Sand Opera Lenten Journey Day 6: Turning Toward the Least: The Blues of Javal Davis (+Timothy Liu)

Sand Opera Lenten Journey Day 6

“Then the righteous will answer him and say,
‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you,
or thirsty and give you drink?
When did we see you a stranger and welcome you,
or naked and clothe you?
When did we see you ill or in prison, and visit you?’
And the king will say to them in reply,
‘Amen, I say to you, whatever you did
for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.’”

--from Matthew 25:31-46

Note:

It’s all too easy to demonize the Javal Davises, who were “just following orders” when asked to “soften up” the detainees who were purportedly enemies of America. Certainly, Davis could have refused to abuse the detainees; yet his own testimony suggests the duress that he and his cohort were under—facing constant mortar attack, and living in a haunted prison. War places us in a position where we see strangers are suspects, not proxies for Jesus. Even in civilian life, we find ways of seeing the stranger as a threat. Nowhere is this more clear on a political level than in the debates around whether we accept a place for refugees and undocumented workers in this country. But if we focus in a little closer, to the mundane occasions of our immediate life, are we turning toward or away from the “least”?

On “The Blues of Javal Davis” by Timothy Liu

So he blasted country music as a means of torture. As opposed to Death Metal. The irony in that. Country music as soundtrack (Garth Brooks, Shania Twain) when I google “Abu Ghraib” for images online. It’s a challenge. Spelling “Abu Ghraib” correctly. Imagine a gun being pointed at your head and your being commanded to spell “Abu Ghraib” correctly. Or else. Who among us would end up in one of those photos as a corpse, as a smiling torturer? Try spelling the following names correctly: Ali Shallal al-Qaisi. Manadel al-Jamadi. Ameen Saeed Al-Sheik. Saad Naif. Try pronouncing their names correctly. One of them said, “They confined us like sheep.” One of them said, “They stripped me naked. One of them told me he would rape me. He drew a picture of a woman to my back and made me stand in shameful position holding my buttocks.” One of them was designated Detainee #151362. Does it matter who got to ride Hashem Muhsen like a donkey after that naked human pyramid photo was shot? Coda: Javal Davis pled guilty on 2/5/05 to dereliction of duty, making false official statements, and battery. Sentenced to six months. Became an actor in two documentary films on the scandal after he got out.

Timothy Liu's most recent book of poems is Don't Go Back To Sleep. http://timothyliu.net 

Sand Opera Lenten Journey Day 5: Temptations in the Desert (All of This Will Be Yours) + Tyrone Williams

Sand Opera Lenten Journey Day 5

Luke: 4:1-13

Filled with the Holy Spirit, Jesus returned from the Jordan
and was led by the Spirit into the desert for forty days,
to be tempted by the devil.
He ate nothing during those days,
and when they were over he was hungry.
The devil said to him,
“If you are the Son of God,
command this stone to become bread.”
Jesus answered him,
“It is written, One does not live on bread alone.”
Then he took him up and showed him
all the kingdoms of the world in a single instant.
The devil said to him,
“I shall give to you all this power and glory;
for it has been handed over to me,
and I may give it to whomever I wish.
All this will be yours, if you worship me.”
Jesus said to him in reply,
“It is written:
You shall worship the Lord, your God,
and him alone shall you serve.”
Then he led him to Jerusalem,
made him stand on the parapet of the temple, and said to him,
“If you are the Son of God,
throw yourself down from here, for it is written:
He will command his angels concerning you, to guard you,
and:
With their hands they will support you,
lest you dash your foot against a stone.”
Jesus said to him in reply,
“It also says,
You shall not put the Lord, your God, to the test.”
When the devil had finished every temptation,
he departed from him for a time.

The first recorded Christian conscientious objector was Maximilian, who in the 3^rd century refused to serve in the Roman army and was beheaded for his faith. I learned about him from The Catholic Peace Tradition, by Ronald Musto, a book whose title felt slightly oxymoronic, given how many Catholics serve in the U.S. armed forces. In Luke’s cinematic story of Jesus’s temptations in the desert, the devil’s invitation to worldly power must have been particularly difficult to turn down; after all, what good could a person do, if they were in a position of great power, to change the lives of so many others? And all they would have to do is worship someone other than God.  

