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The War Works Hard, by Dunya Mikhail, Saadi S. Simawe, Elizabeth Winslow
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Mikhail’s poetic vision transcends cultural and linguistic boundaries with liberating compassion.
Revolutionary poetry by an exiled Iraqi woman. Winner of a 2004 PEN Translation Fund Award. "Yesterday I lost a country," Dunya Mikhail writes in The War Works Hard, a revolutionary work by an exiled Iraqi poether first to appear in English. Amidst the ongoing atrocities in Iraq, here is an important new voice that rescues the human spirit from the ruins, unmasking the official glorification of war with telegraphic lexical austerity. Embracing literary traditions from ancient Mesopotamian mythology to Biblical and Qur'anic parables to Western modernism, Mikhail's poetic vision transcends cultural and linguistic boundaries with liberating compassion.- Sales Rank: #879569 in Books
- Published on: 2005-04-17
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x .30" w x 6.10" l, .34 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 96 pages
From Publishers Weekly
"What good luck!/ She has found his bones." So begins a litany of horrors from an Iraqi poet who witnessed Saddam's regime's atrocities firsthand. Mikhail, 40, works in Arabic, Chaldean and English, and had to flee Iraq in the years just before the current war; after a stint in Jordan, she now lives in Michigan, where the poems in the first section here were composed over the past few years. They are forceful and direct, with ironies that ring through their blunt admonishments: "Please don't ask me, America./ I don't remember their names/ or their birthplaces./ People are grass—/ they grow everywhere, America." In some, the speaker imagines life in wartime Iraq or writes in one of its many voices, including mythic ones ("I am Inanna," begins one in the Sumerian love goddess' voice, "[a}nd this is my city"). In others, she channels grief or anger, as in a bitter and beautiful set of "Non-Military Statements." The book's other two sections contain poems from the earlier collections Almost Music (1997) and The Psalms of Absence (1993) respectively; their coverage of the Gulf War makes clear just how much, for Iraqis, war has been a nightmarish way of life, with the U.S. playing a recurrent role. Stark and poignant, Mikhail's poems give voice to an often buried, glossed-over or spun grief. (Apr.)
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Review
“Here, the fierceness of the public life meshes with the hard-won tenderness of the private, in a passionate dialectic that makes her voice the inescapable voice of Arab poetry today.” (Pierre Joris)
“Dunya Mikhail is a woman who speaks like the disillusioned goddesses of Babylon. Blunt as well as subtle, she makes of war a distinct entity, thus turning it into a myth. To her own question, 'What does it mean to die all this death?,' her poems answer that it means to reveal the only redeeming power that we have: the existence of love.” (Etel Adnan)
About the Author
Dunya Mikhail was born in Iraq in 1965. While working as a journalist for the Baghdad Observer, she faced increasing threats from the authorities and fled to the United States in the late 1990s. In 2001, she was awarded the UN Human Rights Award for Freedom of Writing. Her first poetry book in English, The War Works Hard, was named one of 2005’ twenty-five Books toRemember by the New York Public Library and Diary of A Wave Outside the Sea won the 2010 Arab American Book Award for poetry. Mikhail teaches atOakland University, Michigan.
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
I enjoyed it very much--definitely not going to sell this like ...
By Tenny37
I bought this book for a class, and I was surprised by it. I enjoyed it very much--definitely not going to sell this like other school books!
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Witnessing War
By Robert Philbin
The war works hard
by Robert Philbin
[ bookreviews ]
"We'd all be human, if we could." Bertolt Brecht
A journalist covering the Iraq war commented on a late night talk show last night that America's situation in Iraq is hopeless because by now, he said, he doesn't know of a single Iraqi family who has not suffered some tragedy or horror as a result of the US invasion. We have lost something, he commented, in that transition from being "liberators" to becoming "occupiers", and we may never get it back. I don't doubt his insight about the widespread misery, just look at the Iraqi civilian casualty estimates - many as high as hundreds of thousands - but I question that more than a few of us understand what the reporter means by the mass personification of war, or the blame the Iraqi people harbor toward the US government as a result.
