Gupta - Imagining Iraq Literature in English and The Iraq Invasion (2011)

Imagining Iraq
10.1057/9780230298118 - Imagining Iraq, Suman Gupta

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08
Also by Suman Gupta:
AESTHETICISM AND MODERNISM: Debating Twentieth Century Literature

(Edited with Richard Brown)

CORPORATE CAPITALISM AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
THE CULTURES OF ECONOMIC MIGRATION: International Perspectives

(Edited with T. Omoniyi)
ENGLISH STUDIES ON THIS SIDE: Post-2007 Reckonings (Edited with M. Katsarska)
GLOBALIZATION IN INDIA: Contents and Discontents (Edited with T. Basu and

S. Chattarji)
INDIA IN THE AGE OF GLOBALIZATION: Contemporary Discourses and

Texts (Edited with Tapan Basu and Subarno Chattarji)
GLOBALIZATION AND LITERATURE
MARXISM, HISTORY AND INTELLECTUALS: Toward a Reconceptualized

Transformative Socialism
V. S. NAIPAUL (Writers and their Work)
NIGERIA AND GLOBALIZATION: Discourses of Identity and Social Conflict

(Edited with Tope Omoniyi, Duro Oni, Segun Awonusi and Efurosibina Adegbija)
THE REPLICATION OF VIOLENCE: Thoughts on International Terrorism

After 11 September
RE-READING HARRY POTTER
SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONIST IDENTITY POLITICS AND LITERARY STUDIES
THE THEORY AND REALITY OF DEMOCRACY: A Case Study in Iraq
A TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE READER: Texts and Debates

(Edited with David Johnson)
TWO TEXTS AND I: Disciplines of Knowledge and the Literary Subject

Imagining Iraq
Literature in English and the
Iraq Invasion

Suman Gupta
Professor of Literature and Cultural History, The Open University

© Suman Gupta 2011
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
publication may be made without written permission.
No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted
save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the

Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence
permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency,
Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.
Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2011 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978–0–230–27875–2 hardback
ISBN 978–0–230–27877–6 paperback
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully
managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing
processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the
country of origin.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

LALITA SUBBU
To the memory of

This page intentionally left blank

Contents
Acknowledgements viii

1. Making War: Introduction 1
Setting the tone 1
Theme, text, reality 13
2. ‘Laws’ for Poets: Poetry Anthologies 32

A special relationship 32
Three anthologies 34
3. Exacting World: Individual Poetry Collections 66

Anger and poetry 66
Side by side 81
My readings 95
4. To Smash the Mirror: Theatre 96

Frontline drama 96
Record of reality 105
Domestic and national 120
Classics 125
Performance and statement 138
5. A Joint Enterprise: Fiction 141

Action thrillers 141
‘Literary fiction’ 154
6. Windows into Life-Worlds: Blogs and Conclusion 170

Fear and two blogs 170
Conclusion: in other languages 184
References 191
Index 204
vii

Acknowledgements
Numerous meandering conversations, more for the pleasure than to any

purpose, have fed into this book, particularly with Bob Owens, John
Seed, and Cheng Xiao. Purposeful exchanges, to sharpen ideas and obtain
information, have played a more tractable part: Achim Brosch, Milena
Katsarska, Sevdalina Rukanova, Tahrir Hamdi, Khalid Bekkaoui, Dilek
Doltaş, Oya Berk, Subarno Chattarji, and Sudhanva Deshpande have
been wonderfully generous with their time and insights. My colleagues
in the English Department of The Open University have been unwittingly
exploited to allow me time for research: I hope they will forgive me
in retrospect and continue to be exploitable. Roehampton University
has put at my disposal space for reading and writing close to home,
which was gratefully occupied to write this. Paula Kennedy of Palgrave
Macmillan supported this project with heartening confidence, and
the publisher’s assessors made splendid suggestions for improving it.
If the result is not up to scratch I alone am to blame.
Thanks are due to the following authors for permission to quote the
passages that appear from their poetry in this study: Kim Addonizio,
Sampurna Chattarji, Richard A. Falk, Sandra M. Gilbert, Tony Harrison,
Dunya Mikhail, David Ray, Adrienne Rich, Todd Swift and Michael Gould-
Wartofsky. And I am grateful to these publishers for permitting me to
use quotations from books they have published: Alice James Books and
Bloodaxe Books (for quotations from Brian Turner’s poetry), Carcanet
(Dunya Mikhail’s poetry), Faber and Faber (Harold Pinter’s poetry, Seamus
Heaney’s A Burial at Thebes, Timberlake Wertenbaker’s translation of
Sophocles’s Antigone, Martin Crimp’s Cruel and Tender), W. W. Norton
(Adrienne Rich’s poetry), Penguin Group USA (Robert Fagles’s transla-
tion of Sophocles’s Antigone), Random House and West End Press (Pablo
Neruda’s poetry).
The publishers wish to state that they have made every effort to
contact the copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the
publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangement at the first
opportunity.
viii

1
Making War: Introduction

Setting the tone
2004 was a good year for poet Don Paterson. His 2003 volume Landing
Light had won the Whitbread Poetry Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize.
Paterson had also been awarded the latter in 1997; in 2004 it merely
reconfirmed Paterson’s standing in the British poetry establishment.
In the tradition of Eliot, Paterson’s place in that establishment was
due both to his virtuosity as a poet and discernment as a publisher. As
poetry editor Eliot had established the Faber and Faber poetry list as a
repository of the elect, and Paterson has figured firmly there since 1993.
At the same time Paterson has himself played an Eliot-like role as poetry
editor for Picador publishers. The Eliot Prize was undoubtedly apt
recognition for such standing. Drawing upon a donation from Eliot’s
wife, Valerie Eliot; organised by the Poetry Book Society; judged by
three peers with sufficient kudos in poetry circles; leading to events in
London’s South Bank – the prize is redolent of success where it matters
and pays. Unsurprisingly, the T. S. Eliot Lecture which Paterson went
on to deliver on 30 October 2004 at the South Bank Centre, entitled
‘The Dark Art of Poetry’, came in the unmistakable tones of the voice of
authority in matters poetic.
Paterson’s assumption of authority was so unabashed that many of his
admirers were taken aback. In brief, he announced that poetry should
really only be pursued by true-born poets and that the ‘undemocratic
idea of Natural Talent’ is inevitable in relation to poetry. He dismissed
all ‘amateur’ poets in one fell swoop and was scathing about some cate-
gory of intellectuals he designated ‘the postmoderns’. He maintained
that the affirmation of serious poetry occurs through ‘publication’. He
talked about serious poets being ‘apprentices’ first and, by implication,

2 Imagining Iraq
‘professionals’ eventually in the same way as plumbers and roofers.

He bemoaned the lack of serious poets and castigated all other would-be
or occasional poets. He threaded these sentiments around a muddled
theory of poetry – too muddled and distant from the concerns of
this study for me to dwell upon. The passage in his lecture that both

summed up his attitude and particularly drew attention at the time
went as follows:
The way forward, it seems to me, lies in the redefinition of ‘risk’. To

take a risk in a poem is not to write a big sweary outburst about how
dreadful the war in Iraq is, even if you are the world’s greatest living
playwright. This kind of poetry is really nothing but a kind of inverse
sentimentalism – that’s to say by the time it reaches the page, it’s less
real anger than a celebration of one’s own strength of feeling. Since it
tries to provoke an emotion of which its target readers are already in
high possession, it will change no-one’s mind about anything; more
to the point, anyone can do it. Neither is ‘risk’ the deployment of dis-
junctive syntax, innovatory punctuation or wee apropos-of-nothing
allusions to Heisenberg and Lacan; because anyone can do that, too.
Risk, of the sort that makes readers feel genuinely uncomfortable,
excited, open to suggestion, vulnerable to reprogramming, complicit
in the creative business of their self-transformation is quite different.
(Paterson 2004, emphases in original)
Irrespective of how Paterson proceeded to define ‘risk’ in poetry, this

passage made listeners pause – and journalists prick up their ears – because
it brought in an overwhelming preoccupation of the time. Paterson’s
entire argument was momentarily and inevitably crystallized with refer-
ence to the invasion of Iraq and the passionate debates surrounding it.
It is obvious in retrospect that the argument was designed to draw away
from the prevailing immersion in those debates, and yet, simply by
mentioning Iraq, the argument was drawn into those debates. It didn’t
seem to matter what Paterson thought ‘risk’ means or whether his appar-
ently authoritative voice made sense. What did seem to matter was that
his lecture gave an opening for the preoccupations of the time and those
preoccupations bore in upon his views.
The ‘big sweary outburst about how dreadful the war in Iraq is’ by
‘the world’s greatest living playwright’ was immediately recognized as
a reference to Harold Pinter’s brief collection of anti-war poems War
(2003). The deliberate placing of Pinter, so conscious of literary stature,
among the ranks of the ‘anyones’ who were writing such poetry at the

Making War: Introduction 3
time was troubling on two counts. First, it seemed to make a particularly

big deal of the biogenetically implanted authority of the serious poet
(not just any exalted literary figure but a poet), and a hackneyed con-
flict of genres was provocatively reiterated. Second, along with Pinter’s
anti-war poetry Paterson had in the same breath dismissed all the ‘any-

ones’ who had written anti-war poetry as if some deep norm of poetry
matters and war doesn’t. Indeed, as if concern about the invasion had
obstructed poetry. The first suggestion worried those who keep accounts
of literary statures, ultimately a small number of cultural capitalists.
The second implication worried those who were concerned about the
invasion of Iraq at the time, and had sought to express their anxieties
through various means – including poetry. The latter were a numerous
and variegated constituency, and dead serious in their contemplation of
the invasion.
Naturally it was those linked implications with regard to the ‘anyones’
who write anti-war poetry, who are concerned about the Iraq invasion,
and the reference to Pinter in their midst that mainly drew such com-
ment as Paterson’s lecture excited. A report in The Guardian on the
lecture came with the title ‘Pinter’s Poetry? Anyone can do it’, and
quoted Pinter’s response: ‘You want me to comment on that? […] My
comment is: “No comment”’ (Higgins 2004). This also noted with some
pride that many of Pinter’s anti-war poems had appeared in the pages
of The Guardian. Among the letters that appeared in response to the
report there was one from Todd Swift, editor of a timely e-anthology
100 Poets Against the War (2003), complaining that Paterson’s ‘terribly
small-minded positions can only damage poetry at the start of the 21st
century’, especially in seeking to ‘oppose Pinter’s – and by extension,
most – anti-war poems for their simplicity’ (Swift 2004). Soon after,
poet Andy Croft reported on the lecture in the New Statesman in an
article entitled ‘Pure Doggerel’ and observed that: ‘a great many
poets – “professional” and “amateur” – have written powerfully against
the invasion of Iraq […] That “anyone” can write about such a neces-
sary subject is precisely the enduring appeal and significance of poetry’
(Croft 2004, p. 43). The year before Andy Croft and Andy Mitchell
had edited a volume of socialist poetry, Red Sky at Night (2003), which
was definitively at the other ideological pole from the neo-conservative
initiators of the invasion of Iraq and which contained a selection of
anti-war poetry. George Szirtes won the T. S. Eliot Prize the following
year with Reel (2004), and used the podium of the 2005 Eliot Lecture to
‘quarrel with my immediate predecessor, Don Paterson’. He particularly
took issue with Paterson’s dismissal of amateurs and the distinction

4 Imagining Iraq
made between amateurs and serious poets, and observed that the popular
perception ‘that poetry is not simply a decorative way of speaking but
something with a function’ is not to be taken lightly (Szirtes 2005). As it
happened Szirtes was the chairperson of the three-member panel which
had awarded the Eliot Prize to Paterson the year before. The poetry estab-

lishment of Britain is a small one.
Interest in Paterson’s views was low key at best and passed soon;
the overwhelming preoccupation with the Iraq invasion that they had
appeared amidst continued. Paterson’s comments were noted, as observed
above, primarily because they seemed to be momentarily relevant to that
context and finally were left aside as superficial and unworthy of notice
in that context – unworthy, as Pinter said, of comment. And rightly so:
as far as the context of the Iraq invasion or the place of literature therein
went its direct implications were insubstantial. However, in an indirect
fashion, the juxtaposition of Paterson’s views on the Iraq invasion
context was revealing. Perhaps they were more revealing than Paterson
intended or apprehended. Something of the fraught environment of
the time, and more importantly of the place of literary production
and reception – of literary writing and the dissemination of literary
works and the reception thereof – in relation to that environment, was
effectively conveyed. In many ways the implicit issues that arose there
are germane to understanding the condition of literature at large now.
Some of the less obvious nuances of the above-quoted passage from
Paterson’s lecture are therefore worth noting.
Let me return then to Paterson on Pinter, to that phrase: ‘even if you
are the world’s greatest living playwright’. The emphasis on ‘are’ (it’s
there in the text as it was in Paterson’s modulation) is interesting; it is a
categorical ‘are’, with an affirmative ‘yes, of course you are’ air about it,
without leaving any space for qualification (it is not phrased as ‘one of the
world’s greatest …’ or ‘possibly the world’s greatest …’ or ‘widely regarded
as the world’s greatest …’ etc.). There is no tentativeness behind that
extremely tall claim, merely the subtle assertion that despite that Pinter
is no more than an ‘amateur’ poet. Indeed, it is because that tall claim is
so categorically accepted that the denigration is all the more telling.
In discussions of matters literary such unquestionable acceptance of
global status is rare and seldom taken seriously. It’s the sort of thing
that a literary agent or a publisher’s blurb writer or a memorial speaker
may come out with and that few literary critics take seriously. But as
it happened Paterson’s superlative appraisal of Pinter’s literary status
drew no comment, and those who might have commented on it merely
took umbrage that even his poetic credentials were being questioned.

In a fundamental way Paterson and the critics of his lecture were on

the same wavelength. And that had something to do with the context.
In the context of the invasion of Iraq such pat attributions of status
did matter. It did matter who was taking what position with regard
to the invasion, and the news media constantly marked the status of

commentators as such. In fact, ‘the world’s greatest living playwright’
sounds like exactly the sort of newspeak which proliferated and circu-
lated abundantly alongside quoted or cited opinions about the invasion
which took over the news media at the time. Just as political and legal
and theological ‘authorities’ and ‘experts’ and a vast array of ‘celebrities’
and ‘role-models’ were constantly named as such, so too a hierarchy of
literary celebrity and authority – of status – was marked in reportage
about the invasion of Iraq. It was news if a ‘Nobel laureate’ of literature or a
‘poet laureate’ or a ‘cult novelist’ or a ‘bestselling author’ or ‘the world’s
greatest living playwright’ could be quoted as coming out for or against
the invasion. In newspeak such quick attribution of status works often
in lieu of arguments and rationalizations, and is used constantly. But
these quick attributions of status are not entirely constructed by news
media themselves. In this regard the news media shadow a political
economy of literary productions and circulations that already exists,
or rather the structures of a dominant literary industry and establish-
ment. The latter incorporates publishers and agents and award makers
and influential persons from other cultural institutions in concert with
coteries of celebrity authors and in-writers who are as much the manag-
ers of literary markets as products of literary markets. Here the words of
literary agents and publisher’s blurb writers and award ceremony speak-
ers count as a kind of official rhetoric of the literary industry. Insofar as
literature was called upon in the media during the Iraq invasion it was
in the terms of that official rhetoric, and in the flow of debates at the
time that otherwise little regarded and always doubtful literary hierar-
chy passed momentarily into broader public discourse.
Paterson’s ostensible reasons for singling Pinter’s anti-war poetry out
for special reference also digs into broader literary and contextual matters:
‘Since it tries to provoke an emotion of which its target readers are
already in high possession, it will change no-one’s mind about any-
thing.’ In 2003–4 this was apt to be taken as an art-for-art’s-sake poet’s
impatience with the immediacy of propagandist or utilitarian poetry.
That Paterson was obviously well aware of this underlines it context-
specific nuances. Apropos the propagandist, Paterson asserts the futility
of making poetry subject to a strong political imperative that is, so to
speak, out there: in this case, to change the minds of war-mongers and

6 Imagining Iraq
arouse the indifferent against the invasion of Iraq. The evidence of this
political imperative occupied at the time innumerable public statements,
websites, media features and active protest gestures ranging from the
individual (such as Brian Haw’s protest outside the British Parliament)
to the collective (such as the worldwide marches of 15 February 2003).

The evidence of the imperative was also felt powerfully at an interper-
sonal and everyday level, in day-to-day informal conversations and
exchanges. In the heat of the debate, taking a position and opposing
the counter-position appeared of paramount interest wherever the inva-
sion was registered – particularly in guilt- and doubt-ridden Britain. To
try to ‘change the minds’ of those espousing the other view was a per-
vasive preoccupation in a deeply polarized politically aware populace
regarding a deeply contentious issue. Picking the measure of ‘changing
minds’ thus allowed Paterson to immediately tap into immediate anxi-
eties, and gave immediate clarity to the notion of propagandist poetry.
In seeking to draw away from such poetry to a kind of art-for-art’s-sake
view, Paterson then shifted the grounds for employing that measure. In
art-for-art’s-sake, Paterson seems to maintain, it is also ‘changing minds’
that is at stake but in a deeper, less worldly, and more profound way:
‘the sort that makes readers feel … vulnerable to reprogramming, com-
plicit in the creative business of their self-transformation’. Effectively
the idea of ‘changing minds’ is transposed from its immediate political
relevance to a contained aesthetic sphere, and appears nevertheless to
make sense because of its immediate political relevance. Another way
of saying that might be: Paterson used an urgent preoccupation with
‘changing minds’ to denigrate poetry that is instrumentalized for some
end and champion poetry that actuates its ends. ‘Instrumentalized’ and
‘actuate’ are rather fuzzy academic-sounding words which, nevertheless,
have a self-evident and useful succinctness here.
Paterson didn’t use the rather quaint terms ‘propagandist’/’utilitarian’
or ‘art-for-art’s-sake’ and may well quarrel with them, but that doesn’t
matter. They have the merit of being familiar to those interested in litera-
ture, and place Paterson’s comments within a line of long-drawn debates
that have occupied much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Paterson’s lecture makes reasonable sense as a contribution to those
debates about poetry, and about literature in general. When seen as such,
though, the strategy adopted by Paterson and described above does appear
unusual. It is unusual in espousing an art-for-art’s-sake position to use the
political imperatives of the time, and thus tangentially acknowledge the
pervasiveness of those political concerns. Of course, the political com-
plicities of those who assume an art-for-art’s-sake position have often

been noted in the line of long-drawn debates mentioned. Influentially,

for instance, the Marxist theoretician Sergei Plekhanov’s Art and Social
Life (1912) had argued that art-for-art’s-sake writers are products of their
social and political circumstances, however vehemently they may deny it
(incidentally, unlike some of his intellectual descendants, for Plekhanov

this was an argument for not making utilitarian demands of art). Quite
possibly though, no art-for-art’s-sake proponent has conceded the hold
of the political to the extent that Paterson does here. In itself that seems
to me to reveal something of the pressure of the environment, some-
thing of the palpable political tension in the air when Paterson took the
podium. In a way, he was unable to escape the contextual frame which
he was flailing against as a poet.
Then there is Paterson’s further objection to Pinter’s kind of ‘big sweary
outburst’ in verse: ‘more to the point, anyone can do it. Neither is “risk”
the deployment of disjunctive syntax, innovatory punctuation or wee
apropos-of-nothing allusions to Heisenberg and Lacan; because anyone
can do that, too.’ It would surprise almost anyone that she is considered
invariably capable of coming up with allusions to Heisenberg and Lacan.
But let’s leave that ‘anyone’ aside – it seems to be a different ‘anyone’
from the sort who writes ‘big sweary outbursts’. The latter ‘anyone’ comes
in for a good deal of flak from Paterson:
Our problem is that the roles of poet and reader have become blurred;
on the one hand we have the populists, who have made the fatal
error of thinking that feeling and practice form a continuum. They
infantilise our art: chicken-soup anthologies full of lousy poems;
silly workshop exercises where you write a poem in the voice of your
socks; ultra-‘accessible’ poetry programs, where the general public
text in poems to be read out on the show. Poetry is a wonderfully
therapeutic thing to do at amateur level; but amateur artists and
musicians don’t think they should exhibit at the Tate, or play at
the Wigmore. (Serious poets, I should say, don’t start off amateurs,
but apprentices – just like any other vocation.) The result of the
inadvertent democratisation of the art has been many people feeling
that armed with a beer-mat, a pencil, and a recent mildly traumatic
experience they are entitled to send 100pp of handwritten drivel into
Faber or Cape.
This is a little bit rudely expressed, but clarifies Paterson’s objections to

the ‘anyone’ poets – and that too is of the moment. Paterson is simply
doing what an established poet cum publisher in his position is expected

8 Imagining Iraq
to do: defend the exclusive institutional spaces of the establishment

against any foray from alternative democratic spaces. Paterson appoints
himself doorkeeper of institutional reputation as other kinds of estab-
lished artists might: as for the Tate Gallery or the Wigmore Hall so for
the Faber and Faber or Jonathan Cape offices. Fair enough, his somewhat

maligned readers might say, but why bother? After all, the reputations
of these publishers rest on what they endorse by publication and none
can stop them from rejecting unworthy aspirants. So why bother to
humiliate them with invective into the bargain? The obvious answer
is in Paterson’s words: because he feels threatened by those alternative
democratic spaces, because they attract readers too, because (heaven forbid)
they even have an impact upon ‘our art’. Instead of simply kowtowing
to established poets, readers are daring to write and listen to readers
who write. And sometimes that kind of thing even appears within the
doors of the establishment, with august institutional sanction. After all,
Pinter’s ‘big sweary outburst’ was published by Faber.
What is in evidence there is the anxiety of the literary establishment
about losing control of literary production and circulation and recep-
tion, or of having some of the keys to mediation between authors and
readers taken away. This is symptomatic of the fast-changing condi-
tion of literary production and circulation in general of recent years,
and in particular of how that condition was manifested during the
invasion of Iraq.
The condition of literary production and circulation has recently seen
rapid changes in the direction of challenging the hold of conventional
modes of publishing. The more consolidated and centralized the con-
ventional modes of publication have become the more energetically
have alternative spaces appeared and unorthodox critical attention been
garnered. Until quite recently, say the 1970s, the mediation of literature
between author and reader was comprehensively conducted in the print
form by a somewhat variegated publishing industry, ranging equally
between corporate and independent. Through the mixture of corporate
and independent publishing, through the freedoms and competitions of
a variegated industry, certain norms of what is high or mass literature
and of what is regarded as valuable in literature – of ‘literariness’ – were
substantially maintained. There are numerous accounts of the manner
in which the industry changed from roughly the 1980s to the detriment
of independent publishing and in favour of conglomerated multina-
tional publishing corporations. Publishers such as André Schiffrin, in
The Business of Books (2000), and scholars such as John Feather, in
Communicating Knowledge (2003), have presented valuable insights into

this process and its effect on literature. In brief, the giant corporations
were able to substantially oust competition and operate an economy of
global scale to mould markets and maximise profits by focusing on the
most saleable literature. This meant narrowing down the access to lit-
erature that they provide in terms of certain formulae of saleability, or,

in other words, narrowing down the variety of published and available
literature itself in significant ways. ‘Literariness’ was inclined towards
market-friendliness by a more consolidated and centralised publishing
industry. That is a significant aspect of what may be regarded as a top-
down and very ‘advertent democratization’ of literature, but that is not
what Paterson – well ensconced in that industry himself – rails about.
Paterson gestures instead toward the ‘inadvertent democratization’, or
rather the emergence of alternative spaces of literary production and
circulation, outside the hold of the increasingly consolidated publish-
ing industry. This happened more or less simultaneously and, to some
degree, in response to developments in the industry, and it was success-
ful enough for the industry to make occasional overtures to it.
There are two sides to this ‘inadvertent democratization’ that can be
usefully noted here (doing so gives more substance to Paterson’s anxiety
about it than he managed to convey). First, technological developments
in electronic media, communications and networking facilities have had
a significant impact on literary productions and circulations. The form of
the hypertext has developed since the 1980s both in terms of increased
user-friendliness and in terms of the possibilities of linkage across media
and mobile access. In the course of the 1990s those have converged
with technological developments enabling a simply enormous access to
information (especially through the Internet), and presenting unprec-
edented possibilities for global networking (through blogging and web
chat rooms from the mid-1990s and through social networking websites
post-2000). All sorts of conventional establishments, not least publish-
ers, have had a troubled relationship with the more or less unregulated
zone of creativity and communications thus brought about. Some have
sought to impose regulation on it, and others have sought to buy into
its advantages and reach. The literary industry has attempted both
with varying degrees of success; but it has not been able to control the
extraordinary surge of literary and creative writing networks, blogging,
fan fiction, electronic publication, and so on. Since both authors and
readers now actively participate in these developments, the ability to
guard the doors of ‘literariness’ that an established literary industry
exercised in the past has been considerably weakened. The key ele-
ments of literature – including the nature of texts, the maintenance

10 Imagining Iraq
of archives, the degrees to which authors and readers can interact or

even be regarded as distinct – are in the process of being reconsidered
as these processes take hold. Paterson’s remark on ‘accessible’ poetry
programmes and poetry being ‘texted’ is not a frothy ironic moment, it
is a real concern where he speaks from. Elsewhere it appears as a rather

thrilling opening up of the possibilities of literature. Second, another
establishment institutional space which has a symbiotic relationship
with the literary industry – in that each feeds upon and props the
other up – has taken an interest in these emerging alternative spaces of
production and circulation and in the ‘inadvertent democratization’ of
literature. I mean the academy, and literary studies therein. The interest
that literary studies have taken in the above-mentioned developments
has grown through a process itself. To some extent it has to do with the
political aspirations of what is thought of as Theory (with a capital T)
in literary studies circles, which gathered momentum particularly from
the 1970s and had a considerable impact on institutional pedagogy
and scholarship thereafter. One of the fallouts was the emergence of
cultural studies within literary circles as precisely that area which ques-
tions conventional norms of ‘literariness’ and pays attention to mass
market texts and ‘new’ media texts. The latter tended to be regarded as
largely unworthy of serious academic examination before the 1980s, but
became not only respectable but in vogue within the literary academy in
the course of the 1990s (with some allowances for the decadal looseness
of these summary periodizations). Naturally bestsellers and mass market
texts and other media texts attracted research and study. Moreover,
the emerging forms of literary production using electronic means
and facilities for networking have been exposed to serious analysis, and
university courses encouraging both the study of these and engagement
with such creativity were instituted. These few sentences are neces-
sarily cursory pointers towards an extremely complex process. I do not
dwell on the complexities here; I have discussed these developments
in literary studies at greater length elsewhere – in Social Constructionist
Identity Politics (2007) and Globalization and Literature (2009b), and to
some extent in the second edition of Re-Reading Harry Potter (2009c).
It is sufficient to note here that the academy has also worked to some
degree with the ‘inadvertent democratization’ of literature that Paterson
descries. Perhaps that explains his hostility to those vaguely defined
intellectual sort of persons, the ‘postmoderns’.
The movement from the general to the particular is more germane
to this study. The two paragraphs above describe literary processes that
unravelled over several decades; of particular interest here is how those

processes worked in the context of the Iraq invasion, which Paterson

inevitably has in view. A constantly remarked two-way interaction is
significant here. On the one hand, public interest in the unfolding
events of the time was such that there was a great demand for and
consumption of all kinds of information – any kind of information.

News reports and opinions were immediately picked and unpicked,
rumours abounded, ‘facts’ of doubtful legitimacy were contested, sup-
port for moral qualms and convictions was sought wherever possible.
Significant increases were noted in sales of newspapers, viewings of
political broadcasts and discussions, hits on information websites. Perhaps
more importantly, the resources of social networking were abuzz with
commentaries, blogs, chat room discussions and every kind of advocacy
for action – especially anti-invasion protests. The principal organizations
opposed to the invasion, such as the Stop the War Coalition (STWC),
Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER), United for Peace and
Justice, and the Not in Our Name Project, conducted their operations
largely through electronic media and networks. On the other hand,
such exchanges and communications through new media, which are
usually registered as a kind of constant background murmur or white
noise in the mediascape, were actually allocated a distinct character in
the mainstream. Just as the established media highlighted the opin-
ions of the great and good (the appearance of a literary hierarchy that
I noted above), so too they constructed a sort of voice of the ‘person on
the street’, ‘the common person’, ‘citizens’, ‘the people’. Venerable broad-
cast media (e.g. CNN, VOA, BBC) and prestigious broadsheets (e.g. The
Guardian, The Times, New York Post) had perfected techniques for repre-
senting this voice around the time of the terrorist attacks of 11 September
2001 in the USA, and it appeared frequently as the invasion of Iraq was
planned and undertaken. This consisted in such conventional methods
as interviewing the ‘passerby’ or some representative of the many and
tracking crowds in protest marches, and also in keeping tabs on popular
blogs and networking sites and co-opting from these at times and using
amateur mobile phone images and so on.
In this environment the alternative modes of literary production and
circulation described above, which are usually drowned in the ceaseless
and uncontainable traffic of global communications, also acquired an
unusual public visibility. Such literary production and circulation as
turned to the political concerns of the time drifted out of closed circuits
of networking coteries and scholars and became part of a larger public
scrutiny. This happened in various ways. The statements of established
literary authors used by the mainstream media were immediately picked

12 Imagining Iraq
up and recirculated and hyperlinked and dissected in a variety of ways.

Pronouncements by Pinter, poems by Seamus Heaney or Andrew Motion
in newspapers, plays by David Hare etc. which seemed directly relevant
to the invasion were instantly noted, commented on and analysed,
in an extraordinarily diverse and dispersed way on the Internet, for

instance. Further, electronic texts which may be regarded as literary (just
as diaries and journals may be regarded as literary texts) from unknown
persons who were in ‘hotspots’ or simply made noteworthy arguments
surfaced through the chain of blog and discussion forum watchers into
the mainstream media and sometimes into mainstream publication.
Thus various blogs by persons in Iraq describing their daily lives and
thoughts as the invasion proceeded caught the attention of mainstream
news media and made it into international book publishing, such as
Salam Pax’s The Baghdad Blog (2003) and Riverbend’s Baghdad Burning
(2005). Some blogs by American soldiers in Iraq were similarly success-
ful: Colby Buzzell’s My War (2005) and Matthew Currier Burden’s The
Blog of War (2006) come to mind. More significantly for this study, a
great deal of literary writing was produced and circulated by known
and unknown writers with no known connection to Iraq directly on
the Internet, through a variety of electronic forums and networking
sites. There was a particular proliferation of anti-invasion poetry. Some
of these were engineered into anthologies by anti-invasion litterateurs –
those ‘chicken soup anthologies full of lousy poetry’ that Paterson sput-
ters about. Todd Swift, who had written the bitter letter about Paterson’s
lecture quoted above, edited an electronic anthology 100 Poets Against
the War (2003) – announced at the time as the fastest anthology ever put
together (within a week). Sam Hamill set up a resoundingly successful
Poets Against the War website (www.poetsagainstthewar.org) and also
put together a published anthology, Poets Against the War (2003). In the
midst of this effervescence the most revered arbiter of the poetry
establishment, Faber and Faber, felt called upon to come up with a topical
anthology also, 101 Poems Against War (2003) – albeit of a very different
sort. I return for a closer look at such texts in subsequent chapters. At
this juncture here’s the point of these observations: in the heat of the
lead-up to and invasion of Iraq, the distinctions between mainstream
literary publishing and alternative modes of literary production and cir-
culation, established and celebrity pen-wielders and unknown ‘ordinary’
litterateurs, the great news-hungry public and the select literature-reading
constituency, literary authors and activists and political commentators
seemed to merge and separate and blur in unexpected ways. Something
about the current condition of literary production and circulation and

reception, and about the current shape of ‘literariness’ itself, was forced
into wide attention against the grain of established traditions and dis-
tinctions during the invasion of Iraq.
Such a blurring of distinctions can hardly be received without anxiety
by those who appoint themselves guardians of literature and literariness.

