What We Owe Each Other: A Review of They Dragged Them Through the Streets (2013)
Flipping channels the other day, I was thinking again about
the strangely narrow window of representations offered by television. We are awash in reality stars, sundry undead,
goofy ensembles of the bourgeoisie, drug-addled gangsters, pathological
murderers, and quirky detectives. Not
only on TV, but in all the popular and literary arts, it is almost unheard-of
to see a thoughtful, rounded representation of a self-described progressive
political activist, someone who devotes their labor to societal change. Even rarer is the sight of someone working to
oppose war.
One can go back, of course, to The Iliad’s hump-backed Thersites—whose complaint against
Agamemnon’s war brings derision and a swift beating—to note a long history of
depicting anti-war voices as unwell, ugly, and deranged. A contemporary analogue was sent to me by a
Facebook friend when I asked for nuanced depictions of anti-war protesters: Rob
Riggle’s Daily Show send-up of hippies and Code Pink in “Marines in Berkeley.”
Modern literature and film has brought us its share of
anti-heroes and the occasional activist, but few anti-war activists or peace
workers. In literature, a few key
non-fictional works have explored the inner and outer lives of the anti-war
movement. Among the most remarkable,
William Stafford’s Down in My Heart
(1947), Norman Mailer’s Armies of the
Night (1967), Daniel Berrigan’s Trial
of the Catonsville Nine (1970) stand out as thoughtful depictions of the
lives and psychologies of people drawn to resist war. There have been some intriguing novels as
well, including John Irving’s A Prayer
for Owen Meany (1989), Sigrid Nunez’s The
Last of Her Kind (2006), Dana Spiotta’s Eat
the Document (2006), and Philip Roth’s American
Pastoral (2006), but they are rather exceptional.
By focusing entirely on the voices of these
activists—something I’ve seen nowhere else—Hilary Plum’s They Dragged Them Through The Streets (FC2, 2013) is a
revelation. Avoiding both caricature and
heroizing, Plum creates an intimate and ruminative portrait of five friends
whose activism against the Iraq War, spurred by the suicide of one of the
friends’ brother, turns to acts of violent sabotage.
The book begins with a news report of the death of activist
Zechariah Berkman from a bomb blast in his basement. The aptly-named Berkman (echoing the
well-known anarchist Alexander Berkman) remains the silence around which the
story turns. Has he died by accident, or
was his death a suicide?
Through first person narration, the four surviving
characters—A, Ford, Sara, and Vivienne—look back on what drew them together,
how they came to take their actions to a level of violence, and what tore them
apart. In deft fragments laid out in a
non-linear pattern, each character recounts their early passions, their
isolation, their growing disillusionment, and their eventual breakup. The novel is a postmortem in multiple senses:
it occurs after the death of Z, after the breakup of the group, and amid the
wider losses of the war.
The young activists, in their occupations and
preoccupations, demonstrate a surprising range of gifts, sensibilities, and worldviews. A has aspirations to journalism, Ford is a
scientist, Sara is a nurse, Vivienne is a writer, and Zechariah is a political
junkie. Plum captures the sense of
meta-excitement of being involved in a cause, as if they were characters caught
up in a larger drama:
our sense of ourselves as
protagonists: Ford stretched out on the couch, announcing his every idea;
Vivienne in a chair in the corner, her quick replies; Sara arguing on the floor
where she sat like a martyr she insisted on being—no, that was unkind; she
stroked the dog’s head and he loved her. And Zechariah on the wooden chair
pulled close to Vivienne, when he was not on the phone pacing the kitchen, his crisp
speech floating out to us. (3-4)
Even A’s revision enacts that sense of complexity of
character—that Sara may have occasionally had a martyr complex (as do some
activists), but she was also loving.
Such diversity of character and talent reminds me of
activists with whom I’ve worked, in Bloomington, Indiana, and Cleveland, Ohio,
people who came together to oppose imperial interventions. I think of Maria Smith, a lawyer, whose work
in Nicaragua with Witness for Peace crystallized her lifelong commitment to
nonviolence. And Penny Allen, a health
care provider, whom I saw birding one Saturday morning. And Kadhim Shaaban, an Iraqi-American
businessman who could not bear to see his people suffer under economic
sanctions and spearheaded efforts to send medical aid to Iraq. And Kathryn Bryan, who went to live in Rafah
refugee camp in Gaza. And Art Dorland, a
veteran, who left a flyer under my windshield when we parked our well-stickered
Honda at the Cleveland Metroparks.
