 2003 to present US intelligence. The manner in which abstract political norms and culturally specific perspectives operated in these were widely dissected; more interestingly, the vested interests that lie behind proposing interpretations of texts and the degree to which inter-textual linkage illuminates interpretation were pondered. Needless to say, similar attention was given to the texts of speeches, press releases and policy statements by the main proponents of invasion in the UK and US, by leaders of various countries, by religious leaders, by spokespersons for alignments against invasion, by representatives of political parties, and (as noted above) celebrities and public figures of various sorts. After the invasion other texts continued to come up for similar attention: the press releases and policy statements issued by the Coalition Provisional Authority; calls for tenders and contracts issued by the United States Army Corps of Engineers and the United States Agency for International Development for reconstructing Iraq; progress reports by various corporations involved in reconstruction; various investigations into the process of the invasion and aftermath (into torture of Iraqi prisoners, into false claims in the lead-up to invasion, into corruption in the administration of the reconstruction …); and so on. Add to that, and in a continuous fashion, the interpretive energy and habits of sceptical reading and weighing of facts and inferences that were expended on news reports and news analyses. These incorporated unusual awareness of the channels and sources of news, and the extent to which their locations and interests were reflected in the disposal of texts. An enormous flood of textualized conversation hummed on electronic channels throughout. It wouldn’t be too far-fetched to claim that between 2003 and 2005, the invasion of Iraq generated a widespread – with some




Imagining Iraq

particularly dynamic nodes – mass culture of critical engagement with texts, in a pragmatic, immediate, imperative fashion. Moreover, this mass culture of critical engagement with texts operated, more or less spontaneously, with a range of factors which are not on the surface of the texts in view: texts were habitually read between the lines, with reference to other texts, with an ear for tone and style, with a grasp of the underlying political and ethical abstractions, with discernment of rhetoric and ambiguity and evasion. Such interpretive attention is constantly given by different sets of professionals to texts relevant to them: lawyers and bureaucrats look closely at dossiers; diplomats and ministers read between the lines of foreign policy documents; military and corporate strategists constantly weigh a range of reports and indicators; academics look at everything interrogatively within their disciplinary scopes. Under the conditions of a mass culture of interpretation that prevailed during the Iraq invasion, every reading and writing person was doing all those things to some extent and effectively employing sophisticated strategies for engaging texts in general. The environment which enabled this probably didn’t last long beyond 2005 – but I will not speculate on its life. The point I am getting at is that the literary texts in question here appeared self-consciously in the midst of this heightened mass interpretive field. The appearance of a heightened mass interpretive field, engaging every kind of text critically, presented an unusual opportunity for producers of literary texts. Some took the opportunity and others were taken by the opportunity (made advantageous offers and given commissions), and yet others (Paterson amongst them) deliberately stood back. To say that those who took the opportunity were being ‘opportunistic’ wouldn’t be incorrect, but to read that as a term of moral opprobrium would be simplistic. There may be selfish motives behind tapping into the opportunity; perhaps in addressing the invasion of Iraq some poets and playwrights and novelists were trying to draw attention to themselves and hoping to enlarge their sales and widen their readership in a rather obvious way. Perhaps they were ‘jumping on the bandwagon’, ‘prostituting their art’, ‘playing to plebeian sensationalism’; equally they may have been ‘acting on their convictions’, ‘expressing their deepest feelings’, ‘being true to their art’. Let’s divest ‘opportunistic’ here of its pat moral baggage. The appearance of such a field of mass readership certainly presented an opportunity for literature, and those who produce literary texts are likely to be sensitive to the opportunity in that vein. For literary authors the context opened the possibility of playing with textual features and expecting to be immediately understood.



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A rich field of inter-textual resonances and allusions, pregnant phrases, ironies and innuendoes, of play with words and texts was ready at hand to irrigate and plant in. Sensitivity to a range of textual registers – legal, political, corporate, cultural – was extraordinarily high, and could be co-opted without confusion within literary efforts. Perhaps more importantly, heightened awareness of such textual features led also to a heightened ability to contemplate the resources of literature and literariness. In other words, it meant that a theatre performance addressed to some aspect of the Iraq invasion would spur contemplation of how performance has worked in the politics and media of the time, and that in turn could throw light on what theatre as an art form is; or, to take another example, poetry addressed to the invasion could draw attention to how the shapes and sounds and meanings of words were used in the broader context, and thereby clarify something of what using words in poetry entails. This sort of turning inwards of the literary text could be thought of as drawing on a meta-literary perspective: a straightforward engagement with what a literary text says and at the same time a further level of awareness of what makes this text literary. Putatively, the appearance of a heightened mass interpretive field may provide ample opportunity for literary authors to exploit such a metaliterary perspective and hope to get across. Whether and to what extent and in what manner that opportunity was exploited is an issue of considerable interest in this study. It may be expected that hopeful access to a widespread meta-literary perspective could release unexpected and inventive handling of literary forms and styles. Underlying and encouraging all those opportunities, there’s a more basic consideration at work: the relation of literature to the world, or what is often loosely thought of as the real world or reality. In the context of the invasion of Iraq this relationship was a pressing and unavoidable concern for those with literary interests. This brings me to the final substantial point that I wish to make in this chapter. I appear to be inching towards well-worn philosophical debates about literature’s relation to the world, towards a formulation about how the literary text should be understood with some notion of an empirical reality or certain social conditions (what I have been loosely calling a ‘context’) in view. This complicated area could involve a tussle between various positions, simplistically stated thus: that the literary text represents or imitates some aspect of reality; that the literary text poses its artifice against reality; that the literary text can be largely explained with reference to social contexts; that literary texts construct our sense of the world in concert with other kinds of texts; that literary texts are




Imagining Iraq

interventions in social life; that perspectives of the world determine readers’ approaches to literary texts; that literary texts clarify how provisional and ambiguous perceptions of reality are. I note these positions here, however, not so much to plunge into their midst as to put them aside. The point of interest here has a relation to such arguments, but is not of these. What was foregrounded through the numerous responses to the invasion of Iraq, including the literary, was the idea of its reality as an event – the conceiving and anticipation and realization of its enormity, its materiality, its real violence, the unquestionable visceral and tangible reality of it. The need to explain its causes and consequences, to justify or denounce it, to come to terms with it arose from this apprehension of its imponderable reality. The idea of its reality was actually a kind of obstruction to the smooth flow of lives and communications and thoughts at various levels. It was an obstruction to all kinds of political and social norms and assumptions. It interfered with the unthinking sense of normality and everyday life that prevails generally in various places. It placed an unwieldy burden amidst institutional and bureaucratic processes. The idea of its reality just stuck out, so to speak, and couldn’t be contained by reasoning and discussion and description. Understandably, the idea of the imponderable reality of this invasion fed into literature’s relation to the world, from whatever position. The reality of it was unavoidably both talked about in literary texts and impinged upon the forms of literary texts. The first question I was asked when I put this thought about the sense of reality of the Iraq invasion to a colleague was whether it differed from any perception of great violence – say, the 11 September 2001 terrorist attack in New York? With a long view of history there probably isn’t much to differentiate the unwieldy idea of reality that attends perceptions of large-scale violence; quite possibly there are analogues to be found across the literature addressed to any such violence (invasions, wars, genocides, terrorist attacks, riots) and that addressed specifically to the invasion of Iraq. In fact, the literary texts I cite below constantly reiterate such analogues. But my project here is not to do with the enormous historical sweep of literature’s relation to large-scale violence (that would be an ambitious project), but to do with the specifics of the recent period of invasion and the relevant literature – with a contemporary reckoning. Unmistakably though, there is a particular tilt to that question in offering another specific, and quite clearly related, incidence of large-scale violence to hold against the case in point here. The question sought (an implicitly political search) a balance of focus: it was an implicit reminder that if this is to be examined in specific detail then



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so should that alongside. But I do think that the ideas of reality for the two instances are different and have a different bearing on literature, worth considering independently of each other. The 11 September 2001 attacks were a shock. It was a shock of, let’s say, the sudden and unexpected explosion of the reality of large-scale violence. All the narratives of it, all the explanations and accounts and media frames and moral judgements and political engagements and expressions of feeling were after the fact of the shock of its reality. In a way, all those were modes of absorbing the idea of its reality and fitting it into life and the world after the fact. For the invasion of Iraq all the narratives along all those lines were anticipated and initiated and undertaken before the invasion actually started. All explanations and accounts and frames and expressions had already been applied in anticipation, and could only be repeated and reiterated as the invasion took off and followed a predictable path. The chronicle of the invasion of Iraq was a chronicle foretold intensively and insistently. Every minutiae and possibility was already anticipated, and in a way already spent. The effect was not of absorbing the idea of its reality into life and the world after the fact, but of pushing that idea of reality ever more starkly to the fore – so that it acquired a kind of phenomenological insistence. The shock here was in the gradual crystallization of that idea of reality without any kind of narrative closure, while for the 11 September 2001 attacks there was a steady proliferation of attempts at closure (however inconclusive) after the shock. The idea of reality attached to the invasion simply kept sticking out more and more sorely, kept obtruding with increasing emphasis. Nevertheless, it is now customary to see everything after 11 September 2001 as an unravelling singularity characterized as the ‘post-9/11 world’, and the sense of reality of the Iraq invasion has been fitted in accordingly. This has occurred in literary terms too, as I shall note where relevant in subsequent chapters. The unwieldiness of the idea of reality with regard to the Iraq invasion in the midst of political and ethical discourses, bureaucratic and institutional processes, and for a range of media and communications, has been widely discussed in various kinds of texts. Literary texts have contributed to those discussions. More importantly perhaps, literary texts have accounted the imponderability of the idea of reality here in relation to that which is least tractable in reportage and informational writing: the everyday life of ordinary persons, in the midst of habitual day-to-day existence. In the texts discussed below, the idea of reality interferes constantly and is shown as interfering constantly in the depicted and expressed lives and days; and that interference of reality




Imagining Iraq

troubles the very substance of literature. Numerous poets attest to such interference amidst their immediate environments in Northern America or Britain, the nagging reality of a distant invasion. In most that irritation turns into introspection on poetry and being a poet. Novels and plays often register the invasion as an eruption of the idea that the invasion is really happening in the midst of families and lovers and friends going about their daily lives. It leads to bitter domestic squabbles in McEwan’s Saturday (2005) and Hare’s The Vertical Hour (2008, first performed in 2006). It cuts into friendships in Oglesby’s US and Them (2003) and Baker’s Checkpoint (2004). In Cicero’s The Human War (2003), two youngsters pause in mid-coitus as the invasion of Iraq is about to be launched on 20 March 2003: ‘People are going to die in a little bit and we’re fucking,’ I said. ‘What else can we do?’ ‘I don’t know, it just feels like there must be something we should be doing.’ ‘All we can do is fuck.’ ‘But we’re having so much pleasure, and people are going to be suffering so intensely in just a little bit.’ (p. 22) On a related note, perhaps the most telling achievement of Salam Pax’s and Riverbend’s blogs from Baghdad is that they were able to convey both the everyday reality that was disrupted by the invasion and insert the disrupted everyday reality of the invasion amidst distanced reckonings in the UK and USA. Their own analyses of developments, often responsive to international media coverage, were framed comprehensively by detailed narratives of lives and days in Baghdad – their own and others’. And on a slightly different note, the boundaries between the texts that ostensibly record and report reality (news reports, minutes, press briefings) and literary texts that ostensibly construct plausible fictions were sometimes deliberately blurred. The expectations, in other words, of literary reality and historical reality were not only brought together (that happens often in various kinds of historical fiction, for instance), but were played against each other to shake preconceptions about both in an immediate way. Thus, David Hare’s play Stuff Happens (2004) and Richard Norton-Taylor’s Justifying War: Scenes from the Hutton Inquiry (2003) incorporated texts that audiences and readers who had followed the news would have been familiar with.



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The following five chapters follow a fairly conventional mould. Each is devoted to a specific genre of literary texts of the invasion of Iraq: two chapters on poetry (one on anthologies and one on individual collections), and then one each on theatre, fiction and blogs respectively. The concluding section in the final Chapter 6 takes account of some of the relevant literature in languages other than English. In view of the above observations my adherence to generic distinctions appears artificial at times. And yet, these are useful devices for approaching the field, since the field is structured by authors, markets, producers, disseminators, audiences and readers, and critics who presume the efficacy of such generic divisions. In each chapter the focus is on specific texts rather than on authors and their bodies of works. Chapters discuss how and why the texts in question appeared, the material forms in which they appeared and the manner in which they were received, what may be inferred from them given the context, and how they may be brought to bear upon each other. The characteristics of contemporary literature in general are kept in view as the texts are discussed, and occasionally future directions are gestured towards.



The idea of the reality of the invasion of Iraq appeared in revealing ways in almost all the literary works of the period which referred to the invasion.

‘Laws’ for Poets: Poetry Anthologies

A special relationship Immediate literary responses to the imminent invasion of Iraq came in the form of poetry in early 2003. Among literary forms, poetry appears in the course of the twentieth century to have formed a special relationship with war and pacifism. In resorting to that special relationship, poetry both constructs perceptions of that which is addressed as ‘war’ and constructs perceptions of itself as ‘poetry’. This chapter examines some of the poetry that appeared in the context of the Iraq invasion along these two-fold lines. First and foremost, poetry seems to emphatically register the idea of the reality of war. In the previous chapter I have dwelt briefly on the idea of reality that appears in relation to the Iraq invasion in literary texts. By and large poetry does not detail or debate the causes of armed conflicts, or consider definitions and distinctions and measures involved in understanding war, or weigh the strategies and technologies that operate therein. Other kinds of literary texts might, but poetry does so seldom. Rather, poetry simply recognizes the condition of war as real in a denunciatory or celebratory (increasingly rarely) or indifferent (very rarely indeed) spirit. Poetry appears, so to speak, in relation to war after arguments and analyses of war or despite arguments and analyses of war, to assert the reality of war in itself – the stark condition of war stripped of political and economic and academic considerations. It presents war as a sort of transcendent condition. Arguably, in homing in thus on the reality of war, poetry actually cultivates and propagates a rather abstract and decontextualized apprehension of war. I return to this below. I have observed above that the invasion of Iraq was so intensively debated and analysed before it was launched that ways of coming to 32



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terms with it seemed exhausted. The frames of explanation and analysis were all out there already well before it started, and nothing new in that direction could be anticipated. Consequently, the stark reality of it was felt all the more sharply. Recourse to poetry’s apprehension of the condition of war was perhaps particularly apposite under the circumstances. On the day the invasion of Iraq started Richard Falk wrote a poem, ‘The Iraq War Begins’, with a careful note of the date and place of composition alongside the title: 13 March 2003, Hopkins, Belize. It was published in June 2004 in a special issue of Legal Studies Forum, a law journal, carrying poems by lawyers and edited by James R. Elkins. The special issue might strike some as an oddity, but a substantial introduction by Elkins makes a good case for taking poetry by lawyers seriously, noting that the issue brings together: ‘men and women drawn by fate and disposition to be poets and lawyers, and in being both, embodiments of both the perceived and real tensions found in law and in poetry as well as between law and poetry’ (Elkins 2004, pp. 8–9). That one of these is a famous professor of international law with numerous scholarly books on war, but with no published volume of poetry and no significant reputation as a poet, presenting a poem on war might strike some as odd too. But in this instance and on this theme this is in fact more understandable than it might have been otherwise. Falk appears to be distributing tensions between law and poetry (to give Elkins’s words a twist): he takes recourse to poetry at the moment when all the arguments which he, possibly more than most, had contemplated and debated seemed to be inadequate and finished – when there was nothing else left to do but register the reality of the invasion in itself, in poetry. It seems to me particularly indicative that someone who makes arguments and reasons and analyses of war his business should choose at that moment to turn to poetry. It is a poem which strikes notes which are all too familiar: it registers the reality of war in contrast to the poet’s distant position in Belize, it denounces the perpetrators, it gestures to the suffering of war, it bemoans the contemporary ethos – all notes already struck copiously by poets at the time. It also, more interestingly, touches directly on the defeat of debate and analysis that takes recourse to poetry, or leads to this poem, by noting the alternatives left in verse: As terror strikes Baghdad Some bemoan our helplessness Others remain silent and afraid Others get lost in maelstroms of news



‘Laws’ for Poets: Poetry Anthologies 33

Imagining Iraq

Others write their congressperson Others seek the solace of God of prayer Others, a rare few, bear witness in Baghdad Others breathe deeply the thrill of war Thrilled by patriotic songs and victory promises Others abide the purity of mountain lakes. (Falk 2004, p. 494) And, by implication, Falk the scholar of international law and war writes this poem. Of the alternatives left when the invasion of Iraq starts, Falk’s poem suggests, writing poetry is one. Let me note the therapeutic function that Falk allocates to poetry and that Falk performs for himself in writing this, and move on. That poetry is commonly regarded as medicine for the metaphysical wounds of war is often noted – it was one of Paterson’s themes in dismissing the ‘chicken-soup anthologies’. But that it is so undeniably says something about how poetry is regarded now, which is not a shallow matter. It needs unpicking. It has something to do with the poetic register for addressing war that has developed and now prevails, a register which seems to apprehend the condition of war as a superseding reality. It calls for closer attention to the poetry in question rather than dismissal, however uneven that poetry may seem to guardians of quality and taste. As I said, though Falk’s poem was written at the onset of the invasion it actually came late and repeats poetic strategies already numerously deployed. The tone was set in a series of anti-war poetry anthologies earlier in 2003. More complex engagements with the invasion of Iraq in poetry followed in the form of individual collections. I proceed to examine these in that order: focusing on some anthologies in this chapter, and then on certain individual collections in the next.

Three anthologies Three anthologies of anti-war poetry appeared in quick succession and circulated widely in early 2003 amidst the unfolding drama of moves towards invasion, UN weapons inspections in Iraq and increasingly fraught UN Security Council debates, some of the largest protest marches ever seen and other mobilizations. The anthologies were among the latter and meant to contribute to what was understood as an anti-war movement. These anthologies were actually crystallizations of



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more dispersed manifestations of protest through poetry: an immense number of poetry readings, individual poems and selections of poetry published in various magazines and journals and newspapers, recitations amidst protest gatherings, and networks of poets in electronic forums lay behind them. Charting the various spaces where poetry swirled around these anthologies and tracking the passages of poems which made their way into these anthologies would be a daunting enterprise – one that I won’t attempt here. An impressionistic sense of those can be obtained by focusing on the texts of these anthologies and on what was involved in their realizations and receptions. The earliest of the three anthologies was 100 Poets Against the War edited by Todd Swift and released as an electronic ‘chapbook anthology’ for free download on the Nth Position website www.nthposition.com on 27 January 2003, after an appeal for contributions on 20 February. Two further editions of this followed in quick succession, 100 Poets Against the War Redux (3 February 2003) and 100 Poets Against the War 3.0 (10 February 2003), French and German versions became available within the month, and it was published in book form by Salt publishers in early March. Poet Sam Hamill requested contributions of poetry protesting against the invasion in late January 2003 and received responses from 11,000 poets; organized (through the website www.poetsagainstwar. org) a day of anti-war poetry readings in the USA and elsewhere on 12 February; and arranged for a collection of 13,000 ‘peace poems’ to be handed to various government representatives on 5 March. A selection of the ‘best’ from these, edited by Hamill, was published in April 2003 by Thunder’s Mouth Press and Nation Books. Publishers Faber and Faber released an anthology entitled 101 Poets Against War on 19 February 2003, put together by editors Matthew Hollis and Paul Keegan, both employed at the firm, and with an Afterword by then British poet laureate Andrew Motion. Each appeared with stories framing them – stories told by the editors, reported in the media, circulated in poetry circles, launched through publicity drives – which gave them both a kind of unity in the context and more importantly distinguished them. Other anthologies which appeared in the same period but circulated more locally should also be noted: Enough (London and Scalapino eds, 2003), Raising Our Voices (Poncy and McLean eds, 2003) and D.C. Poets Against the War (Browning, Elliott and Rose eds, 2004). On the front of similitude, the framing stories for the three anthologies I focus on here were united in drawing attention to the speed of their coming together and the scale of texts involved – the numbers received and selected from and circulated. In the introduction to 100 Poets




Imagining Iraq

Todd Swift observed that: ‘it may hold the record for being the fastest assembled global anthology […] Only the speed of the Internet, and the overwhelmingly positive support of so many poets, who shared the project with their colleagues and personal networks, could have made it happen’ and noted that ‘many fine poets could not be included’ (Swift ed. 2003a, p. i). By the second edition a week later Swift was speaking of the speed of its circulation and reception too: ‘Never before has a book travelled the globe so quickly. […] Our DIY chapbook has become part of various peace demonstrations and rallies world-wide, from Oxford to Seattle. And all this week, hundreds of new poems, from Gambia to China, kept arriving by email’ (Swift ed. 2003b, p. i). The introduction to the third another week later reiterated the growing ‘global’ scope and speedy reach of the enterprise. Hamill’s introduction to his Poets Against the War made similar claims of speed, scale and reach, and was similarly grateful to the resources of the Internet: Between the last week of January and the end of February, poetsagainstthewar.org became host to several historic moments: Never before in recorded history have so many poets spoken in a single chorus; never before has a single-theme anthology of this proportion been assembled; never before had such a wide-reaching national – and eventually global – ‘Days of Poetry Against the War’ been organized. (Hamill 2003a, p. xvii) The published anthology featured 73 poems from the field of over 13,000 which Hamill received. The Faber anthology 101 Poems also came with framings of speed and scale written around it, albeit in a different vein. It was reported that: The Faber poetry editors Matthew Hollis and Paul Keegan spent every evening and weekend for three weeks locked away with piles of slim volumes. ‘We ploughed through two and a half thousand years of war poetry in that time,’ said Mr Hollis, ‘and not just from the English-speaking world. Other anthologies have tended to focus on poets who write in English, but we were keen to give it an international feel.’ (Patterson 2003) A BBC report observed that, ‘It is reputed to be one of the fastest productions of a new book’ (BBC 2003b), taking three weeks from editing being initiated to appearing in print. Speed and scale in this instance were evidently not due to the Internet but due to corporate will.



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Here then was poetry on a war-footing. The framings of speed and scale seemed in tune with the urgency of the moment, with the feeling that invasion was speeding up and an intervention against invasion needs to be equally speeded up. The rhetoric of ‘war’ itself (which is how the invasion was registered and narrated) is coextensive with faster speed and larger scales in various ways. War seems to involve concentration of time and scale: movements are speedy, communications are speeded up, technologies of speed and mass effect are developed/deployed, mobilizations of large scale take place, weapons are unleashed in large quantities, mass casualties occur, the dissemination of information becomes both faster and voluminous, and correspondingly anti-war gestures make sense only if they come with speed and on a massive scale. The scaling up of anti-war gestures before the invasion of Iraq was in terms of both mass and speed: a concentration of the largest protest marches ever happening simultaneously around the world, alignments of the most diverse and dispersed and multitudinous interest groups being coordinated at dazzling pace, the speeding up and increasing quantity of information and news to be assimilated and analysed. Similarly, and as a subset therein, the writing, circulating, collecting, sieving, publishing, downloading and consuming of poetry against the war also speeds up and intensifies – hoping thereby to form another effective counter to the idea of war itself, simply by dint of its quantitative and urgent volume. So, it might be felt, these anthologies are crystallizations of poets and poetry responding to the scale and speed of impending war appropriately. Equally though, it might be felt that this kind of scaling up and speeding up of poetry is perhaps not simply responsive to impending war; perhaps the relationship can be seen just as plausibly as symptoms of an underlying social condition. In other words, perhaps the social circumstances which accommodate the scale and speed of contemporary war also enable the scaling up and speeding up of poetry, of literature generally, now. It is quite possible that perceptions of quantitative leaps of speed and scale are aspects of a modern condition of society within which war (especially) and literature and many other aspects of human existence (economic, political, technological, communicative etc.) are comprehended, so that they all urge each other on in a mutually responsive and impelling dynamic. Such an idea, at any rate, is pondered in several texts by philosopher Paul Virilio. Virilio observes variously that in the twentieth century an abstract impulse of ‘pure war’ or ‘total war’, attended by the dominance of what he calls the ‘military classes’, has fed into technological development, processes of corporate production, functioning of media, artistic




Imagining Iraq

output, and indeed into all areas of professional and everyday social life. The effect has been of a continuously accelerating sense of speed and concentration of scale, with a consequent diffusion of conventional measures of time and space. Virilio suggests that thereby a militaristic bent has become embedded in the civilian sphere now: All of us are already civilian soldiers, without knowing it. And some of us know it. The great stroke of luck for the military class’s terrorism is that no one recognizes it. People don’t recognize the militarized part of their identity, of their consciousness. (Virilio and Lotringer 1997 [1983], p. 26) These might sound like rather intangible suppositions, but they are suggestive and worth pondering in this context. The expeditious means through which the anti-war anthologies mentioned above appeared were not simply because there was an immediate political eventuality to respond to; it was also because those means and a familiar way of engaging war already coexisted at the service of poetry – of literature – to be drawn upon. Perhaps such means and approaches are now continuously on the hob in literary production, circulation and consumption, but are usually perceived only in a blurred fashion, or neglected. It may be that the context of the invasion of Iraq merely brought into sharp focus something that is the underlying reality of how poetry – literature – works largely these days. Possibly, the matters of the speed and scale of anti-war anthologies have to do with the prevailing inadvertent and advertent democratizations and alternative spaces of literature which I considered briefly in the previous chapter à la Paterson’s lecture. I offer these thoughts tentatively here and they are no more than speculations. The similarity of the three anti-war poetry anthologies in question end there; the other nuances of their framing stories differentiate them. The framing stories simply put Swift’s and, particularly, Hamill’s anthologies on one side and the Faber anthology on quite another. I have gestured towards this already: Swift’s and Hamill’s anthologies appeared as ‘collective action’ through poetry and the Faber anthology as a result of corporate enterprise. This is indicated by the titles: the former anthologies are addressed ‘against the war’ – the specific situation marked by the definite article – while the latter ostensibly speaks ‘against war’ in general. Hamill’s anthology was initiated not just against the war but on account of an incident. As was reported in newspapers at the end of January 2003, and as Hamill says in his introduction to the anthology,



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the whole business began with an invitation from First Lady Laura Bush to a poetry event in the White House slated for 12 February 2003. Hamill had decided to use the event to read anti-war poetry without realizing initially that the event was meant to discuss the poetry of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Langston Hughes. When the White House realized that anti-war sentiments may crop up at the event it was postponed indefinitely and Hamill was, so to speak, ‘disinvited’ with the following explanation: ‘While Mrs. Bush respects the right of all Americans to express their opinions, she, too, has opinions, and believes it would be inappropriate to turn a literary event into a political forum’ (Noelia Rodriguez, spokesperson for Laura Bush, quoted in The Guardian, 30 January 2003 – see Left 2003). The process of collecting poems outlined above followed, with 12 February being turned as a consequence into a Poetry Against the War Day. The symbolic resonances of a rejection of specifically anti-war poetry from the White House itself were not lost in the context of broader anti-invasion mobilizations. Hamill’s anthology was thus seen as both a manifestation and an outcome of a ‘global peace movement’ and was used as such in public events: as petitions against the invasion, as enabling an anti-invasion networking forum through the website www.poetsagainstthewar.org. It was widely discussed accordingly in the news media, and Hamill became a public figure who was frequently interviewed. As is worthy of such successful mobilization, it prodded attempts at setting up a www.poetsforthewar.org forum (as this is written in late 2009 the website has been withdrawn, while Hamill’s website is going strong), and the Wall Street Journal organized a ‘Poets For the War Day’ on 12 February 2003 too (a selection of the results is available, made by James Taranto 2003). Swift’s 100 Poets in their several editions were each conceived as direct contributions to a political moment and deliberately targeted to anti-invasion protests. The first edition was timed, as Swift noted in his introduction, to coincide with the day when Hans Blix delivered his first weapons inspections report to the UN; and in the second Swift expressed sympathy with Hamill’s efforts. As against these collaborative and collective efforts in response to an immediate impulse, the Faber and Faber anthology 101 Poems was accounted as a corporate effort, an initiative of the reputed publishing firm. A report in The Independent announced it in the following words on the day of its publication: It was conceived by the chief executive, Stephen Page, who returned from his Christmas holiday determined to respond to the signs of war.




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That it was conceived by a chief executive and edited or executed by two employees of Faber and Faber seemed to push it unusually as a corporate inspiration in the sphere of poetry – a ‘passionate piece of publishing’ is an unprecedented appeal for a poetry book. The Afterword by Andrew Motion seemed (and was positioned) almost like an afterthought. It was evidently designed to fit Faber’s 101 series, which already included volumes with themes such as ‘happy poems’, ‘humorous poems’, ‘very short poems’, ‘poems to remember’, ‘poems to be heard’. The theme of war, however, seemed an opportunistic departure in this upbeat series. For an anthology that was received as an intervention against the invasion of Iraq it was actually remarkably circumspect about mentioning the invasion directly: none of the poems it includes does so, and nor does the blurb on the dust-jacket. It was left to Andrew Motion to do so in the last paragraph on the last page of the book: ‘This anthology would be significant whenever it were published. The fact that it appears now, with the world on red alert and the West threatening to invade Iraq, gives it a special value and poignancy’ (Motion 2003, p. 137). And yet, there was no mistaking its positioning within the context of the invasion: the timing, the speed of production, the inclusion of poems which had appeared as anti-invasion in newspapers, the studied inclusion of ‘Arabic poets of today’ (as the blurb did make a point of mentioning) were clearly to the purpose. And yet, there was no saying that the invasion was in view: it was barely mentioned, it wasn’t given as a context, the selection of poems from classical antiquity to the present appeared in no particular order and with no rationale for choices. Swift’s and Hamill’s anthologies and the Faber anthology therefore appeared and were received as quite different texts though answering to the same context, and accordingly I address the first two together and the latter separately from them. Swift’s 100 Poets and Hamill’s Poets Against appeared to be deliberately following a well-trodden path of contextually responsive war poetry anthologies. The poems they selected referred back often to other wars – ancient and mythical wars, the First World War and occasionally the Second World War, most emphatically the Vietnam War, and wars in the interim (in the former Yugoslavia, the Iraq–Iran War, the



The book is, he says, ‘a passionate piece of publishing that responds to a change in the world at large … Writers and especially poets have always had strong views on the human experience of war, and we sought to gather them into this volume.’ (Patterson 2003)

Gulf War) – and, more importantly, used rhetorical strategies and poetic devices which recalled past efforts. But this was not just a matter of what specific poems did. It was a matter of the act of anthologizing poetry or of the poetry anthology as a composite text in response to war. Let me make that emphasis clear: the issue here has to do with what an anthology in relation to war signifies now, to some extent irrespective of what it contains (the drift of which can usually be anticipated fairly plausibly, and which is always a surfeit and difficult to assimilate), and entirely irrespective of who is anthologizing (that doesn’t matter much). Swift and Hamill were recognized as worthy participants in the anti-invasion protests, but they were not really rated as anthologists – in the sense of employing the skills of anthologizing – or even seriously as poets. They became briefly representatives of poetry against war amidst other parties opposed to the invasion. Hamill’s standoff with the White House recalled for some Robert Lowell’s refusal to participate in the ‘White House Festival of Arts’ at President Lyndon B. Johnson’s invitation in 1965 in protest against the Vietnam War, and the support he garnered in that instance. But it was a similitude in gesture that was recalled, without impinging on assessments of Hamill as poet or as anthologist. However, the appearance of these anthologies was significant in literary terms. They were significant both because of the shadows of other anthologies behind/within them and because of their difference from forebears. From the friction between reiteration of past and uniquely addressing the present, these anthologies revised the prevailing understanding of anthologizing poetry in relation to war – and thereby arguably of how poetry in general is commonly understood now. The significance of poetry anthologies in relation to war has received a certain amount of scholarly attention. Several useful studies chart how such anthologies have constructed perceptions of war and the moral imperatives of war in influential ways by appearing when they did and approaching poetry as they did. That anti-war poetry in the modern sense is strongly associated with the soldier-poets of the First World War is too familiar an observation to need elaboration. Underneath that observation lie the processes through which those poets came to be seen as expressing a collective sensibility, most immediately an anthological process, i.e. one in which that sensibility is brought forth by simply reading them together. The soldier-poets of the First World War were themselves influenced by an anthological appreciation of poetry, and found their expressive mode with reference to the anthologized English canon of poetry. As Paul Fussell observes in his influential




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book on the First World War, ‘the Oxford Book of English Verse presides over the Great War in a way that has never been sufficiently appreciated’ (Fussell 1975, p. 159). The importance of anthologizing in understanding poetry’s relation to war, from the First World War onwards, is remarked in Brian Murdoch’s Fighting Songs and Warring Words (1990, pp. 6–13) and particularly in Hugh Haughton’s essay ‘Anthologizing War’ (Kendall ed. 2007, ch. 22). These demarcate several phases in the production of war poetry anthologies, which were often undertaken with a view to informing and intervening in discussions of ongoing or imminent wars. Thus, anthologies of the First World War and other wars appeared in the context of the Second World War in the 1940s, and then again in the 1960s: notably, for the former, Robert Nichols’s Anthology of War Poetry 1914–1918 (1943), Julian Symons’s An Anthology of War Poetry (1942) and Richard Eberhart and Selden Rodman’s War and the Poet (1945); and for the latter, the two anthologies edited by Brian Gardner, Up the Line to Death (1964) and Terrible Rain (1966), and Ian M. Parsons’s Men Who March Away (1965). These anthologies were not explicitly anti-war: the sufferings and inequities of war were registered amidst complex reflections on war. The selections and extractions and juxtapositions in these were designed to emphasize the extremities of experience and their expression in poetry, an aspiration succinctly expressed in Julian Symons’s preface to his anthology: ‘War poetry is not a specialized department of poetry; it is, as this book I hope faithfully shows, quite simply the poetry, comic or tragic, cynical or heroic, joyful, embittered or disillusioned, of people affected by the reality of war’ (Symons 1942, p. viii). However, as opposed to the jingoistic celebrations of heroism and sacrifice that dominated pre-twentieth-century war poetry these were principally characterized by their darkness. They contained an anti-war attitude without being pacifist. The anthologies made a point of presenting the work of soldier-poets, from the battleground, and also included other established and highly regarded poets. Anthologizing poetry in relation to war took a distinctive turn during the Vietnam War. This brings us considerably closer to where the matter rests apropos the invasion of Iraq, since the features of an explicitly and unambiguously anti-war or pacifist poetry appears here, involving a broader range of poets (not just soldier-poets and established poets) who produce collective or joint interventions in response to an ongoing conflict. The collective effort came to be accounted in terms of the impetus given by veterans (the salience of soldier-poets continued to be emphasized) and by identity-based political alignments (along the lines of race, gender and sexuality), and in terms of what was revealed of



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the American national psyche. Serious scholarly attention to Vietnam War poetry gathered pace comparatively late. When Michael Bibby published Hearts and Minds (1996) he prefaced his efforts by noting the ‘paradoxical silence’ which prevailed about this period of prolific poetry production, and the dismissive manner in which the poetry has been treated since. His approach to the area was structured by the ‘concern with issues of self-representation, identity and community’ (Bibby 1996, p. 4) he found therein, and accordingly he examined the poetry in relation to black liberation, women’s liberation and GI resistance. Subarno Chattarji’s thoughtful account of Vietnam War poetry that followed, Memories of a Lost War (2001), dwelt principally on veteran poetry. Both focused on the complexities of American society and politics, principally at the national level. The distinctive role of anthologizing anti-war poetry, of bringing together and selecting and juxtaposing such poems collectively, within the Vietnam War context has been given sustained attention in Philip Metres’s Behind the Lines (2007). Since, moreover, Metres does this with a broad post-1941 view of anti-war poetry (he calls it ‘war resistance poetry’), including coverage of such poetry in the context of the Iraq invasion, his approach to the matter is worth considering carefully. Metres registers the distinctive turn given to anthologies of antiwar poetry (with current resonances instated) in the Vietnam War period by recalling such anthologies – similar to Swift’s and Hamill’s in inclusiveness and purpose – as Robert Bly and David Ray’s A Poetry Reading Against the Vietnam War (1966), Denise Levertov and others’ Out of the War Shadow (1967), Todd Gitlin’s Campfires of Resistance (1971) and Larry Rottmann, John Barry and Basil T. Paquet’s Winning Hearts and Minds (1972). With particular reference to the first Metres observes: The mélange of sources in A Poetry Reading Against the War demonstrates the creativity with which poets and activists deconstructed the official narrative produced by the administration, showing how civilians attempted to know what they often could not personally witness; even if independent journalists, dissident intellectuals, antiwar soldiers, and government officials […] would later become crucial resources for the movement, in its historical moment. This anthology suggests that the truth was not just out there on the battlefield but also in the mainstream papers of the day. Second, the anthology presents itself as poetry for use, conceived as a kind of script or score generated from readings given by




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Interestingly, it becomes evident that Metres’s approach to these specific anthologies and anti-war poetry of the Vietnam War period generally is based on the idea of a kind of total anthology – what he calls a ‘potential archive’ below. The specific anthologies that Metres discusses are understood as extrapolations from this ‘potential archive’, and what is revealed through them applies to the whole. The following quotation reveals quite a lot about Metres’s method and assumptions in addressing anthologies specifically and anti-war poetry generally: The consensus view of literary criticism that the antiwar poetry produced during the Vietnam War – that it was forgettable, lamentable, or even dangerous – misses the cultural work which the rich archive of war resistance poetry contributed to and constitutes. This ‘potential archive’ […] – the sum total of war resistance texts that could be included in such an archive – consists of more than a catalogue of protests or statements against the war; rather, it is an ongoing poetic engagement with and window into the movement’s identificatory investments, its conflicted rhetorical address, its resistance to co-optation and commodification as war story, and its attempt to overcome its own conditions of marginalization (both from American political culture and from the war itself). […] Taken as a whole, the massive corpus of war resistance poetry from the Vietnam War challenges long-held assumptions about literariness, authority, and truth claims of poetry about war. (pp. 95–6) Metres locates in the Vietnam War anthologies, and coextensively in the ‘potential archive’, many of the features that characterize anthologies such as Swift’s and Hamill’s: the assertion of the civil and civilian sphere, the dislocation of authority from establishment poetry and battlefront experience, its ‘conflicted rhetorical address’ and purposiveness and ‘marginalization’ and interrogation of ‘official narratives’. Metres then proceeds to comment on anthologies of the Gulf War; these, in his view, ‘mark a continuity to war resistance during the Vietnam War and throughout the Cold War’ (p. 166). He also touches in the ‘Coda’ of his book on anthologies of the Iraq invasion. Metres too notes the importance of the Internet and the scaling up and speeding up of these, which to him ‘suggests a new relevance for what was commonly conceived as a moribund genre for activist ends’, and interestingly observes



American Writers against the War to enable other communities to create their own war resistance events. (Metres 2007, p. 6)

that these ‘anthologies became events-in-themselves, a documentary of their own documentation, a pulse of the moment, a movement within a movement’ (p. 223). And yet, Metres’s approach to the pioneering drives of Vietnam War poetry and development of anti-war poetry thereafter, including of the Iraq invasion, as a continuous sweep is incompatible with my approach here. That which enables Metres to build from specific anthologies and poems to a more holistic ‘potential archive’ of ‘war resistance texts’ of the Vietnam War and thereafter seems suspect to me: it seems to me that Metres is able to do this only because he has presumed a coherent pacifist ‘movement’. If some understanding of a continuum of anti-war or peace movement is given superlative status, then it makes sense to see certain texts as accruing under the aegis of that movement and giving substance to the movement’s drive. Equally, thereby these texts are fixed in their connotations in relation to such a superlative movement, and they become subject to it and narrowly expressive of it and little else. In other words, it seems to me that Metres’s approach constructs the pre-eminence of the movement by presumptively arranging his sense of poetry in relation to it: by setting up a historical sweep from specific texts to pioneering collections of texts to a ‘potential archive’ and onwards which are defined as of the movement – and which he then uses (in a circular way) to describe the movement. Notably ‘the sum total of war resistance texts’ of the Vietnam War serve to describe, in Metres’s view, the movement in an essentialized and singular way: the poetry describes ‘the movements’s identificatory investments … conflicted rhetorical address … resistance to co-optation’ etc. Metres turns anti-war poetry since the Vietnam War from a ‘catalogue’ to a description of the ‘movement’. In Metres’s view the anthologies of the Iraq invasion period are, as a step forward, both circumscribed by the movement and propelled by it: ‘a movement within a movement’. My interest here, as I have said, is in the implications of literary texts addressed to the Iraq invasion for literature itself; in the implications of the poetry of the Iraq invasion context for poetry in general; of literary anthologies then for literary anthologizing in general – and not in what they reveal specifically about the invasion or about the mobilizations against it. And also, the interest of this study is not in what they reveal about the politics of being for or against war as a decontextualized abstraction. It seems to me that anti-war anthologies such as Hamill’s and Swift’s are significant because they pull precisely in the direction of reconsidering poetry itself, beyond their immediate anti-invasion




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interventions. As it happens, the most efficient way to explain why that is so is by working through the kind of presumptions and methodologies that Metres draws upon, and yet against their grain. Swift and Hamill and most of the contributors to their anthologies and reviewers of these anthologies regarded themselves as participating in or contemplating a ‘movement’: a pacifist or anti-war mobilization relevant to and yet larger than immediate conflicts, much as Metres understands it. I have already noted above that that was the frame within which these anthologies appeared and circulated. It was expedient for them to do so because the concept of ‘social movements’ has gathered emancipative associations that are current and enjoy political currency. I have discussed in detail elsewhere how the concept of ‘social movements’ acquired such currency since the early 1980s, largely at the expense of conventional left-wing politics centred on the working class and by co-opting a range of identity-based political alignments and moves towards economic and political globalization (see Gupta 2006, ch. 8; Gupta 2007, ch. 5). I have also detailed in another study how literary texts reflect on concepts of social movements (including in relation to the Iraq invasion), and sometimes are seen as the fulcrum of such movements – as Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues (1998) is for what’s now known as the V-Day ‘global social movement’ to stop violence against women (see Gupta 2008, ch. 2). To start a movement (as Hamill apparently did), to be part of a movement (as Hamill’s and Swift’s anthologies were regarded as being), and to converge into a ‘movement of movements’ are now a received part of the emancipative political register (against every kind of repression, against global capitalism, against war, etc.). Literary writers and critics play their part in it: Swift’s and Hamill’s anthologies and the poets they feature, and Metres’s approach to ‘war resistance poetry’, are part of it. In the proud tradition of such social movements, their gestures and productions are received with hoots of disparagement by conservatives and representatives of the establishment. The kind of dismissiveness about Vietnam War poetry that scholars from Bibby to Metres note in the literary establishment – in critical responses and academic attitudes – was largely repeated in reviews of Swift’s and Hamill’s anthologies. Some of these reviews did them no disservice since they appeared predictably from exactly the opposed direction of conservative (neo-conservative) convictions. The longest of these came from the pens of J. Bottum in February 2003, who saw in such poetry ‘straightforward anti-Americanism – although that’s probably better put the other way around: Anti-Americanism translates straightforwardly into these befuddled and mutually contradictory protest



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what they are celebrating in these poems is a security for which they have to thank (horrors) the U.S. military and a prosperity that they owe to (horrors again) American capitalism. Entirely absent from their facile scribblings, indeed, is any sign of awareness that this ‘blue planet’ is a terribly dangerous place and that the affluence, safety, and liberty they enjoy, and that they write about with such vacuous self-congratulation, are not the natural, default state of humankind but are, rather, hard-won and terribly vulnerable achievements of civilization. (Bawer 2004, p. 739) They denounced the rudeness and lack of humility of the poets and anthologists, and said in many words what the Evening Standard report on Swift’s anthology observed in brief and more politely (thus repeating ad nauseam similar sentiments since the Vietnam War inspired anti-war poets): ‘But most of it, however righteous in sentiment, is lamentable in quality. There are, it seems, only a few ways to write a poem against the war and they soon become familiar’ (Sexton 2003). The sentiment apropos Swift’s anthology was to be taken up in a more protracted and belligerent fashion by Tim Kendall in his book Modern English War Poetry (2006), who also charged Swift of ‘vulgar opportunism’ and dismissed the anthology with the following words: ‘Does a book titled 100 poets against the war reveal, whether powerfully or poignantly or in any other way, the opinions of anyone other than its poets? If public opinion is strongly against a war, it hardly requires a poetry anthology to announce the fact’ (Kendall 2006, p. 240). On the whole, doubts or a dismissive attitude about the quality and effect of such anti-war anthologies were not confined to any ideologically defined party, and pretty ubiquitously held by reviewers and critics. Pronouncing on quality is the prerogative of authority – the critic’s, the reviewer’s, the established writer’s – and there is little to say about it. Most evinced little interest in the analytical possibilities that these anthologies raised (Metres has been the notable exception), as opposed to pronouncing judgement on them. Nor did the anthologists and poets concerned (many of them academics) worry about analytical possibilities particularly. All sides (including Metres) were too busy being for or against the movement or being authority figures sitting in judgement on contemporary poetry. The logic of the movement-absorbed environment has, however, brought about an interesting pass in these anthologies for the idea of



slogans’ (Bottum 2003), and Bruce Bawer in 2004, who derided the poets for not realizing that:

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poetry, the understanding of poetry in a general way now. As observed above, previously anti-war poetry had been refracted through the lenses of identity and political alignment. It was possible to uncomplicatedly consider the nuances of poetry in relation to war and assume a resistant stance because the poet identified herself and was identified by others in a certain way. The poetry was understood given that the poet’s voice or location is such. In other words, the resources of poetry were drawn upon, poetry’s enunciations were distinguished, according to the poet’s or audience’s consciousness of affiliation to some social alignment and the bearing that had on a condition of social conflict. This sense of affiliation enabled linguistic sensitivity, conformed to or tested the assumptions of linguistic usage, and suggested adherence to or departure from distinctive literary traditions – all pricks to poetry and grist to the mill of poetry. Anti-war poetry was the result of the poet’s or audience’s sense of identity and its troubled relation to war. Apropos an anti-war stance this worked in various ways: strongly in terms of allegiance to nation; powerfully also at times in terms of marginalization on the grounds of class, gender, sexuality, race, religion; and often in terms of professional experience (especially as soldier, but also as reporter, politically active intellectual, etc.). All of these worked clearly and well in the Vietnam War period – as the studies by Bibby, Chattarji and Metres show – and all these continue to be found frequently in the anthologies of the Iraq invasion. However, at each of these nodes there is also evidence of a diminution of strength or weight insofar as such allegiances mediate between the poetry and the apprehension of war. Put otherwise, the particularities of identity and community and affiliation continue to be deployed as before, but with less conviction or seemingly less relevance to what is at stake: the invasion of Iraq and poetry protesting against it. The early Vietnam War anthologies mentioned above were ensconced primarily within the American sphere and emerged with a sense of national circumscription. They were accounted accordingly by serious readers and critics, including by Metres (he sticks to the ‘American Homefront’). In Swift’s and Hamill’s anthologies, national perspectives are deliberately diluted: some poems may speak as such but they fit into or are fitted into what is conceived as a global movement, actuated by global communications in the age of the Internet. The politics of identity figured in different ways, with unavoidable emphasis on some claims and with surprising inattention to others. The politics of gender and sexuality were powerfully inscribed on the unfolding of the Iraq invasion: discussions in the West about Islam since 11 September 2001 have constantly focused on the position of women, and that simmered



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through the invasion period; the rhetoric of war came with gendered tropes of territoriality and patriotism, power and weakness, invasion and control; the images of torture and abuse in the Abu Ghraib prison that came to light in early 2004 seemed like shocking concretizations of gendered and sexual violence; and so on. Many of the poems in the anthologies drew upon the politics of gender and sexuality. The politics of race played a very subdued role in the invasion and in the anthologies. Unlike for the Vietnam War, there was no Jean-Paul Sartre (1974, pp. 67–83) here to controversially declare it a genocidal conflict, nor any popular retrospective ‘veteran’ perception of being ‘sent […] off to Vietnam/ To go and kill the yellow man’ (to quote Bruce Springsteen’s lyrics of Born in the USA, 1984). In any case, the politics of religion and the euphemisms of ethnicity – Islam and Middle East/Arab world – subsumed inklings of the politics of race: there was plenty of that in the poems too. Irrespective of such differentiations, there was little evidence of participation in Swift’s and Hamill’s anthologies in a distinctively identity-based way. There was no evidence of a perception that any identity-based inclusion should be particularly marked (unlike the ‘Arabic poets’ in the Faber anthology). And the reception of the anthologies didn’t perceivably approach the poems along identity lines either. The thrust of the anthologies was on creating an impression of unspecified democratic inclusiveness which made identity-based allegiances or interventions appear unnecessary. The politics of class has practically disappeared since the 1980s, and especially in the context of ‘social movements’; so, unsurprisingly, any hint of that was missing from the anthologies. In fact, political ideology other than in articulations of identity and nationality were generally absent: all the included poems could be broadly regarded as ‘liberal’ and opposed to ‘neo-conservatism’, but little appeared that could be thought of as revolutionary or anarchist, for instance. Many academics appeared as poets with their reputations known or their institutional affiliations and publications listed in Hamill’s anthology. So did ‘activists’ of different hues, including peace campaigners of old from the Vietnam War period. But these didn’t appear as a particularly distinguishable ideological sector of the anthology, nor did they present a noteworthy variegation of ideological positions. Anti-war soldier-poets of past conflicts, also going back as far as the Vietnam War period, made occasional appearances. Interestingly, though, neither these nor veterans of recent military actions in the Gulf War or in Afghanistan emerged as significant presences in these anthologies. And indeed, in the anti-war poetry that followed after these anthologies veterans and soldierpoets failed to make the impact they had in the Vietnam War period.




