Syria may be the essential 21st-century mess.
No matter how you look at this conflict that has displaced 10 million Syrians and taken hundreds of thousands of lives, there are grave regrets: the creation of ISIS, the reverberations of the Iraq war, American vacillation and meddling, and roads to peace not travelled (or even considered).
What might have been done, what might yet happen, and what is the lesson for the Middle East, the next president and the global community?
Peter Balakian has made “the aftermath of catastrophe” his poetic terrain. He is doubtless best known for his prose memoir of the Armenian genocide of 1915. Inspired by his grandmother’s strange shards of stories and nightmare visions, Balakian’s celebrated Black Dog of Fate (1997) is a classic account of repressed memory among survivors of the Turkish slaughter, and of resurgent memory and activism among diaspora Armenians born in America — near Tenafly, New Jersey, in Peter’s case.
But Peter Balakian seems to have been hooked on poetry even before he understood his family’s history. And his new collection Ziggurat widens the frame of his fascination back to ancient times in Mesopotamia, and up to the 9.11 attack on Lower Manhattan (where Peter Balakian was a teenage mail runner) and the US war in Iraq.
The Ziggurat of his title was the very type of the monumental tower in the ancient world — most famously the Sumerian Ziggurat at Ur, in what is now Iraq, excavated in the 1920’s by England’s Sir Leonard Wooley.
The longest poem in Peter Balakian’s new book is a 43-section lyric in which four strands emerge: A protagonist on the A-train subway heading south under Manhattan is reading Wooley’s history of Ur, recalling his own erstwhile messenger’s intimate knowledge of the alleys and elevators of Wall Street, and reflecting on the news that a former student, now an ABC News correspondent, has been struck and very nearly obliterated by an IED in Iraq.
Peter Balakian has assigned himself a sort of test, he suggests, to see how well his long lyric sequence can weave those four strands of experience: the A-train, long-gone Sumerian glory, an insider’s haunted memory of the Twin Towers, and the explosion of Iraq. Balakian is working an American tradition of longer lyrics that includes Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”; Hart Crane’s “The Bridge”; William Carlos Williams’ “Paterson”; and Ezra Pound’s Cantos. Ears better tuned than mine will probably hear New York echoes of Frank O’Hara as well.
With thanks again to the Grolier Poetry Book Shop on Plympton Street in Harvard Square for turning a store into a studio, in support of our continuing series with people “committing poetry” in our times.
Tracy Kidder actually finds a needle in the haystack — a kernel of inspiration in a continent of bad news — in his virtually irresistible new saga (with a Wordsworth title) Strength in What Remains.
The bad news is the ongoing massacres and underlying misery in East Central Africa – in the neighborhood of Rwanda, hard by the killing fields in the Congo today.
The inspiration in Tracy Kidder’s sudden best-seller is a young man named Deo – short for the Latin “Deogratias,” meaning “thanks be to God” – who goes back to his blighted roots in Burundi to found Village Health Works, putting his medical education at the service of war’s survivors.
How we long — writers, book-buyers, interviewers, too — for bulletins from abroad without US Marines or drones in the picture. I like the moment in our conversation when I refer to one of Deo’s signature stories, about the need to build a six-kilometer road to his new health clinic in Kayanza. Tracy Kidder leaps up. “Can I read this?” he asks, reaching for his own book. In the anecdote, Deo, in Africa, was saying that a Belgian construction company would want US$50,000 to build the road, when a Burundian woman with a baby crying on her back interrupted him.
She said: “You will not pay a penny for this road. We become so much sick because we are poor, but we are not poor because we are lazy. We will work on this road with our own hands.”
The next day a hundred sixty-six people showed up with pickaxes, hoes, machetes, and other tools. The road was finished before the Belgian road builders got to bid on the job.
“Who did it?” the professionals asked. “We are the only road construction company in the entire region!”
“Not anymore,” Deo responded.
From Tracy Kidder’s Strength in What Remains, pages 255-6.
What I am asking Tracy Kidder here is how to generalize that Deo story to the scale of Africa’s problem and the policies from Washington, the West, and now China, that have been anything but a solution:
It’s not tremendously complicated but it is difficult work. And it’s not the kind of work that some people like to do [because] you can’t do it in Washington D.C.
