Highlights from this issue...

Erasing the lines
The Line: Women, Partition and the Gender Order in Cyprus by Cynthia Cockburn. New York: Zed Books, 2004, 244 pp., $25.00 paper.

Reviewed by Ayse Gul Altinay

APRIL 24, 2004, was a historic day in the troubled history of the Mediterranean island of Cyprus. More than half a million Cypriots voted on the future of their island and their lives. The voting came 30 years after the Turkish military intervention in Cyprus, which had followed years of communal strife between the Greek majority and the Turkish minority in the 1960s and a coup d'etat by Greek Cypriot extremists associated with the Greek military junta in 1974. Ironically called "the Peace Operation" by the Turkish social-democratic government of the time, this military intervention, like all others, resulted in many deaths and disappearances on both sides, forced relocations, and the partition of the island into two: the Turkish North and the Greek South. In April, Greek and Turkish Cypriots were asked to express their opinions about a UN-driven negotiation document for a reunited Cyprus, the Annan Plan. Unfortunately, the results were less than satisfactory for those longing for a solution: a 65 percent "yes" to the Annan Plan in the Turkish North and a 75 percent "no" in the Greek South. The 30-year-long struggle to demilitarize the island and normalize relations between Turkish and Greek Cypriots went into a new phase, its success to be determined by the extent to which women become a part of it. Because so far, women's position has been one of total invisibility.

Cynthia Cockburn's remarkably timely book, The Line, introduces a woman's group, Hands Across the Divide (HAD), which was set up in 2001 as the first Cypriot political organization that, by the device of constituting itself with a London postal address, legally has both southern and northern members. The book also includes interviews with women in both parts of the island who don't necessarily see themselves as political activists. Through their life stories and daily struggles, a very different picture of "the Cyprus problem" emerges. "The Line is a book about Cyprus as seen through women's eyes," says Cockburn.

But that is not the whole story.

At another level, equally inspiring, The Line is a book about new ways of imagining the connectedness of ethnic and gender conflicts, anti-militarism, and feminism. Cockburn continues the conversation she began in her earlier work The Space Between Us (1998), which examined women's across-the-line activism in Northern Ireland, Bosnia, and Israel/Palestine. In The Line, she presents her analysis of the "inner processes of line making, line negotiation and line melting." Do not be misled by the singular use of "the line" in the title; the book is about the many lines that structure our thinking, our politics, and our every day lives.

How can we understand as well as challenge these lines which delimit our militarized, ethnicized, gendered lives? Cockburn says we must start with a simple realization.

A geo-political partition is not just armoured fencing, it is also a line inside our heads, and in our hearts, too. In fact, the physical fence is a manifestation of these more cognitive and emotional lines that shape our thoughts and feelings. (p. 1)

In the case of Cyprus, the lines demarcating ethnic difference were a result of colonial, international, and national projects that included Britain, Turkey, Greece, and the United States as the most decisive actors. The Line presents a nuanced history of these political projects--as interpreted by women. Not surprisingly, the women's interpretations belie the over-used Turkish vs. Greek analysis we often confront in both the media and academic works.

While some Greek Cypriot women come from nationalist families that supported the ghettoization and marginalization of the Turkish minority in the 1960s and applauded the coup in 1974, others were its victims. Arianna Enonomou, the dancer whose performance inspired the book's title, had experienced British raids into her home as well as threats from both Greek and Turkish nationalist extremists. For her leftist parents, the Turks were hardly the enemy. They identified "the Greek fascists and their local supporters as enemies more immediately menacing than either Turkish Cypriots or Turks." Sevgül Uludag, today a prominent Turkish Cypriot journalist, also remembers Turkish extremists being more of a danger to her leftist parents than anybody else. After the 1974 coup, some of the Greek women who now belong to HAD, or their parents, were blacklisted. While some women, like Ayse Hasan, saw the Turkish intervention as a lifesaver, for others, who lost their villages, houses, and loved ones in the ten years of ethnic strife, Turkish military intervention was not the solution.

THE SUMMER OF 1974, when the Turkish military fought with Greek Cypriot forces and ultimately drew the partition line, was a turning point in the history of Cyprus.

From then on there would always be "before" and "after". The thing that made the difference was your ethnicity in relation to where on the geo-ethnic map of the island you had been living. If you were a Turkish Cypriot living north of the Partition Line or a Greek Cypriot living south of it, you were relatively lucky. (p. 73)

Those who did not fit in the new geo-ethnic divisions would experience violence of all kinds, and, ultimately, displacement. Many were killed or went missing, and everybody else had to relocate: about 180,000 Greek Cypriots became refugees in the South and 45,000 to 60,000 Turkish Cypriots in the North.

The result is one of the most heavily militarized pieces of land on the planet, where lives are separated by barbed wire and mines. Militarization in Cyprus, as elsewhere, is deeply gendered.

In one sense, all politicians in both north and south Cyprus are "military men" because the entire male population, bar a few ethnic and religious categories deemed unreliable (such as Catholics and Turkish Cypriots in the south), are conscripted into military service. (p. 113)

Cockburn explains the processes through which Turkish and Greek nationalisms, each supported by militarized notions of heroic, soldierly masculinity, have created deeply patriarchal gender orders on either side of the Partition Line. "Neither militarism nor nationalism is conducive to women's equality and autonomy. In Cyprus these twin mind-sets are still firmly in place, everlastingly legitimated by the unresolved war, the unsigned peace."

How can this picture change? Cockburn, based on her interviews with HAD members and other women in Cyprus, proposes two important types of action. The first is to implement UN Security Council Resolution 1325, which calls for including women at all levels of negotiation, as well as in post-agreement processes of peace-building. As the UN has recognized: "War is a women's issue. Gender is a peace issue." Second, Cockburn argues, we should understand, reveal, and change the mutual workings of ethnic lines and gender lines through what she calls transversal politics, "a very difficult art." Such politics entail taking a position of "neither/nor" to the limiting models of nationalism and patriarchal gender orders, a position that the women of HAD struggle to implement across their own divisions. Different strategies are needed to tackle gender and ethnic lines, says Cockburn: "While an ethnic line, such as the line that encircles a ghetto or the partition line that splits a country, may almost totally separate two cultural groups, the gender line that differentiates men from women operates in another way. The gender line runs through every institution, every street, every building, every bedroom - even the bed itself." An ethnic line is reason for outcry and international negotiations; gender lines are less visible because they have been normalized through patriarchal discourses and practices.

One recent strategy to decenter the ethnic line and to emphasize the Cypriot identity on the Turkish side has been the use of the terms new Kibrislitürk (Cypriotturk) and Kibrislirum (Cypriotgreek) in everyday language. As for other creative strategies for revealing and changing the gender and ethnic lines of differentiation on the island, we will need to keep our eyes and ears open for the actions of Hands Across the Divide and other women's groups from Cyprus. I share Cynthia Cockburn's hope that her book "might encourage the growth of an inclusive and outward-reaching woman's movement in Cyprus, help make feminism a more say-able word, and feminist change a more thinkable thought." What an inspiration a demilitarized, gender-equal, multiethnic, multi-religious Cyprus would be for our conflict-ridden region! What a gift this book is for making such an idea a "thinkable thought"!

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Reaching across divided societies
A conversation with Cynthia Cockburn

By Ayse Gul Altinay

CYNTHIA COCKBURN WAS INVITED to Turkey by Sabanci University to give a talk on her new book The Line in March 2004. She spoke in Istanbul, Diyarbakir, and Mardin, and met with various women's groups from western and eastern Turkey. The following interview was done on March 14, 2004.

Ayse Gul Altinay: You talk about having two hats, the researcher hat and the activist hat. In both The Line and your earlier book, The Space Between Us (1998), these two seem to have come together in a new way. Could you tell us a little bit about how this happened, how you integrated research and activism?

Cynthia Cockburn: I've always thought one way an academic researcher can contribute to activism is to research and write with a constituency in mind, by which I mean a group of people for whom it could be politically important to have the knowledge the research generates. I've always tried to do that in my research, to work close to a constituency. The constituency isn't necessarily the same group as the research focus. For example, when, as a feminist researcher, I studied male trade unionists, the constituency I had in mind was women trade unionists. But in the case of women actively counteracting the negativities of war, the women who are the subjects of The Line and Space, I have actually been researching the very women who I would hope would also be my constituency. They're both topic and constituency.

AA: How did you make the shift?

CC: It happened like this. My main active involvement in the 1980s was in the movement for peace and disarmament. We were protesting the deployment of US nuclear missiles in Britain and the pursuit of a futile arms race with the USSR. In the 1990s things changed. The USSR collapsed. There was the Gulf War and then the Bosnian war, and they really shocked those of us in the peace movement very badly. At that moment I was in any case ready for a change of research direction. In my labor process studies I'd been working and focusing intently on men and masculinity for many years, and I felt it would be a sort of kindness to myself to start working more closely with women. I wanted to work both in and for the anti-war movement. And I wanted to find something positive to study. So I made contact with women's groups that appeared to me to be doing very creative work in situations of ethnicized conflict.

AA: Can you explain what you mean by "ethnicized" as opposed to "ethnic"?

CC: Wars that present themselves as local, ethnic wars are often, in reality, international wars or wars about economics or other aspects of power. But they take the form of conflict between ethnic groups. In many ways the differentiation of ethnic groups is as much the product of the war as the cause of it. That's what I mean by saying "ethnicized war." Anyway, through an international feminist friendship network of women opposing war and militarism, I already knew of some projects where women were working to counteract ethnic aspects of conflicts. And I asked them if I might come closer to try to learn more about their work. It was truly a great relief and pleasure to me at that moment to be able to put my research energy where my political activism had already been for a long time.

AA: So you chose women's groups in Northern Ireland, Bosnia, and Israel/Palestine for your first anti-militarist, action-research project--

CC: Yes, in Northern Ireland I worked with the Women's Support Network, which was an umbrella organization of women's community centers. In Bosnia it was a women's therapy center I got involved with. It had been set up during the war to respond to the physical, social, and psychological needs of women who were raped or otherwise traumatized--and their children. And in Israel and Palestine, my research was about Bat Shalom, a local alliance of Jewish women from kibbutzim in the North of Israel and Palestinian women, Israeli citizens, living in Nazareth and other Arab towns. What I studied among them was the mechanisms by which women cooperate across conflictual ethnic identities in times of ethnicized war.

AA: And then you moved on to Cyprus--

C: Yes, some Cypriot women had the aspiration to take an initiative that could bring together Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot women in a unitary organization. One of them had read The Space Between Us. They got in touch and invited me to facilitate a seminar of 60 women from North and South Cyprus. This was very exciting. I'd always had my eye on Cyprus as a place where very interesting things must be happening, from which we could all learn. In setting up the seminar, we agreed that I'd be accompanied by two women from Northern Ireland, two from Bosnia-Herzegovina, and two from Israel/Palestine, a Palestinian woman and a Jewish woman. They'd come and help us at the seminar by telling us how they have been dealing with partition lines, as women. So it was a four-way look at gendered and ethnicized partitions, and it really was quite inspiring. After that, the Cypriot women decided that they wanted to remain in touch with each other and with me, and this led to the establishment of what eventually became Hands Across the Divide. And, for my part, it led to a two-year program of action-research in and among the group. One result of that is The Line.

AA: So, your book, The Space Between Us, has been a catalyst for the formation of a new women's group in Cyprus. How inspiring!

CC: Yes, The Space Between Us seems to have been of use, let's say, to some Cypriot women. It could be that The Line proves of use to women in other countries, perhaps more than it does to women in Cyprus. The way, for instance, I try to clarify the relationship between ethnicity and gender may ring bells for women elsewhere. I felt this very much when I visited the women's groups in the Kurdish areas in Turkey with you last week. It was suddenly very gratifying to see that I understood enough about what Irish women were experiencing to realize that there would be a potential for dialogue between them and women's centers like KAMER in Diyarbakir [a city in Kurdish-dominated southeastern Turkey]. We are already trying to arrange contact between them. So in that way, yes, the work does feed from one situation to another.

AA: Because you've made it feed from one situation to another, both in your writing and in your networking.

CC: Yes, it's true that as I've studied instances of women making connections, I've often looked for a way of enabling them to directly transmit what they're learning to similar groups in other countries. Bridges between bridges.

AA: You came to Turkey at a particularly heightened time in the Cyprus conflict. Ever since the Annan Plan was accepted in New York by both sides as a basis of negotiation, every night on television you can find a discussion on the Cyprus issue. And yet it's almost exclusively men, sitting around a table talking about what you call "big P politics" and making "strategic" analyses of Cyprus for Turkey. Unfortunately, women and feminists haven't joined into this discussion. We don't even see a parallel discussion going on among feminists themselves. When you came here were you expecting to find women more interested in Cyprus?

CC: I have to say I've been quite confused to find women a bit surprised to be asked to talk about Cyprus. As if to say, "Where did that come from?" Conversely, when you're in Cyprus, everyone sees Turkey as so central to what's going on. It's been a bit surprising to be told, for instance, that the Cyprus problem isn't a "real problem": People aren't dying; it's not Palestine. This, I think, is to seriously underestimate what it is like to live in North Cyprus, an embargoed economy where your children are doomed to emigrate; where there are no career prospects; it's very difficult to travel freely in the world; your currency is worth absolutely nothing; and you're never invited to international events because people either assume you can't come, or they forget you exist. Those things are life-damaging problems, and if there are forces that can actually resolve them, then I think they have an obligation to do so. You might expect that the women's movement and the anti-militarist movement in Turkey to be helping and listening and actually looking for relations of solidarity with people who are saying Turkey's policy constitutes a problem in Cyprus. Of course, I have only met a few people here, so maybe I'm wrong, but I haven't met any who are seriously concerned about it. A positive exception is the visit of Istanbul's Amargi Women's Group to Cyprus last year. But even that doesn't seem to have resulted in concrete relations or joint action.

AA: Do women in both parts of Cyprus, particularly those in Hands Across the Divide, have anything specific to say about the Annan Plan?

CC: As the negotiations continue, week by week, the detailed provisions in the Annan Plan are changing. I know women in Hands Across the Divide feel it's a flawed plan, and each would perhaps choose different things in it they'd want to improve. But the majority want to move forward--on this basis because there isn't any other. More concretely, one thing they are agreed on is that the absence of women, and civil society as a whole, from the negotiations has meant that a whole spectrum of real, every day life is left out of the plan altogether.

This week, Hands Across the Divide will send letters to all parties at the negotiation table, including representatives of the UN, the European Union, the United States, Britain, Greece, Turkey, as well as Cypriot politicians in the North and South. What they say in that letter is this: The Annan Plan aims to create a new Cyprus that will enable relations between the Greek Cypriots and the Turkish Cypriots to become equal, respectful, communicative, and nonviolent. Hands Across the Divide makes a parallel demand for the relations between men and women, for the first time in history, also to become equal, respectful, communicative, and nonviolent. Let's take an example. We all know that in the new Cyprus, school history and other textbooks would need to be rewritten because currently, both the Greek and the Turkish pedagogy is heavily nationalistic. As education gets rid of nationalism, why not simultaneously rid it of sexism too, bring gender sensitivity and equality to schooling? If we can think of ending the stereotyping of Turks and Greeks, couldn't we think of ending the sex-typing of boys and girls too?

As I argue in The Line, in conflict situations like this, the key conceptual problem for a group like Hands Across the Divide is to bring ethnicity and gender into a single conceptual framework, a single equation. This letter they've sent to the leaders on the "gender dimension of a post-solution Cyprus" in a way is saying that the processes by which we draw arbitrary lines between ethnic groups and between genders are pretty similar. This is just the kind of thinking I reckon UN Security Council Resolution 1325 meant to introduce into peace negotiations when it called for the greater inclusion of women. I think it's sad that in the Cyprus negotiations, which the UN actually hosted, they haven't acted on the Resolution they themselves passed four years ago.

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From recruit to soldier
Military discipline is enforced with marching chants-and their sexist, racist, brutal messages.

Reviewed by Carol Burke

ALMOST EVERYONE HAS SEEN THE MOVIES about basic training. Some celebrate it; some mock it; but each typically depicts a tight-lipped, square-jawed dynamo of a drill instructor barking commands at a group of hapless recruits whose every act subjects them to merciless criticism seasoned by colorful profanities. Although real drill instructors may not be as square-jawed or as tall as their cinematic equivalents, they do bark out commands to each new cohort of recruits to arrive at basic training. For their part, recruits soon figure out which answers are acceptable and which will be ridiculed. They learn to walk or run in step, to endure petty humiliations, and to internalize the will of their drill instructor as their own. Basic training aims to transform individuals into standard, "government-issue" soldiers by erasing civilian identities that have been formed over many years. During basic training, recruits are prohibited contact with the civilian world, the anchor to their former selves. No previous accomplishments matter. Intelligence, charm, and humor count for little. Above all, basic training demands a suppression of individual difference and exacts conformity in all outward actions and dress.

Drill instructors deliberately treat the recruits as children, scolding these babes in arms because in the eyes of the institution they do not speak, walk, or even eat properly. They cannot accomplish the simplest of tasks--making the bed or cleaning the floor--to the satisfaction of their overseers. Recruits cannot keep time; therefore they are allowed no control over their time. The noncoms determine when they wake, when they go to the bathroom, and when they sleep. Basic training withdraws recruits from society and consigns them to a liminal, deindividualized state where it comes to seem natural to refer to themselves in the third person, to get little, then less sleep, to swallow complaints when the body rebels at the relentless demands that it leap, crawl, squat, swing, carry, and march, and march, and march.

Most new recruits experience profound disorientation. Drill instructors talk to them in ways they have never been addressed before. Forced to suppress their anger and frustration, they must endure emotional bullying and the cognitive confusion that results from incessant, often contradictory commands: They are ordered to march one way on the parade ground, then suddenly reversed, only to be reversed again. You might think that an institution that so prizes order would have no use for confusion; yet confusion is a state that drill instructors intentionally induce in their recruits, because it increases the recruits' dependence on their harsh taskmaster. Only the drill instructor, the god of their universe and the architect of their transformation, can erase their confusion. As Lieutenant Colonel Michael Becker, commander at Parris Island, told Thomas Ricks in Making the Corps (1997), "The reason we do this [simulate confusion] the way we do is to create uncertainty.... From the recruit's perspective, it appears to be chaos. War is chaos. And then they see this drill instructor--this magnificent creature who brings order to chaos. They learn that if they follow orders, their life will be calmer."

Without uniformity, the highly choreographed dance of the military parade would dissolve into chaos. Drill effectively teaches recruits that each must keep every step, every line of the body, even every gaze in sync with the group. Close-order drill is important figuratively also--it trains individual soldiers under the orchestration of their leaders to configure an army collectively.

Drill has played an important part in military training since the 17th century, when Dutch forces demonstrated the power of rigorous drill to transform the rank and file into a cohesive unit that would be efficient in battle and obedient in the garrison, explains William H. McNeill in The Pursuit of Power (1982). But today's drill, considered essential to any training program, has no direct parallel to movements in war. A vestige of a time when men fought standing up, not on their stomachs, and certainly not behind technologically complex control panels, drill today teaches obedience, erases individuality, and inscribes a corporate identity in which the movements of individuals are indistinguishable from the whole.

