The Death of a Mouse and the Fall of Rome
Roughly twelve days before Christmas, two unfolding tragedies overlapped in a way that felt surreal. Arrowsmith Journal columnist Mosab Abu Toha, the suddenly world-renowned and wholly remarkable poet from Gaza, put out a message asking for help in extricating a Palestinian physician trapped in Gaza whose Ukrainian wife and young children were waiting for him in Odesa. Mosab himself had left Gaza two weeks earlier, following a massive effort by a number of players, including the New Yorker's David Remnick and Jane Unrue, director of Harvard's Scholars and Artists at Risk Program.
Only four years earlier I watched Jane move heaven and earth to bring Mosab to Harvard as a SAR fellow. Why it should have been so difficult to receive permission for a 26-year-old poet to leave Gaza is itself a question worth considering: were the bureaucrats adjudicating visas, here and in Israel, Platonists, indoctrinated into a knee-jerk fear of poets? Yet there must be something about those unarmed and generally not especially physically fit human specimens that makes some politicians quake while inspiring others to feel maybe a tad over-protective, granting writers special status as carriers of culture and therefore making their lives appear more valuable than those of a mechanic or a baker. It was thanks to the case of another writer in trouble that I came to know Jane in the first place. We were introduced in 2014 by our mutual friend, the essayist and critic George Scialabba, because I was looking for someone to help a Ukrainian poet, whose life had been threatened by Ukraine's pro-Russian regime, to escape Kyiv.
What further boggles the mind is the politics of the matter. Hamas, after all, is supported by Russia as part of what the Carnegie Endowment describes as Russia's desire "to boost its standing with the Global South." (https://carnegieendowment.org/politika/90841)
Hamas' horrific murder of some 1200 Israelis (according to the IDF and the Israeli government) has incited savage retribution leading to the death of over 20,000 people, among them some 8,000 children (according to Hamas and the Gaza Health Ministry). The numbers speak for themselves, but they can never say enough. Lumped together in this way, the horror quickly feels abstract, a statistic, just more big data, when each one of the innocent dead on either side deserves their own novel. Or, at the very least, a poem.
In his haunting poem "Advice to a Prophet," published in 1961, Richard Wilbur warns against relying on dry "facts," on big data, to help us understand our world, because the "long numbers that rocket the mind" are unable to move us: "Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind, /Unable to feel what is too strange." A veteran of World War II, and no stranger to the horrors of war, Wilber knew the damage war inflicted not only on its mortal victims but on truth and language itself. The poet's task was to recover for words their ability to move us, to make us feel, and therefore to engage more fully with the real. And maybe this is why poets continue to be seen as threats by authoritarian regimes. If, as Ford Madox Ford reminds us, even the death of a mouse by cancer, "is tantamount to the fall of Rome — to the mouse," surely the end of a human life is no less than the implosion of the universe.
Maybe.
I'm reminded of some of the most memorable poetry to come out of the Vietnam era, when writers were doing their part to remind their fellow citizens that each one of the 882,000 dead in both North and South Vietnam (among them some 84,000 children) once had the same physical dimensions and aspirations as they did. Verse from that period ranged from the acerbic, as in these lines from Bill Knott's "Nuremberg, USA": "if bombing children is preserving peace, then/my fucking you is a war crime," to the subtler but even more shocking "Of Late" by George Starbuck. In this, to my mind one of the greatest anti-war poems in English, Starbuck writes about what happens to language by focusing on the anti-war activist and Quaker, Norman Morrison, who, at the age of 32, doused himself with kerosene and set himself on fire outside the Pentagon offices of then Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara. The poem begins with a quote:
"Stephen Smith, University of Iowa sophomore, burned what he said was his draft card"
and Norman Morrison, Quaker, of Baltimore, Maryland, burned what he said was himself.
You, Robert McNamara, burned what you said was a concentration
of the Enemy Aggressor.
No news medium troubled to put it in quotes.
The poem then describes Morrison's self-immolation in neutral, journalistic, yet devastating terms: "Norman Morrison, Quaker, of Baltimore, Maryland, burned, and while burning, screamed...." Finally, in its last stanza, the poem acknowledges that language has limits — an admission which, paradoxically, allows language to transcend itself by pointing at the expressiveness hidden in silence:
Norman Morrison, Quaker, of Baltimore, Maryland, burned and was burned and said
all that there is to say in that language.
Twice what is said in yours.
It is a strange sect, Mr. McNamara, under advice to try
the whole of a thought in silence, and to oneself.
In harvesting as much data as we can, we risk forgetting the importance of allowing information to acquire meaning, for numbers to become bodies again, for bodies to show faces reflecting human longings and aspirations no different from our own.
