"The situation of a poet and a war-mongering ideologue sharing the stage is odious in itself ..."; clearly, if Aleksandar Hemon believes the two professions cannot be combined, he has never heard of Ezra Pound. But this false dichotomy is just the beginning of a strikingly silly diatribe against the NEA's Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience. Hemon's objections to Operation Homecoming are: the project seeks to help "tell the story of our nation", an idea evidently reeking of ideological nationalism; that voices will be censored; that "the story would be much better told by those who died in Iraq"; and that "any account of Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom that does not include testimonies of the freedom-shocked Iraqis cannot avoid being a lie."
To take these in reverse order: no, an account of these Operations that does not include the testimony of Iraqis is not a lie. It is incomplete (like all historical testimonies). The appropriate response, surely, is to try to extend the narrative, if possible; not to abandon it because it fails some absurd test of all-inclusiveness. Whether or not the stories of dead soldiers would be more interesting than those of live ones is an open question, but unless the NEA intends to use ouija boards as part of its research resources, also something of a moot one. Hermon hasn't a shred of evidence that any soldiers' stories will be politically edited; the NEA says that it "has no preconceived ideas about the content of the anthology", and in the absence of any other information I'm willing to take them at their word. I suspect that contributions using language like "lying, manipulative motherfucker" will not make the published cut (though presumably they will be included in the archives along with everything else), but whether this constitutes censorial interference is up to the reader: I don't quite see it that way myself. As for the idea that one group of voices necessarily excludes those of others ... do we really have to defend the idea that historical testimony is a non-zero-sum game?
Posted by Alan Allport at October 24, 2004 12:23 PMFunny criticism to make from a liberal perspective, as there are a couple of perfectly good liberal arguments for the program: first, it encourages actual soldiers and their families to describe actual war, which might debunk some of the bellicose romanticizations we keep getting from noncombatants, and, second, it's therapy for people who might otherwise suffer mental health consequences from bottling up the trauma.
But I do wonder how frank the writers will feel they are allowed to be. If this guy has a solid reason to expect critical comments will not be welcomed, that knocks down both the reasons I've just given. I'm not entirely sure he's given a solid reason but at least he has raised a question worth asking.
And then he writes:
This standard tenet of nationalism—that writers, just like everyone else, serve the nation—is necessarily ideological and stacks the odds against the writers who prefer to tell a different national story.
Dunno, it seems like this sentence should have ended somewhere else -- like "...and stacks the odds against the writers who prefer not to serve or oppose big causes at all..." Cue "Inside the Whale" on the subject of persistently remaining human through times of violence & propaganda. It seems like another fallacy to see the Role Of The Writer as being limited to either nationalism or criticism thereof. What would this guy have made of Emily Dickinson, who did after all have several close friends in the Civil War?
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at October 24, 2004 02:39 PMWhere he errs is in assuming the "the national story" has by definition to be some hulking grand narrative with Big Themes and Issues, whereas it can equally be understood as a complex interwoven sequence of tales by millions of voices with no particular purpose or conclusion - something rather like the Operation Homecoming project, in fact.
Posted by: Alan Allport at October 24, 2004 03:56 PMImagine the books we'd have to toss if we were serious about avoiding nationalist literature. Retellings of national origination myths would go right out the door, sorry Vergil, good try, but not quite what we're looking for.
I haven't read the article yet, but I wonder what the author would think of a similar project that was entirely from the POV of dead people and Iraqis? Would that be just as ideological? Apparently not.
Posted by: Alan Hogue at October 24, 2004 05:35 PMLet's not forget that history written by the losers is often uglier than that written by the victors, at least if you consider the Dunning School, Holocaust "revisionists", and Martin Bernal.
Posted by: Ben Brumfield at October 26, 2004 09:12 PM