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The perceptual significance and power of testimony that soldier-poets used to bring to such anthologies seemed considerably diminished; these were really put out and received as of the civilian sphere. Of tangential interest on that last point: it is clear that the kind of sympathies and collaborations that developed between soldier-poets and civilian-poets in opposition to the Vietnam War (indeed from the First World War onwards) have not appeared in the context of the Iraq invasion. Various explanations for this can be suggested. Perhaps the civil and civilian sphere’s conventional regard for the military profession and its social role has changed. Perhaps the educational backgrounds and present modes of professionalizing soldiers somehow work against such sympathies and collaborations. Perhaps, with the experience of the Vietnam War in view, military administrators and governments have found ways of managing the post-conflict creativity of soldiers to avert embarrassment. I mention the former two possibilities in a purely speculative way, but for the last there is some evidence. On 21 April 2004 it was reported in the New York Times that the National Endowment for Arts will be setting up the programme ‘Operation Homecoming’, consisting of writing workshops for soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. The programme was a partnership with the Ministry of Defense and sponsored by Boeing (one of the companies that benefited from the ‘reconstruction’ contracts after the Iraq invasion). The writing workshops were to be held at seven military installations around the United States, and would lead to the publication of an anthology which would be widely distributed (Olsen 2004, p. 2). An article on this by Eleanor Wilmer in the journal Poetry expressed deep unease. She recalled the grassroots anti-war poetry anthology by Vietnam War veterans Winning Hearts and Minds (1972), and noted that ‘this project appears to be an attempt to preempt the immediate (and even archival) record of this war by its combatants’ (Wilmer 2004, p. 40), and that it ‘arouses suspicion about its ultimate purpose – doubts fed by its feel-good rhetoric, its slick packaging, its inimical setting, its timing, its cozy insularity, the vested interests of its sponsors’ (p. 42). The promised anthology Operation Homecoming appeared, edited by Andrew Carroll, in 2006, and a DVD of the same title was released, directed by Richard Robbins, in 2007. But back to the observation I was leading up to: in the Iraq invasion context, anti-war anthologies such as Swift’s and Hamill’s didn’t manifest significantly many of the markers of allegiance and affiliation – of nation, identity, community, profession – which were important in similar Vietnam War anthologies. Where the latter mediated poetry



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apropos war through an American sensibility, identity-based political allegiances, ideologically different alignments, the testimony and realizations of veterans, in the Iraq invasion context these had a muted role. Instead, the anthologies here deliberately embraced and were received as embracing the universality of a global social movement and of indiscriminate democratic inclusiveness. Through the Internet they circulated with corresponding reach. The removal of those mediating allegiances and affiliations meant that universal allegiance to humaneness and humanity at large was claimed – and that puts significant demands on the very idea of poetry. Poets are now put in the position of calling upon poetry for the sake of universal humanity and with regard to war in general, without comfortable recourse to specific traditions of poetry and particularistic discourses (languages in use) of allegiance and affiliation and ideology. Some pressing questions consequently arise: can current apprehensions of poetry sustain such a demand? Does a plausible understanding of universal poetry exist? Can anthologies realistically and meaningfully convey such an understanding of poetry? Can poets situate themselves as within or as part of a universal community of poets? In brief, is poetry a universal calling in a homologous way? Such questions are not unfamiliar in academic circles. It has been variously noted that Goethe’s old (1827) idea of ‘world literature’ seems to be making a comeback in literary criticism. Pascale Casanova in The World Republic of Letters (2004 [1999]) has proposed thinking of literature on a global scale as a competition between national literatures; Franco Moretti’s ‘Conjectures on World Literature’ (2000) takes a world-systems perspective of literature and proposes a concept of ‘distanced reading’; David Damrosch’s What is World Literature? (2003) offers a global view of literature in terms of texts crossing boundaries. A spate of anthologies of ‘world literature’ has followed. If a concept of ‘world literature’ can be entertained, then a notion of ‘world poetry’ or a universal sense of poetry may also be contemplated as a subset. But, as is necessary from a critical perspective, such formulations take a receptive view of literature: they consider ideas of ‘world literature’ given that there are literary texts available and moving and getting translated and read around the world. With a productive view the notion of subscribing to a universal form and expression is rare: poets, at any rate, are rarely called upon to think of writing poetry explicitly within a global fold, with a universal address, and in a concordantly collectivized manner. They may end up doing so, but it is rare to call on them to do so or for them to feel so called upon. In the context of responding against the Iraq invasion and with the prospect of appearing amidst a ‘global peace movement’ anthology, poets




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did feel so called upon. The result is that Swift’s and Hamill’s anthologies present poems with two kinds of thrust: first, the poems make an effort, in diverse ways, to assume a collective poetic voice or to appear as part of a universal collective of poets; and second, at the same time they are implicitly contemplative or reflexive about the function and nature of poetry in general. These thrusts are not so much talked about in the anthologies as performed in poetry, written as poetry. These are also contained in the poems’ framing within the anthologies, in their collocation there. And these thrusts are crystallized in terms of a direct relation of poetry in general to war in abstract – equally decontextualized form and theme which are confronted with each other, and which can find relevance in an immediate context. Poetry itself and war itself are at stake, but given a context-specific ring in view of the invasion of Iraq. The nuances of assuming or constructing a collective voice for poets, and reconsidering the resources of poetry, were not particularly pondered by the anthologists. Like the poets, they did what they could without explicitly thinking about it. However, there are slight but useful indications of the moves made between the Vietnam War anthologies and those of the Iraq invasion. Todd Gitlin, in introducing his Vietnam War poetry anthology Campfires of Resistance (1971), had briefly reflected on the ‘We’ who were being represented in it: There is a different We behind this anthology – a political movement. It is an ecumenical movement, operating in many arenas, often with different identities and priorities; maybe even the singular ‘movement’ is inexact, but underneath the differences and sometimes centrifugal motion there seems to me something of a common, though changing, identity. We have not only common enemies, but a sense of ourselves as united by bonds stronger than those of nation, class, origin, and organization. (Gitlin 1971, p. xv) This ‘We’ is of a political movement which chooses to take recourse to poetry, as it might to other modes of protest. Its political self-definition may rise above ‘nation, class, origin, and organization’, but only by apprehending their common purpose beyond those narrower divides in terms of those narrow divides; ‘nation, class, origin, and organization’ provided the definition of their rising above them. Gitlin’s is quite a different sense of ‘movement’ from Metres’s: Gitlin’s is a political movement, and the ‘We’ of it is not those who ‘lead good burgher lives’ or belong to a ‘comfortable coffee-table community of literate viewers with alarm’ (p. xv). Metres’s sense of the movement is not political in Gitlin’s exclusive way. With the



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Poets don’t have any corner on the truth, of course. But Shelley’s ‘Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’ may mean that the ‘laws’ poets follow and teach are laws of perception that underlie all ethical actions and institutions, including those of our Constitution and the ‘truths we hold to be self-evident’. (Barrington and Le Guin 2003, p. vi) This ‘we’ tries to assume not so much a political identity as one signifying a universal community of poets. It admittedly does so tentatively and impressionistically. But it is a noteworthy statement on both counts mentioned above: it endows universal poetry with a collective voice which the anthology articulates; and it contemplates fumblingly the deep ‘laws’ of poetry themselves (irrespective of whether they have to do with war) such that they can give substance to the status of this community. The implications of thinking about poetry and poets thus are of particular interest in this study, and I return to this below. The manner in which the poets sought to assume such a collective voice or contemplated poetry thus in their poetry is best demonstrated by a few illustrations from Swift’s and Hamill’s anthologies. A sampling of a couple of poems where this seems to me to happen in revealing ways follows, but with a few caveats. By choosing to focus on these poems I do not mean to highlight the quality of these poems or remark on their success or say anything about the anthologies in toto. A sampling can’t do that. Nor can my examples be thought of as representative of the plethora of ways in which poetry is articulated and voices assumed in these anthologies. My examples are simply a couple of particular ways in which that was done, to illustrate the argument I am making here. Consider, for instance, Michael Gould-Wartofsky ‘Poetry of Bodies’ in the Hamill anthology – the poet was introduced at the time as a 17-year-old high school student who ‘performs’ his poetry: I see a poetry of bodies Bowed down to the ground, then Rising to the sound of the beating of the heart of a heartless world that’s Starved for the sacred



inclusively pacifist sense of movement that dominated opposition to the Iraq invasion, here is another ‘we’ articulated by anthologists of anti-war poetry – not by Swift or Hamill, but by Judith Barrington and Ursula K. Le Guin in their anthology focusing on poets from Oregon:

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And in another part of this parted world, boys and girls are starved and naked Earth-scraping for something to stuff emaciated faces with Verse taken by the grace of the Master Race when Stumbling on the seeds of hatred, planted in forsaken places Leaving generations vacant Like the sand painted over with pavement, lands raped and Red stripes in the wake of the acid rainmaking There’s no poetry in the bodies stacked in mass graves and The bodies paying death’s wages sitting on their ass complacent Or marching with death without their goosestep breaking (Gould-Wartofsky in Hamill ed. 2003, p. 81) Here a series of counterpoints are set up around the neutral human core of ‘bodies’: everything is after the fact of the existence of ‘bodies’, some of which endure and some cause suffering, some of which are alive and some dead, some express poetry and some verse. The counterpoint between poetry and verse works by how bodies are disposed. Verse – which suggests (commonly, by dictionary definition) order, regularity, something less than poetry – is associated here: first, with phrases and images of deprivation (‘starved of the sacred’, ‘starved and naked’, ‘earth-scraping’, ‘leaving generations vacant’); second, with environmental depredation and destruction (‘forsaken places’, ‘lands raped’, ‘acid rainmaking’); and third, with political oppression and killing (the ‘Master Race’ that gives verse, ‘mass graves’, ‘paying death’s wages’, ‘goosestep’). The poetry which rises from and through counterpoints against those associations follows: But some bodies have awakened from the longest sleep Bodies fully human, no longer belonging with sheep I hear the living song as it leaps From the bodies in the throngs up the steepest mountain All along the peaks resounding A poetry of bodies seeping from the deepest fountain into the streets of our towns To put down the sweeps of those with skin colored brown and Drown the beat of the war drum’s pound And in the middle of winter, we’ve found the heat to surround (pp. 81–2) Poetry is associated here, in contrast to verse, with: first, health and life (‘awakened’, ‘fully human’, with bodies which ‘throng’ and ‘leap’, which



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are warm, sing ‘living songs’); second, with the natural environment (bodies emerging from mountains, peaks, fountains); and third, with political emancipation (of racial minorities with ‘brown skins’ as opposed to the ‘Master Race’, drowning out war drums). My systematizing of the parts and counterpoints of the poem around a neutral centre (‘bodies’) is, however, at odds with its effect in reading or being listened to. A steady employment of sound assonances has the effect of a sort of sprung rhythm fighting against irregular line breaks, as if the poetry can break into a steady chanting cadence but is held in check by the stated sentiments. The images and phrases in counterpoint actually don’t appear neatly in clear sequence or logical development, but are run into each other in the two sections of the poem. In the initial lines the associations of verse seem to collide into and feed each other, as do the associations of poetry in the latter lines to give the poem two distinct sections in counterpoint to each other. It is poetry that is heard more clearly than read, so that the concentration of images in the two sections, and the superlatives of the latter section (‘deepest’, ‘steepest’, ‘peaks resounding’), reminds of anthems and rabble-rousing speeches. There is a slight ironic touch, a flicker of a disquieting possibility, in the assonance between that quality ‘we’ve found’ and the ‘war drum’s pound’. Most importantly, though, it is through this performance of counterpoints that the poet is able to express, by poetry, a shift from the distanced individual ‘I’ which ‘sees a poetry of bodies’ in the first line to the collective ‘we’ which has ‘found the heat to surround’ in the last line. Experienced arbiters of high taste will no doubt find much to complain about in this poem – it may seem ‘overwritten’ or ‘naive’ or ‘sentimental’. My reading of it here is neither to defend it against such judgements nor to agree with such judgements: it is to demonstrate one distinctive way in which a poem in these anthologies both seeks to assume a collective voice of poetry and simultaneously to present an apprehension of poetry itself. To take another quite different instance in a similar direction, let me pause on Sandra M. Gilbert’s ‘January Meadow’ in the Redux edition of Swift’s anthology. Gilbert is a highly regarded scholar and poet and her name was likely to have been immediately recognized by many when the poem appeared. January meadow, Whistles and simmers in the low, south-sliding California sun, clack of crows in hedgerows, prickle of grasses still abiding




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winter pallor, silence of cypresses upholding sheaves of needles – here they are! – like gifts of darkness to a sky whose light’s so fierce and clear it arches like forever in the tiny shine of noontime minutes. The tree guy’s dragged and dumped the tree that toppled last week (when the power failed). Let’s gather sunshine now, lounge in the hot tub, tipple a little, watch the twelve o’clock news together – (peace marchers shouting in the city under a sky like this, so blue, so pretty …) (Swift ed. 2003b, p. 88) There’s an implied ‘we’ here too, in the invitation ‘Let’s gather/ sunlight now …’ – but this is a personal ‘we’, a domestic ‘we’ enclosed amidst the comforts of meadow and home. It is a personal voice which looks and feels here. The poem is about looking and feeling: the sensation of sound (‘whistles’, ‘clack of crows’ and ‘silence of cypresses’) and touch (‘prickle of grasses’) and, particularly, light. The arousing of the senses is carefully enacted in words, so that the physical presence of the persona who speaks and her intimate enjoyment of the space around her set the dominant note. The parenthetical last two lines are an interruption in the dominant note thus set up. It is perhaps a subdominant note, its muted but interfering position emphasized by the unnecessary brackets. The parentheses don’t mark a qualification of some clause, they just appear there both as an irresolution (the three dots of continuity followed by the closing bracket but without a full-stop after) and as a muting of this image of ‘peace marchers shouting in the city’. The muting and irresolution of the bracketed image however nags – the diminutive last two lines seem to unevenly stop the advance of the first thirteen, depart from the ‘January meadow’ which they were dwelling upon. The bracketed two lines, in other words, perform succinctly a series of crisscrossing connections. They emphasize the distance of the poet and her world from the peace march, and at the same time they indelibly interrupt there across that distance. The parentheses of the last two lines refer back to the previous and more necessary bracketed phrase – ‘(when the power failed)’ – a domestic inconvenience seems to be formally linked to this distant interruption. And yet along the triviality of that barely available connection unravels a poetic conceit to do with light. The power-failure suggests darkness and the peace marchers are in the light; the ‘fierce and clear’ light of the same sky that the poet has 10.1057/9780230298118 - Imagining Iraq, Suman Gupta


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above her extends in an obviously sympathetic way to them; and yet it throws an uncomfortable retrospective nuance on that paradoxical phrase amidst the poet persona’s comfortable dominant note – ‘gifts of darkness to a sky whose light’s / so fierce and clear it arches like forever’. A subtle twist of phrasing and syntax, in other words, leads the reader forwards and backwards over the poem to grasp the tentativeness of the poet’s view of the peace march. Through her very sensitivity about her distance and her world, through the slightness of her connection, a connection is established which disturbs her intimate domestic ‘we’. The poem doesn’t quite assume a collective voice, doesn’t seem sure that it can, but it nevertheless brings together a small-scale local ‘we’ to bear upon the peace marchers through the speaking/writing of poetry itself. In a quite different way from Gould-Wartofsky’s poem, it draws attention to the devices of the poem and puts the responsibility of that distant connection on those devices. To carry on picking individual poems and analysing them in this vein would be a protracted exercise – it would be useful and interesting but too protracted for this study. Some poets made the effort to assume a collective voice and contemplate poetry in equally complex ways and some in relatively simplistic ways. In Swift’s and Hamill’s anthologies very few didn’t. In many instances, the poems come from amidst a tranquil natural environment which is disturbed by awareness of the distant violence, rather like Gilbert’s poem. In his hostile review Bawer notes this: ‘A staggering number of poems here follow a single trite formula, presenting the news of war as an unpleasant intrusion upon an (American) life lived in harmony with nature and characterized by a taken-for-granted feeling of safety and tranquillity’ (Bawer 2004, p. 739). He sees these as instances of poets celebrating their (American) lifestyles, protected by American capitalism and military might. He could equally and perhaps more aptly have read these as poets feeling that something is tainted where they are accustomed to find poetry, tainted by the guilt of taking pleasure in their surroundings and in feeling that the reality of invasion has infected a happy illusion. In my reading, most such poems – and indeed there are many in the anthologies – were expressive of bewilderment at having lost some presumed deep connection between poetry and nature. In most this was expressed as a collective sensibility, as in Kim Addonizio’s (which Bawer quotes): […] Outside The gray doves bring Their one vowel to the air, 10.1057/9780230298118 - Imagining Iraq, Suman Gupta



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The same sound From many throats, repeated.

Bawer probably didn’t mistake the metaphor employed here (the doves of peace calling in one voice) for simply nature poetry; he chose to read it that way. What Addonizio’s poem does strike is a note of being stuck, like a broken record: beginning in the image of her daughter making origami cranes over and over again, then in the ‘one vowel’ of the doves repeated, and by implication like this poem in this anthology seeking collective affirmation of peace ‘from many throats’ making the ‘same sound’. If the reader were pernickety she might object that there’s an unsuccessful metaphor: doves always call in the same way, irrespective of context. If the reader considered the matter further she might argue that it doesn’t matter, what matters is what the poet hears in this context and because of it. Other poems in the anthologies choose the less complicated device of personifying or allegorizing poetry and speaking on its behalf. Some decide to take recourse to the style of lecture or reportage or simply prose disguised as barely plausible verse, gesturing towards the limits of poetry or these poets’ failure to find poetry in this context. Some decide to appeal to popular sentiment, falling on the resonances and inarticulateness of cliché as a shared mode. Many poems about the suffering of children fizzle away self-consciously on such plaintive and saturated chords: The death-dealers deserved to die, you say. Death is easy to pronounce. It’s the smell of burning children that’s hard. (Sampurna Chattarji in Swift ed. 2003a, p. 86) And so on. In a plethora of ways the poems in these anthologies attempt to give substance to a collective sensibility and in the process say something about poetry. The form of the anthology brings the poems together and juxtaposes them against each other to throw their different and yet joined up collective effort into relief. The different efforts to assume a collective voice acquire weight particularly in these collections, as collections. And it is consequently that a collective impression of poetry itself, clearly widely held and in various quarters, emerges in these anthologies. As anthologies these are expressions not just of pacifist sentiment, but of



(Hamill ed. 2003b, p.2)

the aptness of poetry itself for conveying such sentiment. That is the nub. With the dilution of the structures of identity and community, with the drive towards indiscriminate inclusiveness and decontextualized normativeness, with the gestures towards global address and universal poetry these anthologies embody a contemporary apprehension of poetry itself: that poetry is somehow constitutionally moral, moral in a pacifist direction within its deep structures and inspirations. In this collective effort there is a stark confrontation of war by poetry itself, without mediating contexts and affiliations and allegiances, because poetry is widely regarded as moral, peace-loving, the medicine for the ailment of war just by being poetry. These anthologies are not only anti-war: they are anti-war by being pro-poetry where poetry is understood as implicitly a pacifist medium. These anthologies can construct an anti-war stance – construct an oppositional apprehension of war in a decontextualized register – because the medium of poetry is by itself expected to carry that apprehension. Barrington and Le Guin’s conviction that ‘the “laws” poets follow and teach are laws of perception that underlie all ethical actions and institutions’ quoted above was not simply the anti-war activist’s or the anthologist’s wishful thinking. These anthologies show that this is a widely held notion now. There are, no doubt, dissenters against such a moral expectation of poetry in itself, but indubitably the very existence of these anthologies and their contents underline a prevailing moral attitude to poetry. In brief, the prevailing attitude is that poetry is good just as absolutely as war is bad. My task here is more to register this attitude rather than to argue for or against it: it seems to me to be a significant indication of a prevailing and current literary view. To be honest, this seems like a deeply questionable and irrational attitude. Perhaps the explanation for it is to be found in wider social processes: the replacement of ideological analysis by ethical judgement (usually as normatively unthinking as aesthetic judgement); the gradual devolution of human agency in favour of compliance with all-determining abstractions; the refraction of everything through consumable market- and media-friendly frames of moral polarities; and so on. Any such suspected explanation is, of course, no more than speculation which is unburdened here by a careful charting of attitudes to poetry in relation to social and historical changes. Such a charting is a prospective project. The point to note here is that the anthologies that appeared in the context of the invasion of Iraq, in response to it, crystallized this prevailing attitude. That occurred not simply in the spontaneous and immediate outpourings which were Hamill’s and Swift’s anthologies, but interestingly also in




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the deliberate corporate effort of the Faber anthology. A few notes on the Faber anthology serve to bring the argument of this chapter to a close. The Faber anthology 101 Poems Against War was probably not only the first to be produced as expeditiously as it was, it is also probably the first anthology ‘against war’ which strides across human history and continents. The forebears with similar ambition that come to mind (and I come to these soon) were anthologies of ‘war poetry’ or the ‘poetry of war’. It may also be the first anthology to do with war which presents its selection with no discernible ordering whatever: it is not chronological or periodized, it is not arranged according to country or language, and it presents no sequence of themes. No indication is given of the poets’ backgrounds or dates and the contexts of composition. It is not even alphabetically arranged by name of poet. No preface or introduction leads into it. The entire absence of any ordering or supplementary information is probably not the result of laziness (it could be, the volume was speedily put together) – possibly it is a statement of sorts. As a statement it could only be that such ordering is unnecessary because it distracts from what this anthology is about: war and poetry against war. The idea of war that is brought forth is as an abstract condition or state of affairs, one which needs no accounting in terms of history and agents and locations and is essentially always the same. The idea of poetry that is thus tacitly espoused is equally abstract, free somehow of the persons who wrote the poems and the societies and places and times in which they were written, and notable only because poetry is essentially an anti-war vehicle. The lack of ordering suggests that this essentialized formation of poetry has almost always and almost everywhere been directed against an essentialized condition of war. The anthological forebears of similar ambition that come to mind are Richard Eberhart and Selden Rodman’s War and the Poet (1945), Jon Stallworthy’s The Oxford Book of War Poetry (1984) and Kenneth Baker’s The Faber Book of War Poetry (1996). Though Eberhart noted in the preface to the first that there was only one poet (Friedrich Adolf Axel Detlev) included who ‘boasts of loving war’ (Eberhart and Rodman 1945, p. vii), it was clear that the great majority of poems in the anthology could not be described as anti-war in any currently meaningful sense. Nor could those in Jon Stallworthy’s, though he felt he could discern an anti-war tendency in war poetry: much – and most recent – war poetry has been implicitly, if not explicitly, anti-war. So long as warrior met warrior in equal combat



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with sword or lance, poets could celebrate their courage and chivalry, but as technology put ever-increasing distance between combatants and, then, ceased to distinguish between combatant and civilian, poets more and more responded to ‘man’s inhumanity to man’. (Stallworthy 1984, p. xix) His reader might argue that Stallworthy’s selection constructs the tendency rather than reveals it, and in any case he makes the tendency conditional to a perceived historical drift – from hand-to-hand combat to the war machine. Baker’s anthology was as circumspect and more studiedly rounded: among its many themes, ‘pacifism’ is allocated a bit more space than usual but not much more. It is clear to anyone acquainted with these anthologies that the Faber anthology owed something to them. Like those, it is a kind of canon-setting exercise, selecting from the work of the famous and the established. In the absence of ordering devices selections must have been made emphatically in terms of taste, following some invisible gauge like Matthew Arnold’s ‘touchstones’. Taste played an acknowledged part in those earlier anthologies; here it isn’t acknowledged particularly. It is doubtful whether there is much in the Faber anthology from before the Vietnam War which hadn’t figured in one or the other of the earlier war poetry anthologies. Like them too, the Faber anthology’s world-encompassing perspective is heavily weighted towards the European field and particularly towards the English. And similarly again, the selection is biased towards poetry of the twentieth century and since. It differs perhaps in being able to co-opt the newsworthily contemporary (a slight gesture towards the Iraq invasion context): Seamus Heaney’s ‘Testimony’, Saadi Youssef’s extracted poem from ‘America, America’, and Michael Casey’s ‘A Bummer’ had appeared side-by-side as ‘Three War Poems’ in The Guardian on 15 February 2003, and they all figured here. And the Faber anthology differs emphatically from its forebears in being announced on the front cover as ‘against war’; and the blurb on the back-flap asserts that ‘this anthology gathers moments of warning and protest from all corners of the earth: the times in which it was left to the poets to speak out against the true terror of war’. The cynical may have felt this was purely a marketing ploy to capitalize on the moment and let it go at that. The less cynical expressed their unease, starting with Andrew Motion’s Afterword within the covers of the anthology. He notes that the anthology effectively presents more complex reckonings with war in poetry than simply




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an anti-war stance, especially insofar as it extends before the First World War: ‘[…] sympathy, fear, dismay and sorrow do not form the whole of the story, as this anthology proves. Its disparate voices also celebrate, honour, prize and endorse’ (p. 135). Motion goes on to speak mainly to the post-First World War ‘modern war poems’ and leads up to his contextually relevant and definitely pacifist conviction that ‘we compromise, betray or wreck our selves when we take up arms against one another’ (p. 137). In a review David Wheatley stated the obvious when he observed: ‘The sombre truth, which 101 Poems Against War never entirely confronts, is that writing about conflict is at its most honest when it does not assume that literature will automatically be on the humanely right side, which is to say “our” side, no matter who “we” happen to be’ (Wheatley 2003). Whether in terms of design – there was design in having no ordering principles – or packaging, this anthology evidently subscribes to much the same widely held attitude that I have noted in Hamill’s and Swift’s anthologies: that poetry has a deep-seated moral content, which renders it pacifist in a natural way. But where the contents of Hamill’s and Swift’s anthologies gel with that conviction, give weight to it by the collective effort it contains, the contents of the Faber anthology contradict that preconception. In attempting to take a broader and wider view of poetry it reveals exactly the contradictions which Motion gestures towards mildly and Wheatley registers straightforwardly. The contradictions presented by the Faber anthology are not really to do with what is good or bad poetry; as before, it seems to me that quality is not the issue. It is misleading to think of Hamill’s and Swift’s efforts as simply containing indifferent poetry and therefore working as a simplistic anti-war statement, and the Faber anthology as determinedly sticking with proven quality and therefore introducing complexity at odds with its anti-war design and packaging. Hamill’s and Swift’s anthologies are of their moment; the voices in them are cohesive and responsive because of that; and their individual and collective thrusts therefore gel. The moral expectation of poetry is expressed consistently in them because the poems in them are of the present, and that expectation is of the present. In the Faber anthology, that moral expectation does not quite work because it is stretched impossibly. The design of the anthology is itself at odds with its contents. The design seeks to decontextualize poetry where most of the poems are so well known – carry so much contextual baggage – that they simply refuse to fit the design. By way of a brief demonstration of this let me pause on the first poem in the anthology (the problems start with the first poem).



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The first poem in the Faber anthology is Simonides’s well-known two lines ‘For the Spartan Dead at Thermopylai’ in Peter Jay’s translation (Hollis and Keegan eds. 2003, p. 3) – the two lines in which an understated voice requests a stranger to inform the Lakedaimonians that all who fought on their behalf now lie dead. It is given with a footnote: ‘In what was essentially a sacrificial stance, 300 Spartans filled the narrow mountain pass at Thermopylai in 480 BC in order to slow down the Persian advance into Lakedaimon; all were killed’. These two lines figure in similar anthologies of war poetry. Simonides’s poetry featured in Eberhart and Rodman’s anthology, and this poem was there in a translation ‘by various hands’ under the title ‘At Thermopylae’ (Eberhart and Rodman eds. 1945, p. 15). However, it appeared there alongside another one on the episode by Simonides, ‘The Thermopylae Ode’, which is a celebration of dying thus in battle, and begins: ‘For those who fell at Thermopylae / Their fortune is blessed and their doom is splendour’ (p. 15). Read together the anti-war resonance of the two lines seems very suspect. The two lines appeared by themselves in a translation by William Lisle Bowles in Stallworthy’s anthology (Stallworthy ed. 1984, p. 9). Perhaps it was the conjunction of Stallworthy’s stated sense, as anthologist, that ‘war poetry has been implicitly … anti-war’ and presence of this poem alone from Simonides in his anthology which encouraged the Faber anthologists to include it in theirs. As it happened, Stallworthy had also given these two lines a footnote: ‘At Thermopylae, a narrow pass between mountain and sea, 6,000 Greeks including 300 Spartans fought off a vast army of invading Persians in 480 BC’. Interestingly, this rather factual bit of information doesn’t have a sufficiently anti-war ring, and the note included in the Faber anthology upped the anti-war stakes by mentioning the ‘essentially sacrificial stance’ (‘sacrificial’ has indisputable normative content) and that ‘all were killed’ (and also forgetting the 6,000 Greeks). It is a small difference – but the note provides a subtle framing, and there isn’t much framing in the Faber anthology. Baker’s anthology simply chose the other one by Simonides mentioned above, the celebratory ode, under the title ‘The Greek Dead at Thermopylae’ (Baker ed. 1996, pp. 561–2). The Faber anthology takes the matter of packaging as far as possible to give Simonides’s two lines an anti-war flavour – every prerogative of the anthology is brought to bear on it, from cover to blurb to design to footnote. And yet, a little bit of context seems to twist things around. But the problem here goes deeper. In the context of the invasion of Iraq, presented by proponents constantly though mendaciously as a conflict between totalitarian Middle East and democratic




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West, between Islamist terrorism and secular civilized values, these lines and their reference to the standoff at Thermopylai in 480 BC present a deep irony as anti-war poetry. The battle of the 300 Spartans has been turned in the British and American imagination into precisely the opposite of anti-war feeling and especially in the Iraq invasion context. In William Golding’s early 1960s musings on the battle while visiting the spot, he imagined the Spartan king Leonidas as driven by ‘some inarticulate and bitter passion for freedom as he knew it’ (Golding 1965, pp. 16–17), and thought of the result as a future victory ‘for shining Athens and all Greece and all humanity’ (p. 20). His essay ended by quoting the two lines by Simonides. Golding was far from being politically right-wing in any coherent way, and the implicit Eurocentrism in evidence here is no doubt more the product of his education than of his politics. But the right-wing ideological possibilities of the battle of 480 BC have been exploited by right-wing artists in popular cultural forms. The 1962 film 300 Spartans, directed by Rudolph Maté, was recognizably meant to resonate with the Cold War context (just put communists instead of Persians). The 1998 comic book written and illustrated by the unabashedly Islamophobic Frank Miller imbued the historical event with every implausible normative polarization possible in the ‘West v. East’ mould. The 2007 film based on it, with Zack Snyder as director and Miller as one of the producers, was predictably nationalist and homophobic and an unapologetic celebration of war and killing – and, with the invasion of Iraq still in the air, was apt to be received as a sort of justification for it. Allusions to the battle of 480 BC in Thermopylai in the Iraq invasion context ranged from the beginning of Faber’s anti-war anthology to the celebration of war and the righteousness of the West in the film 300. It was the ironic common denominator in opposed points of the current cultural and political spectrum, one might say. But such contradictions in the Faber anthology are ultimately an academic matter. The anti-war packaging and design was successful in the market, and by November 2003 it had reportedly sold 35,000 copies (Stone 2003). It no doubt found readers who are already convinced of the ingrained moral pacifism of poetry. And that leads me to my conclusion, easily stated briefly. The poetry anthologies responding to the context of the invasion of Iraq that appeared in 2003 revealed a prevailing moral expectation of poetry in general, a conviction in the deep moral content of poetry in itself. This was evident in the manner in which a large number of poets widely dispersed sought to find a collective voice as poets and ponder the resources of poetry. This was also



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evident in the manner in which Hamill’s and Swift’s anthologies (and other similar anthologies) were framed by the editors and the manner in which they circulated. This was manifest in the kinds of uses that those anthologies were put to for protests against the invasion – the ‘global peace movement’. This was found at times in the kinds of associations those receiving them made in relation to earlier anti-war poetry. This was clear to corporations which deal in poetry, and marked by Faber’s packaging and design of their anti-war anthology. This was no doubt shared by those who bought it, consumers of poetry. In the process the anthologies both constructed the invasion as war and opposed the invasion as war.




Exacting World: Individual Poetry Collections

Anger and poetry Harold Pinter’s short collection of poems, War – which Paterson was to denounce as a ‘big sweary outburst’ – appeared in June 2003. It contained six poems already published in newspapers between August 2002 and March 2003 (during the build-up towards invasion), one from the 1991 Gulf War period (the controversial ‘American Football’) and one from 1997, and the text of a brief speech delivered in Turin in 2002. The ‘Turin Speech’, which decried the various iniquities of the United States’s foreign policy, works as a sort of framing device for the collection. Pinter had made other similar public observations in the interim. Notably, during the 15 February 2003 peace marches in London he issued a characteristically scathing statement (BBC 2003a) on the US and UK governments’ interventions in other countries. A poetry reading by Pinter to mark the appearance of War at the National Theatre, London, on 10 June 2003 was followed by a conversation with Michael Billington during which he compared the US’s foreign policy to that of ‘Nazi Germany’ and dubbed British Prime Minister Tony Blair a ‘deluded idiot’ (Chrisafis and Tilden 2003). There was no mistaking the political sentiments underlying War. Reviewers and literary critics queued up to savage the collection, usually with an air of taking issue with its poetic qualities rather than its political purpose. BBC’s Newsnight Review of 16 June 2003 brought together literati and cultural gurus Mark Lawson, Bill Buford, Germaine Greer and Mark Kermode to discuss it, and they denounced it with one voice. Buford found it to be ‘narcissistic’ and a ‘hysterical rant’, which was neither witty propaganda nor agonized witness poetry as war poetry should be; Greer opined that ‘these are not poetry’ because ‘strong feeling does not create a poem’ and ‘A poem is 66



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a living entity in itself. It has its own biology, its own laws’; Kermode declared the book ‘infantile facile waffle of the highest order’, ‘sixthform poetry’, which ‘tars the people who have a completely legitimate, intelligent, sensible grievance against Bush and the war’ (BBC Newsnight Review 2003). Noel Malcolm’s review in The Telegraph found few of the poems worthy of attention, because in most ‘Harold Pinter has actually written war poetry in the narrow and unusual sense of the term – poetry expressing bellicosity’ (Malcolm 2003). Adam Newey’s review in The Spectator observed: The central problem with Pinter’s poems is that they elide observations on the obscenity of death and killing with moral judgments about that process; on this gut basis, poetry can be nothing but crudely pacifist. Where other forms of discourse (political journalism, to take an obvious example) are able to construct a nuanced, thoughtful, ambiguous relationship with the situation in question, the queen of the arts is reduced to a barely articulate howl of disapproval. (Newey 2003, p. 55) I am not quoting these disparaging observations merely to note their tenor. These are of critical interest to this study and I return to them shortly, after setting the context of this discussion. On the context: hostility to Pinter’s volume War continued to crop up in the following years, as we have seen in, for instance, Don Paterson’s 2004 Eliot Lecture. And it continued to crop up with sustained vehemence since Pinter went on in August 2004 to be awarded the Wilfred Owen Prize – partly for his lifelong contribution to literature ‘and specifically for his collection of poetry entitled WAR, published in 2003’, according to the Wilfred Owen Association’s chairman Michael Grayer (Ezard 2004). And, of course, in 2005 Pinter won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Tony Harrison’s poetry during the build-up towards the Iraq invasion resonated with Pinter’s in some ways. These appeared intermittently in various newspapers and journals from 2002 and through 2003, and most were eventually collected in Under the Clock (2005). Like Pinter, indeed more potently, Harrison had responded in verse to the first Gulf War in two 1991 poems. ‘A Cold Coming’ and ‘Initial Illumination’ were commissioned by and first published in The Guardian in March 1991. In the heat of the debates before the Iraq invasion, ‘A Cold Coming’ was republished in The Guardian on 14 April 2003, along with photographs of the Gulf War and related features (G2 special issue 2003). A close analysis of Harrison’s poems from the Gulf War, and the reappearance



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of ‘A Cold Coming’ as ‘a key contemporary anti-war or protest poem’, followed in a paper by Anne Whitehead (2005, p. 349) – this is ground I don’t cover here. Under the Clock didn’t include those, choosing instead to foreground the Iraq invasion poems by beginning with ‘The Krieg Anthology’. This consisted in adding to and reworking poems which appeared in 2003 (‘Iraquatrains’ on 1 April and ‘Baghdad Lullaby’ on 9 April in The Guardian), and a new ‘Epilogue to The Recruiting Officer by Farquhar’ penned for the revival of Farquhar’s play in the Garrick Theatre, Lichfield, in September. ‘Iraquatrains’ had caused unease among critics as Pinter’s War had – along lines which were captured by David Wheatley in his 2007 reckonings with British poetry around the Iraq invasion: Under the Clock begins with a series of quatrains, ‘The Krieg Anthology’, whose one-note satire consists of lurid, shrieking atrocity coupled with Spitting Image-style portraits of Bush and Blair. Poems about bombs dropped on children can hardly be expected to observe Augustan proprieties, but it should at least trouble the reader that Iraqis feature in these poems as dead babies, bomb victims, and nothing else. It is a literally infantilizing picture. Nor should a satirist be expected to deliver balance; but the fact that Saddam Hussein does not feature at all in these poems (even as a West-supported stooge) only adds to the leftist orientation of Harrison’s project, not unlike that of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. (Wheatley 2007, p. 659) Alongside Harrison’s quatrains, Wheatley was similarly dismissive of Pinter’s War and made short work of it. Tim Kendall was also scornful of Harrison’s anti-war poetry, especially the quatrains, mainly because they weren’t drawn from direct experience but from mass media images (Kendall 2006, pp. 248, 254). Both castigated Harrison and Pinter for writing bad poetry and entertaining shallow moral presumptions against war. ‘The Krieg Anthology’ in Under the Clock has tended to attract particular attention, but the collection also included the title poem from the same period, originally published in the London Review of Books on 17 April 2003. Relevantly for this study, other poems from before and after were included; of which several – like ‘The Grilling’ from June 2002 and ‘Reading the Rolls: An Arse Verse’ from 2004 – pondered the limits of poetry and the profession of the poet. I have indicated already that I do not attempt to provide normative aesthetic or political judgements on texts in this study. The point here is to understand what general conceptions of literature are at work.