“After ‘The Call-Up’” by Tyrone Williams

One of the memorable, because romantic, songs from The Clash’s 1977 Sandinista! album is “The Call-Up,” a song that admonishes youth in general—from the Ukraine to the U.S.S.R., from the U.K. to the U.S.A.—to resist the call of the fathers to die in their wars: “you must not act the way you were brought up.” I like this song because in my imagination it refers not just to the theaters of war but also to the very process of induction into the normative structures and values (economic, political, social, cultural, etc.) of a given society. In others words, even before I read Althusser I was already ringing the changes on what it meant to be hailed, to be called forth. But if being called up, called forth, is a kind of initiation into human society in general, is the soldier  a sacrifice not only in terms of his or her body but also, and perhaps more important, a sacrifice in terms of what it means to be human? In other words, the soldier sacrifices everything—or almost everything—that makes one human in order to safeguard other humans. In short, the decision to circumvent the Geneva Convention in the context of “new” wars (e.g., the ‘war” on terror) means no-holds-barred.

Philip Metres’ Sand Opera raises this issue in general, and the “abu ghraib arias” section explicitly explores it, delineates it in a series of dialectical poems: the verso pages contain poems in the voices of Arab, Afghan and Muslim prisoners while the recto pages contain poems in the voices of U.S.A. soldiers. The dialectics that this sequence sets in motion cannot be simply reduced to innocent testimonials and guilt-ridden confessions. Rather, innocence and guilt haunt the voices of both prisoners and soldiers; both find themselves reduced to shame.

One pairing that I find particularly poignant is “(echo/ex/),” a general title for all the prisoner poems, and “The Blues of Javal Davis.” The prisoner has been reduced not to an ‘animal” or even a plant but, rather, to the first particle of Judaic/Christian creation: “In the beginning                    I was there for 67 days of” (8). I can’t reproduce here Metres’s use of black bars and gray shading to indicate degrees of redacted texts (like FBI files) but they work in concert to indicate broken, incomplete voices; these men will never be the way they were before Guantanamo. At the same time, Javal Davis “testifies” to his own sense of imprisonment: “much on our own working/ seven days straight ducked/ heads when mortars fell/ slept seven to a cell” (9) As the references to the seven days of creation suggest, these are boys in the process of being made into soldiers. Of course, there is no moral, much less military, equivalence between the prisoners of war and the bunkered soldiers. However, in exploring the psychodynamics of both Metres points to, by implication, the larger forces, the “gods” and/or “fathers,” whose deliberate choices set in action the violent encounters between these boys.

  

Born in Detroit, Poet Tyrone Williams is the author of a number of books and chapbooks, including c.c. (2002), On Spec (2008), The Hero Project (2009), Adventures of Pi (2011), and Howell (2011). He teaches at Xavier University in Cincinnati. 

Sand Opera Lenten Journey Day 4

Sand Opera Lenten Journey Day 4

Isaiah 58

Thus says the LORD:
If you remove from your midst oppression,
false accusation and malicious speech;
If you bestow your bread on the hungry
and satisfy the afflicted;
Then light shall rise for you in the darkness,
and the gloom shall become for you like midday…

(echo/ex)
from SAND OPERA

Note:

As I re-read this poem today, I’m reminded of the dual difficulty it presents: that of telling traumatic stories, and of listening to them. The Iraqi who testified to what happened says that he had nothing to gain materially from telling this story, and that he wasn’t even supposed to tell it, but he tells it anyway, even as it returns him to the experience of total humiliation. His voice is difficult to hear because to hear it means that we enter into his experience of suffocating debasement. It also necessitates that we recognize that those who did this to him were Americans. In some strange way, we are the indirect authors of his pain. In today’s readings, Isaiah exhorts us to remove oppression from our midst, but the layers that separate us from this man are so manifold, so visibly invisible, it is difficult to know precisely how.

Two simple ways to begin this process of conscientization. One way is to remember, to remember something that has not been included our collective memory, but nonetheless involves us. For example, today is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Al Amiriyah Attack, in which 400 Iraqi civilians (mostly women and children) in a Baghdad bomb shelter were killed by U.S. missile attacks during the Persian Gulf War. Dima Yassine was ten minutes from the bombing, and could smell the burned flesh for days afterward. http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/23839/resisting-amnesia_twenty-five-years-after-the-al-a

What would it mean to remember Al Amiriyah—or The Move bombing in Philadelphia, for example—as clearly as the San Bernadino attacks or even 9/11?

