# Pointing Towards Syria

September 11, 2016

Honey on the elbow – try sucking and you’ll see.

Though even this prospect ‘s worth more than you or me.

Yet we are here, present and correct, while peace in Syria’ s

But a sweet smear; a smudge on the lens of war-past-war.

Was it ever thus? Is this still politics continued by other means?

In Geneva the protagonists play on, much as they always might

They are the high and mighty, after all.

In Aleppo young men with mortars play out their immortality to the last drop

You don’t have long, lads; aged 27 it turns sour, anyway.

But who knows what the people think? People more partisan

With every falling shell…or past caring whatever it was they once cared about?

Man in gown, transgender pink, not in the ballroom as you might think.

Admitted to hospital suffering from the effects of chlorine inhalation,

Brought on by a barrel bomb – no barrel of laughs in the swimming pool.

The hospital has moved above ground again. Back to normal? Only that the ground floor and basement are now full to overflowing, forcing the reclamation of upper storeys where the ‘walls are open’. Intentional or not, the Syrian doctor’s turn of phrase is undoubtedly poetic. She says again that ‘everything is not enough’. From her lips this is by no means a statement of infinite entitlement. According to another doctor, a Syrian-American who recently returned to the United States, they don’t even have painkillers. In which case the miracle is that people keep on coming.

And the point of pointing this out? The point is to point. Addressing atrocities in terms other than the immediate, means calling to you, dear reader, across the wasteland. It’s important, you see, to retain the capacity for we, renewed by reference to things more important than you and me. And if this makes us ambulance chasers or even vultures whose collective existence feeds on the dead and dying, let’s hope the true nature of our dependence, depends on what we go on to do with it. read more

#97 Moulded Yourself Into A Soldier

August 7, 2016

On 21 July 2016 Dean Carl Evans (22) from Reading died fighting with a Kurdish People’s Defence Unit attempting to re-take the Syrian city of Manbij from Islamic State. Afterwards another British volunteer praised Evans for having ‘moulded himself’ into a soldier during two tours in northern Syria.

Unprepossessing

Unfit for the Army
Asthma let you down
As your undershot jaw would lower
The score on Take Me Out

Unprepossessing

Less of the specified failings
More an awkwardness all round
That question remaining unanswered:
Just what to do with your mouth

Unprepossessing?

Yet you took hold of yourself
Flying out twice to Syria
Now killed in action
With the Kurds against IS

Fatal self-possession

Put paid to any personal
Doubt or insecurity
Though odd if for your counterparts
The motives were much the same

How strange if for your foes
The motive’s exactly the same.

#71 Anthem For A Boy Soldier

February 7, 2016

Did he die like a lamb? Six months ago, having fought ‘like a miracle’ when his home town in Afghanistan was besieged by the Taliban – so says his uncle the pro-government militiaman, boy soldier Wasil Ahmad was feted, garlanded, photographed carrying a taped-up, hand-me-down AK47, and widely shared.

Does this mean Wasil was also fated, set up, all but sacrificed to the Taliban? Who came like priests only completing the ritual when they duly shot and slaughtered the wee boy walking unwillingly to primary school in Tirin Kot, capital of the southern province of Oruzgan.

But reports of Wasil Ahmad’s death may have grossly exaggerated the distance between his chronological age – 10 – and the paramilitary shoe-size he’d already stepped into.

Despite comments to the contrary in Western media, the police uniform which the boy soldier appears in, was not too big for him. In those photographs, widely shared, his head is not too small for the matching helmet. Eyes, nose and the set of his mouth are in proportion – well-balanced – with the rifle sitting comfortably on his arm.

In August’s local hero pictures and again in what appears to be a photo of his body shortly before burial last week, this boy’s countenance seems equally untroubled.

Strange to say but perhaps there’s less to be frightened of at 10 years old and under – before Consequences kick in and we are drummed with uncertainty and impermanence.

What simple innocence (we think) we hear in ‘Once In Royal David’s City’ – twilight on Christmas Eve and all things safe and sound in the voice of a King’s College chorister. But what if boyishly unadulterated is also supremely implacable; not only guileless but remorseless, too?

As death itself; meanwhile so pleasing to behold you cannot help but liken the boy to your own son to have and to hold. read more

#65 Graceless, Sometimes Deliberately So

November 13, 2015

‘There was a huge red ball in the sky above the centre of the city. I turned to my mother and asked “what’s that?”. And she replied: “that’s the cathedral”.’

A few days before the seventy-fifth anniversary of the blitz on Coventry in November 1940, an elderly woman was asked to recall that night of her girlhood when her home town burned down.

From early evening until early morning, more than 500 German aircraft dropped bombs on this Midlands city. Coventry was sent to pieces. Forlorn attempts to save themedieval cathedral came to nothing when the water supply ran dry.