Very few of us know anything about what war does to perfectly innocent people trapped in its awful geometry. Civilians are always innocent bystanders, and always the most meaningful targets. They are all hearts and minds. The purpose of the bombing of the village of Guernica in northern Spain in 1937 was to undermine the morale of the Basque civilians and their insurgency against Franco. The purpose of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the summer of 1945 was to "break the will of the Japanese people" and to "save American lives".
In Vietnam "pacification" meant winning hearts and minds by bulldozing villages and moving populations into distant refugee camps. (Abraham Lincoln understood the impact of a burning cornfield on the civilian populace in the South during the American Civil War.) We experienced what it feels like to suffer war on the home front on September 11, 2001. But many of us still remain immune to government propaganda and a visual history of war, against the daily photographs and reports that bring news of more innocent deaths in Iraq. We may have been safely inoculated against the pain of the innocent by the weight of decades the US has spent at war in our lifetime, and always, it seems, among the poorest and weakest peoples on the earth.
Since Homer first mythologized the fall of Troy, thirty centuries ago, poetry and war have been fused in an unholy alliance producing both the propaganda of heroics, and the chilling reality of mass murder. Poets sometimes make the best journalists because only they can approximate a special kind of truth that shapes a state of mind a reader can absorb viscerally, as soon as he or she encounters it:
What good luck!
She has found his bones.
The skull is also in the bag
the bag in her hand
like all other bags
in all other trembling hands.
His bones, like thousands of bones
in the mass graveyard,
his skull, not like any other skull.
Two eyes or holes
with which he saw too much. [1]
I read these lines knowing nothing of the language or traditions of Iraqi poetry, but, after all, what does one need to know? Where else but Iraq could this bleak discovery have occurred? How could anyone rejoice at the good luck of finding a brother, husband or father's remains in a bag of bones?
Iraqi poet Dunya Mikhail connects any reader to the love of that lucky Iraqi woman clinging to her bag of bones. And when she does, all the propaganda of politics and lies disappear. Poetry raises questions as well as it raises the dead: How monstrous was that dictatorship? Why did we ever support it? Why did we not take it down in Desert Storm? Why did we not support the uprising later? Why do we still make war among a people exhausted by killing, adding only to their bone yards? What are we doing in Iraq?
Poetry translated from another culture has the magical power of carrying the reader to the human heart of that culture. This is possible because the artist, the poet, is an alien in any culture, both apart of, and apart from its mores. In another Mikhail poem:
The war continues working, day and night.
It inspires tyrants
to deliver long speeches
awards medals to generals
and themes to poets
it contributes to the industry
of artificial limbs
provides food for flies
adds pages to the history books
achieves equality
between killer and killed.
In the world where The War Works Hard, death is the great equalizer in a landscape of artificial limbs. The poet is the outsider and her poetry brings down the flimsy barriers of time, space, and circumstance. What remains is the human being, no different than any other human being. Foreign poetry makes the foreign universal, and this is the unique power of Ms. Mikhail. Unlike the returning combat veteran poet, she documents and laments the loss of human love in a culture so brutalized that humanity itself may become only a memory:
Graves were scattered with mandrake seeds.
A bleating sound entered the assembly.
Gardens remained hanging.
Straw was scattered with the words.
No fruit is left.
Born in Iraq in 1965, "her imagination saturated with uprootedness and endless war," Ms Mikhail worked as Literary Editor of The Baghdad Observer until threats and harassment from Bath authorities forced her to flee Iraq in the late 1990s. In 2001 she was awarded the UN Human Rights Award for Freedom of Writing and has published four collections of poetry in Arabic (an Iraqi Christian, she speaks and writes in Arabic, Aramaic and English).
