Poetry Forum

Coffee-coloured gentlemen
in a mish-mash
of dishdash and Western dress
saunter lazily
in the souk, twirling
prayer beads, car keys,
so insouciant, the modern
descendants, so many,
of the Bashi-bazouk
of the Ottoman day,
mercenaries without pay,
lashed and beaten like dogs,
men who unleashed
great fortunes in plunder,
seeking and finding, performing
feral casual rape on the side;
men who went swaggering
down these same narrow
twisting lanes, twirling
severed human heads.

Ahh, the good old days.

They have been going on,
those good old days,
for quite some time:
Sargon of Akkad.
Tiglath-Pileser.
Darius and Xerxes.
Tamerlane, Saladin,
Saddam Hussein....

Mountains of skulls,
vast pyramids of burning bodies;
smoke from horizon to horizon,
the wailing wives and mothers.

Some Western optimist, occasionally,
marches in at the head of an army,
some fool with visions of conquest:
Alexander, Crassus, General Maude,
these and so many others, seem
so surprised when they leave their bones
strewn across the barren sands.
These hostile arid sun-scorched lands
have an ancient habit
of sucking in foreign armies
and draining them dry.

You win the first war rapidly, then slowly lose the second.

Even before humble Allenby
entered Jerusalem, on foot,
(unlike the vainglorious
German Kaiser before him)
the European Near East project
was foredoomed: armies
of strangers can bleed and die,
win all the important battles, exult
in transient victories: then history
leaves them high and dry.

Cheerio, Johnny Turk,
Au ‘voir, la Légion!
Pip-pip, Tommy Atkins,
So long, Yankee Doodle!

Only Israel remains,
an ideal, an imposed
necessity: a nation composed
of Hope and the Holocaust,
thrust deep into the heart
of the Muslim World
like a poisoned dagger.
We defend it in the West,
fretfully, reluctantly,
(more so, perhaps, in America)
through vague strangled feelings
of ignorance and guilt.

Those to whom evil has been done
do evil in return. In our secret hearts
we turn away, think but do not say,
Thank God I'm not Palestinian.

Now come the Americans,
untroubled, as usual, by history,
obsessed by numbers, technology
and firepower; unaware (as yet)
that they are not winning, dangerously
out of tune with their surroundings;
unaware that they are stranded
in the original killing fields
those ancient killing fields
where there is an inherited tolerance
for endless horror.

Boy have you picked a subject here!

I find it hard to evaluate this without reference to the framing of the images in the cultural and political contexts of our time.

I admire you for expressing with eloquence what I have heard expressed in many ways in conversation among thinking folk in these isles.

But I wonder if you have entirely escaped the influence of orientalism in the images you present. http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Orientalism.html - having said that, it's your poem...

I find a huge ambivalence - an uncertainty of values - embedded in the poetic voice here, which makes me uneasy. That would work if this was a poem about ambivalence but it seems to be about how Muslim lands have been the long home of death, rape and destruction. I don't know if that was your intent...

I hope this hasn't seemed too critical. Voicing genuine feeling - even ambivalence - about these things is a brave act, and a poetic one.

Luisetta

Too long, IMHO. A rhetorical exercise of condemnation of war but it lacks clarity.

Impressive force to it, I will admit.

Stu

Thanks, Luisetta and Stu ...

Ambivalent, a bit fuzzy in the values department, too long, flirting dangerously with "orientalism" -- I can see where you are coming from with these comments, and I would even have to agree with you to a certain extent!

One might say that history itself is too long, with far too many incidents and way too many characters: you could never make a movie out of it! One could just imagine a frustrated producer crying out, "Do we really need these bloody Middle Ages?" I try to focus on one particular region, the Near East (Mesopotamia, the Levant, bits of Iran), which is in itself a European designation -- "near" to us, not "far" like China or Japan. Although these lands have been Muslim since the Arab Conquest, the far greater part of their recorded history took place during the four or five thousand years before that -- Ur of the Chaldees, Abraham, the Akkadians, the Babylonians, David and Solomon, the Assyrians, the Persians, the Greeks, the Western then Eastern Romans, with the Egyptians in there from time to time as well. I am trying to set up a much wider historical context for the region than that of Islam, which accounts for the central part of the poem from "Ahh, the good old days" to "You win the first war rapidly, then slowly lose the second." Then, of course, we do swing into more modern times from about the end of the First World War with the French and British, and now the Americans.

Robert Fisk in his huge book, in all senses of the word, traces the problems of the current Middle East to the postwar dismantling of the Ottoman Empire. Beg, borrow or steal (even buy) it: "The Great War for Civilisation".

I followed the link supplied by Luisetta above, and read with interest:

Latent Orientalism is the unconscious, untouchable certainty about what the Orient is. Its basic content is static and unanimous. The Orient is seen as separate, eccentric, backward, silently different, sensual, and passive. It has a tendency towards despotism and away from progress. It displays feminine penetrability and supine malleability. Its progress and value are judged in terms of, and in comparison to, the West, so it is always the Other, the conquerable, and the inferior.

I can see the trap, but I'm not quite sure I fell into it. The rather clearly-stated message of the poem, or so I thought, is that the region absorbs and eventually defeats all invaders, not because it is separate, eccentric, backward, silently different, sensual, and passive ... (and) displays feminine penetrability and supine malleability but because it sucks them in, wears them out, can be extremely violent, and, in the end, simply outlasts them!!

This is a bit of a lengthy reply, and I certainly hope it doesn't come across as (too) defensive. I thought the criticisms and comments were rather good and to the point, so I wanted to enter into a bit of a debate. That can be dangerous. Robert Fisk went on for 1200 pages and he's still not finished! A passionate, dedicated reporter, mind you.

I don't really want to go any further along factual lines for the same reasons as you (because I have too much to do and it's endless, and my facts will run out and they're not my favourite things anyway).

But from a poetic point of view I wondered where the Middle East plugs into you or you into it? Is it the somewhat touristic image of men in a souk with dishdash? Is that a personal memory, a postcard in a long-forgotten drawer, a scene from a movie? Regardless of the politics and your ambition in writing such a poem and even of your (as I call it) ambivalence, that is what I missed most in this. If there's an emotional hook where you have obviously, in some sense, met your images, it doesn't matter in the slightest whether you, or the poem's voice/narrator, are 'orientalist' or anything else, from the poem's point of view. But I don't see where the poet, or the 'voice', commits himself here. It's like pub talk after a few beers. Very lyrical pub talk, but ultimately unsatisfying (to me). But then I'm one of those people who can't be arsed with it and that annoys people who like to try for a broad view. I don't trash that viewpoint but I don't like doing it...

I hope I'm not being too brash, here. I get the sense that you're a talented and open-minded chap. I hope you don't think I'm attacking you.

Luisetta