Our eye-witness spoke in the voice we reserve for memories we revere – resonant (we hope), redolent (we’d like to think), little short of sanctified; until the last phrase, when the reverential tone was flattened into matter-of-fact.

Whether she was echoing her mother’s lack of intonation, or whether the change oftone was all her own; or perhaps it’s part of the Coventry city psyche – any road, ‘that’sthe cathedral’ was delivered deadpan, without any saving grace.

No more tripping the light fantastic for those good ol’ cops charged with murdering a six year old last week.

The dead boy was a passenger in his father’s car when it came under fire from Louisiana law enforcement officers.

Taken before the fatal shooting, Facebook photos of father and son make you think ofa beam of light between them.

A long way from luminous, the officers’ leaden mug shots suggest graceless lives lived on a flat earth peopled by perps, victims and law enforcement; and barely a human soul among the lot of them.

Maybe with partners and families they managed to enter into the spirit of the thing (thething spirited, spiritualised because people have entered into it); or perhaps prison-style purgatory is where they’ve been living all along.

Half-way between the bombing of Coventry and the recent recollection of it, in theearly 1980s the same flat tone was clearly audible in the singing voice of Terry Hall, lead vocalist in Coventry’s best-known band, The Specials. He set about using it to deliberately poignant effect, even if it was also part of his personality (the singer’s persona who previously worked in a stamp collecting shop).

A gift to be able to turn it on and off. But what if you can’t give it back?

Life among the graceless must be a crying shame,

#64 Replaying The War

November 1, 2015

They called it a turkey shoot but you wouldn’t stuff this carcass at Christmas.

It is the charred man, crisped to ash and bone when a convoy of conscripts was strafed by Coalition planes in the closing stages of the ‘video game war’ against Iraq (February 1991).

The posture of the burnt-out body told photographer Kenneth Jarecke ‘how precious life was to this guy…trying to get out of that truck’.

Head and shoulders framed in the windscreen, hands pushing down on the dashboard,the human remains that Jarecke froze on film had been ‘fighting to save his life to thevery end, till he was completely burned up.’

But ‘Crispy’ didn’t tally with the preferred, purposely blurred image of ‘surgical strikes’ against Saddam Hussein, dictator of Baghdad. When it mattered most, most newspapers demurred: they deferred printing until the picture was already its own archive.

Head tilted, teeth bared, shoulders bunched forward, the charred man of nearly 25 years ago is precursor to the pose struck by a previously charmed man, fighting to save his public life in a recent interview with CNN (the rolling news channel which first came to international prominence during the war in which Crispy was incinerated).

Flesh turned to ash would have toned in perfectly with Tony Blair’s grey suit and matching tie. Likewise, the former British prime minister also bares teeth, tilts his head, and bunches his shoulders forward as he gazes intently – too intensely – at interviewer Fareed Zakaria.

Dried out in an instant, how Crispy would have envied the merest smear of sweat on Tony’s upper lip. But would he be duped by his doppleganger’s verbal delivery? Oh-so deliberately casual, with prepared pauses in the, wrong places – as if words are simply springing to mind and not always at a regular rate, when really their spontaneity has been repeatedly rehearsed. read more

#39 Remembrance

November 9, 2014

Pace Wilfred Owen, it’s not an outright lie – dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

Remembrance ceremonies, such as the ceremony taking place this morning at London’s Cenotaph, enact the ‘sweet and noble’. A ritual of dulce et decorum, but not necessarily hollow. The falsification comes in the change of tense – not ‘to die’, Horace’s old line would be straight and true if it read: ‘to have died’.

On Remembrance Sunday, in the primary composition of former combatants, thesecondary role accorded to politicians and other civic dignitaries, and, above all, in thetwo, silent minutes of concerted contemplation, decorum is restored to all those who have died in bloody chaos.

In the moment, bodies broken open (more ghastly than grave robbing), bereft of sense and sensibility (only sensation, agonising sensation). But now they are people again, re-assembled in orderly progression.

The solemn procession, at its head our idea of the dead.

Take this, we say, for we do it remembrance of you. Which may be only partly true, but what else….?

Whichever side. Besides the Cause. There is nobility in having died, now it has been entered post festum.

#30 The Substance of ‘J.F.’ versus Phenomenal ‘J.J.’

August 23, 2014

Two men in the desert, front of camera: J.F. in a prisoner’s orange overall, head shaved, kneeling, apparently penitent; J.J., knife in (left) hand, face covered, swathed in black from head to….ankle, where Grim Reaper garb gives way to non-apocalyptic desert boots.

How did they get there?