Don Paterson was one such.
Theme, text, reality
That longish preamble uses bits of Paterson’s 2004 T. S. Eliot Lecture to

illuminate some aspects of literature during the Iraq invasion period.
The context is recent enough to be still relevant and its aftermath ongo-
ing. Whatever can be observed about the condition of literature then
(roughly 2003 to 2005) is likely to obtain as this is written (in 2009–
2010) and for a while to come. In the preamble I have made no attempt
to determine what Paterson’s views about the invasion itself may have
been, whether he was for or against it. That is the spirit in which this
study is conducted. The literary texts that are addressed below are not
taken up with a view to identifying pro- or anti-invasion positions, or
dwelling on the political choices of their authors, or trying to reach a
moral consensus on the invasion. The point here is not to discern what
literature and literary authors have contributed to our understanding
of the invasion of Iraq, but to analyse how the environment of the
invasion revealed something about the recent and current condition of
literature. No one is held to account for his or her position regarding
the invasion. In a general way I try to desist from normative judgements
here, moral or political or aesthetic. I choose the phrase ‘condition of
literature’ advisedly, with an aspiration to the analytical balance which
carefully charts the influences on and workings of the corpus of litera-
ture now, rather than to exert a diagnostic gaze and pronounce sickness
or health, greatness or mediocrity. The idea here is to examine how cer-
tain literary texts (not authors, texts) appeared within and ‘spoke’ to a
specific socio-political context, not so much to reckon with that context
but to understand the nuances of contemporary literature.
Having said that I might as well note straightaway that most of the
texts discussed in subsequent chapters are either explicitly against the
invasion of Iraq or against war in general. There are significant differences
within their anti-invasion expressions: some are bitter interventions,
some are pensive ruminations, some are intellectual probings, some seek
to universalize from the particular moment and some to give flesh to
the particularity of the Iraq invasion, some look back and some forward.

14 Imagining Iraq
The anti-war attitude, where that is explicit, is a given position which

can scarcely be neglected – but the matter of interest here is what can
be discerned in the texts beyond that. A literary text can be expected to
convey more and be open to more than simply the political position
it espouses, which is apparent really even before it is read (is probably

announced on its dust jacket, or mentioned in a review, or simply infer-
able from what’s known of the author’s allegiances). That most of the
texts in question are anti-invasion is not down to my selection. There
simply were more such literary texts which reached a wider circulation
or were more widely accessible at the time. Relatively few literary texts
addressed to the invasion could be regarded as pro-invasion or sympa-
thetic to it. Some may perhaps think of Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005) as
such: it gives a close-up view of an eventful day (against the backdrop of
the 15 February 2005 anti-invasion marches) in a London surgeon’s life.
This humane and reasonable protagonist, whose thoughts are described
in detail, finds himself more or less in favour of invasion on moral
grounds. I give a fuller account of the novel in Chapter 5. Some of the
action thrillers discussed in that chapter are more unambiguously pro-
invasion. But whatever the explicit or implicit positions taken, there are
invariably ambiguities and slippages and connotations and allusions to
be discerned which don’t necessarily bear specifically upon the context
of invasion but fold in on the broad relationship between literature and
world. That’s my thing here. It might also be prudent to declare that I was
unambiguously opposed to the invasion of Iraq at the time, and continue
to regard the episode (far from over) as an extraordinary violation of
rational political and ethical principles. I had conducted such research
into the matter as I was capable of, and have detailed my reasons and
misgivings insofar as I could in The Theory and Reality of Democracy: A Case
Study in Iraq (2006). I don’t intend to repeat those arguments with a
somewhat different inflection here.
I have chosen to delimit this study in certain practical ways. To begin
with, I have confined my attention to texts that came into circulation
primarily between 2003 and 2005, occasionally straying beyond. A great
deal of relevant material has become available since, including much
that was written before. Since I am concerned here as much with the
manner in which the context impinged upon literary writing as with the
manner in which texts circulated and were received then, I generally stay
within the demarcated period. Where motifs or strategies were followed
up in some way after 2005 I note and at times discuss them. The period
between 2003 and 2005 is chosen as one during which the nuances,
processes and aftermath of the invasion of Iraq drew maximum public

interest and were passionately debated, and remained constantly ‘hot

news’. From early 2002 the US government under President George
Bush, with staunch support from the UK government under Prime
Minister Tony Blair, had reiterated a desire to disarm Iraq or bring about
a regime change by military means with increasing vehemence. When,

on 7 September 2002, Bush and Blair met in Camp David, Maryland,
and jointly reiterated their determination to prove that Saddam
Hussein’s regime was harbouring ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ (WMD)
and act accordingly, invasion seemed like a foregone conclusion to
many. It duly happened, amidst widespread anxiety and often outrage.
The escalating spiral of violence in Iraq during and after the reign of the
Coalition Provisional Authority under Paul Bremer until 30 June 2004,
and the numerous scandals and iniquities that continued to come to
light, figured significantly in global political and public forums through
2005. I expect the main points of interest in this period are still fresh in
the memories of many readers.
The literary texts examined in subsequent chapters were written in
English and directed towards readers proficient in that language in the
first instance. My limitations are largely to blame for this. Naturally,
numerous literary texts on the invasion of Iraq were penned in Arabic,
French, German and other languages. To a small extent these are noted
in Chapter 6. My limitations aside, focusing on English language texts,
and examining them as an English Literature researcher might, has a few
resonances which are to the purpose for this study. The English language
is now, contentiously but unquestionably, the dominant language of inter-
national politics, commerce and mass media and communications – and as
such has the widest reach. English language cultural products, particu-
larly texts of various sorts, are likely to reach a larger and more dispersed
readership than texts in other languages. Insofar as the invasion of Iraq
generated ripples in an enormous number of political and cultural
areas, texts in the English language are likely to have had something
like a concordant reach. At the same time, however, contemplation of
literature in English immediately brings to mind institutional spaces,
first and foremost to do with education (in schools and universities)
and scholarship, and also to do with the book industry and various
levels of cultural politics. In recent decades the institutional spaces of
English Literature have been fraught with various ideological conflicts,
to a great extent arising from its geopolitical associations with the former
British Empire and latterly with North American neo-imperialism and
its current proliferations through the global dominance of English. In
particular, former colonies where the English language has maintained

16 Imagining Iraq
a place in official and everyday life, and where noteworthy literary

contributions to and scholarly productions on English Literature are
legion, have been loci for interrogating some of the conventional geo-
political assumptions of English Literature. More generally, the sheer
spread of English in non-Anglophone contexts is also necessitating a

wide-ranging reconsideration of the geopolitics of those institutional
spaces. Where English Literature can be located and what are its repre-
sentative texts, how the field should be engaged and in what manner may
its texts be analysed, how the history of the field should be mapped,
what sorts of values are ensconced in its institutions – these are all
questions which have been and continue to be inconclusively debated.
In many ways, the context of the invasion of Iraq chimed in with
the political retrospections and dissensions which have characterized
the pursuit of English Literature from the latter part of the twentieth
century. The key agents of the invasion were the governments of the
United States and Britain, Anglophone centres of past and present geo-
political dominance; by association, the politics of the English language
and of English Literature acquired a particular resonance in this context,
both within those countries and perceivably elsewhere. That the texts
I examine below are in English, and very largely produced in Britain
and North America, allows for active consideration of that resonance.
In many ways, English Literature during the invasion of Iraq is an area
that is troubled by its own history and by differences that are within its
fold. On a related note, the global dominance of the English language
and English language cultural products also means that their relation-
ships with other languages are in a constant state of being negotiated.
Crossings from and into the English language and English Literature
are more the norm than otherwise. At the most obvious level, this
means that translations of literary texts into and from English and
texts crossing into Anglophone contexts from without can be regarded
as part of English Literature. Indeed, the institutional spaces of English
Literature mentioned above – academic spaces, for instance – now often
incorporate texts from other languages and non-Anglophone cultures
as within their remit, and seek to engage the consequent problems
productively. In the context of the invasion of Iraq, people in North
America and Britain naturally evinced a heightened interest in voices
and cultural products from Iraq specifically and the Middle East or (with
somewhat different nuances) the ‘Arab World’ generally. Consequently
translations of Arabic poetry were inserted seamlessly amidst the anti-
war poetry in English featured in the above-mentioned anthologies.
A timely anthology of Iraqi Poetry Today (2003), edited by Saadi

Simawe, appeared to capitalize on this interest; as did a volume by one

of the contributors there, Dunya Mikhail’s The War Works Hard (2005
[2003]). Insofar as some of these can be regarded as works in English
for circulation among an English-reading audience I pick them up below
(Mikhail’s volume is discussed in Chapter 3). Others of similar interest

have appeared in English after 2005, notably Algerian novelist Yasmina
Khadra’s The Sirens of Baghdad (2007, from the French Les Sirènes de
Baghdad, 2006) – those are outside the analytical scope of this study,
but are briefly registered in Chapter 6. From a different direction,
English language readers had the extraordinary advantage of being
able to read blogs kept by Iraqi authors in Iraq through the period of
the invasion. Some of these were narrative records and constructions
(not fictional constructions but constructions in the sense of evoking
personae and locales, and deploying stylistic devices) in the English
language (itself a matter that was debated in their pages) which rightly
attracted considerable attention at the time and eventually passed
into print circulation. I have mentioned such volumes by Salam Pax
and Riverbend above – their volumes are discussed in Chapter 6. I have
stuck somewhat conservatively with texts available in print for this
study, not because that is any assurance of ‘quality’ (in my experience
that is not the case, even if we accept some unambiguous markers
of quality) but because print texts still enjoy a stability in archiving
which electronic texts do not yet.
In terms of practical delimitations for the following, I have also
chosen to focus primarily on literary texts derived from and addressed
to the civil and civilian sphere rather than the military. Some of my
reasons for this decision are elaborated later in this chapter, when I dwell
on the nuances of ‘war’ apropos the Iraq invasion. In an immediate and
simplistic way, the explanation lies in my perception that the civil and
the military were largely recorded and narrated and presented in distinct
ways for the Iraq invasion particularly and generally by historical con-
vention. Even the count of casualties was maintained separately: Iraq
Body Count (www.iraqbodycount.org) kept a record of civilian deaths
in Iraq, while the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count (www.icasualties.org)
maintained records of dead US and UK military personnel. Accounts of
the invasion – including literary ones – given by US and UK soldiers in
Iraq were often framed in terms of distinctive presuppositions (in terms
of nationalistic agendas, heroism and cowardice, the technicalities of
warfare) and given to readers as expressive of a kind of truth or from the
moral high ground of lived professional experience. The presumptions
which enable engagement in military action as military personnel, the

18 Imagining Iraq
realizations and traumas that may follow, the social norms surrounding
contemplation of military personnel were all deliberately held apart
from the civilian sphere. Powerfully ensconced conventions now accord to
‘veterans’ a somewhat sanctified status which seems to me questionable:
often more to do with perceptions of having served and suffered for

the state than to do with evidence of human and intellectual insight.
As distinct from such military accounts which tell civilians what’s what
or are sanctified by experience, literary texts addressed from and to the
civil sphere during the Iraq invasion circulated in a seething network
of debates and uncertainties. In these mostly the nature of reality and
truth was under duress and the prerogatives of civil society at large
were in issue. The latter are predominantly discussed here. It would,
however, be simplistic to push such a distinction too emphatically. To
begin with, the person and the profession do not necessarily coincide.
There were undoubtedly US and UK soldiers in Iraq who engaged the
civil and civilian sphere sensitively in literary texts – the poetry of US
soldier Brian Turner in Here, Bullet (2005), for instance, often does so
and is discussed in Chapter 3, and so does some of the ‘frontline drama’
examined in Chapter 4. More importantly, to understand literary engage-
ments with the invasion it is necessary to grasp the particular ways in
which the military was presented to and figured in civil discourses – insofar
as the military was distinctively constructed in the public imaginary
during the invasion period. Along with the frontline writings men-
tioned, action thrillers (or combat novels) of the period are useful for
this purpose and taken up accordingly in Chapter 5. Accounts of fighting
in Iraq, on-the-ground memoirs, reports of various sorts from the battle-
zone, voices offering the insights of veterans as such, are however not
taken up in this study.
These pragmatic decisions and explanations do not answer a more
fundamental question: are there sound reasons for expecting literary
texts addressed to the invasion of Iraq to clarify something significant
about the current condition of literature rather than simply having con-
tributed to debates and concerns of the time? Why should I suspect that
this could be a useful exercise from that perspective? This is naturally a
question I asked myself before undertaking this study, and I persuaded
myself to proceed with three broad considerations in mind. These con-
siderations were not inferred from specific texts; these are preliminary
notions which seemed to cut across my prevailing sense of literature and
literariness, and spur a closer examination of the texts in question. These
have to do with the manner in which that context encouraged, even
impelled, attention to the relationship of literature and world. In brief,

these considerations are with regard to ideas of theme, text and reality – all
seminal in matters literary.
The theme seemed to be war. That poetry pamphlet by Pinter that
Paterson alluded to had it in the title, simply War (more on this in
Chapter 3). Almost all the texts I pick up below refer to the Iraq inva-

sion as ‘war’, and seek their resources for engaging with it in terms of
‘war’. The invasion of Iraq has now become the ‘Iraq War’, following from
the ‘Gulf War’, in everyday parlance as in specialist verbiage. In terms
of any conventionally rigorous understanding of war it wasn’t at all
clear that what happened in Iraq was war, either between 20 March
2003 to 30 April 2003 (when ‘war’ was announced and concluded) or
from 21 April 2003 to 28 June 2004 (when the Coalition Provisional
Authority was in place with the Iraqi Governing Council amidst escalat-
ing carnage) or thereafter (as carnage continued). By a conventionally
rigorous understanding I mean understanding when a condition of
conflict can be recognized meaningfully as war, rather than explaining
how and why and with what effect war happens. The former usually
harks back to the classic work of Carl Von Clausewitz, On War (1873
[1832]), or perhaps looks to Quincy Wright’s A Study of War (1942), or
perhaps – and more bewilderingly – to the many publications from
J. David Singer’s Correlates of War project. The latter had identified a
state of ‘civil war’ in Iraq in 2006 (according to his colleague Juan Cole
2006), but by any of these approaches it is difficult to recognize the
invasion of Iraq as it got underway from 2003 as ‘war’. In this the diffi-
culty that a rigorous understanding faces is not dissimilar to one that
a clear-headed common-sense understanding should face too, and it
is easiest to briefly present the difficulty here in common-sense terms.
If a large, powerfully built man goes up to a slightly built, frail man
and starts beating him up without active provocation, and if the weak
man puts up his arms to ward off the blows but is beaten to pulp and
dies, we probably won’t call it a ‘fight’. Perhaps we can think of it as
an ‘assault’. Analogously, thinking of the so-called ‘Iraq War’ as ‘war’ is
suspect. To recognize a condition of armed conflict as ‘war’ some sort
of irreconcilable difference, some equivalence in the intent to engage
each other, or some parity in the capacity to engage each other should
be discernible in the warring parties. The military action in Iraq was
clearly, however, an ‘invasion’ in the first instance and all that followed
(including ‘civil wars’) were the consequences of invasion – and in this
study I use ‘invasion’ deliberately as distinct from ‘war’. It is necessary
to keep this distinction foregrounded because both those promoting
invasion and those opposing it deployed a subsuming rhetoric of war.

20 Imagining Iraq
In a variety of ways, the jargons, ideas, frames, associations, sentiments,

imaginations and anxieties of war were brought to bear on the build-up
to, and undertaking and aftermath of the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The
invasion, in brief, was surrounded so comprehensively by talk of war
that it appeared to become war.

For champions of the invasion this involved, to begin with, applications
of the technical jargon of war: there was constant technical-sounding
discussion of military capabilities, strategies, terrain, war-time provisions
and budgets, technology, intelligence, publicity and propaganda, preci-
sion-bombing, collateral damage, friendly fire, etc. The language of the
machine-like character of modern warfare was applied; a language that
was succinctly summarized by Daniel Pick – in his historical analysis of
the development thereof – as follows:
The ‘unstoppable engine of war’ has become something of a modern

truism. As though in answer to the question ‘Why War?’, the answer
finally might turn on the insatiable and irresistible drive of the
‘military-industrial complex’ – that ambiguous phrase crucially beg-
ging the question of human agency or responsibility. Or as though war
today might not only involve the deployment of new technologies,
but be essentially redefined by them: satellites, television, computers
and video games after all have occupied centre-stage in the repre-
sentation and military news management of the Gulf War. Are we not
so often caught in the fascination and massive distortion of this
‘high-tech’ image of conflict today – as though war is decreed and
exclusively played out by high-precision automata? (Pick 1993, p. 11)
On the ethical front, champions of invasion brought back the concept

of ‘Just War’, usually by referring to and updating St Augustine’s prin-
ciples of just cause for and just conduct of war. Numerous statements
and discussions and tracts were produced to debate the just causes and
conduct of the invasion, and ‘war’ slipped in and stayed with these as
a natural base of Augustinian principles, by lexical association more
than anything else. And, even more tenuously, those promoting inva-
sion continued to play with a loose ‘war’ of abstractions – the ‘war on
terror’ – which had been put together after 11 September 2001, and
which, by dint of repetition, seemed to acquire a reality of its own.
Among early commentators on the construction of the ‘war on terror’
after September 2001, in The Replication of Violence (2002, ch. 4) I had
charted some of the ways in which the notion of ‘war’ was being applied
then to a range of abstractions which could obfuscate a large variety

of realities according to convenience. ‘War on terror’ was designed to

exacerbate implausible ideological polarizations, and signify both an
internal conflict within the so-called West and an external one with
those espousing ‘other values’. All those moves had come to pass before
the invasion of Iraq, and in a way the ‘war’ perceived therein was really a

metaphorical war of values and ideologies translated simplistically into
material and visceral realities. Predictably, that was done for agendas
with little investment in either values or ideologies. On the other side,
those opposing the invasion responded to the champions of invasion
accordingly, and took up the significations of ‘war’ accordingly. Where
the terminology of the war machine was deployed by agents of inva-
sion, opponents of invasion sought to highlight the human suffering
of war. Where proponents of invasion presented arguments in terms of
‘Just War’ theory, opponents engaged them on their own ground and
denounced their injustice. The particularities of motives and respon-
sibilities and the specificities of actions and conducts were pored over
to determine their normative implications as much by one side as by
the other – all in terms of ‘war’. The various flexibilities of the war of
abstractions were exploited for the opposing purposes of taking for or
against positions regarding invasion. In effect the idea of ‘war’ was super-
imposed on the invasion of Iraq by both those in its favour and those
vehemently opposed to it, in a kind of concord on the terminology of
war while being diametrically opposed on how it should be perceived
and evaluated. At both ends of these poles, the invasion of Iraq was
associated with a range of past conflicts which can more uncomplicatedly
be regarded as wars.
Insofar as the resources of literature were brought to bear on the
invasion, it was naturally the literature of war in a general way that was
thoroughly ploughed and variously evoked. Poets looked back to war
poetry in various contexts, particularly in the context of the Vietnam
War and the First World War. ‘War poetry’ was understood as a received
tradition to which the context of invasion called for further contribu-
tion: a reiteration of both contemporaneity and tradition, to echo Eliot’s
formulation of modernist poetry. These appeared variously through
poetry that alluded to other wars and the poetry of other wars, or that
engaged human suffering as a universal condition which spurs a universal
poetic sensibility, or that often made of war an allegorical monster with
another hydra head stirring in Iraq. Such poetry also appeared amidst
new canonical constructions of ‘anti-war poetry’, a way of both register-
ing a tradition and confirming it by participating in it. Thus, Hollis and
Keegan’s anthology 101 Poets Against War (2003) – that’s the Faber and

22 Imagining Iraq
Faber one – put together poetry from antiquity to the present, including
poems penned against the invasion of Iraq, to make a topical interven-
tion which was also an act of canon formation. At the same time Todd
Swift’s 100 Poets Against the War (2003) and Sam Hamill’s Poets Against
the War (2003) recalled for many the kind of anti-war ‘collective action’

anthologies that appeared during the Vietnam War. These are discussed
in Chapter 2 below. A number of classical Greek plays were translated
or adapted as the Iraq invasion progressed (by Seamus Heaney, Tony
Harrison, Martin Crimp and others) to deliberately make the classical
perception resonate with the contemporary concern – Chapter 4 examines
some of these. Past literary strategies for thematizing and disposing war
for public attention were extensively recalled in the literature of the
invasion of Iraq. War surfaced as the theme through these, a thematic
horizon and the theme of the moment. Along with literary resources of
the past those of more current provenance played amongst them. The
metaphoric possibilities of the background war of abstractions gave way
to literary explorations of culture-clashes – interestingly between the USA
and UK (e.g. in plays by Tamsin Oglesby and David Hare), and of course
more obviously and numerously with regard to the so-called Western
culture and Islamic culture. At the same time, the ethical debates about
‘just’ and ‘unjust war’ – the ethical rhetoric surrounding the invasion of
Iraq – facilitated incisive psychological portraits of internal schisms and
personality clashes (e.g. in novels by Noah Cicero, Nicholson Baker and
Ian McEwan which are discussed in Chapter 5). More recently, there has
been an increased production of narratives, styled with literary verve,
which renders the invasion as war from a microscopic perspective.
‘Embedded’ reporters and soldiers ‘on the ground’ have employed
the frames of war reportage, life experiences and technological jargons to
tell their stories of invading Iraq as war stories, as a record for posterity.
Thus, there has taken place a sudden proliferation of broadly literary
texts which do not so much thematize imminent or ongoing war, as
issue after the fact of accepting that war has happened and is done
with in Iraq. These are in a way confirmation of the invasion of Iraq as
war after the fact, and include narratives by soldiers – such as Hartley’s
Just Another Soldier (2005), Crawford’s The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell
(2005), Fick’s One Bullet Away (2005), Bellavia’s House to House (2007),
Campbell’s Joker One (2009) – and by correspondents – such as Parenti’s
The Freedom (2004), West’s No True Glory (2005), Pritchard’s Ambush
Alley (2005) and Filkins’s The Forever War (2008). In keeping with my
decision to stick with the civil sphere and primarily the period 2003–5,
these are outside the remit of this study. The problems of constructing

the invasion as ‘war’ in literary terms are of moment for this study of
literature. The narratives which take the invasion as war in terms of
pre-applied media or military frames are not. In brief, and sticking to
my focus and period, the point here is that even as literary texts drew
upon the stabilities and instabilities of rendering the invasion of Iraq as

‘war’ – of thematizing ‘war’ – that effort rebounded into the processes
of literature. The modes through which literary traditions (canons) are
thought about, the manner in which themes are constructed, the extent
to which themes provide linkages between texts, the slipperiness of
what texts say or represent – such matters of literary import bubbled up
and drew attention, and certainly deserve attention.
To move on: literary engagement with the invasion of Iraq was also a
reckoning with what it means to write or read a text. This wasn’t simply
a result of focusing on the theme of war in that context; the nature of
texts was actually under constant and searching investigation through
the invasion period, and put pressure on the most self-consciously textual
of activities: literary reading and writing. In academic circles naturally
the nature of texts has long been under constant discussion, and not
just in literary studies. History, linguistics, jurisprudence, anthropology …
indeed the entire range of human studies has at different stages sought
to clarify the nuances of constructing texts. In literary studies particu-
larly this has been an ongoing preoccupation, from attempts to get to
the bottom of literature by rigorous attention to language inaugurated
in the nineteenth century (the philological tradition of hermeneutics
associated with Wilhelm von Humboldt and Friedrich Schleiermacher)
to perceptions of the slipperiness of texts and of their relation to
ideological inclinations in discourse (the turn to Theory in the late
twentieth century, particularly strongly associated with the influence
of Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, Edward Said and
others). Increasingly since the 1970s these preoccupations of the literary
academy have both drawn upon and encroached upon other fields of
knowledge. The kinds of inadvertent and advertent democratizations
that Paterson, as noted above, seemed uneasy about are largely to do
with such questioning of the nature of texts – of how clear or multiple
their meanings are, of the overt and covert agendas they have, of the
shifts between what their writers intend and what their readers infer,
of the presumptions they work with, of the manner in which they fit
specific contexts, of the uses they can be put to by institutions, and so
on. Unquestionably though, these academic concerns have apparently
been, in a typically academic manner, locked into a rather precious
and removed domain. Literary studies may have been addressing the

24 Imagining Iraq
substance of the world and may have hoped to influence how the world
works, but at the same time it hid behind dense language, forbidding
abstractions, and walls of professional specialism. Poets, novelists and
playwrights who have a symbiotic relationship with the literary acad-
emy, and hope for its notice while aspiring far beyond it, usually know

this – hence Paterson’s scorn for ‘postmoderns’. In the context of the
invasion of Iraq, however, the nature of texts became a matter of
popular or mass concern. In a way, anyone interested in political devel-
opments at the time (and it was a simply huge number) started doing
in a practical common-sense fashion exactly the sorts of things that
literary and other humanities scholars constantly beat their brains
about. Everyone started worrying about the meanings, implications,
presumptions, contexts, and reliabilities of texts. And at the same time,
a large number of texts which are normally regarded as straightforward
and transparent carriers of information – such as political reports and
statements, strategy documents, minutes of meetings and assemblies,
press releases – acquired a kind of literary character, or attracted a sort
of literary attention. The style, contexts, connotations, interpretations,
presumptions and ambiguities of such texts were intensively examined,
more and more searchingly as the invasion approached and then got
underway. Literary writers and literary scholars unexpectedly found
themselves in a context where democratization, advertent or inadvertent,
of their domains was not merely mooted or desired but actually and
explicitly obtained momentarily. It seemed possible to expand outside
their usual domains.
Let me pause a moment to emphasize the sheer range of texts that
received a sort of literary attention in a public way. At one level, this
was a matter of ploughing the connotations of phrases in terms of who
was saying it and where and why. Phrases coined by politicians – such
as George W. Bush’s ‘axis of evil’ in his State of the Union address of 29
January 2002 or Donald Rumsfeld’s ‘old Europe’ in his press briefing of
22 January 2003 – or those used to identify operations and tactics – like
‘shock and awe’ or ‘Operation Infinite Justice’ or ‘Operation Enduring
Freedom’ – were dismantled and appropriated way beyond their
immediate purposes. The impact of the apt phrase is a daily concern
for propagandists and publicity agents; it is doubtful whether their
resonances are usually as consistently and interrogatively approached
as during the Iraq invasion. But phrases are not quite texts, and texts
are the issue here. A range of ‘dossiers’ were intensely scrutinized. The
so-called ‘Strategic Dossier’ of the International Institute for Strategic
Studies (9 September 2002); the National Security Strategy document that

Bush put to the House of Representatives (20 September 2002); the

Iraqi government’s dossier declaring weapons holdings to the United
Nations (7 December 2002); and especially the three dossiers produced
by the British government to make the case for invasion (Joint Intelli-
gence Committee 2002; Foreign and Commonwealth Office 2002;

Iraq 2003) – all were subjected to prolonged examination. Questions
of authorship, sources, selection and juxtaposition of information,
presentation, rhetorical strategies, interpretive clarity and doubt, and
ideological and normative underpinnings were raised. The nuances of
every word of a range of United Nations Security Council (UNSC) texts
were weighed: of every draft of the Resolution 1441; of every state-
ment on weapons inspections issued by Hans Blix of UNMOVIC and
Mohamed El Baradei of IAEA; of all the minutes of UNSC meetings,
and particularly Colin Powell’s presentation to that body of 5 February
2003 to present US intelligence. The manner in which abstract politi-
cal norms and culturally specific perspectives operated in these were
widely dissected; more interestingly, the vested interests that lie behind
proposing interpretations of texts and the degree to which inter-textual
linkage illuminates interpretation were pondered. Needless to say, simi-
lar attention was given to the texts of speeches, press releases and policy
statements by the main proponents of invasion in the UK and US, by
leaders of various countries, by religious leaders, by spokespersons for
alignments against invasion, by representatives of political parties, and
(as noted above) celebrities and public figures of various sorts. After the
invasion other texts continued to come up for similar attention: the
press releases and policy statements issued by the Coalition Provisional
Authority; calls for tenders and contracts issued by the United States
Army Corps of Engineers and the United States Agency for International
Development for reconstructing Iraq; progress reports by various cor-
porations involved in reconstruction; various investigations into the
process of the invasion and aftermath (into torture of Iraqi prisoners,
into false claims in the lead-up to invasion, into corruption in the
administration of the reconstruction …); and so on. Add to that, and
in a continuous fashion, the interpretive energy and habits of sceptical
reading and weighing of facts and inferences that were expended on
news reports and news analyses. These incorporated unusual aware-
ness of the channels and sources of news, and the extent to which their
locations and interests were reflected in the disposal of texts. An enor-
mous flood of textualized conversation hummed on electronic channels
throughout. It wouldn’t be too far-fetched to claim that between
2003 and 2005, the invasion of Iraq generated a widespread – with some

26 Imagining Iraq
particularly dynamic nodes – mass culture of critical engagement with

texts, in a pragmatic, immediate, imperative fashion. Moreover, this
mass culture of critical engagement with texts operated, more or less
spontaneously, with a range of factors which are not on the surface of
the texts in view: texts were habitually read between the lines, with

reference to other texts, with an ear for tone and style, with a grasp of
the underlying political and ethical abstractions, with discernment of
rhetoric and ambiguity and evasion. Such interpretive attention is con-
stantly given by different sets of professionals to texts relevant to them:
lawyers and bureaucrats look closely at dossiers; diplomats and minis-
ters read between the lines of foreign policy documents; military and
corporate strategists constantly weigh a range of reports and indicators;
academics look at everything interrogatively within their disciplinary
scopes. Under the conditions of a mass culture of interpretation that
prevailed during the Iraq invasion, every reading and writing person
was doing all those things to some extent and effectively employing
sophisticated strategies for engaging texts in general. The environment
which enabled this probably didn’t last long beyond 2005 – but I will
not speculate on its life. The point I am getting at is that the literary
texts in question here appeared self-consciously in the midst of this
heightened mass interpretive field.
The appearance of a heightened mass interpretive field, engaging
every kind of text critically, presented an unusual opportunity for
producers of literary texts. Some took the opportunity and others were
taken by the opportunity (made advantageous offers and given commis-
sions), and yet others (Paterson amongst them) deliberately stood back.
To say that those who took the opportunity were being ‘opportunistic’
wouldn’t be incorrect, but to read that as a term of moral opprobrium
would be simplistic. There may be selfish motives behind tapping into
the opportunity; perhaps in addressing the invasion of Iraq some poets
and playwrights and novelists were trying to draw attention to them-
selves and hoping to enlarge their sales and widen their readership in
a rather obvious way. Perhaps they were ‘jumping on the bandwagon’,
‘prostituting their art’, ‘playing to plebeian sensationalism’; equally
they may have been ‘acting on their convictions’, ‘expressing their
deepest feelings’, ‘being true to their art’. Let’s divest ‘opportunistic’
here of its pat moral baggage. The appearance of such a field of mass
readership certainly presented an opportunity for literature, and those
who produce literary texts are likely to be sensitive to the opportunity in
that vein. For literary authors the context opened the possibility of play-
ing with textual features and expecting to be immediately understood.