Marching chants accompany drill in all branches of today's military. Practical in their purpose, they build morale, insure group cohesion, and ease strain by diverting attention from monotonous, often strenuous labor or training. As military traditions, these verses pass from company to company, division to division, service to service, even war to war. Although some chants celebrate the bravado of combat, most complain of the daily discomforts suffered away from home: "Ain't no use in going to chow/They never feed you anyhow."

Through marching chants, humor lightens the tedium and pain of training, providing opportunities for even the lowliest to mock a superior and for the group to express its disdain for a rival. Sometimes wit and originality are applied to amend the most familiar chants and express a group's sentiments. The improvised additions to standard chants are evidence that even within the rigid practice of discipline there is room for collective innovation.

OFFENSIVENESS DRIVES MARCHING CHANTS. Some take the form of insult to a superior:

The cabin boy, the cabin boy,
That naughty little nipper:
He lined his ass with shards of glass
And circumcised the skipper.

Chants can also be ghoulish celebrations of the slaughter of innocents:

See the family by the stream,
Watch the parents run and scream.
Viet Cong will never learn.
Push a button and watch 'em burn.

or playfully objectify women:

I wish all the girls were bricks in a pile,
And I was a mason; I'd lay 'em all in style.
I wish all the girls were pies on a shelf,
And I was a baker; I'd eat 'em all myself.

Through such chants, the group asserts itself as the tough "bad boy," equally ready to slaughter or to screw. For the trainee, these chants transform the horrifying prospect of combat into a humorous, macabre sport.

Other marching chants oppose the longing for loved ones with the celebration of a new life as a member of the group:

Suzie said to me one day long ago
"Honey, please don't join the corps [pronounced co]
All they do is fuss 'n' fight
and they look kinda weird with those 'high-and-tights'" [popular marine corps hairstyle].

Presented with Suzie's ultimatum, the recruit exchanges his girl for the corps--or rather, the stern drill instructor shouts the lines and his trainees repeat them in unison. These chants celebrate the displacement of sexual energy from the female left behind to the enemy waiting on the battlefield. Women are as infinitely replaceable as the enemy, and combat, according to marching chants, is as exhilarating as sex. They devalue all nonprofessional affiliations and mark a soldier's passage from civilian life to combat by encouraging masturbatory compensation: "I don't want no teenage queen./ I just want my M-16."

Such compensation was illustrated first in James Jones's novel From Here to Eternity and later in Stanley Kubrick's Vietnam film, Full Metal Jacket. In the film, a drill instructor leads his trainees, clad only in underwear, one hand on their rifles, the other grasping their genitals, in a truly universal marching chant, one that has crossed all service lines:

This is my rifle; this is my gun.
This is for fighting; this is for fun.

As folklorist Bruce Jackson has pointed out, the character Joe de Grinder in African-American work-songs is the devilish ladies' man who makes time with the workingman's lover, mother, and sister, then makes off with his possessions, while the cuckold goes out to earn an honest living. During the Korean War, many African-American drill sergeants took their work-song tradition with them, which spread through every training unit, black or white, and transformed the marching chant. Joe de Grinder became the character Jody, and the word jody itself became synonymous with marching chants. Even today in the marine corps or the army, one calls a jody, not a chant. For the trainee, Jody is the clever civilian who brutally divorces the recruit from the civilian world by appropriating all his possessions and loved ones:

Ain't no use in callin' home.
Jody's on your telephone.

Ain't no use in lookin' back.
Jody's got your Cadillac.

Ain't no use in goin' home.
Jody's got your girl and gone.

Chants rarely speak of war's loneliness. The exception, Vietnam chants, contain several references to the isolation of the single combat soldier. Take, for example, the following:

Vietnam, Vietnam,
late at night,
while you're sleeping,
Charlie company comes creeping.

You're sitting in your foxhole.
You think you got it made.
But there lies your buddy
with a bullet in his head.

You're sitting in your foxhole,
You're thinking about your wife.
Charlie's on the move.
He's out to take your life.

They take you up in choppers
to the battle zone.
You think they're all around you.
Then you find you're all alone.

Here the bitter voice of experience speaks. The narrator has known the darkness through which Charlie invisibly creeps, firing silent bullets. Without his buddy, without his wife, without even the "they" who take him to the battle zone, the soldier is alone with Charlie.

Each war carries its own brand of dark, twisted humor that laughs at what is too horrible to take seriously. The chilling irony of battlefield humor removes the speaker from the terror close at hand and imposes a momentary control that softens the shriek into uneasy laughter. In response to a 1967 New Yorker article by Jonathan Schell, General William Westmoreland, the commander of all allied forces in Vietnam, rationalized the need for gallows humor: "Soldiers have employed gallows humor through the ages. What paratrooper, for example, singing the drinking song 'Blood on the Risers,' really revels in the gory death of the man he is singing about? Gallows humor is, after all, merely a defense mechanism for men engaged in perilous and distasteful duties."

To laugh at the chance accident, to minimize the fear that every paratrooper faces, is a way of keeping that fear under control, or at least within the ordered rhythm of a patriotic hymn. "He was just a rookie trooper, and he surely shook with fright," "Blood on the Risers"--sung to the tune of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic"--begins, and each stanza is followed by the chorus:

Gory, gory, what a helluva way to die!
Gory, gory, what a helluva way to die!
Gory, gory, what a helluva way to die!
And he ain't gonna jump no more.

BUT WESTMORELAND MIGHT HAVE FOUND more typical examples of battlefield humor, Vietnam style. To shrug off in song a real danger that confronts each paratrooper is very different from chanting of one's pleasure at inflicting pain on civilians, as in the following Vietnam chant, which begins,

See the family beside the stream,
flyin' high and feelin' mean.
Pick one out and watch 'em scream.
Yo, oh! Napalm, it sticks to kids.

In this chant, the demonic pilot, from his remote and mighty perspective, delights in repeated demonstrations of his power, or rather, the power of American technology to unleash napalm. The napalm rarely lands on enemy troops and does little to insure victory, but falls from the skies like blazing rain, searing the civilian population below. The speaker fiendishly narrates in the first person one brutal scene after another--barbecued babies, burned orphans, decapitated peasants.

Napalm, the sign of American extravagance, luxuriously annihilates even the harmless. The narrator who wields such a weapon does not speak as the brave warrior of "Blood on the Risers," who defends himself against assault on all sides, but sounds instead like a crazed adolescent who delights in his own power, the puny guy inside the big machine.

Such sadistic pleasure rings through calls sung during and after Vietnam that have no explicit Vietnam theme. Consider the following:

A little bird with a yellow bill
Landed on my windowsill.
I coaxed him in with a piece of pie
And then I poked out his little eye.

The giving hand is the hand of destruction in this call, as it is in other napalm chants:

Throw some candy to the children.
Wait till they all gather round.
Then you take your M-16 now
and mow the little fuckers down.

See the Cobras in formation.
Watch them flying way down low.
See them fly into the children,
Heads are tossed to and fro.

Such chants demonstrate the irony at the center of American ambivalence toward its role in Vietnam, an irony that haunts today's Iraq war as well. American soldiers sent to free Iraqis from a hostile dictator, like those sent to defend South Vietnam, find themselves performing aggressive acts against the people and the land they seek to liberate. Vietnam lore inverts an American stereotype: the friendly GI surrounded by foreign children, familiar in accounts of World War II veterans. In the Vietnam chants, the GI's gesture of generosity becomes the act of destruction.

The rage of the narrator of these kinds of marching chants erupts in hideous delight at the game of war. But such dismal delight infects all battlefield humor, from legends of grunts gone crazy in combat to macabre jokes, from accounts of ear necklaces to stories of photo albums of Vietnamese corpses (with their grim mockery of photojournalism). The chants articulate the anger and enthusiasm of the soldier in combat: two emotions, many would argue, that enable the soldier to fight. In preparing thousands to fight and kill, training programs that employ such marching chants seek to regulate the fears of young recruits through the perfectly measured recitation of sadistic verse.

A version of this article appeared in Camp All-American, Hanoi Jane, and the High-and-Tight: Gender, Folklore, and Changing Military Culture by Carol Burke. Copyright © 2004 by Carol Burke. By permission of Beacon Press, www.beacon.org.

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Immigration Ain't for Sissies
Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return by Marjane Satrapi. New York: Pantheon, 2004, 191 pp., $17.95 paper..

Reviewed/drawn by Jennifer Camper

 

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Dueling masculinities
Plan of Attack by Bob Woodward. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004, 480 pp., $28.00 hardcover, $14.00 paper.

Reviewed by Cynthia Enloe

THIS YEAR HAS OFFERED BUSH-WATCHERS a treasure trove of insiders' books. Right now, my own collection is dispersed throughout the apartment: Richard Clark in the kitchen; John Dean and James Mann on the coffee table; Paul O'Neill beside the bed; and Bob Woodward here on the desk at my elbow. All of these inside-the-Beltway books are written by men, about men. With the notable exception of National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, in each of these books, women remain almost invisible. Masculinities remain unexamined. Yet as feminists, we must aim our curiosity at the political workings of masculinity and femininity, even when others claim or imply that gender is beside the point.

In Plan of Attack, Bob Woodward describes how the Pentagon's chief military operations strategist, General Tommy Franks, presented a full-blown, detailed Iraq invasion plan--with slides--to President George W. Bush and members of the National Security Council on August 5, 2002 (at a time when Bush has insisted that he did not yet have a war plan "on my desk"). Few of us ever glimpse these kinds of details, yet the small circle of civilian and uniformed war-planners went on the record with Woodward, the well-known Washington Post reporter who in the 1970s, with his Post colleague Carl Bernstein, broke the story that became the Watergate scandal. Woodward's own political loyalties have always been unclear, as befits a professional reporter, although many reviewers felt that Bush at War (2002), his first book on the Bush administration, treated the president and his advisers with considerable generosity. Plan of Attack is neither an apologia nor a critique. Rather, it is a day-by-day account of who said what to whom, who kept secrets from whom, and who tried to marginalize whom as planning for the invasion of Iraq progressed.

Feminists have learned that while gender refers to masculinity and femininity, neither is singular in practice. Masculinities--the plural is important. In any patriarchal political system, the crafting of rival masculinities is serious business, so to understand such systems we must discover what criteria the senior actors wield to judge masculine behavior. Woodward reveals that, in the upper reaches of the Bush administration, the men competing for policy influence wield specific kinds of masculinities. Those who fail to meet the criteria for masculinity lose credibility and influence. Without ever consciously giving a nod to gender, Woodward reveals how such competition between masculinities laid the groundwork for preemptive war. He demonstrates that, for members of the Bush inner circle, masculinity equals "resolve."

For example, Bush told Woodward about a meeting he had with British Prime Minister Tony Blair. "We want you to be part of this," Bush had told Blair. Woodward notes, "Blair's resolve had made a real impression":

After the meeting, Bush walked into the conference room where Alastair Campbell, the prime minister's communications director, and several other Blair aides were waiting.
"Your man has got cojones," the president said, using the colloquial Spanish for balls.
The president recalled, "And of course these Brits don't know what cojones are." He said he would call the Camp David session with Blair "the cojones meeting." (p. 178)

In the president's eyes, Blair proved his possession of "cojones" by showing resolve. George W. Bush himself was determined to show resolve. His father, George H. W. Bush, had jeopardized his standing as a masculine player by showing insufficient resolve.

To create and sustain a hierarchy of masculinities--who are the "real men"; what is a "manly pursuit"; what is worthy of masculine attention-effort must also be constantly invested in feminization: The masculinity gamesman maneuvers to relegate the allegedly insufficiently manly men to feminized arenas. Woodward's account shows how individuals, institutions, and even processes and ideologies were feminized by Bush and his circle. It is difficult to show and practice resolve--thus masculinity--in a democracy, which requires free-wheeling public discussion, weighing complexities, and hammering out compromise. Anyone--for instance, Secretary of State Colin Powell--who had the patience (or the principled commitment) to engage in such feminized processes risked becoming feminized himself and thus politically marginalized. In the build-up to the invasion of Iraq, diplomacy became feminized in the minds of the Bush circle. The United Nations became feminized. Congress became feminized. So, eventually, did democracy.

OFTEN, BUSH IS PORTRAYED AS putty in the hands of his vice president and secretary of defense, but this is belied by Woodward's evidence. Bush was the principal audience for each successive iteration of the Rumsfeld/Franks invasion plan, and he gave his personal approval as the timetable for logistical preparation got shorter; the numbers of US troops to be initially deployed shrank; and a veil of secrecy was imposed over the extensive military preparations in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. Bush insisted that that no one outside his small circle--Rumsfeld and his civilian aides Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz; Cheney and his aide Lewis "Scooter" Libby; Franks; Rice; and CIA Director George Tenet--learn about their invasion plan.

It is easiest to show manly "resolve" when decision-making is shrouded in secrecy. George W. Bush created an executive policy-making culture rooted in distrust of and distaste for the messiness of democratic life. Members of Congress--including Republicans--were not to be trusted. Foreign allies were not worthy of confidence. Journalists were kept in the dark, despite their post-9/11, passive, rely-on-the-president-to-tell-us-what-to-say mode. Even the Joint Chiefs of Staff were not fully informed. That is, being male did not alone qualify one to be "in the loop." Entry was insured only to those who held particular masculine credentials.

The way Bush characterized the Rumsfeld/Franks strategy for "moving troops in and expanding infrastructure" is, in this context, revealing: "It was, in my judgment," Bush said, "a very smart recommendation by Don and Tommy to put certain elements in place that could be done so in a way that was quiet so that we didn't create a lot of noise and anxiety." In the minds of Bush and his advisers, "noise and anxiety" appear to have been the chief attributes of democratic life--ones to be avoided.

Instead, the sort of manly resolve that won credibility in the White House required quietly holding one's cards close to the chest, even during high-level discussions. Bush often simply said nothing, while Vice President Dick Cheney spoke cryptically, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld responded to questions with volleys of unrelated questions of his own. This mode of interaction required the key players to resort to reading one another's body language.

The president told Woodward that when he first met with Franks in late December 2001 to craft the Iraq war plan, "I'm watching his body language very carefully." Woodward notes that Bush "emphasized the body language, the eyes, the demeanor. It was more important than some of the substance."

Similarly, Rice recalled trying to "read" President Bush in January 2002, to figure out whether he had understood that launching a covert CIA operation in Iraq would require persuading Iraqi operatives that the administration would back them up with the US military: "The president's body language suggested he had received the message," she told Woodward.

And Woodward notes that in September 2002, when Nick Calio, the White House congressional lobbyist, was trying to persuade members of Congress to give the president broad military authority, Calio assumed "from Bush's side comments and body language…that the question on Iraq was not if but when there would be a war."

Body language is open to conflicting interpretations and myriad misreadings. Yet in the Bush White House it determined matters of state and international affairs.

AS FEMINISTS, WE SHOULD ALWAYS ASK, "Where are the women?" Woodward tells of one, an economist in the state department, who was brought in to inform the president about the UN-supervised Oil for Food program in Iraq. The president did not ask her for any substantive policy advice. But Condoleezza Rice was party to almost all the war-planning sessions. In early 2002, Colin Powell asked for his first-ever private meeting with the president, to express his concern that Bush's fixation on invasion planning was making a military solution a foregone conclusion. Rice sat in on the conversation, as she did again at a later meeting when Powell's concern about creeping militarization had deepened even further. As Woodward describes it, Rice served as Bush's shield against Powell's skepticism.

Journalist Laura Flanders' provocative book Bushwomen (2004) shows that the women in and around the Bush administration indeed have political interests and ideas of their own--but these are barely visible in Plan of Attack. In 2003, Woodward asked President Bush about Laura Bush's apparent unhappiness at the prospect of war with Iraq. Bush replied that his wife "understands the sadness and agony" that war produces, as well as "the uproar, the noise, the protestation." Woodward followed up: "And she told you this?" Bush responded: "Not really. She told you that. And probably by telling you, told me."

Three women senators make a brief but enticing appearance in September 2002, when the president belatedly and partially briefed elected representatives on his Iraq policy. Christine Ciccone, a lawyer and member of the White House congressional lobbying team, reported to the president that California Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, who serves on the Senate Intelligence Committee, was not persuaded by the White House case. Perhaps even more worrisome to the White House, Feinstein wasn't alone:

Ciccone reported that Senators Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, and Kay Bailey Hutchison, a Texas Republican, had waited for Feinstein at the door, and they had left together. (pp. 171-172)

Maybe the next insider's book will be written by a feminist and will start with Feinstein, Murray, and Hutchison.

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Some recent "insider" books:
Richard A. Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror, New York, Free Press, 2004.
Ron Suskind, The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill, New York, Simon and Schuster, 2004.
John W. Dean, Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush, New York, Little, Brown and Co., 2004.
James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: A History of Bush's War Cabinet, New York, Penguin Books, 2004.

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Pink thongs and patriarchy
In protests against the Iraq war, women are using the media and popular culture as never before.

Reviewed by Liza Featherstone

 

Photo by Jennifer Pozner

WOMEN HAVE BEEN LEADING the most creative, inviting, and lasting manifestations of the movement against the war on Iraq. The most visible leaders of large coalitions like United for Peace and Justice, and of many small, local groups as well, are women. Some groups--whose members are mostly, but never exclusively, women--have chosen to make explicit the femininity--and feminism--behind their anti-war protests. They've often done this in strikingly new ways, but in the process revived some long-running questions about the role of gender stereotypes in women's peace movements.

Take, for example, Axis of Eve, a San Francisco-based phenomenon with national imitators, which sells a line of "protest panties." Outraged by the deceitful way in which the Bush administration went to war, the group urges "no more cover-ups" and appears at major protests flashing fuschia thongs with messages like "Expose Bush," "Drill Bush Not Oil," and "Weapon of Mass Seduction."

Some--myself included--welcome this sort of silliness, but it's a matter of taste. A much bigger group, Code Pink, which boasts at least 100 chapters nationwide, tends not to go in for such sexualized antics. Even the staid and the prim will feel at home at Code Pink's summer protest against the Republican Convention, which begins at the statue of bluestocking icon Eleanor Roosevelt in New York City's Riverside Park. But those with more outrageous sensibilities will also feel welcomed by Code Pink's sense of girly fun. Code Pink has a trademark "pink slip" action, in which our worst leaders are symbolically "fired" by being presented with women's lingerie. Last October, pink slip banners were dropped in 40 cities nationwide. Women dressed in pink also presented Vice President Dick Cheney with a 45-foot banner in the shape of a pink slip, in front of the Beverly Hills Hilton, where he was giving a speech. The banner read, "Dick's in bed with Halliburton, but we got screwed. Cheney, you're fired." President Bush himself has been presented with pink slips on several occasions by Code Pink protesters hoping that he'll soon join the ranks of the nation's unemployed.