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However, it is pretty clear from the above notes on responses to Pinter’s and Harrison’s Iraq invasion poetry that such normative judgements are part of what needs to be analysed. The general ideas of literature which underpin literary production and reception allow for pat normative judgements, given with an air of authority or experience. The immediate task is not to accept or refute such judgements or offer other such, but to examine their basis. In undertaking to do so, I have a somewhat abstract consideration to begin with. Pronouncements of ‘bad poetry’, ‘sixth-form poetry’, ‘infantile facile waffle’ and so on uncomplicatedly put the responsibility for underachievement (or when it comes to that, achievement) on the author and the text. No attention is given to the contribution of reading and the reader in reaching judgements. It seems quite possible though that discernment of poor or good quality could have as much to do with what the author has written as with how the reader has read – with the degree of complexity of reading, awareness and thoughtfulness in reading, which has been brought to the text. The presumption that authors write something which manifests an objective normative quality is, however, a strongly entrenched one when it comes to reviewing literary texts, despite the fact that in thinking about literature the role of the reader has been carefully pondered. This has occurred, as all in the literary academy know, in a variety of ways since the 1960s. The shakiness of the concept of ‘author’ has been variously interrogated: markedly since Roland Barthes’s dramatic 1968 declaration of the ‘death of the author’ (Barthes 1977), and in more considered ways since. The degree to which readers contribute to understanding what is implicit in literary texts, and perhaps even ‘construct’ literary texts, has been much debated. The extent to which authors, texts and critics are circumscribed by – and therefore moulded by – prevailing social and cultural preconceptions is the stuff of much that is studied as Literary Theory in universities now. And yet, when it comes to reviewing texts and especially pronouncing judgement, the onus of being good or bad seems to fall on the work and the author while the reader remains invisible. The norm-drenched reception of Pinter’s and Harrison’s Iraq invasion poetry leads me to suspect that the judgemental critics cited above are particularly guilty of a lack of complexity in their readings. But their views need to be foregrounded to come to grips with the understanding of literature … of poetry … of specifically war poetry … in evidence here, and it is therefore useful to have them in sight. They need to be kept in sight just as the poetry and poets and the invasion context should be. At the nexus of what’s there in the text, what the authors intend, what




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sort of environment the texts become available in, what the critics say, there lurks a prevailing conception of literature, of poetry, of war poetry. So I begin my consideration of Pinter’s and Harrison’s individual collections backwards, so to speak – starting from critical responses rather than from texts and authors. There are some preconceptions which appear consistently in all the responses cited above. These encourage contemplation of what the poetic texts and the poets do. My argument from the critical reception to the poetry and poets, and thereby to the ideas about poetry that emerge between them, devolves into three consecutive observations. First, though all the critics above seem to take issue mainly with the quality of the poetry, their substantive arguments are actually about the political sentiments expressed. Their key reservation is that the poems lack balance or fail to be even-handed. The desire for even-handedness is explicitly understood as a political rather than aesthetic or poetic norm. Wheatley’s objection that Harrison hadn’t mentioned Saddam Hussein in ‘The Krieg Anthology’ and that the Iraqis are presented as passive victims, Newey’s reservations about the one-dimensional moral view of Pinter’s poetry, Kendall’s doubts about poetry of war that doesn’t derive from a direct experience, Buford’s irritation at Pinter’s anti-Americanism, and Kermode’s feeling that Pinter’s poetry is less temperate than most anti-invasion protesters – these are all, in slightly different ways, expressions of the same thing. They are all calls for balance or even-handedness in political perspective. This call is posed as a normative political good which should be, it is suggested, akin to normatively good poetry. The presumed connection between political conviction and poetic assessment doesn’t seem to rest on much more than the strength of these critics’ belief in even-handedness. Pinter’s and Harrison’s perceived political bias is countered by the strength of the critics’ ostensibly balanced politics and the discernment of quality that such balance confers. Political norms were being palmed off as poetic norms. At its most persuasive, the gist of Wheatley’s and Newey’s and some of the others’ argument is that any ad hoc pacifism or absolute moral position about war is untenable, and that poetry shouldn’t become the vehicle of such a purely moral conception of war. This is substantially the same argument as the one I made in the previous chapter: any conviction in the deep moral pacifism of poetry is indeed implausible. However, unlike the anthologies discussed in the previous chapter, in this instance it isn’t a collective expectation of poetry that is at stake. Pinter’s and Harrison’s anti-invasion poems are sustained individual expressions with unambiguous reference to a particular context. The poems in question are



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clear in their contextualized references: names are named, catch-phrases of the time are thrown up, specific dates and acts are noted, the particular political alignments and ideologies in view are registered. The responsibility of generalizing these as broadly morally opposed to any war, in this instance, seems to rest more with the critics than with the poetry. True, the poets said things at times which seemed pacifist in an absolute moral way, but more consistently they said things which were utterly bound to specific conflicts and agents. It seems to me that Wheatley and Newey and other critics themselves rather reductively chose to see a general moral pacifism and disregard the context-specificity in Pinter’s and Harrison’s poetry. They rightly take issue with such absolute pacifism, but they misread the poetry by glossing over its context-specific address. In terms of the specific circumstances of the Iraq invasion period, a demand for political even-handedness in responses wasn’t necessarily reasonable. That the horrors of the Ba’athist regime should be mentioned as soon as the mendacities of George Bush’s and Tony Blair’s administrations are, was a toothless demand to those who felt that the invasion was not being contemplated and undertaken because Saddam Hussein was a uniquely bad guy. At the time, the Bush and Blair administrations and their supporters were carrying out an extensive propaganda campaign precisely to suggest that they were bringing freedom and democracy where these are lacking. Those who disbelieved this claim hardly needed to repeat it. In principle, just as any decontextualized absolute moral attitude against war is questionable, so too is a decontextualized absolute political conviction in even-handedness: it can simply be the case that for a particular conflict one side can be more to blame than the other, or even entirely to blame. There is no natural law which dictates that both parties in any conflict have to be responsible for that conflict to an equal degree. I am, however, straying from the focus of this study: the relevant point here is that critical responses to Pinter’s and Harrison’s anti-invasion poetry seemed often to make judgements in terms of preconceived political norms. Second, and more interestingly, each of the critical responses in question presented judgements in terms of preconceived notions of what poetry – especially war poetry – should do. These preconceived notions were outlined to differing degrees, at times more implied than stated, at times stated sketchily. Greer’s ‘A poem is a living entity in itself. It has its own biology, its own laws’ avoids responsibility for justifying her preconceptions: the laws of poetry simply exist and can merely be recognized as such, she asserts, and they can’t be formulated or changed. She recognizes that Pinter’s War is self-evidently not poetry and feels




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no need to explain. Almost all the cited critics agree that poetry should be complex, should do more than simply express a strong sentiment, should be witty or suggestive rather than direct and blunt. Though all the critics protest that they are ready to go along with the expletives which appear in Pinter’s and Harrison’s anti-invasion poetry (expletives had become something of a trademark of Harrison’s poetry), actually those do cause unease. Expletives are constantly noted in a spirit of open-mindedness, but invariably also with a hint of doubt. Malcolm, Newey, Wheatley and Kendall extend their desire for complexity in poetry at large to a particular demand for complexity in war poetry. Each feels that espousing opposition to this invasion through poetry is not just a reductive apprehension of war per se but also of poetry itself. Newey suggests that poetry cannot be garnered to addressing war at all any longer (better do journalism); Wheatley ends up by recommending poetry which is more equivocal and a-contextual (such as David Harsent’s Legion, 2005, to which I come soon); and Kendall feels that only direct experience (the soldier-poet or the poet with war zone experience) can justify poetry addressed to war. At the same time the poets in question, Pinter and Harrison, seemed to be particularly self-conscious about mediating their anti-invasion efforts through poetry rather than other genres or forms. Here too preconceptions about poetry were obviously at work: both were emphatic about poetry being their chosen medium for their purpose. Pinter didn’t try to explain why it was poetry and not drama, the genre he is associated with, that he had taken recourse to. But he was perfectly clear that poetry was his thing as far as expressing his feelings about the Iraq invasion went. In February 2005 he reportedly observed: I’ve stopped writing plays. I’ve written twenty nine plays. My energies are going in different directions. I’m certainly writing a lot of poetry, and I’m using a lot of energy, more specifically about political states of affairs which I think are very, very worrying as things stand. (Kent 2005, p. 2) And indeed, it was noted that Pinter hadn’t written anything for the stage since Celebration in 2000. Evidently an implicit idea of poetry gripped him at the time: one in which political anxieties are not at odds with but actively a spur for poetry, in which poetic creativity issues from anxiety rather than seeks to overcome it. The intensification of worries was an intensification of poetic creativity for Pinter. Harrison’s various statements on war and poetry give a more nuanced account of



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a similar sense of poetry. This seems to me to be most pithily expressed in the poem ‘Reading the Rolls: An Arse-Verse’, first published in Arion journal in early 2004 (pp. 91–9) and included as the last in Under the Clock (pp. 46–56). Given its timing and substance, the poem can be regarded as a statement on his career as a poet generally and particularly his recent anti-invasion poetry. A summary of the idea of poetry that can be inferred from this could be given as follows. Poetry is not one thing without being at the same time the opposite too; poetry draws not just on the beautiful but also on the ugly; the language of poetry juxtaposes and conjoins the pleasing and the disturbing, the ethereal and the earthy, blossoming and decay, love and lust, aroma and miasma, praise and abuse, the intellectual and the scatological; poetry is not simply memorable but also disposable. In fact the latter, the less salubrious aspects of life, give Harrison’s understanding and undertaking of poetry its verve: ‘From those rough sheets I learned to read / verses in the smell of rot, / dumped dactyl, and turd-smeared trochee / primed the prosodics of decay’ (Harrison 2005a, p. 49). Insofar as this can be extended specifically to the relationship of poetry to such a situation as war (in Harrison’s retrospection war and violence are as abiding a backdrop as social class is), poetry both pulls towards a peace-that-passeth-understanding and finds life in the ugliness of war. Poetry is neither in itself for peace nor war, it is a reckoning. By this account it is a mistake to think of Harrison’s poetry as ‘anti-war’ in some deep way; both the pity of war and the sadism of war are grist to poetry’s mill, and Harrison’s poetry draws its energy from both. The effect is a crystallization of the poet’s anger. The different sorts of preconceptions about poetry that are expressed or implied by the poets and critics above are not particularly indicative in themselves. In themselves none can be taken to be representative of current attitudes; the preconceptions only clarify the thinking of those who subscribe to them. And actually these notions of poetry are not formulated to a sufficient extent to even clarify the thinking of those who espouse them. It seems to me significant, however, that such preconceptions are made available in a diverse and incoherent way, at odds with each other, across gulfs of mutual understanding. The tensions arising from varying preconceptions are of moment here: these are indicative, at the least, of the fact that the very idea of poetry is at issue here as much as attitudes to the invasion or subscription to political norms. At times these tensions feed off each other: the political tensions push the tensions between different ideas of poetry to the fore; battles over political norms spill into differences in aesthetic perception. More interestingly, it seems to me, at the interstices of these tensions, somewhere at the




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interfaces of writing and reading these texts (both the poetry and the critical responses), a renegotiation of poetry occurs. I do not mean that either Harrison or Pinter or the reviewers cited above actually undertake such a renegotiation or come up with some new conception of poetry, but something like a new conception of poetry becomes visible through the clash of reading and writing here, in the pressured context of the invasion. This new view of poetry has to do with the specific context of the invasion and writing poetry with regard to it and reading poetry with invasion in the backdrop – outlining what I mean leads to my third point here. So, third, amidst Harrison’s and Pinter’s anti-invasion poetry and the denunciations of critics there appears a possible renegotiation of poetry in general: a renegotiation which has to do with the relationship of poetry to anger. Anger simmers in the background of the invasion and is centred in the production and reception of the anti-invasion poetry in question, and that bears upon our understanding of poetry. Such a renegotiation doesn’t help us become better or worse judges of poetry, but does call into question what poetry does for us. Anger is expressed and implicated in various ways here. It appears variously on the surface of Pinter’s and Harrison’s poems. There is anger in the expletives: at the ‘big pricks’ that will ‘fuck everything’ (‘Democracy’, Pinter 2003). There is anger in the personal lambasting: George Bush, Tony Blair, Condoleeza Rice, Geoff Hoon are explicitly the addressees and objects of scorn in ‘The Krieg Anthology’. Anger simmers in the numerous context-specific accusations about dossiers and lies in the poetry. Anger drives the associations made in juxtaposing ‘The Krieg Anthology’ with poems on Nazis in Under the Clock. It is an angry poetic gaze which bitterly morphs the ordinary: as the poet, for instance, looks bitterly at guests in a party who ‘loll and lounge about / Decanting claret in convenient skulls’ (‘After Lunch’, Pinter 2005). Anger is vented in pausing on numerous brutal images of violence. Anger leaves the poetry lost for words sometimes: ‘All we have left are the bombs’, observes the poet on finding himself without words (‘The Bombs’, Pinter 2003). It is not so much in a phrase here or there that anger is conveyed, as in the cumulative compressed effect of all those devices. But the issue here goes deeper than that. The anger of the poetry is not contained within the poetry; it finds confirmation through the responsive anger of critics. The critics cited above not only variously recognize the anger as such – they perceive in the poetry ‘strong feelings’, a ‘howl of disapproval’, ‘bellicosity’ – but, more importantly, the critics become angry themselves. The responses in question are themselves remarkable for their waspishness, and the terms in which they are presented froth at the mouth: ‘infantile facile



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waffle’, ‘narcissistic’, ‘hysterical rant’, ‘barely articulate’, ‘one-note satire consists of lurid, shrieking atrocity’, and so on. The anger here is not just expressed in the poem, it fizzes at the interfaces where author and text and reader meet, and is given its edge by all of those. But the issue of anger and poetry here goes deeper: the anger that appears in and in response to these poems is a derivative anger. It derives from the anger which emanates from the specific context of the invasion of Iraq. The relationship of anger and poetry in question here is really a contextually specific matter. The anger here is not an abstract rage at war in general, and the poetry is therefore not ‘anti-war’ in an absolute moral way. The anger is precisely the sort of emotion which was manifested variously and distinctively during the invasion of Iraq. The mass media constantly noted that ‘sharp divisions’ attended every step of the Iraq invasion: divisions and polarizations characterized the entire period of the build-up and aftermath within the USA, UK and other countries; within the European Union and the United Nations; and between the latter and the USA. From these macro-levels the divisions and polarizations stretched to micro-levels, within political parties for instance. Support for the invasion was garnered by trying to rouse social rage: pointing to the Ba’athist regime’s tyranny and human rights abuses, alleging links to terrorists and accumulation of ‘weapons of mass destruction’. Strongly held reservations and outrage about invasion were expressed throughout by ‘anti-war’ organizations. Social rage was aroused particularly when various mendacities and inconsistencies on the part of the invaders were exposed: lies in public statements and dossiers, the sidelining of the UN, failure to find ‘weapons of mass destruction’, manipulation of media, detention of prisoners without legal process in Guantanamo Bay, civilian casualties, the Coalition Provisional Authority’s machinations in occupied Iraq, corruption in the distribution of ‘Iraq reconstruction’ contracts, torture in Abu Ghraib prison and torture renditions, and so on. Anger seemed to precipitate in the intensifying violence in Iraq after the invasion and occupation, in the deepening fissures between religious and ethnic alignments. Heated debates and exchanges about these spilled into everyday life. And the distemper gathered pace by drawing into itself a range of acrimonious histories and geopolitics from beyond the immediacy of the Iraq invasion. Those were structured into the invasion context by associations of considerably longer standing, stretching back step by step through 11 September 2001, the Cold War, and further. Acrimonious histories and geopolitics were drawn in by polarized normative abstractions such as: terrorism v. security, multilateral v. unilateral democracy, universal




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human rights v. national self-determination, religion v. secularism. Anger around the Iraq invasion was sucked into abstract territorial polarities such as: Middle East v. West; Old Europe v. New Europe; Anti-Americanism v. Pro-Americanism. There are very few post-Second World War episodes which generated such a vast and intense network of ruptures and anger both before and after – anger seemed to concentrate and embrace the period of the invasion of Iraq in a sustained manner. It seems reasonable to expect that the poetry of the Iraq invasion would not be found as much in the pity of war as in the anger of invasion. To that extent, it seems to me, the anger that simmers in and around Pinter’s and Harrison’s poetry about the Iraq invasion captures the temper of the Iraq invasion context. The anger of the poets, the poems and the critics make these distinctively poetry of the Iraq invasion. At the same time, they also push against received and prevailing preconceptions about poetry because of that: poetry and anger are conceived as being at odds with each other. Anger is generally understood as immediate and immoderate, and poetry as deliberate and considered. The received idea is that anger (or any strong emotion) cannot really be internalized in the structure of poetry, though poetry may sometimes draw inspiration from anger (strong emotions) and work with it and on it. But then poetry is not the concretization of anger but something that appears away from or at some distance from it. The degree of the distance is in issue, but that there has to be a distance seems a given. The need for distance is apparent in the most familiar notions of poetry’s relation to emotions, even quite contrary ones – such as Wordsworth’s ‘Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity’ (Wordsworth 1974, p. 85), and Eliot’s opposed ‘Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion’ (Eliot 1951, p. 21). The distance is defined variously and invariably in more careful cognitive accounts of poetry’s relation to emotions (usefully summarized, for instance, in Olsen 1978, ch. 2). The current social constructions of strong emotions, especially anger, and of poetry seem to appear in different and non-intersecting planes. Anger is on the plane of the anti-social, the violent or destructive, the irrational, and is countered by ‘anger management’, ‘liberal compromise’, ‘zero tolerance’ policing and dispassionate subscription to the ‘rule of law’. Even apparently neutral academic perspectives usually place anger at the destabilizing or unsavoury end of social phenomena: a study of social rage (the rage that is caused by social forces and expressed through social action) by Bonny Berry (1999), for instance, associates its contemporary political resonances with the survivalist right, crime, religious fringes,



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oppression of minorities. The social construction of poetry is powerfully associated with literacy and the academy, middle-class or elite taste, cultural capital, celebratory or affirmative values – a quite different plane. Perhaps it is the distinct planes of social construction which ultimately explain the widespread conviction in a deep moral pacifism in poetry, which I explored in the previous chapter. And the social constructions probably also explain those more considered views of poetry which, though not pacifist, simply can’t reconcile poetry with anger, such as Germaine Greer’s and Don Paterson’s. For the latter, poetry is a cerebral and autonomous state (of affairs, of mind, of expression) and anger is in the material and happening world. In the context of the invasion of Iraq, however, anger was so pervasive, so distributed and dispersed, that it couldn’t clearly be associated with rights or wrongs, this or that side. Anger was simply all around in the social environment and threatened to engulf all modes of expression. That under such circumstances some sort of rapprochement may take place between poetry and anger seems almost inevitable. Obviously not all poetry would be implicated, but certainly some would. And wherever that happens, some noteworthy renegotiation of the very idea of poetry that prevails now can be expected. Even if that rapprochement is evidenced in the work of one or two poets, it would reopen the conceptual possibilities of poetry and extend fault-lines across dominant preconceptions. A sought-after rapprochement between poetry and anger occurred in the production and reception of Pinter’s and Harrison’s poetry of the Iraq invasion. A project to tease out the conceptual implications of this unusual development for poetry seems imminent, one which is not driven to pass judgement before understanding the rationale of the field of poetry now. It is not my intention to actually undertake this project. That the meeting of anger and poetry in and around the Iraq invasion poems by Pinter and Harrison makes such a project – such a reconsideration of the conceptual underpinnings of poetry – imminent is mainly what I wish to gesture towards here. With that gesture I can perhaps point also to some potential directions for this project: not by engaging with them but by beckoning towards analogous and akin projects and materials. Of course such a project would be neither unprecedented nor original. The directions that may be explored with the contemporary field in view could, it seems to me, be informed by at least three extant considerations. First, both Harrison and Pinter are aware of the connections between anger and poetry that feed into their own writing – a tradition, so to speak, of angry social responsiveness and combativeness through poetry wherein they locate themselves. I have already noted that in




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‘Reading the Rolls: An Arse-Verse’ Harrison articulates a conception of poetry which is illuminating from this perspective, and which suggests such a tradition. And Harrison’s critics have been cognizant of this to some extent from an early stage. As early as in 1990 Bruce Woodcock had noted that ‘His output is increasing dramatically, and he is getting angrier’ (Woodcock 1990, p. 50), and analysed the social factors (particularly class) which productively feed the belligerence and the poetry. In his 2005 Nobel Lecture (discussed in the next chapter) Pinter read an extract from a poem by Pablo Neruda, ‘I’m explaining a few things’ (1936), which vividly evoked the violence of the Spanish Civil War. It was also an evocation of a sensibility, an enraged sensibility, which was carefully chosen by Pinter to fit the thrust of his lecture. Interestingly, the poem (it is in the extract read by Pinter) also involves a careful reckoning with the expectations of poetry: And you’ll ask: why doesn’t his poetry speak of dreams and leaves and the great volcanoes of his native land? Come and see the blood in the streets. (Neruda 1970, pp. 105/107) Indeed that happens elsewhere in Neruda’s poetry too, in the poetry that expresses anger. I am particularly reminded of his last poem, written in 1973 when military dictator Augusto Pinochet deposed the democratically elected socialist President Salvador Allende in a coup with tacit support from the Nixon administration: I assume the duties of a poet armed with a terrorist’s sonnet […] to set down the name of this villain who practices genocide from the White House. (Neruda 1980, p.1) The implicit tradition that echoes in Pinter’s and Harrison’s Iraq invasion poetry and poetry prior to that could be a fruitful place to begin an investigation into contemporary preconceptions about poetry and what anger does to those. Second, the project to understand the relationship between contemporary poetry and anger needs a theoretical grasp of anger which doesn’t



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simply see it in behaviourist or psychological terms (focused on the enraged subject), and nor in the dominant sociological or political terms of our time (which tend to construct anger as something to be managed or controlled, as anti-social). On the latter note I have mentioned Berry’s book, and have examined elsewhere the tendency of contemporary sociological discourse to tame resistant social expressions (see Gupta 2009a). What is needed here, in other words, is an understanding of the relation of subject to object, the relation at the juncture of which anger is felt, expressed, recognized, responded to. Since social rage is the issue here, an understanding of the relation between angry subject and the social condition which instigates anger is called for, and anger needs to be defined in terms of that relation. Such an understanding of anger can then be held against the social constructions of poetry as literary form. Perhaps this need will suggest a reiteration of Jean-Paul Sartre’s theory of emotions, which seeks to locate emotions (and often cites anger among the range of emotions) in the relation of consciousness and world. The appearance of an emotion like anger from the troubled relation of consciousness to world is, it appears to me, described suggestively by Sartre in the following: When the paths before us become too difficult, or when we cannot see our way, we can no longer put up with such an exacting and difficult world. All ways are barred and nevertheless we must act. So then we try to change the world, to live it as though the relations between things and their potentialities were not governed by deterministic processes but by magic. But, be it well understood, this is no playful matter: we are cornered, and we fling ourselves into this new attitude with all the force at our command. […] It is above all a seizure of new relationships and new demands. To put it simply, since the seizure of one object is impossible, or sets up an unbearable tension, the consciousness seizes or tries to seize it otherwise; that is, tries to transform itself in order to transform the object. (Sartre 1994 [1962], pp. 39–40) To translate into the terms of this study: the anger that is felt, say, about some circumstance of the invasion of Iraq is an attempt to change that circumstance by the sheer force of wrenching the consciousness itself that perceives it. This wrenching of the consciousness is manifested and expressed as anger. The important thing is that anger is a state of the consciousness (not something primordial or subliminal) and of its relation to the world (not simply contained in the angry subject). This is important




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and possibly useful for the kind of project envisaged above because poetry is arguably an expression of the consciousness and its relation to the world – and that leads to my third consideration. I mention Sartre’s formulation here simply as one that comes to my mind readily; quite possibly there are other more apt ways of considering anger in the relation between subject and object, consciousness and world, for the purpose. Third, from a critical perspective anger has occasionally and recently been seen as bearing a productive relationship with literature and providing an apt frame for critical analysis. Feminist criticism has been particularly receptive to such an approach. Thus Jane Marcus noted that the suppression of anger was a condition of Victorian women’s lives and the release of anger has been ‘a vital source of intellectual energy in changing the subject of literary discourse’ for women writers and critics (Marcus 1988, p. xxi). Taking the idea forward, Linda M. Grasso’s study of American women writers in the nineteenth century started with the following hypothesis: ‘By identifying the sources of women’s anger and analyzing how their anger assumes literary expression, anger can be used as a paradigm for understanding the ways in which women, at different historical moments, have responded to myriad forms of expression through the literary imagination’ (Grasso 2002, p. 4). These naturally associate anger with the gendered author’s position in society; suggestive as that is for this study and the envisaged project, perhaps a more dispersed and politically inclusive understanding of anger’s relation to literature is more appropriate here. The debate about literature in relation to the ‘angry young men’ or the ‘angry generation’ of the later 1950s comes to mind as another possibly fruitful association here. However, it seems to me that that debate (heavily dominated by the mass media as it was) didn’t quite manage to come up with either an effective analysis of anger or a well-defined thrust for anger. The existing scholarly project which appears to me to come close to the sort of project I have in mind, a renegotiation of preconceptions of poetry in relation to anger in the Iraq invasion period, is found in Andrew Stauffer’s literary historical reappraisal of Romantic poetry. The emphasis on poetry is useful, as is the salutary grounding in socio-political and aesthetic context – the scope of this project is best summarized in Stauffer’s words: In the wake of Augustan satire, the Romantic poets developed their ambivalent attitudes towards angry art in concert with or in the immediate wake of the multitude of outraged voices in the periodical press. Romanticism in England can thus be seen as a chorus of responses to the crisis that was brought about by anger’s prominence in public



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discourse. Godwin, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, and others provide important evidence of the various political and aesthetic pressures on anger for the post-Revolutionary author in England. However, it is Blake, Shelley, and Byron who stand closest to the heart of this book, because the imaginative and poetic programs of each are founded, however uneasily, on a particular species of anger. These three writers attempt to work beyond the limiting sense of anger they inherit from the English reception of the French Revolution. That is, they reject anger as something experienced passively as a visitation upon the self, and articulate angry emotions as positive and decisive enactments of the self upon the world. In so doing, they provide new ways of imagining the value of anger to a culture that had lost faith in that emotion. The literary work produced out of this commitment is characterized by generic experimentation as well, as these poets develop methods of presenting this essentially spectacular emotion in written form. (Stauffer 2005, p. 5) In pointing to Stauffer’s project I do not intend to suggest that Harrison and Pinter are in any way similar to Byron and Shelley, or that they are harbingers of some kind of new Romanticism. The interest of Stauffer’s project is in its structural organization: arranging a specific socio-political context, a variety of responses (including mass media of the time), aesthetic preconceptions about poetry, and the efforts of specific poets in terms of the salience of anger. A similar sort of structural organization could be brought to understanding the kinds of renegotiations of poetry that seem to occur in contemplating the Iraq invasion poetry of Pinter and Harrison (and indeed other literary works of the time). The content of the anger, the preconceptions, the socio-political arena now are indubitably vastly different from that of early nineteenth-century England. The findings of the envisaged project will accordingly be very different too. But, as I have said, this is not a project that is undertaken in this study; the idea is to gesture towards its possibility in view of a brief consideration of Pinter’s and Harrison’s Iraq invasion poems. For this study, and in this chapter, it is more important to register the range of sustained individual poetic responses to the invasion, and Pinter’s and Harrison’s form only a very small proportion of that.

Side by side By ‘individual collection of poetry’ I mean a volume bringing together a number of poems by a single poet, the contents and ordering of which




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are determined by the poet. I have in mind primarily volumes where the contents are published for the first time in book form (not, for instance, a ‘selected works’ volume), and may represent the poet’s work over a recent period or with regard to a particular theme. This could be regarded as individual as opposed to the collectiveness of an anthology, and thought of as a collection as opposed to a volume with a single long poem. I think of the selections, orderings and juxtapositions of specific poems in an individual collection as its design. The individual collection of poetry naturally gives a poetic sensibility more scope than specific poems (as included in anthologies or selections) – more scope, that is, for conveying a sustained engagement of poetry with the conditions of its production and reception. There is, I feel, a kind of intermeshing of writing and reading evident in the structures of an individual collection. Each poem bears on the others and equally the others bear on each; the ordering of poems conveys a process of temporary closures and openings; the ordering places each poem within the continuum of the poetic sensibility on display; the selections and juxtapositions have the effect of layering a macro-level of reading over the micro-level of close reading. In other words, contemplating an individual collection of poetry is both a matter of considering the design of the collection as a whole as well as attending to the nuances of the poems included, and involves establishing the relations between the design of the whole and nuances of the specific. As it happens, conventional critical approaches to poetry generally focus predominantly on specific poems – or specific bits of poetic text – and pay only cursory attention to the design of the collection. The emphasis that literary criticism conventionally lays on close reading of texts is given particular stress when it comes to poetic texts, probably due to the opacity and density of poetic language. Poetics has conventionally been powerfully focused on the discrete composition, and the critical register of poetics is accordingly oriented towards close reading: towards reading the words, the phrases, the stanzas, the images, the conceits, the formal features, the aural patterns, and so on. The design of the individual collection of poetry largely remains a region of critical free-play where there are no specialist terms to reckon with and few theories to contend with; impressionistic descriptions and inferences are legion here, secondary to the weightier businesses of looking closely at specific poems. My account of the individual collections of poetry that follows is more with regard to their design than to specific poems. The latter are thought of as contained in the former here, and I take note of the latter only insofar as they clarify the former. This is the reverse, in other



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words, of the conventional – indeed habitual – critical practice of focusing closely on poetic texts, and giving conditional or post factum attention to the design of the collection. Mine could be thought of, therefore, as a very modest attempt at ‘distant reading’. Here this does not have the ambition of distant reading in Franco Moretti’s (2000) sense of consecutive interpretive removals from close reading, and nor in Peter Middleton’s (2005) sense of ethnographically tracked horizons of reading. What I have in mind here is a formalistic notion of distance: a view which emphasizes the design of the collection and places the poetic texts accordingly, rather than beginning with close attention to poetic texts and understanding the design accordingly. This enables me to focus directly on sustained engagement of a range of poetic sensibilities within the period of the Iraq invasion. In some instances such engagement may make the design of the collection and the focus on the invasion inextricable; in others the design of the collection may place the invasion amidst wider poetic concerns; and in yet others the design may involve only a tangential or tacit (but tractable) relevance to the invasion. Noting such patterns should demonstrate what a sustained engagement of poetic sensibilities within the invasion period entailed. That would also usefully take this study away from individual poems and anthologies and the immediacy of anger discussed above. More significantly, some grasp of sustained poetic engagements with the invasion environment also has a bearing on contemporary poetic production and reception generally. In brief, what I attempt below is to present observations on some individual collections of poetry as wholes – as collections – vis-à-vis the Iraq invasion period in which they appeared and with regard to which they were read. Necessarily my readings of these collections are impressionistic, and disposed according to my sense of the context. I present these readings in a volume-by-volume manner, in a sequence which elucidates differing ways of looking at the invasion through poetry. David Ray, The Death of Sardanapalus and Other Poems of the Iraq Wars (2004) Ray’s collection presents a record in verse of the Iraq invasion period, starting briefly from the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 but focusing predominantly on the build-up to the invasion, its process and immediate aftermath (roughly late 2002 to perhaps the end of 2003). A record, however, suggests something neatly organized by dates, themes and significant events, given in an objective register, and this is nothing of the sort. The collection follows a sequential chronology, but




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not in a rigid or schematic fashion. The chronology is implicit in the subjectiveness of the record: the structure derives consistently from the self-aware voice of the poet amidst his everyday life in the United States (in Tucson, Arizona – but even that detail is not stated in so many words). The collection charts a fluid chronology, where the passage of time is glimpsed through verse that drifts between stream-of-consciousness, diary-like notings, and epiphanic (in the Joycean sense) moments given in the distinctive voice of the poet (the ‘I’ of the collection). The passage of time is also grasped through references which can be mapped on to the unfolding record of the invasion as the collection came together, i.e. with reference to public statements, news reports, discussions etc. that now constitute the record of the invasion period. Let me restate that overlapping two-fold chronological structure of this record in verse. The poems put together here represent a time line which can be grasped, on the one hand, in terms of the poet’s sense of the passage of his everyday life, and, on the other hand, through mapping allusions to the public record of the invasion. These two axes of the collection’s time line are obviously related, and the interest of this collection is primarily in how that relation works. The public record is sieved through the poet’s self-aware everyday consciousness. The reader can glimpse and recognize the sequence of the public record through the gaps of the poet’s everyday life; the reader brings her familiarity of the public record (a shared familiarity) to be able to do so. The poet’s life is charted across the truncations of discrete poems: he reads newspapers and watches TV, makes associations with and reminisces about his past (obviously one of erudite pursuits), simply ponders in solitude, talks to and does things with family members, socializes with friends, goes to a funeral, shops, dines, gossips, notices events in the market or the swimming pool, and so on – lives, so to speak, the stuff of everyday life. And in every poem, every move and thought of the poet’s everyday life is inflected by his awareness of and discomfort about and ironic reckonings with the invasion, by the surrounding media images of and debates about the invasion, by his inability to accept or let go of the unfolding invasion of Iraq. The dual distance of the invasion – as something emanating from the ‘domestic’ national domain and something enacted through distant violence in Iraq – simply interferes constantly in the flow of the poet’s personal and psychological domain, obtrudes and weaves itself into the immediacy of the poet’s everyday. This is especially so since the ruptures of the invasion period in the public record constantly reproduce themselves as ruptures in the poet’s everyday domain: he finds himself quarrelling constantly



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with news reports, with the public statements of ‘our President’ (whose virtual presence and voice is a sore to the poet), with the American public in an abstract way, with friends, with family members. The poetry of this persona – the poet, the ‘I’ – emerges from the alienation he consequently feels. The poetry is a concretization of that alienation; the cadences and counterpoints and assonances of verse are the only bridges which join the ruptures of the public space with the ruptures in the poet’s everyday domain. The raison d’être of the poetry and its relation to alienation is presented sharply in the poem ‘Vows of Silence Essential’ (pp. 58–9), in the context of a very personal slippage – when an unthinking comment from his wife over breakfast leads to the poet withdrawing from discussion and taking recourse to the solitude of poetry: With a vow to discuss words no more lest along with clay gods bombed to oblivion our lovely day will be blasted to hell, I retreat to my cave of exile where in shadows I honor words as if they could never do harm. In other poems such withdrawal, and sometimes ironic detachment, derives from disenchantment with friends, with fellow citizens, and with the news media. This last is an interesting turn at a time when, as I have noted in Chapter 1, consumption of news increased and intensified. But avid consumption and simultaneous alienation were not uncommon at the time, and is expressed often in Ray’s collection – symptomatically in a poem entitled ‘The Poet Almost Always Regrets Reading the Paper and if the President Does Not, Why Should the Poet?’ (p. 95). Often the poetry both ploughs news reports and appears as a remedy for the disappointment. A similar disenchantment, it may be recalled, was expressed by Edward Said around the time: It has finally become intolerable to listen to or look at news in this country. I’ve told myself over and over again that one ought to leaf through the daily papers and turn on the TV for the national news every evening, just to find out what ‘the country’ is thinking and planning, but patience and masochism have their limits. (Said 2004, p. 250 [February 2003]) The principal twist of the collection’s design is that the poet’s everyday life as inflected by the Iraq invasion effectively renders the everyday as not everyday. Everyday preoccupations and habits acquire a significance,




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are given a significance, which undercuts their everyday character. The idea of ‘everyday life’ has come under considerable sociological scrutiny largely because of its apparent intractability: because of the perception that everyday life is the basis of all social existence, and its features are therefore more or less invisible or unregistered. Everyday life is lived rather than analysed. Sociological analysis has been devoted to the fine balance of making everyday life visible for analysis without disturbing its everydayness. Thus, for instance, Michel de Certeau’s influential attempt to chart the practices of everyday life was introduced as a project that seeks ‘not so much to discuss this elusive yet fundamental subject as to make such a discussion possible’ (de Certeau 1984, p. xi). Early forays into analysing everyday life struggled with its subjectivity and intractability variously: Sigmund Freud grappled with the everyday ‘shortcomings in our psychical functioning’ where everydayness is marked by ‘certain dimensions fixed by our judgement, which we characterize by the expression “within the limits of the normal”’ (Freud 1960, p. 300); and Erving Goffman’s (1959) sociology of everyday life foregrounded the ‘self’ performing amidst the performances of other selves. In various ways developments in cultural sociology have since taken these pioneering efforts forward. However, the paradox remains that analysis of everyday life both renders it visible and erases its subjectivity. And it therefore always remains doubtful whether that which is effectively analysed as everyday life is indeed everyday life. A similar paradox is played out from a different direction in Ray’s collection. Ray’s collection indubitably articulates and performs and represents in verse the subjective everyday life experienced by the poet without objectifying it as an analytical approach would. And yet this everyday life is also put into perspective and made strange – not because of any analytical effort but because of the pressure of the Iraq invasion context on the poet’s sensibility. Because of the poet’s discomfort about the invasion, the alienations it generates, the unremitting irritation it causes, his everyday life seems strange to him. The inflection of his everyday life by his awareness of the invasion makes the everyday other than habitual and unthinking and lived. His daily habits of communicating and reading and thinking and looking are put sharply and uncomfortably into relief by the distortions that the invasion disperses across social and individual lives. Everything that the poet habitually does is penetrated by that awareness of the invasion: everyday acts and thoughts become articulated as its metaphor, as commentary on it, as ruptures and aberrations from and correctives to it, as counterpoints to it, as ironic distance from it, and so on. The design of the collection and



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Brian Turner, Here, Bullet (2005) Turner’s collection fits the conception of war poetry as written by a witness or given as a testimony from the ‘war zone’. Turner was an infantry team-leader of the US army in Iraq for a year from November 2003. His poetic engagement with the ‘war zone’, then, was technically after the conclusion of the ‘war’ was declared by President Bush on 1 May 2003, and covered almost the entire occupation period that followed. In the public perception the occupation period was as much a continuing ‘war’ as the invasion itself. The ambiguities of the occupation period are addressed in Turner’s collection; it is a poetic engagement with the displaced presence of the US soldier in Iraq after invasion. In the collection the unease of such presence is not articulated as a political or ethical conundrum. It is articulated instead in terms of an exquisite sensitivity to being a foreigner in this land, to embodying the invading army in another nation, to the two-fold displacement of the poet-soldier away from home (back in the USA) and within a strange land (Iraq). The violence of invasion and occupation expresses itself as the concretization of these schisms. The evidence of violence, in other words, is all around – in a visceral fashion – the poet’s voice and displaced presence in Iraq, and yet his descriptions of violence are given not so much with shock or anger or fear as with a kind of struggle for expression. There’s a curious contemplativeness in these descriptions, as if the poet constantly slips before or after the violence, as if he looks back from or forward to or looks from above or elsewhere at the violence that is pervasive. In other words, the poet seeks constantly to put the violence that is the theme of the collection into some kind of perspective in terms of his displaced presence in Iraq. That works primarily by exploring the linguistic and metaphorical possibilities and failures of translation. The soldier-poet’s displaced presence in occupied Iraq is naturally first and foremost a displacement of words, a struggle with translating words. The introductory ‘A Soldier’s Arabic’ (p. 11) sets the tone for the collection as a whole: in it the soldier-poet’s perception of foreign words (Arabic) in a foreign land becomes at the same time a desire for reaching across the linguistic barrier, a realization of the differences at war (‘Where we would end a war / another might take as a beginning, / or as an echo of history, recited again’), and an expression of his uncomprehending presence. The trope of struggling



its poetic verbosity is in the reiterative articulation of everyday acts and thoughts in the Iraq invasion period so that they become unfamiliar, focalized, not everyday-like.

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with linguistic translation (also picked up in the poem ‘What Every Soldier Should Know’, pp. 19–20), expands into a trope of struggling with translation across a variety of boundaries, indeed a search for translation itself. This operates as recourse to culturally ‘other’ perceptions that are available in translation: variously, a range of Arabic intellectuals associated with Iraq are called upon (the philosopher of history Ibn Khaldun, the scientist Alhazen, the author of Gilgamesh, the poet Sa’di, and others mentioned in the notes of the collection). At times the imperative of translation works as a kind of intralingual effort between different registers: between the military and the civilian, between the soldier’s and the poet’s. More effectively, the effort of translation (in the broadest sense) works according to various standpoints that the poet finds for charting the violence around him: locations real and imaginary – still points, so to speak – that he adopts to be able to present the prospect from a distance or to frame the prospect effectively in verse. Such adoption of standpoints includes: homing in on the indifference of nature amidst the conflict (landscapes and animals appear often); building a ‘poetic machinery’ of the dead or of ghosts around acts of violence; extending a sort of tourist gaze over landscapes and cityscapes (spotting women, marking exotic moments); withdrawing into memories or imaginings of ‘home’; trying to imagine what Iraqis are thinking. The most direct descriptions of an act of violence in the collection appear in the poem ‘2000 lbs’ (about a bombing in Mosul). But description here is refracted through a range of imagined perspectives (of US soldiers, Iraqi men and women, even the suicide bomber, as they died); what we have is a series of translations of the violent moment through different perspectives. The struggle of translation and expression captures the poetic sensibility that cannot ultimately come to terms with its presence in occupied Iraq. That, it seems to me, summarizes Turner’s collection. The collection could be read as the poetry of alienation arising from awareness of the invasion context, in a way like Ray’s collection: only, Ray’s (written at ‘home’) is about alienation from everyday life while living it, and Turner’s is about the alienation of the absence of any meaningful everyday life (for the people of Iraq and US soldiers). Dunya Mikhail, The War Works Hard, translated by Elizabeth Winslow (2005) In the Anglophone world – especially in the UK and USA – the invasion of Iraq naturally aroused some interest in Iraqi and other Middle Eastern literature. In poetry this meant that tokenistic space was made



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for some translations: I have mentioned the appearance of translated Arabic poetry in Faber and Faber’s 101 Poems Against War anthology, and similarly Arabic poetry was featured in a number of newspapers and magazines. More sustained attention to Iraqi literature was evidenced rarely in the USA and UK. The notable exception was Saadi Simawe’s edited Iraqi Poetry Today (2003), which featured poems by Dunya Mikhail among others. Mikhail’s individual collection, drawing on poetry written during the Iraq invasion and earlier, appeared subsequently in a translation by Elizabeth Winslow. In introducing the collection, Saadi Simawe, speaking as ‘a teacher of English literature’, finds resonances in it with the poetry of John Donne (‘metaphysical qualities’) and Emily Dickinson (‘playfulness and stimulating vision of the world’) (p. xiii). Simawe’s weak attempt to affix status for Mikhail’s poetry in terms of English literary canons (without reference to the invasion context), and the piecemeal attention to Iraqi poetry amidst which this collection appeared, draws attention to a wider politics of translation. The politics of translation has been a substantial academic concern in recent decades (primarily since the 1990s), and particularly with regard to translating from and into English. The broad argument that has unfolded is as follows. Geopolitical and inter-cultural disparities of power and hegemonic relationships are often transmitted and perpetuated through translation. This has been possible because of the marginality of translation. While acts of translation are pervasive, they are often not esteemed as significant and tend to be neglected, rendered invisible and considered subservient. Since that is so, translation is par excellence that process through which hegemonic relationships can be perpetuated almost unthinkingly, without appearing to. However, if the process and practice of translation are given deserved and rigorous attention, they can not only be used to determine how power relations work through them but can also be used to oppose them (for a succinct summary of the main points of debate, see Gentzler 2002). Several proposals along those lines for oppositional translation from marginalized positions were offered: for instance, with regard to feminist politics by Sherry Simon (1996), and postcolonial politics by Lawrence Venuti (1995, especially ch. 7). The discernment of power relationships in existing translation practices and any challenge to them through translation practices would involve, naturally, attention to both the actual doing of translation and the manner in which translations circulate: i.e. what is selected for translation, how translations are used in institutions, how they are marketed and received, etc. Since the English language




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has been closely implicated in the history of British colonialism and American superpower dominance, and given its uneven global spread and powerful hold on international cultural circulations, translations from and into English have been of particular interest in relation to the politics of translation. The Iraq invasion period obviously sharpened perceptions of the disparities of power between Anglophone USA and UK and Arabophone Iraq and other Middle Eastern countries, indeed of the inequities that obtain in contemporary geopolitics globally. The invasion also heightened the manifestations of power politics in translation practices, especially of political and cultural texts and discourses and especially from Arabic into English. The degree to which that was manifested in literary translation is yet to be rigorously examined, and undoubtedly will be in due course. Such examination requires a broad sense of the cultural interfaces and cross-perceptions that have developed between Iraq and the USA and UK, of the sort that is ably covered in Muhsin al-Musawi’s Reading Iraq (2006). The specific patterns of the politics of literary translation in the invasion period, informed by such a cultural history as alMusawi’s, is needed for a meaningful exploration of a translated text such as Mikhail’s collection (i.e. alongside other such). That is outside the scope of the present study. But the shadow of translation, an awareness of the implicit if indistinct politics of translation, is cast on any reading of Mikhail’s collection which is cognizant of the invasion period. The collection presses against its translatedness in various implicit ways, somewhat as Turner’s collection probes translation in a number of directions. For Turner the probing comes with the sense of the soldier-poet’s presence in an invaded land, and in Mikhail’s collection translation negotiates the émigré’s or refugee’s presence (chiming with the translated textual presence) in an adopted country. The émigré presence of the poet appears in the collection through a series of abstractions redolent with either desire or revulsion – and sometimes torn between both simultaneously. The primary abstractions are unsurprisingly of nationhood, of the nation left behind (Iraq) and the nation arrived at (America): these are regarded as entities (as personifications or things), much as one might look at a picture or read a text. Such constructions of nationhood are also expressive of the émigré-poet’s sense of being dislocated from them; or, more precisely, the poet’s voice emerges from the interstices of translation back and forth between nations. This is forcefully conveyed in and radiates out of the adjoining poems ‘I Was In A Hurry’ (‘Yesterday I lost a country. / I was in a hurry, / and didn’t notice when it fell from



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me’, p. 31) and ‘America’ (‘Stop your questioning, America, / and offer your hand / to the tired / on the other shore’, p. 34) of the collection. A preoccupation with Iraq as nation naturally dominates – the home that is not home – and is expressed variously as the object of return or loss, a persona and a remembered environment, a text or collage of troubled history stretching well beyond the invasion context itself. The image of ‘the Dictator’ (Saddam Hussein) and references to the Ba’ath regime’s repressions echo through the evocation of Iraq, but neither are explicitly named: the assumption of shared references places the émigré voice as speaking to compatriots. In many ways, references to ‘the Dictator’ here are not unlike David Ray’s references to ‘our President’ in The Death of Sardanapalus. And yet the poetic sensibilities at work are different in the two collections. Where Ray talks of ‘our President’ in terms of his alienation amidst everyday life, Mikhail talks of ‘the Dictator’ as an aspect of the removed home nation. That is essentially the distinction which, I feel, marks Mikhail’s sense of nations as abstract. That abstract sense of nationality is also characterized in relation to the USA: in personifying America, in images of being in transit, in locating the foreign or immigrant voice or gaze, and in one instance by identifying Lynndie England (who figured significantly in the Abu Ghraib prison torture pictures) emphatically with her nationality – ‘This is an urgent call / for the American soldier Lynndie / to immediately return to her homeland’ (p. 13, that too sounds like an airport announcement). The émigré-poet in the collection expresses herself through displacement, in brief. Alongside the abstract nations, and playing with them, is an abstract notion of war in the collection. War is occasionally seen as an autonomous drive of which all are victims (there aren’t really agents, only victims); and sometimes war is seen as a condition of distress which simply incomprehensibly obtains. War characterizes nations and histories and displacements without explanation. The abstraction of war collides against the abstractions of nations (left behind and arrived at), so that they are all caught in the displacement and ambiguity of the émigré-poet’s sensibility. War here is therefore not really a direct reference to the invasion of Iraq and there is no political context for it. The juxtaposition of abstractions of nations and of war and of displacement appears to be particularly suggestive in the Iraq invasion period, but it is difficult to say what is specifically suggested. Perhaps it is the ambiguities and hesitancies of translation, linguistic and cultural, which come through as the substance of the collection – in English.




