Recently, as a ceasefire was announced in Gaza, even as Israel continued killing and bombing in West Bank and Lebanon, I returned to a book by my American friend, Jim Hicks, who in his writings, and also as the editor of the literary journal, The Massachusetts Review, has consistently backed just and humane causes. Early in the preface of that touching book, Lessons from Sarajevo: A War Stories Primer, I came across these lines: “The first lesson from Sarajevo is clear: media coverage and artistic engagement will not suffice. This time we knew, and still the longest siege in European history took place.”
This lesson has obviously been expanded a hundred times by what happened and continues to happen in Gaza, and Jim would be the first person to say so. He goes on to note, quoting Fran Lebowitz, the New Yorker columnist, being interviewed in the aftermath of September 11, 2001: “Writers are luxury items.” Jim annotates the quote thus: “In such moments, many people are essential for the services they alone provide: one imagines a list including police, firemen, surgeons, construction workers, even journalists. Though help and support from everyone, on some level, may also be needed, the skills of the various professions are not equally useful. And as for writers, well, ‘writers are luxury items’.”
Being the calm and balanced thinker that he is, Jim both accepts and “disputes” this view. He notes, based on his many visits to Sarajevo (Serbo-Croatian, or Bosnian as it would be called in Sarajevo today, is a language he taught himself), that the city and its people resisted almost four years of siege and “barbarism in no small part through their cultural institutions and creative arts.” But Jim is not someone to float around on clouds of bourgeois idealism, and he also recalls his first visit to the city in January 1997, soon after the siege: “I saw people everywhere cleaning up, rebuilding, putting their lives back together. At that moment, a life with books rather than bricks just didn’t seem particularly well spent.”
Of course, part of Jim’s purpose in writing Lessons from Sarajevo was to examine what ends the reading or teaching of war stories might serve: he has taught a course on war stories at Massachusetts University for many years now. One of the ends he suggests is what I would call the questioning of language. As he notes, “knowing what happened, and why, is certainly a worthy goal, yet a practical first step – and the one to be emphasised in this book – is to learn the language through which such history is spoken. Understanding how war stories are told may be necessary in order to arm ourselves against them.”
There are two obvious aspects to this in my view. The first one is to arm ourselves against the language or discourse of war, a language that, Jim suggests, was shaped three centuries ago and “is well past its sell-by date.” The other aspect is to create a different language with which to narrate war as it exists today. Writers are by no means “luxury items” in both these endeavours.
Take, for instance, what has been happening in Gaza. About 50,000 Palestinians were killed out of which at least 70 per cent (probably more) were innocent women, children, and civilians. The language used to narrate this has descended from “collateral damage”, a term largely concocted by American and British commentators to explain away excessive (and under-reported) civilian casualties during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. But what does it actually say, this cryptic “collateral damage”? It says that you are guilty of getting in the way of my bullets and bombs. Try putting it in a different context: say, that of a hit and run on the roads by a rash driver. Hear the rash driver plead in court and get acquitted: “M’lord, those five or six people that I drove over and killed in my hurry simply got in the way of my car while I was rushing from my office to my legitimate destination of home! It was their fault.”
In today’s world, a war is being waged on language. It is the writer’s job to fight this war on the side of history – which means on the side of human rights and justice. I suppose it is only in entitled places like the US, where entire creative writing university courses have been structured around the notion of “non-political” literature (largely as a Cold War anti-feminist, anti-civil rights and anti-socialist strategy), that intelligent people can even think of writing as a luxury. The rest of us, including committed scholars like Jim, know that we are also stumbling knee-deep in another kind of rubble: the rubble of words. We have to put them together just as the people of Sarajevo rebuilt with bricks and the people of Gaza will hopefully be allowed to rebuild with bricks. A writer rebuilds with words, and those who want war – who profit from war – first destroy the words, and only then do they destroy what is built of bricks or flesh.
When I visited Sarajevo last year for the first time, I could see not just the barbarism of the missile craters on the streets, some preserved for memory, but also the vitality of the arts and the historic markets. It is recalled that even when Sarajevo’s residents had almost nothing left to eat and were afraid of snipers and bombs, some of them would still repair to the empty cafes in the old markets to talk, exchange news, play chess, and drink tea if it was available and affordable. They too, in their own ways, were reclaiming the words, and then, should we writers, we whose vocation is words, give up on language that easily, let it be stolen and murdered right in front of our eyes?
Also read:
Tabish Khair: On writing with the weight of the world
‘Whom do you write for?’: Tabish Khair argues why writers should refuse to answer this question