HISTORICALLY, WOMEN'S RESISTANCE TO MILITARISM has taken many forms--and ideas about it have varied. In her 1938 treatise Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf argued that as a woman, she had no reason to be patriotic, as the state denied her equal property and citizenship rights. She wrote,

If you insist upon fighting to protect me, or "our" country, let it be understood, soberly and rationally between us, that you are fighting...to procure benefits which I have not shared...in fact, as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.

The Axis of Eve seems to share Woolf's intellectual impulse--though it's a stretch to imagine the melancholy novelist flashing a thong. Noting on their website that only 14 percent of congressional seats are held by women, they explain that "the ultra-feminine gesture of the flash parodies our political exclusion."

Other feminists have suggested that, whether because of biology or culture, women's traditional roles as caregivers--especially as mothers--lend us a more life-affirming worldview, one that frowns on war and violence. In this spirit, in 1961 a national organization called Women Strike for Peace (WSP) organized 50,000 women nationwide to walk off their jobs and out of their kitchens to demand that their elected representatives embrace a nuclear test ban. These women wanted to protect their children, but as historian Amy Swerdlow has pointed out, they also felt a motherly responsibility to the world. As one WSP participant put it: "No mother can accept lightly even the remote possibility of separation from the family which needs her. But mankind needs us too."

The otherwise admirable antinuclear activist Dr. Helen Caldicott has appealed to popular audiences with an even less subtle traditionalism. "As mothers we must make sure the world is safe for our babies," she once said in a speech. "I appeal especially to the women to do this work because we understand the genesis of life.... We have wombs, we have breasts, we have menstrual periods to remind us that we can produce life!"

Photo by Jennifer Pozner

This sort of sentiment doesn't sit well with Jenny Brown, a Gainesville, Florida, activist who is a member of Redstockings (founded in the 1960s, this radical feminist group is still around). "Since when are women naturally peaceful?" asks Brown. "Harriet Tubman carried a gun when she ran the underground railroad." Brown is only 38, but her thinking comes out of a venerable tradition. In January 1968, radical feminists protested the Jeanette Rankin Brigade, an all-women peace formation. They held a funeral procession and buried traditional womanhood. As Brown explains, "They felt that appeals based on women's peaceful natures would only assure men that they were not a threat." Brown and many other women worry that groups like Code Pink, by organizing for peace as women, tap into a deeply conservative tradition.

Particularly given the Bush administration's ferocious attack on reproductive rights, now would be an especially bad time to reinforce traditional gender stereotypes or to exalt the cult of compulsory motherhood. The notion that women are biologically--or even culturally--destined to breed and to nurture could feed the forces of reaction. As radical feminists have long suggested, denying women's capacity for aggression and militancy also denies our power.

But asked about the emphasis on mothering, activists say it hasn't played a significant role in contemporary feminist anti-war organizing. "Some people like it," says Code Pink founder Medea Benjamin. "But we really want to be inclusive. A lot of our friends don't have kids. We don't want it to sound corny, old, or off-putting." Code Pink's mission statement emphatically rejects biological determinism:

Women have been the guardians of life--not because we are better or purer or more innately nurturing than men, but because the men have busied themselves making war. Because of our responsibility to the next generation, because of our own love for our families and communities and this country that we are a part of, we understand the love of a mother in Iraq for her children, and the driving desire of that child for life.

Indeed, the desire of women to protest the war as mothers is still a powerful one; many mothers of soldiers have become activists as a result of the Iraq war, fearing for their children's lives. "Worry and fear for one's child is a horrible thing to live with," writes Vida Jones, the mother of two sons in the army, one of whom was sent to Iraq, on the www.motherspeak.org website, which collects narratives from military mothers (and is encouraging fathers to share their stories, too). Another woman, Rachel Avila, writes of her son's serious injury in Iraq: He has been on a respirator and may permanently live with shrapnel in his brain.

Activists and thinkers today have widely varying theories about why women should oppose war. Most make connections between militarism and oppressive forms of masculinity. Cynthia Enloe, who has written many excellent books on militarism and gender, observed recently in an interview with the Left Business Observer that Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and George W. Bush "take on what they think are the attributes of the military--not to be confused with having ever served in the military--but they take on a militaristic culture of masculinity, and that's how they compare themselves with Clinton"--as well as with the first George Bush, whom they also view as insufficiently manly. Their foreign policies are thus intricately connected to their ideas about men's and women's roles in the world. (See Enloe's article on p. 10 of this issue.)

The relationships between militarism and aggressive masculinity were not abstract to a group of Okinawan women I met at Code Pink's White House vigil in March 2003. Their protest group was founded in 1995, when a 12-year-old Okinawan girl was raped by US soldiers. The women had traveled to Washington to protest the impending war on Iraq, and spoke excitedly through a translator. Said Noriko Akahane, "Women don't want the military anywhere."

CODE PINK AND PROJECTS LIKE IT resist essentialism by making a joke of femininity, even while honoring it. It is a delicate balance, which somehow mostly works. The Axis of Eve promotes its message--and tactics--through "pantyware parties," modeled on Tupperware parties, in which they not only sell their appealing political thongs, they organize women to register voters and donate to John Kerry's presidential campaign. A similar group, the Chicago-based Pink Bloque, whose members, needless to say, always dress in pink, urges members to put the "Femme" in "Femme-inism."

The relationship of these groups to popular culture is strikingly similar to their approach to gender: parodic yet affectionate. The Pink Bloque had Darrin Henson, a choreographer for Britney Spears and N'Sync, teach its members how to dance like MTV stars. At anti-war protests they dance to Mary J. Blige, Nelly, and Justin Timberlake songs, and one of their slogans is "Drop Beatz Not Bombz." (Another is "2 Cute 2 B Arrested.") In the same spirit, Code Pink tried this spring to enter a pop culture realm many social critics love to hate: reality TV. Medea Benjamin attempted to star on Showtime's American Candidate, in which candidates are chosen to "run" presidential campaigns and viewers vote for a winner. The pop culture industry has not yet returned the feminist peace movement's affection, however: Benjamin was initially accepted by Showtime but later rejected for reasons never explained. Such efforts are politically savvy, since most of the public, especially the young public, enjoys pop culture; crucially, however, these activists, although critical of it, also enjoy it themselves. This enjoyment represents a crucial shift: For feminists in the 1970s, pop culture was a target of protest (recall the feminist demonstrators at the Miss America pageant of 1968, who crowned a live sheep with a tiara). Today's feminists view it as a useful lingua franca, even a weapon, however playfully deployed. Humor is part of the pleasure--and effectiveness--of such activism. But these groups also transcend treacly appeals to women's "peaceful nature" in ways that are powerfully serious: They emphasize "sisterhood," recognizing that many of us share experiences that may transcend national boundaries. Code Pink has gone beyond rhetoric in expressing this solidarity. The group has not shied away from protesting the Israeli occupation and has picked a brave place to do so: the West Bank itself. Last fall a Code Pink delegation joined Palestinian and Israeli women's peace groups in protesting the Israeli "security wall," where many were tear-gassed by Israeli soldiers.

This sense of cross-border female solidarity is especially apparent in the journal entries written by women who have traveled to Iraq on Code Pink delegations. Linda Durham wrote in her travel diary, posted on the Code Pink website, codepink.utne.com:

Sitting in small rooms, with groups of Iraqi women, I frequently experienced a strong sense of sisterhood, womanhood, motherhood. It was possible to communicate those feelings with a smile or a gesture. Or with tears. And that happened, over and again.

Of a woman she met in Iraq, who invited the American activists to tea, Durham wrote, "Thoughts of that woman, whose name I do not recall, return to me again and again. Although our lives are so very different, in so many ways, I feel deeply connected to her."

It makes a kind of paradoxical sense that the Bush administration would inspire such solidarity, as well as a women's peace movement with an emerging analysis--whether in the form of parody or explicit critique--of gender. This presidency makes the connections between a crude, violent masculinity and a crude, violent foreign policy painfully obvious. At a time when the only political response to Bush seems to be more swaggering, simian machismo--see for example, the 2004 Democratic Party platform, in which the word strong appears 66 times, the word strength 41, but the word compassion exactly once--the creative feminist presence of groups like Code Pink is badly needed and highly welcome.

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Pro-whose-life?
Ten reasons why militarism is bad for your health

Reviewed by Ryn Gluckman, Betsy Hartmann, and Azi Shariatmadar

THESE DAYS, WE'VE HEARD the most unlikely people sound the battle cry of equal rights for women whenever they want to argue for more funds for the military or for aggressive action in yet another small, poverty-stricken country. When the US invaded Afghanistan in the fall of 2001 and unseated the Taliban, our country was hailed as the liberator of Afghan women. President George W. Bush has repeatedly referred to the expansion of rights for women in Afghanistan and Palestine as a positive potential outcome of US intervention in those areas as well as in Iraq, despite rising body counts and ongoing reports of rape and human rights abuses. If we believe what we hear, militarism is the true herald of feminism. But of course, upon closer examination, it is clear that tanks and guns damage women rather than liberate them. From carcinogenic pollutants to decreasing funds for social services, militarism is among the most dangerous threats to women's health and reproductive freedom around the world. Here's why:

1. Environmental pollution

Militaries are among the worst polluters on the planet. Not only does war degrade or destroy local environments, but military bases and weapons facilities contaminate the air, soil, and water with deadly toxins. In Dangerous Intersections (1999) geographer Joni Seager points out that, "Anywhere in the world, a military presence is virtually the single most reliable predictor of environmental damage." Military pollution has many harmful and long-lasting effects on reproductive health. In Vietnam, the herbicide Agent Orange, sprayed by the US military during the 1960s and '70s, is responsible for high rates of birth defects, miscarriages, and reproductive cancers even today. In both the US and Russia, say Nancy Lee Peluso and Michael Watts in Violent Environments (2001), releases of radioactive materials from nuclear weapons production and testing are associated with sterility, cancer, and genetic abnormalities. Military pollution is usually shrouded in secrecy. In Memphis, Tennessee, a military depot dumped chemical weapons in the midst of a black residential community without informing people of the health dangers. Today, women there report a high incidence of miscarriage, birth defects, kidney diseases, and cancer. (See the report by the Military Toxics Project and Environmental Health Coalition at www.miltoxproj.org/magnacarta/DefendOurHealthReport.html.)

2. Exploitation of prostitutes

Military bases are notorious for their contribution to adult and child prostitution and the spread of HIV/AIDS. In countries where prostitution is illegal, women are counted by those governments and the military as "special job workers" and denied protection against abuse by their customers or their bosses. Military-base prostitution has led to the devastating spread of HIV among prostitutes. Today, sex workers are still blamed for the spread of HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted infections, while little or no attention is given to the military's role.

3. Increased sexual harassment

In times of war, military-sponsored sexual harassment and rape become commonplace. In February 2004, the Denver Post interviewed women who had been raped or sexually assaulted in the US military but never reported the attacks, fearing retaliation. The recent exposure of the horrific sexual abuse and assault by the US military and private security companies at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq also demonstrates how women are exploited as a military tactic. In May 2004, the London Guardian reported that women held in the prison appear to have been arrested in violation of international law,

not because of anything they have done, but merely because of who they are married to, and their potential intelligence value. US officials have previously acknowledged detaining Iraqi women in the hope of convincing male relatives to provide information; when US soldiers raid a house and fail to find a male suspect, they will frequently take away his wife or daughter instead.

4. Rape as a military strategy

The treatment of women in military prisons is devastating. Amnesty International reports that Iraqi women in US military prisons have been raped (sometimes resulting in pregnancy); humiliated, including being harnessed and ridden like donkeys; and forced at gunpoint to expose themselves. Because of the resultant shame and stigma, an unknown number of women have died in suicides and honor-killings carried out by their families.

Rape is also frequently used as a tool of "ethnic cleansing," notoriously in Bosnia-Herzegovina. In the early 1990s, an estimated 20,000 women and girls were raped by the Serbian military in a deliberate campaign to terrorize the population and eliminate Muslims from the region by impregnating Muslim women and forcing them to bear Serbian children.

5. More domestic violence

While rape is used as a strategy of war, the climate of militarism also contributes to domestic violence. In the summer of 2002, four wives of US military officers, all stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, were killed by their husbands. Three of the four officers had recently returned to the country after being deployed to Afghanistan as special operations soldiers. It is suspected that these women had been victims of domestic violence long before their murders, but could not or did not choose to obtain help. This is not surprising, given Cynthia Enloe's observation in Ms. (December 2001/January 2002) that, during times of war, "Soldiers' girlfriends and wives...[have] been persuaded that they are 'good citizens' if they keep silent about problems in their relationships."

6. Denial of necessary health care and social services

While perpetuating a culture of silence and violence against women, militarism restricts women's access to health care. For example, women in the US military are unconstitutionally denied their right to choose abortion if they are faced with an unplanned pregnancy: They are barred from obtaining an abortion on a military base, even if they are able to pay for the procedure with their own money. In June 2002, the Senate voted 52 to 40 to lift this ban. However, the House of Representatives opposed the measure and prevented it from being included in the fiscal year 2003 National Defense Authorization Act. As a result, women who are stationed in countries where abortion is illegal or inaccessible are still forced to carry their pregnancies to term. Their only alternative is to travel long distances at their own expense.

Well-funded and accessible social services like health care, child care, and education are crucial to survival. War is expensive and is often funded at the cost of such services. The National Priorities Project reported that in May 2004, the Bush administration announced its request for another $25 billion for the war and occupation in Iraq, bringing the total war expense to $152.6 billion since April 2003. In contrast, only $13 billion has been allocated for Community Development Block Grant programs, which aid state and local governments. The 2002 Bush budget relied heavily on cutting Medicaid, the Children's Health Insurance Program, and Social Security. Budget cuts such as these jeopardize safe and accessible health care for low income and older women.

7. Curtailed freedom of movement

Restrictions on freedom of movement during wartime include curfews, roadblocks, checkpoints, and closure of geographical areas. These restrictions are enforced by the military. They can have a devastating effect on women, barring their access to food, work, and medical attention. The right to move freely is particularly critical for sick, injured, or pregnant women. The Israeli human rights organization, B'Tselem, has documented at least 35 Palestinian deaths since 2000 due to restriction of movement imposed by the Israeli military. Eighteen of the dead were women and girls. Eight were infants who died because their mothers were detained at checkpoints while in labor.

8. Increased racism and anti-immigrant bigotry

In addition to restricting freedom of movement, militarism increases racism and anti-immigrant activity. It is no secret that militarism fosters racial prejudice in the name of national security. From Japanese-American internment camps during World War II to the current Immigration and Naturalization Service detentions of Middle Eastern men, war reinforces racial stereotypes and discrimination. Today, racial profiling of Arab-Americans, Muslims, and South Asians is defended as necessary for homeland security. In the wake of 9/11, anti-immigrant groups stepped up their activism. Organizations such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform, Negative Population Growth, and the Carrying Capacity Network have advocated for programs, public policy, and legislation that target women of color and immigrant women for population control--which has often taken the form of involuntary sterilizations, welfare family caps, and/or risky long-term contraceptives. The anti-immigration attitudes associated with militarism pose huge threats and challenges to immigrant women, particularly to those seeking asylum or fleeing domestic violence. According to Amnesty International, women seeking asylum in the US (some of whom are pregnant) have reported being detained without adequate food or medical care and undergoing strip searches, as well as physical, verbal, and sexual assaults.

9. Silencing of women's voices

During war, the first voices to be eliminated from the public sphere are those belonging to women. According to a study conducted by Fairness and Accuracy in Media, in the month following 9/11, women were outnumbered by ten to one on the op-ed pages of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and USA Today. Similarly, said media critic Jennifer Pozner in Ms. (December 2001/January 2002), while Bush's 90 percent approval rate was consistently hailed, a poll finding that 48 percent of women supported limited or no military action was severely under-reported.

10. Diminished support for social concerns

Militarism shifts the nation's priorities toward increased support for military and defense programs. This undercuts issues like gender equity and reproductive choice, discouraging citizens from considering such social concerns when voting. Candidates with the staunchest support for war are usually the most adamantly opposed to reproductive freedom; anti-choice politicians win wartime elections and continually draft and introduce anti-choice legislation. Under the Bush administration and the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, several anti-choice, anti-child initiatives have passed in the House including the Child Custody Protection Act, the Abortion Non-Discrimination Act, and the Unborn Victims of Violence Act. These initiatives do the opposite of what their names suggest: They create a wedge in the public mind, pitting the rights and health of mothers against those of their children. Rather than support children, these policies put them and their families in danger, but through strategic messaging and appropriation of human rights and anti-violence language, the administration has garnered significant media and public support for them.

In November 2003, Bush also signed a ban on so-called partial-birth abortion procedures (more accurately described as late-term abortions). The ban is defined so broadly that it could outlaw abortions in the second trimester, and it makes no exceptions for the health of the woman. Bush signed this ban despite that fact that the Supreme Court had found similar bans to be unconstitutional. Bush has also consistently supported judges who are opposed to reproductive freedom.

War kills innocent people. Civilian casualties occur, no matter how "smart" the bombs or how much peanut butter is dropped from the sky. In Afghanistan, among other things, the US bombed a Red Cross building, a UN building, and a wedding. The Gulf War, though hailed as a conflict with so few casualties that the first Bush administration described it as "surgical," resulted in the destruction of all Iraqi irrigation systems, 52 health centers, 28 hospitals, 56 mosques, and over 600 schools. Due to the extensive damage to water and sewer systems, more than 250,000 people (most of them children under the age of five) died within a few months.. After the Gulf War, the US led the United Nations in imposing sanctions on Iraq. The International Action Center estimates that, as a result, 1.5 million Iraqi people died, over half of them children under the age of five. United For Peace and Justice reports that as of July 2004, between 9,451 and 11,333 civilians and 981 military personal have died since the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Why is this amount of death and destruction considered "very clean" and continually justified? That these atrocities are authorized and committed by US leaders who claim to be "pro-life" is more telling than any claim that military action is a liberating force for women. Indeed, from occupation to domestic army-base life, every aspect of militarism is an affront to the reproductive health and well-being of women and their families around the world.

This is a revised version of an article originally published by the Population and Development Program at Hampshire College as "Ten Reasons Why Militarism is Bad for Reproductive Freedom." This article and a poster based on this publication is available from the Population and Development Program. Please contact the program at (413) 559-5506, rgluckman@hampshire.edu, http://clpp.hampshire.edu/population_and_development.htm.

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Arundhati Roy Photo by Pradip Krishen

Connecting the dots
An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire by Arundhati Roy. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2004, 200 pp., $12.00 paper.
The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile: Conversations with Arundhati Roy. Interviews by David Barsamian. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2004, 178 pp., $16.00 paper.

