Review: The War Works Hard

Mikhail, Dunya. The War Works Hard (Trans. Elizabeth Winslow). New Directions 2005.
Review Written and Edited by Peter Buller

War has preoccupied poets for millennia. Poets have meditated on war since Homer, and contemporary efforts scrutinize war so much as to create its own genre. Anti-war poetry sought to remove the aloof veil surrounding the poem and replace it with something hard, abject, impermissible. It was an attempt of the twentieth century post-war crowd to provide a jolt of ethics into the hearts of a crowd growing increasingly disillusioned. Regardless of how one judges the success of anti-war poetry, the project did succeed, more or less, to destabilize war's many faces. Thus, war has been examined and analyzed, glorified and justified, bemoaned and criticized; but has it ever been thanked? There is a somber, knowing tone that pervades most poetic ruminations of war. Marked by a love of tired polemics and starved images, countless reiterations have blunted this tonal point. Dunya Mikhail's The War Works Hard thus offers something fresh and poignant to a poetic body frequently lacking either. In an ironic voice and self-defacing images, The War Works Hard places its anti-war poetics neither above nor beyond the war it criticizes, but uneasily, at its side.

Mikhail's poetry confronts war and its proponents with discomforting intimacy. "Bag of Bones" details a mother's search for her son in the ruins of a bombarded city. The images are stark and harrowing, aided by the ironic tone of the opening lines:

What good luck!
She has found his bones.
The skull is also in the bag
the bag in her hand
like all other bags
in all other trembling hands.

There is no hope for her son's life, and no lament for losing that hope. Mikhail opts for frank observations rather than settling for the impassioned horror of the postwar era. In so doing, she highlights the disturbing regularity that now characterizes wartime atrocities, especially in regions like Iraq (which remains, unfortunately, occupied by conflict). Also underlining this is the mother's subsequent containment in the general. Upon retrieving her son's skull in her bag, the item becomes "like all other bags," and "his bones, like thousands of bones," despite possessing single-minded eyes and ears "that told his own story." Robbed of her particular identity, the mother becomes member to the thousands of others straddling the war's effects. She loses her son and with it her sense of self; and to such an extent that finding her son's bones becomes a cause to rejoice.

Mikhail re-characterizes the notion of post-war poetics by reevaluating its approach. Rather than adjoining to a virtuous moralizing, Mikhail kneels in the rubble to sift through its fractured memories, inextricably drawing from dust of ruined lives and the shrapnel of the conflict. Mikhail's hand guides her readers through this torment, pausing to gather fragments of destroyed lives like sea-shells on a beach. In "The War Works Hard," the piece held in the sunlight becomes a subject of sarcasm, an attempt at delight, however brief. "The Prisoner" offers a more sober perspective, encumbered by the comprehension tragically absent for the poem's subject: the mother of a prisoner enduring an unknown punishment. Meanwhile, "Travel Agency" presents a desperate attempt to escape with the harsh possibility that the naïveté necessary to conceive of hope compromises one's security whilst in a war-zone. All three provide fractures of a whole, a picture as pained by its cracks as anxious to see itself restored; or as Mikhail explores the idea herself in "America":

Imagine, America,
if one of us drops out of the picture
and leaves the album full
of loneliness,
or if life becomes
a camera
without film.
Imagine, America!
Without a frame,
the night will take us
tomorrow,
darling...

Although the poem's voice goes on to wonder about the colours in its picture, it finds no solution; nor any solid point for restoration. Instead, Mikhail points us to the cracks, curved into the shape of a question mark.

Kamau Brathwaite writes of her work as "an addition to what we increasingly understand as 'poetry in english' and in anguish," noting above all her sense of "the poem-tang." The War Works Hard toys with form and makes frequent use of repetition. "Crashed Acts" marks the uniformity one treats victims by refraining (and consequently, reframing) each victim's final moments with the same phrasing. The result produces a similar effect as "Bag of Bones" does: the same phrase compounds the meaning of a life into a final moment inconsequential to any particular human being. As a result, the reader finds the victims subject to horrifying banality. "O" furthers this premise, a voice seeking the point of a narrative that spirals in on itself, falling short of its own breath and instead suffusing the repeated images of a "rushing ambulance," "red light," and "bewildering sirens." In the wake of the aftermath, all that remains are flash-points of memory, the spots on a carpet glimpsed before the roof collapses.

In such a turbulent era, is it easy to forget the atrocities America commits far out of sight, beyond our reach? For some, perhaps--for most, there remains a lingering pressure from the bomb-blasts, and the echoes of shortened screams. Twelve years passed since the publication of The War Works Hard, a span of time that seems so distant, so far tucked into the past. In the safe, removed world of literature, one tends to think of a decade as long enough to cast a text into irrelevancy. However, perhaps what remains starkest of Mikhail's work is how relevant it still remains. For in spite of its dated references, it still gazes at the smoke billowing on our horizons; rising from a war that has yet to retire.