A rich field of inter-textual resonances and allusions, pregnant phrases,

ironies and innuendoes, of play with words and texts was ready at hand
to irrigate and plant in. Sensitivity to a range of textual registers – legal,
political, corporate, cultural – was extraordinarily high, and could
be co-opted without confusion within literary efforts. Perhaps more

importantly, heightened awareness of such textual features led also to
a heightened ability to contemplate the resources of literature and liter-
ariness. In other words, it meant that a theatre performance addressed
to some aspect of the Iraq invasion would spur contemplation of how
performance has worked in the politics and media of the time, and
that in turn could throw light on what theatre as an art form is; or,
to take another example, poetry addressed to the invasion could draw
attention to how the shapes and sounds and meanings of words were
used in the broader context, and thereby clarify something of what
using words in poetry entails. This sort of turning inwards of the liter-
ary text could be thought of as drawing on a meta-literary perspective:
a straightforward engagement with what a literary text says and at the
same time a further level of awareness of what makes this text literary.
Putatively, the appearance of a heightened mass interpretive field may
provide ample opportunity for literary authors to exploit such a meta-
literary perspective and hope to get across. Whether and to what extent
and in what manner that opportunity was exploited is an issue of con-
siderable interest in this study. It may be expected that hopeful access
to a widespread meta-literary perspective could release unexpected
and inventive handling of literary forms and styles. Underlying and
encouraging all those opportunities, there’s a more basic consideration
at work: the relation of literature to the world, or what is often loosely
thought of as the real world or reality. In the context of the invasion of
Iraq this relationship was a pressing and unavoidable concern for those
with literary interests. This brings me to the final substantial point that
I wish to make in this chapter.
I appear to be inching towards well-worn philosophical debates about
literature’s relation to the world, towards a formulation about how the
literary text should be understood with some notion of an empirical
reality or certain social conditions (what I have been loosely calling a
‘context’) in view. This complicated area could involve a tussle between
various positions, simplistically stated thus: that the literary text rep-
resents or imitates some aspect of reality; that the literary text poses
its artifice against reality; that the literary text can be largely explained
with reference to social contexts; that literary texts construct our sense
of the world in concert with other kinds of texts; that literary texts are

28 Imagining Iraq
interventions in social life; that perspectives of the world determine

readers’ approaches to literary texts; that literary texts clarify how pro-
visional and ambiguous perceptions of reality are. I note these positions
here, however, not so much to plunge into their midst as to put them
aside. The point of interest here has a relation to such arguments, but is

not of these. What was foregrounded through the numerous responses
to the invasion of Iraq, including the literary, was the idea of its reality
as an event – the conceiving and anticipation and realization of its
enormity, its materiality, its real violence, the unquestionable visceral and
tangible reality of it. The need to explain its causes and consequences, to
justify or denounce it, to come to terms with it arose from this apprehen-
sion of its imponderable reality. The idea of its reality was actually a kind
of obstruction to the smooth flow of lives and communications and
thoughts at various levels. It was an obstruction to all kinds of political
and social norms and assumptions. It interfered with the unthinking
sense of normality and everyday life that prevails generally in various
places. It placed an unwieldy burden amidst institutional and bur-
eaucratic processes. The idea of its reality just stuck out, so to speak,
and couldn’t be contained by reasoning and discussion and description.
Understandably, the idea of the imponderable reality of this invasion
fed into literature’s relation to the world, from whatever position. The
reality of it was unavoidably both talked about in literary texts and
impinged upon the forms of literary texts.
The first question I was asked when I put this thought about the sense
of reality of the Iraq invasion to a colleague was whether it differed from
any perception of great violence – say, the 11 September 2001 terrorist
attack in New York? With a long view of history there probably isn’t
much to differentiate the unwieldy idea of reality that attends percep-
tions of large-scale violence; quite possibly there are analogues to be
found across the literature addressed to any such violence (invasions,
wars, genocides, terrorist attacks, riots) and that addressed specifically
to the invasion of Iraq. In fact, the literary texts I cite below constantly
reiterate such analogues. But my project here is not to do with the enor-
mous historical sweep of literature’s relation to large-scale violence (that
would be an ambitious project), but to do with the specifics of the recent
period of invasion and the relevant literature – with a contemporary
reckoning. Unmistakably though, there is a particular tilt to that ques-
tion in offering another specific, and quite clearly related, incidence of
large-scale violence to hold against the case in point here. The ques-
tion sought (an implicitly political search) a balance of focus: it was an
implicit reminder that if this is to be examined in specific detail then

so should that alongside. But I do think that the ideas of reality for the
two instances are different and have a different bearing on literature,
worth considering independently of each other. The 11 September
2001 attacks were a shock. It was a shock of, let’s say, the sudden and
unexpected explosion of the reality of large-scale violence. All the nar-

ratives of it, all the explanations and accounts and media frames and
moral judgements and political engagements and expressions of feeling
were after the fact of the shock of its reality. In a way, all those were
modes of absorbing the idea of its reality and fitting it into life and the
world after the fact. For the invasion of Iraq all the narratives along
all those lines were anticipated and initiated and undertaken before
the invasion actually started. All explanations and accounts and frames
and expressions had already been applied in anticipation, and could
only be repeated and reiterated as the invasion took off and followed a
predictable path. The chronicle of the invasion of Iraq was a chronicle
foretold intensively and insistently. Every minutiae and possibility was
already anticipated, and in a way already spent. The effect was not of
absorbing the idea of its reality into life and the world after the fact, but
of pushing that idea of reality ever more starkly to the fore – so that it
acquired a kind of phenomenological insistence. The shock here was
in the gradual crystallization of that idea of reality without any kind
of narrative closure, while for the 11 September 2001 attacks there was
a steady proliferation of attempts at closure (however inconclusive)
after the shock. The idea of reality attached to the invasion simply
kept sticking out more and more sorely, kept obtruding with increasing
emphasis. Nevertheless, it is now customary to see everything after
11 September 2001 as an unravelling singularity characterized as the
‘post-9/11 world’, and the sense of reality of the Iraq invasion has been
fitted in accordingly. This has occurred in literary terms too, as I shall
note where relevant in subsequent chapters.
The unwieldiness of the idea of reality with regard to the Iraq inva-
sion in the midst of political and ethical discourses, bureaucratic and
institutional processes, and for a range of media and communications,
has been widely discussed in various kinds of texts. Literary texts have
contributed to those discussions. More importantly perhaps, literary
texts have accounted the imponderability of the idea of reality here in
relation to that which is least tractable in reportage and informational
writing: the everyday life of ordinary persons, in the midst of habitual
day-to-day existence. In the texts discussed below, the idea of reality
interferes constantly and is shown as interfering constantly in the
depicted and expressed lives and days; and that interference of reality

30 Imagining Iraq
troubles the very substance of literature. Numerous poets attest to such

interference amidst their immediate environments in Northern America
or Britain, the nagging reality of a distant invasion. In most that irrita-
tion turns into introspection on poetry and being a poet. Novels and
plays often register the invasion as an eruption of the idea that the

invasion is really happening in the midst of families and lovers and
friends going about their daily lives. It leads to bitter domestic squab-
bles in McEwan’s Saturday (2005) and Hare’s The Vertical Hour (2008, first
performed in 2006). It cuts into friendships in Oglesby’s US and Them
(2003) and Baker’s Checkpoint (2004). In Cicero’s The Human War (2003),
two youngsters pause in mid-coitus as the invasion of Iraq is about to
be launched on 20 March 2003:
‘People are going to die in a little bit and we’re fucking,’ I said.
‘What else can we do?’
‘I don’t know, it just feels like there must be something we should
be doing.’
‘All we can do is fuck.’
‘But we’re having so much pleasure, and people are going to be suffer-
ing so intensely in just a little bit.’ (p. 22)
On a related note, perhaps the most telling achievement of Salam

Pax’s and Riverbend’s blogs from Baghdad is that they were able to
convey both the everyday reality that was disrupted by the inva-
sion and insert the disrupted everyday reality of the invasion amidst
distanced reckonings in the UK and USA. Their own analyses of
developments, often responsive to international media coverage, were
framed comprehensively by detailed narratives of lives and days in
Baghdad – their own and others’. And on a slightly different note, the
boundaries between the texts that ostensibly record and report reality
(news reports, minutes, press briefings) and literary texts that osten-
sibly construct plausible fictions were sometimes deliberately blurred.
The expectations, in other words, of literary reality and historical
reality were not only brought together (that happens often in various
kinds of historical fiction, for instance), but were played against each
other to shake preconceptions about both in an immediate way. Thus,
David Hare’s play Stuff Happens (2004) and Richard Norton-Taylor’s
Justifying War: Scenes from the Hutton Inquiry (2003) incorporated texts
that audiences and readers who had followed the news would have
been familiar with.

The idea of the reality of the invasion of Iraq appeared in revealing

ways in almost all the literary works of the period which referred to the
invasion.
The following five chapters follow a fairly conventional mould. Each

is devoted to a specific genre of literary texts of the invasion of Iraq:
two chapters on poetry (one on anthologies and one on individual col-
lections), and then one each on theatre, fiction and blogs respectively.
The concluding section in the final Chapter 6 takes account of some
of the relevant literature in languages other than English. In view of
the above observations my adherence to generic distinctions appears
artificial at times. And yet, these are useful devices for approaching the
field, since the field is structured by authors, markets, producers, dis-
seminators, audiences and readers, and critics who presume the efficacy
of such generic divisions. In each chapter the focus is on specific texts
rather than on authors and their bodies of works. Chapters discuss how
and why the texts in question appeared, the material forms in which
they appeared and the manner in which they were received, what may
be inferred from them given the context, and how they may be brought
to bear upon each other. The characteristics of contemporary literature
in general are kept in view as the texts are discussed, and occasionally
future directions are gestured towards.

2
‘Laws’ for Poets: Poetry
Anthologies

A special relationship
Immediate literary responses to the imminent invasion of Iraq came in

the form of poetry in early 2003. Among literary forms, poetry appears in
the course of the twentieth century to have formed a special relationship
with war and pacifism. In resorting to that special relationship, poetry
both constructs perceptions of that which is addressed as ‘war’ and con-
structs perceptions of itself as ‘poetry’. This chapter examines some of
the poetry that appeared in the context of the Iraq invasion along these
two-fold lines.
First and foremost, poetry seems to emphatically register the idea of
the reality of war. In the previous chapter I have dwelt briefly on the
idea of reality that appears in relation to the Iraq invasion in literary texts.
By and large poetry does not detail or debate the causes of armed con-
flicts, or consider definitions and distinctions and measures involved
in understanding war, or weigh the strategies and technologies that
operate therein. Other kinds of literary texts might, but poetry does so
seldom. Rather, poetry simply recognizes the condition of war as real in
a denunciatory or celebratory (increasingly rarely) or indifferent (very
rarely indeed) spirit. Poetry appears, so to speak, in relation to war after
arguments and analyses of war or despite arguments and analyses of war,
to assert the reality of war in itself – the stark condition of war stripped
of political and economic and academic considerations. It presents war
as a sort of transcendent condition. Arguably, in homing in thus on the
reality of war, poetry actually cultivates and propagates a rather abstract
and decontextualized apprehension of war. I return to this below.
I have observed above that the invasion of Iraq was so intensively
debated and analysed before it was launched that ways of coming to
32

‘Laws’ for Poets: Poetry Anthologies 33
terms with it seemed exhausted. The frames of explanation and analysis

were all out there already well before it started, and nothing new in that
direction could be anticipated. Consequently, the stark reality of it was
felt all the more sharply. Recourse to poetry’s apprehension of the condi-
tion of war was perhaps particularly apposite under the circumstances.

On the day the invasion of Iraq started Richard Falk wrote a poem,
‘The Iraq War Begins’, with a careful note of the date and place of
composition alongside the title: 13 March 2003, Hopkins, Belize. It was
published in June 2004 in a special issue of Legal Studies Forum, a law
journal, carrying poems by lawyers and edited by James R. Elkins. The
special issue might strike some as an oddity, but a substantial introduc-
tion by Elkins makes a good case for taking poetry by lawyers seriously,
noting that the issue brings together: ‘men and women drawn by fate
and disposition to be poets and lawyers, and in being both, embodi-
ments of both the perceived and real tensions found in law and in
poetry as well as between law and poetry’ (Elkins 2004, pp. 8–9). That
one of these is a famous professor of international law with numerous
scholarly books on war, but with no published volume of poetry and
no significant reputation as a poet, presenting a poem on war might
strike some as odd too. But in this instance and on this theme this is
in fact more understandable than it might have been otherwise. Falk
appears to be distributing tensions between law and poetry (to give
Elkins’s words a twist): he takes recourse to poetry at the moment
when all the arguments which he, possibly more than most, had con-
templated and debated seemed to be inadequate and finished – when
there was nothing else left to do but register the reality of the invasion
in itself, in poetry. It seems to me particularly indicative that someone
who makes arguments and reasons and analyses of war his business
should choose at that moment to turn to poetry. It is a poem which
strikes notes which are all too familiar: it registers the reality of war
in contrast to the poet’s distant position in Belize, it denounces
the perpetrators, it gestures to the suffering of war, it bemoans the
contemporary ethos – all notes already struck copiously by poets at
the time. It also, more interestingly, touches directly on the defeat
of debate and analysis that takes recourse to poetry, or leads to this
poem, by noting the alternatives left in verse:
As terror strikes Baghdad

Some bemoan our helplessness
Others remain silent and afraid
Others get lost in maelstroms of news

34 Imagining Iraq
Others write their congressperson

Others seek the solace of God of prayer
Others, a rare few, bear witness in Baghdad
Others breathe deeply the thrill of war
Thrilled by patriotic songs and victory promises

Others abide the purity of mountain lakes.
(Falk 2004, p. 494)
And, by implication, Falk the scholar of international law and war writes
this poem.
Of the alternatives left when the invasion of Iraq starts, Falk’s poem
suggests, writing poetry is one. Let me note the therapeutic function
that Falk allocates to poetry and that Falk performs for himself in writ-
ing this, and move on. That poetry is commonly regarded as medicine
for the metaphysical wounds of war is often noted – it was one of
Paterson’s themes in dismissing the ‘chicken-soup anthologies’. But that
it is so undeniably says something about how poetry is regarded now,
which is not a shallow matter. It needs unpicking. It has something to
do with the poetic register for addressing war that has developed and
now prevails, a register which seems to apprehend the condition of
war as a superseding reality. It calls for closer attention to the poetry in
question rather than dismissal, however uneven that poetry may seem
to guardians of quality and taste.
As I said, though Falk’s poem was written at the onset of the invasion
it actually came late and repeats poetic strategies already numerously
deployed. The tone was set in a series of anti-war poetry anthologies
earlier in 2003. More complex engagements with the invasion of Iraq
in poetry followed in the form of individual collections. I proceed to
examine these in that order: focusing on some anthologies in this
chapter, and then on certain individual collections in the next.
Three anthologies
Three anthologies of anti-war poetry appeared in quick succession

and circulated widely in early 2003 amidst the unfolding drama of
moves towards invasion, UN weapons inspections in Iraq and increas-
ingly fraught UN Security Council debates, some of the largest protest
marches ever seen and other mobilizations. The anthologies were
among the latter and meant to contribute to what was understood as an
anti-war movement. These anthologies were actually crystallizations of

more dispersed manifestations of protest through poetry: an immense

number of poetry readings, individual poems and selections of poetry
published in various magazines and journals and newspapers, recita-
tions amidst protest gatherings, and networks of poets in electronic
forums lay behind them. Charting the various spaces where poetry

swirled around these anthologies and tracking the passages of poems
which made their way into these anthologies would be a daunting
enterprise – one that I won’t attempt here. An impressionistic sense of
those can be obtained by focusing on the texts of these anthologies and
on what was involved in their realizations and receptions.
The earliest of the three anthologies was 100 Poets Against the War
edited by Todd Swift and released as an electronic ‘chapbook anthology’
for free download on the Nth Position website www.nthposition.com
on 27 January 2003, after an appeal for contributions on 20 February.
Two further editions of this followed in quick succession, 100 Poets
Against the War Redux (3 February 2003) and 100 Poets Against the War
3.0 (10 February 2003), French and German versions became available
within the month, and it was published in book form by Salt publishers
in early March. Poet Sam Hamill requested contributions of poetry pro-
testing against the invasion in late January 2003 and received responses
from 11,000 poets; organized (through the website www.poetsagainstwar.
org) a day of anti-war poetry readings in the USA and elsewhere on
12 February; and arranged for a collection of 13,000 ‘peace poems’ to
be handed to various government representatives on 5 March. A selection
of the ‘best’ from these, edited by Hamill, was published in April 2003
by Thunder’s Mouth Press and Nation Books. Publishers Faber and Faber
released an anthology entitled 101 Poets Against War on 19 February
2003, put together by editors Matthew Hollis and Paul Keegan, both
employed at the firm, and with an Afterword by then British poet laure-
ate Andrew Motion. Each appeared with stories framing them – stories
told by the editors, reported in the media, circulated in poetry circles,
launched through publicity drives – which gave them both a kind of
unity in the context and more importantly distinguished them. Other
anthologies which appeared in the same period but circulated more
locally should also be noted: Enough (London and Scalapino eds, 2003),
Raising Our Voices (Poncy and McLean eds, 2003) and D.C. Poets Against
the War (Browning, Elliott and Rose eds, 2004).
On the front of similitude, the framing stories for the three antholo-
gies I focus on here were united in drawing attention to the speed of
their coming together and the scale of texts involved – the numbers
received and selected from and circulated. In the introduction to 100 Poets

36 Imagining Iraq
Todd Swift observed that: ‘it may hold the record for being the fastest
assembled global anthology […] Only the speed of the Internet, and
the overwhelmingly positive support of so many poets, who shared the
project with their colleagues and personal networks, could have made it
happen’ and noted that ‘many fine poets could not be included’ (Swift

ed. 2003a, p. i). By the second edition a week later Swift was speaking of
the speed of its circulation and reception too: ‘Never before has a book
travelled the globe so quickly. […] Our DIY chapbook has become part
of various peace demonstrations and rallies world-wide, from Oxford
to Seattle. And all this week, hundreds of new poems, from Gambia to
China, kept arriving by email’ (Swift ed. 2003b, p. i). The introduction
to the third another week later reiterated the growing ‘global’ scope and
speedy reach of the enterprise. Hamill’s introduction to his Poets Against
the War made similar claims of speed, scale and reach, and was similarly
grateful to the resources of the Internet:
Between the last week of January and the end of February, poets-
againstthewar.org became host to several historic moments: Never
before in recorded history have so many poets spoken in a single
chorus; never before has a single-theme anthology of this proportion
been assembled; never before had such a wide-reaching national – and
eventually global – ‘Days of Poetry Against the War’ been organized.
(Hamill 2003a, p. xvii)
The published anthology featured 73 poems from the field of over

13,000 which Hamill received. The Faber anthology 101 Poems also came
with framings of speed and scale written around it, albeit in a different
vein. It was reported that:
The Faber poetry editors Matthew Hollis and Paul Keegan spent
every evening and weekend for three weeks locked away with piles
of slim volumes. ‘We ploughed through two and a half thousand
years of war poetry in that time,’ said Mr Hollis, ‘and not just from
the English-speaking world. Other anthologies have tended to focus
on poets who write in English, but we were keen to give it an inter-
national feel.’ (Patterson 2003)
A BBC report observed that, ‘It is reputed to be one of the fastest pro-
ductions of a new book’ (BBC 2003b), taking three weeks from editing
being initiated to appearing in print. Speed and scale in this instance
were evidently not due to the Internet but due to corporate will.

Here then was poetry on a war-footing. The framings of speed and

scale seemed in tune with the urgency of the moment, with the feeling
that invasion was speeding up and an intervention against invasion
needs to be equally speeded up. The rhetoric of ‘war’ itself (which is
how the invasion was registered and narrated) is coextensive with

faster speed and larger scales in various ways. War seems to involve
concentration of time and scale: movements are speedy, communica-
tions are speeded up, technologies of speed and mass effect are devel-
oped/deployed, mobilizations of large scale take place, weapons are
unleashed in large quantities, mass casualties occur, the dissemination
of information becomes both faster and voluminous, and correspond-
ingly anti-war gestures make sense only if they come with speed and
on a massive scale. The scaling up of anti-war gestures before the inva-
sion of Iraq was in terms of both mass and speed: a concentration of
the largest protest marches ever happening simultaneously around the
world, alignments of the most diverse and dispersed and multitudinous
interest groups being coordinated at dazzling pace, the speeding up
and increasing quantity of information and news to be assimilated and
analysed. Similarly, and as a subset therein, the writing, circulating,
collecting, sieving, publishing, downloading and consuming of poetry
against the war also speeds up and intensifies – hoping thereby to form
another effective counter to the idea of war itself, simply by dint of its
quantitative and urgent volume. So, it might be felt, these antholo-
gies are crystallizations of poets and poetry responding to the scale and
speed of impending war appropriately. Equally though, it might be felt
that this kind of scaling up and speeding up of poetry is perhaps not
simply responsive to impending war; perhaps the relationship can be
seen just as plausibly as symptoms of an underlying social condition.
In other words, perhaps the social circumstances which accommodate
the scale and speed of contemporary war also enable the scaling up and
speeding up of poetry, of literature generally, now. It is quite possible
that perceptions of quantitative leaps of speed and scale are aspects of
a modern condition of society within which war (especially) and litera-
ture and many other aspects of human existence (economic, political,
technological, communicative etc.) are comprehended, so that they all
urge each other on in a mutually responsive and impelling dynamic.
Such an idea, at any rate, is pondered in several texts by philosopher
Paul Virilio. Virilio observes variously that in the twentieth century an
abstract impulse of ‘pure war’ or ‘total war’, attended by the dominance
of what he calls the ‘military classes’, has fed into technological devel-
opment, processes of corporate production, functioning of media, artistic

38 Imagining Iraq
output, and indeed into all areas of professional and everyday social life.
The effect has been of a continuously accelerating sense of speed and
concentration of scale, with a consequent diffusion of conventional
measures of time and space. Virilio suggests that thereby a militaristic
bent has become embedded in the civilian sphere now:

All of us are already civilian soldiers, without knowing it. And some of
us know it. The great stroke of luck for the military class’s terrorism
is that no one recognizes it. People don’t recognize the militarized
part of their identity, of their consciousness. (Virilio and Lotringer
1997 [1983], p. 26)
These might sound like rather intangible suppositions, but they are
suggestive and worth pondering in this context. The expeditious means
through which the anti-war anthologies mentioned above appeared
were not simply because there was an immediate political eventuality
to respond to; it was also because those means and a familiar way of
engaging war already coexisted at the service of poetry – of literature – to
be drawn upon. Perhaps such means and approaches are now continu-
ously on the hob in literary production, circulation and consumption,
but are usually perceived only in a blurred fashion, or neglected. It
may be that the context of the invasion of Iraq merely brought into
sharp focus something that is the underlying reality of how poetry –
literature – works largely these days. Possibly, the matters of the speed
and scale of anti-war anthologies have to do with the prevailing inad-
vertent and advertent democratizations and alternative spaces of literature
which I considered briefly in the previous chapter à la Paterson’s
lecture. I offer these thoughts tentatively here and they are no more
than speculations.
The similarity of the three anti-war poetry anthologies in question
end there; the other nuances of their framing stories differentiate
them. The framing stories simply put Swift’s and, particularly, Hamill’s
anthologies on one side and the Faber anthology on quite another. I have
gestured towards this already: Swift’s and Hamill’s anthologies appeared
as ‘collective action’ through poetry and the Faber anthology as a result
of corporate enterprise. This is indicated by the titles: the former anthol-
ogies are addressed ‘against the war’ – the specific situation marked by
the definite article – while the latter ostensibly speaks ‘against war’ in
general. Hamill’s anthology was initiated not just against the war but
on account of an incident. As was reported in newspapers at the end of
January 2003, and as Hamill says in his introduction to the anthology,

the whole business began with an invitation from First Lady Laura Bush
to a poetry event in the White House slated for 12 February 2003.
Hamill had decided to use the event to read anti-war poetry without
realizing initially that the event was meant to discuss the poetry of Walt
Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Langston Hughes. When the White

House realized that anti-war sentiments may crop up at the event it
was postponed indefinitely and Hamill was, so to speak, ‘disinvited’
with the following explanation: ‘While Mrs. Bush respects the right
of all Americans to express their opinions, she, too, has opinions, and
believes it would be inappropriate to turn a literary event into a political
forum’ (Noelia Rodriguez, spokesperson for Laura Bush, quoted in The
Guardian, 30 January 2003 – see Left 2003). The process of collecting
poems outlined above followed, with 12 February being turned as a con-
sequence into a Poetry Against the War Day. The symbolic resonances
of a rejection of specifically anti-war poetry from the White House
itself were not lost in the context of broader anti-invasion mobiliza-
tions. Hamill’s anthology was thus seen as both a manifestation and an
outcome of a ‘global peace movement’ and was used as such in public
events: as petitions against the invasion, as enabling an anti-invasion
networking forum through the website www.poetsagainstthewar.org.
It was widely discussed accordingly in the news media, and Hamill
became a public figure who was frequently interviewed. As is worthy
of such successful mobilization, it prodded attempts at setting up
a www.poetsforthewar.org forum (as this is written in late 2009 the
website has been withdrawn, while Hamill’s website is going strong),
and the Wall Street Journal organized a ‘Poets For the War Day’ on
12 February 2003 too (a selection of the results is available, made by
James Taranto 2003). Swift’s 100 Poets in their several editions were
each conceived as direct contributions to a political moment and delib-
erately targeted to anti-invasion protests. The first edition was timed,
as Swift noted in his introduction, to coincide with the day when Hans
Blix delivered his first weapons inspections report to the UN; and in
the second Swift expressed sympathy with Hamill’s efforts. As against
these collaborative and collective efforts in response to an immediate
impulse, the Faber and Faber anthology 101 Poems was accounted as a
corporate effort, an initiative of the reputed publishing firm. A report
in The Independent announced it in the following words on the day of
its publication:
It was conceived by the chief executive, Stephen Page, who returned

from his Christmas holiday determined to respond to the signs of war.

40 Imagining Iraq
The book is, he says, ‘a passionate piece of publishing that responds

to a change in the world at large … Writers and especially poets have
always had strong views on the human experience of war, and we
sought to gather them into this volume.’ (Patterson 2003)

That it was conceived by a chief executive and edited or executed
by two employees of Faber and Faber seemed to push it unusually as
a corporate inspiration in the sphere of poetry – a ‘passionate piece
of publishing’ is an unprecedented appeal for a poetry book. The
Afterword by Andrew Motion seemed (and was positioned) almost
like an afterthought. It was evidently designed to fit Faber’s 101 series,
which already included volumes with themes such as ‘happy poems’,
‘humorous poems’, ‘very short poems’, ‘poems to remember’, ‘poems
to be heard’. The theme of war, however, seemed an opportunistic
departure in this upbeat series. For an anthology that was received as
an intervention against the invasion of Iraq it was actually remark-
ably circumspect about mentioning the invasion directly: none of the
poems it includes does so, and nor does the blurb on the dust-jacket.
It was left to Andrew Motion to do so in the last paragraph on the last
page of the book: ‘This anthology would be significant whenever it
were published. The fact that it appears now, with the world on red
alert and the West threatening to invade Iraq, gives it a special value
and poignancy’ (Motion 2003, p. 137). And yet, there was no mistak-
ing its positioning within the context of the invasion: the timing, the
speed of production, the inclusion of poems which had appeared as
anti-invasion in newspapers, the studied inclusion of ‘Arabic poets of
today’ (as the blurb did make a point of mentioning) were clearly to the
purpose. And yet, there was no saying that the invasion was in view:
it was barely mentioned, it wasn’t given as a context, the selection of
poems from classical antiquity to the present appeared in no particular
order and with no rationale for choices.
Swift’s and Hamill’s anthologies and the Faber anthology therefore
appeared and were received as quite different texts though answering to
the same context, and accordingly I address the first two together and
the latter separately from them.
Swift’s 100 Poets and Hamill’s Poets Against appeared to be deliberately
following a well-trodden path of contextually responsive war poetry
anthologies. The poems they selected referred back often to other
wars – ancient and mythical wars, the First World War and occasion-
ally the Second World War, most emphatically the Vietnam War, and
wars in the interim (in the former Yugoslavia, the Iraq–Iran War, the

Gulf War) – and, more importantly, used rhetorical strategies and

poetic devices which recalled past efforts. But this was not just a matter
of what specific poems did. It was a matter of the act of anthologizing
poetry or of the poetry anthology as a composite text in response to war. Let
me make that emphasis clear: the issue here has to do with what an

anthology in relation to war signifies now, to some extent irrespective
of what it contains (the drift of which can usually be anticipated fairly
plausibly, and which is always a surfeit and difficult to assimilate),
and entirely irrespective of who is anthologizing (that doesn’t matter
much). Swift and Hamill were recognized as worthy participants in the
anti-invasion protests, but they were not really rated as anthologists – in
the sense of employing the skills of anthologizing – or even seriously
as poets. They became briefly representatives of poetry against war
amidst other parties opposed to the invasion. Hamill’s standoff with
the White House recalled for some Robert Lowell’s refusal to participate
in the ‘White House Festival of Arts’ at President Lyndon B. Johnson’s
invitation in 1965 in protest against the Vietnam War, and the sup-
port he garnered in that instance. But it was a similitude in gesture
that was recalled, without impinging on assessments of Hamill as poet
or as anthologist. However, the appearance of these anthologies was
significant in literary terms. They were significant both because of the
shadows of other anthologies behind/within them and because of
their difference from forebears. From the friction between reiteration
of past and uniquely addressing the present, these anthologies revised
the prevailing understanding of anthologizing poetry in relation to
war – and thereby arguably of how poetry in general is commonly
understood now.
The significance of poetry anthologies in relation to war has received
a certain amount of scholarly attention. Several useful studies chart how
such anthologies have constructed perceptions of war and the moral
imperatives of war in influential ways by appearing when they did and
approaching poetry as they did. That anti-war poetry in the modern
sense is strongly associated with the soldier-poets of the First World
War is too familiar an observation to need elaboration. Underneath
that observation lie the processes through which those poets came
to be seen as expressing a collective sensibility, most immediately an
anthological process, i.e. one in which that sensibility is brought forth
by simply reading them together. The soldier-poets of the First World
War were themselves influenced by an anthological appreciation of
poetry, and found their expressive mode with reference to the antholo-
gized English canon of poetry. As Paul Fussell observes in his influential

42 Imagining Iraq
book on the First World War, ‘the Oxford Book of English Verse presides
over the Great War in a way that has never been sufficiently appreciated’
(Fussell 1975, p. 159). The importance of anthologizing in understanding
poetry’s relation to war, from the First World War onwards, is remarked in
Brian Murdoch’s Fighting Songs and Warring Words (1990, pp. 6–13) and

particularly in Hugh Haughton’s essay ‘Anthologizing War’ (Kendall
ed. 2007, ch. 22). These demarcate several phases in the production of
war poetry anthologies, which were often undertaken with a view to
informing and intervening in discussions of ongoing or imminent wars.
Thus, anthologies of the First World War and other wars appeared in the
context of the Second World War in the 1940s, and then again in the
1960s: notably, for the former, Robert Nichols’s Anthology of War Poetry
1914–1918 (1943), Julian Symons’s An Anthology of War Poetry (1942)
and Richard Eberhart and Selden Rodman’s War and the Poet (1945);
and for the latter, the two anthologies edited by Brian Gardner, Up the
Line to Death (1964) and Terrible Rain (1966), and Ian M. Parsons’s Men
Who March Away (1965). These anthologies were not explicitly anti-war:
the sufferings and inequities of war were registered amidst complex
reflections on war. The selections and extractions and juxtapositions
in these were designed to emphasize the extremities of experience and
their expression in poetry, an aspiration succinctly expressed in Julian
Symons’s preface to his anthology: ‘War poetry is not a specialized
department of poetry; it is, as this book I hope faithfully shows, quite
simply the poetry, comic or tragic, cynical or heroic, joyful, embittered
or disillusioned, of people affected by the reality of war’ (Symons 1942,
p. viii). However, as opposed to the jingoistic celebrations of heroism
and sacrifice that dominated pre-twentieth-century war poetry these
were principally characterized by their darkness. They contained an
anti-war attitude without being pacifist. The anthologies made a point
of presenting the work of soldier-poets, from the battleground, and also
included other established and highly regarded poets.
Anthologizing poetry in relation to war took a distinctive turn during
the Vietnam War. This brings us considerably closer to where the mat-
ter rests apropos the invasion of Iraq, since the features of an explicitly
and unambiguously anti-war or pacifist poetry appears here, involving
a broader range of poets (not just soldier-poets and established poets)
who produce collective or joint interventions in response to an ongo-
ing conflict. The collective effort came to be accounted in terms of the
impetus given by veterans (the salience of soldier-poets continued to be
emphasized) and by identity-based political alignments (along the lines
of race, gender and sexuality), and in terms of what was revealed of

the American national psyche. Serious scholarly attention to Vietnam

War poetry gathered pace comparatively late. When Michael Bibby
published Hearts and Minds (1996) he prefaced his efforts by noting the
‘paradoxical silence’ which prevailed about this period of prolific poetry
production, and the dismissive manner in which the poetry has been

treated since. His approach to the area was structured by the ‘concern
with issues of self-representation, identity and community’ (Bibby 1996,
p. 4) he found therein, and accordingly he examined the poetry in rela-
tion to black liberation, women’s liberation and GI resistance. Subarno
Chattarji’s thoughtful account of Vietnam War poetry that followed,
Memories of a Lost War (2001), dwelt principally on veteran poetry. Both
focused on the complexities of American society and politics, princi-
pally at the national level. The distinctive role of anthologizing anti-war
poetry, of bringing together and selecting and juxtaposing such poems
collectively, within the Vietnam War context has been given sustained
attention in Philip Metres’s Behind the Lines (2007). Since, moreover,
Metres does this with a broad post-1941 view of anti-war poetry (he
calls it ‘war resistance poetry’), including coverage of such poetry in
the context of the Iraq invasion, his approach to the matter is worth
considering carefully.
Metres registers the distinctive turn given to anthologies of anti-
war poetry (with current resonances instated) in the Vietnam War
period by recalling such anthologies – similar to Swift’s and Hamill’s
in inclusiveness and purpose – as Robert Bly and David Ray’s A Poetry
Reading Against the Vietnam War (1966), Denise Levertov and others’
Out of the War Shadow (1967), Todd Gitlin’s Campfires of Resistance
(1971) and Larry Rottmann, John Barry and Basil T. Paquet’s Winning
Hearts and Minds (1972). With particular reference to the first Metres
observes:
The mélange of sources in A Poetry Reading Against the War demon-

strates the creativity with which poets and activists deconstructed
the official narrative produced by the administration, showing how
civilians attempted to know what they often could not personally
witness; even if independent journalists, dissident intellectuals,
antiwar soldiers, and government officials […] would later become
crucial resources for the movement, in its historical moment. This
anthology suggests that the truth was not just out there on the
battlefield but also in the mainstream papers of the day.
Second, the anthology presents itself as poetry for use, con-
ceived as a kind of script or score generated from readings given by