Reviewed by Kerryn Higgs

FOR AUSTRALIANS LIKE ME, India's proximity and its colonization by the British lend a certain familiarity--India appeared in our history lessons at school, though it was framed by the heroism of the imperial adventure, with the British Raj cast as the bearer of "progress." For many in the US, India is probably a vaguer concept--fabulous fabrics, swamis and ashrams, Gandhi, and, these days, a call to the bank or the cable company, which might easily connect you to Bangalore or Bombay. For the interested westerner, the work of Arundhati Roy offers a highly accessible introduction to the complex mosaic of Indian politics and society and India's relationship to the rest of the world.

Winner of the Booker Prize for her novel The God of Small Things (1997), Roy is not an expatriate like many other celebrated writers from the non-western world. She lives not in London or New York but in New Delhi. She hastens to tell us this is not a decision rooted in patriotism. But it is one that secures her a perspective from outside the centers of global power and gives her an ear to "the murmuring in the servants' quarters... the words of the worlds' subjects."

Roy's two new books differ in scope and content. Her fourth book of nonfiction, An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire, collects seven pieces, six of them originally given as talks and speeches--for the BBC, at the World Social Forum, at the Riverside Church in New York, and at several educational venues in India. The seventh, which gives the book its title, was published in the London Guardian in April 2003, as the British besieged Basra and the US advanced on Baghdad. The war on Iraq is this book's center of gravity.

The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile contains four interviews with Roy conducted by alternative radio producer and journalist David Barsamian, three of them before 2003. Their discussions range across the key passions revealed in all Roy's nonfiction: the analysis of neoliberalism as a new wave of colonial dispossession; the rise of Hindu extremism under the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP--recently defeated in the May 2004 election); and the ways in which dissent battles these forces and still survives. The interviews also include engrossing biographical anecdotes and reflections on writing itself, which are not prominent in the essays.

An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire opens with "Peace is War--The Collateral Damage of Breaking News," a talk Roy first gave in New Delhi at a workshop on the media, just days before the Iraq invasion began. It weaves together two themes: First, the fact, rarely noticed in the West, that "for most people in the world, peace is war--a daily battle against hunger, thirst, and the violation of their dignity…[an] endless crisis of normality." Second, the way the mass media, "an elaborate boardroom bulletin that reports and analyzes the concerns of powerful people," has perfected the production of crisis as spectacle, "unmoor[ed] from the particularities of the history, the geography and the culture that produced it."

The Guardian piece, "The Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire," follows. In February 2003, Hans Blix and his team of inspectors were crushing and burning Iraq's Al Samoud-2 missiles (said to exceed the permitted range by a mere 20 miles) at a time when a US attack seemed imminent. The conventional Iraqi arsenal and Iraq's infrastructure had already been wrecked over the past decade. "Operation Iraqi Freedom?" writes Roy. "I don't think so. It's more like Operation Let's Run a Race, but First Let Me Break Your Knees… an act of cowardice… unrivaled in history."

Roy zeroes in on the misconceived beliefs of ordinary Americans about Iraq's fictitious involvement in the 9/11 attacks. It is anybody's guess, she concedes, how much of the fabrication was and is believed by the US troops; she quotes one private who says he's there "to take revenge on Iraq." Most of the world, she says, sees the war as racist, engendering racism in everybody: "America is a nation of morons, a nation of murderers, they say (with the same carelessness with which they say, 'All Muslims are terrorists')."

Vilified in the past for being anti-American and anti-West, Roy finds herself remembering the massive worldwide demonstrations of February 2003 and defending US citizens from "the tidal wave of hatred… the absurd inability to separate governments from people." It is an inability, she points out in "Instant Mix Imperial Democracy," that is shared by bin Laden and Bush, who might as well be working as a team, and for whom collective guilt and collective punishment are accepted concepts.

"Instant Mix" was first delivered on May 13, 2003, at New York's Riverside Church as an acceptance speech for the 2002 Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom. Roy introduces herself as "a subject of the American Empire, a slave who presumes to criticize her king." This wide-ranging speech is structured around a narrative of the march to war. She describes the doctrine of the pre-emptive strike as "The United States Can Do Whatever the Hell It Wants, And That's Official." She provides a brief history of US relations with Baghdad, from the CIA-orchestrated coup in 1963, which installed the Ba'ath regime in the first place (with the CIA supplying lists of leftists and intellectuals for slaughter, just as in Indonesia in 1965), to the continuing friendly support given to Saddam when he assumed leadership of the Ba'ath regime--money, arms, components for bioweapons.

Roy pinpoints the many facets of US hypocrisy, such as Bush's harping on the theme "Saddam gassed his own people," when the gassing of Kurds--and Iranian soldiers--presented no apparent difficulty for the US government at that time. She slams the "use of the urgent morality of the present to obscure the diabolical sins of the past and the malevolent plans for the future."

She brings a novelist's language to bear on the multiple fictions and deceits deployed to justify the war and rarely misses her mark--whether it's Rumsfeld's remark about freedom being untidy ("Did anybody know that Donald Rumsfeld was an anarchist?") or the ripple of laughter in the pressroom when he marvelled at the multiplicity of vases carted off during the looting of the National Museum ("Would it be all right for the poor of Harlem to loot the Metropolitan Museum? Would it be greeted with similar mirth?"). Or the rhetoric of "free speech" in a situation where corporations control almost all the space available for public speech and, in the case of Italy, the prime minister personally controls about 90 percent of the TV market. Or the greatest democracy on earth, with its president appointed by the Supreme Court. Or the rhetoric of bringing democracy to the benighted world. Turkey was rapped over the knuckles for acting in line with its own population, 90 per cent of whom opposed the war, while other countries like England and Spain were congratulated for ignoring their people. Thus, democracy, the "modern world's holy cow," is in profound crisis: "a hollow word, a pretty shell, emptied of all content and meaning… the Empire's euphemism for neo-liberal capitalism."

IN THE REMAINING PIECES, Roy probes the relationship between the war and established practices of globalization: "[T]he New Imperialist doesn't need to trudge around the tropics risking malaria or diarrhea or early death. New Imperialism can be conducted on e-mail." In India, the process is going smoothly, without military attack:

[A] relatively small section of people become immensely wealthy by appropriating everything--land, rivers, water, freedom, security, dignity, fundamental rights including the right to protest--from a large group of people… [W]ater, electricity, transport, telecommunications, health services, education, natural resources--assets that the Indian State is supposed to hold in trust for the people it represents, assets that have been built and maintained with public money over decades--are sold by the State to private corporations. In India seventy percent of the population--seven hundred million people--live in rural areas. Their livelihoods depend on access to natural resources. To snatch these away and sell them as stock to private companies is beginning to result in dispossession and impoverishment on a barbaric scale. (pp. 103-104)

Roy's latest essays shine with the layered subtlety and acerbic wit of a novelist's prose and a metaphorical flair rarely encountered in conjunction with political thinking. Take this extract from "Do Turkeys Enjoy Thanksgiving?":

The tradition of 'turkey pardoning' in the U.S. is a wonderful allegory for New Racism. Every year since 1947, the National Turkey Federation presents the U.S. President with a turkey for Thanksgiving. Every year, in a show of ceremonial magnanimity, the President spares that particular bird (and eats another one). After receiving the presidential pardon, the Chosen One is sent to Frying Pan Park in Virginia to live out its natural life. The rest of the fifty million turkeys raised for Thanksgiving are slaughtered and eaten on Thanksgiving Day….

That's how New Racism in the corporate era works. A few carefully bred turkeys--the local elites of various countries, a community of wealthy immigrants, investment bankers, the occasional Colin Powell, or Condoleezza Rice, some singers, some writers (like myself)--are given absolution and a pass to Frying Pan Park. The remaining millions lose their jobs, are evicted from their homes, have their water and electricity connections cut, and die of AIDS. Basically they're for the pot. But the Fortunate Fowls in Frying Pan Park are doing fine. Some of them even work for the IMF and the WTO--so who can accuse those organisations of being anti-turkey? Some serve as board members on the Turkey Choosing Committee--so who can say that turkeys are against Thanksgiving? They participate in it! Who can say the poor are anti-corporate globalisation? There's a stampede to get into Frying Pan Park. (pp. 87-88)

Versions of most of the pieces in An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire can be found online, a reflection of Roy's non-proprietorial view of her work. Aiming at getting the stories out, she naturally launches her writing into the world, just as she shared her Lannan Prize with some 50 progressive organizations and community groups throughout India. Though many readers will have seen some of the pieces before, the collection has its own coherence and deserves a place on the bookshelf.

IN 2001, ROY PROPOSED a piercing metaphor for globalization in "Shall We Leave It To The Experts?" (available online and in Power Politics [2001]):

It's as though the people of India have been rounded up and loaded onto two convoys of trucks (a huge big one and a tiny little one) that have set off resolutely in opposite directions. The tiny convoy is on its way to a glittering destination somewhere near the top of the world. The other convoy just melts into the darkness and disappears. (pp. 2-3)

In the first interview with Barsamian in The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile, Roy describes the laborers in her street in Delhi, digging trenches for fiber optic cables by candlelight. The "two convoys" are obvious in Delhi. The poor are "packed like lice into every crevice of the city," while the beneficiaries of the information revolution and the free market drive ever-sleeker cars and build ever-higher gates. When Barsamian asks if the passion for social justice evident in her recent work means that she has joined the large convoy, she is clear that she has not and cannot--education and privilege determine where a person rides. What she can do, from the small convoy, is speak.

The interviews also include Roy's fascinating reflections on her life and her writing. She grew up with her mother in Ayemenen, the village in Kerala where The God of Small Things was set. Not unlike Rahel's mother in the novel, who also transgressed and also detested the smug ordered world of the village around her, Roy's mother married for love--a Bengali Hindu outside her own Syrian Orthodox community--and then divorced. Her mother's advice to the young Roy: "Whatever you do, don't get married."

Growing up in a little village in Kerala was a nightmare for me. All I wanted to do was escape… In Kerala, everyone has what is called a tharavaad, your ancestral home. If you don't have a father, you don't have a tharavaad. You're a person without an address. (p. 5)

She lacked the security implicit in having a father's protection, but the trade-off was a wonderful lack of indoctrination. "I had none of the conditioning that a normal middle-class Indian girl would have… no caste, no religion, no supervision." All this gave her "a vantage point… not rural, not urban, not completely 'traditional', not wholeheartedly 'modern'… without the blinkered single-mindedness of the… oppressed, nor the flabby self-indulgence of the well-to-do." In the wake of her novel's success, she says, people in Ayemenen want to claim her as "their woman" while ignoring the fact that the book damns the "intrinsic callous brutality" of their society.

While those who know her from The God of Small Things might imagine her political interests as new, Roy tells Barsamian she has been writing essays since she was 21. In any case, she says, all of her writing shares the aim of telling a story, building bridges between the small realities of people's lives and the immense social forces that affect them

Fiction is the truest thing… Today's [s]pecialists and experts end up severing the links between things, isolating them, actually creating barriers that prevent ordinary people from understanding what's happening to them. I try to do the opposite: to create links, to join the dots, to tell the politics like a story, to communicate it, to make it real. (p. 10)

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The unmothering
Let Me Go by Helga Schneider. New York: Walker & Company, 2004, 172 pp., $19.00 hardcover.

Reviewed by Lisa London

 

Helga Schneider at age 4, in 1941. From Let Me Go.

A YOUNG WIFE AND MOTHER OF TWO children becomes involved in local political activities. She hires a babysitter so she can attend weekly organizing meetings. She gets her mother-in-law to stay with the children so she can leave for one-, two-, three-day trainings. She participates in local organizing drives and hands out literature, and slowly her participation is recognized and rewarded--she moves up in stature and rank. She assumes more duties and is invited to meetings with higher level officials. But her mother-in-law complains of the time she spends away from the children; her husband demands she stop her activities; and the neighbors talk: "Why isn't she caring for the children? What kind of mother is she?"

Twenty-one-year-old Traudi Schneider not only withstood this criticism from family and friends, she seemed to invite it with her regular rejection of her mothering duties. Finally, in an act of social rebellion, she left her husband and children to enter fully a political life. To reject the role of mother and move on, to "un-mother" oneself: Few women have the inner resources to carry out such an act.

But Let Me Go is not a story about an independent mother and her long-lost daughter. It was 1941 when Traudi Schneider left her husband and two children. She did so to become a proud member of the Nazi SS. In fact, Traudi Schneider was so enthusiastic about her work that she was elected to guard the inmates at the death camps: "Only the hardest, the thickest-skinned were destined for those. That's why you were chosen for Birkenau, the most selective camp of all," she was told. Traudi Schneider never recanted or apologized for her barbarous participation in torture and murder. In fact, those continue to be the proudest days of her life.

In Let Me Go, Traudi's daughter Helga Schneider travels to the bedside of her now 90-year-old mother and transcribes in minute detail the conversation that ensued. A document of the Shoah, the Holocaust, Let Me Go details Traudi's experiences as a female guard. In her daughter's record of their conversation, Traudi recalls numerous horrifying details about her desensitizing training, witnessing torture, and enforcing camp rules: "'I had orders to treat [the prisoners] with extreme harshness,' she crows, 'and I made them spit blood.'" She goes on to describe the medical experiments carried out on Jewish prisoners. Helga takes pain to fully document her mother's role in the camps, which she presents without adornment or apology.

AND YET FOR ALL OF ITS historical weight and importance, this is a deeply personal, heartbreaking story. Although the mother who left and the daughter who was abandoned are continually subsumed by the large, brutal reality at the heart of the last century, their story is always there, pulsing just under the radar. While an apparently straightforward statement like, "Yes, mother, I know, I've read your file," refers to Helga Schneider researching historical documents on Traudi Schneider's crimes against humanity, it also refers to a daughter learning about acts of brutality committed by her mother. The two women share the same blood, the same family history; despite what Helga might wish, she has a connection to the woman who committed these acts. "What a sad couple we are, mother, and what an absurd bond connects us," says Helga.

When Helga meets her mother, she feels not anger but horror, not need but desperation, not understanding but bewilderment. Her experience is not within the normal human emotional range; she can't quite find language to describe it. Twice she has to leave her mother's side because of panic attacks.

The emotional layers are thick and complicated. When Helga first met her mother, Traudi presented her with her SS uniform and wanted her to try it on. She tried to give her daughter jewelry stolen from Jewish prisoners in the camps. When Helga realizes that her mother is completely blind to her horror, she feels some pity for her. But ultimately Helga is unable to reconcile her lifelong desire to meet, understand, and connect with the woman who gave her life with her mother's continued anti-Semitism and outright reverence for Hitler's doctrines.

As a reader, I'm drawn to history books. But I'm one of those for whom history must have a face. As a feminist, I seek out woman's voices, especially in those places where I feel I've heard the men's chorus for far too long. Women's experience of the Holocaust is one of those places where the historical and literary records are still overwhelmingly male. For this reason, I was drawn to this haunting and difficult book. What adult daughter doesn't struggle with the emotional inheritance left to her by her mother? As a historian uncovering the full weight and reality of the past, Helga Schneider excels. As a daughter yearning to connect with her mother, she must, if she has a heart, necessarily fail. Each time Helga uncovers one of Traudi's acts of brutality, she pulls further away, as though, if she can collect enough evidence, she too will be able to "un-mother" herself.

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The "Newspeak" of our time
The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media That Love Them by Amy Goodman with David Goodman. Hyperion: New York, 2004, 342 pp., $21.95 hardcover.

Reviewed by Harriet Malinowitz

"IF THERE IS HOPE," Winston Smith, the protagonist of George Orwell's 1984, wrote in his illicit diary, "it lies in the proles." The proletarians were uneducated and the latent power of their massive numbers unrealized. Yet only such a force, reasoned Winston, could overthrow the ruling party, which controlled the citizens of Oceania with systematic disinformation, unremitting surveillance, and the pervasive threat of violence and imprisonment. Still, wrote Winston, one fundamental conundrum had yet to be worked out: "Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious."

Fast forward to the Orwellian United States of 2004--where public relations specialists craft the terms that make perpetual and spatially limitless war acceptable; yesterday's news goes down the memory hole as today's reality is spun (we never armed Saddam; we never trained and funded the Taliban); hidden video cameras record daily life; and ever-shifting icons of evil flash across our television screens to incite mass rage.

If Winston were here now, it's likely that this obdurate believer in verifiable reality and logical reasoning would write in his diary: If there is hope, it lies in independent media. Back in 1949--the same year 1984 was published--Pacifica Radio, pioneer of listener-sponsored, corporate-unencumbered, dissenting-voiced media, was founded in California. It grew to five stations (in Berkeley, Los Angeles, New York, Washington, and Houston), and in 1985, an avid listener named Amy Goodman started working with WBAI, the Pacifica station in New York. Gaining experience, she became an editor, and then news director and cohost of a morning show called Wake-up Call.

In 1996, the Pacifica stations launched Democracy Now!, originally conceived as a daily election show in the months leading up to what became Bill Clinton's second presidential victory. With Goodman as host, it pushed beyond the usual horse race reported by mass media to critical investigations--of why, for example, most people in the US don't vote. It was so successful that Pacifica decided to continue it in a more general magazine format after the election. With television cameras added in 2001, it has become what I (with all due apologies to Ringling Brothers) think of as The Greatest Show on Earth. Goodman officiates as acuminous ringmaster to an array of voices and ideas that are usually fenced out of mass earshot--from public intellectuals, activists, artists, and global notables like Jean-Bertrand Aristide and the Dalai Lama (who are often inaccurately represented in the mainstream media), to imprisoned political figures, military families, war veterans, and local eyewitnesses in East Timor, Jenin, Falluja, Port-au-Prince, and Sudan.

In 2004, Democracy Now! is the largest public media collaboration in the country, as Goodman mentions frequently. It broadcasts on community radio and public access television stations, Dish Network's Free Speech TV, and via video and audio streaming from www.democracynow.org. (The website has an easily searchable archive, freely available to all: "Our motto is, 'Steal this story, please!'") It is increasingly carried by NPR stations, often in response to local demand. According to Goodman, on many of these stations, "Democracy Now! is beating Morning Edition and All Things Considered hands down on fundraising."

The Exception to the Rulers, a natural outgrowth of the show (as much as it is an introduction to the show's ethos), is written in the first person and details Goodman's experiences and observations about media and politics as culled from her remarkable career before and during the course of DN. (David Goodman is her brother, a print journalist who collaborated in shaping the material into a format more within his bailiwick than hers.) The first six chapters read like a synthesis of numerous Democracy Now! features, exposing the government/corporate synergy that has long guided US foreign policy and the domestic crackdown on civil liberties since 9/11.

Some of this information will be familiar to those who have followed alternative online news compilations such as Truthout (www.truthout.com) and Common Dreams Newsletter (www.commondreams.org), or even the op-ed pages of many newspapers, over the past few years. But other parts will be shocking reading for most Americans--particularly Goodman's narratives of her trips to Nigeria and East Timor, where she reported on atrocities that were largely ignored in the mainstream US press. Why the news "whiteout"? Because these atrocities were perpetrated with aid from a succession of US administrations, both Democratic and Republican, whose commitment to the cheap production of oil and sneakers easily overran considerations of human rights and life. In the interstices between the horrors glint little jewels of cheerier news. We find, for instance, that Condi Rice, the national security adviser and Bush confidante, has a cousin named Connie Rice--a fervent civil rights attorney who spoke out against the round-ups of Muslims in the US. (Is there a remake of The Patty Duke Show in here somewhere?)

