There are at least two other strategies for living in the mutilated world that were offered by the authors of this week’s readings. In Jose Rivera’s play, “Gas,” the opening lines allude to just how important the act of witnessing is. “I could feel his fear,” Cheo says of the “brilliant letters of fear” that his brother writes once a week from his post in the Saudi Arabian desert during a time of war (Rivera). Although his brother’s early letters were riddled with spelling and mechanical errors, “with time, he started to write beautifully,” and “This angel started to come out of the desert…. This singing angel of words” (Rivera). Cheo, as the recipient of the letters, is an important witness to his brother’s transformations, both positive and negative, and perpetuates his memory by telling others his story. “That’s not bragging,” Cheo asserts as he tells the story of his brother’s life and his engagement in a military conflict, it’s “just me telling you a simple truth” (Rivera). By reaching out to the reader is this direct and intimate manner, Cheo testifies about the value of a single life, and in doing so, may encourage the reader to rescue and revive others’ stories. Through witnessing, the meaning and the lessons of violence may not be lost. Rivera seems to suggest that we can save ourselves from self-inflicted violence by honoring individual stories and telling them over and over again. Rivera’s character recognizes that no one else will record the details of his brother’s life, experiences, or his transformation. While the news reports “the fucking temperature in Riyadh” (Rivera), the stories and deeds of the people involved directly in the mutilation of the world, either as protagonists or as antagonists (or both), are lost unless we preserve and perpetuate them.

 

There is still another strategy of coping with the mutilation of the world that we can glean from this week’s readings, though it is one that is dramatically different from all of the positions taken up by the other writers discussed thus far. Yusef Komunyakaa, poet and Vietnam War veteran, offers his own strategy for coping with the world’s violence, but the strategy offered in his short yet powerful “Nude Interrogation” represents an entirely different perspective: that of the perpetrator. The speaker in the prose poem “Nude Interrogation” seems to be putting his experiences of war behind him. When the reader meets him, the speaker is about to engage in the intimacy of sex with a woman named Angela. Angela, however, is curiously preoccupied with the speaker’s war experiences. As she removes her clothes, her “miniskirt drop[ping] into a rainbow at her feet (Komunyakaa), she asks, “Did you kill anyone?” (Komunyakaa). She does not wait for him to answer, however; it is clear that she has developed a powerful fantasy about the speaker’s involvement in the war. She does not only want to know whether he really killed someone; she wants to know how it was done. Rather than letting him answer, though, she fires questions at him as rapidly as a barrage of bullets: “Did you dig a hole, crawl inside and wait for your target?,” “Did you use an M-16, handgrenade, a bayonet, or your own two strong hands…?” “Did you drop your gun afterwards?” (Komunyakka). Her last question is the most intrusive one of all: “Did you kneel beside the corpse and turn it over?” (Komunyakaa), a question that implies her assumption that he did kill someone before he has even had the chance to respond. The speaker listens quietly, and reports some details about the background of the scene—the smoke of the sandalwood incense looping up towards the ceiling, the needle dropping on a Jimi Hendrix record, the first strains of the song “All Along the Watchtower” drifting through the room, Angela’s bra lodging on a crudely constructed bookcase. Finally, the speaker responds: “Yes” (Komunyakaa). “Yes,” he says again, elaborating, “I was afraid of the silence. The night was too big. And afterwards, I couldn’t stop looking at the sky” (Komunyakaa). Only the speaker really knows what he means by these last three lines, which also serve as the poem’s closure. Yet, the meaning of these lines is not particularly important. What Komunyakaa is communicating in “Nude Interrogation” with respect to the survival strategy he uses for living in the mutilated world is that the admission of one’s guilt is important. Confessing the role that one has played in the perpetration of violence may even be as important as raging against the harm we do to one another. Admitting guilt does not absolve us of responsibility, but it does bring the perpetrator and his witness closer together, permitting the possibility of a more open and honest dialogue about the psychological damage of war and violence.

 

The distinct strategies offered in each of this week’s readings are realistic and powerful means of living in a world that is both beautiful and damaged. They are not mutually exclusive strategies. On the contrary, they can be used in conjunction with one another, both by people living in the midst of conflicts and those who are fortunate enough to live far beyond their immediate impact. As we attempt to find ways to preserve beauty and rage in a conflict-ridden world, the strategies presented in this week’s readings can help provide a blueprint for thoughtful and meaningful engagement in the difficult issues that are presented to both victims and perpetrators affected by war and violence.

 

Works Cited

Gourevitch, Philip. “We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families.”

Hagedorn, Jessica. “The Song of the Bullets.”

Komunyakaa, Yusef. “Nude Interrogation.”

Rivera, Jose. “Gas.”

Zagajewski, Adam. “Try to Praise the Mutilated World.”