The second way, specifically related to the content of this poem, is to scrutinize current U.S. policy regarding interrogation. My colleague, the ethicist Paul Lauritzen, wrote a deeply thoughtful examination of U.S. policies of interrogation, particularly the Bush Administration’s employment of the Orwellian-sounding “enhanced interrogation.” In The Ethics of Interrogation, Lauritzen attempts to create a moral framework to guide U.S. interrogation policy, differentiating between coercive interrogation (which he believes is legal and moral) and abusive interrogation. The key, for him, regards the question of whether interrogation acknowledges and maintains the dignity of the one under interrogation. One might hasten to add, with Isaiah in mind, the interrogator’s own potential loss of dignity.

From Paul Lauritzen’s The Ethics of Interrogation (2013)

http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt2tt6qg

Here it is useful to be concrete. Suppose we turn to the techniques set out in Army Field Manual 34-52, the 1992 Army document that spells out guidelines for “intelligence interrogation” and to the ten enhanced interrogation techniques that the classified Bybee memorandum addressed in August 2002. How should these various techniques be classified?  We can begin with FM 34-52. The manual covers interrogation in great detail, with chapters on everything from the general mission of military intelligence units and the structure of such units to the handling of documents produced through intelligence operations, including interrogation. Chapter three of the manual covers the actual techniques of interrogation. It identifies roughly a dozen general interrogation strategies, with some variations within each category. The categories are: direct, incentive, emotional, fear, pride and ego, futility, we know all, file and dossier, establish your identity, repetition, rapid fire, silence, and change of scene.

The coercive nature of all interrogation can be seen in the fact that even in the most innocuous of these techniques, namely, a direct approach in which the interrogator simply asks for the information he wants, the subject being interrogated is powerless and vulnerable. The detainee does not necessarily know where he is; he does not know what will happen if he refuses to answer; and even if he answers questions truthfully, he may not be believed. Nevertheless, not all techniques are the same. Asking a detainee a direct question is very different from what the manual refers to as a “Fear-Up (Harsh)” approach. According to the manual, “in this [Fear-Up (Harsh)] approach, the interrogator behaves in an overpowering manner with a loud and threatening voice. The interrogator may even feel the need to throw objects across the room to heighten the source’s implanted feelings of fear . . . This technique is to convince the source he does indeed have something to fear; that he has no option but to cooperate.”

The fact that questioning a detainee is coercive and may be harsh, however, does not mean it is morally or legally prohibited. Indeed, all the techniques set out in FM 34-52 are approved by the military, in part because they do not violate Geneva Conventions or the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The Preface to the manual is clear about the necessity of restraint. “These principles and techniques of interrogation,” the manual reads, “are to be used within the constraints established by the following”:

·       The Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ)

·       Geneva Convention for the Amelioration of the Wounded and Sick in Armed Forces in the Field of August 12, 1949, hereinafter referred to as GWS

·       Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War of August 12, 1949, hereinafter referred to as GPW

·       Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War of August 12, 1949, hereinafter referred to as GC.

Article three, which is common to all three of these Conventions, provides an indication of the basis upon which interrogations are to be judged. It reads:

(1)   Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed 'hors de combat' by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, colour, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria. To this end, the following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons: (a) violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture; (b) taking of hostages; (c) outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment; (d) the passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.

From this and other articles in the conventions, it is clear that the standard that is to guide the treatment of prisoners is one that safeguards the dignity and humanity of prisoners. Prisoners should not be degraded; they should not be treated cruelly; and they should not be physically or emotionally abused.

--Paul Lauritzen is Professor of Religious Ethics at John Carroll University in Cleveland. He is the author or editor of 5 books, including The Ethics of Interrogation (2013), and has published extensively on issues in bioethics, human rights, and religious ethics. He is the past coeditor of the Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics and is currently an associate editor with the Journal of Religious Ethics.

Sand Opera Lenten Journey Day Three

Sand Opera Lenten Journey: Day Three

Today’s Scripture: http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/021216.cfm

Thus says the Lord GOD:
Cry out full-throated and unsparingly,
lift up your voice like a trumpet blast…

This, rather, is the fasting that I wish:
releasing those bound unjustly,
untying the thongs of the yoke;
Setting free the oppressed,
breaking every yoke;
Sharing your bread with the hungry,
sheltering the oppressed and the homeless;
Clothing the naked when you see them,
and not turning your back on your own.
Then your light shall break forth like the dawn,
and your wound shall quickly be healed….