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Rich’s collection also works through abstractions, but rather differently from Mikhail’s. Here there’s a conceptual field, a coherent and thoughtthrough network of ideas, and a poetic consciousness which is honed by, for instance, knowing that ‘history was not a novel’ (in ‘Equinox’, p. 16), contemplating ‘defeats of language / in history’ (in ‘Tell Me’, p. 19), pondering ‘the hemorrhaging of my history’ (in ‘Variations on Lines from a Canadian Poet’, p. 29), recognizing that ‘We were at the time in the time of our displacement’ (in ‘USonian Journals 2000’, p. 40), considering whether ‘everything returns in time except the / utterly disappeared’ (in ‘Collaborations’, p. 55), registering what happens ‘when we are shaken out to the last vestige / when history is done with us’ (in ‘Alternating Current’, p. 71), and so on. The idea of history is not formulated in an academic way, but it is clear that a well thought out understanding of history – an awareness of the complexities of history – lies beneath such poetic phrases. As for history, so for language, identity, love, the world, ideology, freedom, and an enormous plethora of other concepts which come pregnant with awareness of their complexities, and importantly their interpenetrations with other concepts. The difference from Mikhail’s kind of abstraction is perhaps most easily grasped with reference to evocations of the nation. America – or rather the USA of the ‘USonians’ – appears frequently in Rich’s collection. But instead of presenting any coherent idea of the nation as meaningful, as Mikhail does, Rich’s poetry constantly interrogates the idea of the nation, tries to grasp it from within and without, from different perspectives and in different connections. There is an idea of the nation – of the USA – in Rich’s collection, but it is a provisional, unstable, questionable idea, and it simply cannot be personified or concretized or turned into a cohesive text or image. It falls into the conceptual field that seems to bubble constantly in the collection. The conceptual field is extended from a political perspective, and the poetry of the collection is itself analytical. The poetry is not analytical in the sense of academic argument and evidencing, it is analytical as poetry: where the capture and juxtaposition of words, their sounds and nuances, the connotations of phrases and their dislocations, the suggestiveness of images and their slipperiness, both reveal and sharpen the political perspective. Everything that draws the poet’s attention – from the news, feelings about and conversations with friends and lovers, experience of travels and returns, amidst everyday life – is grist to the political perspective and can be analysed in verse. And everything that 10.1057/9780230298118 - Imagining Iraq, Suman Gupta


Adrienne Rich, The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000–2004 (2004)

is picked up thus has an effect on the entire underlying conceptual field, so that each poem bears on all the others and there’s a cumulative effect that coheres as the collection. Within such a poetic method, particular attention is given to political and personal ruptures or fissures, those which need to be contemplated and understood. ‘War’ is often evoked. War simmers centrally in the conceptual field and political perspective, and is treated with the same kind of interrogative air as the nation is treated. The evocation of war is always an evocation of a particularly bewildering rupture in the poet’s sensibility, in history and the world, and in politics. The invasion of Iraq is naturally not a singularity in Rich’s collection, and doesn’t absorb everyday life and poetry as comprehensively as it does David Ray’s. The collection presents the exercise of Rich’s particular poetic sensibility (which is also a political perspective which derives from a conceptual field) over the period 2000–4. This period is marked, among other momentous personal and public matters, by the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 and the invasion of Iraq. These are ruptures that Rich’s political perspective and poetic analysis could scarcely neglect. In this collection there are inevitable and tractable responses to both, but within the flow and scope of the broad conceptual field. The title poem ‘The School Among the Ruins’ (pp. 22–5) was written in 2001 (probably after 11 September), and was featured in Hamill’s anthology Poems Against the War (2003) during the Iraq invasion period. It presents the malaise of violence within the continuum of the poet’s political perspective and the continuum of contemporary conflicts: the epigram reads, ‘Beirut. Baghdad. Sarajevo. Bethlehem. Kabul. Not of course here’ (p. 22). At times the collection offers a direct allusion to the invasion (in the poem ‘Five O’Clock, January 2003’, pp. 95–6, for instance), and often there’s simply a self-evident fittingness with the concerns of the Iraq invasion. That continues in fact in Rich’s subsequent and companion collection Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth: Poems 2004–2006 (2007). In these collections the invasion of Iraq is but one discord among a variety of discords, and yet it is one that is noted sharply enough to resonate across both collections. David Harsent, Legion (2005) Harsent’s collection is not, in any tractable way, addressed to the invasion of Iraq. On the whole, it is probably about the stabilities and instabilities of humans in their environments. There are three parts. The first, entitled ‘Legion’, appears to describe – sometimes in a collective voice, sometimes as from the eye of a camera, sometimes in an individual 10.1057/9780230298118 - Imagining Iraq, Suman Gupta



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voice – scenes from an anonymous war zone. The sequence in this part is punctuated by poems in italics called ‘Despatches’ (five times), which affect the language of a witness reporting from the war zone (let’s say by radio transmission) but heard only in fragments (as if the transmission is constantly interrupted). The phrases and lines of these poems are scattered on the page, visually suggesting fragmentation. The anonymity of the war zone is carefully constructed, and though there are hints of a shattered landscape in Eastern Europe (perhaps around the former Yugoslavia) there is also a deliberate performance of anonymization: the names of streets and landmarks are often deliberately generic (Street of Locks, Street of Songs, Street of Keys, Terra Damnata, Lake Torpid). The reader is invited to be particularly sensitive to locations, to look for the signs and identifying marks. The second section, entitled ‘Stelae’, is a set of prose-like pieces about rocks. These are justified on both sides to appear as rectangular and solid blocks of text, to signify firmness. The prose has an academic quality, and could be scraps of texts by a geologist or archaeologist or ethnographer confronting human uncertainty against the implacable rocks. The third untitled part describes the everyday life of persons in a city, usually in their voices (‘I’) addressing an interlocutor (‘you’). Location is at stake here too. Most of the poems are located in a carefully anonymized way as in the first part – at the graveside, or riverside, or roadside, or bedside, and so on – but this is the anonymity that suggests the complete familiarity of everyday life. These locations are mentioned as one might say ‘I’m off to the greengrocer’s’ without having to spell out which greengrocer’s. The steady circuit of everyday life in the third part is an effective counterpart to the dislocated anywhereness of the first. There is obviously an evocation of war in there in the first part. It is the most abstract, the most decontextualized evocation of the collections touched on here. It is marked only by its contemporariness: in the recognition of things that are listed as randomly as the shattered landscape throws them up. The war here is not really about any war out there or identifiably about a war; it is really a crystallization of the poetry of war as an autonomous construction, about such poetry itself. It demonstrates what poetry can do with war, how poetry enacts war rather than how poetry responds to war. The war that appears in the first part of Harsent’s collection makes sense within the scheme of the collection: war is an apt counterpoint, a suggestive metaphor, an arrangement of words in relation to images, or some such poetic device. Giving more content to the war evoked in the collection involves assuming an extraneous burden of interpretation. It depends on the



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reader to associate the poems with flesh and blood and particularities according to her preoccupations and experiences. Appearing as it did in the Iraq invasion period the reader of the time would have been perfectly justified in understanding it and construing it accordingly, but that would have been transparently the reader’s doing. In this collection the reader can have no illusion that a specific conflict is characterized, and the reader has to work at bringing the specifics of a war to the poetry.

My readings The invasion of Iraq provides the backdrop for my readings of these individual poetry collections, and for considering them side by side. Mine are simply one possible set of readings within the receptive field where these collections appeared. That my readings were not out of synch at the time can be evidenced in the numerous reviews these collections attracted. The production of these collections were not innocent of the Iraq invasion context either, and of their possible reception at the time. Indeed, the collections were written, arranged, packaged and marketed accordingly. Within the cycle of authoring, production, circulation and reception then, these individual poetry collections illuminate various aspects of the invasion period: the anger, anxiety, reflections, experiences, detachments and so on that were distinctively concentrated in that period with that particular ‘event’ (if that modest word conveys the circumstances) in view. More significantly, these collections draw the particularities of the invasion into wider circles of illuminations. Around the focal point of the invasion these collections address expanding circles of social and human concern: with everyday life, language and translation, movements across boundaries, individuals and society, love and anger and conflict. Ultimately, these collections embrace the contemporary itself. Seen side by side as above, the collections supersede the specific context of the Iraq invasion to demonstrate a range of poetic engagements with the life, world and poetry of our times.




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Frontline drama In his chapter on the ‘Theatre of War’ in The Great War and Modern Memory (1975, ch. 6), Paul Fussell notes a consanguinity between the participant’s view of warfare and of theatre: ‘Seeing warfare as theatre provides a psychic escape for the participant: with a sufficient sense of theatre, he can perform his duties without implicating his “real” self and without impairing his innermost conviction that the world is still a rational place’ (p. 192). The participant’s position provides the fulcrum of Fussell’s discussion of theatre and the First World War from a range of perspectives: wartime audiences escaping the reality of war by immersing themselves in theatre, those with experience of war (the equivalent of soldier-poets) writing theatrically (but not necessarily only plays), representations of war participants in drama, the theatrical language of war participants (particularly class-conscious British soldiers). The catchphrase ‘theatre of war’, in this view, is effective because it captures a double bind of location and participation in war. On the one hand, the war zone is like a stage and those in it become self-conscious performers who are displaced from the everyday life of ‘real’ selves and located in an ‘irrational place’. On the other hand, the theatre stage and actors materialize an experience which temporarily draws audiences away from their everyday existence and ‘real’ selves – and under those conditions the dislocations of war can be effectively represented and conveyed, even if war is distant or past. Of course, the same could be said of cinema or television drama. Theatre and war zone meet in the locations and dislocations of participation in Fussell’s view, and indeed that is the dominant sense in which a ‘theatre of war’ is understood both in literary terms and in the metaphorical plethora of the catch-phrase. 96




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These representations range from documentary to fiction film (which run the gamut from independent to Hollywood), from YouTube accounts of the war by veterans and conscientious objectors to satirical musicals, and from street theatre that simulates military attacks on Iraqi civilians to verbatim theatre that has the ‘big players’ as characters, to testimonial performances by unembedded reporters. (Melo 2009, p. 86) In my discussion of theatre of the Iraq invasion period, I confine myself to live performances involving an established theatre stage and performers, and usually pick on those for which a text (a play-script) is publicly available. Mine is, in other words, a rather conservatively literary approach to the matter, assumed for reasons of economy. Amidst the widespread determination to construct the invasion of Iraq as ‘war’, Fussell’s sense of the ‘theatre of war’ applies to some of the plays that fall within my remit. Plays which were concerned primarily with the frontline, with the participants in the Iraq invasion in Iraq, appeared early in the USA. Tim Robbins’s Embedded is the first of these, first performed in the Actor’s Gang Theatre in Los Angeles in July 2003, and then in the Public Theatre in New York in 2004. A DVD recording of the latter has been available since May 2005. This is a satirical account of the invasion, which focuses on: the US government officials behind it, portrayed as cartoonish characters in masks with names like Rum Rum and Pearly White and Woof, forming an ‘Office of Special Plans’; the ‘embedded reporters’ (on whom more soon) who slavishly presented the war on the media in the US government’s and military’s terms, the latter personified by Colonel Hardchannel; and the US ground soldiers, who are presented as comparatively rounded and innocent characters. A clear line from disaffection to sympathy is set up in that ordering of the main agents in the play. The ‘Office of Special Plans’ is played with hammed-up extravagance, behind the fixed-expressions of masks, on a script full of cynical wisecracks: Rum Rum starts off a meeting with the words, ‘We are currently sufficiently deployed, locked and loaded, cocked and ready, chompin’ at the bit, poised for engagement, steady ready Freddy’ (Robbins 2004). At the other end of the scale, the soldiers are humanized and individualized, presented with initial humour and growing pathos – they are the victims. Sean Huze, of the US Marine Corps who was deployed in Iraq during the invasion in 2003, authored



The range of performances which may broadly be regarded as theatrical and addressed to the Iraq invasion is enormous; according to a reviewer:

Imagining Iraq

the play The Sandstorm: Stories from the Front. It was performed first at the Gardner Stages in autumn 2004 and then at the Elephant Asylum in spring 2005 in Hollywood, directed by David Fofi. The play features the stories of ten soldiers, delivered in consecutive monologues. A detailed review by Robert Litz describes the setting of the Elephant Asylum production: Dominating the upstage wall is a crude collage of dust-weathered letters that provides a screen on which slides, taken by Huze and others during their time in Iraq, are projected. […] We see the charred remains of Iraqi civilians and soldiers, some dismembered, some toppled in degrading heaps like so much refuse and summarizes the monologues as follows: These monologues are memories in progress. Each story has its own individual twist of irony or half-glimpsed insight, but the overall drama of the play is that of not knowing if the percolating memories that consume these 10 young men will ultimately breed psychosis, numbness, denial, homicide, the oblivions of addictions, or radical salvation and private peace. […] They’re not pretty; in fact, most are brutal anecdotes of impulsive stress and adrenalin-induced violence. They offer no uplifting moral lessons or sentimental spins on the fraternity of war. (Litz 2005) Jerry Quickley, a journalist and hip hop poet, was sent by Pacifica Radio as an ‘unembedded’ war correspondent to Iraq shortly before the invasion began and returned to the USA shortly after. He wrote and performed a play based on this experience, Live from the Front, first at the Ivy Substation Theatre, Culver City, California, in May 2005, and then at The Mark Taper Forum’s Douglas Theatre, Los Angeles, in 2006. An extended analysis by Carla Melo gives the following description of this one-person performance: The delivery juxtaposes storytelling with occasional impersonations and often shifts from past to present, turning spectators into active witnesses to his witnessing. […] Quickley’s telling of the tale is somewhat circular in that it starts with television footage of him being interviewed on NBC TV after his return from his first trip to the Middle East, and then rewinds to his preparations for the journey, followed by his arrival in Jordan and the week-long process of finally



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getting into Iraq. As the narrative moves into Iraq, he reenacts his witnessing of the bombings and the encounters with civilians he interviewed there. The performance ends with his dramatic deportation, which involves a life-threatening road trip to Jordan. This entire account is interspersed with sections of hip-hop poetry that relate episodes from his teenage years in New York, mixed with others that vividly capture the horror of the attack. (Melo 2009, p. 89) She notes particularly the manner in which Quickley was able to convey his empathy for the ‘other’ – that is, the Iraqi – in terms of his own ‘otherness’ as belonging to the black minority in the USA (pp. 90–3). The scripts of Robbins’s, Huze’s and Quickley’s plays are unpublished at the time of my writing this (January 2010). Several successful dramatic productions touching on the frontline appeared in the UK: Jonathan Lichtenstein’s The Pull of Negative Gravity (2004), Simon Stephens’s Motortown (2006), Gregory Burke’s Black Watch (2006) and Roy Williams’s Days of Significance (2007). The Pull of Negative Gravity was first performed by the Mercury Theatre Company at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, directed by Gregory Thompson, in August 2004. It describes the devastating effects of the return of a soldier Dai from the Iraq frontline, partially paralysed in a wheelchair, to his family in a failing Welsh farmstead – brother Rhys, mother Vi and fiancée Bethan. The horrors Dai has witnessed, and perhaps perpetrated, in Iraq are hinted at by his inability to describe what he has seen: at one point, in a moment of frustration, all he is able to come up with is a stream of expletives (Lichtenstein 2004, p. 61). Though Bethan marries Dai she finds herself unable to shake off a growing revulsion for him, and is drawn towards an unresponsive Rhys. By the end of the play Dai’s mother Vi helps him commit suicide and withdraws into herself, the farmstead has to be sold off, Rhys settles elsewhere and Bethan kills herself. Another soldier returns to England from the invasion frontline at Basra with unhappy consequences in Simon Stephen’s Motortown, first performed on 21 April 2006 at the Royal Court Jerwood Theatre, London, directed by Ramin Gray. When the play was released Stephens caused controversy by observing that: I was confused by why I felt nervous about the anti-war campaign and the marches on Hyde Park. I was confused by why I felt angry about the moral didacticism of that campaign’s spokespeople. I was confused about why I felt more sympathy towards Fusilier Gary Bartlam, convicted in Osnabruck of several unspecified crimes in his



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This, however, was clearly not a pro-invasion sentiment but an expression of scepticism about the possibility of moral certainty on either or any side – which Motortown was meant to convey. The returning soldier here is Danny, whose time in Iraq has evidently transformed him into a deeply troubled and at times psychotic personality. While finding shelter with his gay younger brother Lee, he is estranged from his former girlfriend and parents, and feels that it is the environment in England which has changed rather than him. His alienation from his homeland is reflected, interestingly, by the philosophical gunsmith Paul who activates a deactivated gun which Danny has acquired. Paul’s views (Stephens 2006b, scene 4) express a detached and bleak cynicism, in some ways the opposite of Danny’s inarticulate feeling of being outof-place and desire for belonging – and yet Paul’s and Danny’s sense of their environment also chime with each other’s. With the reactivated gun Danny goes off on a violent spree, commits a gratuitous murder (perhaps more than one), and finally finds solace with his brother Lee. Gregory Burke’s Black Watch, was first performed at the Drill Hall, Forest Hill, in Edinburgh in August 2006. The play presents the experience of soldiers, interviewed by the author, of the eponymous Scottish regiment which was deployed in Iraq in October 2004 (after the Coalition Provisional Authority was dismantled). Their time in Iraq coincided with moves towards amalgamating the regiment with four others, which happened in 2006. Given these circumstances, the invasion of Iraq is naturally portrayed with a sense of doom. The main characters of the play are aware of the unpopularity of this war, are conscious of being perceived as ‘big bullies’, and are shown at the end as variously traumatized or disenchanted. The performance consists of scenes where the ‘Writer’ interviews the characters, interrupted by scenes where the characters are shown in Iraq, and interspersed with song and dance routines depicting the ritual and historical aspects of the regiment. The locale of Iraq is contained almost entirely in the feeling of despair and physical discomfort that the soldiers experience: they feel let down by the Americans, experience the grief of friends dying, meet embedded journalists, and suffer from the heat and bouts of cynicism. When the ‘Writer’ asks about contact with Iraqis, one of the characters, Stewarty, responds: ‘What the fuck have the fucking Iraqis got tay fucking day way anything?’ (Burke 2007, p. 46). Amidst largely celebratory reviews, an essay by



dealings with Iraqi prisoners, than I felt for Harold Pinter or Damon Albarn. It was especially confusing when many of their arguments resonated with sense. (Stephens 2006a)

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David Archibald (2008) argued that the play depicted the invasion as an aberration in the regiment’s official history, whereas actually the regiment had been involved in many of Britain’s unsavoury imperial and neo-imperial exploits (especially in Ireland). Roy Williams’s Days of Significance (2007) premiered at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, on 10 January 2007, directed by Maria Aberg. It is in three acts: the first follows a group of youngsters on a drunken pub crawl ‘somewhere in the South East of England’, of whom two (Ben and Jamie) are due to head off to Iraq as soldiers; and the second is set in Basra, charting the experiences of Ben and two of his mates (Ben, it appears, ‘opened fire on a group of unarmed kids’, p. 65, and one of his wounded colleagues commits suicide). The third act, a series of fragmentary conversations, brings the audience back to England – it turns out Ben died in Iraq, Jamie is indicted for torturing Iraqi prisoners (vividly described by him, p. 95), and his lover Hannah is torn between loyalty and revulsion. Here Ben’s friend, the intellectual Dan, eloquently expresses the informed anger of public opinion about the invasion. Paradoxically, at the same time – and as in Stephens’s Motortown – a tacit connection is suggested between life in Britain and the experience of invading Iraq. The violence that British soldiers engage in there (both the main characters on the frontline are implicated in war crimes) appears as an intensification of the everyday violence that simmers in England, evident in the drink culture and abrasiveness of the first act. The inspiration of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing which underlies this, especially in the structuring of the first act, is obviously ironic: the possibility of love is doubtful to begin with and wiped out by the last. This brief excursus into plays about, directly or indirectly, the battle zone of the Iraq invasion indicates how the frontline was presented to and apprehended within the civil sphere of the USA and UK. Drama in relation to war is predominantly understood, as I observed at the beginning, as revolving around participants in war. The invasion of Iraq, though not quite war, is presented as war in the above by following the theatrical conventions of frontline drama, by focalizing the frontline and the participants of invasion there. At the same time these plays, in different ways, self-consciously reflect on the mediation between the military and the civil, the frontline and the ‘home’, the military experience and the civilian perception. At times – as in Quickley’s, Lichtenstein’s and Williams’s plays – this is a painful mediation, more interrogative than certain. The manner in which the Iraq invasion was constructed as ‘war’ in literary terms can be discerned clearly between such representations of the frontline and self-reflexive mediations between the military and civil.




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More importantly, as conventional war drama concerned with the participants in the invasion there are two interesting points to note. First, the above evidence a sort of self-absorption amongst the active British and American participants. Irrespective of whether the conflict is implicitly denounced or accepted, and irrespective of how the quotients of tragedy and bitterness and courage and integrity are balanced, these are plays about soldiers. Variously, US and UK soldiers are represented as or represent themselves as victims or heroes, these soldiers speak on their own and others’ behalf and are spoken of, and the civil sphere is presented as a field which revolves around the soldier protagonists. They form the core around which others speak or are silenced. American and British civilians appear as a troubled circle of family and friends, or as caricatured or distant villains in the corridors of power, or as the abstract demos in the background. Iraqi soldiers and civilians are registered distantly through reported speech and images, as a remote outer horizon even of the frontline that is brought to view. Almost inevitably, contemplating ‘soldiers at war’ – especially ‘our soldiers’ – comes with normative sentiments and sympathies which undermine the possibilities of critique. Second, some of the above plays demonstrate that in the Iraq invasion context specifically the concept of participants shifted in an unprecedented direction with powerful implications for writing about and representing ‘war’ generally – and obviously the invasion particularly. This has to do with the so-called ‘embedded reporters’ as a new kind of participant, gaining a status that is close to and sometimes continuous with that of soldiers. Let me be clear about this. As long as there has been mass media reporting on war there have been reporters who attached themselves to units of soldiers and reported accordingly. But an illusion had consistently been maintained that reporting comes from independent observers, not participants: that reporters speak for the interests of their media employers and of the news-consuming public. During the Iraq invasion this illusion was explicitly punctured by contractually attaching reporters to military units, by formalizing the relationship of military as information source and media as concordant information channel, and by the very designation of ‘embedded reporters’ as such. Embedded reporting has since become a media catch-phrase, the theme of numerous academic projects and papers (such as a BBC-funded project at Cardiff University in June–October 2003 and consequent book by Lewis et al., Shoot First and Ask Questions Later, 2006), disturbing documentaries examining this development (e.g. Control Room, directed by Jehane Noujaim in 2004, and War Made Easy, directed by



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Loretta Alper and Jeremy Earp in 2007), and collections of interviews (such as Kavotsky and Carlson, eds, Embedded, 2003) and novels (e.g. Nicholas Kulish’s Last One in (P.S.), 2007). They are a key theme in Tim Robbins’s play, and lurk behind or make cameo appearances in Gregory Burke’s and Jerry Quickley’s. In the first chapter I listed some of the books written on the invasion by embedded reporters. Effectively, the business of representing and writing the invasion particularly and war generally for the media and beyond became a professionally ratified collaboration between military and journalists – competing with the comparatively freewheeling testimony writings of veterans and ‘unembedded’ journalists like Jerry Quickley (bringing the latter a distinctive cachet). Effectively also, the reporter (the writer) also became a visible participant in the war on a similar footing as a soldier – distinct from observers, and thematized as participants. The theatre of war has found a new kind of visible actor, who materializes by and through writing and representation. So much then for theatre from the frontline. Such theatre was a matter of representing the frontline within the civil sphere: in the above plays, for bringing the frontline into the distant homes in the USA and UK. But that effort was coeval with and to some extent circumscribed by a range of other such efforts, especially a powerful mass media effort. Indeed, in the civil sphere the material and violent invasion on the frontline was a concrete manifestation of a broader reflexive sense of invasion. In an immediately relevant way, there was the invasion of media representations of the frontline within domestic spaces. This could be regarded as an intensification of global media circulations that are a continuum in modern society, wherein distant realities are constructed in definite ways, framed and rendered consumable, and disposed as virtually real. The mechanics of these circulations in conflict situations were trenchantly examined in the context of the First Gulf War (e.g. Jean Baudrillard 1995 [1991], for instance, and Martin Shaw 1996), and the trend merely seemed to take a larger-scale but similar direction during the invasion. As Nicholas Mirzoeff observed about images from the 2003 frontline in the USA: In the Second Gulf War, more images were created to less effect than in any other period in human history. […] For all the constant circulation of images, there was still nothing to see. The relative anonymity of the war images must then be understood as a direct consequence of the media saturation. (Mirzoeff 2005, p. 67) However, in the civil sphere the whole perception of invasion was considerably more complicated. To begin with, it wasn’t confined




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simply to the frontline defined by the incursion into, and take-over and occupation of Iraq by primarily US and UK troops. It was rather apprehended as such from before the military action and well into the continuing violence in Iraq after the Coalition Provisional Authority withdrew in 2004. And it wasn’t understood merely as a frontline at all in the sense of the position of the highlighted participants of invasion – the soldiers and embedded reporters; it was grasped instead as an invasion into the multiple and complex area of Iraqi civil society at large – by intent, and in consequences and effects. Further, the invasion was also understood as reflexively within the home-fronts and indeed on the home-fronts in various ways: as an invasion of neoconservative values in Western society, an invasion of fear and guilt in ‘our’ secure and democratic existence, an invasion of security measures on habitual freedoms, an invasion upon the lives of minorities within ‘our’ domain, and invasion of discord upon the accords of everyday and domestic and social spaces. Occasionally, the invasion of Iraq translated into invasion on broad global concerns: an invasion on human rights, international agreements and juridical principals, etc. Within this complex civil sense of the invasion of Iraq, images of invasion did eventually have an impact: the photographs of torture and abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American and British soldiers certainly did, for instance. It is within this matrix of the civil sense of the invasion of Iraq that theatre of the period was more distinctively engaged than the above theatre from the frontline. In fact, the buzz of theatre of the invasion peaked in the first instance amidst the anti-invasion protests in the USA and UK and elsewhere before the invasion formally began. Before the bombing was launched, all those other broader nuances of invasion were already amply felt and responded to, often in performance. To convey a sense of this, consider the theatre repertoire of London in early 2003, in its established spaces. From January 2003 the satirical musical play The Madness of George Dubya, written and directed by Justin Butcher, was performed to packed houses at the fringe Theatro Technic. Inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s cult film Dr Strangelove (1964), this showed the eponymous president in a bunker, pyjama-clad and with a teddy bear for consolation, as the only haplessly sane person who is concerned about the ‘war on tourism’. When the mad General Kipper launches a nuclear attack on ‘Iraqistan’ from a British base, he and Blair try ineptly to find ways to stop Armageddon. The play was updated every night with new jokes and songs as news of debates about invading Iraq broke. By April, the show moved to the West End’s Arts Theatre. By April, too, there were anti-invasion performances taking place in various London venues.



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The Royal Court held a Shock and Awe week (7–12 April 2003), which included plays by Martin Crimp (Advice to Iraqi Women, a short piece read by Stephen Dillane and Sophie Okenedo) and Rebecca Prichard (Delir’ium), Tony Harrison’s reading of Iraquatrians, and some lectures. Crimp’s short play drew particular attention. Apparently a series of statements addressed to Iraqi women, of the sort that are often issued about protecting children in a risk-driven consumer society, the play acquires a particularly eerie quality in view of the contemplated military invasion (for an extract, see Crimp 2003). The National Theatre was the venue of a Friday afternoon series called Collateral Damage, over March and April 2003, in which artists responded to the invasion. Similar reactive or responsive performances addressed to the invasion were taking place numerously in other cities in the UK and USA and elsewhere before the invasion. More reflexive theatre appeared after a lull that followed with the undertaking of the invasion and occupation itself. The following sections trace some of the patterns that became manifest in theatre about the invasion in relation to the civil sphere thereafter.

Record of reality Theatre is probably the cultural form which has been most explicitly and persistently used to understand the relation between reality and artifice. This has been particularly delved since the self-consciously modernist late nineteenth century, and at various levels. The relationship of theatre to social reality was explored in ‘history plays’ and ‘problem plays’ and ‘kitchen-sink drama’; the illusion of theatre and the reality of the stage have been juggled suggestively against each other in modern ‘anti-theatricalist theatrical plays’ and in ‘absurd drama’ (often leading into searching philosophical explorations of reality); both social reality and the ontological reality of the stage have been played with in ‘naturalist drama’ and most influentially in ‘epic drama’; and so on. Each of those phrases in quotation marks has become critical shorthand both for particular historically specific notions of theatrical production and reception as well as for modes of theorizing theatre’s relation to the world. Leading up to our contemporary ethos, and keeping in view developments in audio-visual and broadcasting technologies, further such critical phrases have acquired new or renewed currency: ‘documentary drama’, ‘testimony theatre’, ‘verbatim theatre’, ‘tribunal theatre’. The nuances of the latter were played out in indicative ways in theatrical engagements with the invasion of Iraq within the civil sphere – indicative, that is, of contemporary understandings of theatre




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and social reality and philosophical reality. None of those latter phrases (or the kind of theatre they refer to) originated in the Iraq invasion period. But plays of the period that appeared under those labels pushed the boundaries of theatre’s relationship to perceived reality in ways which seem to me to characterize distinctively contemporary attitudes. These are plays which, in different ways, are about the invasion and of the civil sphere. Seen together, they reveal underlying preconceptions of reality in theatre which constitute our sense of the contemporary. I have three such in mind – descriptions of these lead into a discussion of the broad preconceptions of reality underpinning them: Richard Norton-Taylor’s Justifying War: Scenes from the Hutton Inquiry, first performed at the Tricycle Theatre, London, from 30 October 2003, directed by Nicholas Kent and Charlotte Westenra; Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo’s Guantanamo: ‘Honor Bound to Defend Freedom’, first performed also at the Tricycle Theatre from 20 May 2004, directed by Nicholas Kent and Sacha Wares; and David Hare’s Stuff Happens, first performed at the National Theatre, London, from 1 September 2004, directed by Nicholas Hytner. Hare’s Stuff Happens charts the public and closed-door negotiations conducted by the instigators of the invasion of Iraq – the Bush administration mainly with Tony Blair’s government as principal ally – from the US National Security Council meeting of 30 January 2001 to the apparent end of the invasion in April 2003 and (sketchily) the immediate aftermath in 2003 and 2004. Much of the play uses reported statements by or records of meetings involving public figures like George Bush, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Condoleeza Rice, Dick Cheney, Tony Blair, Jack Straw, Alastair Campbell and others. Information gleaned from the news media, government records, United Nations records, dossiers, statistical data provided by various bodies, and so on figure in the play. Plausible reconstructions of closed-door discussions which are known to have taken place are offered at times. Interludes from the factual or reported are provided in the form of soliloquies by, in that order, an ‘angry journalist’, a ‘New Labour politician’, a ‘Palestinian academic’, a ‘Brit in New York’ and an ‘Iraqi exile’. These soliloquies are designed to advocate for different retrospective positions on the invasion, for and against it. These are therefore not within the chronological tracking that the play follows, but meant to be delivered as looking back from the ‘present’ in which the play is performed – first in 2004, and then updated for performance in 2006. ‘An Actor’ provides a voice-over, to clarify the sequence of scenes and statements which appeared over three years and to fill gaps.



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Brittain and Slovo’s Guantanamo is drawn from interviews with (conducted by the authors in March–April 2004) and letters from men, all British citizens, who were detained as ‘terrorist suspects’ in the US-run prison camp in Guantanamo, Cuba, and their family members. They were detained from various parts of the world – Gambia, Afghanistan, Pakistan – and were released after two years or more without charge in 2004 and 2005. The prisoners’ experiences as documented in the play cover roughly a period from 2002 to 2004. The accounts of the prisoners and their family members are broken down and spliced together, or presented as interwoven bits of concurrent narratives rather than as consecutively presented discrete narratives. These are ‘framed’ by statements from press statements and reported interviews with the then US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, and quotations from lectures and statements by the legal representatives of the prisoners, a British Law Lord (Johan Steyn), human rights activists (Mark Jennings, Clive Stafford Smith), and Tom Clark, a British victim of the 9 September 2001 terrorist attack in New York (whose sister was killed there, and who finds himself troubled by the Guantanamo detentions). The undermining of basic juridical principles and contravention of human rights in the detention of ‘terrorist suspects’ and ‘non-military combatants’ who are not US citizens at Guantanamo Bay, and the manner in which their cases are processed by a US Military Tribunal without independent legal representation, has been widely debated since 2001. Brittain and Slovo’s play was intended to be and received as a contribution to that debate. The play extrapolated from, as Brittain observed in a write-up on its background, 25 hours of taperecorded interviews (Brittain 2004). The public transcripts of the 2003 hearing by Law Lord Brian Hutton to investigate the circumstances of the death of David Kelly provided all the material for Norton-Taylor’s Justifying War. Though widely discussed in the British media at the time, the details of this context were indifferently registered outside the UK and are beginning to fade from the collective memory within – so a brief account is useful. The first of three public dossiers by the British government to justify the invasion of Iraq was entitled Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Assessment of the British Government and released on 24 September 2004. This carried, amongst other information, the claim that the Iraqi military was in a position to launch a missile attack on the UK within 45 minutes of an order being given. This was highlighted in the media at the time. Starting with a 29 May 2003 report on BBC’s Today programme by defence correspondent Andrew Gilligan, a series of media reports




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revealed that a source (‘mole’ was the media-friendly term in use) from the British intelligence services had both questioned the validity of the 45-minute claim, and suggested that the dossier had been unwarrantably ‘sexed up’ by the Prime Minister’s office. Vehement denials, particularly by the Prime Minister’s Communications Director Alastair Campbell, was followed by the ‘outing’ of the ‘mole’ – biological and chemical weapons specialist David Kelly. This was widely regarded as engineered in a vindictive spirit by Campbell’s office, since it had revealed enough information about the source in a press conference for journalists to be able to infer his identity and had then proceeded to confirm any inference that proved to be correct. After several internal hearings and amidst intense media scrutiny, Kelly was found dead in mysterious circumstances (the evidence pointed to suicide) on 18 July 2003. By this time it was evident that the ‘weapons of mass destruction’ which had been cited to justify the invasion couldn’t be found in Iraq, and the integrity of the other dossiers had also been undermined (for a detailed discussion of the dossiers and controversies surrounding them, see Gupta 2007, ch. 9). Brian Hutton was appointed to lead an independent investigation into the circumstances of Kelly’s death by the government on 18 July 2003. But the investigation was really regarded as much more than simply that: it was thought of as an investigation into the veracity of the September 2003 dossier and the UK government’s conduct generally in the lead-up to the invasion. The Hutton Inquiry heard 75 witnesses in August–September 2003, and came up with its findings in a report released on 28 January 2004. The findings, widely regarded as a ‘whitewash’, were that no wrong-doing was found on the part of the government in putting together the dossier or ‘outing’ Kelly, that the reporters who broke the story had not observed the proprieties of reporting, and that Kelly was responsible for breaking an official code of silence. Norton-Taylor’s play appeared immediately after the hearings, and well before Hutton’s report was released in January 2004. The timing is crucial for understanding both its intent and its reception. It selects and presents from the transcripts of 12 witnesses of the 75, and every word is taken from the transcripts (though some detailed exchanges are shorn off for clarity). Each session with a witness is presented as a scene. Amongst those whose testimonies are covered in the play are the BBC correspondent Andrew Gilligan, Alastair Campbell, Secretary of State for Defence at the time Geoff Hoon, Kelly’s colleague Brian Jones, and Kelly’s wife Janice Kelly. As Norton-Taylor observed in his write-up on the background to the play, the ‘real challenge’ was: ‘how to boil down six weeks of oral evidence into a little over



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two hours. The problem was not what to put in, but what to take out’ (Norton-Taylor 2003a). Though in these three plays every effort was perceivably made to establish clear continuities between the play-script and real-world sources, they were obviously compressed, massaged, added to or subtracted from, and arranged for performance – with conventional time-limits and stage constraints and linguistic/performative effects in mind. Some of the nuances of the plays in performance also need to be noted. In Hytner’s National Theatre, London, production of Stuff Happens the entire cast was present throughout on a large and almost bare stage (with furniture props). Performers rose to deliver their lines and had the focal point on the stage marked by lights. In the comparatively smaller space at the Public Theatre in New York, where it was directed by Daniel Sullivan from 28 March 2006, the cast was placed in the corridor dividing the audience leading up to the stage, and walked on to the stage to perform their parts. The different ways in which audience perspective was placed – looking from a distance at the play or seeing the play as flowing out from the audience space – could be regarded as different modes of approaching the historical ‘reality’ it was presenting. From either perspective, though, the effect was of registering the staginess of the stage (foregrounding an awareness of the presence of performers and the performance space) as a counterpoint to the real-world events being depicted. The ‘performativeness’ of the productions was at times curiously put into perspective by the interventions of ‘An Actor’, whose linkage-providing role has been noted above. It isn’t simply background information to fill the gaps that ‘An Actor’ provides; he also introduces the character that a performer steps forward to play, notes time and location when necessary, and even announces the directions for gestures that the performer then performs. In other words, ‘An Actor’ both gives background information and voices the stage directions that are usually silent – in a way becomes the voice of theatre itself. Kent and Ware’s production of Guantanamo at the Tricycle Theatre, London, had a reconstruction of the sterile cages in the prison camp as the backdrop, and the prisoners’ striking orange costumes provided the only splash of colour. There was no action and little movement in the performance; the effect of the play was dependent on oratory, i.e. almost entirely on direct address to the audience. The very structure of the play – focusing on characters speaking to the audience – leads into a double-edged strategy for performance: on the one hand, establishing the closeness of direct address and the exposure of full attention to the speaker, and on the other hand, maintaining distance from the experience which is




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reported and the setting of which is symbolized by the cages behind the speakers. The characters portrayed, in other words, appear to occupy a middle ground between the immediacy of the theatre and the distance of the actualities it refers to. This middle-ground was emphasized by the ambivalent manner in which the play itself concluded, described thus by a reviewer: for me, the most powerful moment came at the play’s end, when the audience realized that there would not be a curtain call, that the actors would remain in their roles, onstage in their cages and on their cots. The audience hesitated, not sure of when or whether to clap, and then quietly exited the theatre. The ending therefore undercut any sense of traditional catharsis that one might expect from drama. (Hesford 2006, p. 39) In the performances of Stuff Happens and of Guantanamo ‘alienation effects’ reminiscent of Brechtian theatre served to create a reflexive distance for the audience, putting into perspective both theatre itself and the social reality that the plays derive from and refer to. Using a different tactic, the setting of Kent and Westenra’s production of Justifying War, also at the Tricycle Theatre, attempted to create a setting that emulated the original setting of the Hutton Inquiry as closely as possible – an official impersonal setting. The intention here was obviously to create a fly-on-the-wall experience for the audience, in a naturalistic manner. And this was reflected in the performances too. As Norton-Taylor observed in his background write-up: We wanted as much verisimilitude as possible. Though the actors are playing the parts of real, identified, individuals, they are not impersonating in the usual meaning of the word. They are getting as close to the real characters they play as possible – some came to the inquiry. We were all aware of the dangers of caricature. (NortonTaylor 2003a) The fact that some of the actors attended the Inquiry is indicative of the intent of the production. Norton-Taylor had himself been one of the witnesses who testified in the Hutton Inquiry. In text and performance then, these plays conducted a subtle negotiation between representing a perceivable social reality – a pressing and already avidly engaged set of real-world events – and at the same time foregrounded the means of representation as theatre. In doing this



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the plays drew upon the resources of theatre’s history of self-conscious development vis-à-vis perceptions of social reality. So far in these observations there isn’t much new food for thought. But things become complicated when further circumstances of their production and reception in the pressured context of the Iraq invasion are registered. As I have often noted already, this was a period that was so preoccupied with the invasion that any literary expression that alluded to any aspect of it tended to get sucked into the advocacies and anxieties of the time – became part of the great flow of talking about the reality of the invasion. These plays were studiedly put forward to get sucked in; they were designed as interventions into the political ethos of invasion. The productions and receptions explicitly framed these plays as such, as timely interventions in and aspects of social reality. In the process these plays not only enabled reflection on theatre’s relation to politics and social reality (under the existing critical rubrics of ‘documentary drama’, ‘tribunal drama’, ‘testimony plays’, ‘verbatim plays’) but also pushed towards contemplation of contemporary social reality as theatre. These plays, in their invasion context, invited reconsideration of the nature of contemporary social reality itself. What I mean by that should become clearer as the imperatives of production and reception are unwound further, and the pressures on representation teased out further. Interestingly, the playwrights, though not performers in their plays, performed roles before and around and after the plays that exceeded that of the ‘literary author’. The role of the ‘literary author’ has arguably always been routinely performed around literary texts and productions in a variety of ways, and doesn’t simply consist in being recognized and having legal prerogatives as such. The practices of this role have come to be increasingly managed by media and cultural industries and publicity agencies – itself the subject of several studies (see, for instance, Coombe 1998; English 2005; Glass 2004). So, the playwrights received the usual attention as authors in introducing their published/performed texts, in media coverage and interviews and statements on their own work, in publicity material, in reviews, in scholarly responses, and so on. In these instances though, such public performance of the role of being ‘literary authors’ (playwrights) was layered with the performance of other and coincident institutional roles (as academics, as journalists, etc.). Or rather, the authority of literary authorship was itself apparently derived from the performance of other kinds of authorial roles. Let me try to phrase that differently for clarity. The status of literary authorship is conferred by the evidence of a literary text, but the status of certain other kinds of authorship (academic,




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journalistic) comes from the institutional standing and professional experience of the author which is brought to and evidenced in the text. For the three plays in question here, the play-script and performances seemed to conform not only to the literary credentials of their playwrights, but also their credentials as other kinds of professionals – as academics or journalists – irrespective of whether they actually have such institutional or professional standing, mainly by their performing such a professional claim. Indeed their literary credentials seemed to derive from their claim of being more than literary authors. The equivocal ‘Author’s Note’ for the published Stuff Happens makes the two kinds of layering of author-ity explicit. It announces the raison d’être of its authoring, production and reception thus: Stuff Happens is a history play, which happens to centre on very recent history. The events within it have been authenticated from multiple sources, both private and public. What happened happened. Nothing in the narrative is knowingly untrue. Scenes of direct address quote people verbatim. When the doors close on the world’s leaders and on their entourages, then I have used my imagination. This is surely a play, not a documentary, and driven, I hope, by its themes as much as by its characters and story. (Hare 2006 [2004], prelim page) The first sentence offers the complex formulation of the ‘history play’, which, for many, would immediately evoke the Shakespearian genre. The following four sentences make an emphatic academic claim for the play which is removed from any current sense of the content of Shakespeare’s history plays. Hare suggests that the text follows the conventions of scholarly history: drawn from multiple sources, authenticated, ‘verbatim’ as academic quotations must be. Equally emphatically, the latter two sentences then take this text to the antipode of theatre as artifice. This is done with a nod towards ‘verbatim theatre’ and ‘documentary drama’, but keeping the text at arm’s length from such in-between forms. Hare’s ‘history play’ is a fusion, he makes out, between two contrary registers without any compromise between them: the register of academic history, and the register of theatrical making and structuring. Brittain (more vocal than Slovo) and Norton-Taylor made almost no claim for the literary aspect of author-ity apropos their plays, and unproblematically claimed professional/investigative authority. Indeed the latter superseded to the degree of deliberately erasing the former. Brittain’s write-up in The Guardian when the play opened came in the



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Gillian Slovo and I travelled from London to Manchester, Birmingham, Tipton and Leeds, meeting families originally from Jamaica, St Lucia, Iraq, Jordan, Pakistan and Bangladesh. For three weeks, we totally immersed ourselves in the realities of life for the families of British detainees in Guantanamo. […] We usually met just one family member, always in their choice of territory: in pubs, hotel bars, impeccable sitting rooms, in rooms that doubled as bedrooms, in lawyers’ offices, in the Tricycle’s rehearsal rooms. They gave us tea, or wonderful Indian sweets, a baby to hold or a lift to the station. There were no prepared questions. We wanted the families to decide what they most wanted to say. (Brittain 2004) Elsewhere and later she has commented on the play from the position of a human rights and feminist activist, summarizing the play thus: Among the major themes that arise from it are: the U.S. readiness to flout all international legal norms; the politicization of the U.S. legal system; the effective acceptance of torture as a tool for U.S. aims, carried out both by the United States and by various allied regimes on behalf of the United States; the impact of this within U.S. society; the assault on civil liberties by governments around the world; the demonization of Muslim men by Western governments, media, and societies; the resistance strategies of Muslim women; and the inevitable effects on the next generation of Muslim children. (Brittain 2006, p. 209) The essay quoted here went on to consider the implications of the absence of Muslim female voices from the play, and how the play has encouraged Muslim women to speak of their experiences after its initial performances. Norton-Taylor is as well-known for having written a series of what the Tricycle Theatre regards as ‘tribunal plays’ in the mould of Justifying War as for his reports in The Guardian as Security Affairs editor. His reports on various aspects of the invasion of Iraq were widely read at the time. In introducing the play in The Guardian when it opened, Norton-Taylor foregrounded his authorial role as a journalist rather than as a playwright, commenting therefore both on differences and similarities between the roles: The craft, the instinct, of the daily newspaper or broadcast journalist is to seize on the most striking revelations – i.e., news – using a



voice of an ethnographer (or field researcher) entering exotic and troubled precincts:

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free range of epithets to drive home the point and then adding as much context as required. Each day is different and not necessarily connected. The value of a play is that you can put together in a single piece of work what, on the face of it, might seem a simple enough disclosure-a-day saga, but which, in fact, is much more complicated. And on the similarity of purpose: ‘theatre is a medium, complementary to newspapers, which by capturing a different kind of audience, or a similar audience in a different way, can lead to a greater understanding of how we are governed and what is being said and done on our behalf’ (Norton-Taylor 2003a). The play is presented, in other words, as emanating from the experience of a journalist and serving the purposes of journalism in a different form. Such authorial claims of academic or journalistic authenticity, at the expense of literary claims, were embraced wholeheartedly in the immediate response to the plays. If the authors performed their parts around the plays as academics and journalists who write the real social world, then the recipients of the plays equally performed their part in accepting them accordingly. The perceived social reality of the invasion period was the measure by which the plays were assessed in a variety of ways, and in many instances the plays were simply taken a priori as records of social reality. Indicatively, the first set of responses to Stuff Happens published in The Guardian came not from literature and theatre reviewers at all. A 3 September 2003 feature in the broadsheet entitled ‘For or Against?’ sought responses from Labour MP Robin Cook (who had resigned from the Cabinet in protest against the invasion), former weapons inspector Scott Ritter, BBC governor Gavyn Davis, Conservative MP Ann Widdecombe, army officer Tim Collins and others in a spirit of using the play to reflect their concerns about the invasion itself. Their responses predictably conflated the two, and drew upon their institutional and ideological positions. Reviewers and critics naturally took recourse to extant formulations of ‘history plays’, ‘tribunal theatre’, ‘verbatim theatre’, ‘documentary drama’ and so on to say their pieces, and yet these all too often either minimized attention to the theatre or uncomplicatedly took the correlation of theatre and reality for granted (with normative comments about the one becoming normative comments about the other). Sometimes they themselves doubted whether it was theatre they were dealing with. In relation to both Stuff Happens and Justifying War the obvious preoccupation of reviewers was whether characterizations and performers measured up to the familiar



