In his poem “Try to Praise the Mutilated World,” Adam Zagajewski juxtaposes intense images of violence, such as “the executioners sing[ing] joyfully” (l. 11), with simple but equally powerful images of beautiful objects and moments of positive connection between people. As this analysis of “Try to Praise the Mutilated World” suggests is that what Zagajewski emphasizes as he asserts that we “must praise the mutilated world” (l. 6) is that both types of experiences are fragmentary and fleeting. The final image of the poem, “the gentle light that strays and vanishes/and returns” (ll. 20-21), reminds the reader that the current oppressive moment of darkness will pass. Meanwhile, we must recall the equally ephemeral moments that have brought us profound joy and a sense of peace. By holding on to such recollections, we are not denying the violence that swirls around us; rather, we are acknowledging that pain and joy co-exist, and that the latter is the only apparent antidote to the former. Zagajewski’s injunction is just one of the strategies available to us for living in a mutilated world. The other readings in this unit offer alternative approaches for both accepting the world as it is and fighting to make it a better place.

 

The survival strategy that Jessica Hagedorn offers in “The Song of the Bullets” appears somewhat similar to that offered by Zagajewski, but acknowledges the constructive and preserving function that rage can play in devastating social situations. As this poem opens, the speaker says that she “still/love[s] music” (ll. 4-5), despite the gathering collection of fears that make life increasingly restrictive and oppressive. In a certain sense, she is becoming numb to the effects of the conflict in which her country is involved; “Day after day,” she states, “with less surprise…/we count the dead” (ll. 6-7;9). She fights against her “weakening rage” (l. 59) towards those responsible for the conflict by trying to focus on the image of her daughter’s “pink and luscious flesh” (l. 56). This image is a sign of new life, innocence, and hope; however, the speaker is “undone” by this image, presumably because she is imagining the very real possibility of her daughter being physically or psychologically destroyed by the violence that touches almost every aspect of their lives. How can one live when the persistent thought that “Someone else’s father/perhaps mine/will be executed” (ll. 41-43), or when “Assassins cruise the streets/in obtrusive limousines” (ll. 69-70), or when one cannot anticipate an end to the violence because relatives send Christmas cards saying “Things still the same” (l. 30)? These are not merely rhetorical questions. For the speaker in Hagedorn’s poem—and for her reader who is conscious of the world’s profound conflicts and their consequences—it is critical to hold on to life. Yet Hagedorn advocates doing that not simply by shifting our gaze to what is beautiful, but by refusing to forget the devastation. She “memorize[s]/a list of casualties” (ll. 18-19), and reminds herself to “stay angry” (l. 63). Denial or repression of the world’s mutilation is not an effective or healthy strategy for the living.

 

So far, then, we have two strategies, which far from being contradictory, actually complement one another. Zagajewski advocates focusing on the praiseworthy aspects of a world that is admittedly mutilated, while Hagedorn asserts that maintaining a healthy level of rage and warding off the eroding effects of forgetting are the only ways we can cope with the massive, almost incomprehensible damage that we inflict upon one another and the world. Both Zagajewski’s and Hagedorn’s strategies are valuable, as the scope of such damage is often beyond our capacity to internalize it in any meaningful way. It is almost impossible, for example, for Americans to visualize exactly what Gourevitch means when he writes that “of an original population of about seven and a half million, at least eight hundred thousand [Rwandans] were killed [by each other] in just a hundred days” (4). Even Gourevitch’s comparison to the death rate during the Holocaust—“The dead of Rwanda accumulated at nearly three times the rate of Jewish dead during the Holocaust” (4)—is hard to grasp. Familiarizing ourselves with the numerical descriptions of horrible social phenomena are not enough; numbers mean little compared to the individual human anecdotes that contextualize the extent of harm caused by the violence we perpetrate against one another. I would contend, then, that reading books such as Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You That We Will be Killed Tomorrow With Our Families, in which the author offers both a quantitative description of the Rwandan civil war as well as a qualitative treatment of how the war affected people on an individual level, can help us to truly begin to understand conflicts, how they are perpetrated, and how we might play a role in preventing them or intervening when they occur in the future.