Fiction in a War-torn World
Preeti Zachariah
I was seven or eight when I first learned about the Second World War. My paternal grandfather had a silver box in his study engraved with a message: “To Colonel JP Zachariah for being taken as a prisoner of war for the second time.” It was a wedding gift, he told me, given to him by his regiment in the army.
“And when were you taken captive the first time?” I asked him.
He laughed and told me about his days in a slave-labor camp in Malaysia where he had spent nearly a year after being captured by the Japanese. One day, he told me, a duck wandered into the camp.
“She would give us eggs every day,” he said — eggs the prisoners would eat with stewed rice and black tea, which was nearly all they ever got.
“What happened to the duck?” I asked him. The Japanese found her and ate her, he told me. I cried about that duck.
**
My fascination with stories set in war and conflict seems to have started that day. Accounts of war in my history textbooks almost always revolved around battles, treaties, leaders, and dates I had to memorize. No fun. What mattered to me then and now are the little stories, the narratives of ordinary people whose lives have been shaped, splintered, and sutured by extraordinary events.
This is where fiction comes in. The most resonant writing about war doesn’t just take you right into blood-soaked battlefields and trenches. It goes beyond that to tell you stories of love forbidden, lost or enduring; to explore the idea of home and the metamorphization of that idea when you return to it; to delve into the struggles of leading a life that will always be shadowed by the memory of “the hell where youth and laughter go,” as war poet Siegfried Sassoon once wrote.
Just as significantly, to me, war literature can address the “othering” that often triggers war in the first place. Take these lines by Paul Baumer, the young hero of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front: “But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late.”
Warfare — and the literature around it — has changed considerably in the years following the Second World War. Holocaust literature, which documented the Nazi parties’ systemic attempts to exterminate the Jewish race, emerged and changed our conception of the enemy in the war narrative. The enemy was no longer the soldier across the water, the colonizer or the slaveholder.
Since the Second World War, almost all major conflicts have been civil or intrastate wars, often triggered by identity politics. And the state has proven to be a failure — and, more importantly, has exhibited criminal complicity in crimes against its ethnic minorities in upholding the Human Rights of many of its citizens.
Anna Burn’s Milkman, which won a Man Booker prize this year, is set in one such ethno-national conflict: The Troubles, which rocked Northern Island through most of the late 1990’s. The book, the Belfast-born writer’s third, has garnered accolades for its “exploration of the universal experience of societies in crisis,” as the chair of the prize jury, Kwame Anthony Appiah, put it. In an interview with The Independent, Burns, who was six when the Catholic Irish nationalists began an armed insurgency against the mostly protestant, British-ruled state, recalls the violence she encountered on a daily basis. “They’d be bloodstains all over the place,” she said.
In a frenzied, stream-of-consciousness narrative — think Mrs. Dalloway with a brogue — Burns takes you into a town occupied by “the country over the water,” torn apart by both “renouncers-of-the state” and “state forces.” As Burns writes in the novel, the events of Milkman take place in a “pyscho-political atmosphere, with its rules of allegiance, of tribal identification, of what was allowed and not allowed.”
The novel’s protagonist is a young girl who walks through streets “every weekday, rain or shine, gunplay or bombs, stand-off or riots,” reading “a nineteenth-century book because I did not like twentieth-century books because I did not like the twentieth century.” (Burns’ did that, too, while growing up). One day, while reading, she is accosted by a character described only, cryptically, as Milkman.
Milkman is a “state-enemy renouncer owning to the political powers that existed in this place,” who makes Middle Sister deeply uncomfortable with his constant presence. But she finds it hard to call him out in “a hair-trigger society where the ground rules were — if no physically violent touch was being laid on you, and no outright verbal insults were being levelled at you, and no taunting looks in the vicinity either, then nothing was happening, so how could you be under attack from something that wasn’t there?”
With that observation, Burns raises some fundamental issues around ethnic conflict — the insidious advent of it, the silence it is mired in, the there-but-not-quite presence of undeclared warfare. Ethnic conflict is a contagion that grows from within, often so slowly and so silently that you miss it until it’s too late.
You find something similar in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost, which is set during the 26-year-long Sri Lankan Civil War. “This is an unofficial war, no one wants to alienate the foreign powers. So, it is secret gangs and squads,” writes the Toronto-based writer and poet, who won the Man Booker prize in 1992 for another war novel, The English Patient.
