Male-female relationships in war
The following was written in response to my editor’s request that I put into writing some of the things I said at a staff meeting on ENDURING WAR: STORIES OF WHAT WE HAVE LEARNED, the winter 2008 issue of MANOA. Another post on this issue appears below.
Chester Aaron as a soldier during WWII
Male-female relationships are part of the story of war. In some cases, they parallel war, as in Chester Aaron’s “Winterswijk.” The relationship between Benjamin and Nikki parallels the relationship between the Dutch and Jews during WWII. He separates from her at the end because he can’t tolerate her limited responses to his pain as an individual and as a Jew; that she wants to have Piet, another man, in her life is indicative to him of the ambivalent, compromised response of the Dutch to the Jews who were taken by the Germans. When Nikki insists that “Dachau” is the answer to his pain, this is true and yet too simple. The pains of his ethnicity and history are intertwined with his pain as a man. This idea is expressed, in very different circumstances, in David Shulman’s set of short essays, “On Being Unfree: Fences, Roadblocks, and the Iron Cage of Palestine”:
David Shulman (photo by Tzahy Lerner)
These are men with the sensitive pride of the Mediterranean male. Their story is one of continuous humiliation, of agonies of impotence: they cannot protect their own fields; their homes have been taken away from them over and over; they are easy prey for the settlers with their guns. They ache the man’s ache, the one that has no healing. I hear it in the broken, staccato language that embodies memory after memory—last night’s incident now added to this unending series of insults.
In Benjamin’s case, he enters Dachau as a victor, but it is too late: he cannot save those who were killed. And when he enters the marketplace of German men and women, he relives his “impotence” as a Jew. The beard he decides to grow at the end hides his scars as an individual and a member of the Jewish community—and, ironically, will make him even more Jewish looking than before.
Shmuel HaNagid’s “First War” is a powerful poem, especially when read in relation to Aaron’s story “Scent of Thyme.” The desperate circumstances of war turn women into prostitutes—voluntarily or not. When HaNagid conflates the desperation of prostitutes with the desperation of soldiers, he is equating the degradation, wounds, and hopelessness of one with those of the other.
Sharon May’s story, “Last Song of Saravat,” probably describes the most complex male-female relationship in the issue, in part because the relationship changes over a long period. The woman is a secondary character, but we have a stronger sense of her than we do of the narrator. Both are survivors of the Khmer Rouge, but the man chooses cowardly means, disguising who he is, destroying evidence of his economic status and his personal history, and so forth. The woman does not become a prostitute or someone’s wife but instead tries to survive without a man—both as a woman and a mother. Her relationship with her daughter is not ideal, but she does not seek to provide the daughter with a father; that is, her sense of what the daughter needs in order to grow up in a healthy way does not embrace the traditional idea of family. In the course of the relationship the man and woman develop in the Thai refugee camp, the woman’s strength, steadfastness, refusal to act out of desperation compel the man to reflect on his limitations and to change.
Shepherd Bliss
Shepherd Bliss ends his essay, “The Grim Reaper: Agrotherapy, Kokopelli, Pinochet’s Darkness,” with a description of two women: a woman he has formed a personal relationship with; and a fellow vet in his writing group. Here is the last part of his essay:
Recently, my new friend and I have been speaking Spanish to each other. She suggested that we go to Chile sometime. The idea does not appeal to me. Even communicating with her in Spanish—though I love doing it—evokes unpleasant memories. After the Chilean coup, I lost my Spanish—a psychic numbing that helped me survive the terror. Many years later, when I visited Spain, my Spanish began to return as I became more able to go down into my grief. Conversely, with the return of the Spanish comes the memories and feelings about Chile.
Leaning on Each Other
“I know I won’t always be here,” the co-host of our vets’ group comments as she looks out the window from her hilltop home into a marvelous Redwood Empire valley. Leaning on her World War II veteran husband, she adds, “So I want to appreciate and care for the earth while I can.” We recently celebrated her husband’s eightieth birthday.