            --Isaiah

The Hebrew prophet Isaiah, one of my favorite prophets, invites us to think of fasting as questing for justice, mercy and love. I've always had a hard time with fasting from food, partly due to health reasons, so I'm drawn to Isaiah's idea that "fasting" can take on other dimensions. Not just self-abnegation, but care for the common self, the common good. To break the bonds of those held captive unjustly, to free the oppressed, to break bread with those without bread, to shelter the homeless, the refugee. How can we break forth our light like the dawn?

(Every few days, I’ll try to offer some a “call to action,” but I welcome your input.)

Today begins the first poem from “abu ghraib arias,” a sequence of poems in Sand Opera that explores the 2004 Abu Ghraib prison scandal, in which it was discovered that U.S. military police had been engaged in abuse and torture of Iraqi detainees, and then documenting it in photographs and film. I won’t link to those pictures, because to do so would be to continue that trauma. What happened there is why I wrote Sand Opera. Words were my way in, into the heart of that moral darkness of the War on Terror.

These poems are a dialogue between Standard Operation Procedure for Camp Delta in Guantanamo Bay, the soldiers who served in Abu Ghraib, and the Abu Ghraib prisoners. I draw upon a number of sources: a Standard Operating Procedure manual for Camp Echo at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp (thanks to WikiLeaks); the testimony of Abu Ghraib torture victims found in Mark Danner’s Torture and Truth: America and the War on Terror; the words of U.S. soldiers and contractors as found in Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris’s The Ballad of Abu Ghraib; the official reports on the Abu Ghraib prison scandal (the Taguba Report, the Schlesinger Report, etc.); interviews with Joe Darby and Eric Fair (two whistle-blowers); the Bible; and the Code of Hammurabi. 

The Blues of Lane McCotter

four Iraqis at the gate

all of them missing

their hands or their

█████████story

under Saddam their arms

██████ had been

██████████said

they knew they were

buried on the grounds

they wanted to uncover

those bones for proper

█████████████

four Iraqis ███████

I could not grant

access on account

█████████████

█████████████

███████one could enter 

████start taking pictures

██████████████

they removed their hands

█████████████

██████ I watched as night

took the rest of them

“The Blues of Lane McCotter” by Peter Molin

Lane McCotter occupies a strange pride-of-place very near the beginning of Sand Opera.  Barely noted in his time or remembered now, McCotter was the Coalition Provisional Authority official charged with standing up a prison system resourced and administered by Americans after they occupied Iraq in 2003. McCotter’s plans were submitted and he was out of the country before the first prisoners were housed in Abu Ghraib, and by accounts McCotter agitated for professionally or even progressively run penal institutions, to include new facilities and a competently supervised Iraqi staff. But McCotter’s recommendations were vetoed and undercut by higher authorities, decisions that led to the makeshift use of Abu Ghraib, a hated symbol of Saddam Hussein’s reign of terror, as a CPA prison and the ad hoc deployment of poorly trained and motivated National Guardsmen to serve as guards. 

So what blues does Lane McCotter sing? Grief that his good work and name were besmirched by the travesty of events that unfolded in his wake? A lament that he was unable to press hard enough to see his plans and vision implemented? The knowledge of ultimate culpability that comes with having been at one time in charge? The guilt of banal bureaucratic participation in evil? One of Metres’ epigraphs, taken from Michael Herr’s Dispatches, would seem to especially apply here:

“…it took the war to teach it, that you were responsible for everything you saw as you were for everything you did.  The problem was that you didn’t always know what you were seeing until later, maybe years later, that a lot never made it in at all, it just stayed there in your eyes….”

“The Blues of Lane McCotter” offers first view of one of Metres’s stylistic signatures in Sand Opera:  the repurposing of passages taken from memoirs and official documents, with blacked-out redactions added by Metres, as poetry to convey the ethical, material, psychological, and social horror of Abu Ghraib events.  The blacked out portions of text compel readers to fill in blanks and make connections as they will, thus drawing readers into the complicated, constricted, and ambiguous smear of implications faced by the Abu Ghraib actors themselves. “The Blues of Lane McCotter” recounts an anecdote related by McCotter in which he remembers denying entrance to a prison under his control to four Iraqis who want to recover severed hands or other body parts suffered during incarceration under Saddam. The speaking voice cannot allow the Iraqis access on security grounds, but the memory, or the image, as Herr has it, of being unable to help lingers. Early on, the anecdote implies, justice and good intentions were fudged, and the new boss remembers himself at the head of a long train of events that would eventually mirror the inhumanity of the old boss. By foregrounding McCotter’s somewhat remote connection to the abuses and humiliations that would follow, Sand Opera asks us to consider the responsibility all Americans bear for Abu Ghraib and to think what we might have done if we were in his place.

