The poets of war opened the world’s eyes and ears to the death and destruction. The challenge is to find the light in man’s inhumanity to itself. Credit: From the book War
In many parts of the world, war is the constant companion to life. Throughout history it has rendered lives to its ways of destruction and death.
It is a rare thing when art blooms from its fire. The ink though is always written and drawn in tragedy. The book Muse of Fire, which details the lives of six poets who fought in World War I, details such rendering. It reveals how life and death are but a mere breath away, and how even in the worst circumstances, for instance the killing fields of France, art can bloom, vis-à-vis through poetry.
The poets of the war, such as Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, were also the rest of the world’s eyes and ears. They wrote of the death and destruction. They were the messengers.
These days, of course, technology, has vanquished that poetic delivery system. We now know, within a bomb blast’s crescendo, what has occurred in remote parts of the world far removed from our safe existence.
In this immediacy of knowing the carnage, is there also an insidious collateral damage, that is, does it also eat away at our having faith in each other? The constant bombardment must weary the most hardy soul.
Polish poet and Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska lived through the Second World War in Krakow. Credit: AP
This isn’t to say, ignorance would be bliss. Ignorance would be darkness. The challenge is to find the light in man’s inhumanity to itself. In essence, in finding where faith lies.
The Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996, lived through the Second World War in Krakow. After seeing fascism, she embraced socialism, only to disavow herself of that as well when it took the shape of Stalin’s face.
She brought to her poetry both art and the sweat and dirt, the blood and hollowness when war invades a people’s existence. It’s no better said than in her poem The End and the Beginning.
An extract is:
After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won’t
straighten themselves up, after all.
Someone has to push the rubble
to the sides of the road,
so the corpse-laden wagons
can pass.
Those who knew
what was going on here
must give way to
those who know little.
And less than little.
And finally as little as nothing.
It’s true there hasn’t been a global conflagration since 1945. Instead, there have been close to 300 regional conflicts. The UN notes that although the number of war deaths has been declining since then, “conflict and violence are currently on the rise, with many conflicts today waged between non-state actors such as political militias, criminal, and international terrorist groups”.
As well, “we are witnessing the unravelling of the international arms control architecture and a gradual backtracking on established arms control agreements, which have supported global stability, restraint, and transparency”.
If you only paid heed to the bad news rising from the battlefields, then truly faith in your fellow human would be on life support. The challenge, if we are up to it, is to fight against the hammer shaping the hand.