AFTER THE FIRST THIRD of the book, Goodman becomes thoroughly attentive to her ultimate message, which is about the messenger. She explicates the wily arts that corporate media use to make Americans stupid, in media critic Mark Crispin Miller's phrase, and lays out a blueprint for an independent media that will instead make us smart.

Goodman asks, "If we had state media in the United States, how would it be any different?" She suggests that the US media slavishly adheres to a code of self-censorship, requiring little government interference because it is so handsomely rewarded for acting as the public-relations wing of the administration. She illustrates this from many angles, but perhaps most pungently in the chapter "Psyops Comes Home":

Psychological warfare--psyops, to those in the business--was something that the United States used against its enemies....Psyops is the military way of winning the hearts and minds of a population....The 1948 Smith-Mundt Act prohibited the domestic dissemination of U.S. government propaganda. The reasoning behind Smith-Mundt was that "Congress wanted to be certain that a U.S. government agency could not brainwash citizens as Hitler had in Germany." (pp. 251-252)

But by 2003, she reports, there was evidence that "[t]he Bush Administration had turned psychological operations against Americans." The large number of Americans who believed, in mid-2003, that Iraq was directly involved in the 9/11 attacks, and that weapons of mass destruction had been found, indicated that "we had become victims of our own propaganda." This is possible, says Goodman, in large part because of "the symbiotic relationship between the corporate media and the officials they cover." She details cases in which psyops personnel freely worked on news programs at CNN and NPR: "Army psyops is forbidden by law from manipulating US media. So what happens when psyops troops are the media?"

During the Iraq war, the 700 reporters officially "embedded" with US troops presented what Goodman calls "the fake war--the one Americans saw on TV":

The embeds were supposedly there to offer frontline coverage. But what can you cover from the turret of a tank? You can cover what it feels like to shoot people. Then you can get the gunner's response and the commander's spin. That is one narrow slice of the war experience....But what about the victims? Shouldn't reporters be embedded in Iraqi communities and hospitals? (p. 173)

Meanwhile, international journalists covering "the real war"--the one in which "8,000 to 10,000 Iraqi civilians [were] killed and 20,000 injured"--quickly came to realize that they, too, were military targets, as an American fighter jet scored a direct missile hit on Al Jazeera's Baghdad bureau, and a US tank opened fire on the Palestine Hotel, where many unembedded reporters from various countries were staying. Some American journalists who expressed opposition to the war were simply fired by their media organizations.

Agony, mutilation, and corpses were absent from the coverage Americans saw--"for taste purposes," as a PBS news executive quoted by Goodman explains. But Goodman is familiar with American "Newspeak": "Censorship goes by many names in the United States. Taste is one of the favorite euphemisms. Sensibility is another." She makes it clear, too, that the orchestrated fiction of a "clean war" didn't originate with 21st-century Bushian extremism; she examines the history in a stunning chapter called "Hiroshima Cover-up: How the War Department's Timesman Won a Pulitzer." General Douglas MacArthur kept the press out of southern Japan after the atomic bombs dropped, disseminating the official story via the US authorities and the military censors: Radiation sickness didn't exist; civilian casualties were minimal. An independent Australian journalist broke the ban, horrifying the world and setting into motion a vast US cover-up. Authorities declared the reporter a dupe of Japanese propaganda, seized his camera and photos, and issued a "corrective" press release.

They also brought reporters to New Mexico to "prove" to them that radioactive contamination didn't cause lingering harm. One of them was William L. Laurence, a science reporter who, Goodman says,

was not only receiving a salary from The New York Times. He was also on the payroll of the War Department....His dual status as government agent and reporter earned him an unprecedented level of access to American military officials--he even flew in the squadron of planes that dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki. (pp. 297-298)

Laurence's series of articles for the Times glorifying the nuclear program began with a front-page story called "U.S. Atom Bomb Site Belies Tokyo Tales," and offered his "expert" assurance that "the Japanese described 'symptoms' that did not ring true." For this, he won a Pulitzer Prize. Goodman raises questions that should be obvious, yet remain astoundingly absent from most public discussion of the "free press":

[W]hat of the fact that the Pulitzer Board knowingly awarded the top journalism prize to the Pentagon's paid publicist, who denied the suffering of millions of Japanese? Do the Pulitzer Board and the Times approve of "uncritical parroting of propaganda"--as long as it is from the United States? (p. 301)

FAST FORWARD AGAIN from the 1940s to the present, to evaluate whether the newspaper of record has tightened its standards. It's hard to pinpoint one particular brazen individual (there were several) who left The New York Times with no choice but to issue, in May, its awkward and half-baked (though still dumbfounding) mea culpa about its fatally mendacious Iraq war coverage. But Goodman's blistering chapter, "Lies of Our Times" (Exception was released in April) certainly didn't minimize the pressure. Goodman particularly skewers the influential Times national security correspondent, Judith Miller, who in the months before she was embedded in an army unit "was filling the Times' front pages with unchallenged government propaganda....Miller's lies provided the pretext for war. Her lies cost lives." But Goodman also makes it clear that Miller couldn't have acted alone:

This was the classic disinformation two-step: the White House leaks a lie to the Times, the newspaper publishes it as a startling exposé, and then the White House conveniently masquerades behind the credibility of the Times. (p. 139)

Though many would call Goodman's a "left" or "liberal" agenda, there's neither an O'Reilly nor a Franken factor to her. She is effective in part because she helps to dissolve old and increasingly useless left/right dichotomies. Her pursuit is not of a utopian ideology, but of those corny propositions called truth and reality, in all their glorious distinction from lies and propaganda. If she can't escape the label "progressive" it's only because--to borrow a remark by Daniel Okrent, the conscientious new public editor of The New York Times, quoted in The New Yorker--"the pursuit of balance can create imbalance, because sometimes something is true."

The really radical thing about Goodman is that she takes conventional journalistic principles seriously: Listen to more than one side of a story; do all you can to provide accurate information; don't be bought; check your facts (and those proclaimed by your sources, even if your source is the president of the United States); report on what's not already being reported on; be a watchdog rather than a mouthpiece for those in power; let diverse voices and real debate be heard. Then, the people can decide what they think.

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Amy Goodman Photo by Robert Kim

The sword and the shield
A conversation with independent journalist Amy Goodman

By Harriet Malinowitz

Harriet Malinowitz: Why did you write The Exception to the Rulers?

Amy Goodman: I think the media is everyone's, or should be. The corporate media is using the public airwaves, and they have a responsibility to bring out the full diversity of views. We are now in an age of the "Clear Channeling" of America--we're undergoing the largest media consolidation this country has ever seen. But people are hungry for, and open to, ideas. What is often called the "mainstream media" is a misnomer. It's not mainstream. It's an extreme media that beats the drums for war. There is a vibrant independent media movement in this country that needs to be shored up and built. And the book may introduce people to independent media who haven't experienced it, and let them know where it is. I also want to encourage people to challenge the corporate media, because they're using our national treasure--the public airwaves.

HM: You wrote this book with your brother. How did your family background influence your work?

AG: When I was growing up, my dad ran a task force in our community to integrate the schools. And he met tremendous public opposition. These were neighborhood schools, so they were de facto segregated. My dad persisted in the face of death threats and a thousand people screaming in an auditorium or a cafeteria--I probably internalized that emotionally even more than I understood what was going on. I saw what it meant to stand up for something you believed in, in order to ultimately make your community a better place. My mother taught women's literature and history at local community colleges, and I saw what a difference she made in the lives of her students. Often her students had come there for continuing ed credits--they were truck drivers and cops, local guys who saved everything to go to community college, bringing their wives to the class. My mother gave them an entrée into another universe. That's what I think media should do--give people an opportunity to experience other worlds, to know that there are many different possibilities out there.

My grandparents all came over from Russia and Poland, fleeing persecution. I was shaped by the Holocaust and losing many members of my family, learning about that. My grandfather and my great-grandfather were Orthodox rabbis. I believe we each have to find our place in the world where we feel comfortable. We must do what we can in that niche where we feel we can reach out from. It doesn't matter if you work in the system or outside the system. What matters is that you feel you can make a difference.

HM: What prompted you to become involved with independent media?

AG: I did my college thesis in medical anthropology on a drug called Depo Provera, a contraceptive. At the time, it wasn't approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), but it was being distributed in more than 80 countries, even though it caused cancer in beagles and monkeys. In Atlanta, Georgia, 10,000 black women at the second largest charity hospital in the country were injected with it, without knowing that it hadn't been approved by the FDA. When I defended it, one of my professors took the thesis, before I even started, and said, "Miss Goodman, you know that this is not a thesis in anthropology. Anthropology is to be a participant-observer in another person's culture. This is looking at your own culture." I said, "Well, Dr. So-and-So, to me, this is anthropology. My thesis is about white male corporate culture, and science as it's practiced in this country. It's not a culture that I'm part of, so it's very legitimate for me to look at it as an outsider."

After college, I worked with a colleague to turn my thesis into a series of articles for the Multinational Monitor called "The Case Against Depo Provera." As I was doing that, I turned on the radio to keep me company, and I heard this remarkable station--WBAI. All the rawness of New York City, authentic voices not trying to sell you anything. It was not slick. All the accents of New York, the beauty and the horror of New York, all conveyed. I was very taken with it.

HM: You've certainly been in some highly dangerous situations--I'm thinking especially of East Timor and Nigeria. How do you manage not to let fear get in your way?

AG: Well, I'm glad you didn't say "How do you manage not to be afraid?" I'm afraid all the time. It is a matter of not letting it get in your way. And fear is good. It makes you more careful. People here at home feel constrained just by peer pressure. You just have to tunnel through that, challenge yourself like you challenge other people.

HM: How would you say the visibility and impact of DN have grown since its inception?

AG: We get millions of hits on our website. People who are interviewed on our show are often called by other news outlets. Often we're not credited. Sometimes we do a show, the international media picks it up, and then the US press picks it up from the international media. I call it "trickle-up journalism."

HM: From your extensive travels around the country, have you gained any insights about Americans?

AG: I would say that Americans are a compassionate people, and when we learn something, we care. But we have to know. I just gave the graduation address at Hampshire College, a very interesting college, which was set up in 1970 as an experiment in alternative education. The motto of the school is, "To know is not enough." We have to go beyond just having the knowledge; we have to do something. But we start with information. That's where the media has fallen so far short--in not providing us that information.

In the old Soviet Union, everyone knew you had to read between the lines of Pravda. It's a state organ, it's not going to tell you the truth. But in this country, we have the illusion, with so many channels and so much press, that we can get our information not between the lines, but from the lines. The great journalist I. F. Stone said to his journalism students, "If there are two words you must remember, they're 'Governments lie.'" The media has done us such a disservice in this country in not acting as a filter, not analyzing. Instead, it has acted as a microphone for those in power.

At Hampshire College, I talked to the students about the danger of seeing the world through a corporate lens and about what the US represents to the rest of the world. We ended the book with this as well. The world sees the US as two things--the sword and the shield. The US government has all too often supported and provided weapons to repressive regimes--the sword. People in other countries know this. But despite this, they have great faith in Americans as a people. We come from the most powerful country on earth. Every little act we engage in has a huge ripple effect around the world-the shield.

In 1991, I covered East Timor, one of the worst genocides of the 20th century, with Allan Nairn, a great investigative journalist. People there would take us to their backyards. They'd look around furtively, to make sure military intelligence was not around. Then they would dig up the ground, and they would pull out a piece of paper, an article written perhaps three years before, that they had saved. And they would ask us, "Did this resolution pass in the US Congress?" It was astounding. The article might be about some nonbinding resolution that we hardly thought about--or that most Americans didn't know about--but people in East Timor were keeping tabs. It so mattered. Allan and I went through this horrific experience, November 12, 1991, when thousands of Timorese were protesting the killings. The Indonesian military marched up with US-made M-16s. They opened fire, and gunned down more than 270 of the protesters, and beat us up--they fractured Allan's skull. They put us before a firing squad but ultimately decided not to kill us--I believe because we were from the same country that had supplied their weapons. They would have had to pay a price for killing us that they'd never have to pay for killing the Timorese.

When the Timorese saw us, Allan covered in blood, they started to cry. We were not in worse shape than they were. But they cried because of what we represented to them as Americans--the sword and the shield. On that day the shield was bloody, and it deepened their despair. But ten years later, they voted for their freedom, and they celebrated their independence. We were there again in Timor when 100,000 people watched as the flag of the Democratic Republic of East Timor was unfurled. This nation of survivors had resisted and won--with the help of people of every political stripe around the world, who called their legislators, who protested. But they had to know about it first.

I always end every talk as I did at Hampshire, saying, "We have a decision every day--whether we're journalists or students, or teachers, doctors, nurses, artists, activists, employed or unemployed--and that is whether to represent the sword or the shield."

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Where are the girls?
Girls have become indispensable members of many armies, in Africa and around the world. Their treatment is often brutal and their reintegration into the community difficult.

Reviewed by Dyan Mazurana

"I JOINED THE REBELS of my own free will." Antonia M. was in the seventh grade when she joined the armed opposition forces of Renamo in 1989, during the height of Mozambique's devastating civil war (1976-1992). As a bright young woman who wanted to go further in her studies, Antonia was blocked by governmental discrimination against her ethnic group, none of whom gained admittance into the few schools of higher education. On the promise of a scholarship to study abroad, Antonia joined Renamo, a rebel force known for abduction, mutilation, brutality, and murder of civilians. When she arrived at the rebel camp, she was told that no scholarship would be forthcoming--but neither could she return home. She was now one of the rebels.

After six months of military and weapons training, Antonia spent the next two years with Renamo, eventually becoming one of the top intelligence officers at age 15, reporting directly to the rebels' president. Antonia was one of approximately 100 students under the age of 17 who formed the core of Renamo's intelligence community in their stronghold of central Mozambique. Some of these children joined freely, but most were abducted. Antonia saw her former classmates among them.

Renamo turned to students because most of its core commanders and the president were uneducated and illiterate. Youth like Antonia could read and write in Portuguese and English, and they monitored the newspapers and radios to gather information about the government's movements and assess international opinion about the war. They infiltrated communities within government-held territories to carry out reconnaissance. And when Renamo was launching a large fighting operation in the center of the country, where she was stationed, Antonia would be called upon to fight.

Even as an intelligence agent, Antonia joined the other women and girls who were Renamo captives to collect wood and water and to wash clothes in the morning. Older women would look after younger ones, teaching them how to carry their loads, cook, and care for their bodies during menstruation. These women cared for each other during pregnancy and birth, with the older women teaching the young mothers how to breastfeed and raise newborns. Those in more privileged positions within the force, such as those working in intelligence, had other captive women and girls look after their children when they were at work. Among the less privileged were rural girls who were abducted to be the forced "wives" of the soldiers, to grow and prepare food for the forces, and to train as fighters and porters.

Antonia is not an anomaly. Both historically and today, girls are present in fighting forces. Between the years 1990 and 2004, girls were part of fighting forces in 56 countries and were involved in armed conflicts in 38 of these countries. Girls enter fighting forces by a variety of avenues, including active recruitment, volunteering, and abduction. As Antonia's story illustrates, these entry methods may overlap.

Along with researcher Susan McKay, I studied girls in armies in Uganda, Sierra Leone, and Mozambique. Our report, Where Are the Girls? shows how girls like Antonia serve in numerous, overlapping roles. They are combat soldiers, including some who fight in the front lines. They train others for combat and in laying ambushes and landmines. They participate in suicide and bombing missions and are forced to be human mine sweeps and human shields in front of adult male combatants. They provide slave labor; gather, prepare and cook food; care for captive children, including those born into captivity; and haul food, medicines, weapons, drugs, diamonds, and loot. Girls are intelligence officers, spies, informants, messengers. And they are often forced by their captors to provide sexual services and sexual labor.

"I WAS THE ONLY SURVIVOR of my village after the rebels attacked. I joined [the militia] the next day because otherwise no one would have survived from my village," recounted Agnes O. Agnes was 15 years old when she joined the Gbethis, one of Sierra Leone's largest militias, composed of people of all ages who fought to protect their communities from attacks during Sierra Leone's 1991-2002 civil war. Supposedly, these groups were all male and relied on magical powers and traditional hunting weapons. Combining skill and valor, they at times thwarted rebel offensives.

Official claims that the pro-government militias were composed only of males are inaccurate. Where Are the Girls? provides among the first documentation that girls like Agnes were fully initiated members of militias in Sierra Leone and were included in all ceremonies, receiving amulets and scarification. Indeed, women and girls were integral to the militias. Some were herbalists, supplying fighters with magic potions to insure their invulnerability, while others were fighters and messengers. Others were used to transport food and other provisions to fighters in the bush. They served as initiators, commanders, frontline fighters, spiritual leaders, medics, spies, and cooks.

High-ranking government officials within Sierra Leone went to great lengths to insure that the presence of children, especially girls, within the pro-government militias was kept secret. As we discovered in our study, Sierra Leone, like other governments, highlighted the use of child soldiers by armed opposition groups but attempted to conceal its own use of children in the armed forces.

Agnes assisted the herbalists and cooks, who played central roles, since they were responsible for daily infusions of herbs into the meals of the militia members, who believed the herbs protected them from injury and death. Agnes was also forced to partake in violent rituals with the Gbethis. These included draining and drinking the blood of civilians who had been captured and executed by the adult males in the group. Such ceremonies were at times carried out before military offensives to ensure that everyone in the group had a strong and fearless heart.

No longer a Gbethis since the war ended in 2002, Agnes still bears the detailed scarring along her arms and back that marks her membership. Because she is a girl, she was blocked from entering government programs for former fighters-like the overwhelming majority of the girls in the countries we studied. However, while the government may refuse to acknowledge her, because Agnes is scarred and has remained in the area she fought to defend, members of her community know that she was a Gbethis. Unlike the boys, who continue their magical training and gather publicly to sing their warsongs, Agnes keeps to herself. The villagers are wary of her and keep their distance because of her perceived powers and her violation of her society's gender norms during her time in the fighting forces.

As Agnes' experiences show, even among groups that deny their existence, girls are central to fighting forces. Official denial often effectively blocks girls from participating in programs established to help fighters transition back into civilian life. At the same time, when the conflict ends, girls' participation in the fighting force may stigmatize them, even among the very communities they sought to defend. Consequently, girls returning to civilian communities face enormous challenges.

GRACE A. WAS CAPTURED by the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) at the age of eight. The LRA is an armed rebel force made up of captive children that has been fighting the Ugandan government since 1987. Because the LRA cannot get fighters to join their ranks, they fill them through abduction. The LRA forces new abductees to participate in the torture or murder of members of their community or family, simultaneously indoctrinating them and attempting to curb their desire to escape.