44 Imagining Iraq
American Writers against the War to enable other communities to

create their own war resistance events. (Metres 2007, p. 6)
Interestingly, it becomes evident that Metres’s approach to these specific

anthologies and anti-war poetry of the Vietnam War period generally is

based on the idea of a kind of total anthology – what he calls a ‘poten-
tial archive’ below. The specific anthologies that Metres discusses are
understood as extrapolations from this ‘potential archive’, and what is
revealed through them applies to the whole. The following quotation
reveals quite a lot about Metres’s method and assumptions in addressing
anthologies specifically and anti-war poetry generally:
The consensus view of literary criticism that the antiwar poetry pro-
duced during the Vietnam War – that it was forgettable, lamentable,
or even dangerous – misses the cultural work which the rich archive
of war resistance poetry contributed to and constitutes. This ‘poten-
tial archive’ […] – the sum total of war resistance texts that could
be included in such an archive – consists of more than a catalogue
of protests or statements against the war; rather, it is an ongoing
poetic engagement with and window into the movement’s identifi-
catory investments, its conflicted rhetorical address, its resistance to
co-optation and commodification as war story, and its attempt
to overcome its own conditions of marginalization (both from
American political culture and from the war itself). […] Taken as a
whole, the massive corpus of war resistance poetry from the Vietnam
War challenges long-held assumptions about literariness, authority,
and truth claims of poetry about war. (pp. 95–6)
Metres locates in the Vietnam War anthologies, and coextensively in

the ‘potential archive’, many of the features that characterize antholo-
gies such as Swift’s and Hamill’s: the assertion of the civil and civilian
sphere, the dislocation of authority from establishment poetry and bat-
tlefront experience, its ‘conflicted rhetorical address’ and purposiveness
and ‘marginalization’ and interrogation of ‘official narratives’. Metres
then proceeds to comment on anthologies of the Gulf War; these, in
his view, ‘mark a continuity to war resistance during the Vietnam War
and throughout the Cold War’ (p. 166). He also touches in the ‘Coda’
of his book on anthologies of the Iraq invasion. Metres too notes the
importance of the Internet and the scaling up and speeding up of these,
which to him ‘suggests a new relevance for what was commonly con-
ceived as a moribund genre for activist ends’, and interestingly observes

that these ‘anthologies became events-in-themselves, a documentary of

their own documentation, a pulse of the moment, a movement within
a movement’ (p. 223).
And yet, Metres’s approach to the pioneering drives of Vietnam
War poetry and development of anti-war poetry thereafter, includ-

ing of the Iraq invasion, as a continuous sweep is incompatible with
my approach here. That which enables Metres to build from specific
anthologies and poems to a more holistic ‘potential archive’ of ‘war
resistance texts’ of the Vietnam War and thereafter seems suspect to
me: it seems to me that Metres is able to do this only because he has
presumed a coherent pacifist ‘movement’. If some understanding of a
continuum of anti-war or peace movement is given superlative status,
then it makes sense to see certain texts as accruing under the aegis
of that movement and giving substance to the movement’s drive.
Equally, thereby these texts are fixed in their connotations in relation
to such a superlative movement, and they become subject to it and
narrowly expressive of it and little else. In other words, it seems to me
that Metres’s approach constructs the pre-eminence of the movement
by presumptively arranging his sense of poetry in relation to it: by set-
ting up a historical sweep from specific texts to pioneering collections
of texts to a ‘potential archive’ and onwards which are defined as of
the movement – and which he then uses (in a circular way) to describe
the movement. Notably ‘the sum total of war resistance texts’ of the
Vietnam War serve to describe, in Metres’s view, the movement in an
essentialized and singular way: the poetry describes ‘the movements’s
identificatory investments … conflicted rhetorical address … resistance
to co-optation’ etc. Metres turns anti-war poetry since the Vietnam
War from a ‘catalogue’ to a description of the ‘movement’. In Metres’s
view the anthologies of the Iraq invasion period are, as a step forward,
both circumscribed by the movement and propelled by it: ‘a move-
ment within a movement’.
My interest here, as I have said, is in the implications of literary texts
addressed to the Iraq invasion for literature itself; in the implications of
the poetry of the Iraq invasion context for poetry in general; of literary
anthologies then for literary anthologizing in general – and not in what
they reveal specifically about the invasion or about the mobiliza-
tions against it. And also, the interest of this study is not in what they
reveal about the politics of being for or against war as a decontextualized
abstraction. It seems to me that anti-war anthologies such as Hamill’s
and Swift’s are significant because they pull precisely in the direction
of reconsidering poetry itself, beyond their immediate anti-invasion

46 Imagining Iraq
interventions. As it happens, the most efficient way to explain why that

is so is by working through the kind of presumptions and methodologies
that Metres draws upon, and yet against their grain.
Swift and Hamill and most of the contributors to their anthologies
and reviewers of these anthologies regarded themselves as participating

in or contemplating a ‘movement’: a pacifist or anti-war mobilization
relevant to and yet larger than immediate conflicts, much as Metres
understands it. I have already noted above that that was the frame
within which these anthologies appeared and circulated. It was expedi-
ent for them to do so because the concept of ‘social movements’ has
gathered emancipative associations that are current and enjoy political
currency. I have discussed in detail elsewhere how the concept of ‘social
movements’ acquired such currency since the early 1980s, largely at
the expense of conventional left-wing politics centred on the working
class and by co-opting a range of identity-based political alignments
and moves towards economic and political globalization (see Gupta
2006, ch. 8; Gupta 2007, ch. 5). I have also detailed in another study
how literary texts reflect on concepts of social movements (including
in relation to the Iraq invasion), and sometimes are seen as the fulcrum
of such movements – as Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues (1998) is
for what’s now known as the V-Day ‘global social movement’ to stop
violence against women (see Gupta 2008, ch. 2). To start a movement
(as Hamill apparently did), to be part of a movement (as Hamill’s and
Swift’s anthologies were regarded as being), and to converge into a
‘movement of movements’ are now a received part of the emancipative
political register (against every kind of repression, against global capital-
ism, against war, etc.). Literary writers and critics play their part in it:
Swift’s and Hamill’s anthologies and the poets they feature, and Metres’s
approach to ‘war resistance poetry’, are part of it. In the proud tradition
of such social movements, their gestures and productions are received
with hoots of disparagement by conservatives and representatives of the
establishment. The kind of dismissiveness about Vietnam War poetry
that scholars from Bibby to Metres note in the literary establishment –
in critical responses and academic attitudes – was largely repeated in
reviews of Swift’s and Hamill’s anthologies. Some of these reviews did
them no disservice since they appeared predictably from exactly the
opposed direction of conservative (neo-conservative) convictions. The
longest of these came from the pens of J. Bottum in February 2003, who
saw in such poetry ‘straightforward anti-Americanism – although that’s
probably better put the other way around: Anti-Americanism translates
straightforwardly into these befuddled and mutually contradictory protest

slogans’ (Bottum 2003), and Bruce Bawer in 2004, who derided the
poets for not realizing that:
what they are celebrating in these poems is a security for which they
have to thank (horrors) the U.S. military and a prosperity that they

owe to (horrors again) American capitalism. Entirely absent from
their facile scribblings, indeed, is any sign of awareness that this ‘blue
planet’ is a terribly dangerous place and that the affluence, safety,
and liberty they enjoy, and that they write about with such vacuous
self-congratulation, are not the natural, default state of humankind
but are, rather, hard-won and terribly vulnerable achievements of
civilization. (Bawer 2004, p. 739)
They denounced the rudeness and lack of humility of the poets and
anthologists, and said in many words what the Evening Standard report
on Swift’s anthology observed in brief and more politely (thus repeating
ad nauseam similar sentiments since the Vietnam War inspired anti-war
poets): ‘But most of it, however righteous in sentiment, is lamentable
in quality. There are, it seems, only a few ways to write a poem against
the war and they soon become familiar’ (Sexton 2003). The sentiment
apropos Swift’s anthology was to be taken up in a more protracted
and belligerent fashion by Tim Kendall in his book Modern English
War Poetry (2006), who also charged Swift of ‘vulgar opportunism’ and
dismissed the anthology with the following words: ‘Does a book titled
100 poets against the war reveal, whether powerfully or poignantly or in
any other way, the opinions of anyone other than its poets? If public
opinion is strongly against a war, it hardly requires a poetry anthology
to announce the fact’ (Kendall 2006, p. 240). On the whole, doubts or a
dismissive attitude about the quality and effect of such anti-war antholo-
gies were not confined to any ideologically defined party, and pretty
ubiquitously held by reviewers and critics. Pronouncing on quality is
the prerogative of authority – the critic’s, the reviewer’s, the established
writer’s – and there is little to say about it. Most evinced little interest in
the analytical possibilities that these anthologies raised (Metres has been
the notable exception), as opposed to pronouncing judgement on them.
Nor did the anthologists and poets concerned (many of them academ-
ics) worry about analytical possibilities particularly. All sides (including
Metres) were too busy being for or against the movement or being
authority figures sitting in judgement on contemporary poetry.
The logic of the movement-absorbed environment has, however,
brought about an interesting pass in these anthologies for the idea of

48 Imagining Iraq
poetry, the understanding of poetry in a general way now. As observed

above, previously anti-war poetry had been refracted through the lenses
of identity and political alignment. It was possible to uncomplicatedly
consider the nuances of poetry in relation to war and assume a resistant
stance because the poet identified herself and was identified by others

in a certain way. The poetry was understood given that the poet’s voice
or location is such. In other words, the resources of poetry were drawn
upon, poetry’s enunciations were distinguished, according to the poet’s
or audience’s consciousness of affiliation to some social alignment and
the bearing that had on a condition of social conflict. This sense of affil-
iation enabled linguistic sensitivity, conformed to or tested the assump-
tions of linguistic usage, and suggested adherence to or departure from
distinctive literary traditions – all pricks to poetry and grist to the mill
of poetry. Anti-war poetry was the result of the poet’s or audience’s sense
of identity and its troubled relation to war. Apropos an anti-war stance
this worked in various ways: strongly in terms of allegiance to nation;
powerfully also at times in terms of marginalization on the grounds of
class, gender, sexuality, race, religion; and often in terms of professional
experience (especially as soldier, but also as reporter, politically active
intellectual, etc.). All of these worked clearly and well in the Vietnam
War period – as the studies by Bibby, Chattarji and Metres show – and
all these continue to be found frequently in the anthologies of the Iraq
invasion. However, at each of these nodes there is also evidence of a
diminution of strength or weight insofar as such allegiances mediate
between the poetry and the apprehension of war. Put otherwise, the
particularities of identity and community and affiliation continue to
be deployed as before, but with less conviction or seemingly less relevance
to what is at stake: the invasion of Iraq and poetry protesting against it.
The early Vietnam War anthologies mentioned above were ensconced
primarily within the American sphere and emerged with a sense of
national circumscription. They were accounted accordingly by serious
readers and critics, including by Metres (he sticks to the ‘American
Homefront’). In Swift’s and Hamill’s anthologies, national perspectives
are deliberately diluted: some poems may speak as such but they fit
into or are fitted into what is conceived as a global movement, actuated
by global communications in the age of the Internet. The politics of
identity figured in different ways, with unavoidable emphasis on some
claims and with surprising inattention to others. The politics of gender
and sexuality were powerfully inscribed on the unfolding of the Iraq
invasion: discussions in the West about Islam since 11 September 2001
have constantly focused on the position of women, and that simmered

through the invasion period; the rhetoric of war came with gendered
tropes of territoriality and patriotism, power and weakness, invasion
and control; the images of torture and abuse in the Abu Ghraib prison
that came to light in early 2004 seemed like shocking concretizations
of gendered and sexual violence; and so on. Many of the poems in

the anthologies drew upon the politics of gender and sexuality. The
politics of race played a very subdued role in the invasion and in
the anthologies. Unlike for the Vietnam War, there was no Jean-Paul
Sartre (1974, pp. 67–83) here to controversially declare it a genocidal
conflict, nor any popular retrospective ‘veteran’ perception of being
‘sent […] off to Vietnam/ To go and kill the yellow man’ (to quote Bruce
Springsteen’s lyrics of Born in the USA, 1984). In any case, the politics of
religion and the euphemisms of ethnicity – Islam and Middle East/Arab
world – subsumed inklings of the politics of race: there was plenty of
that in the poems too. Irrespective of such differentiations, there was
little evidence of participation in Swift’s and Hamill’s anthologies in
a distinctively identity-based way. There was no evidence of a percep-
tion that any identity-based inclusion should be particularly marked
(unlike the ‘Arabic poets’ in the Faber anthology). And the reception of
the anthologies didn’t perceivably approach the poems along identity
lines either. The thrust of the anthologies was on creating an impres-
sion of unspecified democratic inclusiveness which made identity-based
allegiances or interventions appear unnecessary. The politics of class has
practically disappeared since the 1980s, and especially in the context of
‘social movements’; so, unsurprisingly, any hint of that was missing from
the anthologies. In fact, political ideology other than in articulations of
identity and nationality were generally absent: all the included poems
could be broadly regarded as ‘liberal’ and opposed to ‘neo-conservatism’,
but little appeared that could be thought of as revolutionary or anarchist,
for instance. Many academics appeared as poets with their reputations
known or their institutional affiliations and publications listed in Hamill’s
anthology. So did ‘activists’ of different hues, including peace campaign-
ers of old from the Vietnam War period. But these didn’t appear as a
particularly distinguishable ideological sector of the anthology, nor did
they present a noteworthy variegation of ideological positions. Anti-war
soldier-poets of past conflicts, also going back as far as the Vietnam War
period, made occasional appearances. Interestingly, though, neither these
nor veterans of recent military actions in the Gulf War or in Afghanistan
emerged as significant presences in these anthologies. And indeed, in the
anti-war poetry that followed after these anthologies veterans and soldier-
poets failed to make the impact they had in the Vietnam War period.

50 Imagining Iraq
The perceptual significance and power of testimony that soldier-poets

used to bring to such anthologies seemed considerably diminished; these
were really put out and received as of the civilian sphere.
Of tangential interest on that last point: it is clear that the kind of
sympathies and collaborations that developed between soldier-poets

and civilian-poets in opposition to the Vietnam War (indeed from
the First World War onwards) have not appeared in the context of the
Iraq invasion. Various explanations for this can be suggested. Perhaps
the civil and civilian sphere’s conventional regard for the military
profession and its social role has changed. Perhaps the educational
backgrounds and present modes of professionalizing soldiers somehow
work against such sympathies and collaborations. Perhaps, with the
experience of the Vietnam War in view, military administrators and
governments have found ways of managing the post-conflict creativity
of soldiers to avert embarrassment. I mention the former two possibilities
in a purely speculative way, but for the last there is some evidence. On
21 April 2004 it was reported in the New York Times that the National
Endowment for Arts will be setting up the programme ‘Operation
Homecoming’, consisting of writing workshops for soldiers returning
from Iraq and Afghanistan. The programme was a partnership with the
Ministry of Defense and sponsored by Boeing (one of the companies
that benefited from the ‘reconstruction’ contracts after the Iraq inva-
sion). The writing workshops were to be held at seven military instal-
lations around the United States, and would lead to the publication of
an anthology which would be widely distributed (Olsen 2004, p. 2).
An article on this by Eleanor Wilmer in the journal Poetry expressed
deep unease. She recalled the grassroots anti-war poetry anthology by
Vietnam War veterans Winning Hearts and Minds (1972), and noted that
‘this project appears to be an attempt to preempt the immediate (and
even archival) record of this war by its combatants’ (Wilmer 2004, p. 40),
and that it ‘arouses suspicion about its ultimate purpose – doubts fed by
its feel-good rhetoric, its slick packaging, its inimical setting, its timing, its
cozy insularity, the vested interests of its sponsors’ (p. 42). The promised
anthology Operation Homecoming appeared, edited by Andrew Carroll,
in 2006, and a DVD of the same title was released, directed by Richard
Robbins, in 2007.
But back to the observation I was leading up to: in the Iraq invasion
context, anti-war anthologies such as Swift’s and Hamill’s didn’t mani-
fest significantly many of the markers of allegiance and affiliation – of
nation, identity, community, profession – which were important in
similar Vietnam War anthologies. Where the latter mediated poetry

apropos war through an American sensibility, identity-based political

allegiances, ideologically different alignments, the testimony and reali-
zations of veterans, in the Iraq invasion context these had a muted role.
Instead, the anthologies here deliberately embraced and were received
as embracing the universality of a global social movement and of indis-

criminate democratic inclusiveness. Through the Internet they circulated
with corresponding reach. The removal of those mediating allegiances
and affiliations meant that universal allegiance to humaneness and
humanity at large was claimed – and that puts significant demands
on the very idea of poetry. Poets are now put in the position of calling
upon poetry for the sake of universal humanity and with regard to war
in general, without comfortable recourse to specific traditions of poetry
and particularistic discourses (languages in use) of allegiance and affilia-
tion and ideology. Some pressing questions consequently arise: can cur-
rent apprehensions of poetry sustain such a demand? Does a plausible
understanding of universal poetry exist? Can anthologies realistically
and meaningfully convey such an understanding of poetry? Can poets
situate themselves as within or as part of a universal community of
poets? In brief, is poetry a universal calling in a homologous way?
Such questions are not unfamiliar in academic circles. It has been
variously noted that Goethe’s old (1827) idea of ‘world literature’ seems
to be making a comeback in literary criticism. Pascale Casanova in The
World Republic of Letters (2004 [1999]) has proposed thinking of literature
on a global scale as a competition between national literatures; Franco
Moretti’s ‘Conjectures on World Literature’ (2000) takes a world-systems
perspective of literature and proposes a concept of ‘distanced reading’;
David Damrosch’s What is World Literature? (2003) offers a global view
of literature in terms of texts crossing boundaries. A spate of anthologies
of ‘world literature’ has followed. If a concept of ‘world literature’ can
be entertained, then a notion of ‘world poetry’ or a universal sense of
poetry may also be contemplated as a subset. But, as is necessary from a
critical perspective, such formulations take a receptive view of literature:
they consider ideas of ‘world literature’ given that there are literary texts
available and moving and getting translated and read around the world.
With a productive view the notion of subscribing to a universal form and
expression is rare: poets, at any rate, are rarely called upon to think of
writing poetry explicitly within a global fold, with a universal address,
and in a concordantly collectivized manner. They may end up doing so,
but it is rare to call on them to do so or for them to feel so called upon.
In the context of responding against the Iraq invasion and with the
prospect of appearing amidst a ‘global peace movement’ anthology, poets

52 Imagining Iraq
did feel so called upon. The result is that Swift’s and Hamill’s anthologies
present poems with two kinds of thrust: first, the poems make an effort,
in diverse ways, to assume a collective poetic voice or to appear as part
of a universal collective of poets; and second, at the same time they are
implicitly contemplative or reflexive about the function and nature of

poetry in general. These thrusts are not so much talked about in the
anthologies as performed in poetry, written as poetry. These are also
contained in the poems’ framing within the anthologies, in their col-
location there. And these thrusts are crystallized in terms of a direct
relation of poetry in general to war in abstract – equally decontextualized
form and theme which are confronted with each other, and which can
find relevance in an immediate context. Poetry itself and war itself are at
stake, but given a context-specific ring in view of the invasion of Iraq.
The nuances of assuming or constructing a collective voice for poets,
and reconsidering the resources of poetry, were not particularly pon-
dered by the anthologists. Like the poets, they did what they could
without explicitly thinking about it. However, there are slight but useful
indications of the moves made between the Vietnam War anthologies
and those of the Iraq invasion. Todd Gitlin, in introducing his Vietnam
War poetry anthology Campfires of Resistance (1971), had briefly
reflected on the ‘We’ who were being represented in it:
There is a different We behind this anthology – a political move-

ment. It is an ecumenical movement, operating in many arenas,
often with different identities and priorities; maybe even the singular
‘movement’ is inexact, but underneath the differences and some-
times centrifugal motion there seems to me something of a common,
though changing, identity. We have not only common enemies, but
a sense of ourselves as united by bonds stronger than those of nation,
class, origin, and organization. (Gitlin 1971, p. xv)
This ‘We’ is of a political movement which chooses to take recourse to

poetry, as it might to other modes of protest. Its political self-definition
may rise above ‘nation, class, origin, and organization’, but only by appre-
hending their common purpose beyond those narrower divides in terms
of those narrow divides; ‘nation, class, origin, and organization’ provided
the definition of their rising above them. Gitlin’s is quite a different sense
of ‘movement’ from Metres’s: Gitlin’s is a political movement, and the ‘We’
of it is not those who ‘lead good burgher lives’ or belong to a ‘comfortable
coffee-table community of literate viewers with alarm’ (p. xv). Metres’s
sense of the movement is not political in Gitlin’s exclusive way. With the

inclusively pacifist sense of movement that dominated opposition to the

Iraq invasion, here is another ‘we’ articulated by anthologists of anti-war
poetry – not by Swift or Hamill, but by Judith Barrington and Ursula K. Le
Guin in their anthology focusing on poets from Oregon:

Poets don’t have any corner on the truth, of course. But Shelley’s
‘Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’ may mean
that the ‘laws’ poets follow and teach are laws of perception that
underlie all ethical actions and institutions, including those of our
Constitution and the ‘truths we hold to be self-evident’. (Barrington
and Le Guin 2003, p. vi)
This ‘we’ tries to assume not so much a political identity as one signify-
ing a universal community of poets. It admittedly does so tentatively
and impressionistically. But it is a noteworthy statement on both counts
mentioned above: it endows universal poetry with a collective voice
which the anthology articulates; and it contemplates fumblingly the
deep ‘laws’ of poetry themselves (irrespective of whether they have to do
with war) such that they can give substance to the status of this com-
munity. The implications of thinking about poetry and poets thus are of
particular interest in this study, and I return to this below.
The manner in which the poets sought to assume such a collective
voice or contemplated poetry thus in their poetry is best demonstrated by
a few illustrations from Swift’s and Hamill’s anthologies. A sampling of
a couple of poems where this seems to me to happen in revealing ways
follows, but with a few caveats. By choosing to focus on these poems
I do not mean to highlight the quality of these poems or remark on
their success or say anything about the anthologies in toto. A sampling
can’t do that. Nor can my examples be thought of as representative of
the plethora of ways in which poetry is articulated and voices assumed
in these anthologies. My examples are simply a couple of particular ways
in which that was done, to illustrate the argument I am making here.
Consider, for instance, Michael Gould-Wartofsky ‘Poetry of Bodies’
in the Hamill anthology – the poet was introduced at the time as a
17-year-old high school student who ‘performs’ his poetry:
I see a poetry of bodies

Bowed down to the ground, then
Rising to the sound of the beating of the heart of a heartless
world that’s
Starved for the sacred

54 Imagining Iraq
And in another part of this parted world, boys and girls are
starved and naked
Earth-scraping for something to stuff emaciated faces with
Verse taken by the grace of the Master Race when
Stumbling on the seeds of hatred, planted in forsaken places

Leaving generations vacant
Like the sand painted over with pavement, lands raped and
Red stripes in the wake of the acid rainmaking
There’s no poetry in the bodies stacked in mass graves and
The bodies paying death’s wages sitting on their ass complacent
Or marching with death without their goosestep breaking
(Gould-Wartofsky in Hamill ed. 2003, p. 81)
Here a series of counterpoints are set up around the neutral human core
of ‘bodies’: everything is after the fact of the existence of ‘bodies’, some of
which endure and some cause suffering, some of which are alive and some
dead, some express poetry and some verse. The counterpoint between
poetry and verse works by how bodies are disposed. Verse – which sug-
gests (commonly, by dictionary definition) order, regularity, something
less than poetry – is associated here: first, with phrases and images of
deprivation (‘starved of the sacred’, ‘starved and naked’, ‘earth-scraping’,
‘leaving generations vacant’); second, with environmental depredation
and destruction (‘forsaken places’, ‘lands raped’, ‘acid rainmaking’); and
third, with political oppression and killing (the ‘Master Race’ that gives
verse, ‘mass graves’, ‘paying death’s wages’, ‘goosestep’). The poetry which
rises from and through counterpoints against those associations follows:
But some bodies have awakened from the longest sleep

Bodies fully human, no longer belonging with sheep
I hear the living song as it leaps
From the bodies in the throngs up the steepest mountain
All along the peaks resounding
A poetry of bodies seeping from the deepest fountain into the
streets of our towns
To put down the sweeps of those with skin colored brown and
Drown the beat of the war drum’s pound
And in the middle of winter, we’ve found the heat to surround
(pp. 81–2)
Poetry is associated here, in contrast to verse, with: first, health and life
(‘awakened’, ‘fully human’, with bodies which ‘throng’ and ‘leap’, which

are warm, sing ‘living songs’); second, with the natural environment
(bodies emerging from mountains, peaks, fountains); and third, with
political emancipation (of racial minorities with ‘brown skins’ as opposed
to the ‘Master Race’, drowning out war drums). My systematizing of
the parts and counterpoints of the poem around a neutral centre

(‘bodies’) is, however, at odds with its effect in reading or being lis-
tened to. A steady employment of sound assonances has the effect of
a sort of sprung rhythm fighting against irregular line breaks, as if the
poetry can break into a steady chanting cadence but is held in check by
the stated sentiments. The images and phrases in counterpoint actu-
ally don’t appear neatly in clear sequence or logical development, but
are run into each other in the two sections of the poem. In the initial
lines the associations of verse seem to collide into and feed each other,
as do the associations of poetry in the latter lines to give the poem two
distinct sections in counterpoint to each other. It is poetry that is heard
more clearly than read, so that the concentration of images in the two
sections, and the superlatives of the latter section (‘deepest’, ‘steepest’,
‘peaks resounding’), reminds of anthems and rabble-rousing speeches.
There is a slight ironic touch, a flicker of a disquieting possibility, in
the assonance between that quality ‘we’ve found’ and the ‘war drum’s
pound’. Most importantly, though, it is through this performance of
counterpoints that the poet is able to express, by poetry, a shift from the
distanced individual ‘I’ which ‘sees a poetry of bodies’ in the first line to
the collective ‘we’ which has ‘found the heat to surround’ in the last line.
Experienced arbiters of high taste will no doubt find much to com-
plain about in this poem – it may seem ‘overwritten’ or ‘naive’ or
‘sentimental’. My reading of it here is neither to defend it against such
judgements nor to agree with such judgements: it is to demonstrate
one distinctive way in which a poem in these anthologies both seeks
to assume a collective voice of poetry and simultaneously to present an
apprehension of poetry itself. To take another quite different instance
in a similar direction, let me pause on Sandra M. Gilbert’s ‘January
Meadow’ in the Redux edition of Swift’s anthology. Gilbert is a highly
regarded scholar and poet and her name was likely to have been imme-
diately recognized by many when the poem appeared.
January meadow,
Whistles and simmers in the low, south-sliding

California sun, clack of crows
in hedgerows, prickle of grasses still abiding

56 Imagining Iraq
winter pallor, silence of cypresses

upholding sheaves of needles – here they are! –
like gifts of darkness to a sky whose light’s
so fierce and clear it arches like forever
in the tiny shine of noontime minutes.

The tree guy’s dragged and dumped the tree that toppled
last week (when the power failed). Let’s gather
sunshine now, lounge in the hot tub, tipple
a little, watch the twelve o’clock news together –
(peace marchers shouting in the city
under a sky like this, so blue, so pretty …)
(Swift ed. 2003b, p. 88)
There’s an implied ‘we’ here too, in the invitation ‘Let’s gather/ sunlight
now …’ – but this is a personal ‘we’, a domestic ‘we’ enclosed amidst
the comforts of meadow and home. It is a personal voice which looks
and feels here. The poem is about looking and feeling: the sensation of
sound (‘whistles’, ‘clack of crows’ and ‘silence of cypresses’) and touch
(‘prickle of grasses’) and, particularly, light. The arousing of the senses is
carefully enacted in words, so that the physical presence of the persona
who speaks and her intimate enjoyment of the space around her set the
dominant note. The parenthetical last two lines are an interruption in
the dominant note thus set up. It is perhaps a subdominant note, its
muted but interfering position emphasized by the unnecessary brackets.
The parentheses don’t mark a qualification of some clause, they just
appear there both as an irresolution (the three dots of continuity fol-
lowed by the closing bracket but without a full-stop after) and as a mut-
ing of this image of ‘peace marchers shouting in the city’. The muting
and irresolution of the bracketed image however nags – the diminutive
last two lines seem to unevenly stop the advance of the first thirteen,
depart from the ‘January meadow’ which they were dwelling upon. The
bracketed two lines, in other words, perform succinctly a series of criss-
crossing connections. They emphasize the distance of the poet and her
world from the peace march, and at the same time they indelibly inter-
rupt there across that distance. The parentheses of the last two lines
refer back to the previous and more necessary bracketed phrase – ‘(when
the power failed)’ – a domestic inconvenience seems to be formally
linked to this distant interruption. And yet along the triviality of that
barely available connection unravels a poetic conceit to do with light.
The power-failure suggests darkness and the peace marchers are in the
light; the ‘fierce and clear’ light of the same sky that the poet has

above her extends in an obviously sympathetic way to them; and yet

it throws an uncomfortable retrospective nuance on that paradoxical
phrase amidst the poet persona’s comfortable dominant note – ‘gifts of
darkness to a sky whose light’s / so fierce and clear it arches like forever’.
A subtle twist of phrasing and syntax, in other words, leads the reader

forwards and backwards over the poem to grasp the tentativeness of
the poet’s view of the peace march. Through her very sensitivity about
her distance and her world, through the slightness of her connection,
a connection is established which disturbs her intimate domestic ‘we’.
The poem doesn’t quite assume a collective voice, doesn’t seem sure
that it can, but it nevertheless brings together a small-scale local ‘we’ to
bear upon the peace marchers through the speaking/writing of poetry
itself. In a quite different way from Gould-Wartofsky’s poem, it draws
attention to the devices of the poem and puts the responsibility of that
distant connection on those devices.
To carry on picking individual poems and analysing them in this vein
would be a protracted exercise – it would be useful and interesting but
too protracted for this study. Some poets made the effort to assume a
collective voice and contemplate poetry in equally complex ways and
some in relatively simplistic ways. In Swift’s and Hamill’s anthologies
very few didn’t. In many instances, the poems come from amidst a
tranquil natural environment which is disturbed by awareness of the
distant violence, rather like Gilbert’s poem. In his hostile review Bawer
notes this: ‘A staggering number of poems here follow a single trite
formula, presenting the news of war as an unpleasant intrusion upon
an (American) life lived in harmony with nature and characterized by a
taken-for-granted feeling of safety and tranquillity’ (Bawer 2004, p. 739).
He sees these as instances of poets celebrating their (American) lifestyles,
protected by American capitalism and military might. He could equally
and perhaps more aptly have read these as poets feeling that something
is tainted where they are accustomed to find poetry, tainted by the guilt
of taking pleasure in their surroundings and in feeling that the reality
of invasion has infected a happy illusion. In my reading, most such
poems – and indeed there are many in the anthologies – were expres-
sive of bewilderment at having lost some presumed deep connection
between poetry and nature. In most this was expressed as a collective
sensibility, as in Kim Addonizio’s (which Bawer quotes):
[…] Outside
The gray doves bring
Their one vowel to the air,

58 Imagining Iraq
The same sound

From many throats, repeated.
(Hamill ed. 2003b, p.2)

Bawer probably didn’t mistake the metaphor employed here (the doves
of peace calling in one voice) for simply nature poetry; he chose to read
it that way. What Addonizio’s poem does strike is a note of being stuck,
like a broken record: beginning in the image of her daughter making
origami cranes over and over again, then in the ‘one vowel’ of the doves
repeated, and by implication like this poem in this anthology seeking
collective affirmation of peace ‘from many throats’ making the ‘same
sound’. If the reader were pernickety she might object that there’s an
unsuccessful metaphor: doves always call in the same way, irrespective
of context. If the reader considered the matter further she might argue
that it doesn’t matter, what matters is what the poet hears in this con-
text and because of it. Other poems in the anthologies choose the less
complicated device of personifying or allegorizing poetry and speaking
on its behalf. Some decide to take recourse to the style of lecture or
reportage or simply prose disguised as barely plausible verse, gesturing
towards the limits of poetry or these poets’ failure to find poetry in
this context. Some decide to appeal to popular sentiment, falling on
the resonances and inarticulateness of cliché as a shared mode. Many
poems about the suffering of children fizzle away self-consciously on
such plaintive and saturated chords:
The death-dealers deserved to die, you say.