J.F., a 40-year-old, photogenic video-journalist – facial bones like the young Iggy Pop, previously said he was drawn to conflict zones because, unless someone gets up close, ‘we can’t understand the world, essentially’.

In video footage of a Q&A session at his old journalism school (Medill), he does that a lot – that is, he makes a strong statement, then softens the sound of it with an adverb – ‘essentially’; likewise, the ‘prayers and cigarettes, basically’, that got him through a previous period of incarceration (Libya 2011), also in the hands of unreliable captors (teenage Gaddafi loyalists), who shot and killed a South African photographer immediately before taking J.F. into custody.

Describing him as ‘motivated’, J.F.’s father later said of his late son that doing this important job ‘gave him energy’.

During his talk to staff and students at Medill (ignoring the Milky Bar Kid who at the first mention of violence, smirks at the girl in the adjacent seat), J.F. remarks upon the‘reach for humanity’ readily discernible among the people he was reporting on.

He reports being inspired by them, but did they also serve as his surrogates? It is valid to ask whether other people’s war zones (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria) became a theatre of self-validation for J.F. He admits that writing fiction failed to fulfil the romantic idea of himself as a writer (please note, a particular kind of young American invests theword ‘writer’ with a special sort of significance); so he turned to reality rather than questions of realism. read more

#19 All In A D-Day

June 9, 2014

During the BBC Radio 4 Today programme of 6^th June 2014, coverage of the seventieth anniversary of the D-Day landings appeared alongside the breaking story of dead babies shoved into the septic tank of a post-war home for fallen women (unmarried mothers) in rural Ireland.

How wide, I wonder, is the divide between these two sets of casualties – the infantile and adolescent? Both of them ended up in the slurry, dropped right in it to meet therequirements of the time; in accordance with the orders of the day.But even as I say this, I know I am slurring my words for polemical effect. Unlike undifferentiated baby waste, leaving no distinction between a child’s body and the contents of his nappy, the young soldiers forming the first wave of Operation Overlord were always marked out as heroes. Their hero status was as clear as the cocoa smeared on their faces – not faeces – for night time camouflage.

In the wartime broadcasts of BBC radio reporter Richard Dimbleby, even the waste products of their successful advance were duly honoured. Of the equipment left behind by the first Allied troops to land in Normandy, in his sing-song voice Dimbleby said: ‘Today the gliders and some of the discarded parachutes lie like crumpled flowers inthe wet wooded countryside north east of Caen.’

Catch the cadences in that!

Dimbleby’s prose is as sonorous as Dylan Thomas issuing his order to the wartime generation – ‘do not go gentle into that good night’. Thomas was writing not about thewar but for his dying father. Yet both the poet and the war reporter accorded the same high honour to human life and death.

Theirs is not an empty formality, but the proper use of form – to formulate what we are. As writers ordering experience as best they can, they order their readers and listeners to do the best we can.

Citing ‘parachutes..like crumpled flowers’, Dimbleby was already memorialising, only hours after ‘our airborne troops have successfully completed this, the first of their operations in the new battle of Europe’. Whether or not they lived to tell the tale, he was writing an elegy for this, their bravest action.

Seven decades later, the memories of the old boys who came flooding back to Normandy one last time, must now be imbued not only with the shades of fallen comrades but also with the ghosts of all they have and haven’t done with their lives inthe 70 years since that first landing.

Was D-Day what made them find their feet as grown men, or is it that the ground beneath them never seemed so solid again? Scanned by television cameras, their faces said both these things at the same time. read more

Wrong End Of The Shtick

December 19, 2013

Crying but he’s trying to push it away; trying – now failing – to keep the collapse out of his speaking voice. Ditto the Mother. Father and Mother. Of two boys lost. Killed in some kind of an attack, in some sort of city, which happens to be Baghdad.

Their boys lost and gone, now all they can do is hold on to themselves, hold it to together – together.

But neither one succeeds; each of them breaks down in front of the microphone.

Now the radio reporter has got what she wants. For her the interview is drawn around the soundbites of parents crying. As soon as they start speaking again, what they say is translated into English, and the translation is voiced by someone else; someone who is not authentic. But the sound of sobbing seems more vital than anything the parents might have to say. Elemental and transcendental, the parents themselves, as they really are, expressing themselves beyond language. Their crying is what the rest of the package is for.

How wrong can you be? They are not this animal sound. Who they are, is what they have made of themselves, and how they have made themselves stop weeping. Just as parents, previously, they made themselves make their boys into more than whining, whingeing little creatures. On cold mornings and warm evenings, never giving up until the day their children were ripped away.

You’ve got it wrong, Dear Journo. The common denominator is not the lowest but the highest we can be. Better to approach all your interviewees as if each of them is Nelson Mandela.

Which, of course, we are.

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