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public figures depicted and the roles those public figures played in the invasion period. For Justifying War the assertion of verisimilitude was so strong that for some reviewers it caused unease. As the reviewer in The Independent observed: ‘the theatrical vehicle is troubling in being akin to the real-life content in this case. […] This is surely dodgy ground when some of the protagonists’ careers (if not their lives) could be on the line’ (Bassett 2003). Stuff Happens received more considered critical responses after the spate of initial reviewing, and these also occasionally took the social reality represented more seriously than its theatrical devices. Soto-Morettini, for instance, examined the play’s claim to being history seriously and at length, and even discerned a Romantic view of history that it subscribed to. Hare was charged with writing history with the following preconceptions: 1. History is, by and large, about the clash of personalities represented by powerful men. The motor force of history is carried within these great men. 2. Historical action is for the most part reasoned action, proceeding from debate and consideration between great men – but implementation still belongs to those with the might to underpin their will. 3. Great men are flawed but they act in good faith. 4. History is determined by force of individual will. (Soto-Morettini 2005, p. 316) The further the critics were removed from the immediacies of the Iraq invasion perspective, though, the more sensitive they seemed to become to the theatrical devices of Stuff Happens. Thus, Christopher Innes’s reading generally accepted the designation of Stuff Happens as a ‘documentary drama’ before charting out some of the ‘Brechtian elements’ in it (Innes 2007, pp. 443–4); and Elizabeth Kuti went on to analyse the play as a tragedy with a concordant dramatic structure and linguistic devices, and at one point noted firmly that, ‘What the scene captures is not historical truth per se – how could it? This is a play’ (Kuti 2008, p. 465). The receptive construction of the social reality of Guantanamo, and relative neglect of its theatricality, was even more consistent. Initial reviews actually seemed to wish to draw it into the space where public documents and news reports and academic papers are discussed. Both reviewers in The Independent (Paul Taylor 2004 and Raymond Whitaker 2004), for instance, felt that the play almost serves the purpose of the tribunal that the victims of unreasonable detention in Guantanamo Bay will never have. Some felt unhappy that they couldn’t enter into




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some kind of immediate dialogue with what the play seemed to be ‘saying’: Ryan Claycomb, for example, complained that ‘the production assumed a passive, guilty audience, rather than one ready to be drawn into a conversation or rallied into action’ (Claycomb 2006, p. 705). The play was placed alongside factual accounts and images by reviewers: Barbara Harlow’s (2006) review covered it alongside academic books like Paul Farmer’s Pathologies of Power (2005) and Philippe Sands’s Lawless World (2005), and Wendy S. Hesford (2006) discussed it alongside an exhibition of the real-life images of torture of Iraqi prisoners entitled Inconvenient Evidence: Iraqi Prison Photographs from Abu Ghraib, which ran at the International Center for Photography, New York, in 2004. Brittain and Slovo’s Guantanamo appeared to become one document amidst a continuing flow of documents charting and campaigning against human rights abuses in Guantanamo Bay particularly, and the Iraq invasion period generally – gesturing forward towards Brittain’s book-length account with Moazzam Begg of his experiences as a detainee, Enemy Combatant (2006), and the docudrama Road to Guantanamo (2006) directed by Michael Winterbottom. These plays appeared within the Iraq invasion period more with the weight of academic documents or journalistic reports than of literary artefacts. The themes covered in them, their timing, the roles played by authors and producers and commentators around them – all contributed to their appearance as such. That means that these were taken as documents and reports of social reality, which deal in social reality as such and are social reality articulated. Their status as theatre, as literary artefacts, was quickly registered or unthinkingly accepted in the first instance only to be put aside and to allow their academic or journalistic verve to predominate. With more retrospection, with some critical distance from the immediacy of these plays’ appearance in the Iraq invasion period, those theatrical devices began to be unpacked. The immediate relation of these plays to the Iraq invasion period involved a complex circulatory matrix. This was a circulatory matrix which contained political and other public actors, advocates for and against invasion, various media events, perceptions of ‘realities’ in the hotspot of Iraq and relatedly elsewhere, perceived victims and perpetrators, media consumers, the roles of playwrights, producers, performers, audiences, commentators, and all those in relation to other plays and other texts. These were all mapped and located and relocated and bore on each other in a seething interconnectedness. Within this circulatory matrix the plays in question were participant in social reality, were simply an aspect of social reality. In this respect, to some extent these plays cohered



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with the developing aspirations and expectations of ‘documentary drama’, ‘tribunal theatre’, ‘verbatim drama’, etc. generally. They became part of a continuum in which social reality is constantly mediatized and mediated, in much the way that a host of postmodernist intellectuals have suggested. In other words, the indistinguishability of social reality from theatre that I am describing here is the case because social reality is constantly being turned into theatre anyway, into media images and news stories and documentaries and blogs and Internet community themes and so on. These plays became immediately an aspect of the social reality of the Iraq invasion at the expense of their theatrical makeup because that is how social reality is nowadays. Contemporary social reality is intermeshed with, and largely constituted by, the mediatized and the virtual. The invasion of Iraq was consequently itself theatre already and these plays simply became blips in that broader public theatre. That’s one level at which these plays worked. There is another level though, more distinctively of the Iraq invasion period and with equally general import, at which such plays were apprehended. What was at stake here was how specific contemporary public institutions and political actors and social agents fool people or are fooled themselves, the deceptions and illusions and misperceptions in the unravelling of social reality itself. That was the, so to speak, bottom-line of the anxieties and debates that characterized the Iraq invasion period and figured in the plays. These plays put into perspective something that was widely perceived at the time: that the courtroom, the public hearing, the press conference, and the official meeting are all theatre. These spaces of social reality are used to manage belief and disbelief in the public, just as theatre manages the belief and disbelief of audiences. This is not a matter of a generally mediatized and virtualized postmodern ethos; it has to do with material political and social functioning in the present. The cumulative effect of these plays, and such performances, in the Iraq invasion period derived from highlighting that perception of public theatricality – and also, thereby, in similarly partaking of the process of managing belief and disbelief. Such plays could consequently be regarded as part and parcel of the establishment strategy for managing public belief and disbelief that is conducted continuously in courtrooms and parliaments and press conferences and so on. This was something that Derek Paget had suspected for documentaries generally a couple of decades back: Documents are so potentially dangerous to a hegemony that access to them is carefully controlled. Even documents embedded within




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a drama pose a potential threat to a hegemony, unless a means for control can be found. That means has been readily available in naturalism, the hegemony’s preferred dramatic practice. Hence television documentary drama tends to be inflexibly naturalistic, depending on that convention through which it purports to show what is happening, naturally. Like a documentary proper, documentary drama’s very posing of a ‘problem’ can effect a kind of closure to that problem. (Paget 1990, p. 25) It is arguable that these plays participated in the effort to provide closure for anxieties of the Iraq invasion period, in somewhat the same direction as the Hutton Inquiry in Justifying War, by satisfying the desire for a tribunal about the Gunatanamo Bay detentions in Guantanamo, by conducting a sort of public inquest into the build-up to the Iraq invasion in Stuff Happens. Much functioning of public institutions depends on meeting public demands by presenting a satisfying public process or display rather than reaching just or desired outcomes. That the process of a hearing is seen to be undertaken is arguably more socially expedient than the outcome that is reached. In becoming aspects of social reality, the performance of these plays served possibly a similar immediate function within the Iraq invasion period. That is, they either served that function in themselves by simply being performed and publicly accessed, or emphasized the effect of that function on behalf of existing political institutions thereby – even while apparently undermining them. Perhaps that is an unfair argument, and these plays didn’t have the effect of contributing to the management strategies of the Iraq invasion period or working as proxy for them. It is equally arguable that these had the effect of exacerbating the fissures and anxieties of that period: that Stuff Happens served to perpetuate the tensions of the build-up to invasion, that Justifying War actually stopped the Hutton Inquiry from reaching closure with its January 2004 report, and that Guantanamo raised awareness of human rights abuses and intensified the campaign against the detentions. That too would be coherent with their being regarded as aspects of social reality, in the mould of journalistic or academic accounts. Perhaps a bit of both happened. However that worked, for either direction there is a common ground in the relation of these plays to their Iraq invasion context which is relevant here. Indeed, it is this common ground which seems to me to be of particular interest in thinking about these plays and their place in



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the period – distinctly of that period and with broader implications for such theatre. As I have observed above, the theatrical qualities or literary artifice of these plays was downplayed in favour of their journalistic or academic reckoning with social reality. That was quickly registered or unthinkingly accepted only to be put aside, I have said. But however expeditiously put aside it was unavoidably and perceivably there – it was not to be gainsaid. As observed when I outlined the nuances of performance, every production was deliberately performed and foregrounded its theatricality or drew attention to its staginess. The verisimilitude affected by Justifying War was an invitation to compare to the real thing, which also established a distance from the real thing. The almost bare stages of Stuff Happens and Guantanamo naturally highlighted, however subliminally, the starkness of the production and the presence of the actors. In different ways, Brechtian ‘alienation effects’ were introduced to create a reflexive distance between representation and audience. It just took time, given the pressures of the period, for the importance of those to sink in properly in commentaries on Stuff Happens. The productions foregrounded their ‘theatreness’ even while authors and recipients performed the circulation of the plays as academic or journalistic documents. In fact, these two sides – self-evident staginess and socially realistic documentary – were played against each other to enhance the sense of both. Because it was obviously staged, it was more effective as socially realistic documentary; because it claimed to be socially realistic documentary, its staginess seemed apt. Out of this paradox there emerges a contextually relevant observation. Since these plays were critiquing the theatrical strategies of specific public institutions and actors of the time, and exposing the dramatic strategies for managing belief and disbelief, their own self-evident staginess appeared as a sort of contrasting honesty. Here are all these public institutions who are trying to fool us about our concerns by pretending that what they are at is not theatre, it was felt, and here contrastingly is theatre which is obviously theatre speaking to the same concerns. If the former is deceptive the latter is true, if the former blurs reality by not acknowledging its theatricality then the latter sharpens reality because it is obviously and unashamedly theatre. In other words, in the Iraq invasion period such plays about current social reality (‘tribunal plays’, ‘verbatim theatre’, ‘documentary drama’, ‘history plays’ etc.) seemed to present a higher plane of reality – and correspondingly a higher access to truth – than socially realistic political and institutional forums. Of course, such perceptions of higher reality and greater truth were as chimerical as any theatrical illusion. But there it was, and that says much about the potential of such theatre generally in the contemporary world.




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The ‘publicness’ of the issues which feature in the plays above rubs with the ‘publicness’ that theatre, as a form and genre, is conceived with. Whether from the frontline or within the civil sphere, the theatre of invasion collides with the experience of theatre itself in both preconceived and unexpected ways, so that each puts the other into perspective. That is the gist of my argument in this chapter so far. But the invasion of Iraq, I have noted in passing earlier, was also an invasion into private domains within the civil sphere. The idea of the invasion’s reality and its mediated unfolding impinged upon everyday communications and thoughts, among friends and families and colleagues, within domestic and daily working and living spaces. David Ray’s poetry collection Death of Sardanapalus charts the interference into the everyday trenchantly. The presentation of domestic or everyday spaces and proximate circles in theatre at the time can be expected to work with a different perspective from the plays discussed above: that is, when such spaces and circles are shown as disturbed by great public events, and when such events bear upon what are thought of as ‘domestic drama’ or ‘well-made plays’. Two plays come to mind which featured the invasion of Iraq as interference in domestic spaces and intimate circles: Tamsin Oglesby’s US and Them, first performed at Hampstead Theatre, London, from 28 May 2003; and David Hare’s The Vertical Hour, first performed in the Music Box Theatre, New York, from 30 November 2006. Neither of them, in my view, enabled a reconsideration of literary presumptions or presented a particularly distinctive literary development. But both employed a familiar theatrical and literary strategy which played out in interesting ways during the Iraq invasion. Both, to be precise, derived their dramatic tensions from a cross-cultural encounter between dramatis personae defined by nationality, as British and American. In US and Them this was obviously the substance of the play, and was received with mixed feelings as such: with approbation in a review by Charles Spencer, who noted that it was composed of ‘scenes that gleefully skewer the divergent characteristics of the Brits and the Yanks, two cultures eternally divided by a common language’ (Spencer 2003), and grumpily by Sheridan Morley, who observed that, ‘As they plodded through every transatlantic roadblock – historical, emotional, political, parental, above all, fiscal – I longed for just one character, even the waiter, who wasn’t a symbol of the foiled Special Relationship’ (Morley 2003). In an interview on The Vertical Hour Hare rather unnecessarily reminded his audience



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that: ‘One of the things it is about is a traditional Henry James theme of the difference between the Amercian can-do-spirit and the British cynicism. And bringing those two points of view together apart from anything else is quite delicious theatrically’ (Montagne 2006). When first produced in May 2003 the Iraq invasion was slotted into the dominant theme of British–American differences by Oglesby in one scene, or rather a couple of pages (Oglesby 2003, Scene 10, pp. 62–3). Hare’s play presented the tensions of the Special Relationship largely through and as growing out of a conversation about the invasion of Iraq. US and Them charts the friendship and breakdown of relations between an American couple, Ed and Lori, and a British couple, Martin and Charlotte. Its two acts are set in the USA and UK respectively. The first and penultimate scenes are actually one continuous scene, in which the breakup is conducted in a ritualized albeit messy fashion. In the interim, almost every kind of predictable difference of perspective and consequent misunderstandings between the two nationalities is displayed – eloquently summarized in the quotation from Morley above. However, the children of the two couples, Jay and Izzy, deliberately and combatively work through their national differences and end up expecting a child and contemplating marriage. The argument between the couples about the developing situation in Iraq in Scene 10 appears to summarize the national differences trenchantly. These differences appear despite agreement; they argue heatedly while taking roughly the same position. On the difference between Saddam Hussein and George Bush (described succinctly as a ‘murderer’ and an ‘arsehole’ by Martin, which Ed elaborates and agrees with) and on the contradictions of ‘enforced democracy’, all seem to agree. But they argue apparently out of a will towards disputatiousness growing from their national differences, so that they have to check whether they mean the same things by saying ‘democracy’ and register awareness of the relative global positions of their respective nations – USA as the current superpower and Britain as imperialists of yore. In an otherwise obvious display of cultural differences between the UK and USA in the play, this scene offers a fairly subtle reading of those differences in relation to the Iraq invasion. Though presenting a more complex account of interpersonal relationships, The Vertical Hour takes a comparatively straightforward line with regard to national differences. This pits an American professor of international relations, Nadia, who had supported the invasion and even been called upon for advice by George Bush, against a reclusive English doctor, Oliver, who had been vehemently opposed to invasion. They are brought together in the latter’s home in the Shropshire countryside




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when Nadia visits with Philip, Nadia’s lover and Oliver’s son, who had migrated to the USA. A passionate debate about Iraq, where Nadia calls upon her academic credentials, her experience as a journalist in war-torn Sarajevo, and her contemporary ethical sensibility, and Oliver draws on his sense of ethics as a doctor and product of the 1960s leftwing student movement, establishes a bond between the two. This leads to a more intimate conversation in Philip’s absence at night, during which Nadia ponders her troubled love life and traumatic experiences and Oliver exposes his fraught family life (with his son and dead wife) and the trauma of being involved in a road accident. This leads to a sort of healing for both parties, re-establishes understanding between Oliver and Philip, and breaks the relationship between Nadia and Philip. The resolutions that are reached at a personal level appear as a counterpoint to the differences which were articulated in the first instance apropos the invasion of Iraq. The discussion on Iraq allows the characters to go through the panoply of national differences and self-locations – those remain unresolved, or simply remain statically anchored to national differences. The interpersonal resolutions are a matter of domestic accord whereas the unresolved differences about the invasion are due to national environments (the latter is anticipated in the character of the ‘Brit in New York’ in Stuff Happens). These distinct ways of bridging the private and public of the Iraq invasion period by over-determining national characteristics or deploying national stereotypes was entirely of the time. The concerted efforts of the US and UK governments during the invasion of Iraq were discussed on both sides of the Atlantic with national differences in mind. While it was evident that in terms of procedural democracy the invasion was institutionally sanctioned in both countries, and in terms of polarization and intensity of advocacy for and against invasion both countries evidenced sharp frictions, much was made of the differing public attitudes at ‘ground level’. Doubtful survey-based evidence of such differences was constantly cited in unconsidered ways: e.g. that on the eve of the invasion, according to a Pew Research Centre survey of 20 February 2003 in the USA 58 per cent favoured invasion with a UN resolution and 33 per cent without, while according to a MORI survey of 17 March 2003 in the UK 42 per cent favoured invasion with a UN resolution and 24 per cent without. While such indicative differences were not insignificant they were also not especially significant: they needed to be analysed in terms of range of coverage of surveys, the kinds of questions that were posed, the methods of surveying and aggregating, etc. What was interesting was how much mileage was given in the mass media



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and elsewhere to such indicative differences. All sorts of statements seemed to fall into the glib suspicion of anti-Americanism in Britain and corresponding American contempt for or condescension towards Britain. There was a presumption of national differences at work as well as a construction of national differences in the period which appeared to have an almost autonomous momentum, and seemed to escalate. These plays simply gelled with these widespread presumptions and constructions, using their indefinite structure to tie together public and private spaces, impersonal and interpersonal articulations, in relation to the invasion. That these plays called upon presumptions and constructions of nationality, so resonant in the invasion period, is only to be expected. That is not just because of the context-specific resonance, but also because in fact such presumptions and constructions of nationality are useful for linking the public and private, the many layers from formal to informal, from domestic to official, of social life – and importantly, such linkage is connected to the very conceptualization of nationality itself. Whether one accepts Benedict Anderson’s (1991 [1983]) historical account of nationality or not, the logic of his characterization of the nation as both a closed (territorially and administratively discrete and definite) and particularly an imagined community (because it is inevitably larger than any interactive community) can scarcely be gainsaid. A sense of nationality is premised on the constant precedence of the imagined community, a constantly imagined presumption of a ‘deep, horizontal comradeship’ (p. 7) which precedes lived experience of time and place. That this process of imagining is presumptively entrenched in the construction of history, literature and other cultural forms, all sorts of institutions, political and economic processes, has been the subject of considerable scholarly attention. That this process of imagining is also presumptively performed and reified and reconstructed in an ongoing fashion amidst the minutiae and banalities of everyday life – including the private and domestic aspects of it – is a relatively infrequently studied notion. Tim Edensor’s National Identity, Popular Culture, and Everyday Life (2002) is a useful exploration in that direction. Edensor discusses the roles of space and place, performances and material culture – in the occasional and the everyday – in the constant reification of national identity. Unsurprisingly, Edensor’s observations on such continuous constructions of nationality within the less tractable flow of social and individual lives draw upon concepts of theatre. Theatre provides the metaphor of space and performance and things in a network of relations; and equally, this understanding of nationality in




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social and individual lives is amenable to being presented as theatre. Edensor suggests that nationality is constantly constructed and reiterated through mappings of likeness in behaviour, forms, arrangements, expressions, etc. as people traverse and engage a domain in the course of their lives. In theatre such mappings can be condensed to a limited time and space to evoke nationality, and establish a mapping of theatre to world. That is in fact what happens in evoking Britain or America in the above plays. The settings are located as nationally specific, and props are introduced to allow discussion of national perceptions. The characters frequently chart their own and others’ nationalities, constantly announce their attitudes and behaviours as derived from their presumed nationalities, and look to their locales in the plays to map nationally specific likenesses. Effectively, a dominant perception of nationality is constantly presumed and continuously constructed in the plays. In everyday life, of course, such continuous processes of reifying nationality may not be pushed to awareness; in the banality and nebulousness of everyday life it simply happens and may not be thought about. When a visitor travels to another country, when people from different countries meet – when there is a displacement – the national mappings are likely to be pushed to awareness. Thus, Americans Ed and Lori have to constantly explain themselves and locate the British Martin and Charlotte accordingly, and vice versa, and that is what Oliver and Nadja do also. The presumptions and constructions of nationality are consequently thrown forth, and even exacerbated. They perform their nationality more emphatically, draw on its explanatory advantages more readily, than they might otherwise. The equivalent moment in Edensor’s consideration of national identity and everyday life is expressed thus, usefully bringing in theatre as metaphor: a theatrical performer may be so used to playing out the same role that it becomes ‘second nature’ – so sedimented in the habitual bodily enactions required that reflexivity and self-monitoring is no longer necessary. Equally, habitual performances which have been performed unreflexively for a lifetime may suddenly be revealed to those performing them as social constructions. A confrontation with different cultural codes – perhaps by being misunderstood in unfamiliar contexts or being challenged by those from outside one’s everyday community – can reveal that others act differently, inducing a heightened sense of awareness towards what seemed common-sense enactions. Reflexivity and unreflexivity are not properties that are associated with particular kinds of enaction, but



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By making such a situation the fulcrum of their narratives, by condensing it starkly into theatre, both US and Them and The Vertical Hour up the stakes on national differentiation and polarization.

Classics If the entire repertoire of theatre performances within a recent period in, say, the city of London or New York is considered, it becomes evident that not merely the contemporary is performed. Or rather, it is found that contemporary theatre in performance is also an ongoing reckoning with the history of theatre. In the performance repertoire, the present of theatre is constantly put into perspective in terms of its past and vice versa. It would be difficult to find any recent period in the theatre calendar when a new performance or adaptation of classical Greek drama, Renaissance and Restoration drama, or nineteenthand twentieth-century plays wouldn’t be available. Such productions appear with complex intentions and expectations. In some cases, these are ‘rediscoveries’ of plays which have been relatively neglected in performance, and the fact of being produced is an assertion of contemporary relevance. More often, the obviously canonical is reconfirmed by the repeated display of contemporary resonances, and the resonances are sometimes emphasized by adaptations from original texts. Producers and audiences are not only cognizant of the original nuances of such plays, but also of interim performances. Every new production of a Shakespeare play, for example, is a multilayered affair which plays to the audience’s familiarity with the standardized play-script and a range of other productions and adaptations on stage and screen. Allusions to and echoes of theatre of the past are frequently offered and found in new plays or premiering productions. Each production of past theatre in the present, and every juxtaposing of the past and present of theatre, becomes grist to the mill of cultural reportage. Inevitably, academic attention and assessment follow suit. Unlike most other literary forms, the canon of theatre is not really determined by scholarly and pedagogic attention. Other genres of literature are so determined to a significant degree: the canon of poetry, for instance, is largely maintained by evidence of ongoing scholarly interest and institutional appropriation in pedagogy (in curricula). With regard to the canon of drama though, academia plays a less considerable role; the canon of



depend upon contexts and the conditions which shape the frequency of performance. (Edensor 2000, p. 89)

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drama is largely maintained in the continuum of theatrical productions and performances. All this was as much the case for the Iraq invasion period as it is otherwise. Interestingly, a sort of centripetal force seemed to draw a wide variety of canonical drama in performance towards the invasion, implicitly or explicitly. The invasion of Iraq was such a subsuming preoccupation of the period, and so emphatically centralized in media and everyday discourses, that quite different sorts of tried and tested theatre seemed to have potential connections with it. Indeed, for a while the canonical status of plays seemed testable by their ability to incorporate the public drama of the invasion. Naturally, hyper-canonized Shakespearian drama was exploited. In a broadsheet feature of April 2003, Gary Taylor pointed to what he regarded as the pro-war attitude of the history play Henry V to understand the American and British drive towards invading Iraq: ‘Shakespeare transformed a war that kills, wounds, and traumatises untold thousands into a sports contest between two morally opposite men (Bush and Saddam, Henry and the Dauphin). Could Rupert Murdoch’s ministers of misinformation do better?’ (Taylor 2003). This was written in anticipation of a National Theatre, London, production of the play, which was duly staged by actors in modern dress in July and August 2003, directed by Nicholas Hytner. It was obvious to audiences that this was performed ironically, inserting a clear anti-invasion attitude. The performance began with the Archbishop of Canterbury speaking to a dossier to make the case for invading France; and all the parts were played to render the cynicism of political machinations more opaque than the play-text might suggest. The degree to which the invasion context impinged upon the production was testified by the director: In the theatre, we are entirely opportunistic and the dossier they hand round is indeed the Iraq dossier. I don’t think that would have occurred if we hadn’t been rehearsing it at the time we were. The war started during our first week’s rehearsal. For the two or three weeks that the war was happening, there were certain things that ultimately happened that wouldn’t have happened if the war hadn’t finished, because I was quite simply nervous. As an example, the celebratory victory video. I don’t think I would have gone there if the war had been long and bloody and when we opened there were still British soldiers being killed. As the war finished and as scepticism returned and we were looking at it with cooler heads, that which is propagandistic about the play and that within the play which is hagiographic about the king felt very familiar. Shakespeare’s scepticism (which



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Thereafter discussions of Henry V continued to occupy Shakespearian circles. In May 2004 the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington organized a public panel discussion on Henry V’s decision to invade France in 1415. Eight panellists conducted the discussion, including industrialists, journalists and scholars. It was widely reported at the time that this was merely an excuse to discuss the invasion of Iraq, and that it succeeded as such is amply clear from descriptions of the event (such as Bob Thompson 2004). At least two scholarly discussions of the manner in which Henry V was performed and received in the context of the Iraq invasion have appeared since (Henderson 2008 and Lynch 2008). Apart from the National Theatre production of Henry V, Shakespearian performances resonating with the invasion period seemed to gather force a bit belatedly – but they did gather force. An imaginative comic adaptation from Titus Andronicus directed by Darko Tresnjak at the Old Globe, San Diego, June–October 2006, deliberately gestured towards Abu Ghraib torture images (Kanelos 2007, p. 124). In January 2007, the Royal Shakespeare Company presented Roy Williams’s Days of Significance in Stratford-upon-Avon, which was loosely inspired by Much Ado About Nothing (I have commented on it already as ‘frontline’ drama). And in February 2007 the Royal Shakespeare Company presented Richard III: An Arabic Tragedy, in Arabic with English subtitles and with a cast drawn from the Gulf States, directed by Sulayman Al-Bassam. It was set in the present-day Middle East, and began with a monologue written by Al-Bassam and delivered by the character of Queen Margaret: ‘I am Margaret. I would ignore myself if I could but my history will not allow me. We lost. I don’t want your reconstruction grants, your loans, your pity but I just ask of you not to question my thirst for revenge’ (quoted in Usher 2007). An interesting paper by Todd Landon Barnes (2008) tracked and analysed the various ways in which cultural references to Macbeth were used both by the Bush administration and anti-invasion protesters in the invasion period. In mid-2004 theatre critic Michael Billington observed: ‘Where does our theatre instinctively turn in times of crisis? Not to Shakespeare or Shaw but to the Greeks.’ With a number of revivals of classic Greek drama in the UK in view, he concluded that ‘What these revivals all have in common is that they are a direct response to the Iraq war’



I think in the play runs hand-in-hand with his visceral admiration of the king’s qualities of leadership and oratory) seemed clearer and clearer as the rehearsal period went on, and as my frankly ambiguous response to the war crystalised. (Rosenthal 2003)

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(Billington 2004). Indeed, to an extraordinary degree and far outstripping relevant performances of Shakeapeare’s plays, productions of translated and adapted classic Greek drama in the UK and USA and elsewhere were rendered the repository of anxieties about the invasion of Iraq. Seamus Heaney’s translation of Sophocles’s Antigone, entitled The Burial at Thebes, was first performed at the Abbey Theatre, directed by Lorraine Pintal, in April 2004. Antigone has been pondered and performed, as George Steiner’s well-known study Antigones (1984) demonstrates, at defining moments of European cultural and political history – it has a particularly complex and long-standing tradition of receptions. While working on the translation Heaney was naturally aware of this burden of tradition, and observed that he found the impetus for translating it yet again because of its resonances with the Iraq invasion context: One consideration, however, was weighing heavily in favour of a new start. Early in 2003 we were watching a leader, a Creon figure if ever there was one: a law and order bossman trying to boss the nations of the world into uncritical agreement with his edicts in much the same way as Creon tries to boss the Chorus of compliant Thebans into conformity with his. With the White House and the Pentagon in cahoots, determined to bring the rest of us into line over Iraq, the passion and protest of an Antigone were all of a sudden as vital as oxygen masks. (Heaney 2005b) Martin Crimp’s adaptation of Sophocles’s Women of Trachis, entitled Cruel and Tender, was first co-produced by the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord and Ruhrfestspiele Rocklinghausen, at the Young Vic, London, in March 2004, directed by Luc Bondy. In a 2006 interview, Crimp recalled his approach to penning the adaptation: ‘We started working on this piece in 2003 and the War on Terror was in full swing, but I was concerned not to reduce the play into an anti-war diatribe’ (in Sierz 2006, p. 107). The result is naturally more suggestive than a diatribe, and I return to Crimp’s – and Heaney’s – efforts below. In June 2004, Don Taylor’s translation of Euripides’s Iphigenia in Aulis was produced at the National Theatre, London, directed by Katie Mitchell. The director was quoted as follows at the time: I was looking for a play that could have a conversation with the audience about the situation in Iraq. This is a play that takes a cynical and satirical look at the actions of public figures and that was written at



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a time when Euripides was losing faith in political leaders and their inability to extricate themselves from an interminable war. Audiences are very clever so you don’t need to localise events too much: unlike Euripides’ Agamemnon, who sacrifices his daughter, Tony Blair is not actually killing his own children. But what we recognise in this and other Greek plays is the gap between politicians who talk in moral absolutes and our own sense that everything is muddy, complex and confused. (In Billington 2004) Two versions of Euripides’s Hecuba were performed in quick succession in late 2004 and early 2005. Frank McGuinness’s translation of the play was first performed in the Donmar Warehouse, London, in September 2004, directed by Jonathan Kent. Reportedly the translation was a labour of six years: the Omagh bombings in Northern Ireland in 1998 and the terrorist attacks in New York of 11 September 2001 simmered as much behind its making as the invasion of Iraq. It was, however, written, produced and received in the period when the Iraq invasion was uppermost in the minds of producers and audiences, and McGuinness was quoted in the following vein when the play opened: It is no accident that that warmonger George W. Bush has never been to war himself or that Tony Blair has never done service and is so willing to send his own people to fight lunatic wars. If you create an environment where the waging of war is your solution, you are in terrible danger of unleashing something terrifying and demonic that you will never be able to control. War plays remind us of that. Hecuba reminds us of that. It is not a comforting play, particularly not for these dangerous times when there is so much grief. It shows that there is a dark hardness that we all possess, and that the impulse for revenge and war comes from within us all. That means nobody is safe. (In Gardner 2004) Soon after, in March 2005, the Royal Shakespeare Company at Albery Theatre, London, produced Tony Harrison’s translation of Hecuba. In introducing the play prior to its opening, Harrison briefly described its receptive history and observed: We may still be weeping for Hecuba, but we allow our politicians to flood the streets of Iraq with more and more Hecubas in the name of freedom and democracy. The audience might weep for Hecuba in Washington when the tragedy plays there, but will they




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In the New York fringe theatre, Sheila Morgan’s Electra Votes, directed by Rhonda Dodd, opened at the Blunt Theatre in August 2005. This was adapted from the Electra myth, on which there are plays by Sophocles and Euripides and which is covered in the second of Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy (The Libation Bearers), and featured a screen as chorus displaying images from battle-torn Iraq. By December 2006 Iphigenia 2.0, Charles Mee’s adaption from Euripides’s play, was being performed for the first time in the City Garage, Santa Monica, directed by Frederique Michel; it premiered in New York at the Signature Theatre in August 2007, directed by Tina Landau. Mee’s numerous adaptations of classic Greek plays have reflected on contemporary wars and the passage of the American ‘empire’, and it was clear to audiences that Iphigenia 2.0 was particularly addressed to the invasion of Iraq. In various interviews Mee said as much in a laconic fashion, observing in December 2007 that another adaptation, ‘Orestes was occasioned by the first Persian Gulf War and Iphigenia obviously has some very direct resonance with the current war in Iraq’ (Signore 2007). An interview at the time of the premiere in New York gave Mee the opportunity to explain those direct resonances, noting particularly that among the contemporary sources he had used in his adaptation were blogs by ‘young soldiers in Iraq today’, so that ‘what soldiers in the play say are what real soldiers say today’ (Mee 2007). The authors – translators and adapters – of these classical plays, and those involved in bringing about their performances, were obviously motivated by the contemporary resonances with the Iraq invasion. Most were conscious of making an intervention in the ongoing exchanges about the invasion, and of exposing their plays to a particularly polarized environment of advocacies for and against. Most were also circumspect about giving their efforts an explicitly partisan turn. While Harrison and McGuinness were unambiguous about their anti-invasion positions, they undertook translation with a broader historical sense of the source text and its transmissions; Crimp’s and Mee’s adaptations were decidedly more than of-the-moment diatribes; and in translating Antigone Heaney evidently expected some of its ambiguities to bear upon international politics of the time. These translations and adaptations, in other words, pushed against the overwhelming concern of the time not only to reflect on it but also to draw it into a



squirm with regret for Iraq, or the re-election of George Bush, or pause for a moment before going for the gullet of Iran? (Harrison 2005b, p. x)

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wider apprehension of history and humanity. In interesting ways the resonances of these plays with the invasion of Iraq were effectively underlined in performance. In almost all of these the dialogues, with their overt or covert classical origins, were deliberately bounced against the contemporary staging. These productions were usually in modern costume; some were deliberately set in modern war zones, occasionally evoking a Middle Eastern or African location; multimedia devices and props were used in some to draw direct correspondences with invaded Iraq. The numerous reviews that these plays attracted immediately picked up those gestures towards Iraq, and either paused on the resulting insights or castigated the productions for such obviously market-friendly ploys. The authors and directors gave evidence, as noted above, of an Iraq connection. It was widely noted that a juxtaposition of past and present, classic and contemporary, was being thoughtfully conducted with the Iraq invasion in view. But the precise nuances of that juxtaposition were not really teased out in reviews, and are only just beginning to be charted in academic scholarship. The classic/contemporary juxtapositions in relation to the Iraq invasion period were noted but barely analysed, or were recognized without being much considered. If they had been considered carefully it is likely that some distinctive aspects of contemporary theatre’s negotiations with the classical would have surfaced. The classic/contemporary juxtapositions in question involve a notion of the classical text and performance, and adjustment of that notion to a contemporary environment (refracted through the Iraq invasion here). Inevitably, the notion of the classical is itself reflexive of the present and the adjustment of that notion is little more than a strategy for putting the present into perspective. The performance of the classical play in translation or adaptation now is, in other words, a performance of two present-day ideas: a contemporary sense of what is classical theatre (what theatre of antiquity means to us), and thereby finding a theatrical way of coming to grips with the present itself. A classicist’s approach to such plays – excavating the evidence of what antiquity and classical theatre really was like and how far adaptations and translations depart from that reality – is not much to the moment from this perspective. That classicist’s project is an important scholarly one, of course, but not for this study: this is concerned with the construction of the present in the present. These are somewhat abstract observations, which are easily given flesh by considering how to engage the texts and performances noted above within the space available here. Two directions suggest themselves. On the one hand, we can




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look closely at the sorts of juxtapositions and negotiations involved in specific translations and adaptations. All the productions mentioned could be usefully examined to this end, but that would take too long. For the sake of brevity, therefore, I focus on two below: a translation, Heaney’s The Burial at Thebes; and an adaptation, Crimp’s Cruel and Tender. On the other hand, we can consider the implications of the unusual frequency of such productions of classical theatre in the Iraq invasion period in a general way. Some remarks along those lines bring this section to a close. As observed above, when translating Antigone as the invasion of Iraq unfolded Heaney felt he could perceive a parallel between Creon and George Bush. It was a point he emphasized severally, in the Guardian article quoted above, and in his earlier working notes: ‘Just as Creon forced the citizens of Thebes into an either/or situation in relation to Antigone, the Bush administration in the White House was using the same tactic to forward its argument for the war on Iraq’ (Heaney 2004, p. 227). These asseverations seem to establish a thematic link between the drama of the build-up to invasion and the Greek tragedy, but Heaney’s claim in this regard is questionable. The central theme of the play, to state it briefly, is the opposition between Antigone, who is determined to bury her dead brother Polyneices (vanquished in his recent assault on Thebes) with the usual rituals, and Creon, king of Thebes, who had expressly forbidden burial. Antigone appeals to ‘higher’ laws of respect for the dead to justify herself, and Creon appeals to the prerogatives of social order and his position as ruler. Arguments are offered at length on both sides, and the Chorus (citizens of Thebes) find themselves swayed in both directions. Irrespective of how these arguments might have been weighed in antiquity (in Sophocles’s play it appears that Creon suffers the wrath of the gods, though Antigone is not spared either), at least since Hegel’s (1998, pp. 1217–18) interpretation of the play equally understandable moral grounds have often been perceived on both sides. Nevertheless, the figure of Antigone – a rebellious individual opposed to the power of the state – has consistently been attributed a heroic stature as opposed to the repressive head of state Creon. Numerous politically nuanced adaptations and interpretations have ploughed the rebellious versus repressive associations of the two figures, without however succeeding in denying either some claim to moral reason. With this in mind, Heaney’s reading of a parallel between Creon and Bush has been subject to disagreement. On the one hand, some critics have been inclined to accept it and see it as coeval with Heaney’s sense of an Irish tradition of resistance to repressive power



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Creon’s phraseology calls to mind the post-9/11 climate of fear, loyalty (to the government), and vengefulness, which was encouraged by the U.S. president through the adoption of the U.S.A. Patriot Act, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. Moreover, there is an underlying parallel between Creon’s treatment of Polyneices and Bush’s denial of human rights in the interrogation and imprisonment of anyone labelled as a terrorist. (Wilmer 2007, p. 225) On the other hand, critics like Michiel Leezenberg have voiced objections to suggesting such parallels: Depictions of George Bush as a Creon or Pentheus who brings disaster to himself, his family, and his country, by refusing to heed good advice, are as misleading as they are tasteless. In general, the comparison with such classical models confers on contemporary rulers an aura of aesthetic and moral grandeur that they do not necessarily possess or deserve: unlike the tragic rulers, for example, their policy decisions do not generally plunge their own families into misery. Worse, such comparisons come perilously close to the ways in which Iraqi government propaganda tried to glorify Saddam as a hero comparable in stature to Gilgamesh, Nebuchadnezzar, or Saladin. (Leezenberg 2007, p. 269) Behind the somewhat stuffy tones of a scholar who wishes to keep classical antiquity as far as possible from the banality of the contemporary, this latter seems to me to be closer to audience perceptions of Heaney’s version of Antigone. I suspect that the Creon–Bush parallel would not have occurred to audiences if Heaney hadn’t mentioned it, and failed to be a meaningful parallel despite Heaney’s mentioning it. Creon may not arouse the audience’s sympathy, but it is clear even in Heaney’s translation that he at any rate has arguments he believes in. Creon’s integrity is never in doubt, and there is no doubt about Antigone’s responsibility for her actions. Debate about the invasion of Iraq arose precisely because the Bush administration’s and Blair government’s integrity was questionable, and the existence of the ‘weapons of mass destruction’ in Iraq was in doubt. It seems to me that, in the Iraq invasion context, there was an inevitable



(e.g. Younger 2008). So Stephen Wilmer has no difficulty in discerning the following:

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slippage between Heaney’s expectations (and intentions) in translating Antigone and the manner in which it appeared to audiences in production and as text. Such a failure of expected and intended parallels is legion in the translations and adaptations of classical plays in the Iraq invasion period, and conversely some parallels unexpectedly hit home (though not in Burial at Thebes). The point, however, is that failure of parallels is as productive as aptness of parallels: at the least, they give rise to a contemplative consideration and clarification of the situation at hand. The level at which Heaney’s translation worked against the backdrop of the Iraq invasion is also shared by all the translations and adaptations in question. This was simply at the level of language, or at the level of phrasing – the matter closest to the heart of translating. Phrases which particularly resonated with the current political environment and which were nevertheless not out of synch with the classical text acquired a significant ring in the juxtaposition of classical and interim and contemporary. This was not so much a matter of registering inter-lingual translation between the classical Greek and contemporary English, but more of registering the context-specific nuances of the English language at the level of intralingual shifts. By way of a brief demonstration, consider Heaney’s version alongside the following recent English translations, roughly divided by a decade each, of the passage where Creon announces his suspicions on being told that Polyneices has been administered burial rites: For a good while now I have had reports Of disaffected elements at work here, A certain poisonous minority Unready to admit the rule of law, And my law in particular. (Heaney 2005a, p. 14) From the moment the edict was proclaimed, there were men in this city who were whispering against me, who were tossing their heads defiantly, instead of submitting their necks to the yoke, as they should in justice – honouring me. (Sophocles [trans. Wertenbaker] 1992, p. 100) No, from the first there were certain citizens who could hardly stand the spirit of my regime, grumbling against me in the dark, heads together,



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tossing wildly, never keeping their heads beneath the yoke, loyally submitting to their king.

Fagles’s translation finds Creon using the inclusive ‘citizens’ for the hypothetical culprits and asserting his position as ‘king’, while Wertenbaker’s Creon chooses the neutral ‘men in this city’ and demands the ‘honour’ that is his due ‘in justice’. Both evoke an image of the culprits as restless conspirators or an unruly herd or chariot horse-team. By contrast, in Heaney’s translation Creon employs a pair of loaded phrases to characterize the culprits – ‘disaffected elements’, ‘poisonous minority’ – and contradicts himself by colliding the ‘rule of law’ (which doesn’t allow individual assertion) with ‘my law in particular’. Each of these phrases were redolent with significance in the context of the invasion of Iraq, and indeed since the so-called ‘war on terror’ after September 2001, and each gave the received translated sense of Sophocles’s text a quite new turn without quite transforming it. Numerous other such examples can be cited from this play, and indeed from the other translations of classics in the Iraq invasion period mentioned above. So, significantly, it was at the level of phrasing that Heaney offered a reading within the act of translating which played against the invasion context. This wasn’t a simple matter of offering straightforward parallels, but of making the play chime with the political environment of the time. The same could be said of the other translations (Harrison’s and McGuinness’s, for instance), and insofar as the adaptations (such as Crimp’s and Mee’s) can be regarded as translations. Adaptations are obviously more flexible than translations. Or, more precisely, adaptations can be regarded as the relatively free end of the process where translations are the relatively constrained. The process that both belong to involves reference to a source text within a specific linguistic/cultural/geopolitical/historical domain, and most importantly a contemporary domain – i.e. the present in which the translation or adaptation takes place. Where the translation is constrained by focusing on changing the language while maintaining an attitude of fidelity to other aspects of the source text, adaptations take the liberty of changing any aspect of the source text without losing a sense of continuous reference to it. Both are inevitably part and parcel with updating, with evoking the source text in the language of the present and in the circumstances of the present. Martin Crimp has both translated plays (by Ionescu, Genet and Marivaux) and tested the fine balance between adapting and translating (particularly in his updated version of Molière’s



(Sophocles [trans. Fagles] 1982/1984, p. 73)

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The Misanthrope, 1996) before basing Cruel and Tender on Sophocles’s Women of Trachis. In an interview with Dominic Cavendish (2004) when Cruel and Tender premiered, Crimp traced his sense of the difference between translating, described as ‘trying to act as a window of the French language’, and adapting, which is ‘a rewriting of the original play […] in reaction to the original text’. Crimp illustrated the relation between translation (with its linguistic focus) and adaptation in Cruel and Tender by observing that his writing of the General’s speeches in the third part was inspired by Hercules’s speech in Sophocles’s play – where the ‘verse goes completely mad’. Interestingly, this connecting point between the language of Women of Trachis and of Cruel and Tender can also be used to clarify the adaptive shifts (in the plot, in characterization, in the reactive rewriting) from former to latter. Women of Trachis mainly focuses on Deianira’s inadvertent poisoning of her husband, Hercules. Hercules had conquered and sacked a city because of his desire for the ruler Eurytus’s daughter Iola, whom he sends to Deianira’s care before he returns home. Deianira pities the girl and takes her in, but feels nervous about losing Hercules’s love and sends him a love-potion. The love-potion actually turns out to be a deadly poison which causes Hercules’s slow agonized death. The larger part of the play depicts Deianira’s anxieties as she discovers first the motives for Hercules’s absence and then realizes that she has poisoned him, and finally commits suicide. Hercules appears in the latter part of the play and makes arrangements for his own demise amidst excruciating pain (that’s where the ‘verse goes completely mad’). Cruel and Tender is set amidst the ‘war on terror’ where the General corresponds to Hercules, and his wife Amelia to Deianira. The sacked city is now in Africa, and naturally the General’s razing of the city can only be regarded as a devastating war crime (and not his first). As in the original, the General appears late in the adapted play, and is shown as disintegrating psychologically and physically – his final articulations are no more than a frenzied repetition of his being ‘not the criminal / but the sacrifice’ (Crimp 2004, pp. 68–9). The words of the dying Hercules in Women of Trachis and of the maddened General in Cruel and Tender are both similar in effect and different in import – and from that difference the shift of the adaptation from the original can be grasped. Hercules vividly describes his own physical and psychological suffering; in a way, he draws in all the anxieties and violence surrounding the play, the domestic and political violence, and concentrates and embodies it in his agony. Everything else becomes silent before or distant from Hercules’s suffering: Deianira, whose tremulous doubts and tensions occupied the early part of the play, is already dead; the eponymous chorus are no



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more than echoes of Deianira and Hercules throughout; the captives of the sacked city (including Iola) have only silent parts. In Cruel and Tender the maddened and dying General mostly speaks of the cruelties he has perpetrated in the name of the ‘war on terror’, and instead of embodying and concentrating the violence around him gradually appears to emanate it and become hemmed in by it. The only straightforward expression of his own suffering is in the stuck-record-like reiteration of ‘not the criminal / but the sacrifice’ – an inadequate loss of words. It is clear that while the General is the representative of crude violence and cruelty, there is violence and cruelty and suffering all around him in a pervasive way which cannot be made remote or silenced. There is simmering sexual violence at every corner of the play (the General’s lustful demolition of a city is in a way but a crystallization of this environment), from the first lines by Amelia: ‘There are women who believe / all men are rapists’ (Crimp 2004, p. 1). The counterpart of the deferential messengers and attendants of Sophocles’s play here are devious political actors who control the ‘war on terror’. The chorus here are three women (Housekeeper, Physiotherapist, Beautician) who are aware of their class difference and interests, and cannot sympathize with the main protagonists. The captives here (especially Laela, the Iola of the play) are not silent background figures, and are shown as assimilating themselves to the casual manipulativeness and callousness of consumer society. In brief, Crimp uses the structure of Sophocles’s play to describe the pervasive multi-layered cruelty and violence of modern society at large, of which the ‘war of terror’ (and the implicit invasion of Iraq) is simply one particularly brutal manifestation. Behind the nuances of producing and receiving adaptations and translations of specific classic Greek plays in the Iraq invasion period – briefly gauged here through The Burial at Thebes and Cruel and Tender – there lies the general question: why was particular recourse to classic Greek drama taken during that period? Why did theatre at that time of crisis turn particularly to the Greeks (to echo Billington)? All responses to such a question will necessarily be speculative, but each speculation acquires a bit more weight here because of the clear evidence of turning to the Greeks in the invasion period. In the conventional understanding of the ‘classic’ in literature as standing the test of time, there are no more venerable literary texts than classical Greek drama. To pick on such drama could be regarded as an attempt to co-opt some of its undeniable respectability, or its unquestionable literary authority. That authors and audiences felt such authority needed to be called upon not once or twice but severally during the Iraq invasion is probably a measure




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of the pressures that were felt then. To some degree this was a moral pressure: classical Greek drama has often been recalled as presenting a basic humanistic perspective when such a perspective was deemed lacking. Thus, with American involvement in Vietnam in view in the 1960s, philosopher Walter Kaufman had observed: The inability of the American President and his chief advisers to see the point of view of their opponents – and of most of mankind – and to see the enemy as human beings, with fathers and mothers, wives and children, instead of crowing over the daily, weekly, monthly numbers of those killed, stands in appalling contrast not only to the avowal that the United States is the champion of humanity but also the infinitely more human attitudes of Homer’s Iliad, Aeschylus’ Persians and Euripides’ Trojan Women. (Kaufman 1968, p. 317) Taken in itself, this is a rather idealized apprehension of the classics (and on the whole Kaufman’s argument is much more than that). More pragmatic pressures were undoubtedly at work also. In an especially polarized political environment, authors and audiences may have turned to the classics as a relatively non-committal method for driving home disquiet without being overly partisan. As Rabinowitz has recently put it: ‘as a result of [their] status, the ancient plays have been employed as a way of safely questioning authority. They offer protective cover to critical writers since they have an irreproachable pedigree’ (Rabinowitz with Blundell 2008, p. 183). At any rate, however imaginatively the translations and adaptations were undertaken, and with however postmodern or contemporary a sensibility, their relatively frequent appearance under those pressures gestures towards one element of the contemporary literary milieu: the idea of the venerable and the authoritative has a theatrical purchase which is proportional to the anxieties and uncertainties felt in the present.