Death is easy to pronounce.
It’s the smell of burning children that’s hard.
(Sampurna Chattarji in Swift ed. 2003a, p. 86)
And so on. In a plethora of ways the poems in these anthologies attempt

to give substance to a collective sensibility and in the process say some-
thing about poetry.
The form of the anthology brings the poems together and juxtaposes
them against each other to throw their different and yet joined up col-
lective effort into relief. The different efforts to assume a collective voice
acquire weight particularly in these collections, as collections. And
it is consequently that a collective impression of poetry itself, clearly
widely held and in various quarters, emerges in these anthologies. As
anthologies these are expressions not just of pacifist sentiment, but of

the aptness of poetry itself for conveying such sentiment. That is the
nub. With the dilution of the structures of identity and community,
with the drive towards indiscriminate inclusiveness and decontextualized
normativeness, with the gestures towards global address and universal
poetry these anthologies embody a contemporary apprehension of poetry

itself: that poetry is somehow constitutionally moral, moral in a pacifist direc-
tion within its deep structures and inspirations. In this collective effort there
is a stark confrontation of war by poetry itself, without mediating con-
texts and affiliations and allegiances, because poetry is widely regarded
as moral, peace-loving, the medicine for the ailment of war just by being
poetry. These anthologies are not only anti-war: they are anti-war by being
pro-poetry where poetry is understood as implicitly a pacifist medium.
These anthologies can construct an anti-war stance – construct an oppo-
sitional apprehension of war in a decontextualized register – because
the medium of poetry is by itself expected to carry that apprehension.
Barrington and Le Guin’s conviction that ‘the “laws” poets follow
and teach are laws of perception that underlie all ethical actions and
institutions’ quoted above was not simply the anti-war activist’s or the
anthologist’s wishful thinking. These anthologies show that this is a
widely held notion now. There are, no doubt, dissenters against such a
moral expectation of poetry in itself, but indubitably the very existence
of these anthologies and their contents underline a prevailing moral
attitude to poetry. In brief, the prevailing attitude is that poetry is good
just as absolutely as war is bad.
My task here is more to register this attitude rather than to argue for
or against it: it seems to me to be a significant indication of a prevail-
ing and current literary view. To be honest, this seems like a deeply
questionable and irrational attitude. Perhaps the explanation for it
is to be found in wider social processes: the replacement of ideologi-
cal analysis by ethical judgement (usually as normatively unthinking
as aesthetic judgement); the gradual devolution of human agency in
favour of compliance with all-determining abstractions; the refraction
of everything through consumable market- and media-friendly frames
of moral polarities; and so on. Any such suspected explanation is, of
course, no more than speculation which is unburdened here by a care-
ful charting of attitudes to poetry in relation to social and historical
changes. Such a charting is a prospective project. The point to note
here is that the anthologies that appeared in the context of the inva-
sion of Iraq, in response to it, crystallized this prevailing attitude. That
occurred not simply in the spontaneous and immediate outpourings
which were Hamill’s and Swift’s anthologies, but interestingly also in

60 Imagining Iraq
the deliberate corporate effort of the Faber anthology. A few notes

on the Faber anthology serve to bring the argument of this chapter
to a close.
The Faber anthology 101 Poems Against War was probably not only
the first to be produced as expeditiously as it was, it is also probably the

first anthology ‘against war’ which strides across human history and
continents. The forebears with similar ambition that come to mind (and
I come to these soon) were anthologies of ‘war poetry’ or the ‘poetry of
war’. It may also be the first anthology to do with war which presents its
selection with no discernible ordering whatever: it is not chronological
or periodized, it is not arranged according to country or language, and
it presents no sequence of themes. No indication is given of the poets’
backgrounds or dates and the contexts of composition. It is not even
alphabetically arranged by name of poet. No preface or introduction
leads into it. The entire absence of any ordering or supplementary infor-
mation is probably not the result of laziness (it could be, the volume was
speedily put together) – possibly it is a statement of sorts. As a statement
it could only be that such ordering is unnecessary because it distracts
from what this anthology is about: war and poetry against war. The
idea of war that is brought forth is as an abstract condition or state of
affairs, one which needs no accounting in terms of history and agents
and locations and is essentially always the same. The idea of poetry that
is thus tacitly espoused is equally abstract, free somehow of the persons
who wrote the poems and the societies and places and times in which
they were written, and notable only because poetry is essentially an
anti-war vehicle. The lack of ordering suggests that this essentialized
formation of poetry has almost always and almost everywhere been
directed against an essentialized condition of war.
The anthological forebears of similar ambition that come to mind
are Richard Eberhart and Selden Rodman’s War and the Poet (1945), Jon
Stallworthy’s The Oxford Book of War Poetry (1984) and Kenneth Baker’s
The Faber Book of War Poetry (1996). Though Eberhart noted in the pref-
ace to the first that there was only one poet (Friedrich Adolf Axel Detlev)
included who ‘boasts of loving war’ (Eberhart and Rodman 1945, p. vii),
it was clear that the great majority of poems in the anthology could not
be described as anti-war in any currently meaningful sense. Nor could
those in Jon Stallworthy’s, though he felt he could discern an anti-war
tendency in war poetry:
much – and most recent – war poetry has been implicitly, if not
explicitly, anti-war. So long as warrior met warrior in equal combat

with sword or lance, poets could celebrate their courage and chivalry,
but as technology put ever-increasing distance between combatants
and, then, ceased to distinguish between combatant and civilian,
poets more and more responded to ‘man’s inhumanity to man’.
(Stallworthy 1984, p. xix)

His reader might argue that Stallworthy’s selection constructs the
tendency rather than reveals it, and in any case he makes the ten-
dency conditional to a perceived historical drift – from hand-to-hand
combat to the war machine. Baker’s anthology was as circumspect
and more studiedly rounded: among its many themes, ‘pacifism’ is
allocated a bit more space than usual but not much more. It is clear
to anyone acquainted with these anthologies that the Faber anthol-
ogy owed something to them. Like those, it is a kind of canon-setting
exercise, selecting from the work of the famous and the established.
In the absence of ordering devices selections must have been made
emphatically in terms of taste, following some invisible gauge like
Matthew Arnold’s ‘touchstones’. Taste played an acknowledged part
in those earlier anthologies; here it isn’t acknowledged particularly.
It is doubtful whether there is much in the Faber anthology from
before the Vietnam War which hadn’t figured in one or the other of
the earlier war poetry anthologies. Like them too, the Faber antholo-
gy’s world-encompassing perspective is heavily weighted towards the
European field and particularly towards the English. And similarly
again, the selection is biased towards poetry of the twentieth century
and since. It differs perhaps in being able to co-opt the newsworthily
contemporary (a slight gesture towards the Iraq invasion context):
Seamus Heaney’s ‘Testimony’, Saadi Youssef’s extracted poem from
‘America, America’, and Michael Casey’s ‘A Bummer’ had appeared
side-by-side as ‘Three War Poems’ in The Guardian on 15 February 2003,
and they all figured here. And the Faber anthology differs emphati-
cally from its forebears in being announced on the front cover as
‘against war’; and the blurb on the back-flap asserts that ‘this anthol-
ogy gathers moments of warning and protest from all corners of the
earth: the times in which it was left to the poets to speak out against
the true terror of war’.
The cynical may have felt this was purely a marketing ploy to capi-
talize on the moment and let it go at that. The less cynical expressed
their unease, starting with Andrew Motion’s Afterword within the
covers of the anthology. He notes that the anthology effectively
presents more complex reckonings with war in poetry than simply

62 Imagining Iraq
an anti-war stance, especially insofar as it extends before the First

World War: ‘[…] sympathy, fear, dismay and sorrow do not form the
whole of the story, as this anthology proves. Its disparate voices also
celebrate, honour, prize and endorse’ (p. 135). Motion goes on to speak
mainly to the post-First World War ‘modern war poems’ and leads up

to his contextually relevant and definitely pacifist conviction that ‘we
compromise, betray or wreck our selves when we take up arms against
one another’ (p. 137). In a review David Wheatley stated the obvious
when he observed: ‘The sombre truth, which 101 Poems Against War
never entirely confronts, is that writing about conflict is at its most
honest when it does not assume that literature will automatically be
on the humanely right side, which is to say “our” side, no matter who
“we” happen to be’ (Wheatley 2003). Whether in terms of design –
there was design in having no ordering principles – or packaging, this
anthology evidently subscribes to much the same widely held attitude
that I have noted in Hamill’s and Swift’s anthologies: that poetry has a
deep-seated moral content, which renders it pacifist in a natural way.
But where the contents of Hamill’s and Swift’s anthologies gel with
that conviction, give weight to it by the collective effort it contains,
the contents of the Faber anthology contradict that preconception.
In attempting to take a broader and wider view of poetry it reveals
exactly the contradictions which Motion gestures towards mildly and
Wheatley registers straightforwardly.
The contradictions presented by the Faber anthology are not really to
do with what is good or bad poetry; as before, it seems to me that quality
is not the issue. It is misleading to think of Hamill’s and Swift’s efforts
as simply containing indifferent poetry and therefore working as a
simplistic anti-war statement, and the Faber anthology as determinedly
sticking with proven quality and therefore introducing complexity
at odds with its anti-war design and packaging. Hamill’s and Swift’s
anthologies are of their moment; the voices in them are cohesive and
responsive because of that; and their individual and collective thrusts
therefore gel. The moral expectation of poetry is expressed consistently
in them because the poems in them are of the present, and that expec-
tation is of the present. In the Faber anthology, that moral expectation
does not quite work because it is stretched impossibly. The design of the
anthology is itself at odds with its contents. The design seeks to decon-
textualize poetry where most of the poems are so well known – carry so
much contextual baggage – that they simply refuse to fit the design. By
way of a brief demonstration of this let me pause on the first poem in
the anthology (the problems start with the first poem).

The first poem in the Faber anthology is Simonides’s well-known

two lines ‘For the Spartan Dead at Thermopylai’ in Peter Jay’s transla-
tion (Hollis and Keegan eds. 2003, p. 3) – the two lines in which an
understated voice requests a stranger to inform the Lakedaimonians that
all who fought on their behalf now lie dead. It is given with a footnote:

‘In what was essentially a sacrificial stance, 300 Spartans filled the nar-
row mountain pass at Thermopylai in 480 BC in order to slow down
the Persian advance into Lakedaimon; all were killed’. These two lines
figure in similar anthologies of war poetry. Simonides’s poetry fea-
tured in Eberhart and Rodman’s anthology, and this poem was there
in a translation ‘by various hands’ under the title ‘At Thermopylae’
(Eberhart and Rodman eds. 1945, p. 15). However, it appeared there
alongside another one on the episode by Simonides, ‘The Thermopylae
Ode’, which is a celebration of dying thus in battle, and begins: ‘For
those who fell at Thermopylae / Their fortune is blessed and their
doom is splendour’ (p. 15). Read together the anti-war resonance of
the two lines seems very suspect. The two lines appeared by them-
selves in a translation by William Lisle Bowles in Stallworthy’s anthol-
ogy (Stallworthy ed. 1984, p. 9). Perhaps it was the conjunction of
Stallworthy’s stated sense, as anthologist, that ‘war poetry has been
implicitly … anti-war’ and presence of this poem alone from Simonides
in his anthology which encouraged the Faber anthologists to include it
in theirs. As it happened, Stallworthy had also given these two lines a
footnote: ‘At Thermopylae, a narrow pass between mountain and sea,
6,000 Greeks including 300 Spartans fought off a vast army of invading
Persians in 480 BC’. Interestingly, this rather factual bit of information
doesn’t have a sufficiently anti-war ring, and the note included in the
Faber anthology upped the anti-war stakes by mentioning the ‘essen-
tially sacrificial stance’ (‘sacrificial’ has indisputable normative content)
and that ‘all were killed’ (and also forgetting the 6,000 Greeks). It is a
small difference – but the note provides a subtle framing, and there
isn’t much framing in the Faber anthology. Baker’s anthology simply
chose the other one by Simonides mentioned above, the celebratory
ode, under the title ‘The Greek Dead at Thermopylae’ (Baker ed. 1996,
pp. 561–2). The Faber anthology takes the matter of packaging as far as
possible to give Simonides’s two lines an anti-war flavour – every pre-
rogative of the anthology is brought to bear on it, from cover to blurb
to design to footnote. And yet, a little bit of context seems to twist
things around. But the problem here goes deeper. In the context of the
invasion of Iraq, presented by proponents constantly though menda-
ciously as a conflict between totalitarian Middle East and democratic

64 Imagining Iraq
West, between Islamist terrorism and secular civilized values, these lines
and their reference to the standoff at Thermopylai in 480 BC present a
deep irony as anti-war poetry. The battle of the 300 Spartans has been
turned in the British and American imagination into precisely the
opposite of anti-war feeling and especially in the Iraq invasion context.

In William Golding’s early 1960s musings on the battle while visiting
the spot, he imagined the Spartan king Leonidas as driven by ‘some
inarticulate and bitter passion for freedom as he knew it’ (Golding
1965, pp. 16–17), and thought of the result as a future victory ‘for shin-
ing Athens and all Greece and all humanity’ (p. 20). His essay ended by
quoting the two lines by Simonides. Golding was far from being politi-
cally right-wing in any coherent way, and the implicit Eurocentrism in
evidence here is no doubt more the product of his education than of
his politics. But the right-wing ideological possibilities of the battle of
480 BC have been exploited by right-wing artists in popular cultural
forms. The 1962 film 300 Spartans, directed by Rudolph Maté, was
recognizably meant to resonate with the Cold War context (just put
communists instead of Persians). The 1998 comic book written and
illustrated by the unabashedly Islamophobic Frank Miller imbued the
historical event with every implausible normative polarization pos-
sible in the ‘West v. East’ mould. The 2007 film based on it, with Zack
Snyder as director and Miller as one of the producers, was predictably
nationalist and homophobic and an unapologetic celebration of war
and killing – and, with the invasion of Iraq still in the air, was apt to
be received as a sort of justification for it. Allusions to the battle of
480 BC in Thermopylai in the Iraq invasion context ranged from the
beginning of Faber’s anti-war anthology to the celebration of war and
the righteousness of the West in the film 300. It was the ironic common
denominator in opposed points of the current cultural and political
spectrum, one might say.
But such contradictions in the Faber anthology are ultimately an
academic matter. The anti-war packaging and design was successful in
the market, and by November 2003 it had reportedly sold 35,000 cop-
ies (Stone 2003). It no doubt found readers who are already convinced
of the ingrained moral pacifism of poetry. And that leads me to my
conclusion, easily stated briefly. The poetry anthologies responding to
the context of the invasion of Iraq that appeared in 2003 revealed a
prevailing moral expectation of poetry in general, a conviction in the
deep moral content of poetry in itself. This was evident in the manner
in which a large number of poets widely dispersed sought to find a col-
lective voice as poets and ponder the resources of poetry. This was also

evident in the manner in which Hamill’s and Swift’s anthologies (and

other similar anthologies) were framed by the editors and the manner
in which they circulated. This was manifest in the kinds of uses that
those anthologies were put to for protests against the invasion – the ‘global
peace movement’. This was found at times in the kinds of associations

those receiving them made in relation to earlier anti-war poetry. This was
clear to corporations which deal in poetry, and marked by Faber’s packag-
ing and design of their anti-war anthology. This was no doubt shared
by those who bought it, consumers of poetry.
In the process the anthologies both constructed the invasion as war
and opposed the invasion as war.

3
Exacting World: Individual Poetry
Collections

Anger and poetry
Harold Pinter’s short collection of poems, War – which Paterson was

to denounce as a ‘big sweary outburst’ – appeared in June 2003. It
contained six poems already published in newspapers between August
2002 and March 2003 (during the build-up towards invasion), one
from the 1991 Gulf War period (the controversial ‘American Football’)
and one from 1997, and the text of a brief speech delivered in Turin
in 2002. The ‘Turin Speech’, which decried the various iniquities of the
United States’s foreign policy, works as a sort of framing device for
the collection. Pinter had made other similar public observations in the
interim. Notably, during the 15 February 2003 peace marches in London
he issued a characteristically scathing statement (BBC 2003a) on the US
and UK governments’ interventions in other countries. A poetry read-
ing by Pinter to mark the appearance of War at the National Theatre,
London, on 10 June 2003 was followed by a conversation with Michael
Billington during which he compared the US’s foreign policy to that of
‘Nazi Germany’ and dubbed British Prime Minister Tony Blair a ‘deluded
idiot’ (Chrisafis and Tilden 2003). There was no mistaking the political
sentiments underlying War. Reviewers and literary critics queued up to
savage the collection, usually with an air of taking issue with its poetic
qualities rather than its political purpose. BBC’s Newsnight Review of 16
June 2003 brought together literati and cultural gurus Mark Lawson,
Bill Buford, Germaine Greer and Mark Kermode to discuss it, and they
denounced it with one voice. Buford found it to be ‘narcissistic’ and
a ‘hysterical rant’, which was neither witty propaganda nor agonized
witness poetry as war poetry should be; Greer opined that ‘these are not
poetry’ because ‘strong feeling does not create a poem’ and ‘A poem is
66

Exacting World: Individual Poetry Collections 67
a living entity in itself. It has its own biology, its own laws’; Kermode
declared the book ‘infantile facile waffle of the highest order’, ‘sixth-
form poetry’, which ‘tars the people who have a completely legitimate,
intelligent, sensible grievance against Bush and the war’ (BBC Newsnight
Review 2003). Noel Malcolm’s review in The Telegraph found few of the

poems worthy of attention, because in most ‘Harold Pinter has actually
written war poetry in the narrow and unusual sense of the term – poetry
expressing bellicosity’ (Malcolm 2003). Adam Newey’s review in The
Spectator observed:
The central problem with Pinter’s poems is that they elide observa-
tions on the obscenity of death and killing with moral judgments
about that process; on this gut basis, poetry can be nothing but
crudely pacifist. Where other forms of discourse (political journalism,
to take an obvious example) are able to construct a nuanced, thought-
ful, ambiguous relationship with the situation in question, the queen
of the arts is reduced to a barely articulate howl of disapproval. (Newey
2003, p. 55)
I am not quoting these disparaging observations merely to note their

tenor. These are of critical interest to this study and I return to them
shortly, after setting the context of this discussion. On the context: hos-
tility to Pinter’s volume War continued to crop up in the following years,
as we have seen in, for instance, Don Paterson’s 2004 Eliot Lecture. And
it continued to crop up with sustained vehemence since Pinter went
on in August 2004 to be awarded the Wilfred Owen Prize – partly for
his lifelong contribution to literature ‘and specifically for his collection
of poetry entitled WAR, published in 2003’, according to the Wilfred
Owen Association’s chairman Michael Grayer (Ezard 2004). And, of
course, in 2005 Pinter won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Tony Harrison’s poetry during the build-up towards the Iraq invasion
resonated with Pinter’s in some ways. These appeared intermittently
in various newspapers and journals from 2002 and through 2003, and
most were eventually collected in Under the Clock (2005). Like Pinter,
indeed more potently, Harrison had responded in verse to the first Gulf
War in two 1991 poems. ‘A Cold Coming’ and ‘Initial Illumination’ were
commissioned by and first published in The Guardian in March 1991. In
the heat of the debates before the Iraq invasion, ‘A Cold Coming’ was
republished in The Guardian on 14 April 2003, along with photographs
of the Gulf War and related features (G2 special issue 2003). A close
analysis of Harrison’s poems from the Gulf War, and the reappearance

68 Imagining Iraq
of ‘A Cold Coming’ as ‘a key contemporary anti-war or protest poem’,

followed in a paper by Anne Whitehead (2005, p. 349) – this is ground
I don’t cover here. Under the Clock didn’t include those, choosing instead
to foreground the Iraq invasion poems by beginning with ‘The Krieg
Anthology’. This consisted in adding to and reworking poems which

appeared in 2003 (‘Iraquatrains’ on 1 April and ‘Baghdad Lullaby’ on
9 April in The Guardian), and a new ‘Epilogue to The Recruiting Officer
by Farquhar’ penned for the revival of Farquhar’s play in the Garrick
Theatre, Lichfield, in September. ‘Iraquatrains’ had caused unease
among critics as Pinter’s War had – along lines which were captured by
David Wheatley in his 2007 reckonings with British poetry around the
Iraq invasion:
Under the Clock begins with a series of quatrains, ‘The Krieg Anthology’,
whose one-note satire consists of lurid, shrieking atrocity coupled with
Spitting Image-style portraits of Bush and Blair. Poems about bombs
dropped on children can hardly be expected to observe Augustan
proprieties, but it should at least trouble the reader that Iraqis feature
in these poems as dead babies, bomb victims, and nothing else. It is
a literally infantilizing picture. Nor should a satirist be expected to
deliver balance; but the fact that Saddam Hussein does not feature
at all in these poems (even as a West-supported stooge) only adds to
the leftist orientation of Harrison’s project, not unlike that of Michael
Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. (Wheatley 2007, p. 659)
Alongside Harrison’s quatrains, Wheatley was similarly dismissive of

Pinter’s War and made short work of it. Tim Kendall was also scornful
of Harrison’s anti-war poetry, especially the quatrains, mainly because
they weren’t drawn from direct experience but from mass media images
(Kendall 2006, pp. 248, 254). Both castigated Harrison and Pinter for
writing bad poetry and entertaining shallow moral presumptions against
war. ‘The Krieg Anthology’ in Under the Clock has tended to attract par-
ticular attention, but the collection also included the title poem from
the same period, originally published in the London Review of Books on
17 April 2003. Relevantly for this study, other poems from before and
after were included; of which several – like ‘The Grilling’ from June 2002
and ‘Reading the Rolls: An Arse Verse’ from 2004 – pondered the limits
of poetry and the profession of the poet.
I have indicated already that I do not attempt to provide normative
aesthetic or political judgements on texts in this study. The point here
is to understand what general conceptions of literature are at work.

However, it is pretty clear from the above notes on responses to Pinter’s

and Harrison’s Iraq invasion poetry that such normative judgements are
part of what needs to be analysed. The general ideas of literature which
underpin literary production and reception allow for pat normative
judgements, given with an air of authority or experience. The immedi-

ate task is not to accept or refute such judgements or offer other such,
but to examine their basis. In undertaking to do so, I have a somewhat
abstract consideration to begin with. Pronouncements of ‘bad poetry’,
‘sixth-form poetry’, ‘infantile facile waffle’ and so on uncomplicatedly
put the responsibility for underachievement (or when it comes to that,
achievement) on the author and the text. No attention is given to the
contribution of reading and the reader in reaching judgements. It seems
quite possible though that discernment of poor or good quality could
have as much to do with what the author has written as with how the
reader has read – with the degree of complexity of reading, awareness
and thoughtfulness in reading, which has been brought to the text. The
presumption that authors write something which manifests an objec-
tive normative quality is, however, a strongly entrenched one when it
comes to reviewing literary texts, despite the fact that in thinking about
literature the role of the reader has been carefully pondered. This has
occurred, as all in the literary academy know, in a variety of ways since
the 1960s. The shakiness of the concept of ‘author’ has been variously
interrogated: markedly since Roland Barthes’s dramatic 1968 declara-
tion of the ‘death of the author’ (Barthes 1977), and in more considered
ways since. The degree to which readers contribute to understanding
what is implicit in literary texts, and perhaps even ‘construct’ literary
texts, has been much debated. The extent to which authors, texts and
critics are circumscribed by – and therefore moulded by – prevailing
social and cultural preconceptions is the stuff of much that is studied as
Literary Theory in universities now. And yet, when it comes to review-
ing texts and especially pronouncing judgement, the onus of being
good or bad seems to fall on the work and the author while the reader
remains invisible.
The norm-drenched reception of Pinter’s and Harrison’s Iraq invasion
poetry leads me to suspect that the judgemental critics cited above are
particularly guilty of a lack of complexity in their readings. But their
views need to be foregrounded to come to grips with the understanding
of literature … of poetry … of specifically war poetry … in evidence here,
and it is therefore useful to have them in sight. They need to be kept in
sight just as the poetry and poets and the invasion context should be.
At the nexus of what’s there in the text, what the authors intend, what

70 Imagining Iraq
sort of environment the texts become available in, what the critics say,
there lurks a prevailing conception of literature, of poetry, of war poetry.
So I begin my consideration of Pinter’s and Harrison’s individual col-
lections backwards, so to speak – starting from critical responses rather
than from texts and authors. There are some preconceptions which

appear consistently in all the responses cited above. These encourage
contemplation of what the poetic texts and the poets do. My argument
from the critical reception to the poetry and poets, and thereby to the
ideas about poetry that emerge between them, devolves into three
consecutive observations.
First, though all the critics above seem to take issue mainly with the
quality of the poetry, their substantive arguments are actually about the
political sentiments expressed. Their key reservation is that the poems
lack balance or fail to be even-handed. The desire for even-handedness is
explicitly understood as a political rather than aesthetic or poetic norm.
Wheatley’s objection that Harrison hadn’t mentioned Saddam Hussein
in ‘The Krieg Anthology’ and that the Iraqis are presented as passive
victims, Newey’s reservations about the one-dimensional moral view of
Pinter’s poetry, Kendall’s doubts about poetry of war that doesn’t derive
from a direct experience, Buford’s irritation at Pinter’s anti-Americanism,
and Kermode’s feeling that Pinter’s poetry is less temperate than most
anti-invasion protesters – these are all, in slightly different ways, expres-
sions of the same thing. They are all calls for balance or even-handedness
in political perspective. This call is posed as a normative political good
which should be, it is suggested, akin to normatively good poetry. The
presumed connection between political conviction and poetic assessment
doesn’t seem to rest on much more than the strength of these critics’
belief in even-handedness. Pinter’s and Harrison’s perceived political
bias is countered by the strength of the critics’ ostensibly balanced poli-
tics and the discernment of quality that such balance confers. Political
norms were being palmed off as poetic norms.
At its most persuasive, the gist of Wheatley’s and Newey’s and some
of the others’ argument is that any ad hoc pacifism or absolute moral
position about war is untenable, and that poetry shouldn’t become the
vehicle of such a purely moral conception of war. This is substantially the
same argument as the one I made in the previous chapter: any convic-
tion in the deep moral pacifism of poetry is indeed implausible. However,
unlike the anthologies discussed in the previous chapter, in this instance
it isn’t a collective expectation of poetry that is at stake. Pinter’s and
Harrison’s anti-invasion poems are sustained individual expressions with
unambiguous reference to a particular context. The poems in question are

clear in their contextualized references: names are named, catch-phrases

of the time are thrown up, specific dates and acts are noted, the particular
political alignments and ideologies in view are registered. The responsi-
bility of generalizing these as broadly morally opposed to any war, in
this instance, seems to rest more with the critics than with the poetry.