Like thousands of children before her, Grace was taken to the LRA's bases in southern Sudan, where she underwent a brutal military training. Unless a girl was pregnant or had a small child, she was forced to join the other captive boys and girls early in the morning, singing and dancing at a frantic pace until noon. Around noon, the children were then forced to run for hours under the heat of the sun. Those who dropped from exhaustion were left to die. Those left standing would gather in groups of seven to ten and share one cup of water and one cup of beans. They would forage for the rest of their food. This training went on for months, and many died. The survivors were given weapons training and sent to loot civilian villages in southern Sudan and northern Uganda and fight the various armed forces in both countries. Grace was a survivor.

In 2003, Grace's unit came under attack in southern Sudan. During the bombardment, Grace escaped the LRA, only to find herself alone in the arid lands of southern Sudan. For the next month, she traveled cautiously to avoid the various groups fighting in the area as she made her way back to northern Uganda. She slept in trees to avoid the wild animals that were tracking her and that on some nights would circle below her. To drink, she pressed water from mud and licked the morning dew from the grasses. She ate leaves and wild foods. She was 10 years old.

We spoke with Grace several days after she had crossed into northern Uganda and reached the relative safety of a reception center for formerly abducted children. There, a nurse cared for her wounds; she received food and clean water; and she waited to hear if any of her family members would come to claim her. In many ways, Grace was fortunate. Unlike some of the other recently escaped girls, she did not return with a child born in captivity or having served as the captive "wife" of a rebel commander. Due to the stigma of having a baby from the rebels, potential health problems, lack of education and training, and poverty, these girl-mothers and their children are at the highest risk of any group of children associated with the fighting forces.

Antonia, Agnes, and Grace are three among the hundreds of girls whom we talked with during the three years we spent researching and writing Where Are the Girls? Girls have suffered severe violations of their human rights at the hands of various fighting forces. At the same time, they show tremendous ability to plan and cope. But their coping strategies and resilience must not be mistaken for empowerment.

Girls clearly articulate what is empowering to them. Education for themselves and their children nearly always tops the list. This is followed by the desire for the love and support of their families and communities. We found that community healing and reintegration rituals are often gender specific, and that it was often community women who organized to work with these girls. Girls in general, and girl-mothers in particular, are also in great need of health care, particularly reproductive health care and treatment of sexually transmitted diseases contracted while in the fighting forces.

Where Are the Girls? demonstrates that taking seriously girls' roles and experiences in fighting forces leads to a deeper understanding of what it takes to create and maintain the fighting forces in current armed conflicts. In the conflicts and armed forces studied, girls' labor was not incidental, but rather was the foundation upon which the forces relied. This was particularly true for rebel forces, since they could not rely on state support. This means that as feminists we should be highly skeptical when we hear girls and women referred to as "camp followers." Government and military officials lump girls into this category when they want to avoid taking responsibility for them.

Girls who have served in fighting forces have often been simultaneously victims and perpetrators, and it is inaccurate to think of them only as victims, "sexual slaves," or "captive wives." While it is true that these girls were victimized, many are moving on with their lives. Through their experiences, they have learned both positive and negative lessons that they can selectively return to as they confront future challenges. Rather than assuming that they are "healing a victim," with a notion of regaining a norm that can never be regained, those who wish to help these girls must take a holistic approach. They must take into account the gendered physical, psychological, spiritual, and social aspects of healing and reintegration. The girls have a place and a future in the community they have returned to, and they can make meaningful contributions to it.

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Where Are the Girls? Girls in Fighting Forces in Northern Uganda, Sierra Leone, and Mozambique: Their Lives During and After War by Susan McKay and Dyan Mazurana. Montreal, PQ: International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development, 2004, 145 pp., $15.00 (Canadian).

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Shaping the past
Naked Barbies, Warrior Joes, & Other Forms of Visible Gender by Jeanne Banks Thomas. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2003, 240 pp., $39.95 hardcover, $21.95 paper.
Restoring Women's History Through Historic Preservation edited by Gail Lee Dubrow and Jennifer B. Goodman. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003, 464 pp., $41.95 hardcover.
Monuments to the Lost Cause edited by Cynthia Mills and Pamela H. Simpson. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2003, 296 pp., $45.00 hardcover.

Reviewed by Martha Norkunas

THESE THREE VERY DIFFERENT but related texts weave together ideas about the politics of representation and preservation. Based on years of experience in the field of public history, the authors in one collection of essays argue that women must be fully integrated into the presentation of the past. A second set of essays focuses on the shaping of Southern public memory after the Civil War. The third text looks at the representation of women's bodies on the landscape and in popular culture. All consider the complicated relationships between gender, race, and class.

Monuments to the Lost Cause chronicles the role that elite, white women played in the creation and preservation of a conception of the Confederacy known as the Lost Cause. Many assumed leadership positions in the public domain for the first time, exercising their considerable power through club activities. As W. Fitzhugh Brundage comments in his essay "Woman's Hand and Heart and Deathless Love," the goal of revering white heroes and all things Confederate "was as safe and unimpeachable a ground for women's activism as was conceivable in the New South." Brundage says that in the 19th century,

[a]rmed with the privileges of whiteness and affluence, commemorative activists employed the full array of cultural resources at their disposal--scholarly monographs, mawkish stage dramas, romantic poetry, atmospheric local color fiction, heroic public sculpture, and pious public commemorations--to insinuate their memory into the public realm. (p. 70).

Detail of frieze showing "black mammy," Confederate Monument at Arlington National Cemetery. From Monuments to the Lost Cause.

In "The Confederate Monument at Arlington: A Token of Reconcilation," Karen Cox describes the powerful role the United Daughters of the Confederacy played in building a monument at Arlington National Cemetery, which was unveiled on June 4, 1914. By placing images of Confederate heroes on the national landscape, the Daughters were able to preserve their vision of the Old South in the creation of the New.

Catherine Bishir reiterates this point in "'A Strong Force of the Ladies': Women, Politics and Confederate Memorial Associations in Nineteenth-Century Raleigh." "Ladies Memorial Associations," she says, "had a defining role in shaping public memory of the Lost Cause, creating a widely accepted meaning of the Confederacy and contributing to national reunification largely on southern terms." They lobbied to have Civil War monuments memorialize their particular version of history. While they honed their executive and persuasive skills, they also relied on feminine deference and promoted the traditional gender division of labor.

Kathleen Clark points out that it was also ladies' memorial associations that attempted to excise the history of slavery as a cause of the Civil War with stories that insisted on the Southern soldier's manly defense of life, honor, and the happiness of women and children.

 

"Another Suggestion for the 'Mammy' Monument," Baltimore Afro-American, March 30, 1923. From Monuments to the Lost Cause.

The women of the UDC and the memorial associations, although activists, were not feminists, Pamela Simpson emphasizes. "What they defended was not their right to challenge authority but instead the conservative position we have come to know as the Lost Cause." Yet as Cynthia Mills notes, the role of women was changing, and that change was negotiated in the commemorative context. In "Gratitude and Gender Wars, Monuments to Women of the Sixties," Mills recounts the early 20th century effort by Southern male veterans to build monuments to the women of the Confederacy. While the men's avowed goal was to express gratitude to Southern women for their valor, self-sacrifice, and strength of character during the war years, Mills argues that one of their main purposes was to defend Southern men against Northern accusations of emasculation and to assert white male honor by erasing the stain of rape. The seven monuments to women erected between 1912 and 1926 enshrined elite, white, self-denying, submissive wives. Protecting the pure, white woman was a defining ideal of the Confederacy. Yet the monuments were at odds both with younger women's new vision of their role in society and with older women's recollections of antebellum life and the reality of war.

THE 21 ESSAYS in Restoring Women's History through Historic Preservation also describe women's historic preservation efforts throughout the United States, though the essays are less overtly political. Women played critical leadership roles in identifying sites for preservation and raising funds. Barbara Howe describes the link between cults of domesticity and the patriotic fervor that drove women's preservation efforts in the 19th century. Shaun Eyring describes the important work done by garden clubs, including early efforts to establish the National Park Service, state parks, and highway beautification projects, and later to conserve vernacular landscapes. Fath Davis Ruffins write of efforts to preserve sites associated with African-American women.

Most of the essays are concerned with rethinking the interpretation at historic sites and museums so that women's roles become central to the story. At the heart of the book is the argument that placing women's experiences at the core of the historical record will redefine the basic narrative of American history. Editor Gail Dubrow begins the book with a strong overview essay that summarizes key issues in the field. In a later essay Dubrow explores the identification and preservation of gay and lesbian sites, as well as the reinterpretation of sites, many literary, to include information on the writers' homosexuality. Dolores Hayden's "Power of Place" project in Los Angeles marked places of meaning on the landscape for women and ethnic minorities. The reinterpretation of the Martin Van Buren National Historic Site to include women who worked as domestic servants also encompassed gender and class. Writer Patricia West explains,

Examining how house servants lived is an ideal way of demonstrating some of the important changes in American political culture across Van Buren's lifetime, most significantly mass immigration, a feature of American history which has shaped its politics as well as its social structure in fundamental ways. (p. 90)

Page Putnam Miller writes about initiatives within the National Park Service. The Women's History Landmark Project resulted in the designation of approximately 40 National Historic Landmarks associated with women, doubling the proportion of women's National Historic Landmarks from two to four percent. Miller rightly argues that women's history sites require definitions different from those associated with male achievement, and thus that we need a fundamental restructuring of the criteria for national designation.

The closing article, written by Heather Huyck, identifies issues common to many of the essays. She urges curators of historic sites to ask where women were, what experiences they had, what difference they made, and what implications their experiences have for today. Women's unpaid labor, she points out, is a fundamental part of the economy and can be interpreted at every site. She also argues for surveys in each state on women's historic resources and the establishment of a national collaborative of women's historic sites. (That last was achieved with the founding of the National Collaborative for Women's History Sites, ncwhs.oah.org/.) The full inclusion of women's experiences into the nation's past has the potential to rewrite history for everyone. "There is an abundance of women's history if we know where to look, if we successfully argue that such history is so critical to understanding the past that it cannot be ignored by anybody."

JEANNE BANKS THOMAS' Naked Barbies, Warrior Joes, & Other Forms of Visible Gender looks at cemetery statues, yard art, and Barbie and GI Joe dolls, and at the stories people tell about those objects, to think about how Americans construct gender in everyday life. "When examined as a group, the three types of gendered material indicate that the most pervasive gendered and sculptural figures are presented in a fashion approximately two hundred years behind current discourse on gender and equality."

 

GI Joes. From Naked Barbies, Warrior Joes, & Other Forms of Visible Gender.

Like others who have written about public images of women, Thomas notes the pattern of representing Woman as an aesthetic ideal rather than women as individuals. The two stock female figures in our culture are the loving, nurturing, comforting mother or the young, beautiful, erotic woman. The young, eroticized figures are subjects of the male gaze; men act as observers or sexualized witnesses. The female figures are desirable but do not desire. Male images are, interestingly, rigidly essentialized. Men are portrayed in action, battle, or business. They are less frequently sexualized, rarely associated with the domestic or intimate, and less often depicted as parents. They are almost always presented as powerful. Banks chronicles these gender stereotypes in cemeteries, in people's yards, and in a history of two modern dolls. She traces their antecedents to 19th-century fine art traditions and examines how little gendered imagery changed when mass production made statuary affordable and widely available.

Thomas reflects on the representation of race in yard art and dolls. Stereotypes are made manifest in the statuary. In yard art, African-American males were often portrayed as jockeys, symbols of the docile, faithful servant. "Owning" an image of an African-American male vitiated the threat the black male posed to whites.

However, Thomas discovered that these stereotypes are satirized in folklore. In the narratives she collected we see how people understand, critique, and subvert gender images. She found that women have access to more roles than men in both visual and verbal traditions. The Barbie doll, for example, has assumed a culturally complex role. Adults and children use Barbie as a vehicle to address key issues in their lives, creating S&M Barbie, Hacker Barbie, Menopause Barbie. Near the end of the book, Thomas spends some time thinking about the rigid gender roles constructed for GI Joe and the lack of parody of these roles in play behavior.

These three books shed light on the creation and maintenance of public memory, which is a powerful force in understanding the past and in creating contemporary public policy. Women have been erased from the past at many historic sites, and they have suffered the ongoing misrepresentation of their bodies as erotic statues or grieving madonnas. But women have also entered the public arena as powerful creators and keepers of public memory. In the American South, some have enshrined elite, white versions of history. Contemporary activists are creating a different vision of the past. They are altering the stories told at historic sites, in museums, and on the landscape to include gender, class, and race, and in so doing they are working to fundamentally transform the definition of history.

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Hidden soldiers
Women with jobs in the defense industry must keep the nature of their work secret--from friends, family, and even themselves.

Reviewed by Robin Riley

OVER THE LAST 50 YEARS, the US has been obsessed with continual preparation for war. The primary beneficiaries of this obsession have been private defense contractors, who rely on US government for their economic well being. While men hold the majority of the prestigious and high paying jobs in defense corporations, these industries could not exist without women's labor. One of the best-kept secrets of militarism is its reliance, not just on particular constructions of femininity and masculinity, but also on the labor--public and private, visible and invisible--of women.

Between 1997 and 2000 I conducted 40 in-depth interviews with women who are associated by work or through their spouses or partners with private defense corporations in two small cities in upstate New York. I also visited one of the worksites and examined industry documents. When I began my study I assumed that I would find "manly" men and "girly" women. Instead, the women's stories revealed that although militarism is indeed dependent upon the cooperation and participation of both men and women, this doesn't always work in the simple, traditional ways that one might imagine.

Militarism influences how people express femininity and masculinity through a complex process that includes the seepage of militarism beyond the fences surrounding military bases or the walls of defense factories into daily life and cultural assumptions. For those working in the defense industry, secrecy and silences divide intimate partners from one another, children from their parents, individuals from neighborhoods and communities, and worker from worker. The participants in my study articulated the ways in which an ideology of good citizenship and patriotism guarantees that people will comply with militarization by participating in defense work. Patriotic ideology also insures that workers won't break the silences.

Audrey (all interviewee names are pseudonyms) described the work she and other women did as "housekeeping… finance--that kind of thing is what we basically do." She and other women often referred to their work as unimportant, calling their participation in the construction of weaponry "housekeeping," "exporting," or "counting." How does "finance" become "housekeeping"? Perhaps "finance" when performed by men has a special meaning, additional importance. The discourse of defense, in which, at the strategy level, human beings are "collateral damage," and at the factory level, buildings are called "the house," encourages these women to use domestic language, such as referring to making cabinets. Is this way of talking Audrey's attempt to distance herself from war? What Audrey calls "housekeeping" is vital to the operations of defense corporations--but renaming it removes its lethality. Performing work that consists mainly of dealing with formulas or anonymous parts helps the women to stay disconnected from the true nature of their work.

I asked another study participant, Angel, whether ever she thinks of herself as building weapons. "No," she said, "I can't say that I do. No, nothing like that has ever crossed my mind." The "hidden soldiers" in my study don't acknowledge their contribution to war and see themselves as peace-loving women. Teresa explained:

We make radar. It's not like we're making machine guns, which obviously some plants do.... I guess I've never thought about it as a war product other than as a defense product. It was like working anywhere else. It wasn't a big intricate part of... where we were going to drop bombs on somebody. It was basically just office work.

AN ETHIC OF SILENCE permeates these women's lives. It starts from the prohibition against discussing the work even among colleagues or with partners and families. Karen, who works for the same defense contractor as her husband, explained:

You want to talk about what you do but you just didn't dare really say too much…. It's been tough…being a wife of someone who works there... For years I could never go into the part of the building where he works. I didn't have the [security] clearance…. Other husbands and wives come home and talk about what happened at the office, and you just couldn't. If there were things that were not going well, and he was really upset, I somehow had to deal with this--not knowing why--and that has been difficult over the years. To know that he can't tell certain things to me…. It's just a certain part of his world that I'll never know about…. You always feel like there's this wall. But that's just the nature of what he's doing, and he can't jeopardize his job.

When I asked the women about their work, many joked, "If I tell you, I have to kill you." The joke seems to be part of a discourse that aims to make silence acceptable and normative.

"You know, everyone tells me this joke," I commented to one woman. She explained,

It's not a joke if you work there. I don't mean I would kill somebody. I mean that's what they're telling you. When you get debriefed in the military, and you know some top secret stuff, you just can't tell anybody…. There is a seriousness--if you really care about the national defense you'll abide by [secrecy rules], and you have to trust that they're doing it in your best interest. You have to trust somewhere.

Of course, defense corporation administrators also overtly reinforce the prohibition against talking about work. At one of the companies I studied, as you walk through the building, you see signs reminding employees about security clearance classifications. Other signs exhort employees to "Protect Classified and Sensitive Information" and warn that "Others Are Interested in Your Work."

The secrecy reinforces the gendered division of labor inside the defense industry as well as the feminization of home responsibilities in the families of employees. These women must struggle with the contradiction between their actual practice of gender and their loyalty to traditional roles. Said Audrey,

I've resented it sometimes, you know. My husband at one point was doing a lot of traveling. As a result of that, the kids were always left with me. And I think it kind of stunned him at one point when he came back to realize that I could pay the bills, I could mow the lawn, I could fix the lawnmower…. When he came back, he felt left out because I had taken on the full responsibility of running this home by myself. The kids didn't go to Dad, they always came to me.

The perpetuation of militarism relies on the keeping of this secret. Strong, self-sufficient women capable of self-care and self-protection do not require male attention or approval. It is therefore important for militarized women to deny their contributions and capabilities in favor of patriarchal constructions that keep them subordinate. Men and women who realized how false these traditional understandings are, and how dependent militarism really is on women, would be less likely to accept the kinds of sacrifices on the part of individuals, families, and society that militarism demands.

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Germaine Tillion. From Germaine Tillion, une femme-mémoir by Nancy Wood.

A life of resistance
Ethnographer and concentration camp survivor Germaine Tillion is little known in the US but a hero in France for her lifelong opposition to violence and torture.

Reviewed by Suzanne Ruta

FRENCH ETHNOGRAPHER GERMAINE TILLION, now aged 96, was in Algiers when the Nazis invaded France in June 1940. She had just completed five-and-a-half years of intensive research among Berber seminomads in the Aures mountains, at the edge of the Sahara. She had been so busy compiling their complete genealogies that she had lost track of Europe. There had been no newspapers in the remote mountains and no mail delivery.

She wept with Algerian friends over the French defeat, and immediately returned to Paris and joined the resistance--or rather, created it from scratch with her friends from the Musée de l'Homme, France's anthropology museum. Betrayed, arrested, and condemned to death on five separate counts by a German military tribunal, she was deported to Ravensbrück, a women's concentration camp in the chilly swamps of eastern Germany, in October 1943.