War stories were a common-enough topic at our dinner table when I was growing up in New Jersey. My mother often spoke of friends who died during the war, or who were disappeared by the Bolsheviks before the war began. I can't say now whether my parents, who lived into their mid-nineties, suffered from what we term PTSD, though my mother did suffer from depression, anxiety, and panic attacks which finally ended when her memory faded. Others in the family who survived the war, followed by years in a refugee camp, suffered considerably more severe consequences. Much of my creative life has been an attempt to convey, via stories, poems, essays, what I've seen of the long-term consequences of war — and why we should do all we can to avoid it. It's not necessarily what I'd choose to write about — but I've come to believe our material chooses us, and that a writer's task is to make himself as capable a vehicle as possible.
"The problem after a war," wrote the pacifist historian A.J. Muste, "is the victor. He thinks he has just proven that war and violence pay. Who will now teach him a lesson?" The simple, obvious lesson — that violence, inevitably, over time, results in more violence — is one many seem determined to ignore, no matter how often poets try to remind us, but that doesn't mean they should stop trying.
A large part of what makes Mosab's poetry, as well as his recent pieces in the New Yorker, so powerful is his avoidance of rhetoric and jargon. He brings us back to the human term, to the ordinary, as when he evokes life in the Jabalia refugee camp as he embarks on a quest for bread: "The houses in Jabalia are so small that the street becomes your living room. You hear what your neighbors talk about, smell what they cook. Many lanes are less than a metre wide. After two days in the camp, on Saturday morning, my family has no bread to eat." His quiet language evokes a sense of the intimacy which allows us to feel the pain of lives upended by violence. By returning us to the "foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart," he helps us to attend to truths and realities we'd as soon turn away from. We would be wise to listen.
PS
As of this writing, efforts to help the physician are ongoing.
PPS
This issue is dedicated to the memory of my dear friend, and sometime Arrowsmith contributor, Julia Lieblich who died just before Thanksgiving. I met Julia back in 1992, around the publication of her brilliant first book, Sisters, the story of four nuns with a lifelong commitment to social justice, soon after she finished her studies at Harvard Divinity School. She left the Boston area not long after that. I would occasionally read her in the New York Times or the Nation and elsewhere. We reconnected nearly 30 years later when she moved back to Cambridge, just before Covid sent us all into our own silos. She had in the meantime published Wounded I Am More Awake, a book co-authored with Esad Boskallo, a Bosnian psychiatrist who had been tortured during the Bosnian war, and who now worked in Chicago helping victims of war deal with their trauma. We published several new pieces by her in the Arrowsmith Journal, including one about the family she'd adopted — or who had adopted her — in Guatemala, where she spent part of every year. She was at work on a promising new book along the lines of Sisters in which she planned to offer cameos of iconoclastic female spiritual leaders of several faiths. As someone wholeheartedly committed to the pursuit of justice and peace, she was incredibly distressed by the Israel-Hamas war. In characteristic fashion, her response was to put on her Star of David and head to the Andala Cafe in Cambridge, where which she was a regular, to meet with its "shy Palestinian owner." The piece she wrote about her encounters, published in the Forward, reveals the essence of this great spirit, and testifies to all the world lost when she chose to leave it:
https://forward.com/opinion/566024/change-encounter-arab-jewish-women-grief/
Askold Melnyczuk’s book of stories, The Man Who Would Not Bow, appeared in 2021. His four novels have variously been named a New York Times Notable, an LA Times Best Books of the Year, and an Editor’s Choice by the American Library Association’s Booklist. He is also co-editor of From Three Worlds, an anthology of Ukrainian Writers. His published translations include work by Oksana Zabuzhko, Marjana Savka, Bohdan Boychuk, Ivan Drach, and Skovoroda. His shorter work, including essays, stories, and reviews, have appeared in The Paris Review, The New York Times, The Missouri Review, The Times Literary Supplement (London), The Los Angeles Times, The Harvard Review and elsewhere. He’s received a three-year Lila Wallace-Readers’ Digest Award in Fiction, the McGinnis Award in Fiction, and the George Garret Award from AWP for his contributions to the literary community. As founding editor of Agni he received PEN’s Magid Award for creating “one of America’s, and the world’s, leading literary journals.” Founding editor of Arrowsmith Press, he has taught at Boston University, Harvard, Bennington College and currently teaches at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Most recently he has been organizing readings in support of writers in Ukraine, as well as interviewing writers for his For the Record series which appears online at Agni Online (https://agnionline.bu.edu/blog/for-the-record-conversations- with-ukrainian-writers/), as well as on Arrowsmith Press’s website.