True, the poets said things at times which seemed pacifist in an absolute
moral way, but more consistently they said things which were utterly
bound to specific conflicts and agents. It seems to me that Wheatley and
Newey and other critics themselves rather reductively chose to see a gen-
eral moral pacifism and disregard the context-specificity in Pinter’s and
Harrison’s poetry. They rightly take issue with such absolute pacifism, but
they misread the poetry by glossing over its context-specific address.
In terms of the specific circumstances of the Iraq invasion period, a
demand for political even-handedness in responses wasn’t necessarily
reasonable. That the horrors of the Ba’athist regime should be men-
tioned as soon as the mendacities of George Bush’s and Tony Blair’s
administrations are, was a toothless demand to those who felt that the
invasion was not being contemplated and undertaken because Saddam
Hussein was a uniquely bad guy. At the time, the Bush and Blair adminis-
trations and their supporters were carrying out an extensive propaganda
campaign precisely to suggest that they were bringing freedom and
democracy where these are lacking. Those who disbelieved this claim
hardly needed to repeat it. In principle, just as any decontextualized
absolute moral attitude against war is questionable, so too is a decontex-
tualized absolute political conviction in even-handedness: it can simply
be the case that for a particular conflict one side can be more to blame
than the other, or even entirely to blame. There is no natural law which
dictates that both parties in any conflict have to be responsible for that
conflict to an equal degree. I am, however, straying from the focus of
this study: the relevant point here is that critical responses to Pinter’s
and Harrison’s anti-invasion poetry seemed often to make judgements
in terms of preconceived political norms.
Second, and more interestingly, each of the critical responses in ques-
tion presented judgements in terms of preconceived notions of what
poetry – especially war poetry – should do. These preconceived notions
were outlined to differing degrees, at times more implied than stated,
at times stated sketchily. Greer’s ‘A poem is a living entity in itself. It
has its own biology, its own laws’ avoids responsibility for justifying her
preconceptions: the laws of poetry simply exist and can merely be rec-
ognized as such, she asserts, and they can’t be formulated or changed.
She recognizes that Pinter’s War is self-evidently not poetry and feels

72 Imagining Iraq
no need to explain. Almost all the cited critics agree that poetry should
be complex, should do more than simply express a strong sentiment,
should be witty or suggestive rather than direct and blunt. Though all
the critics protest that they are ready to go along with the expletives
which appear in Pinter’s and Harrison’s anti-invasion poetry (expletives

had become something of a trademark of Harrison’s poetry), actually
those do cause unease. Expletives are constantly noted in a spirit of
open-mindedness, but invariably also with a hint of doubt. Malcolm,
Newey, Wheatley and Kendall extend their desire for complexity in
poetry at large to a particular demand for complexity in war poetry.
Each feels that espousing opposition to this invasion through poetry is
not just a reductive apprehension of war per se but also of poetry itself.
Newey suggests that poetry cannot be garnered to addressing war at all
any longer (better do journalism); Wheatley ends up by recommend-
ing poetry which is more equivocal and a-contextual (such as David
Harsent’s Legion, 2005, to which I come soon); and Kendall feels that
only direct experience (the soldier-poet or the poet with war zone expe-
rience) can justify poetry addressed to war.
At the same time the poets in question, Pinter and Harrison, seemed
to be particularly self-conscious about mediating their anti-invasion
efforts through poetry rather than other genres or forms. Here too pre-
conceptions about poetry were obviously at work: both were emphatic
about poetry being their chosen medium for their purpose. Pinter didn’t
try to explain why it was poetry and not drama, the genre he is associ-
ated with, that he had taken recourse to. But he was perfectly clear that
poetry was his thing as far as expressing his feelings about the Iraq
invasion went. In February 2005 he reportedly observed:
I’ve stopped writing plays. I’ve written twenty nine plays. My ener-
gies are going in different directions. I’m certainly writing a lot of
poetry, and I’m using a lot of energy, more specifically about political
states of affairs which I think are very, very worrying as things stand.
(Kent 2005, p. 2)
And indeed, it was noted that Pinter hadn’t written anything for the
stage since Celebration in 2000. Evidently an implicit idea of poetry
gripped him at the time: one in which political anxieties are not at
odds with but actively a spur for poetry, in which poetic creativity issues
from anxiety rather than seeks to overcome it. The intensification of
worries was an intensification of poetic creativity for Pinter. Harrison’s
various statements on war and poetry give a more nuanced account of

a similar sense of poetry. This seems to me to be most pithily expressed

in the poem ‘Reading the Rolls: An Arse-Verse’, first published in Arion
journal in early 2004 (pp. 91–9) and included as the last in Under the
Clock (pp. 46–56). Given its timing and substance, the poem can be
regarded as a statement on his career as a poet generally and particularly

his recent anti-invasion poetry. A summary of the idea of poetry that
can be inferred from this could be given as follows. Poetry is not one
thing without being at the same time the opposite too; poetry draws
not just on the beautiful but also on the ugly; the language of poetry
juxtaposes and conjoins the pleasing and the disturbing, the ethereal
and the earthy, blossoming and decay, love and lust, aroma and miasma,
praise and abuse, the intellectual and the scatological; poetry is not sim-
ply memorable but also disposable. In fact the latter, the less salubrious
aspects of life, give Harrison’s understanding and undertaking of poetry
its verve: ‘From those rough sheets I learned to read / verses in the smell
of rot, / dumped dactyl, and turd-smeared trochee / primed the prosodics
of decay’ (Harrison 2005a, p. 49). Insofar as this can be extended specifi-
cally to the relationship of poetry to such a situation as war (in Harrison’s
retrospection war and violence are as abiding a backdrop as social class
is), poetry both pulls towards a peace-that-passeth-understanding and
finds life in the ugliness of war. Poetry is neither in itself for peace nor
war, it is a reckoning. By this account it is a mistake to think of Harrison’s
poetry as ‘anti-war’ in some deep way; both the pity of war and the
sadism of war are grist to poetry’s mill, and Harrison’s poetry draws its
energy from both. The effect is a crystallization of the poet’s anger.
The different sorts of preconceptions about poetry that are expressed
or implied by the poets and critics above are not particularly indicative
in themselves. In themselves none can be taken to be representative of
current attitudes; the preconceptions only clarify the thinking of those
who subscribe to them. And actually these notions of poetry are not for-
mulated to a sufficient extent to even clarify the thinking of those who
espouse them. It seems to me significant, however, that such preconcep-
tions are made available in a diverse and incoherent way, at odds with
each other, across gulfs of mutual understanding. The tensions arising
from varying preconceptions are of moment here: these are indicative,
at the least, of the fact that the very idea of poetry is at issue here as much
as attitudes to the invasion or subscription to political norms. At times
these tensions feed off each other: the political tensions push the ten-
sions between different ideas of poetry to the fore; battles over political
norms spill into differences in aesthetic perception. More interestingly,
it seems to me, at the interstices of these tensions, somewhere at the

74 Imagining Iraq
interfaces of writing and reading these texts (both the poetry and the
critical responses), a renegotiation of poetry occurs. I do not mean that
either Harrison or Pinter or the reviewers cited above actually undertake
such a renegotiation or come up with some new conception of poetry, but
something like a new conception of poetry becomes visible through the

clash of reading and writing here, in the pressured context of the invasion.
This new view of poetry has to do with the specific context of the invasion
and writing poetry with regard to it and reading poetry with invasion in the
backdrop – outlining what I mean leads to my third point here.
So, third, amidst Harrison’s and Pinter’s anti-invasion poetry and the
denunciations of critics there appears a possible renegotiation of poetry
in general: a renegotiation which has to do with the relationship of
poetry to anger. Anger simmers in the background of the invasion and
is centred in the production and reception of the anti-invasion poetry
in question, and that bears upon our understanding of poetry. Such a
renegotiation doesn’t help us become better or worse judges of poetry,
but does call into question what poetry does for us.
Anger is expressed and implicated in various ways here. It appears vari-
ously on the surface of Pinter’s and Harrison’s poems. There is anger in
the expletives: at the ‘big pricks’ that will ‘fuck everything’ (‘Democracy’,
Pinter 2003). There is anger in the personal lambasting: George Bush,
Tony Blair, Condoleeza Rice, Geoff Hoon are explicitly the addressees and
objects of scorn in ‘The Krieg Anthology’. Anger simmers in the numer-
ous context-specific accusations about dossiers and lies in the poetry.
Anger drives the associations made in juxtaposing ‘The Krieg Anthology’
with poems on Nazis in Under the Clock. It is an angry poetic gaze which
bitterly morphs the ordinary: as the poet, for instance, looks bitterly at
guests in a party who ‘loll and lounge about / Decanting claret in con-
venient skulls’ (‘After Lunch’, Pinter 2005). Anger is vented in pausing
on numerous brutal images of violence. Anger leaves the poetry lost for
words sometimes: ‘All we have left are the bombs’, observes the poet on
finding himself without words (‘The Bombs’, Pinter 2003). It is not so
much in a phrase here or there that anger is conveyed, as in the cumula-
tive compressed effect of all those devices. But the issue here goes deeper
than that. The anger of the poetry is not contained within the poetry;
it finds confirmation through the responsive anger of critics. The critics
cited above not only variously recognize the anger as such – they perceive
in the poetry ‘strong feelings’, a ‘howl of disapproval’, ‘bellicosity’ – but,
more importantly, the critics become angry themselves. The responses
in question are themselves remarkable for their waspishness, and the
terms in which they are presented froth at the mouth: ‘infantile facile

waffle’, ‘narcissistic’, ‘hysterical rant’, ‘barely articulate’, ‘one-note satire

consists of lurid, shrieking atrocity’, and so on. The anger here is not just
expressed in the poem, it fizzes at the interfaces where author and text
and reader meet, and is given its edge by all of those.
But the issue of anger and poetry here goes deeper: the anger that

appears in and in response to these poems is a derivative anger. It
derives from the anger which emanates from the specific context of the
invasion of Iraq. The relationship of anger and poetry in question here
is really a contextually specific matter. The anger here is not an abstract
rage at war in general, and the poetry is therefore not ‘anti-war’ in an
absolute moral way. The anger is precisely the sort of emotion which
was manifested variously and distinctively during the invasion of Iraq.
The mass media constantly noted that ‘sharp divisions’ attended every
step of the Iraq invasion: divisions and polarizations characterized the
entire period of the build-up and aftermath within the USA, UK and
other countries; within the European Union and the United Nations;
and between the latter and the USA. From these macro-levels the divi-
sions and polarizations stretched to micro-levels, within political parties
for instance. Support for the invasion was garnered by trying to rouse
social rage: pointing to the Ba’athist regime’s tyranny and human rights
abuses, alleging links to terrorists and accumulation of ‘weapons of
mass destruction’. Strongly held reservations and outrage about inva-
sion were expressed throughout by ‘anti-war’ organizations. Social rage
was aroused particularly when various mendacities and inconsistencies
on the part of the invaders were exposed: lies in public statements and
dossiers, the sidelining of the UN, failure to find ‘weapons of mass
destruction’, manipulation of media, detention of prisoners without
legal process in Guantanamo Bay, civilian casualties, the Coalition
Provisional Authority’s machinations in occupied Iraq, corruption in
the distribution of ‘Iraq reconstruction’ contracts, torture in Abu Ghraib
prison and torture renditions, and so on. Anger seemed to precipitate in
the intensifying violence in Iraq after the invasion and occupation, in
the deepening fissures between religious and ethnic alignments. Heated
debates and exchanges about these spilled into everyday life. And the
distemper gathered pace by drawing into itself a range of acrimonious
histories and geopolitics from beyond the immediacy of the Iraq inva-
sion. Those were structured into the invasion context by associations
of considerably longer standing, stretching back step by step through
11 September 2001, the Cold War, and further. Acrimonious histories
and geopolitics were drawn in by polarized normative abstractions such
as: terrorism v. security, multilateral v. unilateral democracy, universal

76 Imagining Iraq
human rights v. national self-determination, religion v. secularism.

Anger around the Iraq invasion was sucked into abstract territorial
polarities such as: Middle East v. West; Old Europe v. New Europe;
Anti-Americanism v. Pro-Americanism. There are very few post-Second
World War episodes which generated such a vast and intense network of

ruptures and anger both before and after – anger seemed to concentrate
and embrace the period of the invasion of Iraq in a sustained manner.
It seems reasonable to expect that the poetry of the Iraq invasion would
not be found as much in the pity of war as in the anger of invasion.
To that extent, it seems to me, the anger that simmers in and around
Pinter’s and Harrison’s poetry about the Iraq invasion captures the
temper of the Iraq invasion context. The anger of the poets, the poems
and the critics make these distinctively poetry of the Iraq invasion. At
the same time, they also push against received and prevailing precon-
ceptions about poetry because of that: poetry and anger are conceived
as being at odds with each other. Anger is generally understood as
immediate and immoderate, and poetry as deliberate and considered.
The received idea is that anger (or any strong emotion) cannot really be
internalized in the structure of poetry, though poetry may sometimes
draw inspiration from anger (strong emotions) and work with it and on
it. But then poetry is not the concretization of anger but something that
appears away from or at some distance from it. The degree of the distance
is in issue, but that there has to be a distance seems a given. The need
for distance is apparent in the most familiar notions of poetry’s relation
to emotions, even quite contrary ones – such as Wordsworth’s ‘Poetry is
the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from
emotion recollected in tranquillity’ (Wordsworth 1974, p. 85), and
Eliot’s opposed ‘Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape
from emotion’ (Eliot 1951, p. 21). The distance is defined variously and
invariably in more careful cognitive accounts of poetry’s relation to
emotions (usefully summarized, for instance, in Olsen 1978, ch. 2). The
current social constructions of strong emotions, especially anger, and of
poetry seem to appear in different and non-intersecting planes. Anger is
on the plane of the anti-social, the violent or destructive, the irrational,
and is countered by ‘anger management’, ‘liberal compromise’, ‘zero
tolerance’ policing and dispassionate subscription to the ‘rule of law’.
Even apparently neutral academic perspectives usually place anger at the
destabilizing or unsavoury end of social phenomena: a study of social
rage (the rage that is caused by social forces and expressed through social
action) by Bonny Berry (1999), for instance, associates its contemporary
political resonances with the survivalist right, crime, religious fringes,

oppression of minorities. The social construction of poetry is powerfully

associated with literacy and the academy, middle-class or elite taste,
cultural capital, celebratory or affirmative values – a quite different plane.
Perhaps it is the distinct planes of social construction which ultimately
explain the widespread conviction in a deep moral pacifism in poetry,

which I explored in the previous chapter. And the social constructions
probably also explain those more considered views of poetry which,
though not pacifist, simply can’t reconcile poetry with anger, such as
Germaine Greer’s and Don Paterson’s. For the latter, poetry is a cerebral
and autonomous state (of affairs, of mind, of expression) and anger is
in the material and happening world.
In the context of the invasion of Iraq, however, anger was so pervasive,
so distributed and dispersed, that it couldn’t clearly be associated with
rights or wrongs, this or that side. Anger was simply all around in the social
environment and threatened to engulf all modes of expression. That under
such circumstances some sort of rapprochement may take place between
poetry and anger seems almost inevitable. Obviously not all poetry would
be implicated, but certainly some would. And wherever that happens,
some noteworthy renegotiation of the very idea of poetry that prevails
now can be expected. Even if that rapprochement is evidenced in the work
of one or two poets, it would reopen the conceptual possibilities of poetry
and extend fault-lines across dominant preconceptions. A sought-after
rapprochement between poetry and anger occurred in the production and
reception of Pinter’s and Harrison’s poetry of the Iraq invasion. A project
to tease out the conceptual implications of this unusual development for
poetry seems imminent, one which is not driven to pass judgement before
understanding the rationale of the field of poetry now.
It is not my intention to actually undertake this project. That the
meeting of anger and poetry in and around the Iraq invasion poems by
Pinter and Harrison makes such a project – such a reconsideration of the
conceptual underpinnings of poetry – imminent is mainly what I wish to
gesture towards here. With that gesture I can perhaps point also to some
potential directions for this project: not by engaging with them but by
beckoning towards analogous and akin projects and materials. Of course
such a project would be neither unprecedented nor original. The direc-
tions that may be explored with the contemporary field in view could, it
seems to me, be informed by at least three extant considerations.
First, both Harrison and Pinter are aware of the connections between
anger and poetry that feed into their own writing – a tradition, so
to speak, of angry social responsiveness and combativeness through
poetry wherein they locate themselves. I have already noted that in

78 Imagining Iraq
‘Reading the Rolls: An Arse-Verse’ Harrison articulates a conception of

poetry which is illuminating from this perspective, and which suggests
such a tradition. And Harrison’s critics have been cognizant of this to
some extent from an early stage. As early as in 1990 Bruce Woodcock
had noted that ‘His output is increasing dramatically, and he is getting

angrier’ (Woodcock 1990, p. 50), and analysed the social factors (par-
ticularly class) which productively feed the belligerence and the poetry.
In his 2005 Nobel Lecture (discussed in the next chapter) Pinter read
an extract from a poem by Pablo Neruda, ‘I’m explaining a few things’
(1936), which vividly evoked the violence of the Spanish Civil War.
It was also an evocation of a sensibility, an enraged sensibility, which was
carefully chosen by Pinter to fit the thrust of his lecture. Interestingly,
the poem (it is in the extract read by Pinter) also involves a careful reck-
oning with the expectations of poetry:
And you’ll ask: why doesn’t his poetry

speak of dreams and leaves
and the great volcanoes of his native land?
Come and see the blood in the streets.
(Neruda 1970, pp. 105/107)
Indeed that happens elsewhere in Neruda’s poetry too, in the poetry

that expresses anger. I am particularly reminded of his last poem,
written in 1973 when military dictator Augusto Pinochet deposed the
democratically elected socialist President Salvador Allende in a coup
with tacit support from the Nixon administration:
I assume the duties of a poet

armed with a terrorist’s sonnet
[…]
to set down the name of this villain
who practices genocide from the White House.
(Neruda 1980, p.1)
The implicit tradition that echoes in Pinter’s and Harrison’s Iraq inva-
sion poetry and poetry prior to that could be a fruitful place to begin an
investigation into contemporary preconceptions about poetry and what
anger does to those.
Second, the project to understand the relationship between contempo-
rary poetry and anger needs a theoretical grasp of anger which doesn’t

simply see it in behaviourist or psychological terms (focused on the

enraged subject), and nor in the dominant sociological or political terms
of our time (which tend to construct anger as something to be managed
or controlled, as anti-social). On the latter note I have mentioned Berry’s
book, and have examined elsewhere the tendency of contemporary

sociological discourse to tame resistant social expressions (see Gupta
2009a). What is needed here, in other words, is an understanding of the
relation of subject to object, the relation at the juncture of which anger
is felt, expressed, recognized, responded to. Since social rage is the issue
here, an understanding of the relation between angry subject and the
social condition which instigates anger is called for, and anger needs to
be defined in terms of that relation. Such an understanding of anger can
then be held against the social constructions of poetry as literary form.
Perhaps this need will suggest a reiteration of Jean-Paul Sartre’s theory of
emotions, which seeks to locate emotions (and often cites anger among
the range of emotions) in the relation of consciousness and world. The
appearance of an emotion like anger from the troubled relation of con-
sciousness to world is, it appears to me, described suggestively by Sartre
in the following:
When the paths before us become too difficult, or when we cannot

see our way, we can no longer put up with such an exacting and
difficult world. All ways are barred and nevertheless we must act. So
then we try to change the world, to live it as though the relations
between things and their potentialities were not governed by deter-
ministic processes but by magic. But, be it well understood, this is no
playful matter: we are cornered, and we fling ourselves into this new
attitude with all the force at our command. […] It is above all a seizure
of new relationships and new demands. To put it simply, since the
seizure of one object is impossible, or sets up an unbearable tension,
the consciousness seizes or tries to seize it otherwise; that is, tries to
transform itself in order to transform the object. (Sartre 1994 [1962],
pp. 39–40)
To translate into the terms of this study: the anger that is felt, say, about
some circumstance of the invasion of Iraq is an attempt to change that
circumstance by the sheer force of wrenching the consciousness itself
that perceives it. This wrenching of the consciousness is manifested and
expressed as anger. The important thing is that anger is a state of the con-
sciousness (not something primordial or subliminal) and of its relation to
the world (not simply contained in the angry subject). This is important

80 Imagining Iraq
and possibly useful for the kind of project envisaged above because poetry
is arguably an expression of the consciousness and its relation to the
world – and that leads to my third consideration. I mention Sartre’s
formulation here simply as one that comes to my mind readily; quite pos-
sibly there are other more apt ways of considering anger in the relation

between subject and object, consciousness and world, for the purpose.
Third, from a critical perspective anger has occasionally and recently
been seen as bearing a productive relationship with literature and pro-
viding an apt frame for critical analysis. Feminist criticism has been
particularly receptive to such an approach. Thus Jane Marcus noted that
the suppression of anger was a condition of Victorian women’s lives
and the release of anger has been ‘a vital source of intellectual energy in
changing the subject of literary discourse’ for women writers and critics
(Marcus 1988, p. xxi). Taking the idea forward, Linda M. Grasso’s study
of American women writers in the nineteenth century started with the
following hypothesis: ‘By identifying the sources of women’s anger and
analyzing how their anger assumes literary expression, anger can be used
as a paradigm for understanding the ways in which women, at differ-
ent historical moments, have responded to myriad forms of expression
through the literary imagination’ (Grasso 2002, p. 4). These naturally
associate anger with the gendered author’s position in society; suggestive
as that is for this study and the envisaged project, perhaps a more dis-
persed and politically inclusive understanding of anger’s relation to lit-
erature is more appropriate here. The debate about literature in relation
to the ‘angry young men’ or the ‘angry generation’ of the later 1950s
comes to mind as another possibly fruitful association here. However, it
seems to me that that debate (heavily dominated by the mass media as
it was) didn’t quite manage to come up with either an effective analysis
of anger or a well-defined thrust for anger. The existing scholarly project
which appears to me to come close to the sort of project I have in mind,
a renegotiation of preconceptions of poetry in relation to anger in the
Iraq invasion period, is found in Andrew Stauffer’s literary historical
reappraisal of Romantic poetry. The emphasis on poetry is useful, as
is the salutary grounding in socio-political and aesthetic context – the
scope of this project is best summarized in Stauffer’s words:
In the wake of Augustan satire, the Romantic poets developed their

ambivalent attitudes towards angry art in concert with or in the imme-
diate wake of the multitude of outraged voices in the periodical press.
Romanticism in England can thus be seen as a chorus of responses
to the crisis that was brought about by anger’s prominence in public

discourse. Godwin, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, and others

provide important evidence of the various political and aesthetic
pressures on anger for the post-Revolutionary author in England.
However, it is Blake, Shelley, and Byron who stand closest to the heart
of this book, because the imaginative and poetic programs of each

are founded, however uneasily, on a particular species of anger. These
three writers attempt to work beyond the limiting sense of anger they
inherit from the English reception of the French Revolution. That is,
they reject anger as something experienced passively as a visitation
upon the self, and articulate angry emotions as positive and decisive
enactments of the self upon the world. In so doing, they provide new
ways of imagining the value of anger to a culture that had lost faith
in that emotion. The literary work produced out of this commitment
is characterized by generic experimentation as well, as these poets
develop methods of presenting this essentially spectacular emotion
in written form. (Stauffer 2005, p. 5)
In pointing to Stauffer’s project I do not intend to suggest that Harrison

and Pinter are in any way similar to Byron and Shelley, or that they are
harbingers of some kind of new Romanticism. The interest of Stauffer’s
project is in its structural organization: arranging a specific socio-political
context, a variety of responses (including mass media of the time), aes-
thetic preconceptions about poetry, and the efforts of specific poets in
terms of the salience of anger. A similar sort of structural organization
could be brought to understanding the kinds of renegotiations of poetry
that seem to occur in contemplating the Iraq invasion poetry of Pinter
and Harrison (and indeed other literary works of the time). The content of
the anger, the preconceptions, the socio-political arena now are indubi-
tably vastly different from that of early nineteenth-century England. The
findings of the envisaged project will accordingly be very different too.
But, as I have said, this is not a project that is undertaken in this
study; the idea is to gesture towards its possibility in view of a brief
consideration of Pinter’s and Harrison’s Iraq invasion poems. For this
study, and in this chapter, it is more important to register the range of
sustained individual poetic responses to the invasion, and Pinter’s and
Harrison’s form only a very small proportion of that.
Side by side
By ‘individual collection of poetry’ I mean a volume bringing together a

number of poems by a single poet, the contents and ordering of which

82 Imagining Iraq
are determined by the poet. I have in mind primarily volumes where

the contents are published for the first time in book form (not, for
instance, a ‘selected works’ volume), and may represent the poet’s work
over a recent period or with regard to a particular theme. This could be
regarded as individual as opposed to the collectiveness of an anthology,

and thought of as a collection as opposed to a volume with a single long
poem. I think of the selections, orderings and juxtapositions of specific
poems in an individual collection as its design.
The individual collection of poetry naturally gives a poetic sensi-
bility more scope than specific poems (as included in anthologies or
selections) – more scope, that is, for conveying a sustained engagement
of poetry with the conditions of its production and reception. There
is, I feel, a kind of intermeshing of writing and reading evident in the
structures of an individual collection. Each poem bears on the others
and equally the others bear on each; the ordering of poems conveys a
process of temporary closures and openings; the ordering places each
poem within the continuum of the poetic sensibility on display; the
selections and juxtapositions have the effect of layering a macro-level
of reading over the micro-level of close reading. In other words,
contemplating an individual collection of poetry is both a matter of con-
sidering the design of the collection as a whole as well as attending to
the nuances of the poems included, and involves establishing the rela-
tions between the design of the whole and nuances of the specific. As
it happens, conventional critical approaches to poetry generally focus
predominantly on specific poems – or specific bits of poetic text – and
pay only cursory attention to the design of the collection. The emphasis
that literary criticism conventionally lays on close reading of texts is
given particular stress when it comes to poetic texts, probably due to the
opacity and density of poetic language. Poetics has conventionally been
powerfully focused on the discrete composition, and the critical register
of poetics is accordingly oriented towards close reading: towards reading
the words, the phrases, the stanzas, the images, the conceits, the formal
features, the aural patterns, and so on. The design of the individual
collection of poetry largely remains a region of critical free-play where
there are no specialist terms to reckon with and few theories to contend
with; impressionistic descriptions and inferences are legion here, second-
ary to the weightier businesses of looking closely at specific poems.
My account of the individual collections of poetry that follows is
more with regard to their design than to specific poems. The latter are
thought of as contained in the former here, and I take note of the lat-
ter only insofar as they clarify the former. This is the reverse, in other

words, of the conventional – indeed habitual – critical practice of

focusing closely on poetic texts, and giving conditional or post factum
attention to the design of the collection. Mine could be thought of,
therefore, as a very modest attempt at ‘distant reading’. Here this does
not have the ambition of distant reading in Franco Moretti’s (2000)

sense of consecutive interpretive removals from close reading, and nor
in Peter Middleton’s (2005) sense of ethnographically tracked horizons
of reading. What I have in mind here is a formalistic notion of distance:
a view which emphasizes the design of the collection and places the
poetic texts accordingly, rather than beginning with close attention to
poetic texts and understanding the design accordingly. This enables me
to focus directly on sustained engagement of a range of poetic sensi-
bilities within the period of the Iraq invasion. In some instances such
engagement may make the design of the collection and the focus on
the invasion inextricable; in others the design of the collection may
place the invasion amidst wider poetic concerns; and in yet others the
design may involve only a tangential or tacit (but tractable) relevance
to the invasion. Noting such patterns should demonstrate what a
sustained engagement of poetic sensibilities within the invasion period
entailed. That would also usefully take this study away from individual
poems and anthologies and the immediacy of anger discussed above.
More significantly, some grasp of sustained poetic engagements with
the invasion environment also has a bearing on contemporary poetic
production and reception generally.
In brief, what I attempt below is to present observations on some
individual collections of poetry as wholes – as collections – vis-à-vis the
Iraq invasion period in which they appeared and with regard to which
they were read. Necessarily my readings of these collections are impres-
sionistic, and disposed according to my sense of the context. I present
these readings in a volume-by-volume manner, in a sequence which
elucidates differing ways of looking at the invasion through poetry.
David Ray, The Death of Sardanapalus and Other Poems

of the Iraq Wars (2004)
Ray’s collection presents a record in verse of the Iraq invasion period,
starting briefly from the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 but
focusing predominantly on the build-up to the invasion, its process
and immediate aftermath (roughly late 2002 to perhaps the end of
2003). A record, however, suggests something neatly organized by dates,
themes and significant events, given in an objective register, and this is
nothing of the sort. The collection follows a sequential chronology, but

84 Imagining Iraq
not in a rigid or schematic fashion. The chronology is implicit in the

subjectiveness of the record: the structure derives consistently from
the self-aware voice of the poet amidst his everyday life in the United
States (in Tucson, Arizona – but even that detail is not stated in so many
words). The collection charts a fluid chronology, where the passage of time

is glimpsed through verse that drifts between stream-of-consciousness,
diary-like notings, and epiphanic (in the Joycean sense) moments given
in the distinctive voice of the poet (the ‘I’ of the collection). The passage
of time is also grasped through references which can be mapped on to
the unfolding record of the invasion as the collection came together, i.e.
with reference to public statements, news reports, discussions etc. that
now constitute the record of the invasion period. Let me restate that
overlapping two-fold chronological structure of this record in verse. The
poems put together here represent a time line which can be grasped, on
the one hand, in terms of the poet’s sense of the passage of his everyday
life, and, on the other hand, through mapping allusions to the public
record of the invasion. These two axes of the collection’s time line are
obviously related, and the interest of this collection is primarily in how
that relation works.
The public record is sieved through the poet’s self-aware everyday
consciousness. The reader can glimpse and recognize the sequence
of the public record through the gaps of the poet’s everyday life; the
reader brings her familiarity of the public record (a shared familiarity)
to be able to do so. The poet’s life is charted across the truncations of
discrete poems: he reads newspapers and watches TV, makes associations
with and reminisces about his past (obviously one of erudite pursuits),
simply ponders in solitude, talks to and does things with family mem-
bers, socializes with friends, goes to a funeral, shops, dines, gossips,
notices events in the market or the swimming pool, and so on – lives,
so to speak, the stuff of everyday life. And in every poem, every move
and thought of the poet’s everyday life is inflected by his awareness of
and discomfort about and ironic reckonings with the invasion, by the
surrounding media images of and debates about the invasion, by his
inability to accept or let go of the unfolding invasion of Iraq. The dual
distance of the invasion – as something emanating from the ‘domestic’
national domain and something enacted through distant violence in
Iraq – simply interferes constantly in the flow of the poet’s personal and
psychological domain, obtrudes and weaves itself into the immediacy of
the poet’s everyday. This is especially so since the ruptures of the invasion
period in the public record constantly reproduce themselves as ruptures
in the poet’s everyday domain: he finds himself quarrelling constantly

with news reports, with the public statements of ‘our President’ (whose
virtual presence and voice is a sore to the poet), with the American
public in an abstract way, with friends, with family members. The poetry
of this persona – the poet, the ‘I’ – emerges from the alienation he con-
sequently feels. The poetry is a concretization of that alienation; the

cadences and counterpoints and assonances of verse are the only bridges
which join the ruptures of the public space with the ruptures in the
poet’s everyday domain. The raison d’être of the poetry and its relation
to alienation is presented sharply in the poem ‘Vows of Silence Essential’
(pp. 58–9), in the context of a very personal slippage – when an unthink-
ing comment from his wife over breakfast leads to the poet withdrawing
from discussion and taking recourse to the solitude of poetry:
With a vow to discuss words no more lest

along with clay gods bombed to oblivion
our lovely day will be blasted to hell, I retreat
to my cave of exile where in shadows
I honor words as if they could never do harm.
In other poems such withdrawal, and sometimes ironic detachment,

derives from disenchantment with friends, with fellow citizens, and with
the news media. This last is an interesting turn at a time when, as I have
noted in Chapter 1, consumption of news increased and intensified. But
avid consumption and simultaneous alienation were not uncommon at
the time, and is expressed often in Ray’s collection – symptomatically
in a poem entitled ‘The Poet Almost Always Regrets Reading the Paper
and if the President Does Not, Why Should the Poet?’ (p. 95). Often the
poetry both ploughs news reports and appears as a remedy for the disap-
pointment. A similar disenchantment, it may be recalled, was expressed
by Edward Said around the time:
It has finally become intolerable to listen to or look at news in this

country. I’ve told myself over and over again that one ought to leaf
through the daily papers and turn on the TV for the national news
every evening, just to find out what ‘the country’ is thinking and
planning, but patience and masochism have their limits. (Said 2004,
p. 250 [February 2003])
The principal twist of the collection’s design is that the poet’s everyday
life as inflected by the Iraq invasion effectively renders the everyday as
not everyday. Everyday preoccupations and habits acquire a significance,

86 Imagining Iraq
are given a significance, which undercuts their everyday character.

The idea of ‘everyday life’ has come under considerable sociological
scrutiny largely because of its apparent intractability: because of the
perception that everyday life is the basis of all social existence, and its
features are therefore more or less invisible or unregistered. Everyday

life is lived rather than analysed. Sociological analysis has been devoted
to the fine balance of making everyday life visible for analysis with-
out disturbing its everydayness. Thus, for instance, Michel de Certeau’s
influential attempt to chart the practices of everyday life was introduced
as a project that seeks ‘not so much to discuss this elusive yet fundamen-
tal subject as to make such a discussion possible’ (de Certeau 1984, p. xi).
Early forays into analysing everyday life struggled with its subjectivity
and intractability variously: Sigmund Freud grappled with the every-
day ‘shortcomings in our psychical functioning’ where everydayness
is marked by ‘certain dimensions fixed by our judgement, which we
characterize by the expression “within the limits of the normal”’ (Freud
1960, p. 300); and Erving Goffman’s (1959) sociology of everyday life
foregrounded the ‘self’ performing amidst the performances of other
selves. In various ways developments in cultural sociology have since
taken these pioneering efforts forward. However, the paradox remains
that analysis of everyday life both renders it visible and erases its sub-
jectivity. And it therefore always remains doubtful whether that which
is effectively analysed as everyday life is indeed everyday life. A similar
paradox is played out from a different direction in Ray’s collection.
Ray’s collection indubitably articulates and performs and represents
in verse the subjective everyday life experienced by the poet without
objectifying it as an analytical approach would. And yet this everyday
life is also put into perspective and made strange – not because of any
analytical effort but because of the pressure of the Iraq invasion con-
text on the poet’s sensibility. Because of the poet’s discomfort about
the invasion, the alienations it generates, the unremitting irritation
it causes, his everyday life seems strange to him. The inflection of his
everyday life by his awareness of the invasion makes the everyday
other than habitual and unthinking and lived. His daily habits of com-
municating and reading and thinking and looking are put sharply and
uncomfortably into relief by the distortions that the invasion disperses
across social and individual lives. Everything that the poet habitually
does is penetrated by that awareness of the invasion: everyday acts and
thoughts become articulated as its metaphor, as commentary on it, as
ruptures and aberrations from and correctives to it, as counterpoints to
it, as ironic distance from it, and so on. The design of the collection and

its poetic verbosity is in the reiterative articulation of everyday acts and

thoughts in the Iraq invasion period so that they become unfamiliar,
focalized, not everyday-like.
Brian Turner, Here, Bullet (2005)

Turner’s collection fits the conception of war poetry as written by a
witness or given as a testimony from the ‘war zone’. Turner was an infan-
try team-leader of the US army in Iraq for a year from November 2003.
His poetic engagement with the ‘war zone’, then, was technically after
the conclusion of the ‘war’ was declared by President Bush on 1 May
2003, and covered almost the entire occupation period that followed. In
the public perception the occupation period was as much a continuing
‘war’ as the invasion itself. The ambiguities of the occupation period
are addressed in Turner’s collection; it is a poetic engagement with the
displaced presence of the US soldier in Iraq after invasion.
In the collection the unease of such presence is not articulated as
a political or ethical conundrum. It is articulated instead in terms of
an exquisite sensitivity to being a foreigner in this land, to embody-
ing the invading army in another nation, to the two-fold displacement
of the poet-soldier away from home (back in the USA) and within a
strange land (Iraq). The violence of invasion and occupation expresses
itself as the concretization of these schisms. The evidence of violence,
in other words, is all around – in a visceral fashion – the poet’s voice
and displaced presence in Iraq, and yet his descriptions of violence are
given not so much with shock or anger or fear as with a kind of struggle
for expression. There’s a curious contemplativeness in these descrip-
tions, as if the poet constantly slips before or after the violence, as if he
looks back from or forward to or looks from above or elsewhere at the
violence that is pervasive. In other words, the poet seeks constantly to
put the violence that is the theme of the collection into some kind of
perspective in terms of his displaced presence in Iraq. That works pri-
marily by exploring the linguistic and metaphorical possibilities and
failures of translation. The soldier-poet’s displaced presence in occupied
Iraq is naturally first and foremost a displacement of words, a struggle
with translating words. The introductory ‘A Soldier’s Arabic’ (p. 11) sets
the tone for the collection as a whole: in it the soldier-poet’s percep-
tion of foreign words (Arabic) in a foreign land becomes at the same
time a desire for reaching across the linguistic barrier, a realization of
the differences at war (‘Where we would end a war / another might
take as a beginning, / or as an echo of history, recited again’), and an
expression of his uncomprehending presence. The trope of struggling