Since 2001, I’ve worked on an oral narrative project called
“Stories of War and Peace,” and got to meet people from all walks of life who
opposed the Iraq War. They are people
who have lost family members to the violence of war; who have witnessed
firsthand the costs of war; who have religious or moral convictions about the
wrongness of killing; who have political disagreements with particular
conflicts; yet they all have seen themselves as agents of change, as small
characters in a large and often dismayingly distant drama.
It is this last point—that these activists have labored
distant from the scene of battle, and feel acutely their alienation and guilt
both from the chauvinism that fuels conflict and the conflict itself—that Plum
captures well. It is the state of living
at the center of empire, largely immune to its violence but complicit in
it. In Ford’s words,
I was never in that country, never
saw the faces and can’t pronounce the names.
I didn’t stand with the doctors, staunching, stitching. I wouldn’t know where to begin. But every day the war went on and so did
I. We were secured, allied in our
survival. I was there to tally each
day’s deaths. I was hungry for the
newspaper. Every day the war resisted
me, didn’t include me. You will live on,
it said, turning pictures toward me.
Limbs in ice, a foot protruding, absurd.
Soldiers’ faces turned skyward.
You will be fine. (63).
That maddening security, “allied in our survival,” with a
war that seems both real and utterly unreal, leads this group to try to breach
the very real distance between there and here.
This real unreality draws the characters together, to make
visible the invisible war, by choosing targets to destroy. But they fight over every possible target,
measuring the relative value and cost that each target might offer. Here, the activists seem lost, groping for
symbols, as locked in their abstractions as the war-makers themselves. This is a similar situation that birthed The
Weather Underground, in the wake of the post-1968 violence and the failures of
the nonviolent anti-war movement.
One of the characters even suggests blowing up a hospital,
though the idea is shouted down by others in the group. In fact, they agree on very little, except
the impossibility of living without making some kind of concrete action. But there always seems to be a reason not to
bomb. What makes them activists—their
ability to imagine, to witness even from afar, the physical and psychic damage
of violence—is precisely what makes it hard for them to bomb anything.
Some of the most powerful writing in They Dragged Them Through the Streets occurs around the characters’
apperception of the vulnerable human body, wrenched by war. If we could nurture a citizenry for whom the
bodies and minds of others are nearly as precious as their own, we would have
another world. In the words of
Sara,
So I’m here. All wars come to the
shelter in time. The skin smoothes over the nub of an amputation.
My parents think this is noble
work, but they don’t want to hear about it. If they ask questions I sanitize my
answers. There’s no way to say how beneath my hands I can always feel the hair
on the back where I press the stethoscope, the blood that browns around
sutures.
What I want to end with is not violence, but something
else. As Muriel Rukeyser wrote, in The Life of Poetry, the poetry of 1930s
social protest failed because of the “blood-savagery in it, ranging all the way
from self-pity—naked or identified with one victim after another—to actual
blood-lust and display of wounds…[it was] begging for attention and sympathy in
the name of art that was supposed to produce action” (211). Sometimes anti-war activists have relied too
much on shocking imagery of destruction, rather than offering an alternate way
of seeing and being. Or, as A says—after
watching a journalist’s carnage-filled presentation on the war, intended to
disgust people into opposition—we owe the victims more than a repetition of
their death or victimization:
I am no different from anyone, I
said, after a pause. I was thinking of
that journalist: I threw up outside after, he’d said, standing before the
slideshow, on the screen one body’s imperfectly closed eyes, lids too swollen. He thought we would sympathize. But you were one of the last people to see
them, I thought. Didn’t you owe them
more, than to let disgust be your last gesture, the last thing they were
offered? To sit and watch them, watch
the flesh bruise and dampen on the stone, that had been blossoming becoming
decay, no one coming through that place to tidy, and why should they be
tidy?—that’s not what we owe each other.
(120-121)
What we owe each other is the question of the book, and
indeed, the question of all ethical relation—and in a more intensified way in a
globalized world. The answer will not be
easy.
No comments:
Post a Comment