Like the Troubles, the Sri Lanka civil war emerged out of state discrimination against a minority — in this case, the Buddhist Sinhalese state against the Hindu Tamils. The protagonist of the novel, Anil Tissera, is a forensic anthropologist, apparently of Sinhalese origin, who returns to the country of her birth as part of a United Nations human rights mission to investigate claims of “organized campaigns of murder on the island.” Like Ondaatje, who was born in the island country but moved to Canada in 1962, Anil’s interpretation of Sri-Lanka is one with “a long-distance gaze.” As she combs through reports, meets people with missing families and discovers the bones of a man (she names him Sailor) who she believes was killed by the government, Anil gets drawn deeply into the politics of her homeland, a “country (that) existed in a rocking, self-burying motion.”
According to Amnesty International, there have been between 60,000 to 100,000 alleged disappearances in Sri Lanka — people whose families still wait for them. “People just started disappearing. Or bodies kept being found burnt beyond recognition. There’s no hope of affixing blame. And no one can tell you who the victims are,” writes Ondaatje. Anil’s Ghost brings personhood to the victims of the Sri Lankan genocide and make a reader remember that a body is “not just evidence, but someone with charms and flaws, part of a family, a member of a village who in the sudden lightening of politics raised his hand at the last minute, so they were broken.”
Colonialism underlies much of the ethnic conflict around the world today. By the end of the Second World War, most countries had started shrugging off the colonial yoke. But the European hegemony of centuries has continued to impact the idea of a true nation-state.
Colonial powers, which had resorted to the Machiavellian divide-and-conquer policy, actively encouraged the idea of communal representation. When they left, they left behind countries with fragmented identity — — an ideal breeding ground for ethnic civil war. The latter half of the twentieth century saw a rise in insurgency and separationist movements all across Asia and Africa, most that spiralled into immense violence and bloodshed. Think Rwanda, Kashmir, Bangladesh, Sudan, Nigeria, Sri Lanka, Myanmar…
Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, whose Orange-prize-winning novel Half of Yellow Sun chronicles Biafra’s struggle to establish an independent state in Nigeria, constantly alludes to Nigeria’s colonial past in her novel. Writing in the voice of Odenigbo, an Igbo professor and revolutionary, Adichie proclaims, “My point is that the only authentic identity for the African is the tribe…I am Nigerian because a white man created Nigeria and gave me that identity. I am black because the white man constructed black to be as different as possible from his white. But I was Igbo before the white man came.”
Adichie, in this novel, is strongly critical of white society’s response to the war. “The Red Cross irritated Ugwu; the least they could do was ask Biafrans their preferred foods rather than sending so much bland flour,” she writes. In one scene, two American journalists sent to cover the crisis are shown in extremely poor light. “The rule of Western journalism: One hundred dead black people equal one dead white person,” Adichie writes. Then there is the introduction of a (largely virtuous) white characters Richard, who is modelled after British journalist and writer Frederick Forsyth. Richard, is (like Forsyth) writing a book about the conflict. He gives up conceding that “the war isn’t my story to tell.”
My grandfather went to the Second World War as part of the Allied forces contingents; India was still under the British till 1947. Decolonization in India lead to the splintering of the country into two separate nations — the mostly Muslim Pakistan and the more-Hindu India — a bloody story that has been immortalized in a wealth of literature including Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan, Amrita Pritam’s Pinjar (The Skeleton) and the short stories of Saadat Hasan Manto.
The scar of Partition is still raw and bleeding in Kashmir where more than 40 soldiers were killed on Valentine’s Day this year, in a suicide attack spearheaded by Pakistan-based armed group, Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM). There has been unrest all across the country — both the countries have engaged in surgical strikes, Kashmiri students have been attacked, the Indian army announced that “anyone who has picked up the gun in Kashmir will be eliminated unless they surrender.”
The Kashmir story, like most war narratives, cannot be painted in shades of black and white. While the loss of so many lives is indeed horrific, it is also true that the Indian Army’s presence in Kashmir is often problematic. Arundhati Roy, latest novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness — which is set in a “heart-stoppingly beautiful” Kashmir — maps out the politics of a state reeling under, “inbuilt idiocy, this idea of jihad (that), has seeped into Kashmir from Pakistan and Afghanistan.”
Through the somewhat ill-fated love story of Tilottama (who “has the insouciant secretiveness of a pyromaniac”) and her former classmate, Musa (a Kashmiri boy with “browngreen” eyes and “a chipped front tooth” who goes on to become a terrorist), Roy draws our attention to the crisis unfurling in the Valley. She writes of endless curfews and shoot-on-sight orders; torture and mass killings; sudden assassinations and suicide bombings and theorizes that the Indian state, “doesn’t want the militancy to end,” as “everyone on all sides is making money on the bodies of young Kashmiris.” Through her novel, Roy is allowing the reader to enter what literary critic Hillis Miller calls “a relatively safe or innocuous place in which the reigning narrative of a given culture can be criticized.”
As Nigerian writer Ben Okri has said, fiction “can make the heart bigger,” and it has certainly enlarged my understanding of humankind in times of war.