Performance and statement The complexity of the relation between a political and human pressure zone like the Iraq invasion period and the theatre that appeared in relation to it is ultimately difficult to convey. The relation tests the boundaries of perceptions of political reality and forms of theatre in numerous ways. The implications for contemporary literature that I have tried to tease out above – in terms of the modifications of ‘frontline’, the representation of recorded reality and theatre as record, the play of constructing nationality, the recourse to classical authority – seem



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disparate. But to my mind there is an underlying unity, which has to do with the flickering and inescapable and intermeshed duality of talking about political reality and the happening of reality, of representation and performance. Theatre modifies political reality just as political reality modifies theatre under such circumstances, and though the boundaries of the stage and the world seem clear they also blur. The pervasiveness of such blurring seems to me to distinguish the period in question. In the Iraq invasion period theatre could be seen everywhere in the public sphere and political reality could be found in every kind of theatre in a concentrated tractable way. Perhaps the most succinct and self-reflexive performance and statement (both together) of the kind of blurring I have in mind appeared in Harold Pinter’s Nobel Lecture Art, Truth and Politics of December 2005. This was a statement on American foreign policy (especially with the invasion in mind) as the ‘greatest show on the road’, on Pinter’s own life and plays, on the relation of drama to politics. Unsurprisingly, it was roundly denounced as ‘anti-Americanism’ from the usual quarters. But, that aside, it was a dramatic statement on theatre of various sorts – on the stage, in life, in global politics. At the same time it was a performance, it was theatre, which was only to be expected from a playwright and actor of considerable experience. There was a clear audience, that of the Nobel Prize Ceremony, to whom it was presented as a video recording (circumscribing an audio-visual theatrical space). It was also made available on video and DVD for public consumption (Pinter 2006). The setting was a blue illuminated background with a screen featuring a photograph of the younger Pinter. Pinter appeared in a wheelchair in a black suit with a red blanket on his knees there, speaking in a husky passionate voice. Inevitably this set-up recalled a Beckettian scenario – this could be Krapp or Hamm from Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape or Endgame (and the echo was fitting since Beckett was a sort of artistic progenitor for Pinter). And yet there is no ostensible effort at theatre, it is simply the reality of Pinter being and expressing himself: Pinter looks straight at the audience, he needs the wheelchair, he speaks what he believes, and there is no distraction from what he has to say. And yet again, it is theatre in that this is a performance, there is a setting, there is a practised theatre professional delivering lines, and these lines are dramatic (there is self-reflection, poetry, denunciation, metaphors, anecdotes in there). Harold Pinter’s Nobel Lecture both spoke about the complicity of drama and political reality and life, and performed the complicity of drama and political reality and life – and these became so inextricably mixed up that it was difficult to take them apart. In a




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way, the whole performance-cum-statement acts as a metaphor for the preoccupations of theatre in the invasion period. The metaphor that Pinter employed himself in the lecture grasps this situation perfectly, and the desire he expressed through the metaphor seems to me to be of the moment too for litterateurs at large: When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror – for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us. (Pinter 2006)



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Action thrillers I have argued in previous chapters that in literature the invasion of Iraq has been unquestioningly constructed as ‘war’ (i.e. implicitly as a more or less equitable military engagement between opposed alignments), largely by drawing upon a tradition of war literature. Thus, anti-invasion poetry in 2003 found it expedient to allude to past ‘anti-war’ poetry, and theatre of the Iraq ‘frontline’ assimilated pre-existing conceptions about the theatre of ‘war’. This argument gives the impression that the pat construction of the invasion as ‘war’ works through some kind of internal literary logic. That is, however, not quite right, especially in the USA and UK: it is obvious that the invasion of Iraq has come to be constructed as the ‘Iraq War’ generally, in the mass media as much as in various kinds of retrospective accounts as in academic writing as in popular discourse. The ‘Iraq War’ is now standard shorthand for the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003–4. Modes of mediating perception are evidently at work in this preference for ‘war’: ‘war’ suggests a somewhat regulated affair, for which there are principles and procedures and laws to fall back upon, whereas ‘invasion’ is a messier and more intractable business, with a rawer sense of power politics and brute force at work. ‘War’ suggests a predominantly military engagement and involves highlighting military operations, while ‘invasion’ suggests that the integrity of a civil domain has been disturbed. Designating the invasion as ‘war’ shows a preference for confining attention to the military aspects and having the reassurance of regulatory principles to refer to. Contemplation of ‘invasion’ is more disturbing, blurred, unregulated, intractable. Preferring ‘war’ is a matter of rhetorical management or rhetorical choice. 141



A Joint Enterprise: Fiction

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The construction of the invasion as the ‘Iraq War’, and the consequent highlighting of military operations and procedures, is naturally more outside literature than within. On the surface that involves simply focalizing (or selectively focusing on) the realities of the military operation as such: in the mass media, in government reports and statements, in retrospective accounts by participants, in academic writing, in a range of public forums. To that extent, one may think that literary texts reflect such focalization, insofar as these dwell on the military at all, as a mirror of wider public discourses. However, further reflection suggests that focalization is only a small part of the picture. The military operation is not simply conveyed by selectively highlighting the realities, but actually in terms of moulding perceptions of the military within the public sphere, for the benefit of civil society. What relation this moulded public perception has to the realities is a moot issue. But it is arguable that the impression of the military and of war that is publicly put about has an autonomous structure – is a kind of imagined structure – which pertains more to the imperatives of civil society than the reality of military engagements. To gauge the public impression of military operations and war and discern the imaginary strands therein needs no special insight into the realities of war. A particular sort of literature plays a not insignificant role here and mediates the fictive side of public impressions. Attention to this type of literature enables a reasonably clear sense of how war and military engagements are moulded for public consumption, with the exigencies of civil perception in mind, and for the purpose of dispersing impressions within civil society. As might be expected, the type of literature I have in mind – action thrillers – circulates particularly well, considerably better by all accounts than the genres I have been discussing so far. Action thrillers have a wider reach than the literature touched on so far, and certainly reach readers who may not read poetry or plays often: these texts simply correspond to and bear upon widely held public impressions more surely than the ostensibly elite forms discussed above. The nuances of thus constructing war and the military for civil purposes in the Iraq invasion period is best approached by noting features of action thrillers of the time. Before doing so, however, I need to foreground some preliminary considerations. I need to register, for instance, that to address action thrillers in an analytical spirit is to enter an as yet fluid critical field. Prior to the 1980s such texts received only sporadic and at best condescending critical attention, and though attitudes have changed the terms in which they are analysed continue to be vague. These are nevertheless indicative terms which point in directions which



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are pertinent to this study. The broad area of literary production that action thrillers belong to is variously thought of as ‘bestsellers’, ‘mass market fiction’, ‘popular fiction’, ‘pulp fiction’, ‘genre fiction’, ‘formula fiction’. These terms seem to run into each other and be distinguished from each other in a variety of ways, and are in any case not precise but blurred designations. The first three emphasize the reach of these texts; they are defined to some degree by their appeal to a large number of readers. ‘Pulp fiction’ correspondingly refers to the production values of such texts, often produced in bulk and sold cheap. ‘Genre fiction’ and ‘formula fiction’ gesture towards the manner in which this field of production is disposed for consumption: it is divided into categories according to themes/styles and reader expectations, and is packaged and marketed and bought and read accordingly. Thus the ‘genres’ of ‘genre fiction’ (not the conventional formal divisions which I have been referring to as ‘genre’ here) are identified by certain broadly repetitive themes and styles of fictional texts, such as horror, detective, romance, fantasy, etc. – action thrillers are one such ‘genre’ of ‘genre fiction’, or follows a specific sort of ‘formula’ of ‘formula fiction’. Actually, the kind of ‘genre fiction’ that I am calling ‘action thrillers’ here can be captured by other terms too, such as ‘military or espionage fiction’ or ‘combat novels’, but ‘action thriller’ seems to catch both theme and effect, the mores of production and consumption, nicely. ‘Genre fiction’ and ‘formula fiction’ also allude to segmented readerships, often characterized by cohesion in terms of fandom or followings. Each of the above terms has a touch of the pejorative about it: as disposable, not written or read seriously, and generally kept outside critical attention, unworthy of the application of too many grey cells. The various rather serious complexities that nudge those multiple terms and the texts they apply to become clearer as I plunge into some such texts: action thrillers which in some way refer to or draw upon the Iraq invasion. Given the high frequency with which new action thrillers appear in the market, and keeping in mind the degree of public interest in Iraq from 2002 to 2005 (what I consider the high pressure period of the invasion), relatively few were directly addressed to Iraq in that period. This is interesting in itself, and I return to this in a speculative manner below. Since 2007 a considerable number of action thrillers set in or around the Iraq invasion have appeared, but the ground for those was set in the few that did appear between 2002 and 2005 – and in this section, as in this study generally, I focus primarily on those. Prolific action thriller authors like Dale Brown and Jim DeFelice registered a timely concern with weapons being produced in Iraq in Razor’s Edge (2003).



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This appeared in the Dreamland series, and details how a crack air force team of the US research centre ‘Dreamland’ manage to defuse in May 1997 the threat of a deadly laser weapon for destroying aircraft (a replica of the Dreamland’s own Razor weapon) which had apparently been developed in Iraq. It turns out though that the weapon was not really developed in Iraq at all but in Iran (where mysterious Chinese military connections are evident), which was using it deliberately to implicate Iraq and distract the USA and its allies. Subsequent novels by Brown and DeFelice – particularly Armageddon (2004), Satan’s Tail (2005), End Game (2006) – and by Brown alone – such as Strike Force (2007) – move around a ‘volatile’ Middle East, amidst threats from terrorist organizations, and Iranian and Chinese military alignments, without quite managing to focus on the invasion of Iraq, and it is only in Rogue Forces (2009) that Brown sets a novel squarely in post-occupation Iraq, in an imaginary future. The idea of the imaginary future, however, had already been used in Richard A. Clarke’s The Scorpion’s Gate (2005), of which more soon. Meanwhile, Oliver North and Joe Musser’s The Jericho Sanction (2004) appeared to exploit concerns of the time in a similar way as Razor’s Edge. Here we have US Marine Peter Newman striving single-handedly in early 1998 to bring out three nuclear warheads, obtained from Russian arms dealers and hidden in Iraq unbeknownst to Saddam Hussein by his son-in-law Hussein Kamil before his defection to Jordan. Despite Saddam Hussein’s son Qusay Hussein’s search for the warheads, the discouraging attitude of the US civilian administration, the Israeli government’s determination to launch a nuclear attack on Iraq (that’s the Jericho Sanction), and the unfortunate inconvenience of Newman’s wife being kidnapped, Newman succeeds in getting hold of the warheads (and rescues his wife too). In 2004 this was meant to be received as a clear indication of the realistic threat that the presence of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ in Iraq had posed; unlike Razor’s Edge, the weapons here were unambiguously in Iraq (and not really in Iran) and the plan to use them against Israel and the West was unquestionably the Iraqi government’s (and not a ploy from Iran). If the above novels fed current interests by looking at the recent past (1997, 1998) of possible acquisitions of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ in Iraq, Richard A. Clark’s The Scorpion’s Gate (2005) did so by presenting a possible future. In this future the post-occupation instability in Iraq has led to the installation of a puppet government under Iranian control, and the House of Saud has been deposed from power and replaced by an idealistic Islamic state (and consequently Saudi Arabia has been renamed Islamyah). A ‘hawkish’ US Defense Secretary, clearly reminiscent of Donald Rumsfeld, is determined to remove the



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‘al-Quaeda’ related government of Islamyah at all costs and reinstate the Sauds and take control of oil resources; oil motivates a militarily ambitious Chinese government to send warships armed with nuclear missiles to the region; and a scheming Iranian military and clerisy, bent on extending global influence, mastermind a series of terrorist attacks to implicate Islamya and encourage a US attack. Fortunately, a small coterie of patriotic and idealistic US and British and Islamyah spies see through the self-interested machinations of all parties, and cooperate to avert any drastic military engagement over Islamyah (thus stopping the ‘scorpions’ at the ‘gate’). Following a somewhat different tack, i.e. neither looking back to years before the invasion nor looking forward to an uncertain future, appeared Andy McNab’s Deep Black (2004), set largely and squarely in occupied Iraq in October 2003. This features world-weary secret agent Nick Stone, a battle-scarred witness of atrocities in Bosnia in 1994, who finds himself disenchanted with his US secret service employers and consequently employed by a friend, photographer Kerry, as protector for a trip to Baghdad. Their quest is apparently to meet a potential saviour of the Muslim world, a Bosnian person named Nuhanovic, reputed to have the ability to unite all factions and undermine the hold of Western capitalism in the Middle East – both Nick and Jerry admire him. Their search for Nuhanovic in Baghdad gives plenty of scope for detailing the violence and dangers of occupied Iraq, and they even encounter (in a typically brutal way) US officers eager to get rid of reporters with an interest in Iraq reconstruction contracts. They catch up with Nuhanovic not in Baghdad, though, but near Sarajevo; Nick realizes that Nuhanovic is actually not a saviour but a human trafficker (selling young women into prostitution) and, amidst much bloodshed, arranges his assassination. With a similar interest in the present, Chris Ryan’s Ultimate Weapon (2006) actually places his two British heroes, much-battered former solider Nick Scott and efficient active soldier Jed Bradley, in the dungeons of Saddam Hussein’s palace as the invasion is launched in March 2003. They find their separate ways there in search of Sarah Scott, Nick’s daughter and Jed’s lover. Sarah is a talented nuclear scientist who has been kidnapped and taken to Iraq to help develop nuclear weapons. Along the way the reader finds out much about the mendacity and duplicity of British government officials and agents, and by the end Sarah is rescued and able to confirm that the Iraqis weren’t close to developing nuclear weapons (by 2006 it was clear that none were being found) – but they certainly intended to. Those give a fair sense, in summary, of action thrillers related to the Iraq invasion when it was uppermost in the public view. That these




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follow certain set patterns of plot construction, and presume a similar understanding of the military (and espionage and international politics) sphere, is pretty evident even within the brief set of summaries above. There are two types of indestructible heroes, cynical and scarred or able and keen; the heroes are driven by love or ideals; there’s little doubt that Saddam Hussein’s government was trying to obtain ‘weapons of mass destruction’ before 2003; Iran and China are the real threats lurking in the background, and Russians are still bad news; civilian governments are to be viewed with suspicion while the military has dependable sectors; states determine what happens in international politics most powerfully; the Middle East is rife with terrorists, violence and extreme religiosity. None of these set patterns is actually particularly distinctive to the action thrillers summarized above, and indeed these are merely a subset of a range of familiar patterns of considerably longer standing: such textual patterns have been oft-noted in critical studies; and the patterns are not just in the texts but in the manner in which they are packaged and marketed. The physical appearances of action thrillers (armaments and devastated landscapes figure on the dust-jackets of my copies, and all are announced boldly as ‘bestsellers’) are familiar, akin to and yet distinctive from other ‘genre fiction’. Claims of authority and truthfulness on behalf of the authors are an important aspect of their marketing: on dust-jackets, in advertising, in reviews. Oliver North is a former US Marine Officer who has been involved in covert operations (notoriously associated with the Iran–Contra affair), and has been a war correspondent for Fox News (an embedded reporter in Iraq). Richard A. Clarke has held government posts in the White House, Pentagon and State Department under four US Presidents. Dale Brown served in the US Air Force. Both Andy McNab and Chris Ryan were soldiers in the British Special Air Service, and both have written memoirs of their experiences during the Gulf War. North and Clarke claimed to give real ‘inside information’ in a disguised form in their novels, and readers expected to find coded truths therein. From Brown, McNab and Ryan readers expect authentic descriptions of war and frontlines. That the revelations their personal standing might bring can be dressed up in the set patterns of action thrillers – the promised play of reality/truth and fiction – is largely what’s marketed in the form of such action thrillers. The promise of insights in terms of these authors’ military experience or insider knowledge in these texts is actually propped up by a standard rhetorical strategy of action thrillers. In an examination of the language of ‘action stories’, Walter Nash had observed (with particular attention to Fredrick Forsyth’s action thrillers) a penchant for presenting compendiums



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of names and ‘facts’. He attributed several functions to such strategies beyond simply demonstrating a grasp of ‘reality’, perceiving therein a mode of ‘fixedly and repeatedly formulated’ identity which ‘triumphs over the shifting truths and fugitive potential of characters’ – thereby deflecting any expectations of ‘subtle, perceptive examination of characters and relationships’ (Nash 1990, pp. 62–3). More interestingly, in such intensive relating of names and ‘facts’ Nash discerned a strategy for drawing in the reader by presenting the world as full of ‘complicating objects’ which the reader can apprehend without understanding: ‘This is the author’s way of telling us that the problem is big enough for his hero to solve’ (p. 72). These observations fit the novels summarized above perfectly. In all of them many technical terms and names of machines and organizations are liberally scattered across the texts (North’s novel even usefully begins with a glossary, mainly of acronyms and abbreviations). Around the same time as Nash’s book, several essays on action thrillers (e.g. Jones 1990; Palmer 1984) argued that such rhetorical strategies are part of a larger strategy of centring professionalism as the heart of such texts: essentially a reassuring military professional, alongside bureaucracy and amateur victims and onlookers. This is clearly evidenced in the thrillers in question here at various levels. The heroes through whose eyes the stories are told, or whom the stories follow, are particularly professionally adept in the technical implements of warfare, in gauging battle-zone situations, in dealing with physical violence, etc. But beyond that, the professional air of these narratives is embedded within the form of the text: without exception each is presented in chapters or sections in report form, labelled with date, place and time (or some combination of these). The illusion of the report format of course breaks down in the descriptions and dialogues contained within. Numerous critical works (recently and illuminatingly Baker 2006 and Gallagher 2006) have examined the most obvious aspect of such thrillers: that they construct the military or action domain as a predominantly male one, wherein masculine values are formulated and tested. I have already noted the two kinds of indestructible male heroes who dominate in the above-mentioned thrillers: the cynical and scarred, the eager and keen. These are masculine types with a considerable history, variously referred back to action thrillers from Ian Fleming to Tom Clancy and Clive Cussler. But the masculine sphere is not only described by the individual male hero; perhaps more potently, it has to do with the group dynamics of the professional military or militarized zone. In McNab’s Deep Black, loner Nick Stone immediately finds a network of other former soldiers (all male) on reaching occupied Baghdad who help and assist




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him in various ways. Male camaraderie in the echelons of the secret service and the military hold the action thriller worlds of Oliver North and Richard A. Clarke together. In the former there are kidnapped women to be rescued and a female secretary of state to be countered; in the latter a female journalist is used as observer, lover, and finally victim. Ryan’s Ultimate Weapon also has two male heroes joining forces to rescue a kidnapped female character, and fighting off a manipulative female operative (she is finally killed off). Perhaps most interesting from this perspective is Brown and DeFelice’s Razor’s Edge, which features a mixed group of warriors. The main female heroine here, Breanna Stockard, is distinguished by her ability to hold her own amongst men as a fighter pilot and otherwise. In a concession to gender complexity, the eager and ever-ready male heroes are shown to have a nurturing side as they collectively first help a Kurdish couple to deliver a baby and then care for it most affectionately. Around the particularly patriarchal military and action domain, there’s naturally an implicitly patriarchal worldview in such thrillers. In Cold War times, John Sutherland was able to discern in his serious critical survey (a relatively early one) of 1970s ‘war and espionage novels’ a consistent view of history: History, as those novels conceive it, is a thing of drastic possibilities and hairbreadth chances. There is no ‘inexorability’, no ‘forces’, no ‘weight of history’. Everything, in the final analysis, is a matter of risky, personal interventions at the right moment. (Sutherland 1981, p. 174) The terms of reference might have changed from Cold War to ‘war on terror’ and ‘preventive war’, but the action thrillers of the Iraq invasion present precisely the same view of history. Indeed the point of these thrillers is that behind the public perception of the invasion, disquietingly heavy with the ‘weight of history’, there is a confident lightness of history which has been withheld from public knowledge, incorporating a plethora of secret histories that have been contained in the military domain. For Sutherland the compendia of names and facts with which I started this rather long paragraph are modes of authenticating such secret histories: ‘The main narrative device of these novels is that of pseudo authenticity. Secret histories go to extraordinary lengths to tantalize readers on the matter of their facticity’ (p. 175). What I am saying here then is that there is nothing distinctive in the texts and production and marketing practices of action thrillers that appeared in and with regard to the Iraq invasion period. They firmly followed strategies that were already tried and tested and established.



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They perpetuated a view of the military domain for civil consumption that was already in place, already familiar to readers. They subscribed closely to features that critics had already described in detail for action thrillers in general. If there was anything distinctive about the appearance of these at the time, it is not to be found in the texts but perhaps in their receptive field – in how they were received within the civil sphere. To pose the question that is implicit there: were they received in the Iraq invasion period with the jaded familiarity and habitual gratification which is usual, or was there anything off-tune in how these rang to readers’ ears at the time? To engage with that question is necessarily to enter a speculative area, where arguments can be offered only as plausible though uncertain. This is all the more so since these texts received few reviews – most action thrillers are scantly reviewed – and no systematic surveys of their readers or reliable breakdown of consumption patterns are available. I fall back then on broad formulations on what reading such popular fiction (particularly action thrillers) entails, and how that might have worked in the invasion period for the above texts. It is evident from the summaries and observations above that by and large action thrillers, and certainly those in question here, present a conservative worldview: patriarchal and usually heterosexual-normative; with sharp polarities of good and bad which are mapped on to individuals, ethnicities, regions, organizations and states; and designed to confirm the indispensability and autonomy of the military (often demonstrating that these work effectively away from civil regulation or by self-regulation). Indeed, such worldviews characterize a large proportion of popular fiction generally, not just action thrillers. However, it has been argued that irrespective of the overt content of such texts, their consumption may in fact manifest more complex ideological tendencies and incorporate a spirit of resistance to establishment or bourgeois values. The paradox of the kind of extreme conservatisms that may be found in such texts and the subversive tendencies that might nevertheless underlie their consumption was put as follows by Clive Bloom: It is an interesting irony that pulp thrives on the fantasy representation of authoritarian, fascistic figures and situations, situations simplified to violence and erotica. […] pulp represents an anarchic edge on the margin of bourgeois propriety and at the centre of modern consumerist multiplicity. This, if anything, is the totalitarianism of an unrealized and groundless space of endless choices and no consequences. (Bloom 1996, p. 16)




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Bloom felt convinced that ‘No really authoritarian states can stand pulp culture – it reeks of anarchy and nonconformity and subversion’ (p. 15); and that the ‘illicit pleasure’ of reading pulp ‘comes from reading for the wrong reasons and knowing it’ (p. 133). These are enthusiastic words, and perhaps they tell us more about the critical context of the mid-1990s, when this was written, than about the popular fiction and readership in question. Though popular fiction did receive a modicum of serious attention since the 1970s, this was subject initially to the condescension, if not dismissiveness, of a literary academy that was still taking on board the implications of Theory and its emerging emancipative political aspirations for the established literary canon (I have described this process briefly in Chapter 1). By the 1990s, however, Theory had become institutionalized in the literary academy, its ‘radical’ political aspirations (especially along the lines of identity politics) taken on board, and the established literary canon was being opened up and alternative canons put in place. A marked move towards cultural studies within literary studies was symptomatized, at one level, by a new interest in mass market cultures and new media. These newly admitted areas of academic attention were recruited to scholarship (and pedagogy) with a celebratory air, a sense of being progressive or emancipatory moves – as much to guard against scepticism as to sell itself as a worthy enterprise. The rhetoric of subversion and emancipation, of being in touch with the people’s pulse and the contemporary, was regarded as a necessary boost to formerly looked-down-upon texts. It wasn’t regarded as enough to say that analytical attention can be revealing and useful with regard to any literary text, without presuming the intrinsic value of those that are analysed. Nor did it seem enough to say that scale of popular consumption itself is a sufficient reason for looking at such texts closely. As Bloom did, popular fiction often had to be celebrated as somehow constitutively in an emancipative direction. A similar tendency is seen, even more persistently, in critical studies of fandom from Lawrence Grossberg (1992) to Henry Jenkins (2006) – I have examined that elsewhere (Gupta 2009c, Part 3, ch. 4). But it would be over-endowing Bloom’s views of 1996 to regard them as representative; around the same time Scott McCracken, for instance, was taking a more temperate line when he decided to leave aside the matter of ‘cultural value’ and focus on the ‘relation between a particular reader (or coalition of reader groups) and a particular text or genre’ (McCracken 1998, p. 5). Back to the point: the quotation from Bloom above, though addressed to popular fiction in general, has a special relevance for consumption of action thrillers. Action thrillers are often tendentiously conservative, and



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this quotation gives an optimistic account of the consumption thereof. A similarly optimistic account is given by Mark Gallagher a decade later (the invasion of Iraq has happened in the interim) with particularly action thrillers in view, but the terms are different and therein lies the interest. Gallagher recognizes the conservative underpinnings of many action thrillers and the reassurance they may provide for readers who are so inclined ideologically, and also argues the following: Progressive readers and viewers cognizant of their ideological opposition to the premises and institutions that many action films and literary thrillers celebrate – police violence, vigilantism, military and espionage activity, subordination of women, and punishment of nonwhite or gay characters – can find pleasure, diversion, and cultural critique in the exaggerated and conflicted nature of such texts, not to mention the sometimes comic level of transparency. Action films’ glorification of violent spectacle or popular novels’ overemphasis of patriotic, prosocial values, for instance, can offer solace to viewers or readers who recognize the somewhat desperate quality of such formal or normative strategies. Action films that explicitly promote conservative ideologies can provide disturbing spectacles, but their reductio ad absurdum of historically rooted social and political conflicts may demobilize conservative positions, to the relief of progressive viewers. (Gallagher 2006, p. 15) Where Bloom extolled the pleasures of subversive consumption, Gallagher resorts to the relief and solace of the ‘progressive reader’s’ critical distance from and recognition of contradictions and exaggerations within the obviously conservative text. Gallagher, in brief, makes a virtue of critical readership and, by a clever twist, presents that as to the advantage of action thrillers. To me this seems like trying too hard to reconcile progressive critical reading and conservative action thrillers – indeed trying harder than Bloom. More interestingly, the shift from Bloom’s mid-1990s view of popular fiction representing totalitarianisms and violence being consumed for subversive pleasure to Gallagher’s mid-2000s view of action thrillers being consumed for reassurance, solace, relief, appears to me an indicative one. Ideologically, Bloom and Gallagher are not particularly differently positioned – both subscribe to a liberal left critical awareness of popular cultural forms, and both feel a need to validate their objects of study as worthy from that point of view. But their perceptions of consuming imperatives are divided by a decade and their perceptions of attitudes to action thrillers are markedly different.




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There was of course plenty of reason for the shift in readers’ attitudes from hoping for better to fearing the worst between the mid-1990s and the mid-2000s: accruing anxieties from the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks in the USA to the case in point here, the prolonged tensions of the Iraq invasion. In the latter period, it simply was harder for progressive critical readers to take ‘police violence, vigilantism, military and espionage activity, subordination of women, and punishment of nonwhite or gay characters’ blithely as ‘subversive pleasure’ and consumer’s choice: all that was tainted and grated by the ‘war on terror’ and the tensions of the Iraq invasion. And frankly, I don’t think it at all likely that with these in view progressive critical readers – or indeed many readers generally –- could read conservative action thrillers for solace or relief, however sophisticated their critical discernment. No wonder Gallagher seems to be trying too hard with this argument. With regard to critical thinking, the very awareness that such action thrillers are supposed to appeal to a wide range of consumers and are designed for uncritical consumption would have caused many readers to feel uneasy about them. In fact, there arguably emerged in the invasion period an analytical attitude to all kinds of texts and at all levels of civil society (as I have argued in the opening chapter), and moreover an analytical attitude that was constantly honed by debate, which may have been unfriendly to such action thrillers. That might explain why so few action thrillers set in the Iraq invasion appeared while it was the hot topic, why most skirted around the hot topic. Only diehard thriller-writing professionals who were convinced of their military-centred worldviews braved the public environment to venture in that direction between 2003 and 2006, precisely writers like Oliver North, Richard A. Clarke, Dale Brown, Andy McNab and Chris Ryan. Speculatively then, and in metaphoric terms that are somewhat different from those employed so far, this is how action thrillers of the Iraq invasion might have fared in the receptive field of the invasion period. Action thrillers crowd, so to speak, the forefront of the reader’s attention with hectic action: with the speed of developments, with the machinations of different actors, with facts and names that construct a dense pseudo-reality. These absorb the reader’s straightforward engagement with the thriller. Implicit in this crowded and forefronted area are a series of presumptions which are in the background, and which operate as a sort of backdrop screen or white noise for the reader’s attention. That background is where a view of history, geopolitical assumptions, political ideologies, ethical norms etc. are tacitly placed – the reader usually accepts these quickly to keep up with the speedy and crowded



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front of action. There may be a willing suspension of disbelief involved in accepting the background presumptions; mostly though, they are unthinkingly absorbed as the reader focuses on the forefront of action and because the reader is habituated to such presumptions being ‘out there’, often presented in different public forums and news media and entertainment media and indeed other similar thrillers. The regular reader is habituated to go along with that background of presumptions. Insofar as a civil conception of the military domain is constructed in such action thrillers, it is built between the forefronted action and such background presumptions. The reader’s interest in the action, the very integrity of the action that holds the reader, guarantees the reader’s unthinking acceptance of the salience of the military domain which is usually familiarly out there. In the Iraq invasion period, however, a sort of static crackles on the forefront and thereby interferes with the background when the Iraq context is directly referred. It so happens that directly evoking Iraq in the invasion period throws amidst the forefronted action an already forefronted matter: the plethora of debates, texts, anxieties about the invasion that are out there now. The hectic action at the front of the novel is interfered with by the intense drama of the invasion out there, these collide in the reader’s attention, and these are unavoidably brought to bear on each other by the reader. Since the public sphere itself is troubled by the closeness and intensity of the Iraq invasion context, anxieties spill into the reading of the crowded action thriller which directly evokes the invasion context. In doing so, anxieties also spill into the background presumptions which are usually unthinkingly accepted. The relationship between forefronted action and background presumptions within the action thriller are troubled just as the forefronted drama of the Iraq invasion out there is already troubled. The failure of the action thriller’s effect, which is usually a habituated thrill, a routinized acceptance of background presumptions, almost inevitably follows. The action thriller simply seems inadequate before the enormity it has evoked, and the integrity of the thriller’s action and presumptions is ironically diminished before the complexity of the present. The effect of the action thriller fails because its presumptions become subject to analysis. The tacit acceptance of the salience of the military domain is undermined by the analytical interrogativeness that has gripped the civil sphere already and which magnifies civil anxieties. Irony tends to overstep the thrill of action thrillers under these circumstances. Their deep-set militarism seems suspect. Real worldly wisdom and irony characterizes naturally the few reviews that the above-mentioned thrillers attracted, that mainly (for obvious reasons) Oliver North’s and Richard Clarke’s




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efforts attracted: ‘was the Iraq War – and is it – a struggle between good and evil? According to Oliver North’s new novel The Jericho Sanction, you’d better believe it’ (Llull 2003, p. 26); in The Scorpion’s Gate Clarke ‘displays the usual attitudes of recent US governments’ (Clawson 2006, p. 88); ‘The Scorpion’s Gate is unlikely to alter American foreign policy and as a thriller it is not going to set anyone’s hair on fire’ (Finder 2005, p. 12); and so on. Possibly action thrillers which didn’t directly allude to the Iraq invasion were more successful. Perhaps the Iraq invasion was more significantly brought to bear tangentially and unthinkingly upon numerous thrillers, and numerous thrillers were designed to encourage a tangential, almost unthinking, gesture towards the Iraq invasion – and as such, in an indirect way the anxieties out there enhanced the thrills of action within because of their lack of obvious connection. But that might be a speculation too far, and is at any rate outside the scope of this study. This study delimits its coverage to literary texts which addressed the Iraq invasion directly.

‘Literary fiction’ There’s an unwritten but well understood contract between authors (texts), publishers, distributors and readers which distinguishes ‘genre fiction’ of the sort discussed above from the ‘literary fiction’ I now move on to. In literary studies this contract is often thought of as established in the encounter between text and reader: in the linguistic, structural and formal disposition of the text and the reader’s responsive recognition and decoding of the text. It is in terms of this encounter, for instance, that semiotician Umberto Eco influentially distinguished between ‘closed’ and ‘open’ texts (Eco 1979), which can be roughly correlated to ‘genre fiction’ and ‘literary fiction’. However, it has become increasingly clear since that such an explanation is far from satisfactory. The account of distinguishing between texts according to their make-up is plausible enough, but the contract is not simply established between text and reader. A large number of extrinsic and tacit factors mediate and indeed pre-empt that encounter. Such factors have much to do with the manner in which authors and publishers and distributors target markets, and in which consumers regulate their expectations and choices according to the market. A more precise way of understanding the contract which distinguishes ‘genre fiction’ from ‘literary fiction’ could be put thus: increasingly authors write, publishers design and produce, distributors disseminate, and readers choose and read texts with the presumption that some texts can be read unthinkingly and others need to be read



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thinkingly. Those that can be read unthinkingly, such as ‘genre fiction’, come with familiar structures which are built upon and varied slightly by authors, gestured towards in book designs, highlighted in marketing, recognized and consumed accordingly and effortlessly by readers. Those that are apt to be read thinkingly, such as ‘literary fiction’, are more independently conceived by authors, packaged and produced and marketed to underline their originality, and test readers’ preconceptions in some way – or at least readers pick them up on the understanding that they might. But that is still too neat an opposition. In fact, both ‘literary fiction’ and ‘genre fiction’ are market terms, originating in publishers’ and retailers’ firms, and both in fact formalize the consumption of fiction for marketing purposes. The market mediation of ‘literary fiction’ is as carefully managed as that of ‘genre fiction’: for instance, particular kinds of reviewing spaces, book designs, modes of recognition and celebrity attach to the former as to the latter. The very fact that ‘literary fiction’ exists as a market category suggests not so much greater openness or thinkingness, but well-formulated corporate management of authoring and reading. From a rigorous critical perspective, of course, neither phrase makes much sense: all fiction is literary, and all can be examined in generic terms. But when a critic plays along with the broad market division – as I am in this chapter – it is a matter of factoring in a critical awareness of market mediations when analysing texts. In thinking about ‘literary fiction’ of the Iraq invasion, the factoring in of market mediations has a critical importance. The kind of ‘genre fiction’ I have examined above, the action thriller, has its market ambitions written on its sleeves. But the ‘literary fiction’ of the Iraq invasion does not – its claims are deeper and more self-consciously literary. Such works of literary fiction promise to engage the reader’s analytical and aesthetic sensibilities in distinctive and unexpected ways. So it is of particular interest whether the hidden hand of the market can be discerned in these, and whether their foregrounded literariness can be regarded as derived from or responsive to market conditions. I argue below that in a subtle way my examples do hold their literary ambition in a careful balance with the market construction of literariness, and that this balance is woven deep into their structures. But before going into that, a brief account of the fiction in question is needed: they are, within the invasion period this study focuses on, Noah Cicero’s The Human War (2003), Nicholson Baker’s Checkpoint (2004) and Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005). The Human War tracks the thoughts of a 22-year-old resident of Youngstown, Ohio, Mark Swift, interspersed with conversations he has with various persons, after he leaves his parents listening to the news two




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hours before the Iraq invasion is formally due to begin. Mark’s thoughts appear with the randomness of everyday thoughts and touch on various personal circumstances and general observations, but invariably revolve around the upcoming invasion. His sense of the violence that is about to be unleashed is acute and it disturbs him deeply, and he is simply unable to let it go – it seems to crystallize his personal dissatisfactions, his philosophical anxieties, his feelings of restlessness and uncertainty. He first meets his casual lover Kendra and has sex with her (and talks about Iraq). Then Mark comes across a Vietnam veteran in a fast-food restaurant where he stops for coffee, and receives the following advice from him: ‘Listen to me kid, never go into the military. Read your books, go to college, have sex, but never go into the military, they’ll brainwash you, and make you believe that fighting for America has meaning, it doesn’t’ (Cicero 2003, p. 36). Afterwards Mark meets up with his friend Jimmy and has the kind of purposeless conversation friends hanging out together often have (and much of it revolves around Iraq); they go to a strip joint, then a bar, and meet various women, and as the evening progresses Mark becomes progressively drunk (and all Mark’s conversations and ruminations return obsessively to Iraq). As his inebriation mounts, Mark starts shouting obscenities about President Bush and the war, then vomits in the bathroom, is accosted by a ‘really stupid hot girl’ who is entirely in favour of the invasion on the grounds that ‘It’s pretty selfish for America to keep freedom to themselves’, and leaves Mark on the floor with his final thoughts for the novel: I sit there confounded. I don’t know what to make of this war. I don’t know what I should do. You know what, FUCK THIS WAR, FUCK BUSH, FUCK GOD, AND FUCK AMERICA. I’ll just be drunk. (p. 86) On a similarly despairing note begins Baker’s Checkpoint, where two friends, Ben and Jay, meet in a hotel in Washington DC in May 2004 after having lost touch for a considerable period. Jay sets off the conversation by declaring that he has decided to assassinate US President George Bush ‘For the good of humankind’ (Baker 2004, p. 5). The entire novel is the conversation that follows, in which Jay lays out his reasons and Ben tries to dissuade him, and in the process they reveal something of their personal circumstances and preoccupations. Jay’s decision derives from his bitter disenchantment with the invasion and



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its results, and he justifies it by recounting the various incidents of civilian killings and torture of Iraqi prisoners that occurred in gruelling detail. Ben, though determined to dissuade Jay from such a rash step, shares Jay’s sense of outrage about the invasion, and, as a historian, is able to see the lines of complicity reaching back into post-Second World War US foreign policy. As their conversation develops it becomes clear that Jay’s and Ben’s agreement on the Iraq invasion doesn’t arise from shared ideological convictions. On the contrary, they hold opposed views on most matters. Jay turns out to be vehemently anti-abortion, Ben is firmly pro-choice; Jay tends to leap to wildly implausible conspiracy theories, while Ben is methodical and informed in his analysis of the Iraq invasion. It becomes apparent that Jay and Ben are very differently located in their personal and professional lives, and that this might have a bearing on Jay’s passionate and Ben’s relatively stoical response to the situation in Iraq. Jay is in financial difficulties, and has moved from a teaching job to working as a day labourer. He has consequently lost his intellectual interests, is separated from his children, and has been unable to sustain relationships with a series of partners. Ben has a steady job as an academic, a stable family life, has cultivated his research interests and developed new hobbies. Ben suggests, and it seems increasingly likely, that Jay’s vehement hatred of President Bush and rage at the injustice being perpetrated in Iraq may be driven by the deficiencies of his personal and professional circumstances. Likewise, if Ben is able to temper his sense of outrage it is because his personal and professional stabilities enable a more temperate disposition, or at the least a more cautious and restrained one. But however intermeshed the personal and the political might be, their shared unease about the invasion cannot be denied by either, so that when Ben appeals to Jay’s humaneness the latter is able to do the same with contrary effect: Ben: But don’t you think that if you – I mean, you’ve seen the tape of when Kennedy was shot. You’ve seen the frames that were cut out of the film because all that blood was blasting from his head? A spray of brain? I mean it’s a horrifying sight. It’s a human being that is now just nothing. You want to be a part of that? Jay: That’s the thing. I have allowed myself to feel that feeling with the people in Fallujah, in Karbala, in Nasiriyah, in Basra, in Baghdad, in Mosul – all these cities. And Afghanistan before that. I’ve seen the pictures. And I feel that they – I mean Bush, any Marine sergeant, any soldier – all these guys are in the war business, one way or




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another. So they know that there’s a certain risk involved. You can become a casualty of the wars you incite, or that you volunteer for. But these kids who are having their limbs blown off, they don’t know what’s going on. There’s just a sudden sound of jet engines. (Baker 2004, pp. 108–9) At the end Ben accepts this but still prevents Jay from carrying out his assassination attempt, presenting Jay with a picture of Bush instead to vent his rage on in a ritual fashion. This is not so much a resolution of anything, simply an assertion finally by the successful and stronger personality over the vulnerable and weaker personality. Where despair or helplessness are the predominant notes of the above two novels, a fairly upbeat note is struck in McEwan’s Saturday. This describes an eventful day, 15 February 2003, in the life of a London neurosurgeon Henry Perowne, through his eyes and thoughts. The novel begins with Perowne rising at dawn and witnessing a plane crashing from his window, then details his interactions with his family and colleagues, his memories, his social and philosophical attitudes, his professional activities, and is gradually structured around two events: an encounter with a gang of aggressive youths after a minor car accident, and the reappearance of this gang at his home to wreck an evening family get-together. Perowne obviously belongs to the affluent professional middle class, lives in an up-market house in central London and drives an expensive car, and his view of the world and life is circumscribed by his circumstances. The two encounters with the gang of youths, particularly their leader Baxter, turn out to be encounters across a class chasm, infused with the desire and aggression that the less solvent Baxter feels towards Perowne and his family. Baxter’s disadvantages are underlined by his having inherited a genetically transmitted disease, which Perowne discerns in their first meeting (thus establishing a kind of authority). The novel ends with Perowne, the authority figure and devoted family man, overcoming Baxter, and then, as healer and humanist, saving his life by performing surgery on him (though unable to cure him). Throughout, the invasion of Iraq is in the background, both as a pressing reality – for this is the day of the largest ever anti-invasion marches in London – and as a nagging preoccupation in Perowne’s mind. Mostly Perowne’s preoccupation with the pros and cons of the coming invasion is in an almost subliminal stratum of his consciousness: he finds himself thinking of Saddam Hussein as he watches his sleeping wife, for instance. Despite qualms about the motives of the US–UK led drive to invade Iraq, Perowne is not against it. On the contrary, and largely due to a personal encounter



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with a professor who was tortured in Iraq, he rather thinks it might lead to desirable outcomes. While watching the protesters from his car he lists in his mind all their arguments against war and recognizes their veracity, and yet ‘can’t feel, as the marchers themselves probably can, that they have an exclusive hold on moral discernment’ (McEwan 2005, p. 73). Or, as he later explains in an argument with his daughter: No rational person is for war. But in five years we might not regret it. I’d love to see the end of Saddam. You’re right, it could be a disaster. But it could be the end of a disaster and the beginning of something better. It’s all about outcomes, and no one knows what they’ll be. That’s why I can’t imagine marching in the streets. (McEwan 2005, p. 187) From the perspective of this study, in brief, the novel demonstrates how deeply embedded the upcoming invasion was in the routine consciousness of people in London (and presumably elsewhere), how enmeshed in the domestic, personal, everyday preoccupations of people like Perowne (and others, presumably both the protesters and those who didn’t protest). The forms of these three works of ‘literary fiction’ were designed to address the invasion and appear in the market of the invasion period with considerable caution. They came with the deliberation of fictional texts of immediate relevance in a divided context, aware of the weight of contextually determined attention. At a time when, as I noted in the first chapter, every statement by any notable person or in any forum was apt to be received as advocacy for or against invasion, as denunciation or approval of occupation and aftermath, these novels used formal strategies to evade easy fixing in those terms. All three were, in other words, carefully designed to write out any authorial perspective, or to simply not allow the reader an opportunity for discerning an authorial narrative voice and attributing a political position to it. Not even apparently innocent passages of description or summary were given in the voice of an omniscient narrator, thus evading critical readings for which no passage is innocent and no omniscience is impregnable. The ingenuity of critical reading now is often devoted to teasing out the ideological or ethical nuances of apparently neutral descriptions or summaries. McEwan’s Saturday might appear to present the most scope for such reading, where Perowne’s day and musings are reported in the third person, but in fact that is an invitation which is thwarted by the determination with which the narrative sticks to Perowne – largely saying what he thinks and perceives, occasionally flicking into his interlocutors’ view (but that may just be Perowne’s sense of the interlocutor), and sometimes giving