Mikhail, whose work has been compared to the reclusive and brilliant Emily Dickinson, currently lives and teaches in Michigan. The War Works Hard, her latest book was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize last year, and includes earlier works written before her exile. She says "most of my writings serve as documents of witness; they document what I saw. " As in a few lines from her poem, 'The Jewel', about the bombing of the main bridge in Baghdad,
It no longer overlooks the river
No longer is in the city
No longer on the map
The bridge that was
The bridge that we used to cross every day
The bridge
The war tossed it into the river
Just as that lady aboard the Titanic
Tossed her blue diamond
In a recent interview, Mikhail discussed the liberating experience of adjusting to thinking and writing in a culture that respects free speech above propaganda:
"In Iraq, there are no editors because they have censors. They don't care about the quality, they care about the ideology, and that is how they use their editing scissors. There, they are watching every work and they can put you in prison--they care that much! Here, you can write whatever you want but no one cares? It is very ironic. I noticed a change in my writing when I came here: I didn't need to use symbols anymore. My language and my poems became more direct. I do not know if not using symbols has made my writing more powerful or less powerful but I wanted to peel away some of those masks and shields that burdened me." [2]
She writes about memory and war and healing directly in the poem 'America':
Please don't ask me, America
I don't remember
on which street
with whom
or under which star
Don't ask me
I don't remember
the colours of the people
or their signatures
I don't remember if they had
our faces
and our dreams
if they were singing
or not
writing from the left or right
or not writing at all
sleeping in houses
on sidewalks
or in airports
making love or not making love
Please don't ask me, America
I don't remember their names.
The War Works Hard is an important and informative document because it communicates the experiences of war directly from the perspective of its most silent victims.
Notes
1 All poetry by Dunya Mikhail, translated by Elizabeth Winslow, from The War Works Hard. Ms Winslow is a fiction writer and a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her translation of Dunya Mikhail's The War Works Hard won the PEN prize for translation in 2004 and was published by New Directions in 2005. She has had other translated poems published in Modern Poetry in Translation, Poetry International, Words Without Borders, Circumferenceand World Literature Todayand short stories or non-fiction published in Phoebe, Blue Mesa Review, Louisville Review and Variety. [Back]
2 From a Legacy Project Interview with Dunya Mikhail, April 21, 2005.
Video: Dunya Mikhail reading at Berkeley, February 2007. [Back]
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
Authentic and Moving
By Fawzi M. Yaqub
This book is full of eloquent and very forceful poems dealing with life in Iraq and some of its heart wrenching experiences during the last 20 years. Many of these poems have appeared in Arabic in a book with the same title (In Arabic, *Al-harb taamal bijidd*) published by Al-Mada P.C., Damascus, Syria. The translation into English by Elizabeth Winslow is excellent and conveys a lot of the simplicity and force of the original poems.
What I admire most in Dunya Mikhail's poetry is her ability to take simple words and turn them into beautiful poems that, alternately, delight, move, surprise, and even baffle her readers. This simplicity of words is more apparent in Arabic than in English. Typical of her poetry and its unexpected effect on the reader is "The Jewel," a poem in which she compares the collapse of a bridge during the 1991 American bombing of Baghdad to the dropping of a jewel by the lady on the Titanic. "It no longer stretches across the river. / It is not in the city, / not on the map. / The bridge that was . . . / The bridge that we were . . . /The Pontoon bridge / we crossed every day . . . / Dropped by the war into the river / just like the blue jewel / that lady dropped / off the side of the Titanic."
In another poem she writes, "Yesterday I lost a country. / I was in a hurry, / and didn't notice when it fell from me / like a broken branch from a forgetful tree. / Please, if anyone passes by / and stumbles across it, / perhaps in a suitcase / open to the sky, / or engraved on a rock / like a gaping wound, / ... / If anyone stumbles across it, / return it to me please. / Please return it, sir. / Please return it, madam. / It is my country . . . / I was in a hurry / when I lost it yesterday."
Professor Pierre Joris described Mikhail's work as "a poetry of urgency that has no time for the traditional (in Arab[ic] poetry) flowers of rhetoric; ... [Her] lines move at the speed of events--be it war or love."
No matter what the subject is, Dunya Mikhail's poetry is always authentic and moving.
Fawzi M. Yaqub
Fredonia, NY
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