88 Imagining Iraq
with linguistic translation (also picked up in the poem ‘What Every

Soldier Should Know’, pp. 19–20), expands into a trope of struggling
with translation across a variety of boundaries, indeed a search for
translation itself. This operates as recourse to culturally ‘other’ percep-
tions that are available in translation: variously, a range of Arabic intel-

lectuals associated with Iraq are called upon (the philosopher of history
Ibn Khaldun, the scientist Alhazen, the author of Gilgamesh, the poet
Sa’di, and others mentioned in the notes of the collection). At times the
imperative of translation works as a kind of intralingual effort between
different registers: between the military and the civilian, between the
soldier’s and the poet’s. More effectively, the effort of translation (in
the broadest sense) works according to various standpoints that the poet
finds for charting the violence around him: locations real and imagi-
nary – still points, so to speak – that he adopts to be able to present
the prospect from a distance or to frame the prospect effectively in
verse. Such adoption of standpoints includes: homing in on the indif-
ference of nature amidst the conflict (landscapes and animals appear
often); building a ‘poetic machinery’ of the dead or of ghosts around
acts of violence; extending a sort of tourist gaze over landscapes and
cityscapes (spotting women, marking exotic moments); withdrawing
into memories or imaginings of ‘home’; trying to imagine what Iraqis
are thinking. The most direct descriptions of an act of violence in the
collection appear in the poem ‘2000 lbs’ (about a bombing in Mosul).
But description here is refracted through a range of imagined perspec-
tives (of US soldiers, Iraqi men and women, even the suicide bomber,
as they died); what we have is a series of translations of the violent
moment through different perspectives. The struggle of translation
and expression captures the poetic sensibility that cannot ultimately
come to terms with its presence in occupied Iraq. That, it seems to me,
summarizes Turner’s collection. The collection could be read as the
poetry of alienation arising from awareness of the invasion context,
in a way like Ray’s collection: only, Ray’s (written at ‘home’) is about
alienation from everyday life while living it, and Turner’s is about the
alienation of the absence of any meaningful everyday life (for the
people of Iraq and US soldiers).
Dunya Mikhail, The War Works Hard, translated by Elizabeth

Winslow (2005)
In the Anglophone world – especially in the UK and USA – the inva-
sion of Iraq naturally aroused some interest in Iraqi and other Middle
Eastern literature. In poetry this meant that tokenistic space was made

for some translations: I have mentioned the appearance of translated

Arabic poetry in Faber and Faber’s 101 Poems Against War anthology,
and similarly Arabic poetry was featured in a number of newspapers
and magazines. More sustained attention to Iraqi literature was evi-
denced rarely in the USA and UK. The notable exception was Saadi

Simawe’s edited Iraqi Poetry Today (2003), which featured poems by
Dunya Mikhail among others. Mikhail’s individual collection, drawing
on poetry written during the Iraq invasion and earlier, appeared sub-
sequently in a translation by Elizabeth Winslow. In introducing the
collection, Saadi Simawe, speaking as ‘a teacher of English literature’,
finds resonances in it with the poetry of John Donne (‘metaphysical
qualities’) and Emily Dickinson (‘playfulness and stimulating vision of
the world’) (p. xiii).
Simawe’s weak attempt to affix status for Mikhail’s poetry in terms
of English literary canons (without reference to the invasion context),
and the piecemeal attention to Iraqi poetry amidst which this col-
lection appeared, draws attention to a wider politics of translation.
The politics of translation has been a substantial academic concern
in recent decades (primarily since the 1990s), and particularly with
regard to translating from and into English. The broad argument that
has unfolded is as follows. Geopolitical and inter-cultural disparities
of power and hegemonic relationships are often transmitted and per-
petuated through translation. This has been possible because of the
marginality of translation. While acts of translation are pervasive, they
are often not esteemed as significant and tend to be neglected, rendered
invisible and considered subservient. Since that is so, translation is par
excellence that process through which hegemonic relationships can be
perpetuated almost unthinkingly, without appearing to. However, if
the process and practice of translation are given deserved and rigorous
attention, they can not only be used to determine how power relations
work through them but can also be used to oppose them (for a succinct
summary of the main points of debate, see Gentzler 2002). Several pro-
posals along those lines for oppositional translation from marginalized
positions were offered: for instance, with regard to feminist politics
by Sherry Simon (1996), and postcolonial politics by Lawrence Venuti
(1995, especially ch. 7). The discernment of power relationships in exist-
ing translation practices and any challenge to them through translation
practices would involve, naturally, attention to both the actual doing
of translation and the manner in which translations circulate: i.e. what
is selected for translation, how translations are used in institutions,
how they are marketed and received, etc. Since the English language

90 Imagining Iraq
has been closely implicated in the history of British colonialism and

American superpower dominance, and given its uneven global spread
and powerful hold on international cultural circulations, translations
from and into English have been of particular interest in relation to the
politics of translation.

The Iraq invasion period obviously sharpened perceptions of the
disparities of power between Anglophone USA and UK and Arabophone
Iraq and other Middle Eastern countries, indeed of the inequities that
obtain in contemporary geopolitics globally. The invasion also height-
ened the manifestations of power politics in translation practices, espe-
cially of political and cultural texts and discourses and especially from
Arabic into English. The degree to which that was manifested in literary
translation is yet to be rigorously examined, and undoubtedly will be
in due course. Such examination requires a broad sense of the cultural
interfaces and cross-perceptions that have developed between Iraq and
the USA and UK, of the sort that is ably covered in Muhsin al-Musawi’s
Reading Iraq (2006). The specific patterns of the politics of literary trans-
lation in the invasion period, informed by such a cultural history as al-
Musawi’s, is needed for a meaningful exploration of a translated text such
as Mikhail’s collection (i.e. alongside other such). That is outside the scope
of the present study.
But the shadow of translation, an awareness of the implicit if
indistinct politics of translation, is cast on any reading of Mikhail’s
collection which is cognizant of the invasion period. The collection
presses against its translatedness in various implicit ways, somewhat
as Turner’s collection probes translation in a number of directions. For
Turner the probing comes with the sense of the soldier-poet’s presence
in an invaded land, and in Mikhail’s collection translation negotiates
the émigré’s or refugee’s presence (chiming with the translated textual
presence) in an adopted country. The émigré presence of the poet
appears in the collection through a series of abstractions redolent with
either desire or revulsion – and sometimes torn between both simulta-
neously. The primary abstractions are unsurprisingly of nationhood, of
the nation left behind (Iraq) and the nation arrived at (America): these
are regarded as entities (as personifications or things), much as one
might look at a picture or read a text. Such constructions of nationhood
are also expressive of the émigré-poet’s sense of being dislocated from
them; or, more precisely, the poet’s voice emerges from the interstices of
translation back and forth between nations. This is forcefully conveyed
in and radiates out of the adjoining poems ‘I Was In A Hurry’ (‘Yesterday
I lost a country. / I was in a hurry, / and didn’t notice when it fell from

me’, p. 31) and ‘America’ (‘Stop your questioning, America, / and offer
your hand / to the tired / on the other shore’, p. 34) of the collection.
A preoccupation with Iraq as nation naturally dominates – the home that
is not home – and is expressed variously as the object of return or loss,
a persona and a remembered environment, a text or collage of troubled

history stretching well beyond the invasion context itself. The image of
‘the Dictator’ (Saddam Hussein) and references to the Ba’ath regime’s
repressions echo through the evocation of Iraq, but neither are explic-
itly named: the assumption of shared references places the émigré voice
as speaking to compatriots. In many ways, references to ‘the Dictator’
here are not unlike David Ray’s references to ‘our President’ in The
Death of Sardanapalus. And yet the poetic sensibilities at work are differ-
ent in the two collections. Where Ray talks of ‘our President’ in terms
of his alienation amidst everyday life, Mikhail talks of ‘the Dictator’ as
an aspect of the removed home nation. That is essentially the distinc-
tion which, I feel, marks Mikhail’s sense of nations as abstract. That
abstract sense of nationality is also characterized in relation to the USA:
in personifying America, in images of being in transit, in locating the
foreign or immigrant voice or gaze, and in one instance by identifying
Lynndie England (who figured significantly in the Abu Ghraib prison
torture pictures) emphatically with her nationality – ‘This is an urgent
call / for the American soldier Lynndie / to immediately return to her
homeland’ (p. 13, that too sounds like an airport announcement). The
émigré-poet in the collection expresses herself through displacement,
in brief.
Alongside the abstract nations, and playing with them, is an abstract
notion of war in the collection. War is occasionally seen as an autono-
mous drive of which all are victims (there aren’t really agents, only
victims); and sometimes war is seen as a condition of distress which
simply incomprehensibly obtains. War characterizes nations and his-
tories and displacements without explanation. The abstraction of war
collides against the abstractions of nations (left behind and arrived
at), so that they are all caught in the displacement and ambiguity of
the émigré-poet’s sensibility. War here is therefore not really a direct
reference to the invasion of Iraq and there is no political context for
it. The juxtaposition of abstractions of nations and of war and of
displacement appears to be particularly suggestive in the Iraq inva-
sion period, but it is difficult to say what is specifically suggested.
Perhaps it is the ambiguities and hesitancies of translation, linguistic
and cultural, which come through as the substance of the collection – in
English.

92 Imagining Iraq
Adrienne Rich, The School Among the Ruins:

Poems 2000–2004 (2004)
Rich’s collection also works through abstractions, but rather differently
from Mikhail’s. Here there’s a conceptual field, a coherent and thought-

through network of ideas, and a poetic consciousness which is honed
by, for instance, knowing that ‘history was not a novel’ (in ‘Equinox’,
p. 16), contemplating ‘defeats of language / in history’ (in ‘Tell Me’, p. 19),
pondering ‘the hemorrhaging of my history’ (in ‘Variations on Lines
from a Canadian Poet’, p. 29), recognizing that ‘We were at the time
in the time of our displacement’ (in ‘USonian Journals 2000’, p. 40),
considering whether ‘everything returns in time except the / utterly dis-
appeared’ (in ‘Collaborations’, p. 55), registering what happens ‘when
we are shaken out to the last vestige / when history is done with us’
(in ‘Alternating Current’, p. 71), and so on. The idea of history is not
formulated in an academic way, but it is clear that a well thought out
understanding of history – an awareness of the complexities of history –
lies beneath such poetic phrases. As for history, so for language, identity,
love, the world, ideology, freedom, and an enormous plethora of other
concepts which come pregnant with awareness of their complexities,
and importantly their interpenetrations with other concepts. The differ-
ence from Mikhail’s kind of abstraction is perhaps most easily grasped
with reference to evocations of the nation. America – or rather the USA
of the ‘USonians’ – appears frequently in Rich’s collection. But instead
of presenting any coherent idea of the nation as meaningful, as Mikhail
does, Rich’s poetry constantly interrogates the idea of the nation, tries
to grasp it from within and without, from different perspectives and in
different connections. There is an idea of the nation – of the USA – in
Rich’s collection, but it is a provisional, unstable, questionable idea, and
it simply cannot be personified or concretized or turned into a cohesive
text or image. It falls into the conceptual field that seems to bubble
constantly in the collection.
The conceptual field is extended from a political perspective, and the
poetry of the collection is itself analytical. The poetry is not analytical
in the sense of academic argument and evidencing, it is analytical as
poetry: where the capture and juxtaposition of words, their sounds and
nuances, the connotations of phrases and their dislocations, the sugges-
tiveness of images and their slipperiness, both reveal and sharpen the
political perspective. Everything that draws the poet’s attention – from
the news, feelings about and conversations with friends and lovers,
experience of travels and returns, amidst everyday life – is grist to the
political perspective and can be analysed in verse. And everything that

is picked up thus has an effect on the entire underlying conceptual field,

so that each poem bears on all the others and there’s a cumulative effect
that coheres as the collection. Within such a poetic method, particular
attention is given to political and personal ruptures or fissures, those
which need to be contemplated and understood. ‘War’ is often evoked.

War simmers centrally in the conceptual field and political perspective,
and is treated with the same kind of interrogative air as the nation is
treated. The evocation of war is always an evocation of a particularly
bewildering rupture in the poet’s sensibility, in history and the world,
and in politics.
The invasion of Iraq is naturally not a singularity in Rich’s collection,
and doesn’t absorb everyday life and poetry as comprehensively as it
does David Ray’s. The collection presents the exercise of Rich’s particu-
lar poetic sensibility (which is also a political perspective which derives
from a conceptual field) over the period 2000–4. This period is marked,
among other momentous personal and public matters, by the terrorist
attacks of 11 September 2001 and the invasion of Iraq. These are rup-
tures that Rich’s political perspective and poetic analysis could scarcely
neglect. In this collection there are inevitable and tractable responses
to both, but within the flow and scope of the broad conceptual field.
The title poem ‘The School Among the Ruins’ (pp. 22–5) was written
in 2001 (probably after 11 September), and was featured in Hamill’s
anthology Poems Against the War (2003) during the Iraq invasion period.
It presents the malaise of violence within the continuum of the poet’s
political perspective and the continuum of contemporary conflicts:
the epigram reads, ‘Beirut. Baghdad. Sarajevo. Bethlehem. Kabul. Not
of course here’ (p. 22). At times the collection offers a direct allusion
to the invasion (in the poem ‘Five O’Clock, January 2003’, pp. 95–6,
for instance), and often there’s simply a self-evident fittingness with
the concerns of the Iraq invasion. That continues in fact in Rich’s sub-
sequent and companion collection Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth:
Poems 2004–2006 (2007). In these collections the invasion of Iraq is but
one discord among a variety of discords, and yet it is one that is noted
sharply enough to resonate across both collections.
David Harsent, Legion (2005)

Harsent’s collection is not, in any tractable way, addressed to the invasion
of Iraq. On the whole, it is probably about the stabilities and instabili-
ties of humans in their environments. There are three parts. The first,
entitled ‘Legion’, appears to describe – sometimes in a collective voice,
sometimes as from the eye of a camera, sometimes in an individual

94 Imagining Iraq
voice – scenes from an anonymous war zone. The sequence in this part
is punctuated by poems in italics called ‘Despatches’ (five times), which
affect the language of a witness reporting from the war zone (let’s say
by radio transmission) but heard only in fragments (as if the transmis-
sion is constantly interrupted). The phrases and lines of these poems are

scattered on the page, visually suggesting fragmentation. The anonymity
of the war zone is carefully constructed, and though there are hints of
a shattered landscape in Eastern Europe (perhaps around the former
Yugoslavia) there is also a deliberate performance of anonymization: the
names of streets and landmarks are often deliberately generic (Street
of Locks, Street of Songs, Street of Keys, Terra Damnata, Lake Torpid).
The reader is invited to be particularly sensitive to locations, to look for
the signs and identifying marks. The second section, entitled ‘Stelae’, is
a set of prose-like pieces about rocks. These are justified on both sides
to appear as rectangular and solid blocks of text, to signify firmness.
The prose has an academic quality, and could be scraps of texts by a
geologist or archaeologist or ethnographer confronting human uncer-
tainty against the implacable rocks. The third untitled part describes the
everyday life of persons in a city, usually in their voices (‘I’) addressing
an interlocutor (‘you’). Location is at stake here too. Most of the poems
are located in a carefully anonymized way as in the first part – at the
graveside, or riverside, or roadside, or bedside, and so on – but this is
the anonymity that suggests the complete familiarity of everyday life.
These locations are mentioned as one might say ‘I’m off to the green-
grocer’s’ without having to spell out which greengrocer’s. The steady
circuit of everyday life in the third part is an effective counterpart to
the dislocated anywhereness of the first.
There is obviously an evocation of war in there in the first part. It is
the most abstract, the most decontextualized evocation of the collec-
tions touched on here. It is marked only by its contemporariness: in
the recognition of things that are listed as randomly as the shattered
landscape throws them up. The war here is not really about any war
out there or identifiably about a war; it is really a crystallization of the
poetry of war as an autonomous construction, about such poetry itself.
It demonstrates what poetry can do with war, how poetry enacts war
rather than how poetry responds to war. The war that appears in the first
part of Harsent’s collection makes sense within the scheme of the collec-
tion: war is an apt counterpoint, a suggestive metaphor, an arrangement
of words in relation to images, or some such poetic device.
Giving more content to the war evoked in the collection involves
assuming an extraneous burden of interpretation. It depends on the

reader to associate the poems with flesh and blood and particularities
according to her preoccupations and experiences. Appearing as it did
in the Iraq invasion period the reader of the time would have been
perfectly justified in understanding it and construing it accordingly,
but that would have been transparently the reader’s doing. In this

collection the reader can have no illusion that a specific conflict is
characterized, and the reader has to work at bringing the specifics of a
war to the poetry.
My readings
The invasion of Iraq provides the backdrop for my readings of these indi-
vidual poetry collections, and for considering them side by side. Mine
are simply one possible set of readings within the receptive field where
these collections appeared. That my readings were not out of synch at
the time can be evidenced in the numerous reviews these collections
attracted. The production of these collections were not innocent of the
Iraq invasion context either, and of their possible reception at the time.
Indeed, the collections were written, arranged, packaged and marketed
accordingly. Within the cycle of authoring, production, circulation and
reception then, these individual poetry collections illuminate various
aspects of the invasion period: the anger, anxiety, reflections, experi-
ences, detachments and so on that were distinctively concentrated
in that period with that particular ‘event’ (if that modest word conveys
the circumstances) in view. More significantly, these collections draw
the particularities of the invasion into wider circles of illuminations.
Around the focal point of the invasion these collections address expand-
ing circles of social and human concern: with everyday life, language
and translation, movements across boundaries, individuals and society,
love and anger and conflict. Ultimately, these collections embrace the
contemporary itself. Seen side by side as above, the collections supersede
the specific context of the Iraq invasion to demonstrate a range of poetic
engagements with the life, world and poetry of our times.

4
To Smash the Mirror: Theatre

Frontline drama
In his chapter on the ‘Theatre of War’ in The Great War and Modern
Memory (1975, ch. 6), Paul Fussell notes a consanguinity between the
participant’s view of warfare and of theatre: ‘Seeing warfare as theatre
provides a psychic escape for the participant: with a sufficient sense of
theatre, he can perform his duties without implicating his “real” self
and without impairing his innermost conviction that the world is still a
rational place’ (p. 192). The participant’s position provides the fulcrum
of Fussell’s discussion of theatre and the First World War from a range of
perspectives: wartime audiences escaping the reality of war by immers-
ing themselves in theatre, those with experience of war (the equivalent
of soldier-poets) writing theatrically (but not necessarily only plays),
representations of war participants in drama, the theatrical language of
war participants (particularly class-conscious British soldiers). The catch-
phrase ‘theatre of war’, in this view, is effective because it captures a
double bind of location and participation in war. On the one hand, the
war zone is like a stage and those in it become self-conscious performers
who are displaced from the everyday life of ‘real’ selves and located in
an ‘irrational place’. On the other hand, the theatre stage and actors
materialize an experience which temporarily draws audiences away from
their everyday existence and ‘real’ selves – and under those conditions
the dislocations of war can be effectively represented and conveyed,
even if war is distant or past. Of course, the same could be said of cinema
or television drama. Theatre and war zone meet in the locations and
dislocations of participation in Fussell’s view, and indeed that is the
dominant sense in which a ‘theatre of war’ is understood both in literary
terms and in the metaphorical plethora of the catch-phrase.
96

To Smash the Mirror: Theatre 97
The range of performances which may broadly be regarded as theatrical

and addressed to the Iraq invasion is enormous; according to a reviewer:
These representations range from documentary to fiction film (which

run the gamut from independent to Hollywood), from YouTube

accounts of the war by veterans and conscientious objectors to satiri-
cal musicals, and from street theatre that simulates military attacks
on Iraqi civilians to verbatim theatre that has the ‘big players’ as
characters, to testimonial performances by unembedded reporters.
(Melo 2009, p. 86)
In my discussion of theatre of the Iraq invasion period, I confine

myself to live performances involving an established theatre stage and
performers, and usually pick on those for which a text (a play-script) is
publicly available. Mine is, in other words, a rather conservatively literary
approach to the matter, assumed for reasons of economy.
Amidst the widespread determination to construct the invasion of Iraq
as ‘war’, Fussell’s sense of the ‘theatre of war’ applies to some of the plays
that fall within my remit. Plays which were concerned primarily with
the frontline, with the participants in the Iraq invasion in Iraq, appeared
early in the USA. Tim Robbins’s Embedded is the first of these, first per-
formed in the Actor’s Gang Theatre in Los Angeles in July 2003, and
then in the Public Theatre in New York in 2004. A DVD recording of the
latter has been available since May 2005. This is a satirical account of
the invasion, which focuses on: the US government officials behind it,
portrayed as cartoonish characters in masks with names like Rum Rum
and Pearly White and Woof, forming an ‘Office of Special Plans’; the
‘embedded reporters’ (on whom more soon) who slavishly presented
the war on the media in the US government’s and military’s terms, the
latter personified by Colonel Hardchannel; and the US ground soldiers,
who are presented as comparatively rounded and innocent characters.
A clear line from disaffection to sympathy is set up in that ordering of
the main agents in the play. The ‘Office of Special Plans’ is played with
hammed-up extravagance, behind the fixed-expressions of masks, on
a script full of cynical wisecracks: Rum Rum starts off a meeting with
the words, ‘We are currently sufficiently deployed, locked and loaded,
cocked and ready, chompin’ at the bit, poised for engagement, steady
ready Freddy’ (Robbins 2004). At the other end of the scale, the soldiers
are humanized and individualized, presented with initial humour and
growing pathos – they are the victims. Sean Huze, of the US Marine
Corps who was deployed in Iraq during the invasion in 2003, authored

98 Imagining Iraq
the play The Sandstorm: Stories from the Front. It was performed first at
the Gardner Stages in autumn 2004 and then at the Elephant Asylum
in spring 2005 in Hollywood, directed by David Fofi. The play fea-
tures the stories of ten soldiers, delivered in consecutive monologues.
A detailed review by Robert Litz describes the setting of the Elephant

Asylum production:
Dominating the upstage wall is a crude collage of dust-weathered

letters that provides a screen on which slides, taken by Huze and
others during their time in Iraq, are projected. […] We see the
charred remains of Iraqi civilians and soldiers, some dismembered,
some toppled in degrading heaps like so much refuse
and summarizes the monologues as follows:
These monologues are memories in progress. Each story has its own
individual twist of irony or half-glimpsed insight, but the overall
drama of the play is that of not knowing if the percolating memories
that consume these 10 young men will ultimately breed psychosis,
numbness, denial, homicide, the oblivions of addictions, or radical
salvation and private peace. […] They’re not pretty; in fact, most
are brutal anecdotes of impulsive stress and adrenalin-induced violence.
They offer no uplifting moral lessons or sentimental spins on the
fraternity of war. (Litz 2005)
Jerry Quickley, a journalist and hip hop poet, was sent by Pacifica Radio
as an ‘unembedded’ war correspondent to Iraq shortly before the invasion
began and returned to the USA shortly after. He wrote and performed
a play based on this experience, Live from the Front, first at the Ivy
Substation Theatre, Culver City, California, in May 2005, and then at
The Mark Taper Forum’s Douglas Theatre, Los Angeles, in 2006. An
extended analysis by Carla Melo gives the following description of this
one-person performance:
The delivery juxtaposes storytelling with occasional impersonations

and often shifts from past to present, turning spectators into active
witnesses to his witnessing. […] Quickley’s telling of the tale is some-
what circular in that it starts with television footage of him being
interviewed on NBC TV after his return from his first trip to the
Middle East, and then rewinds to his preparations for the journey,
followed by his arrival in Jordan and the week-long process of finally

getting into Iraq. As the narrative moves into Iraq, he reenacts his
witnessing of the bombings and the encounters with civilians he
interviewed there. The performance ends with his dramatic depor-
tation, which involves a life-threatening road trip to Jordan. This
entire account is interspersed with sections of hip-hop poetry that

relate episodes from his teenage years in New York, mixed with others
that vividly capture the horror of the attack. (Melo 2009, p. 89)
She notes particularly the manner in which Quickley was able to con-
vey his empathy for the ‘other’ – that is, the Iraqi – in terms of his own
‘otherness’ as belonging to the black minority in the USA (pp. 90–3). The
scripts of Robbins’s, Huze’s and Quickley’s plays are unpublished at the
time of my writing this (January 2010).
Several successful dramatic productions touching on the frontline
appeared in the UK: Jonathan Lichtenstein’s The Pull of Negative Gravity
(2004), Simon Stephens’s Motortown (2006), Gregory Burke’s Black Watch
(2006) and Roy Williams’s Days of Significance (2007). The Pull of Negative
Gravity was first performed by the Mercury Theatre Company at the
Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, directed by Gregory Thompson, in August
2004. It describes the devastating effects of the return of a soldier Dai
from the Iraq frontline, partially paralysed in a wheelchair, to his family in
a failing Welsh farmstead – brother Rhys, mother Vi and fiancée Bethan.
The horrors Dai has witnessed, and perhaps perpetrated, in Iraq are
hinted at by his inability to describe what he has seen: at one point, in a
moment of frustration, all he is able to come up with is a stream of exple-
tives (Lichtenstein 2004, p. 61). Though Bethan marries Dai she finds
herself unable to shake off a growing revulsion for him, and is drawn
towards an unresponsive Rhys. By the end of the play Dai’s mother Vi
helps him commit suicide and withdraws into herself, the farmstead has
to be sold off, Rhys settles elsewhere and Bethan kills herself. Another
soldier returns to England from the invasion frontline at Basra with
unhappy consequences in Simon Stephen’s Motortown, first performed
on 21 April 2006 at the Royal Court Jerwood Theatre, London, directed
by Ramin Gray. When the play was released Stephens caused controversy
by observing that:
I was confused by why I felt nervous about the anti-war campaign

and the marches on Hyde Park. I was confused by why I felt angry
about the moral didacticism of that campaign’s spokespeople. I was
confused about why I felt more sympathy towards Fusilier Gary
Bartlam, convicted in Osnabruck of several unspecified crimes in his

100 Imagining Iraq
dealings with Iraqi prisoners, than I felt for Harold Pinter or Damon
Albarn. It was especially confusing when many of their arguments
resonated with sense. (Stephens 2006a)
This, however, was clearly not a pro-invasion sentiment but an expres-

sion of scepticism about the possibility of moral certainty on either or any
side – which Motortown was meant to convey. The returning soldier
here is Danny, whose time in Iraq has evidently transformed him into
a deeply troubled and at times psychotic personality. While finding
shelter with his gay younger brother Lee, he is estranged from his
former girlfriend and parents, and feels that it is the environment in
England which has changed rather than him. His alienation from his
homeland is reflected, interestingly, by the philosophical gunsmith
Paul who activates a deactivated gun which Danny has acquired. Paul’s
views (Stephens 2006b, scene 4) express a detached and bleak cynicism,
in some ways the opposite of Danny’s inarticulate feeling of being out-
of-place and desire for belonging – and yet Paul’s and Danny’s sense of
their environment also chime with each other’s. With the reactivated
gun Danny goes off on a violent spree, commits a gratuitous murder
(perhaps more than one), and finally finds solace with his brother Lee.
Gregory Burke’s Black Watch, was first performed at the Drill Hall, Forest
Hill, in Edinburgh in August 2006. The play presents the experience of
soldiers, interviewed by the author, of the eponymous Scottish regi-
ment which was deployed in Iraq in October 2004 (after the Coalition
Provisional Authority was dismantled). Their time in Iraq coincided with
moves towards amalgamating the regiment with four others, which
happened in 2006. Given these circumstances, the invasion of Iraq is
naturally portrayed with a sense of doom. The main characters of the play
are aware of the unpopularity of this war, are conscious of being per-
ceived as ‘big bullies’, and are shown at the end as variously traumatized
or disenchanted. The performance consists of scenes where the ‘Writer’
interviews the characters, interrupted by scenes where the characters are
shown in Iraq, and interspersed with song and dance routines depicting
the ritual and historical aspects of the regiment. The locale of Iraq is
contained almost entirely in the feeling of despair and physical discom-
fort that the soldiers experience: they feel let down by the Americans,
experience the grief of friends dying, meet embedded journalists, and
suffer from the heat and bouts of cynicism. When the ‘Writer’ asks about
contact with Iraqis, one of the characters, Stewarty, responds: ‘What
the fuck have the fucking Iraqis got tay fucking day way anything?’
(Burke 2007, p. 46). Amidst largely celebratory reviews, an essay by

David Archibald (2008) argued that the play depicted the invasion as
an aberration in the regiment’s official history, whereas actually the
regiment had been involved in many of Britain’s unsavoury imperial
and neo-imperial exploits (especially in Ireland). Roy Williams’s Days of
Significance (2007) premiered at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon,

on 10 January 2007, directed by Maria Aberg. It is in three acts: the first
follows a group of youngsters on a drunken pub crawl ‘somewhere in
the South East of England’, of whom two (Ben and Jamie) are due to
head off to Iraq as soldiers; and the second is set in Basra, charting the
experiences of Ben and two of his mates (Ben, it appears, ‘opened fire
on a group of unarmed kids’, p. 65, and one of his wounded colleagues
commits suicide). The third act, a series of fragmentary conversations,
brings the audience back to England – it turns out Ben died in Iraq,
Jamie is indicted for torturing Iraqi prisoners (vividly described by
him, p. 95), and his lover Hannah is torn between loyalty and revulsion.
Here Ben’s friend, the intellectual Dan, eloquently expresses the informed
anger of public opinion about the invasion. Paradoxically, at the same
time – and as in Stephens’s Motortown – a tacit connection is suggested
between life in Britain and the experience of invading Iraq. The violence
that British soldiers engage in there (both the main characters on the
frontline are implicated in war crimes) appears as an intensification of
the everyday violence that simmers in England, evident in the drink
culture and abrasiveness of the first act. The inspiration of Shakespeare’s
Much Ado About Nothing which underlies this, especially in the structuring
of the first act, is obviously ironic: the possibility of love is doubtful to
begin with and wiped out by the last.
This brief excursus into plays about, directly or indirectly, the battle
zone of the Iraq invasion indicates how the frontline was presented
to and apprehended within the civil sphere of the USA and UK. Drama
in relation to war is predominantly understood, as I observed at the
beginning, as revolving around participants in war. The invasion of Iraq,
though not quite war, is presented as war in the above by following the
theatrical conventions of frontline drama, by focalizing the frontline
and the participants of invasion there. At the same time these plays, in
different ways, self-consciously reflect on the mediation between the
military and the civil, the frontline and the ‘home’, the military experience
and the civilian perception. At times – as in Quickley’s, Lichtenstein’s and
Williams’s plays – this is a painful mediation, more interrogative than
certain. The manner in which the Iraq invasion was constructed as ‘war’ in
literary terms can be discerned clearly between such representations of the
frontline and self-reflexive mediations between the military and civil.