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dialogues verbatim. There is no moment at which the voice which speaks of Perowne’s day can be distinguished as saying anything more than what Perowne felt, saw, thought or said. But there is an invitation to the reader to see whether an authorial view can be distinguished – the thirdperson narrative is an invitation – and the reader is consequently kept on her toes, alert for any extrinsic authorial perspective on Perowne. But it doesn’t come. The narrative flows seamlessly as Perowne’s day unravels without summative pause or comment. It seems to me that some of the tautness of the prose derives from the third-person narrative which refuses to articulate a third-person position. Cicero’s The Human War doesn’t offer the invitation that McEwan’s third-person narrative does: it is given in the first person of the character being portrayed, Mark Swift, and moves in the haphazard and bitty fashion of thoughts. The impression created for the reader is of almost unmediated access to Mark’s thoughts – occasionally interspersed with dialogues given verbatim, but mostly as if the reader eavesdrops into Mark’s mind. This impression is strengthened by the liberty with syntax and sentence connectives that the narrative takes, so that as Mark becomes drunk his sentences seem to become more fragmented and disjointed. In fact, Saturday and The Human War deliberately throw readers back to familiar fictional techniques of the early twentieth century, to the period of Édouard Dujardin, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson. With the latter in view, the ‘stream of consciousness’ and ‘interior monologue’ techniques were succinctly defined in 1950 as follows: the stream of consciousness technique may be defined as that narrative method by which the author attempts to give a direct quotation of the mind – not merely of the language area but of the whole consciousness. […] The only criterion is that it introduces us directly into the interior life of the character, without any intervention by way of comment or explanation on the part of the author. If the author limits his direct quotation to that area of consciousness in which the mind formulates its thoughts and feelings into language, the method may still be called by the comprehensive term the stream of consciousness technique, but in this case it would be more exact to apply the more restricted term interior monologue. If, however, the author intervenes in any way between the reader and the character’s consciousness in order to analyze, comment, or interpret, then he is employing not the stream of consciousness technique but a fundamentally different method which may correctly be designated internal analysis. (Bowling 1950, p. 345)



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The application of such definitions to McEwan’s and Cicero’s novels seems self-evident: both employ the stream of consciousness technique, and Cicero’s particular method is close to interior monologue. Both carefully eschew any internal analysis. Baker’s Checkpoint, however, adopts a quite different technique which is equally successful in concealing any authorial position: it is composed entirely of dialogue. If the cover didn’t announce it as ‘a novel’ beside the title, it could well be regarded simply as a play. That it is announced as a novel though draws attention to how comprehensively shorn of fictional prose it is, how carefully its two characters are allowed to subsume the narrative space. It is possible that these are novels which singularly replay a late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century aesthetic quest in the fraught early twenty-first, the sort of aesthetic achievement that James Joyce’s would-be artist Stephen Dedalus understands as: ‘The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalises itself, so to speak’ (Joyce 1964 [1916], p. 219). Given that the Iraq invasion is the common denominator of these, it seems likely that actually the quest is more to keep readers at bay than to reach artistic impersonality, or more to protect the artist from political pigeonholing than to reach an aesthetic goalpost. The ‘personality of the artist’, at any rate, is not so much ‘refined out of existence’ as simply not allowed space. The central characters so crowd the view, are put so close up to the reader, that there is little space to register the artiness of the novels. In this these are quite unlike Joyce’s or Woolf’s efforts, where the hand of the impersonal artist is conveyed in carefully weighed words, and always in the tacit choices made: of juxtapositions of scenes and thoughts, of deliberateness in pacing and resonances. The latter have, at the least, a deliberate ‘arranger’ behind the impersonalizing techniques of the novel. So, of course, do the three in question here (an ‘arranger’ is inevitable), but it is a less deliberate one: the arrangers of these novels hide behind Aristotelian unities which seem to leave minimum scope for arranging. These are compressed in time and space so that each has to follow the logic of unity of time and space to a considerably greater extent than is usual in novels: the logic of what’s possible for one person in one day in Saturday, one person in one evening in The Human War, for recording every word that two people spoke over something like an hour and a half in Checkpoint. The formal precautions taken in these novels to write out any authorial perspective were justified insofar as their initial reception can be traced. Unfortunately, such reception was uneven, and the intervention




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of market processes is salient here. The main recorded source for early responses is naturally the book review. How well-established the author is, how influential the publishing firm, how determinedly the publicity is managed, what policies the reviewing outlets (broadsheets, magazines, etc.) follow, how accessible the book is from retailers, and a large number of such other factors skew the traceable receptive field of book reviews in numerous ways. Naturally, established novelists like McEwan and Baker publishing with an international corporation like Random House attracted (or manipulated) the notice of a wide range of respectable broadsheets and literary journals. Cicero’s first novel was published in the USA by the small publisher of ‘experimental fiction’ Fugue State Press in 2003, and received no significant notice in the usual reviewing spaces – but it was noticed in a more dispersed space of electronic literary magazines and websites and blogs. In the UK it appeared five years later in 2007 published by the somewhat larger independent firm Snowbooks, which got it only marginally more attention in terms of belated reviews. For the former two, their reception through book reviews was generated by controversy which was precisely against the grain of their careful author-erased forms. Controversy here sounds so much like newsworthy publicity that it is difficult to pin to the texts in question; such controversies appear to have an autonomous media rationale and purpose. In this instance the controversies had to do squarely with the Iraq invasion context and immediately played against the obvious cautiousness of the forms and the authorial anticipations those forms suggest. The November 2004 issue of the online Complete Review conducted a useful accounting and analysis of reviews of Baker’s Checkpoint (‘Nicholson Baker’s Checkpoint: The Reaction and Reviews’ 2004). Surveying 27 reviews of the book in the USA, UK and Germany, the following noteworthy points were made here. First, reviewers pronounced judgement about the novel when pre-publication information was released and before reading the novel: Over- and premature reactions were the order of the day, the public (or rather their pundit-representatives) quickly split into only two extreme camps: those who thought the book (meaning, to them, the idea – presidential assassination – presented in the book) was unacceptable, versus those who thought that, since it was a work of fiction, anything goes. Meanwhile, almost no one on either side – at least not the most vociferous opponents and defenders – appears to have actually read the book. (‘Nicholson Baker’s Checkpoint’ 2004)



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Second, with occasional exceptions, even after publication the book was reviewed in simplistic ways to be fitted into the frame of being for or against invasion, often simply misrecognizing or neglecting the narrative strategies and fictional vision it offered: in the Complete Review’s terms, ‘So far, […] rather than being considered a fiction providing an insight into the times it has become a symbol of them; in the near future it seems unlikely to be seen any differently’. And third, despite the prepublication controversy and timing of publication (not just with Iraq in the news, but connectedly the upcoming US presidential elections), interest in the novel waned almost as soon it was published: The great media interest led publication of the book – already rushed, and (adding to the controversy) originally scheduled for just before the Republican National Convention – to be moved up from 24 to 10 August [2004], with an initial print run reported to have been 60,000 (or 75,000). Media interest continued – the book was widely reviewed – but did not translate into sales-success. By the end of August, only some 6,500 copies had been sold, a very poor performance for a book receiving so much attention. (‘Nicholson Baker’s Checkpoint’ 2004) Possibly the novel’s formal and structural resistance to simplistic rendering in the immediate invasion context made it expedient for readers to neglect it rather than engage with it. McEwan’s Saturday had a quite different reviewing experience, and yet that was marked by controversy too. The novel was received on publication in January 2005 with extravagantly laudatory reviews in the UK and USA, was soon placed on bestseller lists, and seemed headed for the Booker Prize for which it was nominated. Its ambiguities were noted, and it was widely regarded as the definitive literary expression of the post-11 September 2001, or most immediately post-Iraq invasion, ethos in most ‘quality’ broadsheets and literary magazines. Mark Lawson’s review in The Guardian was characteristic in noting that: ‘Most of the fictions provoked by post-9/11 politics have taken up positions as clearly as a party spokesman. But Saturday […] is subtle enough to be taken as a warning against either intervention or against isolationism. […] As in the best political novels, the evidence and arguments are distributed with careful ambiguity’ (Lawson 2005). Its upbeat ending and tone were particularly valued amidst what had been a prolonged and grim reckoning with the consequences of invasion: ‘There is indeed grandeur in this view of life, matter giving rise to minds which create the modern




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wonders’ (Kohn 2005, in The Independent); ‘Saturday is about feeling good rather than feeling bad’ (Sophie Harrison 2005, in New Statesman); ‘McEwan slows or freezes the dramatic action to better emphasise the rituals of daily violence that surround, and sometimes even protect, our elusive experience of happiness’ (Scurr 2005, in The Times); and so on. Reviewers seemed to have decided to celebrate the ‘happiness’ of the novel in view of the Iraq invasion if not to find an authorial for-oragainst position (the desire to find happiness from a novel is not much different from determination to discover a political position in a novel), until John Banville’s review appeared on 26 May 2005 in The New York Review of Books. Banville didn’t mince words: he regarded Saturday as ‘a dismayingly bad book’ in terms of plotting and characterization; observed that ‘if Tony Blair – who makes a fleeting personal appearance in the book, oozing insincerity – were to appoint a committee to produce a “novel for our time”, the result would surely be something like this’ (p. 14). With the background anti-invasion protests in mind, Banville found evidence for McEwan’s ideological perspective early in the novel – quoting the following sentiment pronounced by Perowne’s son Theo from it: When we go on about the big things, the political situation, global warming, world poverty, it all looks really terrible, with nothing getting better, nothing to look forward to. But when I think small, closer in – you know, a girl I’ve just met, or this song we’re doing with Chas, or snowboarding next month, then it looks great. So this is going to be my motto – think small. (McEwan 2005, pp. 34–5) and succinctly observing that, ‘It might also be, amazingly, the motto of McEwan’s book’ (Banville 2005, p. 12). The observation that ‘think small’ is McEwan’s ‘motto’ (i.e. the author is so close to his subject Perowne that he can deliberately circumvent the larger political issues that the novel is ostensibly set amidst) did precisely what the strategy of the stream of consciousness novel was designed to avoid: it found a deliberate mode of political evasion which could be attributed to the author (as ‘arranger’) within that strategy itself. It also implicated all those reviewers who were pleased to find an upbeat tone in the novel in the same kind of political evasion, and Banville gave them an earful too. It was too precise an observation to be easily countered, and in fact it wasn’t – but controversy followed on other grounds. As it happened, Banville’s novel The Sea was also heading towards the Booker Prize and had been nominated, and it was unusual for one contender



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to undermine another in this fashion. Now the Booker Prize, as novelist Gilbert Adair had observed back in 1986, is more an annual marketing event than an indicator of quality. It has consequently thrived on being able to generate controversies which draw public attention, and such ‘Bookerization’, critic James English (2002, p. 18) noted, could be thought of as a modern literary and art market phenomenon which has caught on. John Sutherland, chairman of the Booker Prize committee, published a letter (23 June 2005) in response to Banville’s review objecting that it was too harsh and picking on a trivial factual error (really small thinking), and Banville’s response on the same page was scathingly dismissive. As it happened, McEwan’s Saturday did not make it to the Booker shortlist announced in September 2005 while Banville’s The Sea did, and in fact the latter went on to win the prize that year. A downward slide in McEwan’s popularity as an author, not in the literary establishment but among the reading public, has been noted since. In a 2009 article, David Sexton observed a groundswell of attacks against McEwan’s novels among bloggers: noting ‘an astounding outpouring of bile against him’, Sexton put it down to ‘just unthinking class-antagonism and political fault-finding’ stirred largely by Saturday. When Cicero’s The Human War appeared in the UK in 2007, the well-known novelist Ellis Sharp in his blog-site (9 July 2007) and Lee Rourke in his Guardian book-blog (8 August 2007) recommended it strongly for its contrasting approach to the Iraq invasion compared to Saturday. Let me draw some of the threads of the above observations together. In distinctive ways, the novels in question by Cicero, Baker and McEwan were about the environment of the Iraq invasion period and were meant, in the first instance, to provoke the interest of readers within that environment. Possibly because of their awareness of the polarized ways in which readers were reading anything about Iraq at the time, these authors tried to structure their texts so as to play with readers’ expectations without taking any clearly attributable authorial position about the invasion. They attempted, in other words, to anticipate and thwart readers’ expectations by structuring their novels so as to write out the author. The books were naturally produced and appeared in the market to capitalize on the charged atmosphere of the Iraq invasion period and the extraordinary interest among readers in anything to do with Iraq. Judging by the run of reviews, the authors anticipated readers’ expectations correctly but didn’t quite manage to thwart those expectations. Despite, and sometimes through unexpected engagement with, the author-erased forms of these novels, reviewers sought to impose their contextually predetermined readings. This was




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manifested variously in single-minded efforts to read the novels as pro- or anti-invasion statements, in trying to find the panacea for the bitterness caused by the invasion therein, and in bickering amongst reviewers according to their own stances apropos the invasion. In various ways and at various levels – in the authors’ sense of the market and the readers’, in the production and dissemination processes, in the manner in which reviewers received them and the controversies generated, in the mediated ways in which readers consumed them – the structures of the literary market of the time were apparent. In fact, I feel that this argument could go one more step. Though the reviews are uneven indicators of consumption and reception, they are indicative enough to suggest some broader features of the complicity of authors, texts and readers in market mechanisms of the time, and indeed in general for our time. As for the action thrillers in the previous section, some plausible but speculative thoughts in this regard draw this chapter to a close. The slippage between what the authors of these texts attempted and what the readers found in the texts can be considered, somewhat tangentially, in terms of another formulation in and about early twentiethcentury fiction. Aldous Huxley’s notion of a ‘novel of ideas’ is still evoked as a familiar one every now and then, but on the whole it has almost disappeared from serious critical discussions. Like Joyce’s would-be artist Stephen Dedalus in his novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man theorizing the artist’s erasure, Aldous Huxley’s would-be novelist Philip Quarles in Point Counter Point defines the phrase in his notebook: Novel of ideas. The character of each personage must be implied, as far as possible, in the ideas of which he is the mouthpiece. In so far as theories are rationalizations of sentiments, instincts, dispositions of the soul, this is feasible. […] The great defect of the novel of ideas is that it’s a made-up affair. Necessarily; for people who can reel off neatly formulated notions aren’t quite real; they are slightly monstrous. Living with monsters becomes rather tiresome in the long run. (Huxley 1947 [1928], pp. 409–10) Putting the novelist as theorist within the novel (another strategy that Quarles interestingly ponders) is a kind of explicit announcement of the aesthetic quest which Joyce articulated through Dedalus – a self-reflexive moment when the work of art both performs and labels this quest. Nothing of the sort happens in any of the novels in question here, but the idea of the ‘novel of ideas’ could be regarded as pertinent to them. The Iraq invasion period was afloat on a limited but absorbing range



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of ideas to do with the justifications and fallacies of invasion: limited, but complex considerations to do with the nature of national and international regimes and prerogatives, and the responsibilities towards and of peoples, were involved. The polarizations that I have mentioned frequently were to do with accepting or being convinced by these ideas, with unresolved discussions of these, and particularly with seeking confirmation for one or the other side of contending ideas. While trying to withhold any easy identification of authors with political ideas and sides under discussion, Cicero, Baker and McEwan nevertheless let loose fictional characters who could be identified by readers as representatives of specific ideas and therefore holders of specific positions regarding the invasion. Mark in The Human War brings his sense of the world, a downto-earth philosophical bent, to express his revulsion at the invasion; Perowne in Saturday does the same from a different social position to clarify his acceptance of the invasion; and Ben and Jay in Checkpoint are personifications of two ideational positions against the invasion. Instead of presenting their own political positions, in other words, the authors used their texts to put the political positions out there – which would be immediately grasped and recognized at the time – in the form of characters for readers to reckon with. So far then, the authors wrote texts which could be thought of as ‘novels of ideas’, with characters as mouthpieces for contextually relevant ideas. However, this ploy slipped, in that readers in that heated environment read the texts as ‘novels of ideas’, but quite differently. Readers searched for confirmation of their ideas rather than sitting back and considering the ideas, distanced though personified mouthpieces, as such. Put otherwise, readers looked for one definitive idea in each text, to be able to attribute an idea to the novel as a whole or its author which could then be accepted or refuted. This was at odds with the careful designs of the novels, indeed this was precisely what the novels were designed to discourage, but readers did it anyway: they wondered whether this novel isn’t offering a ray of sunshine in dark times, whether that character isn’t in fact the author, whether such-and-such a passage doesn’t reveal what the author/text is ultimately saying. In view of and with a view to engaging the charged political atmosphere of the time authors offered effectively ‘novels of ideas’ and readers looked for ‘novels of ideas’, but what authors intended and texts presented and readers read didn’t quite gel. The contract of ‘literary fiction’ with which I began this section was implicated both in the production of ‘novels of ideas’ and in the (mis)readings of ‘novels of ideas’ in this context. Beneath such particular negotiations of the contract of ‘literary fiction’ in the Iraq invasion period lie the general features of that contract




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and the general character of the contemporary literary market: the latter form the ground on which the specific experience of these Iraq invasion ‘literary fictions’ was built. In an interesting essay recently (well, more recently than Huxley), Timothy Bewes has sought to make a distinction between the ‘novel of ideas’ and the ‘philosophical novel’ by taking account of the intervention of the literary market. Bewes thinks of regard for the literary market amongst authors and readers and in texts as introducing ‘philosophical dishonesty’ in the encounter between authors/texts and readers. His moralistic distinctions follow accordingly: What distinguishes the [‘philosophical novel’] from the [‘novel of ideas’] is: (1) the absence of authorial predetermination or ulterior motives. The philosophical novel should be a meditation which engages the reader philosophically, in which the author and reader are embarked upon a joint enterprise – not one in which the author is leading the reader by the nose. […] In the philosophical novel the author writes out of a formal principle; from a position that is not elevated above the reader, but one in which the reader meets the author halfway; (2) the existence of a point of resistance to the values of the objective world, a temperament of refusal towards the instinct to play to the gallery, to appeal to the market, rather than to a more rarefied and unquantifiable idea of literary creation, or aesthetic harmony. In other words, the author of the philosophical novel appeals to the reader from a position which is at least as elevated as the reader, and not from a position subordinate to the sovereign reader-consumer. If the literary work violates these conditions of the philosophical novel, the writer can be said to be engaged in a technical task (the phrase which Kant uses of the political moralist), and to have produced merely a ‘novel of ideas’; that is to say, a work for the market, or one which is concerned to reiterate an intellectual conviction that is apparent (retrospectively or otherwise) in the work from the opening page – a conviction to which the text itself is therefore merely incidental, extraneous, supplementary. (Bewes 2000, pp. 427–8) If such a moralistic factoring in of the literary market and consequent distinctions were accepted, the situation of the three novels in discussion here grows more complicated. A number of questions arise. Let me pose some of them: Given that the Iraq invasion had predisposed the literary market in certain ways, could the very fact that the invasion was



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engaged in these texts be regarded as an appeal to the market? Was it possible for any literary fiction about Iraq not to have appealed to the market in predetermined ways, irrespective of philosophical probity? Was it possible to write and publish a ‘philosophical novel’ during the Iraq invasion period particularly, and is it generally possible any longer? Is it possible that ‘philosophical novels’ in the above terms could have been received as ‘novels of ideas’, i.e. that readers (who don’t necessarily hold a moral high ground) inserted their market-led expectations in their readings? Wouldn’t certain agents of the literary market (which includes literary agents, publishers, book designers, distributors, retailers, advertisers, reviewers) inevitably and actively skew the passage of a pristinely ‘philosophical novel’ from author to a philosophically suspect ‘novel of ideas’ for the reader – in view of market features (such as interest in Iraq) when the book is released? On the last, Bewes seems to incorrectly assume that the market is in the hands of authors and readers/consumers, and all mediators are passive subsets of one or the other. And here’s another one: Is Bewes’s understanding of a ‘philosophical novel’ an idealistic and anachronistic reiteration of the early twentiethcentury aesthetic quest à la Joyce? It seems to me sufficient to raise these questions here, rather than to try and answer them. Answers would inevitably stray far from the thrust of this study. In those answers, I suspect, the terms of the contract of ‘literary fiction’ are to be found. And unless those terms are clarified the practices of contemporary ‘literary fiction’ in their specific contexts cannot be adequately analysed. Without the benefit of those clarifications, the bearing of a specific context, such as that of the Iraq invasion period, can only be taken so far and no further: perhaps only somewhat further than the discussion of the three novels which occupy this section. To go somewhat further would be to take account of fiction that I have not touched on here, and that’s a dense area of fiction. This section has been confined to what I have thought of as the high-pressure period of the Iraq invasion, from 2003 to 2005. Many relevant novels have appeared since. I have unwarrantably neglected short stories, a simply enormous area of Iraq invasion productions. I have stuck to texts in English, circulating primarily in the UK and USA. A great deal more remains to be considered and analysed than this section, this chapter, and indeed this study generally can extend to.




Windows into Life-Worlds: Blogs and Conclusion

Fear and two blogs Often the most knowledgeable informants about relatively distant countries and cultures in the UK and USA are émigrés from those countries. This is understandable; they can be expected to have a close awareness of both their countries of origin and domicile, some degree of allegiance to both, and a stake in mediating between them. And indeed an ‘insider’ perspective, which an émigré informant is likely to have, is regarded as valuable in cultural and scholarly works. For instance, the perspectives of ethnographers from within the culture being studied, or ‘autoethnography’, are often received as more authentic than those from a different culture engaging in field research (on this, particularly in relation to literary narratives, see Buzard 2003 and 2005; Ellis 2009; Pratt 1992). In addition to possessing an insider perspective, émigré informants may derive advantages from their outside position unavailable to those within the country of origin: they may have better resources at their command, the benefits of a comparative perspective, or the freedom to engage with areas which are unpopular or denied within the country of origin. However, there are also obvious problems with uncritically accepting what such informants say. To some extent, these are problems which may apply to any insider perspective (and those cited above have debated this apropos autoethnographers’ claims to ‘authenticity’): for example, an inside position is not necessarily unbiased, and could variously distort observations in terms of internal political or social allegiances. Beyond these, the émigré’s position as informant is apt to arouse suspicion on other grounds. Her migration might be motivated, for instance, by dissatisfactions with her country of origin which are not necessarily shared by those who live there – and these dissatisfactions may well colour the kind of information 170



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she provides. Since her livelihood and economic interests are within the adopted country of domicile, she might feel called upon to subscribe or be pressured into subscribing to attitudes and prejudices that prevail there. However well-informed she may feel about her country of origin, the fact of domicile at a distance is not a discountable factor: inevitably, the information she provides will gradually lose touch with the experience of living in that country, will not be borne upon and conditioned by the textures of everyday life there, will be given to generalizing in ways which look unrealistic for the citizens living there. In literature and criticism addressed to postcolonial and diasporic contexts such issues have caused numerous quarrels: émigré authors have occasionally been at odds with those who live in their countries of origin, émigré postcolonial critics in Western academies and postcolonial critics within postcolonial countries often regard each other with suspicion (both sides feel they occupy a moral high ground). As Bush’s ‘war on terror’ and the invasion of Iraq unfolded, literature about the Middle East that circulated in the UK and USA was variously discussed along the above lines. A spate of well-publicized ‘literary fiction’ and memoirs (sometimes balanced on the boundary between those) by émigré writers made their way to the market, those about Iran and Afghanistan circulating most widely: for example, Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003); Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite-Runner (2003); Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel Persepolis (Vol. 1, 2003, first French issue in 2000); Christopher de Bellaigue’s (whose Iranian connections are very close) In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs (2004). These generated an anxious debate on their veracity and the effect they had on, particularly, American perceptions of the Middle East in the invasion context. An essay by Hamid Dabashi entitled ‘Native Informers and the Making of American Empire’ (2006) observed, with Nafisi’s book in view, that such memoirs served the invasion ethos by cultivating collective amnesia and selective memory, and Syed Mohammed Marandi (2008) charted the various inaccuracies of Nafisi’s book. Fatemeh Keshavarz’s book-length study Jasmine and Stars (2007) discerned the features of a New Orientalism for American consumption in such books, at a time when, ‘since 9/11, knowing about the Muslim Middle East is not a luxury, it is a matter of life and death’ (p. 2). In the November 2009 issue of the Journal of Multicultural Discourses, Coeli Fitzpatrick and Melissa Lim argued respectively the cases for and against these books. Fitzpatrick confirmed that, ‘these works function as active producers of meaning within American society in that they take up previous Orientalist assumptions about the Middle East and Muslims, giving these assumptions rejuvenated force with authorship by natives and near



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natives’ (p. 244); while Lim found ‘mitigating circumstances’ (p. 261) for them, primarily with reference to their gender and sexual politics. This debate was primarily about books addressed to Iran and circulating in the USA, at a time – following the invasion of Iraq – when it seemed to many that Iran may well be the next target. But literary works by émigré Iraqi authors, in various languages, had also played their part in the book market of the invasion period – I come to some of these in the next section. In English, a less-noted novel by Khalid Kishtainy, Tomorrow is Another Day: A Tale of Saddam’s Baghdad (2003), appeared in the UK. This dark satire is set in Baghdad during the Iraq–Iran war of the 1980s, and describes the picaresque adventures of Muhammad Zabib after his release from Abu Ghraib prison, where he had been incarcerated for his communist convictions. He starts up a successful business of marrying war widows for a generous reward (offered by a government decree), finds himself forcibly recruited to the war, starts up various lucrative enterprises after the war (gallows, mobile mosques, illegal migrants), and eventually finds his way to Europe and settles there with his wives. In the last lines of the novel Mohammad discovers a wholly new sort of freedom as émigré: ‘for the first time I feel secure and free from worry. No one will come and knock at my door with a rifle at dawn. No one will come and take from me all that I may or may not have and leave me with nothing I can call my own other than the clothes I stand up in’ (Kishtainy 2003, pp. 198–9); and he ends contemplating living ‘the rest of our lives off the bounteous munificence of good old imperialism!’ (p. 199). The picaresque novel, true to its form, succeeds in presenting Iraq – in an amusing way – as a thoroughly corrupt and brutalized society under Saddam Hussein’s arbitrary and repressive regime. It also succeeds in demonstrating that this corruption is not merely top-down but fully assimilated at ground level: persons are not merely obliged by circumstances to be corrupt, they cultivate corruption unabashed themselves; all are compliant subjects of the brutality and hypocrisy generated by the state, and complicit with the state; and the blanket moral bankruptcy of the whole goes hand in hand with the unmitigated moral bankruptcy of every individual, without exception. The only realization of the pressure of repression becomes possible from the outside, when Iraqi protagonists leave the country and look back (and in the process export corruption). Tomorrow is Another Day appeared in September 2003. This picture of the comprehensively bleak environment in Iraq under Saddam Hussein – sustained from top to bottom, from state to individual, from macroscopic whole to microscopic part – had already been widely circulated before and during the invasion in the USA and UK, and was



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familiar. Perhaps that is why Kishtainy’s novel received little notice. This picture was cited as the ethical justification for invasion, and sought to convey the terror which grips every aspect of life in Iraq under Hussein’s regime: the unavoidable hold of terror on every individual and family, who suffer without reprieve. One of the infamous UK government dossiers to make the case for invasion in December 2002, Saddam Hussein: Crimes and Human Rights Abuses, had set the tone. It was introduced with the words: ‘Iraq is a terrifying place to live. People are in constant fear of being denounced as opponents of the regime. They are encouraged to report on the activities of family and neighbours’ (Foreign and Commonwealth Office 2002, p. 4); and concluded by noting the contributions made to it by refugees and claiming to be ‘a faithful representation of what ordinary Iraqis face in their everyday lives’ (p. 20). Reports supporting the ethical case for invasion reiterated this picture variously. A March 2003 Newsweek report observed: ‘It is one of the last truly totalitarian states, in the tradition of Germany under Adolf Hitler or the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, whom Saddam is said to admire greatly. […] Throughout Iraq one is surrounded by what Hannah Arendt, writing of the Nazis, called the “banality of evil”’ (Dickey et al. 2003, p. 35). Incidentally, the quotation from Arendt’s report on the Eichmann trial in 1961 (Arendt 1963/1964) was off the point. Misconstrued quotations were fairly common in journalism on the invasion. Arendt’s observation was of the banality she perceived in Eichmann’s person and psyche contrasted with the enormity of his crimes during the trial – it wasn’t really about the ‘banalization of antiSemitic violence’ in Nazi Germany. The latter has to do with a habitual acceptance of violence in a society, which this report was actually trying to get at. Arendt’s observation on the ‘banality of evil’ was more aptly evoked during Saddam Hussein’s trials in 2005 and 2006. Anyway, along similar lines a BBC report of April 2003 by Stephen Sackur observed: ‘Saddam’s Iraq was like Stalin’s Soviet Union – a republic of fear in which truth-telling was punishable by death. Even within families there could be no trust, no honesty. You could never, ever, be sure who was being blackmailed, squeezed, by the mukhabarat, the secret police’ (Sackur 2003). The comprehensive depth of terror here was also captured by a resonant phrase, ‘republic of fear’, in this instance more meaningfully applied. It was the title of the émigré Iraqi academic in the USA, Kanan Makiya’s book (first published under the pseudonym Samir al-Khalil in 1989, reissued 1998), detailing how under Hussein’s regime ‘horror stories became the norm inside a hitherto ordinary developing country’ (Makiya 1998, p. xi).




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This picture of Iraq under Saddam Hussein, so effectively characterized for the invasion and testified by émigré Iraqi writers (whose integrity there is no reason at all to doubt), is easiest put into perspective by drawing attention to some distinctions made in rigorous examinations of such repressive conditions. The notion of a ‘banalization of violence’, which I have mentioned in passing, has been much examined for various contexts where violence has been rife and has come to be a key instrument of control. With colonial African experiences in view, Achille Mbembe has formulated this succinctly as the form of violence that is: […] designed to ensure the authority’s maintenance, spread, and permanence. Falling well short of what is properly called ‘war,’ it recurred again and again in the most banal and ordinary situations. It then crystallized, through a gradual accumulation of numerous acts and rituals – in short, played so important a role in everyday life that it ended up constituting the central cultural imaginary that the state shared with society, and thus had an authenticating and reiterating function. (Mbembe 2001, p. 25) The significant point in this formulation is in the emphasis Mbembe puts on ‘imaginary’: violence becomes an active agent in the manner in which government and governed understand each other and envision their expectations of each other in an everyday way, or are constructed and reconstructed daily with regard to each other – hence ‘imaginary’ (in the psyche of such a society). This does not mean that each and every person involved in this situation regards it as normal, or accepts this situation without a resistant thought, or is gripped by unthinking passive voiceless fear. That would render such a condition unalterable from within, and, with Mbembe’s view in mind, render decolonization movements (for instance) inexplicable. The question is always how far can everyday resistant feelings and fear of the pervasive everyday violence be contained by the ‘imaginary’ shared between state and society, and when could it become unacceptable and implode. From within such a situation, that always depends on the complexities of everyday life: there are usually let-outs in everyday life from the imposed ‘banalization of violence’ where the everyday fears and resistant misgivings can be assuaged or forgotten; the textures of individual pleasures and sufferings remain variegated, and so indeed are loyalties and suspicions. At worst, the response to such a ‘banalization of violence’ could be a sort of habituation of fear. But that too is a fragile thing, and not a one-dimensional fear that subsumes the consciousness and makes it unthinking and inarticulate – more, it seems



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a state of doubleness of social being in which one moves in bursts between somehow accepting the situation as normal, only to be thrown into a panic or shocked into disorientation by an event, a rumour, a sight, something said, or not said – something that even while it requires the normal in order to make its impact, destroys it. […] people like you and me close their eyes to it, in a manner of speaking, but suddenly an unanticipated event occurs, perhaps a dramatic or poignant or ugly one, and the normality of the abnormal is shown for what it is. Then it passes away, terror as usual, in a staggering of position that lends itself to survival as well as despair and macabre horror. (Taussig 1992, p. 18) The possibility and impossibility of normality, a horizon of imagined normality, in other words, shadows everyday life under a repressive and violent political order, and in its interstices critical thinking and human intelligence remain always active. The comprehensive grip of a politics of violence doesn’t mean that the political subject becomes uniformly fearful and passive, and doesn’t mean that everyday lives lose their complex textures and assume one taut colour of fear. Moreover, different classes and different occupations in a repressive society have quite different views on its condition, even if repressive violence is endemic. The simplistic view of a repressive society being coloured by fear constantly and uniformly and daily can, however, seem plausible from an extrinsic position. The Iraqi émigré’s account of Saddam Hussein’s regime – such as Kanan Makiya’s or, in a different way, Khalid Kishtainy’s – might have been truthful in essence and detail, but it was removed from and removed the complex textures of everyday life within Iraq. Also, some such accounts were perhaps not devoid of political vested interests and over-determination of personal experiences. In the American and British dispensations where invasion was programmatically lobbied for, these were received not simply as truthful in essence and details, but as comprehensive characterizations of a uniformly fear-ridden and victimized population in passive submission – to the core of individual and domestic and everyday existence. In the USA and UK, it seems to me, a perception of a population paralysed by fear in Iraq was promoted which comprehensively wiped out the critical intelligence of Iraqi subjects. This erasure was certainly accepted by the pro-invasion lobby, and actually also



to me, it is in line with what Michael Taussig described as a ‘doubleness of social being’:

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among many who were opposed to the invasion. Such erasure could be regarded as a particular way of regarding Iraqis in general under Saddam Hussein as, somehow, different from – or other than – (free and democratic) Americans and British citizens because of their social and political condition: different by dint of a psyche that has been moulded by repression and everyday violence. Both pro- and sometimes anti-invasion proponents sought to reach across this barrier of otherness: the former by their generosity in liberating them from Hussein; the latter by their virtuousness in trying to protect them from Bush and Blair. The sense of a deeply traumatized and paralysed society seemed to be supported by reliable Iraqi émigré informants in the USA and UK. To a great extent the invasion and occupation was conducted ostensibly on the back of Iraqis abroad: for instance, in the puppet Iraqi Governing Council during the occupation period, 10 of the 25 variously appointed council members had been abroad for significant periods before the invasion, and of the 12 persons who held the rotating presidency 8 had been exiles or émigrés. Under these circumstances the appearance of two blogs from Iraq made something of a stir during the invasion period: Salam Pax’s blog started appearing from September 2002 and continued through the build-up to the undertaking of the invasion, and the book published from this, The Baghdad Blog (2003), covered up to June 2003; Riverbend started blogging on Pax’s pages before setting up her own, and covered almost the entire occupation phase from August 2003 – the first published book based on these (2005) reached to September 2004, and another volume has been published since (2006). Both have continued to write blogs, and – apart from the published books – their blogs have passed into other media: Salam Pax made four 15-minute reports for the BBC after Saddam Hussein’s fall, which have been collected and produced on DVD (2006); Riverbend’s blog has been turned into theatre performances, by the Six Figures Theatre Company, New York, in March 2005, and in other countries. In terms of the above observations, the effect these blogs had could be summarized in three points. First, these came with evidence of articulateness and critical intelligence which undermined any presumption of otherness or difference, or of victimized paralysis. Second, they constructed and conveyed an impression of everyday life and individual lives in Baghdad which was as complex and irreducible as everyday life anywhere, and not captured by the monotones of pervasive fear. And third, they traced an ever-intensifying path of everyday violence and fear in Baghdad as being actuated by the invasion, and at every point refused to let this violence become banalized or the resulting fear to become habitual (and that undermined the preconception of the Iraqi people’s



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psyche as having become deeply habituated to violence and fear under the prolonged regime of Saddam Hussein). Each of these effects, or rather the cumulative effect along these three lines intertwined, could be understood in terms of the literary form of the blog. Blogs (digital diaries) such as these are, of course, as much a literary form as published texts of diaries and journals are now regarded as being, and yet their electronic character renders them distinct from the conventional diary in ways which are of moment here. I trace the literary qualities of the diary generally, and their distinctiveness in the electronic form of blogs, in describing the singular three-fold effects of Pax’s and Riverbend’s writings in the invasion period here. The conventional diary seems to present the process of the diarist’s writing about her life as she lives it. The diary develops with the unpredictability of everyday life, touches upon this thought or that experience or such and such observation of the diarist as it occurs, without overall predetermination or closure. Since there isn’t a holistic design in the diary, the consciousness of the diarist – her persona – seems to provide the unifying thread. These are consequently the two poles of the diary form: on the one hand, it seems to provide an ongoing record of the process of living; on the other hand, it thereby conveys the character (self) of the diarist. From a literary perspective these are both textual constructions. By that I do not mean that the diarist’s existence is doubtful or the veracity of her record questionable (those can be checked), but that the diary form itself – in its layout and structures and expressions as a text – creates a powerful impression of the reality of the diarist and the veracity of the record. The unpredictable day-by-day process of the diary text resonates with, so to speak, the complexity of living from day to day; and the necessity of a unifying consciousness to hold the diary entries together conveys a strong sense of the integrity of the diarist. Since the conventional diary is usually read retrospectively, probably in a published form (as the books from Pax’s and Riverbend’s blogs may be), there might be some suspicion of its having been moulded or adjusted with hindsight. The electronic form of the blog adds further emphasis to the impression of everyday reality and the diarist’s integrity. The blog enables the intertwining of the process of writing with the process of reading, i.e. as the blog is written piece by piece it is read piece by piece. So the formal impression of a process of writing in the diary form is more than an impression in the blog form: here the process of writing and the process of reading do unfold side by side. Further, not only do they unfold side by side, writing and reading interact with each other – readers can post comments and bloggers can respond to readers




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in their blogs, so that the blog becomes a dynamic communicative space, and the processive blog text is formulated somewhere between a process of writers and readers writing to and reading each other. The interactiveness of readers and writers of such electronic texts has been of considerable interest to literary theorists, who have consequently sought to modify conventional notions of authorship, readership and texts (e.g. see Bolter 1991, p. 121, on ‘interactive fiction’, and Gaggi 1997, p. 122, on ‘interactive literature’). Moreover, readers’ sense of the integrity of the blogger as a person is also sharpened beyond the possibilities of the diarist. Bloggers often announce their constructedness by assuming fake blogging identities (as Pax and Riverbend do, both pseudonyms), but capitalize on the persuasiveness of their texts and their interactions with readers to construct themselves gradually too (it is like reader and blogger living together in cyberspace). The blog therefore comes with a particularly powerful sense of both the blogger’s presence and of the everyday life presented, along the lines of the conventional diary but more emphatically so. In brief, as Campbell and Kelly (2009) have put it in their discussion of two other bloggers in ‘post-Saddam Iraq’, blogs provide ‘a real-time, unfolding, reflexive, and often interactive window into particular life-worlds’ (p. 22). To understand the effects of Salam Pax’s and Riverbend’s blogs in the invasion period, the form of the blog needs to be kept firmly in view. The books published on their basis are a reduction of the blog form to the conventional diary form, and shadow the blog form inadequately. The effects are because of the blog form. The above observations are particularly relevant here because both blogs were in fact received unusually sceptically. The perception in the USA and UK of the otherness of Iraqis in Iraq, of the passivity moulded by repression under Hussein’s government and simply of political and cultural distance, was such that the verve and accessibility of these blogs simply seemed implausible. Not only were they approached sceptically, in many quarters they caused resentment. The critical thinking they evidenced seemed to undermine the doubtful but acceptable ethical basis (leaving aside the obvious mendacities) of the invasion, that terrorstruck Iraqis needed to be rescued from tyranny – these both said or argued they didn’t need rescuing and sounded like they didn’t, without making any concessions to Saddam Hussein’s regime. Every sort of doubt was aired by readers. Their command of the English language seemed suspicious, and both explained. There were speculations about which agency these blogs were propaganda for – ‘Which is sexier? To be a CIA put-up or a propaganda ploy?’, asked Pax (2003, p. 25). Both received numerous comments and emails which were described by



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Riverbend as ‘full of criticism, cynicism, and anger’ (2005, p. 10). And this is where the blog form came into play. Much of both blogs were responses to these, writing back to lack of information with information, to mindless abuse with satire, to points of debate with arguments. The blogs were largely conversations: of these bloggers with those responding to their observations and with other bloggers and with each other and with, importantly, news reportage which formed a common backdrop for participants in the blogosphere on all sides. In the books based on these blogs numerous interlocutors are implied and shadowed within Pax’s and Riverbend’s texts, directly addressed, quoted and annotated, referred and so on – fragmented or implied voices around the fringes of the text. In the live blog, all the interlocutors were, so to speak, there, a click of a button away, conducting a textualized conversation in real time. Every interaction between Pax and Riverbend and these interlocutors was within a progressively accruing concretization of the integrity of Pax and Riverbend, and a confirmation of their thinking presence. A prolonged conversation between persons – even a hostile one, it seems to me – involves mutual agreements and progressive clarifications which establish a kind of friendship, a mutual recognition of each other’s presence. The shared backdrop of news reportage was particularly important, because the sense of the everyday in Baghdad that Pax and Riverbend conveyed was built around it. News reportage is a constant and shifting flow, and blogs can be a constant responsive flow to news. The news that was being followed and sieved and analysed in the UK and USA was being similarly followed in Baghdad too, and Pax and Rivebend could put some of that contextually specific reception amidst the contextually specific receptions in the UK and USA. The slippages were the spur of interactions. News reportage is not merely provided and received in contextually nuanced ways, it is moulded or framed in ideologically predetermined ways. To some extent this could be put down to the well-known ‘propaganda model’ of how news is produced, formulated persuasively by Herman and Chomsky (1988), and in some part to the disposition of the market: what sort of news is consumed most voraciously, what readers want or what sells. Behind what is said, a much larger part remains unsaid or hidden by rhetoric and inflection. Apart from analysing what was said in contextually specific ways, Pax and Riverbend constantly sought to provide the unsaid details, give the links and connections which were missing or misplaced, correct the tacit misconceptions fostered in the news. From arguments about the location of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ to the ‘precision strikes’ of the invasion to the Iraqi Governing Council’s and Coalition Provisional Authority’s




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declarations to the reconstruction contracts to the reality of women’s experiences in Baghdad before and after invasion, Pax and Riverbend sought to articulate the unmentioned or neglected in the news, and make it matter for debate. But this goes deeper. News reportage follows a quite distinctive register, one that enacts the differentiation of news from the everyday. The language of news – its rhetorical tricks are familiar to all newsreaders – arguably makes a highlighted and reported event seem newsworthy. The language of news confers significance on what is reported, and takes it out of the indistinguishable flow of the everyday which is not newsworthy, which is captured in everyday and routine exchanges and records. News is conceived thus as the opposite of the everyday, highlighted as opposed to the passing blur, memorable as opposed to forgettable, the significant big thing as opposed to trivial little things. This implied separation of the everyday from the newsworthy doesn’t, however, hold water – the relationship of the newsworthy and the everyday is extremely porous: reported policies bear upon individual and domestic lives, reported events float up from the mesh of individual and domestic lives, and so on. Alongside responding to the news as news, Pax and Riverbend maintained a running record of their individual and family lives which couldn’t be separated from the newsworthy. The ordinariness of family, neighbourly, friendly get-togethers and festivals and daily relationships described with humour and affection by both complicated the newsworthy highlightings of a terror-struck population in the news. What seemed like an Olympian recording of the experience of invasion and occupation – of bombings, raids, abductions, crumbling of basic amenities and infrastructures, unemployment, religious factionalism and violence, repression and dispossessing of women – in the news, was given a visceral and emotional content when viewed through dislocations within everyday life. In both blogs these were feelingly described. The ongoing common backdrop of news provided a boundary and a screen against which or in terms of which the everyday life of Baghdad could be articulated in both blogs and presented to widely dispersed and removed readers/respondents. At various points both bloggers expressed their disgruntlement at the misperceptions and misinformations being generated by the news; their attempts to convey their everyday lives within Baghdad was their retort, as if that could be a corrective. The intensity with which the news was followed in the invasion period served both blogs well. The fear in the everyday, or of the dislocation of the everyday, because of (and during) the invasion could be effectively conveyed by



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both because of the above-noted textual features of the blog form: the integrity and presence of the bloggers constructed through interaction (readers and respondents were concerned about them at various times as friends would be); and the strong impression of everyday life in Baghdad woven against the common backdrop of news. The resonance of that fear can only really be conceived within the conversational blog form. The simplicity of Salam Pax’s 2 April 2003 entry beginning with: ‘Actually too tired, too scared and burnt out to write anything. Yes, we did go out again to see what was hit. Yes, everything just hurts’ (2003, p. 143); or the poignancy of Riverbend’s finding out that she had lost her job simply because she’s a woman, and walking through her colleagues and noting on 24 August 2003 that, ‘Suddenly, the faces didn’t look strange – they were the same faces as before, mostly, but there was a hostility I couldn’t believe. What was I doing here?’ (2005, p. 24) – the effect of these seen retrospectively in the published book is momentary, gives a pause, but within the flow of blog interactions momentous, sinks in. The fear after invasion, which emanated from the crumbling of everyday stabilities, could only be partially accounted in terms of regimes (despite the powerful pressure to do so in the USA and UK and elsewhere). It couldn’t merely be disposed off as the transition from a repressive regime to a promised liberal order, or in terms of the contrast between the repression that prevailed there in Iraq and the freedoms and securities that ‘we’ enjoy ‘here’. Fear after invasion conveyed by the blogs was only partially apprehended in terms of stateless anarchy or violence on the Iraqi civil sphere contrasted with the secure comfort ‘we’ have here. Ultimately, it appears to me, the apprehension of an environment of fear that became possible through these blogs was of a reflexive nature. An environment of fear in the USA and UK was, it has been widely observed, both at large since 11 September 2001 and programmatically exacerbated in the buildup to invasion. The whole ‘war on terrorism’ business, with the openendedness of that abstract enemy ‘terrorism’, was undertaken ostensibly to manage terror within the USA and UK and elsewhere. Quite possibly, the presumption of terror ‘within’ made sense because it captured something deeper than the particularity of the 11 September 2001 attacks. The presumption made sense because it intermeshed with, and gave a coherent shape to, a plethora of small to large everyday fears which are managed by the panoply of small to large strategies and implements of managing fears. The structure of social stability, it can be persuasively argued, in societies such as the USA and UK is based on a political economy of playing on fears and consuming against fear – the raison d’être of sociologist Ulrich Beck’s formulation of ‘risk society’ (1992). It is an




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Fear is not fundamentally an emotion. It is the objectivity of the subjective under late capitalism. It is the mode of being of every image and commodity and of the groundless self-effects their circulation generates. […] [Fear] is the most economical expression of the accident-form as subject-form of capital: being as being-virtual, virtuality reduced to the possibility of disaster, disaster commodified, commodification as spectral continuity in the place of threat. When we buy, we are buying off fear and falling, filling the gap with presence-effects. (Massumi 1993, p. 12) Translated into what I am getting at in this context: the fear of the crumbling of everyday life in Baghdad through the blogs was apprehended by their followers in the USA and UK as a terrifying removal of the possibility of buying security, consuming to protect oneself, which is the everyday life ‘here’. It was understood in terms of the security of being able to buy oil, electricity, water, insurance, education, medicine, surveillance systems, arms, gates, houses, legal recourse, and so on – and the impotence of imagining not being able to do so. It particularly made sense as such because of various levels of ongoingness that surround and mesh within the blog form: the process of writing and reading and writing which is the blog form, along with the process of following continuously updated news, along with the process of living from day to day ‘there’, along with the process of living from day to day ‘here’. I have given the impression above that the blog in published diary form is a less substantial thing, a shadow of the interactive electronic text as it appears. This is obviously motivated by the thrust of this study, designed as it is to get to the nuances of literary production of and within the Iraq invasion period – and to understand the possibilities of the blog form now. From the perspective of literary studies, the published diary derived from a blog is of interest in itself. First, as I have observed in Chapter 1, literary publication is a kind of literary gate-keeping. Since literariness is largely constructed institutionally (by corporations, academia, media), the seal of approval and the attention publication brings cannot be dismissed lightly. Second, and more importantly, the published book form enables discriminate archiving amidst the sheer excess of the electronic archive. Third, and most importantly, the published book form enables a kind of critical reading that processive



argument that Brian Massumi put (somewhat forbiddingly, but suggestively nevertheless) as follows:

engagement with the blog does not. Retrospective and linear organization in the diary form, with a beginning and ending and annotations and editing, allows for discernment of textual patterns and strategies which the dynamic blog form renders unlikely. As critical readings of texts, the former is not necessarily less perceptive than ongoing reading-writing. Such an observation as the following, for instance, about Riverbend’s blog could only be possible with the book in hand – and its implications are worth considering: Riverbend’s continuous reversals of mainstream US frameworks of knowledge are certainly strategically viable and compelling as a form of opposition. In fact, they are so compelling that the book collection of her weblog ends with the entry about 9/11/04 in Fallujah, presumably because it is a particularly salient point for U.S. audiences. Moreover, the book is largely marketed as an insider perspective on the real status of Iraqi women, and the fact that they are losing rights and opportunities, as opposed to being liberated. However, because her blog entries are organised and framed as a set of reversals, her counter-narrative engages in a dichotomous logic that ultimately reifies the very categories she wishes to dismantle. […] In fact, the way in which Baghdad Burning is framed for U.S. reception suggests that her story of the Iraq war actually enacts a parallel regime of truth organized around the notion of giving voice to othered, ‘Third World’ women. (Jarmakani 2007, p. 42) With the book in view, a complete rather than accruing text, Jarmakani argues for quite a different sense of the veracity of the text and integrity of the author from the one suggested to me by the blog form. To Jarmakani the text appears to be deliberately structured in opposition to an equally complete (retrospective) view of the ‘mainstream U.S. framework of knowledge’, and is confirmed as such in the marketing and reception history of the published book. And to Jarmakani, Riverbend seems to construct herself as an ‘othered “Third World” woman’, rather than establishing her integrity through a communication process. Consequently, a somewhat different effect (that is, in the USA) is found for the blog here than the one I have described: not one of disturbing readers’ preconceptions in the invasion period, but of reification of the invasive presumptions which it sought to oppose. If the distinctiveness of the blog form is forgotten and the whole published diary text remains as the dominantly archived record, this may well come to be the critical consensus on Riverbend’s efforts.




