The enemy, the Other, is what countries need to divert attention from internal tensions.
UPDATED – 12:57 AM, THURSDAY – DECEMBER 8 22
Pramod K Nayyar
In 1919, WB Yeats painted a portrait of a soldier, specifically an Air Force fighter pilot:
I don’t hate what fights me,
I don’t love those I guard
When Wole Soyinka asked his speakers to ask soldiers, he echoed Yeats:
your friend, even now, knows
What exactly is going on?
Who are those destined to die at your hands? Who are you sworn to protect? Does the latter depend on the former?
These are the questions Yeats asks in An Irish Airman Foresaw His Death and Soyinka in The Civilian and the Soldier. These are reflections on others wounded in war, but also reflections on self. How to express the enemy and express oneself is a problem that plagues poets.
enemy face
In William Blake’s famous “Poison Tree,” the speaker confesses that he never told his enemies how much he despised him. By suppressing this confession, hatred grew in him. Toxin is a plant that grows:
I water it in fear,
Night and morning, I burst into tears:
And I smiled and sunned it,
“Waiting for the Barbarians” by Constantine Cavafy depicts barbarians throughout the kingdom waiting for “due today”. Everyone is on vacation and getting ready for the arrival. After the poem was finished, everyone was disappointed, because the barbarian never appeared again:
For night fell, and the savages had not yet come.
Some of us who just came back from the border say
There are no more barbarians.
Like Cavafy’s savages, constructed out of necessity, Czeslaw Milosz’s speaker in “The Quest” describes a situation in which one dominant voice subsumes all others:
we’re allowed to scream in dwarf language demon
But words of purity and generosity are forbidden.
The scream constitutes the enemy/other, the savage.
internal enemy
In ‘The Poisonous Tree’, Blake says enemy hatred defines us. Our enemy, then, is within us. Cavafy sums up “Waiting for the Barbarians” this way:
Where would we be without the savages?
Those people are a solution.
Cavafy says that enemies, the Other, are what the state needs in order for us to project our anxieties onto them. Rulers use others to divert attention from internal tensions.Nations produce myths, fantasies, and nightmares—what Czeslaw Milosz describes in The Sons of Europe as an injunction to “grow your tree of lies from a little truth”—about others, and Define yourself in the process: we need an enemy.
Denise Levertov is outspoken in her “Weeping Woman,” telling the story of using a “rifle/shooting down an attack plane” from the perspective of a one-armed female soldier. The speaker, apparently maimed by enemy fighters, said to the aggressor America:
brutal america,
When you destroy our land and our bodies,
You destroy your own soul,
not ours.
In Mahmoud Darwish’s “Poem to Earth,” the singer croons about the past. The speaker described how they checked the singer:
they searched his chest
but only to find his heart
they searched his heart
only to find him
they searched his voice
but only to find his sorrow
they searched for his sorrow
only to find his cage
they searched his prison
But I can only see myself chained
In song (Darwish) and “scream” (Milos), when we make enemies, we become the demons we condemn.
use of the dead
In some cases, poets believe that the dead can and should haunt their past oppressors. Primo Levy in “For Adolf Eichmann” asks:
Will you finally, hard worker
His life was too short for his long art,
Lament your unfinished sorry work,
Thirteen million still alive?
Unlike Black’s speaker, he doesn’t want the enemy to die, instead he wants this:
O Son of Death, we do not wish you to die.
May you outlive anyone.
May you spend five million sleepless nights.
May everyone’s pain visit you every night
who saw
Close the door behind him that blocks the way back,
He stared helplessly at the darkness around him, and the air was filled with the breath of death.
But for the most part, history ignores the others who died because
History calculates its skeleton in integers.
A thousand and one is still a thousand,
It’s as if that person never existed.
(Wislawa Szymborska, “The Hunger Camp bright‘)
We don’t care about the dead because they are just that: dead. In “What Were They Like,” Denise Levertov ponders the identities of those enemies killed by soldiers. The poem begins with a series of questions about the exterminated Vietnamese:
Do Vietnamese people have
A lantern made of stone?
did they have a ceremony
In awe of the opening of the buds?
There is no answer because:
All the bones were charred.
It doesn’t remember. remember,
Most are farmers; their livelihood
In rice and bamboo.
The war wiped them out:
when the bomb shattered those mirrors
Only time to scream.
At the end of “Sons of Europe,” Milosz appropriates the dead enemy to the demagogue’s cause:
Those who cite history are always safe.
The dead will not rise up to testify against him.
You can accuse them of any behavior you like.
Their answer is always silence.
Their hollow faces swim out of the deep darkness.
You can fill them with whatever functionality you want.
Enemy names are enough, their histories are rewritten and falsified, others serve us endlessly. What are the others like? Levertov’s “What Were They Like” ends with this answer
Who can tell? It’s silent now.
(The author is a professor of English and a UNESCO Chair) Vulnerability Research and Researcher at University of Hyderabad Royal Historical Society of England)