--Peter Molin is a retired US Army infantry officer who currently teaches in the Writing Program at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ.  He blogs at Time Now: The Iraq and Afghanistan Wars in Art, Film, and Literature. www.acolytesofwar.com

Sand Opera Lenten Journey Day 2

Sand Opera Lenten Journey Day 2

Today’s Scripture

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/021116.cfm

If, however, you turn away your hearts and will not listen,
but are led astray and adore and serve other gods,
I tell you now that you will certainly perish.

Including this reference in Deuteronomy, there are at least 42 instances in the Bible in which we are admonished to “harden not our hearts.” In a world so full of din and spin, voices thick with propaganda and hatred, it is easy to close our ears to everything but our own immediate concern. Sometimes, to my great shame, I've shut out the people I love the most. What of the “many long dumb voices,” of which Whitman spoke: “through me many long dumb voices,” the voices that have been mute or made mute in our lives and in our world? What if we’re not listening to the very voice of God?

I found this illumination (below) in an exhibit at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and was struck by its astonishing beauty and its representation of a cruel and hideous act, the beheading of St. Bartholomew. I wondered again at the paradox of the limitlessness of human depradation and also the ability of human beings to depict even such acts with such grace. What if flesh is the text of God?

Illumination of the Martyrdom of St. Bartholomew

from the dried hide of calves

carved sewn in quires

they bend & tend to him / as if

tailors or healers & not rending

skin from limb / their eyes

narrowing knives / he balances

naked on ankle / a single

arm aloft as if in flight

from body’s scything / O wholly

gold-haloed & yet-membered head

soothe the eye in which I am

thrown / hand without shield /

scissored out hymn / & if

the body’s flayed & displayed

in human palms / & human skin

scrolled open / the body still dances

& if the flesh is the text

of God / bid a voice to rise /

& rise again

On “Illumination of the Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew” by Hilary Plum

In an age of text casually digitally illuminated, I find online a reproduction of a leaf from a ca. 1340 Italian hymnal, which above its fragment of hymn portrays in tempera, gold, and ink the martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew. I am following the poem. The pose of the saint corresponds; in one panel, skin of one leg flayed to the thigh; in the next, skin a cloak tied round the neck of the headless saint. Bartholomew is often portrayed offering forth his skin, specter of his own face gathered in his hands.

Bid a voice to rise: the page is waiting to be sung. Yet its fate has long been silence. A hymnal like this has become a document of song, not a means to it; to preserve and be preserved and not to be used.

Bid a voice to rise: of his encounter with the testimonies of those imprisoned in Abu Ghraib, Metres writes I found the transcripts… were too painful for me to read straight through; the only way I could bear to read them was to work with them. So every morning, I sat down with a photocopied page and a yellow highlighter. To illuminate.

The voice that rises, ruptures: in the “abu ghraib arias” that follow this poem, space and silence rupture the text. Black bars obscure where text might have been. To illuminate; to hear the history of silence. These poems document a silence that is a silencing; they mourn by hearing what they cannot hear. The poet calls forth his voice and then lets silence occupy it.

When I sit before the reproduction of this page I am following the poet, occupying a space before the screen he must once have occupied. Years have passed since he was here, years that have silenced further the fact of these crimes and of these living voices, the hooded faces we have yet to see. I sit before the poem and all that has come after. I follow the poem; the work remains. The poem means to be used.

Hilary Plum is the author of the novel They Dragged Them Through the Streets (FC2, 2013) and the essay Watchfires (Rescue Press, forthcoming 2016).

Sand Opera Lenten Journey Day One: Compline

Sand Opera Lenten Journey

Day One

From Joel, Chapter 2:

Even now, says the LORD,
return to me with your whole heart,
with fasting, and weeping, and mourning;
Rend your hearts, not your garments,
and return to the LORD, your God.
For gracious and merciful is God,
slow to anger, rich in kindness….

Opening Thoughts

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. Today is Ash Wednesday. I remember the awe and confusion I felt as a child, approaching the priest to receive an ashen cross on my forehead. It was a reminder of our mortality, and I did not know the first thing about death. That we are given this small span, as Blake once wrote, to bear the beams of love. I’ve always had a quarrel with Lent, the idea of fasting and penitence in winter. Living in Cleveland, I experience Lent during the months when my energy is lowest, my mood’s tending toward darkness. Winter’s incessantly gray skies, its icy sidewalks, and sometimes sub-zero temperatures make it hazardously physically and emotionally.  I already tend toward the masochistic. Shouldn’t I be practicing “hygge”? Probably.