Too often what happens is that people start out with good intentions and raise substantial sums of money to do their work. Then things start to go wrong: they buy fleets of SUVs for their own use in that country, they call for big huge conferences with experts who don’t speak the language, and then they realize that it is really hard to work in a place like Haiti or Burundi and pretty quickly declare defeat. Before they leave they blame the people they had come to help …
I don’t think the conclusion should be that we give up because it is impossible. I consider effective foreign aid as a debt that is owed by the West to many of these countries, such as Haiti, which has been a virtual colony of the United States. Certainly Europe owes some big debts to many countries in Africa …
The fact is that to have a Burundian leading this effort in Burundi is a really important aspect … I mean you’ve really got to speak the language. You have got to understand connotation and so on. You’ve got to be able to cultivate a local base: people you can trust. I think the effective projects are the ones that, while they have big goals, start with the individual. Let the individual patient teach you how to treat their family, and let that family teach you how to treat a village, and let that village teach you how to treat a province and the province: the nation. You can be working from both ends but you can’t forget the essential part: the local. I mean it’s where we all live.
Tracy Kidder with Chris Lydon in Cambridge, September 22, 2009.
Who can imagine that a Save Darfur coalition vocally including Al Sharpton (“we know when America comes together, we can stop anything in the world”), Mia Farrow, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, Elie Wiesel (“Darfur today is the world’s capital of human suffering”), Nat Hentoff, Bob Geldof, George Clooney, Angelina Jolie, Harold Pinter, Oprah Winfrey, the gold-medal speed skater Joey Cheek, Tony Blair and Dario Fo might be profoundly shallow in its reading of the brutal warfare in Sudan five years ago… and just as wrong-headed in its drum beat for an American intervention?
Mahmood Mamdani: on the “pornography of evil”
Mahmood Mamdani can. We are talking here about his book Saviors and Survivors and his argument that the Darfur rescue campaign, which became a sacred cause of our civil religion, was not so much the moral alternative to Iraq, the Bush “war on terror,” and Cheney-think as it was a variation and extension of the same toolkit. I begin with a sort of confession that I may be a sample of Mamdani’s problem — having drenched myself in Nicholas Kristof‘s New York Times columns and largely absorbed the common framework that Darfur was about Arabs slaughtering Africans, and that somebody had to something about it.
If you represent my problem, then I think you also represent my solution. If you interviewed Nicholas Kristof, then you participated in shaping to some extent that audience which is the constituency of Save Darfur. I need to get to that audience because I need to turn a sermon into a debate and a discussion. I need to sow some seeds of doubt about what have been presumed to be simply goodwill gestures. I need to convince that audience that there is a politics around this — not simply good intentions and moralism and a fight against evil. I need to tell them that there is no such thing as a trans-historical evil in the world in which we live; that, in fact, all violence without exception has causes, and the causes are historical. And if you want to do something about the violence, we need to do something about the causes. The idea that violence is its own explanation is an idea which will take us nowhere except into a cycle of violence.
Mahmood Mamdani in conversation with Chris Lydon in Boston, April 2, 2009.
What held the Save Darfur campaign together? In his book, Mamdani concludes that inside the hyped numbers and moral spin was a sort of conspiracy of prejudices and neo-imperial impulses to head off the unity and independence of Africa.
The Save Darfur lobby in the United States has turned the tragedy of the people of Darfur into a knife with which to slice Africa by demonizing one group of Africans, African Arabs…
The Save Darfur lobby demands, above all else, justice, the right of the international community — really the big powers in the Security Council — to punish “failed” or “rogue” states, even if it be at the cost of more bloodshed and a diminished possibility of reconciliation. More than anything else, “the responsibility to protect” is a right to punish without being held accountable — a clarion call for the recolonization of “failed” states in Africa. In its present form, the call for justice is really a slogan that masks a big power agenda to recolonize Africa.
Mahmood Mamdani, Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror., p. 300. Pantheon, 2009.
Mahmoud Mamdani, the Herbert Lehman professor of government at Columbia, is a socio-historical anthropologist of Africa and also of American media and fashions in public wisdom. He is taking apart American attitudes that took hold around Iraq and the so-called “war on terror” and that will surely affect our path to Afghanistan and the Obama team’s reconception of our American place in the world.
I loved this conversation as a short course in how to think like an anthropologist — how to peel back events to find unwritten rules and unseen implications in a social order — Africa’s and ours.
Listen for the ideas here that reach beyond Africa, anger and accustion. The most challenging may be the argument that “survivors’ justice” (“inside” repairs, modeled on South Africa’s “truth and reconciliation” process) comes to seem much more promising than “victors’ justice” (“outside” punishment, as in the Nuremberg Trials, and de-Baathification in Iraq) as means of reforming politics and remaking broken societies.