Upon her arrival in Ravensbrück, she was stripped of the big blue suitcase containing her ethnographic notes and thesis drafts. They would never resurface. But she already had a new subject in mind. In March 1944, while the SS woman guard of her work detail went off to chat up a boyfriend, leaving some friendly Polish prisoners in charge, Tillion seized the opportunity to lecture a group of newly arrived French prisoners, including her mother, on the operations of the "slow extermination camp." Ravensbrück, she explained, was a hub from which women prisoners were rented out, in groups of 50 or 100, to German factories, at so much per day, minus the minimal cost to their jailers of food, clothing, and shelter. As long as the women could work, they were shunted about from one camp to another, depending on where the need for labor arose. Once they had lost the capacity to generate income for the system, they became candidates for extermination. Tillon provided precise figures on costs and benefits and named the chief beneficiary, Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS. She later learned that the very parcel of real estate, dismal swampland, on which the camp stood, belonged to Himmler. Before Hannah Arendt wrote about the "banality of evil" in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1964), Tillion had dismissed the SS as "paltry shopkeepers of death." Perhaps her years with hospitable subsistence farmers in Algeria helped her to spot the perverted frugality, or avarice, that permeated the Nazi system.

Tillon meant her lecture to comfort the newly arrived prisoners:

To understand a mechanism that is crushing you, to dismantle its inner workings, to examine in full detail an apparently hopeless situation, is a powerful source of coolheadedness, serenity and moral force. Nothing is more terrifying than the absurd. Chasing away the ghosts, I was aware I had helped lift the spirits of the best of us, at least somewhat. Beyond that, there was our indignation, our passionate will that our outrage survive us, that such a mass of crimes not become a "perfect crime." Yet it was already clear that few of us would survive. The thought of the truth that must be preserved , obsessed me from the day I arrived at Ravensbrück. And I was not the only one so obsessed. How can one say that there is no truth, when it is loved so universally and passionately? (Ravensbrück, p. 217)

The long engagement with the hateful subject, Tillon biographer Nancy Wood suggests, was Tillion's work of mourning for her mother. Ravensbrück, the text, as elegy? But the book also delivers her message to the world:

Kill off the "superfluous"? There are those who dream of doing just that now on every continent. There is no safe recipe to keep us from this crime, except perhaps the good habit of abolishing secrecy everywhere and the complementary habit of believing that every bit of truth deserves to be verified and told. (p. 21)

In the camp, Tillion's brand of scholarship took courage. Her status as a prisoner was of the lowest: NN for Nacht und Nebel, "destined to disappear without a trace." She was not allowed to leave the camp for factory work elsewhere (the lucky break that saved Primo Levi's life at Auschwitz). She deliberately cultivated the position of Verfügbar, or "available," for recruitment to the most backbreaking and grubby work, the repaving of camp roads. With the complicity of other prisoners, she managed to go snooping about the camp and to write poetry, producing a comic opera pastiche of Jaques Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld titled Available in Hell, full of jokey rhymed couplets about starvation and beatings and the longing for a nice clean death at home in bed.

She chronicled the courage of her Polish friends, the lapins, or guinea pigs, students from Lublin, who were subjected at Ravensbrück to hideous medical experiments that left them with mutilated legs. Banding together, the lapins resisted a second round of experiments. Other prisoners were so determined that these young women should survive to testify against Nazi doctors that they offered to take their places on lists of those slated for extermination. When Tillion left the camp in April 1945--one of 300 French prisoners rescued by Count Bernadotte, head of the Swedish Red Cross, who saved 20,000 concentration camp inmates in the last days of the war through secret negotiations with Himmler--she had a roll of film in her pocket, taken with a stolen camera, documenting the state of the Polish girls' legs.

Women had it easier in the camps, Tillon believed. Men might be more proficient technically, which could be useful. But as the rations were the same for both sexes, women, who could survive on less food, suffered less hunger. In the men's camp, ordinary criminals, rapists, and murderers made life miserable for those interned on political or racial grounds, something the women were spared. Tillon adds, "It also seems to me that their personal relations were rougher, even the politicals had trouble getting along. Like us, they protected the youngest and saved some who had fallen ill… It seems to me that in the women's camps, friendly support was more consistent, substantive and widespread."

Maia Wechsler's splendid 2000 documentary about Tillion and her comrades, Sisters in Resistance, illustrates this "friendly support." Annie Postel-Vinay, who was 20 when she arrived in Ravensbrück, recalls that Tillion, who was 36, insisted on giving her part of her daily bread ration. "Not every day," Tillion objects.

"Yes, every day. You said, 'You're young, you'll live and marry and have ten children.'"

Whether for lack of inclination or of time, Tillion herself never married, nor did she have children.

On VE Day, May 8, 1945, Tillion was convalescing in Sweden, in mourning for her mother, who had been murdered in the Ravensbrück gas chamber two months earlier. Ever the assiduous ethnographer, Tillion was busy establishing, not genealogies, alas, but lists of the Frenchwomen who perished in the camps--"their names their only tombs," she said. She missed the big news from Algeria, the uprising in Setif that left 102 Europeans dead--and between 5,000 and 15,000 Algerians, in horrific reprisals involving the French navy and air force and frenzied colonialist militias.

SHE WAS STILL HUNTING for untapped Gestapo archives when the Algerian war began in November 1954. At once she appealed to then Minister of the Interior François Mitterand to send her on a mission to her beloved Aures Mountains, to act as an advocate for the civilian population of what was already a war zone. On her way into the hills she heard the story of the Setif massacres and realized she was in for the long haul. The dirty war in Algeria lasted eight years, longer than World War II. By the end, French resistance veterans were badly split. Some condoned the torture of Algerians with Gestapo-like techniques and worse. Others, like Tillion, denounced the torture.

World War II was a necessary war, Tillon believed; but the war in Algeria was a stupid war.

In Algeria, the Realities (1978), Tillion registers her horror at the change she saw in Algeria on her return. The very benefits of French rule--vaccinations, antibiotics, roads--had caused what she called a "brutal demographic surge" that destroyed traditional peasant societies, driving thousands into the big cities, where nothing awaited them but a miserable half-life in the slums. Clochardization, Tillon calls this process, or "reduction to the state of beggarhood." It is the crime of the 20th century, she says, like colonialism in the 19th century or slavery in the 18th. No wonder people in other parts of the world hate the West and its modernity, she says, when it wreaks havoc with their lives. No wonder they turn to "unconditional revolt."

Published in 1957, when the war was at its most nasty, her analysis struck some as impossibly lofty. What about racism, her Algerian critics demanded, what about colonial exploitation and injustice and land grabs? (Today we'd ask, what about NAFTA, the IMF, and the WTO?) And yet she was onto something. Algeria, population 30 million, hasn't yet begun to solve the problems Tillion identified in this book, the work of a clear-eyed pessimist with a firm grasp of the law of unintended consequences and the need for universal education.

Tillion practiced what she preached. In 1955 she founded a network of Centres Sociaux, social centers, that offered literacy, job training, and health care to the destitute in the shantytowns of Algiers. Funded by the French Ministry of Education, the Centres were staffed by Europeans and Muslims working in enlightened cooperation. The centers continued to function until the end of the war. But they were too little, too late. By 1957, the battle of Algiers pitted FLN (National Liberation Front) urban terrorists against the French army. Thousands of Muslims were arrested and tortured. Europeans who associated with Muslims were automatically suspect. Sixteen employees of the Centres Sociaux were arrested; most were tortured. Outraged, Tillion marshaled a committee of former deportees like herself to visit internment camps in Algeria in June 1957. Their conclusion: "At this moment in Algeria, Nazi practices are employed."

Algiers was locked in a cycle of torture and terror. In Complementary Enemies (1961) (recently reissued under the catchier title, Deux Terrorismes Face á Face--Two Terrorisms Face to Face). Tillion tells how she tried to break the cycle apart. In July 1957, an old friend came to her Algiers hotel and announced, "They want to see you." Three women awaited her with tea and pastry in a cool house in the Casbah. Suddenly two men appeared, armed with machine guns and revolvers and perhaps grenades: Saadi Yacef, the commander of the FLN in Algiers, the man who decided when and where the bombs would go off, and his crony Ali la Pointe, known assassin. Tillion recalls, "I felt the tragedy of their precarious lives, hunted night and day by thousands of soldiers in a space the size of a Paris park. And everything I had seen that month and everything I had lived twelve years earlier was like an enormous lead weight crushing down on me." Tillon, the 50-year-old resistance leader, carried moral authority with these men and women young enough to be her children.

Yacef, sensing her sympathy, said, "You see that we are not criminals and murderers."

She retorted, "You are murderers."

He was struck speechless for a moment, as if suffocating. Then his eyes filled with tears and he said to her, "Yes, Madame Tillion, we are murderers." He exclaimed, "Oh those bombs, I'd like to see them all at the bottom of the sea." Overcome, he added, "It's our only way of making ourselves heard."

To which she replied, "Innocent blood calls for vengeance." She wondered if this hunted leader, whom everyone looked up to, was going through some kind of moral crisis long in the making.

Suddenly he said, "I promise you that from now on no one will harm the civilian population."

She told him she could promise nothing in return, and they talked for five hours, the conversation returning again and again to the link between the terrorist attacks on the one hand and the executions on the other. They reached no agreement. Tillion had little confidence in French policy in Algeria, but dared to ask, "And if there are more executions, will you keep your promise?"

"In that case, I can't answer for anything," Yacef said, with great vehemence.

Jean Lacouture, Tillion's friend for 40 years and her biographer, finds the heart of the Algerian tragedy in this encounter, which was a turning point in Tillion's own understanding of the war.

BACK IN PARIS, Tillon made the rounds of all her old friends from the resistance, who were now in government. But her efforts to stop the executions failed. The military in Algeria wasn't taking orders from Paris. The executions continued; the bombings too, but no one was hurt. Yacef kept his word to that extent. Then in September, he was betrayed by a friend, arrested, and jailed, and the lethal bombings resumed. Tillion made the rounds again in Paris until she found a general who commanded respect in Algiers. He ordered the prisoner transferred to the civilian authorities pending trial. Thus, she saved Yacef from torture and worse. He lived to make the film The Battle of Algiers with Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo--which has been enjoying a revival lately in Paris, New York--and at the Pentagon, where they're studying techniques of urban warfare. Blessed are the peacemakers--who are omitted from the movie version of the war.

The Algerian war ended in 1962, in chaos, rancor, and disgrace. One million Europeans fled to France. Algeria gained its independence and fell under an authoritarian military regime from which it has not yet recovered. In the final chaos, six French and Algerian directors of the Centres Sociaux, dedicated educators, visionaries, were shot in cold blood by the Algérie Française cabal. Tillion wrote an outraged obituary.

During the battle of Algiers, a young FLN combatant named Louisette Ighilahriz, was shot, captured, brutally tortured, and finally rescued by a French physician, who sent her to the civilian prison where her parents were detained. In 1961, still a prisoner of the French state, she was interned on Corsica, where she scrubbed hotel floors to earn her keep. Tillion went to Corsica that summer on a mission of mercy. She and a friend took Ighilahriz for a vacation. They slept under the stars, visited the beaches, laughed a great deal, and wouldn't let Ighilahriz obsess about her torture.

In 2000, Ighilahriz described her torture, including rape, on page one of the Paris daily, le Monde. Tillion and her friends petitioned the French state, demanding that it condemn and apologize for the atrocities committed in Algeria. So far, no response. In spring 2004, the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, and the petitioners renewed their claim, saying that "the punishments inflicted by US and British soldiers on Iraqi prisoners prove that resorting to force to settle a political problem invariably leads to the worst." They point out that France's condemnation of American behavior in Iraq would carry more weight if France would set an example "by rejecting these practices that stain the honor of an entire nation."

In Algeria, Tillion had met marabouts, men revered as sages, saints, or prophets who alone had the power to make peace between feuding clans. It's not a stretch to call Tillion a marabout; she almost admits as much herself in Ravensbrück: "By good luck, in Africa I had acquired a marabout manner" that impressed her SS guards, she says. In France today, she's revered as a sort of secular saint. A recent spate of biographies, anthologies, exhibitions, conferences, and films celebrate her life and works. But perhaps the best introduction in English to her supple wit and generous humanity is the feminist classic The Republic of Cousins: Women's Oppression in Mediterranean Society (1966)--intimate, erudite, and still appallingly up to date, 40 years after it first appeared.

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Memory and survival
After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust by Eva Hoffman. New York: Public Affairs, 2004, 301 pp., $25.00 hardcover.
The Jewish Women of Ravensbrück Concentration Camp by Rochelle G. Saidel. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004, 268 pp., $26.95 hardcover.

Reviewed by Rochelle G. Ruthchild

IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE HOLOCAUST, Jews, the People of the Book, have published countless works in an effort to make sense of the crimes perpetrated by those who began by burning books and ended by burning human beings, and of the courage of those who defied Nazi orders and rescued Jews. Both of these books add to our understanding of Hitler's war against the Jews and its aftermath.

Eva Hoffman is one of the most eloquent spokespeople of the second generation, the children of Holocaust survivors. Born in Poland immediately after World War II, Hoffman emigrated with her parents to Vancouver, Canada, in 1959. An accomplished writer and scholar, she has journeyed from the shadows of Poland's killing fields to the heights of the US and western European cultural establishment. She holds a Harvard PhD, has won a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship, and served for most of the 1980s as editor of The New York Times Book Review. Now residing in London, she lives the life of a cosmopolitan intellectual, jetting to visiting professorships and lectures in the US and to Holocaust events in Poland and relaxing by working her way through the classical piano repertoire she learned in her youth. In previous books, she explored her childhood and the shock of emigration, the history of a Polish shtetl, and the impact of the fall of Communism in eastern Europe. She has been compared to Primo Levi, whose searing descriptions of his Auschwitz experiences remain among the best of Holocaust memoirs.

In After Such Knowledge, Hoffman reflects on the Holocaust as a particular historical event and contemplates its various meanings in today's world. As she notes, despite common references to the "memory" of the Holocaust, subsequent generations have only indirect knowledge of it, although it irrevocably changed their lives.

Refuting the idea of collective guilt is a central theme of Hoffman's work. This is no doubt directly connected to the experience of her parents, who owed their survival to Christians who risked their lives to harbor them (in German-occupied Poland, where hiding Jews was punishable by death). Hoffman's belief in the courage and decency of ordinary people in the face of the venality, brutality, and racism too often displayed by Christians during the Holocaust serves as a counterpoint to Jan Gross' account of Polish savagery in the village of Jedwabne and Daniel Goldhagen's condemnation of German complicity in Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996).

As Hoffman observes, the "characteristic postwar mood" among survivors was a "mix of carpe diem energy and carpe diem cynicism," resulting in a fixed focus on the present. She devotes a section to the psychology of the survivors and to studies of their post-genocide trauma, which she distinguishes from the "tragedy" of others who experienced the horrors of war. She discusses the concept of the "memorial candle," the one child in each survivor's family chosen as "the instrument of commemoration, devotion, and mourning." And, as she has done in other writing, she emphasizes the significance of the emigration, the "uprooting [that was] an almost intrinsic part of the Holocaust's aftermath."

Hoffman covers a wide range of topics intelligently and well, including her own and others' second generation encounters with Christian Germans and Poles (she's in favor of these, but not as trite group therapy exercises); the replacement of immediate post-war amnesia about the Holocaust with the last decade's "near-obsessive interest"; morality, memory and memorials; survivors as "the Brahmins of the trauma elites"; the Holocaust as "an empty if universal symbol"; and the necessity of "separation and containment--the two great psychoanalytic goods," in coming to terms with "the most difficult of pasts." References to psychoanalysis and its concepts recur, but while her book is intensely personal, Hoffman maintains a certain psychic distance, revealing no specifics about her own encounters with psychoanalysis.

One of the most moving sections of the book recounts Hoffman's visit with her sister to Zalosce, the scene of their parent's Holocaust agony but also of their life before the war. They meet their parent's rescuers, the Hryczkos, now in their 80s, who retain vivid memories of them, and leave Hoffman puzzling about why her parents completely lost contact with their saviors.

Turning to the present, Hoffman condemns the rise of anti-Jewish racism on both the right and the left. Islamists proclaiming a new jihad against the West have adopted the worst canards of European anti-Semitism, making as their holy book The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the old forgery concocted by the Tsarist secret police at the end of the 19th century. It is ironic that this new virulent and deadly strain of the age-old hatred has emerged among people who consider themselves opponents of everything western and Christian. Turning her critical eye leftward, Hoffman also deplores the use of anti-Jewish slogans by some peace activists. She decries equally the militarism and anti-Muslim racism directed against Islam and Islamists in general.

Although Hoffman would probably reject this characterization, part of what made her earlier work stand out in the vast body of Holocaust literature, most of it written by men, was her recounting of her experiences as a girl and a woman. Her sensitivity to the life of the Other, the quintessential mark of the Jew in the diaspora, was deepened by her experience of the otherness of being female, albeit an extraordinarily highly achieving one. In Lost in Translation, for example, she explored emigration from the vantage point of a teenager learning to wear a miniskirt, a girl passing into western sexual objectification from the relatively sheltered Communist East. But in her current book, feminist and gender issues are addressed obliquely, dismissed, or simply not mentioned. Hoffman specifically condemns the feminist motto "the personal is political" as "much too glib," even as she uses her personal experience as the basis of her arguments about the Holocaust. She omits any mention of homosexuality, although gay men and lesbians were sent to the concentration camps; identification with the Holocaust is a prominent theme in the gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender world; and the second generation includes some outspoken gays and lesbians.

This is particularly perplexing because in general Hoffman is not shy about wrestling with complex contemporary issues, such as Polish complicity in the Holocaust or the recent genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda. She discusses not only the significance of Israel in the post-Holocaust world, but also Israeli invocation of the Holocaust to justify brutality against the Palestinians.

Ultimately, Hoffman advocates moving on, citing the Jewish tradition of grieving fully for the dead but placing a finite end to mourning. "Perhaps," she argues, "that moment has come, even as we must continue to ponder and confront the knowledge that the Shoah has brought us in perpetuity."

IN CONTRAST TO HOFFMAN, Rochelle G. Saidel focuses on the specifics of the Holocaust, on the forever incomplete work of preserving survivors' accounts. Although the Holocaust is the most documented genocide in history, each survivor's story is unique. Saidel's goal is to make visible a previously ignored aspect of women's Holocaust history: Jewish women's experience at the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Saidel, born in the United States in 1942, represents the generation untouched physically by the Holocaust but deeply identifying with those who experienced its horrors. She is the author of two other Holocaust-related books, one on the politics of the New York City Holocaust Museum and the other on the search for Nazi war criminals in the US.

Saidel first became involved in documenting the history of Ravensbrück after a 1980 visit to East Germany, when she was appalled to learn that, as was the practice in the Soviet bloc, Jews, who had comprised 20 percent of the camp population, were not represented in the various memorials at the site. Ravensbrück, the only Nazi concentration camp exclusively for women, was located 55 miles from Berlin. After the war, the area was part of the Communist German Democratic Republic; since 1990, it has become part of the reunified Germany. Between 1939 and 1945, 132,000 women from 23 countries were held in the camp. Besides Jews, Ravensbrück's population included political prisoners, Jehovah's Witnesses, and so-called "asocials," a category encompassing Gypsies, prostitutes, lesbians, and criminals. As was the practice in other camps, as the liberating armies neared, the relatively healthy, some 11,000, were driven from the camp by the Germans on a forced death march. Few survived. When the Soviet Army entered the camp on April 30, 1945, only 3,000 seriously ill women remained. One thousand were taken to Sweden as a result of an agreement between the Swedish Red Cross, Nazi SS head Heinrich Himmler, and a representative of the Swedish section of the World Jewish Congress.