Traditionally, Lent asks its pilgrims to take on some act of penance, some act of fasting. Not too long ago, it meant “giving something up”—chocolate, television, the internet—some bit of worldly pleasure that might keep us from dwelling with ultimate things. More recently, people have begun performing acts that might bring us closer to God. This year, I wanted to enter into the Lenten mystery more fully. To return, as the Hebrew prophet Joel invites, with a whole heart, despite (or perhaps through) my brokenness.

In some sense, Sand Opera, which began when I started “writing through” the Abu Ghraib story, was both a “giving up” and an act of penitential witness. When faced with the problem of evil, the theodicy that was the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, I found myself closer to the mystery of suffering and the demonic forces of unchecked power in war. I wrote these poems to read them, and now I read them again to write them. To return again to the questions that they ask.

Today, I’m sharing "Compline," the last poem of Sand Opera, and poet Luke Hankins’ reflections.

“Compline” by Philip Metres     

That we await a blessed hope, & that we will be struck

With great fear, like a baby taken into the night, that every boot,

Every improvised explosive, Talon & Hornet, Molotov

& rubber-coated bullet, every unexploded cluster bomblet,

Every Kevlar & suicide vest & unpiloted drone raining fire

On wedding parties will be burned as fuel in the dark season.

That we will learn the awful hunger of God, the nerve-fraying

Cry of God, the curdy vomit of God, the soiled swaddle of God,

The constant wakefulness of God, alongside the sweet scalp

Of God, the contented murmur of God, the limb-twitched dream-

Reaching of God. We’re dizzy in every departure, limb-lost.

We cannot sleep in the wake of God, & God will not sleep

The infant dream for long. We lift the blinds, look out into ink

For light. My God, my God, open the spine binding our sight.

First published in Poetry (February 2012). From Sand Opera (2015)

On “Compline,” by Luke Hankins

“I will not keep silent.”

Perhaps no other phrase is more emblematic of Western religious traditions at their points of intersection with lived experience. Praise and lament, petition and complaint all arise from the human impulse to assert one’s voice—even on the largest scale, before the very Creator.

“I will not keep silent,” Job cries. “I will speak out in the anguish of my spirit, I will complain in the bitterness of my soul.” (Job 7:11; see also The Holy Qur’an, Ṣād 38:41)

In Sand Opera, Philip Metres inhabits and extends this tradition, voicing not only his own outcry as an Arab American living in the post-9/11 era, but seeking to bring the silenced and molested voices of victims of the War on Terror to a wide audience—but not in any straightforward or facile way. Many of Metres’ compositional techniques imitate the very offenses—imprisonment, torture, erasure—that they lament. In so doing, the reader arrives along with the author at a place of anguish over our contemporary state of affairs.

Again, let me emphasize that Metres’ work is anything but one-sided, facile, or selective in its vision or empathy. Alongside the voices of Middle Eastern victims in Abu Ghraib, the reader will find voices like those of a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan who took part in the arrest of a murderer of both children and adults, but who ultimately was forced by absurd government and military policy to release him because they were only authorized to detain “terrorists” and “insurgents,” not mere murderers. “I had looked directly into the eyes of evil,” he says, “and could do nothing about it.”

In the final poem of Sand Opera, “Compline”—an evening prayer—Metres writes:

“[W]e will learn the awful hunger of God, the nerve-fraying

Cry of God, the curdy vomit of God, the soiled swaddle of God,

The constant wakefulness of God, alongside the sweet scalp

Of God, the contented murmur of God, the limb-twitched dream-

Reaching of God. We’re dizzy in every departure, limb-lost.

We cannot sleep in the wake of God, & God will not sleep

The infant dream for long. We lift the blinds, look out into ink

For light. My God, my God, open the spine binding our sight.”

Metres locates God here among and within us. When a newborn sleeps, God partakes in that peace. When an Abu Ghraib prisoner is violated, so is God. When a soldier is compelled to act against her conscience, God is taken advantage of. When we blind ourselves to the realities of modern warfare, nation-building, and “homeland security,” we are attempting to cover the very eyes of God. Cry out all we like, until we remove the veil from our eyes and confront the world as it is, we will receive no illumination from above.