Robert Bly begins his poem “In the Month of May,” “I see when I walk how well all things lean on each other.” As our vets’ group goes on its afternoon walking meditation, I notice how well the trees and other vegetation lean on each other. Such leaning can create great joy and the capacity to endure pain and suffering. The reverence and humor of our being together enable me to speak more of my truth, ask for help, and lean toward others, thus dispersing some of the isolation that has long dogged me.
I am seeking to talk and write about my bright summer images of torture in order to replace them with sweet images of leaning on each other. It is warmer that way. As we walk on our meditation by the giant trees, a woman vet takes my arm. You can lean on me, I think as we go down the hill. May I lean on you? I wonder.
Bliss’s leaning on the woman vet—as he has learned to lean on his “new friend”—is a wonderful suggestion not only of the power of comradeship but of the power of men and women to help, console, and heal each other. There is a power inherent in the opposition of the genders that can heal, make things whole. When these are set in violent opposition, as in “Scent of Thyme,” the result is destruction of the kind that war produces—the destruction of the individual that Serbian writer Vladislav Bajac describes in his essay and that we often see only the outward forms of, e.g., the relocation camps in Leo Litwak’s story, “Heartless Willy.”
Tamura Ryuichi
I like the idea of having Tamura Ryuichi’s poem “The Ashen Colored Notebook” come right before Ch’oe Yun’s story. Ryuichi writes: “Thirty years have gone by / since the war ended / and my ashen colored notebook / has completely burned up…”
In Ch’oe’s “Whisper Yet,” the notebook of the handyman becomes a magical thing, like the wand that appears at the beginning of the story. Here is what the narrator first says about it:
Several times late at night I saw Ajaebi scribbling and erasing in old notebooks I no longer kept. That I became particularly interested in these notebooks only belatedly might have been because I too had begun to keep a journal around then. For all I know, he might have been writing in notebooks for quite a long time.
Ch'oe Yun
It’s only with time and maturity that the narrator is able to put together the story of Ajaebi’s life, the notebook being one of the keys. When she addresses her daughter and says
My child, I have so much to whisper to you, like I did when you and I were one body. How should I tell the story now? Shall I tell a story of tears, a story of laughter? A story of days gone by, a story of days to come? A story of air, a story of fluid? My child, the sun is still so very hot…Shall I tell you the story like I did when you and I were one body?
she is speaking not only with the urgency that Ajaebi’s death has imparted to her but also the understanding of what happens when things are bifurcated: life into life and death; mother into mother and child; experience into experience and knowledge; Ajaebi’s life into his life before he met her and after. Chased by time and a sense of how little she understood things when she had much time—i.e., while she was growing up—she can’t wait to impart stories to her child, even before it is born. In a sense she does so to coordinate their living, to make their lives more parallel, to avoid the loneliness that Ajaebi suffered by having to withhold his life story from her—and the loneliness she suffered by fully realizing his story only after he was gone.
Vladislav Bajac
What war does to men is similar to what men do to women. For this reason, I sympathize with Vladislav Bajac’s account, “Back to the World,” of his retreat into himself during the NATO bombing of Serbia at the end of the twentieth century. There are no significant females in his essay—unlike the stories of Chester Aaron and Leo Litwak, for example—but his descriptions of the destruction and the recovery of the self will speak to the experience of many women. And when he says, “I was able to convey the viewpoint of one who believes in the reign of the spirit,” his readers—men and women alike—celebrate with him.
Neuroanatomist 
The idea of the brain having a place where peace and compassion reside is alluded to in the last work in this volume: Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “Jerusalem.” Nye calls mankind’s attempt to find peace a riddle that is lodged in the brain. Perhaps there indeed is a place in the brain where our capacity for peace and compassion resides—Taylor certainly believes so—and if this is so, creativity must be right next to it. This might be the place the writers in this volume have written from, sharing with us the stories of what they have learned.