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In moving towards a conclusion for this study, I do not attempt to draw together the various half-baked tendencies noted in the preceding chapters. As observed in Chapter 1, I had started with the expectation that the literature of the Iraq invasion may enable clarifications about literature in general now. For reasons enumerated there, I delimited my scope to literature in English which was produced, circulated and received within the Anglophone sphere, primarily within the UK and USA, and focused on the high-pressure invasion period between 2003 and 2005 (though I have occasionally strayed beyond into 2006 and 2007). By looking closely at such works of different genres, I have gestured towards observations which are possibly of moment to contemporary literature in general: the deep moral expectations of, and strategies for collectivizing, protest poetry; the possible reconfigurations of poetry through anger; the parameters within which the everyday and the contemporary are expressed in individual collections of poetry; the emerging features of frontline drama; the current appeal of verbatim or documentary or testimony theatre; the manner in which theatre appeals to concepts of nationality and the classical; the degree to which markets are implicated in the production and reception of ‘genre’ or ‘popular’ fiction (action thrillers) and ‘literary fiction’; the distinctive literary qualities of blogs; and other more incidental observations in passing. I don’t see any need to draw these together into some sort of grand synthesis. The reader can make the connections between the various points in numerous ways – some of which I may not be able to foresee – and openness in trying to conceive of as dynamic and fluid a field as contemporary literature seems desirable to me. Indeed, it would actually be disingenuous of me to attempt a linked-up final statement on contemporary literature because, obviously, such a study as this cannot possibly be regarded as finished. There is simply a great deal of relevant material which hasn’t figured here. Too much is left out to say anything sufficiently generalized for contemporary literature – I am happy to make gestures in that direction, but don’t feel I can pronounce. In fact, this cannot even be regarded as a reasonably wide survey of the literature about and of the Iraq invasion. I have occasionally marked omissions within the field of literature in English in the above; considerably more importantly, that this study is limited to literature in English is itself reason enough to be modest. The literature about and of the Iraq invasion was substantially produced and circulated and received outside the Anglophone field, in numerous languages and linguistic territories.



Conclusion: in other languages

In conclusion then, I present a few notes on the inconclusiveness of this study by drawing attention to relevant literature in languages other than English. Some of these have been translated into English, many haven’t yet. My inconclusive conclusion is necessarily an exercise in indicating some patterns and exemplifying with a few instances from a simply enormous volume of texts. The patterns that I mark out here resonate with some that are analysed above, and equally show the limitations of the above. To continue in an analytical vein a great number of geopolitical perspectives and cultural traditions need to be taken into account. My inconclusive notes are therefore necessarily not analytical, they are indicative and descriptive. The most ‘othered’ of languages other than English for the Iraq invasion context is unquestionably Arabic. An article in the English edition of the Arabic daily Asharq al-Awsat in December 2006 observed: With a few exceptions of Iraqi writers and artists, the continuous bloodshed in Iraq has failed to elicit any poetry or prose from the Arab men of letters. While political writers expounded and analyzed, the literary writers and artists did not channel this harrowing Arab tragedy into creativity, and neither did they attempt to engage with it. Some attribute this absence to the obscurity of the events taking place, while others fear that their expression might be misconstrued as advocating or commemorating the dictator’s bygone era [by writing against the occupation]. So many different reasons all converge into one question: Where is the Iraqi war literature? (Muhanna 2006) The article also noted the following: Iraqi novelist Shaker al Anbari believes that there is a substantial amount of contemporary writing in Iraq, particularly poetry and novels, which are published in the daily newspapers. They deal with topics that range from human suffering in Iraq to emigration and the killing that takes place – but they do not reach an Arab readership. He explained that they were rushed and emotional for the most part because the writer inside Iraq does not have the suitable living conditions to continue his/her creative production. (Muhanna 2006) The Arabic literary productions of writers inside Iraq are still relatively inaccessible from without as this is written, but some Iraqi writers, mostly émigrés in different parts of the world (like Kishtainy in the UK), have been productive. The poetry of Dunya Mikhail (whose collection




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is discussed in Chapter 3) and Saadi Youssef (featured in The Guardian and in the Faber anthology 101 Poems Against War, 2003) has already been mentioned. Quite a few novels by émigrés and exiles described life under Saddam Hussein’s regime (to that extent like Kishtainy too, but with very different ideological and aesthetic visions), and the travails of emigration, in ways which were particularly meaningful in the invasion period. Sinan Antoon, who migrated to the USA, wrote the Arabic novel I’jaam [Diacritics] (2004), translated into English as I’jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody (2007). This is presented as a manuscript found in 1989 in an Iraqi prison, which is prefaced and annotated by the Mukhabarat (military intelligence under Hussein). The fragmentary text is by a Chaldean Christian student of Baghdad University, Furat, and describes the hardships and abuse of life as a student and as a political prisoner during the Iran–Iraq war of the 1980s, with the footnotes giving the official rhetoric where the narrator’s account contradicts the establishment view. Najem Wali, who is settled in Germany, offered the Arabic novel which appeared first in German translation as Die Reisenach Tell al-Lahm [Journey to Tell al-Lahm] (2004). Here two characters, Najem and Ma’ali, are found driving to the Iraqi town of Tell al-Lahm in pursuit of their partners, who have run off together. The stories they tell each other on the way, and their experiences in the eponymous town, paint a bleak picture of Iraq in the 1990s. Alia Mamdouh’s Al-Mahboubat (2003), translated into English as The Loved Ones (2006), is set amongst Iraqi immigrants in Paris, where the author lives. This centres on the life of a 50-year-old woman, Suhaila, and her connections with various protagonists – focusing particularly on female perspectives and experiences, with a significant role for her son Nadir – after she suffers a brain stroke and lapses into coma. Through a variety of registers (conversations, diary, letters) a picture of the Iraqi diaspora and their attachment to Iraq is conveyed. Stories of the past and of migration, with the Iraq invasion behind them, have been written by Iraqi émigré authors in languages other than Arabic too. Noted Iraqi-Israeli author Sami Michael’s Hebrew novel Aida (2008) describes the relationships of Baghdad-based Jewish journalist Zakhi Dali, a woman named Aida whom he takes in, and his friend Nazar al-Sayad who works for the Mukhabarat. The story revolves around the gradual discovery of Aida’s Iraqi-Kurdish identity, and Zakhi’s sense of isolation and feeling for the Iraqi landscape amidst a city in ruins after the Gulf War. Iraqi resident in Germany, Abbas Khider’s German language novel Der falsche Inder [The False Indian] (2008), describes various readings of a manuscript found on the Berlin–Munich train. The manuscript tells the story of an Iraqi student



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who escapes from prison in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and undertakes a journey through various countries of North Africa and Europe before settling in Germany. Along the way he encounters numerous migrants like himself, and in Germany feels the dislocations of being an immigrant keenly. Turkish author Semra Beken in her novel Kocamın Bekçisi [My Husband’s Guardian] (2008) recounts the experiences of an Iraqi Turkman woman, Naza, with her three children, after her husband dies in the Gulf War. Based on the real experiences of a woman the author met in Vienna and interviewed over six months, the novel details her sufferings as member of a minority in Iraq, and as a stranger in Turkey and eventually an immigrant in Austria. Arabic literature addressed to Iraq of the invasion and occupation period, and such literature in other languages from the so-called ‘Arab world’ (in the Middle East and North Africa), form a somewhat distinct category. The French poetry volume, A Bagdad à Bassora: Amulette [Baghdad to Basra: Amulet] (2003), by the Algerian poet Chekib Abdessalam is worth noting here. Perhaps the most widely circulated novel on the conflict from the region is the Algerian novelist Mohammed Moulessehoul’s French novel, written under the pen-name Yasmina Khadra, Les Sirènes de Bagdad (2006) – translated into English as The Sirens of Baghdad (2007). This describes the experiences of an unnamed student of Baghdad University after he returns to his village Kafr Karum when the invasion begins. Formerly a peace-loving person, a series of experiences – the killing of a simpleton at a check-point, the accidental bombing of a wedding party, and the humiliation of his family during a house raid by American soldiers – brings about a transformation in the main protagonist, an uncontainable rage and desire for revenge. He consequently returns to Baghdad and joins an anti-occupation resistance organization originating with people of his home village, and sinks into a spiral of terrorism and bloodshed which exacerbates the inhumanities of invasion and occupation. Taking up the female perspective of the invasion zone, the Iraqi author (living in Paris) Inaam Kachachi’s Arabic novel Al Hafida al Amerikiyya [The American Granddaughter] (2008) is about a Christian Iraqi American, Zeina Behnam, who goes to Iraq with the invading American army as an interpreter. She works in the Green Zone, close to the home of her grandmother Rahma, widow of a colonel in the Iraqi army. The difference of perspectives between Zeina and Rahma remain unresolved to the end; Zeina is unable to win the trust or love of her grandmother and relatives and is unable to regain her Iraqi identity because she sees herself as an American. Iraqi novelist Ali Bader’s Haris al Tabigh [Tobacco Guard] (2008) in Arabic, describes the




Imagining Iraq

life of Iraqi Jewish musician Kamal Midhat, who was kidnapped and killed in the city of Al Mansur in Baghdad in 2006. This reflects both on Midhat’s past struggle to integrate in Iraqi society and the problems of post-invasion Iraq. Though not from the ‘Arab world’, German novelist Sherko Fatah (whose father was Kurdish Iraqi) wrote a novel which resonates with some of the themes described above, Das dunkle Schiff [The Dark Ship] (2008). Here the adventures of a cook, the Kurdish Iraqi Kerim, in invaded Iraq are recounted. Kerim is picked up and obliged to join a group of terrorists, God’s Warriors, but escapes them and journeys to Europe, where he gets asylum in Germany. A number of literary works from elsewhere probed the frontline experiences of those who participated in the invasion alongside USA and UK troops. Spanish author Fernando Marias’s novella Invasor [Invader] (2004) tells the story of a doctor, Pablo, sent to Iraq on a peace mission in August 2003 (the Spanish Prime Minister of the time, José María Aznar, was one of the firm supporters of invasion). There he gets caught in an ambush which he survives, but with serious injuries and at the expense of the lives of those who gave him refuge. Back home in Madrid he begins to feel a change in himself. His guilt about the crimes he committed in Iraq manifests itself in feeling possessed by his Iraqi victims, and he begins to entertain violent impulses towards his family and himself. Denis Gorteau’s French novel A Mort L’Irak [Death to Iraq] (2006) follows the invasion over three weeks, from Kuwait to Northern Iraq to Baghdad, through the eyes of an American soldier and war criminal. Having joined up to escape the dead-end life of his hometown in Oklahoma, the invasion gives him the opportunity to play out his violent desires – justified to his mind as taking revenge for the terrorist attacks in the USA of 11 September 2001. A Puerto Rican play in Spanish, Irak en mi [Iraq in Me] (2007) was written by Roberto Ramos Perea, and directed by the author in its first performances at the El Ateneo Puertorriqueño y su Conservatorio de Arte Dramático, San Juan, in January–February 2008. This tells of the anguish of two Puerto Rican soldiers, part of the invading US forces, after their return from Iraq. Their participation in the invasion plays in troubling ways against the ambiguous political status of their homeland as an incorporated territory of the USA, and both feel alienated. The Bengali playwright from India, Sangram Guha, wrote Operation Flush (2004), first performed in Rabindra Sadan, Kolkata, by Spandan group/Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) under the direction of Samudra Guha in July 2004. This was based on newspaper reports and public records of the trials of US soldiers for torturing prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison in the occupation period, and was advertised as one of the first ‘documentary



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drama’ staged in India. The play is set in a courtroom convened by the United Nations in an army camp in Iraq, and follows the hearings of Lt. Colonel Nathan Sassaman, in charge of the Abu Ghraib prison, and cell commander Luke Harding, accused of torture. Cross-examinations of the prisoners and various witnesses by human rights lawyer Nicholas Terse reveal that torture extended to civilians, and was motivated by a sinister experiment to perpetuate terror at a biological level. Though found guilty the accused are handed extremely lenient sentences. In line with the revival of classical Greek plays resonating with the invasion context (examined in Chapter 4), Atropa: De wraak van de vrede [Atropa: The Vengeance of Peace] (2008) was adapted by Flemish playwright Tom Lanoye from plays by Euripides and Aeschylus on the Trojan War, and first performed during the Avignon Festival in July 2008, and then at the Tonnelhuis, Antwerp, in August. This focused on the female characters of the Greek myth and Agamemnon, and weaved into the lines of the latter statements by George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld during the build-up to invasion. Anti-invasion satire also played its part in performances in many places. In India the Jana Natya Manch (People’s Theatre Association) produced satirical plays in Hindi for different performance spaces. These included the street theatre Zulm Phir Zulm Hai [Oppression is Oppression] (early 2003), performed in various spots in Delhi, and the proscenium play Bush ka Matlab Jhadi [Bush Means a Thick Shrub – ‘jhadi’ is the Hindi translation for ‘bush’ in the vegetal sense] (2004), commissioned by and performed at the Mumbai World Social Forum, January 2004, directed by Sudhanva Deshpande. Pierre Grou’s French play Le brave soldat Chvéïk dans la guerre d’Irak [Brave Soldier Schweik in the Iraq War] (2006) took the son of the intrepid anti-hero of Czech writer Jaroslav Hašek’s famous satirical novel The Good Soldier Schweik (1923) to the invasion frontline. This Schweik follows the build-up to invasion avidly, goes to Iraq to fight, looks for ‘weapons of mass destruction’, tries to determine whether the purpose of achieving security and democracy in Iraq was being achieved, and unhappily returns to Prague. Talking of satire, a Norwegian novel by Knut Nærum, Krig! [War!] (2004) also spoke in a tangential fashion to the concerns of the Iraq invasion period. Here a war between Norway and the Netherlands is envisaged, growing out from a trivial skating accident, and pulling together every kind of absurdity that war rhetoric presents. And finally, there was popular ‘genre fiction’ set in the Iraq invasion too. Controversially, two Turkish action thrillers (through the invasion period relations between Turkey and the USA deteriorated) imagined invasions of Turkey by US forces. Burak Turna and Orkun Uçar’s Metal




Imagining Iraq

Fırtına [The Metal Storm] (2004) was a bestseller, and describes a US invasion of Turkey to gain control of deposits of borax, followed by an attempt to divide Turkey between Greece and Armenia. Under these circumstances, naturally, the Turkish armed forces fight back valiantly, make alliances with China, Russia and Germany, and even manage to steal a US nuclear warhead and detonate it in Washington DC. An international alliance against the USA finally ends the invasion. Condoleeza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld figured as such on the invading side. Not long afterwards, Alaettin Parmaksız’s Türk-Amerikan Savas¸ı – Kanlı Deprem [Turkish-American War – The Bloody Earthquake] (2007) also describes a war between the two nations, arising largely from Turkish disapproval of US interference in the internal affairs of Northern Iraq, and the stout defence against US invasion put up by Turkish armed forces. Less combatively, two detective novels and one work of fantasy fiction appeared in Germany against the backdrop of the invasion. Andreas Albes’s Der Schatz [The Treasure] (2005) has war correspondent Michael Bellow investigating the looting of treasures from the national museum in Baghdad and the operation of aid organisations. In Code Freebird (2006) by Roman Rausch, the investigation of a series of bombings in Hamburg and Frankfurt takes profiler Baltazar Levy to invaded Iraq despite the investigating team’s scepticism about his methods. And Michael Pfrommer’s fantasy, Das Zweite Buch [The Second Book] (2007), moves back and forth between Babylon of 568 BC, when Ezekiel’s prophecies were recorded, and Iraq during the invasion in 2003, when the second book of those prophecies is found there. These are but a selection of literary texts in languages other than English about the invasion of Iraq which appeared within or around the invasion period. With these in view, the conclusions of this study can only remain inconclusive. There are many more literary works about the invasion out there already than this study has covered, and undoubtedly many more to come. Critical reckonings with this area of literary production and reception are certainly more in the prospect than behind. These will necessarily continue to modify the features of contemporary literature in general.



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All website references were downloaded between December 2009 and April 2010. Abdessalam, Chekib (2003). A Bagdad à Bassora: Amulette [Baghdad to Basra: Amulet]. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003. Albes, Andreas (2005). Der Schatz [The Treasure]. Munich: DTV Deutscher Taschenbuch. Al-Musawi, Muhsin (2006). Reading Iraq: Culture and Power in Conflict. London: I. B. Tauris. Alper, Loretta and Jeremy Earp (dirs.) (2008). War Made Easy. DVD, Disinformation Company. Anderson, Benedict (1991 [1983]). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Antoon, Sinan (2004). I’jaam [Diacritics]. Beirut: Dar al-Adab. In English: I’jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody. San Francisco: City Lights, 2007. Archibald, David (2008). ‘“We’re just big bullies …”: Gregory Burke’s Black Watch’. The Drouth 26: 8–13. http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/3896/1/The_Drouth3896.pdf Arendt, Hannah (1963/1964). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Bader, Ali (2008). Haris al Tabigh [Tobacco Guard]. Beirut: Arab Association for Studies and Publication. Baker, Brian (2006). Masculinity in Fiction and Film: Representing Men in Popular Genres 1945–2000. London: Continuum. Baker, Kenneth (ed.) (1996). The Faber Book of War Poetry. London: Faber and Faber. Baker, Nicholson (2004). Checkpoint. New York: Knopf. Banville, John (2005). ‘A Day in the Life’. New York Review of Books 52(9), 26 May: 12–14. Barnes, Todd Landon (2008). ‘George W. Bush’s “Three Shakespeares”: Macbeth, Macbush, and the Theater of War’. Shakespeare Bulletin 26(3), Fall: 1–29. Barrington, Judith and Ursula K. Le Guin (2003). ‘Introduction’. In Duane Poncy and Patricia McLean (eds), Raising Our Voices: An Anthology of Oregon Poets Against the War. Portland, OR: Habit of Rainy Nights, v–vii. Barthes, Roland (1977). ‘The Death of the Author’. Image, Music, Text. Selected and trans. Stephen Heath. London: Fontana. Bassett, Kate (2003). ‘Unsettling, Ambitious, Bold’. The Independent, 9 November. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/ madame-bovary-lyric-hammersmith-londonbrjustifying-war-tricycle-london brtrue-west-old-vic-bristol-735258.html Baudrillard, Jean (1995 [French edn 1991]). The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bawer, Bruce (2004). ‘A Plague of Poets’. Hudson Review 56(4), Winter: 737–46. BBC (2003a). ‘Million March Against Iraq War’. BBC News, 16 February. http:// news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/2765041.stm 191



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Baghdad Blog, The (Pax) 12, 17, 30, 176–82 Baghdad Burning (Riverbend) 12, 17, 30, 176–83 Baker, Kenneth, The Faber Book of War Poetry 60, 63 Baker, Nicholson 22; Checkpoint 30, 155, 156–8, 159–63, 165–6, 167 Banville, John 164–5; The Sea 164–5 Baradei, Mohamed El 25 Barnes, Todd Landon 127 Barrington, Judith, and Le Guin 53, 59 Barthes, Roland 23, 69 Al-Bassam, Sulayman 127 Bawer, Bruce 47, 57 Beck, Ulrich 181 Beckett, Samuel 139 Begg, Moazzam, Enemy Combatant (with Brittain) 116 Behind the Lines (Metres) 43–6, 48, 52 Beken, Semra, Kocamın Bekçisi 187 de Bellaigue, Christopher, In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs 171 Bellavia, David, House to House 22 Berry, Bonny 76–7, 79 Bewes, Timothy 168–9 Bibby, Michael, Hearts and Minds 43, 48 Billington, Michael 127–8, 137 Black Watch (Burke) 99, 100–1, 103 Blair, Tony 15, 66, 71, 74, 104, 106, 129, 164, 176 Blake, William 81 Blix, Hans 25, 39 The Blog of War (Burden) 12 Bloom, Clive 149–51 Bly, Robert, A Poetry Reading Against the Vietnam War (with Ray) 43 Bottum, J. 46–7 Le brave soldat Chvéïk (Grou) 189 Bremer, Paul 15 Brittain, Victoria 112–13; Enemy Combatant (with Begg) 116; 204



Index

Guantanamo (with Slovo) 106, 107, 109–19 Brown, Dale 144, 146, 152; Razor’s Edge (with DeFelice) 143–6, 148; Rogue Forces 144 Bufford, Bill 66, 70 Burden, Matthew Currier, The Blog of War 12 The Burial at Thebes (Heaney) 128, 132–5, 137 Burke, Gregory, Black Watch 99, 100–1, 103 Bush, George W. 15, 24, 67, 71, 74, 85, 87, 91, 104, 106, 121, 129, 130, 156–8, 171, 176, 189; compared to Creon 132–4 Bush ka Matlab Jhadi (Deshpande dir.) 189 Bush, Laura 39 The Business of Books (Schiffrin) 8–9 Butcher, Justin, The Madness of George Dubya 104 Buzzell, Colby, My War 12 Byron, George Gordon 81 Campbell, Alastair 106, 108 Campbell, Donovan, Joker One 22 Campbell, Kerri, and Kelly 178 Campfires of Resistance (Gitlin) 43, 52 Carroll, Andrew, Operation Homecoming 50 Casanova, Pascale, The World Republic of Letters 51 Casey, Michael 61 Celebration (Pinter) 72 de Certeau, Michel 86 Chattarji, Sampurna 58 Chattarji, Subarno, Memories of a Lost War 43, 48 Checkpoint (Baker) 30, 155, 156–8, 159–63, 165–6, 167 Cheney, Dick 106 Chomsky, Noam, and Herman 179 Cicero, Noah 22; The Human War 30, 155–6, 159–62, 165–6, 167 Clarke, Richard A. 146, 152; The Scorpion’s Gate 144–6, 148, 153–4 Clausewitz, Carl von, On War 19 Claycomb, Ryan 116

Coalition Provisional Authority 15, 19, 25, 75, 100, 104, 179–80 Code Freebird (Rausch) 190 Communicating Knowledge (Feather) 8–9 Cook, Robin 114 Correlates of War project (Singer) 19 Crawford, John, The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell 22 Crimp, Martin 22, 130, 135–6; Advice to Iraqi Women 105; Cruel and Tender 128, 132, 135–7 Croft, Andy 3; Red Sky at Night (with Mitchell) 3 Cruel and Tender (Crimp) 128, 132, 135–7 Damrosch, David, What is World Literature? 51 Das dunkle Schiff (Fatah) 188 David, Gavyn 114 Days of Significance (Williams) 99, 101, 127 The Death of Sardanapalus (Ray) 83–7, 88, 91, 93, 120 Deep Black (McNab) 145–6, 147–8 DeFelice, Jim 144; Razor’s Edge (with Brown) 143–6, 148 Delir’ium (Prichard) 105 Derrida, Jacques 23 Deshpande, Sudhanva 189 Dickinson, Emily 89 Donne, John 89 dossiers 24–5, 107–8, 126, 173 Dr Strangelove (Kubrick dir.) 104 Dujardin, Édouard 160 Eberhart, Richard, War and the Poet (with Rodnan) 42, 60, 63 Eco, Umberto 154 Edensor, Tim, National Identity, Popular Culture, and Everyday Life 123–5 Electra Votes (Morgan) 130 Eliot, T. S. 1, 76 Eliot, Valerie 1 Elkins, James R. 33 Embedded (Robbins) 97, 99, 103 embedded reporters 102–3; books by 22; in plays 97, 102–3



Index 205

Index

Enemy Combatant (Begg and Brittain) 116 England, Lynndie 91 English, James 165 Ensler, Eve, The Vagina Monologues 46 Euripides 130; Hecuba 129–30; Iphigenia in Aulis 128, 130 everyday life, in blogs 176–8, 179–82; de Certeau on 86; Freud on 86; Goffman on 86; in Harsent’s poetry 94; and nationality (Edensor on) 123–5; and news 179–81; in Ray’s poetry 84–7, 88, 93, 120; under repression 174–5 The Faber Book of War Poetry (Baker) 60, 63 Fagles, Robert 134–5 Falk, Richard 33–4 Der falsche Inder (Khider) 186–7 Fatah, Sherko, Das dunkle Schiff 188 Feather, John, Communicating Knowledge 8–9 Fick, Nathaniel, One Bullet Away 22 Fighting Songs and Warring Words (Murdoch) 42 Filkins, Dexter, The Forever War 22 First World War, poetry of 21, 41–2, 62; theatre of 96 Fitzpatrick, Coeli 171–2 The Forever War (Filkins) 22 Forsyth, Fredrick 146 Freedom, The (Parenti) 22 Freud, Sigmund 86 Fussell, Paul, The Great War and Modern Memory 41–2, 96, 97 Gallagher, Mark 151–2 Gardner, Brian, Terrible Rain 42; Up the Line to Death 42 Gilbert, Sandra M. 55–7 Gilligan, Andrew 107–8 Gitlin, Todd, Campfires of Resistance 43, 52 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 51 Goffman, Erving 86 Golding, William 64 The Good Soldier Schweik (Hašek) 189 Gorteau, Denis, A Mort L’Irak 186

Gould-Wartofsky, Michael 53–5 Grasso, Linda M. 80 Grayer, Michael 67 The Great War and Modern Memory (Fussell) 41–2, 96, 97 Greer, Germaine 66–7, 71–2, 77 Grou, Pierre, Le brave soldat Chvéïk 189 Guantanamo (Brittain and Slovo) 106, 107, 109–19 Guantanamo Bay detentions 75, 107, 113, 115–16 Guha, Sangram, Operation Flush 188–9 Gulf War, and media 103; poetry of the 44, 66, 67–8 Al Hafida al Amerikiyya (Kachachi) 187 Hamill, Sam, Poets Against the War 12, 22, 35–6, 38–41, 45–59, 62, 65, 93 Hare, David 12, 22; Stuff Happens 30, 106, 109–19; The Vertical Hour 30, 120–5 Haris al Tabigh (Bader) 187–8 Harrison, Tony 22, 67–78, 105; Gulf War poetry by 67–8; Hecuba translation 129–30; Iraq invasion poetry (esp. Under the Clock) 67–78, 81 Harsent, David, Legion 72, 93–5 Hartley, Jason Christopher, Just Another Soldier 22 Hašek, Jaroslav, The Good Soldier Schweik 189 Haughton, Hugh 42 Haw, Brian 6 Heaney, Seamus 12, 22, 61, 130; The Burial at Thebes 128, 132–5, 137 Hearts and Minds (Bibby) 43 Hecuba (Euripides) 129–30 Hegel, G. W. F. 132 Here, Bullet (Turner) 18, 87–8, 90 Herman, Edward S., and Chomsky 179 Hollis, Matthew (with Keegan) 101 Poems Against War 12, 21–2, 35, 36, 39–40, 60–5, 89, 186



206

Hoon, Geoff 74, 108 Hosseini, Khaled, The Kite-Runner 171 House to House (Bellavia) 22 The Human War (Cicero) 30, 155–6, 159–62, 165–6, 167 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 22 Hussein, Saddam 15, 68, 70, 71, 91, 121, 133, 144, 145, 158, 172–4, 175–7, 178, 186–7 Hutton, Brian 107–8 Hutton Inquiry 107–9, 110 Huxley, Aldous 166–7 Huze, Sean, The Sandstorm 97–8, 99 Hytner, Nicholas 106, 109, 126–7 I’jaam (Antoon) 186 In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs (de Bellaigue) 171 Innes, Christopher 115 Invasor (Marias) 188 Iphigenia 2.0 (Mee) 130 Iphigenia in Aulis (Euripides) 128, 130 Iraq en mi (Perea) 188 Iraq Body Count 17 Iraq Coalition Casualty Count 17 Iraqi Governing Council 19, 176, 179–80 Iraqi Poetry Today (Simawe) 16–17, 89 James, Henry 121 Jana Natya Manch 189 Jarmakani, Amira 183 Jasmine and Stars (Keshavarz) 171 Jericho Sanction, The (North and Mussler) 144–6, 153–4 Johnson, Lyndon B. 41 Joker One (Campbell) 22 Jones, Brian 108 Joyce, James 84, 160, 161, 166, 169 Just Another Soldier (Hartley) 22 Justifying War (Norton-Taylor) 30, 106, 107–9, 110–19 Kachachi, Inaam, Al Hafida al Amerikiyya 187 Kaufman, Walter 138 Keegan, Paul (with Hollis) 101 Poems Against War 12, 21–2, 35, 36, 39–40, 60–5, 89, 186

Kelly, David 107–8 Kelly, Janice 108 Kelly, Peter, and Campbell 178 Kendall, Tim, Modern English War Poetry 47, 68, 70, 72 Kermode, Mark 66–7, 70 Keshavarz, Fatemeh, Jasmine and Stars 171 Khadra, Yasmina (pen-name for Mohammed Moulessehoul), Les Sirènes de Bagdad 17, 187 Khider, Abbas, Der falsche Inder 186–7 Kishtainy, Khalid 185; Tomorrow is Another Day 172, 175, 186 The Kite-Runner (Hosseini) 171 Kocamın Bekçisi (Beken) 187 Krig! (Nærum) 189 Kubrick, Stanley, Dr Strangelove 104 Kuti, Elizabeth 115 Landing Light (Paterson) 1 Lanoye, Tom, Atropa 189 The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell (Crawford) 22 Lawson, Mark 66 Le Guin, Ursula, and Barrington 53, 59 Leezenberg, Michiel 133 Legion (Harsent) 72, 93–5 Levertov, Denise, Out of the War Shadow (with others) 43 Lichtenstein, Jonathan, The Pull of Negative Gravity 99 Lim, Melissa 171–2 Litz, Robert 98 Live from the Front (Quickley) 98–9, 103 Lowell, Robert 41 The Madness of George Dubya (Butcher) 104 Al-Mahboubat (Mamdouh) 186 Makiya, Kanan, Republic of Fear 173, 175 Malcolm, Noel 67, 72 Mamdouh, Alia, Al-Mahboubat 186 Marandi, Syed Mohammed 171 Marcus, Jane 80



Index 207

Index

Marias, Fernando, Invasor 188 Massumi, Brian 181–2 Maté, Rudolph 300 Spartans 64 Mbembe, Achille 174 McCracken, Scott 150 McEwan, Ian 22; Saturday 14, 30, 155, 158–66, 167 McGuinness, Frank 129, 130 McNab, Andy 146, 152; Deep Black 145–6, 147–8 Mee, Charles 130; Iphigenia 2.0 130 Melo, Carla 98–9 Memories of a Lost War (Chattarji) 43 Men Who March Away (Parsons) 42 Metal Firtina (Turna and Uçar) 189–90 Metres, Philip, Behind the Lines 43–6, 48, 52 Michael, Sami, Aida 186 Middleton, Peter 83 Midhat, Kamal 187–8 Mikhail, Dunya, The War Works Hard 17, 88–91, 92, 185–6 military, and civilian 17–18, 37–8, 101–2, 142; Virilio on 37–8 Miller, Frank 300, 64 Mirzoeff, Nicholas 103 Mitchell, Katie 128–9 Modern English War Poetry (Kendall) 47 Moretti, Franco 51, 83 Morgan, Sheila, Electra Votes 130 Morley, Sheridan 120 A Mort L’Irak (Gorteau) 186 Motion, Andrew 40, 61–2 Motortown (Stephens) 99–100, 101 Murdoch, Brian, Fighting Songs and Warring Words 42 al-Musawi, Muhsin, Reading Iraq 90 Mussler, Joe, The Jericho Sanction (with North) 144–6, 153–4 My War (Buzzell) 12 Nærum, Knut, Krig! 189 Nafisi, Azar, Reading Lolita in Tehran 171 Nash, Walter 146–7 National Identity, Popular Culture, and Everyday Life (Edensor) 123–5 Neruda, Pablo 78

Newey, Adam 67, 70–1, 72 Nichols, Robert, Anthology of War Poetry 42 Nixon, Richard 78 No True Glory (West) 22 North, Oliver 146, 152; The Jericho Sanction (with Mussler) 144–6, 153–4 Norton-Taylor, Richard 110, 113–14; Justifying War 30, 106, 107–9, 110–19 Oglesby, Tamsin 22; US and Them 30, 120–5 On War (Clauzewitz) 19 One Bullet Away (Fick) 22 Operation Flush (Guha) 188–9 Operation Homecoming (Carroll ed.) 50 Oresteia (Aeschylus) 130 Out of the War Shadow (Levertov and others) 43 The Oxford Book of War Poetry (Stallworthy) 60–1, 63 Paget, Derek 117–18 Parenti, Christian, The Freedom 22 Parmaksiz, Alaettin, Türk-Amerikan Savas¸i 190 Parsons, Ian M., Men Who March Away 42 Paterson, Don 1, 77; T. S. Eliot Lecture 1–13, 19, 23, 24, 67 Pax, Salam, The Baghdad Blog 12, 17, 30, 176–82 Perea, Roberto Ramos, Iraq en mi 188 Persepolis (Satrapi) 171 Pfrommer, Michael, Das Zweite Buch 190 Pick, Daniel 20 Pinochet, Augusto 78 Pinter, Harold 3, 4, 5, 7, 12, 66–78; Celebration 72; Gulf War poetry by 66; Nobel Lecture 78, 139–40; War 2–3, 19, 66–78, 81 Plekhanov, Sergei, Art and Social Life 7 A Poetry Reading Against the Vietnam War (Bly and Ray) 43 Poets Against the War (Hamill) 12, 22, 35–6, 38–41, 45–59, 62, 65, 93



208

Powell, Colin 25, 106 Prichard, Rebecca, Delir’ium 105 Pritchard, Tim, Ambush Alley 22 The Pull of Negative Gravity (Lichtenstein) 99 Quickley, Jerry, Live from the Front 98–9, 103 Rabinowitz, Nancy Sorkin 138 Rausch, Roman, Code Freebird 190 Ray, David, The Death of Sardanapalus 83–7, 88, 91, 93, 120; A Poetry Reading Against the Vietnam War (with Bly) 43 Razor’s Edge (Brown and DeFelice) 143–6, 148 Reading Iraq (al-Musawi) 90 Reading Lolita in Tehran (Nafisi) 171 reconstruction contracts 25, 50, 75, 127, 145, 180 Red Sky at Night (Croft and Mitchell) 3 Reel (Szirtes) 3 Die Reisenach Tell al-Lahm (Wali) 186 Republic of Fear (Makiya) 173, 175 Resolution 1441 25 Rice, Condoleeza 74, 106, 190 Rich, Adrienne, The School Among the Ruins 92–3; Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth 93 Richardson, Dorothy 160 Ritter, Scott 114 Riverbend, Baghdad Burning 12, 17, 30, 176–83 Road to Guantanamo (Winterbottom dir.) 116 Robbins, Tim, Embedded 97, 99 Rodnan, Selden, War and the Poet (with Eberhart) 42, 60, 63 Rogue Forces (Brown) 144 Rourke, Lee 165 Rumsfeld, Donald 24, 106, 107, 144, 189, 190 Ryan, Chris 146, 152; Ultimate Weapon 145–6, 148 Said, Edward 23, 85 The Sandstorm (Huze) 97–8, 99

Sartre, Jean-Paul 49, 79–80 Satrapi, Marjane, Persepolis 171 Saturday (McEwan) 14, 30, 158–66, 167 Der Schatz (Albes) 190 Schiffrin, André, The Business of Books 8–9 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 23 The School Among the Ruins (Rich) 92–3 Scorpion’s Gate, The (Clarke) 144–6, 148, 153–4 The Sea (Banville) 164–5 Sexton, David 165 Shakespeare, William 101, 112, 126–7 Sharp, Ellis 165 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 81 Simawe, Saadi 89; Iraqi Poetry Today (ed.) 16–17, 89 Simon, Sherry 89 Simonides 63–4 Singer, J. David, Correlates of War project 19 Les Sirènes de Bagdad (Khadra) 17, 187 Slovo, Gillian 112, 113; Guantanamo (with Brittain) 106, 107, 109–19 Snyder, Zack 300, 64 soldiers, civilians as 38; Iraq invasion narratives by 18, 22; in frontline drama 96–102, 130; as poets 42–3, 49–50, 87–8 Sophocles 130; Antigone 128, 132–5; Women of Trachis 128, 135–7 Soto-Morettini, Donna 115 Spencer, Charles 120 Springsteen, Bruce 49 Stallworthy, Jon, The Oxford Book of War Poetry 60–1, 63 Stauffer, Andrew 80–1 Steiner, George, Antigones 128 Stephens, Simon, Motortown 99–100, 101 Straw, Jack 106, 107 A Study of War (Wright) 19 Stuff Happens (Hare) 30, 106, 109–19 Sutherland, John 148, 165



Index 209

Index

Swift, Todd 3; 100 Poets Against the War 3, 12, 22, 35–6, 38–41, 45–59, 62, 65 Symons, Julian, Anthology of War Poetry 42 Szirtes, George, Reel 3; T. S. Eliot Lecture 3–4 Taussig, Michael 175 Taylor, Don 128 Taylor, Gary 126 Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth (Rich) 93 Terrible Rain (Gardner ed.) 42 Tomorrow is Another Day (Kishtainy) 172, 175, 186 translation 16–17, 63, 87–8, 89–90, 134–6 Tresnjak, Darko 127 T. S. Eliot Lecture, Paterson’s 1–13, 19, 23, 24, 67; Szirtes’s 3–4 Türk-Amerikan Savas¸i (Parmaksiz) 190 Turna, Burak, Metal Firtina (with Uçar) 189–90 Turner, Brian, Here, Bullet 18, 87–8, 90 Uçar, Orkun, Metal Firtina (with Turna) 189–90 Ultimate Weapon (Ryan) 145–6, 148 Under the Clock (Harrison) 67–78, 81 United Nations Security Council (UNSC) 25, 34 Up the Line to Death (Gardner ed.) 42 US and Them (Oglesby) 30, 120–5 The Vagina Monologues (Ensler) 46 Venuti, Lawrence 89–90 The Vertical Hour (Hare) 30, 120–5 Vietnam War poetry 21–2, 41, 42–5, 48–50 Virilio, Paul 37–8

Wali, Najem, Die Reisenach Tell al-Lahm 186 war, and invasion 19–20, 22–3, 103–4, 141; concept of 19–21, 22, 37–8, 91, 93; machine 20; rhetoric of 19–21, 32, 37–8, 91, 94, 141–2; theatre of 96–7 War (Pinter) 2–3, 19, 66–78, 81 War and the Poet (Eberhart and Rodnan eds.) 42, 60, 63 The War Works Hard (Mikhail) 17, 88–91, 92 Wertenbaker, Timberlake 134–5 West, Bing, No True Glory 22 What is World Literature? (Damrosch) 51 Wheatley, David 62, 68, 70–1, 72 Whitehead, Anne 68 Widdecombe, Ann 114 Williams, Roy, Days of Significance 99, 101, 127 Wilmer, Eleanor 50 Wilmer, Stephen 133 Winning Hearts and Minds (Rottmann et al.) 43, 50 Winterbottom, Michael, Road to Guantanamo 116 Wolfowitz, Paul 106 Women of Trachis (Sophocles) 128, 135–7 Woodcock, Bruce 78 Woolf, Virginia 160, 161 Wordsworth, William 76 World Republic of Letters (Casanova) 51 Wright, Quincy, A Study of War 19 Youssef, Saadi 61, 186 Zulm Phir Zulm Hai (dir. Deshpande) 189 Das Zweite Buch (Pfrommer) 190



210

Imagining Iraq: Literature in English and the Iraq Invasion

Harry Flashman and the Invasion of Iraq

Harry Flashman and the Invasion of Iraq

Iraq

Ancient Iraq

Understanding Iraq

Understanding Iraq

Iraq War

Marcus In Iraq

Al Qaeda in Iraq

The War Against Iraq

The New Iraq

The War Against Iraq

The Geology of Iraq

The Iraq War

The Iraq Effect: The Middle East After the Iraq War

The Geology of Iraq

Special Operation Forces in Iraq

Iraq: A Lost War

Iraq (Major World Nations)

Freshwater Fishes of Iraq

Surging out of Iraq?

Losing Iraq: Insurgency and Politics

Iraq: Setting the Record Straight

Ancient Iraq: Third Edition

A History of Iraq

Losing Iraq: Insurgency and Politics

Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq

Terrorist Rehabilitation: The U.S. Experience in Iraq

Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in Iraq (Occasional Paper)

War In Iraq (Strategy and History)

Imagining Iraq: Literature in English and the Iraq Invasion

Harry Flashman and the Invasion of Iraq

Harry Flashman and the Invasion of Iraq

Iraq

Ancient Iraq

Understanding Iraq

Understanding Iraq

Iraq War

Marcus In Iraq

Al Qaeda in Iraq

The War Against Iraq

The New Iraq

The War Against Iraq

The Geology of Iraq

The Iraq War

The Iraq Effect: The Middle East After the Iraq War

The Geology of Iraq

Special Operation Forces in Iraq

Iraq: A Lost War

Iraq (Major World Nations)

Freshwater Fishes of Iraq

Surging out of Iraq?

Losing Iraq: Insurgency and Politics

Iraq: Setting the Record Straight

Ancient Iraq: Third Edition

A History of Iraq

Losing Iraq: Insurgency and Politics

Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq

Terrorist Rehabilitation: The U.S. Experience in Iraq

Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in Iraq (Occasional Paper)

War In Iraq (Strategy and History)

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