Metres’ poems can help us see, can help us learn to voice our complaint and that of others—and can help us learn to take the work we ask of God as our own highest calling. It can teach us anew the truth of Jesus’ words, “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”

--Luke Hankins is the author of a collection of poems, Weak Devotions, and the editor of Poems of Devotion: An Anthology of Recent Poets. His latest book is The Work of Creation: Selected Prose. He is the founder and editor of Orison Books, a non-profit literary press focused on the life of the spirit from a broad and inclusive range of perspectives.

A Lenten Journey: The Sand Opera meditations

A Lenten Journey: The Sand Opera meditations

The Project

After Sand Opera’s publication in 2015, Jayme Stayer, S.J., wrote to tell me that he had been praying with the poems as part of his daily Examen, the Jesuit daily contemplation. I was touched to hear that he had intuitively completed what my own morning Lenten practice over the Abu Ghraib testimonies many years before had begun; that these were texts that needed to be prayed over as much as read.

This Lent, beginning tomorrow on February 10^th 2016, I will share one poem per day from Sand Opera on my blog, Behind the Lines, and send the link via Twitter and Facebook—as part of a digitally-collective observance and meditation through poetry. I hope that you might share the news as well.

Why Lent?

During a Lenten season many years ago—a forty day season of penitence and fasting observed by many Christian denominations—I awoke early every morning to read through and work with the testimonies of the abused at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. I wanted to face the darkness of this war, a war carried out in our names and in the name of our security. At some point, after poring over the photographs taken by military police at Abu Ghraib of their abuse of prisoners, although I am a poet, I decided that I could not write my way into or out of them. In some respect, to continue to circulate the photographs themselves, or to write poems from the photographs, would only complete the total objectification of the bodies and souls of those tortured Iraqis.

It was only when I stumbled on transcripts of the testimony given by the Iraqi prisoners themselves (thanks to Mark Danner’s book Torture and Truth) did I discover a way to slip inside that prison. The “abu ghraib arias,” which opens Sand Opera, began simply a way to be with those prisoners through reading their testimonies. However, I found the transcripts which were too painful for me to read straight through; the only way I could bear to read them was to work with them. So every morning, I sat down with a photocopied page and a yellow highlighter, looking for words and phrases that vibrated on the page, that seemed almost to lift up out of the page, and to trace my highlighter over them, bearing down with them, trying not to be suffocated by the story of torture.

Later, I would work with the testimonies of U.S. military personnel who worked in the prison, as well as the Standard Operating Procedure manual for the Guantanamo Bay Prison, to place the testimonies of Iraqis and Americans in dialogue—a dialogue that they did not have in life. The poems that resulted became part of a chapbook called abu ghraib arias, first published in 2011; years later, they became a pivotal section of Sand Opera.

This Lent project circles back to that original practice, but widens out, to include many others voices and poems, alongside the voices that made their mark on me. As I've evolved in the understanding of what this should be, I realized it was the 25th anniversary of the Persian Gulf War, and suddenly it made even more sense. I’m happy that so many people were interested in dilating the conversation (including poetry and activism and art and faith) and that I could invite people from these diverse communities; I’m particularly pleased to have touched base with a number of friends that I have not connected with for years—especially some Iraqi friends from our anti-sanctions campaign in the late 1990s.

When I asked for ideas for how to engage this project, my friend Father Don Cozzens wrote to me, wondering whether “finding a creative, spiritual ‘use’ for the poems for the Lenten season might distract from their innate power, their existential force. But you might consider this: since Lent is about the disciplined hope of transformation into the body of Christ, it’s about both discipline (the paschal mystery) and the joyful hope for healing, new life, and peace. Alongside each of the daily releases, a Scripture quote or an aphorism that calls us to a fearless hope in the midst of our wounded, tragic world might be placed.” Thanks to Father Cozzens, I’ll be sharing a quote from scripture from the day’s readings to frame each day.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed to this dialogue, this contrapuntal chorus. I’m thinking of the work of Edward Said on contrapuntal reading and John Paul Lederach, on peacebuilding. In The Moral Imagination, Lederach argues that from peacebuilding requires both an understanding of the geographies of conflict and an exploration of the creative act:

we must understand and feel the landscape of protracted violence and why it poses such deep-rooted challenges to constructive change. In other words we must set our feet deeply into the geographies and realities of what destructive relationships produce, what legacies they leave, and what breaking their violent patterns will require…[and] we must explore the creative process itself, not as a tangential inquiry, but as the wellspring that feeds the building of peace (5).