Saidel has done a remarkable job of tracking down Ravensbrück survivors and recording their life stories. She lists 91 survivors by name as providing testimony used in her book; the total number she interviewed is even higher. Most live in the US, some in Canada and Australia; some remained in Europe and Russia.

Saidel addresses gender-related issues in a short chapter on "Gender and Women's Bodies." While not of the depth of Nehama Tec's pathbreaking Resilience and Courage: Women, Men, and the Holocaust (2003), Saidel's attention to gender strengthens the book and touches on some issues not discussed by Tec. Saidel, like Tec, emphasizes the patriarchal control reflected in the all-male Nazi power structure and in the Jewish councils set up by the Germans in occupied Europe. Women such as Gemma LaGuardia Gluck, New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia's sister, and relatives of Charles de Gaulle and Winston Churchill, survived because of their connection to powerful men; although a few others, like Olga Benário Prestes, deported from Brazil to Germany because her husband was a Communist Party leader, became particular targets because of such connections. Women could pass more easily as Aryans because they did not have the telltale sign of circumcision. But patriarchal assumptions, such as that women were primarily responsible for children, meant that at death camps like Auschwitz, women with children were sent directly to the gas chambers, while men were "saved" to be slave laborers.

Saidel addresses in detail issues of personal hygiene, nudity, and menstruation in the camps. She also discusses subjects about which survivors are reluctant to talk, such as rape and prostitution. Despite the Nazi prohibitions against "race defilement," the situation in the camps, where men wielded absolute power over women, was a natural setting for such abuse. Saidel recounts survivors' stories about drunken SS men roaring into women's barracks on their motorcycles for a rape spree as just one example of this classic violence against women.

Other Holocaust authors have discussed bonding between women and its importance in camp survival, but Saidel is among the very few to address directly the subject of lesbianism in the Nazi camps. She notes that Nazi law declared male homosexuality illegal; the pink triangle was solely for men. Female homosexuality was not mentioned in the Nazi-adopted, Bismarck-era law code criminalizing same sex relations. Lesbians confined to Ravensbrück wore a black triangle as "asocials." Saidel's section on lesbians is brief, as her sources are limited. She acknowledges that survivors' accounts of same-sex relationships are either absent or overwhelmingly negative, reflecting both lesbian invisibility and deep-seated prejudices.

In bringing to light the experiences of the women of Ravensbrück concentration camp, Saidel adds to our knowledge of Jewish survival in the genocidal conditions created by the Nazis. Her account is valuable for its documentation of the Holocaust and serves as a reminder--as we face US brutality against Iraqi prisoners, Al Qaeda beheadings, Sudanese slavery, Israeli assassinations, and Palestinian suicide bombers--of the ease with which humans create the Other and slide so swiftly into cruelty and killing. The Shoah survivors cried "Never Again!" but the human capacity for abuse, murder, and genocide appears never ending.

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The Coalition of Women for Peace demonstrates in Jerusalem in 2001 against the closure of the Occupied Territories. Photo by Gila Svirsky.

Organizing for peace in Israel
Why Israeli and Palestinian women want a peace movement of their own

Reviewed by Gila Svirsky

ON SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 4, 2001, 500 women gathered on the road opposite Israel's ministry of defense in Tel Aviv. We dressed in black and donned sandwich boards with the word "closure" painted across them in Hebrew, Arabic, and English. At a signal, a small group of us slowly moved into the road and sat down, forming a line clear across it and completely blocking all passage of cars. Within moments, another group of women joined us and stood with their placards facing the cars. We formed a solid block of "closure" signs that completely stopped traffic in both directions. This, we felt, might help the generals understand what a "closure" feels like--what it's like to be prevented from entering or leaving your city or village, a tactic frequently imposed on Palestinian towns. Within minutes, policemen roared up on motorcycles shrieking with sirens. They plowed in and grabbed women, with considerable force, and threw us into police vans. Other women replaced the first group on the road, until they were arrested, too. Seventeen of us spent the night in jail.

This action, carried out by the Coalition of Women for Peace, launched a dramatic and often daring series of direct-action events. Until the "closure" demonstration, the women's peace movement in Israel had mostly used vigils, dialogue, and joint activities with Palestinian women. Now it had added nonviolent resistance to its repertoire. In this article, I will look at the diverse strategies and ideological underpinnings of the women's peace movement in Israel. I believe that this analysis will make evident why we feel that we need a peace movement of our own.

The Coalition of Women for Peace is composed of nine different women's peace organizations in Israel, each with its own strategy and target audience (see sidebar). The Coalition speaks for the women's peace movement as a whole and has its own range of activities: It conducts mass rallies and outreach programs to Israeli populations who do not generally share our political views; it organizes bus tours of the Occupied Territories, urgent-action e-mail lists, and trilingual websites to mobilize international opinion; and participates in direct action in the Occupied Territories.

Much of the Coalition's nonviolent resistance has included acts declared illegal by the authorities, such as blocking the entrance to the ministry of defense. Some actions are carried out together with mixed-gender peace organizations, such as rebuilding Palestinian homes that the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) demolished or removing blockades and filling in trenches intended to enforce the closure. Women have blocked bulldozers with their bodies, chained themselves to olive trees, and confronted soldiers in efforts to prevent further destruction of Palestinian homes and property. Much joint work has also been done with Palestinian women to prevent construction of the so-called security wall. Some of the Coalition's actions have ended in arrests, and many ended in injury to protesters by security forces.

The women's peace movement has also engaged in humanitarian aid as a political statement: helping Palestinian families with the olive harvest; providing school supplies, infant food, sanitary napkins, and other needs. Astonishingly, we generally have to struggle with the IDF to allow aid to enter the Palestinian areas.

The Coalition has also held some dramatic public actions within Israel. Three months after the current Intifadah began in fall 2000, 5,000 Israeli and Palestinian women marched together from the Israeli to the Palestinian side of Jerusalem under the banner "We Refuse to be Enemies." We held a concert for peace, featuring Israeli and Palestinian women performing works that express our longing for peace. We organized a cavalcade of cars that drove through Israel bearing signs like, "The Price of the Occupation is Too High!" We staged a mass "die-in" in Tel Aviv: 1,000 women dressed in black lying flat out on the hot summer pavement under the banner "The Occupation is Killing Us All." Most recently, we have held "walking exhibitions," holding blown-up photos of the carnage in Gaza and standing opposite the lines of people waiting to buy tickets for theater or concert performances in the heartland of cultured Israel. As the violence continues, we wrack our brains to come up with new ways of waking up other Israelis.

WOMEN CONSTITUTE THE MAJORITY of participants even in the mixed-gender peace movement, though they rarely become the decision-makers in these groups. Women are also the initiators and main actors in the organization Black Laundry: Lesbians and Gay Men Against the Occupation. I would be remiss if I did not also mention that lesbians are disproportionately represented throughout the peace and human rights community.

Ideologically, the Coalition of Women for Peace has a broader social vision than that of the mixed-gender peace organizations. We view the conflict as integrally related to social, economic, and gender issues. Indeed, the conflict with the Palestinians directly affects both gender inequality and oppression of the poor. Regarding gender inequality, in a society at war--where it is predominantly the men who are risking their lives in army service and making military and political decisions--men and their views become valued and privileged over women and our views. This entrenches inequality for women, leaving us at a disadvantage in competing for jobs, political office, and social status. The conflict also deepens poverty, as Israel sinks vast resources into security at the expense of housing, education, health, care for the elderly, and other social needs. And since few women are capital holders but rather are likely to find themselves among the poor, women become the first victims of unemployment and recession, both of which currently plague the Israeli economy.

While ending the conflict is important for its own sake--to protect men and women on both sides--it is also important for the sake of the equality of women and the enfranchisement of the poor.

The most successful peace movement ever in Israel was a women's organization--the Four Mothers Movement. This group, founded in 1997 by four women whose sons served in the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, sought to mobilize the Israeli public to demand that Israel withdraw its troops from Lebanon, on the grounds that Israel's prolonged presence there served no security purpose and jeopardized the lives of soldiers. The movement was initially met with scorn from senior military officers. "What do women know about security?" they mocked. Indeed, at the heart of the Four Mothers' strategy was the leveraging of their status as mothers. This was effective in a society that may disrespect professional women but honors its mothers. The Four Mothers Movement never used civil disobedience but rather held small demonstrations and vigils that highlighted the sincerity of their plea as law-abiding women, not activists or politicians. Their status as mothers who had sons serving in combat units gave them the right, in the eyes of the public, to challenge Israeli policy in Lebanon. They demanded--and were accorded--meetings with the highest government officials, whose inadequate answers were then magnified through the well-run media work of this group. The mother-oriented nature of this movement, and its dissociation from partisan politics, struck an empathetic nerve among the Israeli public. The deaths of Israeli soldiers were on the increase in Lebanon, and the message of the Four Mothers fell on attentive ears, feeding public dismay over the seemingly endless body bags. When some generals weighed in on the mothers' side, the tide was reversed. Within three years of the start of the movement, the Israeli army withdrew from Lebanon.

The Four Mothers Movement disbanded in 2000 upon the Israeli evacuation of its troops from Lebanon. Avowedly non-feminist and non-radical, the women in this movement successfully exploited the traditional role of motherhood to buttress their emotional appeal. And yet, scratching the surface reveals that a large proportion of the activists were themselves feminists, progressives, and professional women--and highly skilled at using the media. The apparent success of this movement deserves a careful analysis: The peace movement may have paid a high price for exalting women as mothers rather than as thinkers and doers. Is it possible that women, a group that often includes people particularly skilled at bridge-building, will continue to be kept away from the peace negotiation tables around the world because we nurture our maternal image?

The women's peace movement in Israel has consistently articulated progressive positions-well before the mixed-gender peace movement adopted them. Women advocated a two-state solution, sharing Jerusalem, and returning to Israel's 1967 border long before other peace movements reached these conclusions. These views are today rapidly approaching consensus within Israel, but when we first uttered them, we were branded "pariahs"--the title of the only article in an Israeli newspaper that ever featured our movement.

The women's peace movement continues to assume unpopular positions: encouraging young people to refuse to serve in an army of occupation, labeling as "war crimes" some military actions, advocating against the so-called "security fence," refusing to go along with the prevalent military culture. Our actions are often imaginative and original in a relentless (though often futile) effort to arouse media interest and win public sympathy. Women have also proven to be steadfast peace activists, maintaining the Women in Black vigil every single week for almost 17 years.

Above all, women in both Israel and Palestine have crossed the great divide, forging a peace agreement decades before the Rabin-Arafat talks and maintaining their links with each other despite the Palestinian suicide-bombings, the Israeli invasions, and all the lives lost and destroyed. The feminist principles of an egalitarian world and the nonviolent resolution of conflict have been at the core of our commitment, enabling Israeli and Palestinian women to sustain our alliance for peace despite the bitter reality outside and the pressures within our own societies.

---

The Coalition of Women for Peace includes nine different women's organizations in Israel, each using a different strategy, all with the goal of promoting peace with our Arab neighbors, particularly the Palestinians. These organizations include a mix of Jewish and Palestinian women, all citizens of Israel. The member organizations and their strategies:

* Bat Shalom is the Israeli sister organization to the Palestinian Jerusalem Center for Women, both of which are joined as the Jerusalem Link. Members hammer out political accords with Palestinian women, conduct dialogue groups, document the history of women in conflict, and conduct actions on the ground.

* The Fifth Mother is the re-grouped Four Mothers Movement, which was instrumental in ending the Israeli occupation of Lebanon. The Fifth Mother does outreach to centrist women with a "soft" (not "radical") political message, such as "war is not my language."

* The women of MachsomWatch seek to reduce the physical abuse and humiliation of Palestinians that often takes place at checkpoints (machsomim) erected to enforce closures. The presence of these women watching and reporting is sometimes enough to prevent problems. A MachsomWatch woman once stopped a soldier from firing at a child by deflecting his gun, leading to her arrest for "interfering with the IDF" (the Israeli Defense Force).

* Neled women, living near the old border with Palestine, run coexistence programs for women on both sides of the border.

* New Profile broke new ground in Israel by raising awareness about the heightened militarism in Israeli society, which is often invisible because of its very pervasiveness. New Profile supports men and women who refuse to do military service, and encourages other formats of refusal: "We refuse to raise our children for war, to ignore war crimes committed in our name, to continue our normal lives while others are suffering because of us."

* Noga is a feminist journal that publishes news and analysis of issues in Israel and abroad from a feminist perspective.

* TANDI: Movement of Democratic Women for Israel is the oldest of the groups, founded in 1948, when Israel was founded. It runs workshops and programs to empower and mobilize disadvantaged Palestinian women who are citizens of Israel.

* WILPF is the Israeli chapter of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and maintains our connection with this important international network.

* Last, and best known, Women in Black refers to groups of women (and the men who join us) who hold one-hour vigils on busy crossroads in Israel every Friday, dressed in black and calling for an end to the occupation. The international movement of Women in Black, which began in Jerusalem, has twice been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

---

The principles of the Coalition of Women for Peace were formulated at a meeting on November 8, 2000:

* An end to the occupation.

* The full involvement of women in negotiations for peace.

* Establishment of the state of Palestine side by side with the state of Israel based on the 1967 borders.

* The recognition of Jerusalem as the shared capital of two states.

* Recognition by Israel of its share of responsibility for the results of the 1948 war and cooperation in finding a just solution for the Palestinian refugees.

* Opposition to the militarism that permeates Israeli society.

* Equal rights for women and all residents of Israel.

* Social and economic justice for Israel's citizens and integration into the region.

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POETRY, WAR AND PEACE

The Beheadings

The guillotine at least was swift. After
the head pitched sideways into a basket
and was raised to a thirsty crowd that roared
approval of death from above, the sun turned
a garish yellow and froze on the horizon
raying out behind the jellied blood the way
it once stood still over Jericho at Joshua's command
and the day held its breath...

After they sawed through Nicholas Berg's neck
with an inadequate knife while he screamed,
after the heads of David Pearl
and Richard Johnson were detached
in midthought, in terror but
caught alive on a grainy video, what
did their stored oxygen enable them to mouth,
and Kim Sun-il who danced his last lines
declaiming over and over on worldwide television
"I don't want to die" what rose from his lips?

It was always night behind the blindfold.
Like bats in midflight at dusk
scrolling their thready messages come
words we can never capture, the soul
perhaps flying out from whatever aperture?
--a pox on belief in the soul!--and yet
there's no denying we are witness to
something more than
involuntary twitching going on

the air filling with fleeing souls
as it did in 1790, and filling again today
this poem a paltry testimony
to the nameless next and next--
Turks, Bulgarians, Filipinos whose heads
--severed, it is said the head retains
several seconds of consciousness--
will roll, reroll as in "revolution"
"a time of major crustal deformation
when folds and faults are formed"

time enough, in several languages
to recite a prayer, compose a grocery list
as the day holds its breath.

--Maxine Kumin

Mother with Toddler in War Time

The first soft day after
an intractable winter

a child, conceived before
the Towers burned but born

after, commands a flock
of geese: Do this! Do this!

as her arms flap like wings
under their scraping songs.

The only one more vain
is the mother who knows,

more than thinks, that nothing
on our worn earth matters more

than this one gesture, this
kid this instant, this lifting.

--Julia Kasdorf

The corner restaurant
where you plan
to meet
may not be there.
The chair you position
to catch the sun
on her hair
may be on its side,
glass crushed on glass
and the napkins singed and blown.

Or worse, you will have met
at the moment
the war started,
when the person
who fashioned his body
into an instrument of war
arrived right in the middle
of your life,
the wrong time
to have fallen in love.

--Eloise Klein Healy

NOW:

There's no way to say it, except the blunt way:
facts, searing the eye, facts in the nostrils:
what you love most becomes what

won't keep, that's the oldest part
of the story, not hard: these words slide
easily from fingertips daubing the keys:

what you learned today you learned also
long ago, and in another, more hopeful life:
no place now in the world--no matter how you say it--

untainted, or if you don't say anything,
or if you say the mornings are still
beautiful, late April's aroma of damp soil,

your neighbor's hyacinth easterish, painterly--
wouldn't that also be fact, be true?
A poet yesterday said: only poetry speaks the truth,

I knew that to be false: her gorgeous lines
breathless, staggered, obscure: if that's true,
really, then anything's true: but this report

on my desk, like a script on a stage, is fact, blunt:
which of our weapons are leaking uranium
everywhere on earth, into the nostrils,

inexorably, the pores, the eyes: how deaths
will come here and on distant deserts
and ancient cities and be reported falsely,

the young reporter's cerebral hemorrhage
not a vascular event, but uranium, too,
and those bodies in robes, "ours"

"their" bodies whose faces tried to be masked, bodies
fallen along the dunes, the roads, not:
this is fact: not someone else's, some enemy's

some other's fault: there are facts
undeliverable delivered from the imagination
to the page, the page, the page

from this imagination which is true
only to itself, selfish, bent
on its own peculiar and shapely truth:

--Gail Mazur

From Scenes From A Courtship During Wartime

How He Restored the Good Ambiguity, Née Hope

9 mins. long-distance ($2.52)

He would have been either standing or sitting,
Or leaning, bracing, and then perhaps sitting:
Later he became something like expansive.

Everything had been either unseen or not understood,
And--just that moment--was plainly unspeakaboutable,
If ever speakable or un-: that moment for sure.

Then he pronounced one or two slight sentences
All in the future: I will tell you about it
Was one I remember. Never mind that the language

He spoke in transmuted the I, you, and it
Into a single word. My heart sang. It was the gesture
Toward an existing future that worked so well.

"Accidentally"

Here we had the luxury of not knowing
The splaying of feeling into everything
That looks like a bleeding-over, spreading,
Everywhere seeping; but is a sign of war.

The luxury of not knowing--not knowing,
Truly, there was much to be known,
An admission that led to admission
To the saddest theatre on this earth.

But as when the Irish poet moved "accidentally"
From Belfast to England, and on a suddenty
Westward to Berkeley, CA--"where people
Weren't killing each other at all!"--

In the dream I came from the house
Where I couldn't find you and there
Was your tent and lantern, and you
At the screen-sound knew it was me.

Somewhere else, indoors, was the war
That might not stop with a treaty.
Then I was kissing your temple,
Calmer than that can sound.

The Bird as a Bird

From the Basque of JoxAnton Artze

If I had cut off its wings
It would have been mine.
It wouldn't have gone away.

But then,
It wouldn't have been a bird at all.

And I loved the bird that was a bird.

--Elizabeth Macklin

 

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