What Lederach teaches us is that peacebuilding thus requires a view grounded in the complex and thorny landscapes of oppression and violence. One must analyze fully the protracted nature of destructive relationships, or else we risk moving too quickly to false or unjust peace, and thus fail to understand or address the essence of what fuels conflict and oppression.

What Edward Said teaches us is that to read contrapuntally is to hear with both ears, to see with both eyes—outside the frames offered by mainstream media or ideological propaganda. We need to come to terms with what it means to be citizens of empire, to ask ourselves how we might be participating in injustice simply by living in this time and place, and to find out ways that we ourselves might make more justice, more light, more love, and more peace.  

Philip Metres

February 15, 2016.

A Lenten Journey: The Sand Opera meditations (an open call)

A Lenten Journey: The Sand Opera meditations (an open call)

The Project

I’ve wanted to find ways of connecting the work of this book with the work of other writers, artists, activists, scholars, and people of faith. After Sand Opera’s publication in 2015, Jayme Stayer, S.J., wrote to tell me that he had been praying with the poems as part of his daily Examen, the Jesuit daily contemplation. I was touched to hear that he had intuitively completed what my own morning Lenten practice over the Abu Ghraib testimonies many years before had begun; that these were texts that needed to be prayed over as much as read.

This Lent, beginning on February 10^th 2016, I plan to share one poem per day from Sand Opera on my blog, Behind the Lines, as well as on Twitter and Facebook—as part of a digitally-collective fasting and meditation through poems. But I wanted to make this about more than the poems themselves. The poems are points of departure. I’m hoping that you might add your voice to this conversation by choosing a poem from the collection to write a short meditation? I’m thinking that short pieces of about 100-500 words that meditate on the poem through spiritual, political, ethical, or artistic lenses—whatever suits you. Let me know what you’d like to work with. Again, your faith or lack of faith are not at stake; I'm interested in your voice and what you'd like to say.

For example, a meditation on “Black Site [Exhibit Q]” could explore the meanings and politics of “black sites” in particular, or the problem of incarceration and the prison system in the United States, or the implications of entrapment on a more personal existential level. It could share suggested readings or suggestions for action. For example, for a poem about Guantanamo, it could share links to calls for closing the prison or Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s memoir. However, I am happy with any way you wish to engage with the poems!

Further Background: Why Lent?

During a Lenten season many years ago—a forty day season of penitence and fasting in the Catholic Church—I awoke early every morning to read through and work with the testimonies of the abused at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. I wanted to face the darkness of this war, a war carried out in our names and in the name of our security. At some point, after poring over the photographs taken by military police at Abu Ghraib of their abuse of prisoners, although I am a poet, I decided that I could not write my way into or out of them. In some respect, to continue to circulate the photographs themselves, or to write poems from the photographs, would only complete the total objectification of the bodies and souls of those tortured Iraqis.

It was only when I stumbled on transcripts of the testimony given by the Iraqi prisoners themselves (thanks to Mark Danner’s book Torture and Truth) did I discover a way to slip inside that prison. The “abu ghraib arias,” which opens Sand Opera, began simply a way to be with those prisoners through reading their testimonies. However, I found the transcripts which were too painful for me to read straight through; the only way I could bear to read them was to work with them. So every morning, I sat down with a photocopied page and a yellow highlighter, looking for words and phrases that vibrated on the page, that seemed almost to lift up out of the page, and to trace my highlighter over them, bearing down with them, trying not to be suffocated by the story of torture.

Later, I would work with the testimonies of U.S. military personnel who worked in the prison, as well as the Standard Operating Procedure manual for the Guantanamo Bay Prison, to place the testimonies of Iraqis and Americans in dialogue—a dialogue that they did not have in life. The poems that resulted became part of a chapbook called abu ghraib arias, first published in 2011; years later, they became a pivotal section of Sand Opera.

This Lent project would be a circling back to that original practice, but also a widening to include all of your voices alongside the voices that made their mark on me.

Thanks in advance for your consideration! Let me know.

The following poems have yet to be "claimed":

Illumination

Lane McCotter

In the name

Next day

Public Address

His name is G

Graner

On the third day

First the man

The Blues of Lynddie England

The Blues of Ken Davis

Now I am

And it came to pass

Joe Darby

Woman

Iraqi Curator

Black Site Q

Asymmetries

Salaam

War Stories

The new theory

She asks

What does it mean

Testimony

Saddam

Etruscan

A Toast

What consequence

In the wake of

As if

On the flight