102 Imagining Iraq
More importantly, as conventional war drama concerned with the

participants in the invasion there are two interesting points to note. First,
the above evidence a sort of self-absorption amongst the active British
and American participants. Irrespective of whether the conflict is implic-
itly denounced or accepted, and irrespective of how the quotients of

tragedy and bitterness and courage and integrity are balanced, these are
plays about soldiers. Variously, US and UK soldiers are represented as or
represent themselves as victims or heroes, these soldiers speak on their
own and others’ behalf and are spoken of, and the civil sphere is pre-
sented as a field which revolves around the soldier protagonists. They
form the core around which others speak or are silenced. American
and British civilians appear as a troubled circle of family and friends,
or as caricatured or distant villains in the corridors of power, or as the
abstract demos in the background. Iraqi soldiers and civilians are regis-
tered distantly through reported speech and images, as a remote outer
horizon even of the frontline that is brought to view. Almost inevitably,
contemplating ‘soldiers at war’ – especially ‘our soldiers’ – comes with
normative sentiments and sympathies which undermine the possibilities
of critique.
Second, some of the above plays demonstrate that in the Iraq invasion
context specifically the concept of participants shifted in an unprecedented
direction with powerful implications for writing about and representing
‘war’ generally – and obviously the invasion particularly. This has to do
with the so-called ‘embedded reporters’ as a new kind of participant,
gaining a status that is close to and sometimes continuous with that
of soldiers. Let me be clear about this. As long as there has been mass
media reporting on war there have been reporters who attached them-
selves to units of soldiers and reported accordingly. But an illusion had
consistently been maintained that reporting comes from independent
observers, not participants: that reporters speak for the interests of
their media employers and of the news-consuming public. During the
Iraq invasion this illusion was explicitly punctured by contractually
attaching reporters to military units, by formalizing the relationship of
military as information source and media as concordant information
channel, and by the very designation of ‘embedded reporters’ as such.
Embedded reporting has since become a media catch-phrase, the theme
of numerous academic projects and papers (such as a BBC-funded
project at Cardiff University in June–October 2003 and consequent
book by Lewis et al., Shoot First and Ask Questions Later, 2006), disturb-
ing documentaries examining this development (e.g. Control Room,
directed by Jehane Noujaim in 2004, and War Made Easy, directed by

Loretta Alper and Jeremy Earp in 2007), and collections of interviews

(such as Kavotsky and Carlson, eds, Embedded, 2003) and novels (e.g.
Nicholas Kulish’s Last One in (P.S.), 2007). They are a key theme in Tim
Robbins’s play, and lurk behind or make cameo appearances in Gregory
Burke’s and Jerry Quickley’s. In the first chapter I listed some of the books

written on the invasion by embedded reporters. Effectively, the business
of representing and writing the invasion particularly and war generally
for the media and beyond became a professionally ratified collaboration
between military and journalists – competing with the comparatively free-
wheeling testimony writings of veterans and ‘unembedded’ journalists
like Jerry Quickley (bringing the latter a distinctive cachet). Effectively
also, the reporter (the writer) also became a visible participant in the war
on a similar footing as a soldier – distinct from observers, and thematized
as participants. The theatre of war has found a new kind of visible actor,
who materializes by and through writing and representation.
So much then for theatre from the frontline. Such theatre was a matter
of representing the frontline within the civil sphere: in the above plays,
for bringing the frontline into the distant homes in the USA and UK. But
that effort was coeval with and to some extent circumscribed by a range of
other such efforts, especially a powerful mass media effort. Indeed, in the
civil sphere the material and violent invasion on the frontline was a con-
crete manifestation of a broader reflexive sense of invasion. In an imme-
diately relevant way, there was the invasion of media representations of
the frontline within domestic spaces. This could be regarded as an inten-
sification of global media circulations that are a continuum in modern
society, wherein distant realities are constructed in definite ways, framed
and rendered consumable, and disposed as virtually real. The mechanics
of these circulations in conflict situations were trenchantly examined in
the context of the First Gulf War (e.g. Jean Baudrillard 1995 [1991], for
instance, and Martin Shaw 1996), and the trend merely seemed to take a
larger-scale but similar direction during the invasion. As Nicholas Mirzoeff
observed about images from the 2003 frontline in the USA:
In the Second Gulf War, more images were created to less effect
than in any other period in human history. […] For all the constant
circulation of images, there was still nothing to see. The relative
anonymity of the war images must then be understood as a direct
consequence of the media saturation. (Mirzoeff 2005, p. 67)
However, in the civil sphere the whole perception of invasion was

considerably more complicated. To begin with, it wasn’t confined

104 Imagining Iraq
simply to the frontline defined by the incursion into, and take-over

and occupation of Iraq by primarily US and UK troops. It was rather
apprehended as such from before the military action and well into the
continuing violence in Iraq after the Coalition Provisional Authority
withdrew in 2004. And it wasn’t understood merely as a frontline at all in

the sense of the position of the highlighted participants of invasion – the
soldiers and embedded reporters; it was grasped instead as an invasion
into the multiple and complex area of Iraqi civil society at large – by
intent, and in consequences and effects. Further, the invasion was also
understood as reflexively within the home-fronts and indeed on the
home-fronts in various ways: as an invasion of neoconservative values
in Western society, an invasion of fear and guilt in ‘our’ secure and
democratic existence, an invasion of security measures on habitual
freedoms, an invasion upon the lives of minorities within ‘our’ domain,
and invasion of discord upon the accords of everyday and domestic and
social spaces. Occasionally, the invasion of Iraq translated into invasion
on broad global concerns: an invasion on human rights, international
agreements and juridical principals, etc. Within this complex civil sense
of the invasion of Iraq, images of invasion did eventually have an impact:
the photographs of torture and abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American and
British soldiers certainly did, for instance. It is within this matrix of the
civil sense of the invasion of Iraq that theatre of the period was more
distinctively engaged than the above theatre from the frontline.
In fact, the buzz of theatre of the invasion peaked in the first instance
amidst the anti-invasion protests in the USA and UK and elsewhere
before the invasion formally began. Before the bombing was launched,
all those other broader nuances of invasion were already amply felt and
responded to, often in performance. To convey a sense of this, consider
the theatre repertoire of London in early 2003, in its established spaces.
From January 2003 the satirical musical play The Madness of George
Dubya, written and directed by Justin Butcher, was performed to packed
houses at the fringe Theatro Technic. Inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s
cult film Dr Strangelove (1964), this showed the eponymous president
in a bunker, pyjama-clad and with a teddy bear for consolation, as
the only haplessly sane person who is concerned about the ‘war on
tourism’. When the mad General Kipper launches a nuclear attack on
‘Iraqistan’ from a British base, he and Blair try ineptly to find ways to
stop Armageddon. The play was updated every night with new jokes
and songs as news of debates about invading Iraq broke. By April, the
show moved to the West End’s Arts Theatre. By April, too, there were
anti-invasion performances taking place in various London venues.

The Royal Court held a Shock and Awe week (7–12 April 2003), which
included plays by Martin Crimp (Advice to Iraqi Women, a short piece
read by Stephen Dillane and Sophie Okenedo) and Rebecca Prichard
(Delir’ium), Tony Harrison’s reading of Iraquatrians, and some lectures.
Crimp’s short play drew particular attention. Apparently a series of state-

ments addressed to Iraqi women, of the sort that are often issued about
protecting children in a risk-driven consumer society, the play acquires
a particularly eerie quality in view of the contemplated military invasion
(for an extract, see Crimp 2003). The National Theatre was the venue of
a Friday afternoon series called Collateral Damage, over March and April
2003, in which artists responded to the invasion.
Similar reactive or responsive performances addressed to the invasion
were taking place numerously in other cities in the UK and USA and
elsewhere before the invasion. More reflexive theatre appeared after a lull
that followed with the undertaking of the invasion and occupation itself.
The following sections trace some of the patterns that became manifest
in theatre about the invasion in relation to the civil sphere thereafter.
Record of reality
Theatre is probably the cultural form which has been most explicitly
and persistently used to understand the relation between reality and
artifice. This has been particularly delved since the self-consciously
modernist late nineteenth century, and at various levels. The relation-
ship of theatre to social reality was explored in ‘history plays’ and
‘problem plays’ and ‘kitchen-sink drama’; the illusion of theatre and the
reality of the stage have been juggled suggestively against each other in
modern ‘anti-theatricalist theatrical plays’ and in ‘absurd drama’ (often
leading into searching philosophical explorations of reality); both social
reality and the ontological reality of the stage have been played with
in ‘naturalist drama’ and most influentially in ‘epic drama’; and so on.
Each of those phrases in quotation marks has become critical shorthand
both for particular historically specific notions of theatrical produc-
tion and reception as well as for modes of theorizing theatre’s relation
to the world. Leading up to our contemporary ethos, and keeping in
view developments in audio-visual and broadcasting technologies,
further such critical phrases have acquired new or renewed currency:
‘documentary drama’, ‘testimony theatre’, ‘verbatim theatre’, ‘tribunal
theatre’. The nuances of the latter were played out in indicative ways
in theatrical engagements with the invasion of Iraq within the civil
sphere – indicative, that is, of contemporary understandings of theatre

106 Imagining Iraq
and social reality and philosophical reality. None of those latter phrases
(or the kind of theatre they refer to) originated in the Iraq invasion
period. But plays of the period that appeared under those labels pushed
the boundaries of theatre’s relationship to perceived reality in ways
which seem to me to characterize distinctively contemporary attitudes.

These are plays which, in different ways, are about the invasion and of
the civil sphere. Seen together, they reveal underlying preconceptions
of reality in theatre which constitute our sense of the contemporary.
I have three such in mind – descriptions of these lead into a discussion
of the broad preconceptions of reality underpinning them: Richard
Norton-Taylor’s Justifying War: Scenes from the Hutton Inquiry, first per-
formed at the Tricycle Theatre, London, from 30 October 2003, directed
by Nicholas Kent and Charlotte Westenra; Victoria Brittain and Gillian
Slovo’s Guantanamo: ‘Honor Bound to Defend Freedom’, first performed
also at the Tricycle Theatre from 20 May 2004, directed by Nicholas
Kent and Sacha Wares; and David Hare’s Stuff Happens, first performed
at the National Theatre, London, from 1 September 2004, directed by
Nicholas Hytner.
Hare’s Stuff Happens charts the public and closed-door negotiations
conducted by the instigators of the invasion of Iraq – the Bush admin-
istration mainly with Tony Blair’s government as principal ally – from
the US National Security Council meeting of 30 January 2001 to the
apparent end of the invasion in April 2003 and (sketchily) the immediate
aftermath in 2003 and 2004. Much of the play uses reported statements
by or records of meetings involving public figures like George Bush,
Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Condoleeza Rice, Dick
Cheney, Tony Blair, Jack Straw, Alastair Campbell and others. Information
gleaned from the news media, government records, United Nations
records, dossiers, statistical data provided by various bodies, and so on
figure in the play. Plausible reconstructions of closed-door discussions
which are known to have taken place are offered at times. Interludes
from the factual or reported are provided in the form of soliloquies by, in
that order, an ‘angry journalist’, a ‘New Labour politician’, a ‘Palestinian
academic’, a ‘Brit in New York’ and an ‘Iraqi exile’. These soliloquies are
designed to advocate for different retrospective positions on the invasion,
for and against it. These are therefore not within the chronological track-
ing that the play follows, but meant to be delivered as looking back from
the ‘present’ in which the play is performed – first in 2004, and then
updated for performance in 2006. ‘An Actor’ provides a voice-over, to
clarify the sequence of scenes and statements which appeared over three
years and to fill gaps.

Brittain and Slovo’s Guantanamo is drawn from interviews with

(conducted by the authors in March–April 2004) and letters from men, all
British citizens, who were detained as ‘terrorist suspects’ in the US-run
prison camp in Guantanamo, Cuba, and their family members. They
were detained from various parts of the world – Gambia, Afghanistan,

Pakistan – and were released after two years or more without charge in
2004 and 2005. The prisoners’ experiences as documented in the play
cover roughly a period from 2002 to 2004. The accounts of the prisoners
and their family members are broken down and spliced together, or
presented as interwoven bits of concurrent narratives rather than as
consecutively presented discrete narratives. These are ‘framed’ by state-
ments from press statements and reported interviews with the then
US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and UK Foreign Secretary
Jack Straw, and quotations from lectures and statements by the legal rep-
resentatives of the prisoners, a British Law Lord (Johan Steyn), human
rights activists (Mark Jennings, Clive Stafford Smith), and Tom Clark,
a British victim of the 9 September 2001 terrorist attack in New York
(whose sister was killed there, and who finds himself troubled by the
Guantanamo detentions). The undermining of basic juridical principles
and contravention of human rights in the detention of ‘terrorist suspects’
and ‘non-military combatants’ who are not US citizens at Guantanamo
Bay, and the manner in which their cases are processed by a US Military
Tribunal without independent legal representation, has been widely
debated since 2001. Brittain and Slovo’s play was intended to be and
received as a contribution to that debate. The play extrapolated from,
as Brittain observed in a write-up on its background, 25 hours of tape-
recorded interviews (Brittain 2004).
The public transcripts of the 2003 hearing by Law Lord Brian Hutton
to investigate the circumstances of the death of David Kelly provided
all the material for Norton-Taylor’s Justifying War. Though widely discussed
in the British media at the time, the details of this context were indif-
ferently registered outside the UK and are beginning to fade from the
collective memory within – so a brief account is useful. The first of
three public dossiers by the British government to justify the invasion
of Iraq was entitled Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Assessment
of the British Government and released on 24 September 2004. This
carried, amongst other information, the claim that the Iraqi military was
in a position to launch a missile attack on the UK within 45 minutes of
an order being given. This was highlighted in the media at the time.
Starting with a 29 May 2003 report on BBC’s Today programme by
defence correspondent Andrew Gilligan, a series of media reports

108 Imagining Iraq
revealed that a source (‘mole’ was the media-friendly term in use) from
the British intelligence services had both questioned the validity of
the 45-minute claim, and suggested that the dossier had been unwar-
rantably ‘sexed up’ by the Prime Minister’s office. Vehement denials,
particularly by the Prime Minister’s Communications Director Alastair

Campbell, was followed by the ‘outing’ of the ‘mole’ – biological and
chemical weapons specialist David Kelly. This was widely regarded
as engineered in a vindictive spirit by Campbell’s office, since it had
revealed enough information about the source in a press conference for
journalists to be able to infer his identity and had then proceeded to
confirm any inference that proved to be correct. After several internal
hearings and amidst intense media scrutiny, Kelly was found dead in
mysterious circumstances (the evidence pointed to suicide) on 18 July
2003. By this time it was evident that the ‘weapons of mass destruction’
which had been cited to justify the invasion couldn’t be found in Iraq,
and the integrity of the other dossiers had also been undermined (for a
detailed discussion of the dossiers and controversies surrounding them,
see Gupta 2007, ch. 9). Brian Hutton was appointed to lead an inde-
pendent investigation into the circumstances of Kelly’s death by the
government on 18 July 2003. But the investigation was really regarded
as much more than simply that: it was thought of as an investigation
into the veracity of the September 2003 dossier and the UK govern-
ment’s conduct generally in the lead-up to the invasion. The Hutton
Inquiry heard 75 witnesses in August–September 2003, and came up
with its findings in a report released on 28 January 2004. The findings,
widely regarded as a ‘whitewash’, were that no wrong-doing was found
on the part of the government in putting together the dossier or ‘out-
ing’ Kelly, that the reporters who broke the story had not observed the
proprieties of reporting, and that Kelly was responsible for breaking an
official code of silence. Norton-Taylor’s play appeared immediately after
the hearings, and well before Hutton’s report was released in January
2004. The timing is crucial for understanding both its intent and its
reception. It selects and presents from the transcripts of 12 witnesses
of the 75, and every word is taken from the transcripts (though some
detailed exchanges are shorn off for clarity). Each session with a witness
is presented as a scene. Amongst those whose testimonies are covered in
the play are the BBC correspondent Andrew Gilligan, Alastair Campbell,
Secretary of State for Defence at the time Geoff Hoon, Kelly’s colleague
Brian Jones, and Kelly’s wife Janice Kelly. As Norton-Taylor observed
in his write-up on the background to the play, the ‘real challenge’
was: ‘how to boil down six weeks of oral evidence into a little over

two hours. The problem was not what to put in, but what to take out’
(Norton-Taylor 2003a).
Though in these three plays every effort was perceivably made to
establish clear continuities between the play-script and real-world sources,
they were obviously compressed, massaged, added to or subtracted from,

and arranged for performance – with conventional time-limits and stage
constraints and linguistic/performative effects in mind. Some of the
nuances of the plays in performance also need to be noted. In Hytner’s
National Theatre, London, production of Stuff Happens the entire cast
was present throughout on a large and almost bare stage (with furniture
props). Performers rose to deliver their lines and had the focal point on
the stage marked by lights. In the comparatively smaller space at the
Public Theatre in New York, where it was directed by Daniel Sullivan
from 28 March 2006, the cast was placed in the corridor dividing the
audience leading up to the stage, and walked on to the stage to per-
form their parts. The different ways in which audience perspective
was placed – looking from a distance at the play or seeing the play as
flowing out from the audience space – could be regarded as different
modes of approaching the historical ‘reality’ it was presenting. From
either perspective, though, the effect was of registering the staginess of
the stage (foregrounding an awareness of the presence of performers and
the performance space) as a counterpoint to the real-world events being
depicted. The ‘performativeness’ of the productions was at times curi-
ously put into perspective by the interventions of ‘An Actor’, whose
linkage-providing role has been noted above. It isn’t simply background
information to fill the gaps that ‘An Actor’ provides; he also introduces
the character that a performer steps forward to play, notes time and
location when necessary, and even announces the directions for ges-
tures that the performer then performs. In other words, ‘An Actor’ both
gives background information and voices the stage directions that are
usually silent – in a way becomes the voice of theatre itself. Kent and
Ware’s production of Guantanamo at the Tricycle Theatre, London, had
a reconstruction of the sterile cages in the prison camp as the backdrop,
and the prisoners’ striking orange costumes provided the only splash of
colour. There was no action and little movement in the performance;
the effect of the play was dependent on oratory, i.e. almost entirely on
direct address to the audience. The very structure of the play – focusing
on characters speaking to the audience – leads into a double-edged
strategy for performance: on the one hand, establishing the closeness
of direct address and the exposure of full attention to the speaker, and
on the other hand, maintaining distance from the experience which is

110 Imagining Iraq
reported and the setting of which is symbolized by the cages behind the
speakers. The characters portrayed, in other words, appear to occupy a
middle ground between the immediacy of the theatre and the distance
of the actualities it refers to. This middle-ground was emphasized by the
ambivalent manner in which the play itself concluded, described thus

by a reviewer:
for me, the most powerful moment came at the play’s end, when
the audience realized that there would not be a curtain call, that the
actors would remain in their roles, onstage in their cages and on their
cots. The audience hesitated, not sure of when or whether to clap,
and then quietly exited the theatre. The ending therefore undercut
any sense of traditional catharsis that one might expect from drama.
(Hesford 2006, p. 39)
In the performances of Stuff Happens and of Guantanamo ‘alienation

effects’ reminiscent of Brechtian theatre served to create a reflexive
distance for the audience, putting into perspective both theatre itself
and the social reality that the plays derive from and refer to. Using
a different tactic, the setting of Kent and Westenra’s production of
Justifying War, also at the Tricycle Theatre, attempted to create a setting
that emulated the original setting of the Hutton Inquiry as closely
as possible – an official impersonal setting. The intention here was
obviously to create a fly-on-the-wall experience for the audience, in a
naturalistic manner. And this was reflected in the performances too. As
Norton-Taylor observed in his background write-up:
We wanted as much verisimilitude as possible. Though the actors

are playing the parts of real, identified, individuals, they are not
impersonating in the usual meaning of the word. They are getting
as close to the real characters they play as possible – some came to
the inquiry. We were all aware of the dangers of caricature. (Norton-
Taylor 2003a)
The fact that some of the actors attended the Inquiry is indicative of
the intent of the production. Norton-Taylor had himself been one of the
witnesses who testified in the Hutton Inquiry.
In text and performance then, these plays conducted a subtle nego-
tiation between representing a perceivable social reality – a pressing
and already avidly engaged set of real-world events – and at the same
time foregrounded the means of representation as theatre. In doing this

the plays drew upon the resources of theatre’s history of self-conscious

development vis-à-vis perceptions of social reality. So far in these obser-
vations there isn’t much new food for thought. But things become
complicated when further circumstances of their production and recep-
tion in the pressured context of the Iraq invasion are registered. As

I have often noted already, this was a period that was so preoccupied
with the invasion that any literary expression that alluded to any
aspect of it tended to get sucked into the advocacies and anxieties of
the time – became part of the great flow of talking about the reality of the
invasion. These plays were studiedly put forward to get sucked in; they
were designed as interventions into the political ethos of invasion. The
productions and receptions explicitly framed these plays as such, as
timely interventions in and aspects of social reality. In the process these
plays not only enabled reflection on theatre’s relation to politics and
social reality (under the existing critical rubrics of ‘documentary drama’,
‘tribunal drama’, ‘testimony plays’, ‘verbatim plays’) but also pushed
towards contemplation of contemporary social reality as theatre. These
plays, in their invasion context, invited reconsideration of the nature of
contemporary social reality itself.
What I mean by that should become clearer as the imperatives of
production and reception are unwound further, and the pressures on
representation teased out further. Interestingly, the playwrights, though
not performers in their plays, performed roles before and around and
after the plays that exceeded that of the ‘literary author’. The role of the
‘literary author’ has arguably always been routinely performed around
literary texts and productions in a variety of ways, and doesn’t simply
consist in being recognized and having legal prerogatives as such. The
practices of this role have come to be increasingly managed by media
and cultural industries and publicity agencies – itself the subject of several
studies (see, for instance, Coombe 1998; English 2005; Glass 2004). So,
the playwrights received the usual attention as authors in introduc-
ing their published/performed texts, in media coverage and interviews
and statements on their own work, in publicity material, in reviews, in
scholarly responses, and so on. In these instances though, such public
performance of the role of being ‘literary authors’ (playwrights) was
layered with the performance of other and coincident institutional roles
(as academics, as journalists, etc.). Or rather, the authority of literary
authorship was itself apparently derived from the performance of other
kinds of authorial roles. Let me try to phrase that differently for clarity.
The status of literary authorship is conferred by the evidence of a liter-
ary text, but the status of certain other kinds of authorship (academic,

112 Imagining Iraq
journalistic) comes from the institutional standing and professional

experience of the author which is brought to and evidenced in the text.
For the three plays in question here, the play-script and performances
seemed to conform not only to the literary credentials of their play-
wrights, but also their credentials as other kinds of professionals – as

academics or journalists – irrespective of whether they actually have
such institutional or professional standing, mainly by their performing
such a professional claim. Indeed their literary credentials seemed to derive
from their claim of being more than literary authors. The equivocal
‘Author’s Note’ for the published Stuff Happens makes the two kinds
of layering of author-ity explicit. It announces the raison d’être of its
authoring, production and reception thus:
Stuff Happens is a history play, which happens to centre on very recent

history. The events within it have been authenticated from multiple
sources, both private and public. What happened happened. Nothing
in the narrative is knowingly untrue. Scenes of direct address quote
people verbatim. When the doors close on the world’s leaders and on
their entourages, then I have used my imagination. This is surely a
play, not a documentary, and driven, I hope, by its themes as much
as by its characters and story. (Hare 2006 [2004], prelim page)
The first sentence offers the complex formulation of the ‘history play’,
which, for many, would immediately evoke the Shakespearian genre.
The following four sentences make an emphatic academic claim for
the play which is removed from any current sense of the content of
Shakespeare’s history plays. Hare suggests that the text follows the
conventions of scholarly history: drawn from multiple sources, authen-
ticated, ‘verbatim’ as academic quotations must be. Equally emphati-
cally, the latter two sentences then take this text to the antipode of
theatre as artifice. This is done with a nod towards ‘verbatim theatre’
and ‘documentary drama’, but keeping the text at arm’s length from
such in-between forms. Hare’s ‘history play’ is a fusion, he makes out,
between two contrary registers without any compromise between them:
the register of academic history, and the register of theatrical making
and structuring.
Brittain (more vocal than Slovo) and Norton-Taylor made almost
no claim for the literary aspect of author-ity apropos their plays, and
unproblematically claimed professional/investigative authority. Indeed
the latter superseded to the degree of deliberately erasing the former.
Brittain’s write-up in The Guardian when the play opened came in the

voice of an ethnographer (or field researcher) entering exotic and

troubled precincts:
Gillian Slovo and I travelled from London to Manchester, Birmingham,

Tipton and Leeds, meeting families originally from Jamaica, St Lucia,

Iraq, Jordan, Pakistan and Bangladesh. For three weeks, we totally
immersed ourselves in the realities of life for the families of British
detainees in Guantanamo. […] We usually met just one family
member, always in their choice of territory: in pubs, hotel bars,
impeccable sitting rooms, in rooms that doubled as bedrooms, in
lawyers’ offices, in the Tricycle’s rehearsal rooms. They gave us tea,
or wonderful Indian sweets, a baby to hold or a lift to the station.
There were no prepared questions. We wanted the families to decide
what they most wanted to say. (Brittain 2004)
Elsewhere and later she has commented on the play from the position
of a human rights and feminist activist, summarizing the play thus:
Among the major themes that arise from it are: the U.S. readiness to
flout all international legal norms; the politicization of the U.S. legal
system; the effective acceptance of torture as a tool for U.S. aims, car-
ried out both by the United States and by various allied regimes on
behalf of the United States; the impact of this within U.S. society; the
assault on civil liberties by governments around the world; the demoni-
zation of Muslim men by Western governments, media, and societies;
the resistance strategies of Muslim women; and the inevitable effects
on the next generation of Muslim children. (Brittain 2006, p. 209)
The essay quoted here went on to consider the implications of the absence
of Muslim female voices from the play, and how the play has encouraged
Muslim women to speak of their experiences after its initial performances.
Norton-Taylor is as well-known for having written a series of what the
Tricycle Theatre regards as ‘tribunal plays’ in the mould of Justifying War
as for his reports in The Guardian as Security Affairs editor. His reports
on various aspects of the invasion of Iraq were widely read at the time. In
introducing the play in The Guardian when it opened, Norton-Taylor fore-
grounded his authorial role as a journalist rather than as a playwright, com-
menting therefore both on differences and similarities between the roles:
The craft, the instinct, of the daily newspaper or broadcast journal-

ist is to seize on the most striking revelations – i.e., news – using a

114 Imagining Iraq
free range of epithets to drive home the point and then adding as
much context as required. Each day is different and not necessar-
ily connected. The value of a play is that you can put together in
a single piece of work what, on the face of it, might seem a simple
enough disclosure-a-day saga, but which, in fact, is much more

complicated.
And on the similarity of purpose: ‘theatre is a medium, complementary

to newspapers, which by capturing a different kind of audience, or a
similar audience in a different way, can lead to a greater understand-
ing of how we are governed and what is being said and done on our
behalf’ (Norton-Taylor 2003a). The play is presented, in other words, as
emanating from the experience of a journalist and serving the purposes
of journalism in a different form.
Such authorial claims of academic or journalistic authenticity, at
the expense of literary claims, were embraced wholeheartedly in the
immediate response to the plays. If the authors performed their parts
around the plays as academics and journalists who write the real social
world, then the recipients of the plays equally performed their part in
accepting them accordingly. The perceived social reality of the invasion
period was the measure by which the plays were assessed in a variety
of ways, and in many instances the plays were simply taken a priori
as records of social reality. Indicatively, the first set of responses to
Stuff Happens published in The Guardian came not from literature and
theatre reviewers at all. A 3 September 2003 feature in the broadsheet
entitled ‘For or Against?’ sought responses from Labour MP Robin Cook
(who had resigned from the Cabinet in protest against the invasion),
former weapons inspector Scott Ritter, BBC governor Gavyn Davis,
Conservative MP Ann Widdecombe, army officer Tim Collins and
others in a spirit of using the play to reflect their concerns about the
invasion itself. Their responses predictably conflated the two, and drew
upon their institutional and ideological positions. Reviewers and critics
naturally took recourse to extant formulations of ‘history plays’, ‘tribunal
theatre’, ‘verbatim theatre’, ‘documentary drama’ and so on to say their
pieces, and yet these all too often either minimized attention to the
theatre or uncomplicatedly took the correlation of theatre and reality
for granted (with normative comments about the one becoming norma-
tive comments about the other). Sometimes they themselves doubted
whether it was theatre they were dealing with. In relation to both Stuff
Happens and Justifying War the obvious preoccupation of reviewers was
whether characterizations and performers measured up to the familiar

public figures depicted and the roles those public figures played in the
invasion period. For Justifying War the assertion of verisimilitude was so
strong that for some reviewers it caused unease. As the reviewer in The
Independent observed: ‘the theatrical vehicle is troubling in being akin to
the real-life content in this case. […] This is surely dodgy ground when

some of the protagonists’ careers (if not their lives) could be on the line’
(Bassett 2003). Stuff Happens received more considered critical responses
after the spate of initial reviewing, and these also occasionally took
the social reality represented more seriously than its theatrical devices.
Soto-Morettini, for instance, examined the play’s claim to being history
seriously and at length, and even discerned a Romantic view of history
that it subscribed to. Hare was charged with writing history with the
following preconceptions:
1. History is, by and large, about the clash of personalities repre-

sented by powerful men. The motor force of history is carried within
these great men.
2. Historical action is for the most part reasoned action, proceeding
from debate and consideration between great men – but implementa-
tion still belongs to those with the might to underpin their will.
3. Great men are flawed but they act in good faith.
4. History is determined by force of individual will. (Soto-Morettini
2005, p. 316)
The further the critics were removed from the immediacies of the
Iraq invasion perspective, though, the more sensitive they seemed to
become to the theatrical devices of Stuff Happens. Thus, Christopher
Innes’s reading generally accepted the designation of Stuff Happens as a
‘documentary drama’ before charting out some of the ‘Brechtian elements’
in it (Innes 2007, pp. 443–4); and Elizabeth Kuti went on to analyse the
play as a tragedy with a concordant dramatic structure and linguistic
devices, and at one point noted firmly that, ‘What the scene captures
is not historical truth per se – how could it? This is a play’ (Kuti 2008,
p. 465). The receptive construction of the social reality of Guantanamo,
and relative neglect of its theatricality, was even more consistent. Initial
reviews actually seemed to wish to draw it into the space where public
documents and news reports and academic papers are discussed. Both
reviewers in The Independent (Paul Taylor 2004 and Raymond Whitaker
2004), for instance, felt that the play almost serves the purpose of the
tribunal that the victims of unreasonable detention in Guantanamo
Bay will never have. Some felt unhappy that they couldn’t enter into

116 Imagining Iraq
some kind of immediate dialogue with what the play seemed to be

‘saying’: Ryan Claycomb, for example, complained that ‘the production
assumed a passive, guilty audience, rather than one ready to be drawn
into a conversation or rallied into action’ (Claycomb 2006, p. 705). The
play was placed alongside factual accounts and images by reviewers:

Barbara Harlow’s (2006) review covered it alongside academic books like
Paul Farmer’s Pathologies of Power (2005) and Philippe Sands’s Lawless
World (2005), and Wendy S. Hesford (2006) discussed it alongside an
exhibition of the real-life images of torture of Iraqi prisoners entitled
Inconvenient Evidence: Iraqi Prison Photographs from Abu Ghraib, which ran
at the International Center for Photography, New York, in 2004. Brittain
and Slovo’s Guantanamo appeared to become one document amidst
a continuing flow of documents charting and campaigning against
human rights abuses in Guantanamo Bay particularly, and the Iraq inva-
sion period generally – gesturing forward towards Brittain’s book-length
account with Moazzam Begg of his experiences as a detainee, Enemy
Combatant (2006), and the docudrama Road to Guantanamo (2006)
directed by Michael Winterbottom.
These plays appeared within the Iraq invasion period more with the
weight of academic documents or journalistic reports than of literary
artefacts. The themes covered in them, their timing, the roles played
by authors and producers and commentators around them – all contri-
buted to their appearance as such. That means that these were taken as
documents and reports of social reality, which deal in social reality as
such and are social reality articulated. Their status as theatre, as literary
artefacts, was quickly registered or unthinkingly accepted in the first
instance only to be put aside and to allow their academic or journalistic
verve to predominate. With more retrospection, with some critical
distance from the immediacy of these plays’ appearance in the Iraq
invasion period, those theatrical devices began to be unpacked. The
immediate relation of these plays to the Iraq invasion period involved
a complex circulatory matrix. This was a circulatory matrix which con-
tained political and other public actors, advocates for and against inva-
sion, various media events, perceptions of ‘realities’ in the hotspot of
Iraq and relatedly elsewhere, perceived victims and perpetrators, media
consumers, the roles of playwrights, producers, performers, audiences,
commentators, and all those in relation to other plays and other texts.
These were all mapped and located and relocated and bore on each
other in a seething interconnectedness. Within this circulatory matrix
the plays in question were participant in social reality, were simply an
aspect of social reality. In this respect, to some extent these plays cohered

with the developing aspirations and expectations of ‘documentary

drama’, ‘tribunal theatre’, ‘verbatim drama’, etc. generally. They became
part of a continuum in which social reality is constantly mediatized and
mediated, in much the way that a host of postmodernist intellectuals
have suggested. In other words, the indistinguishability of social reality

from theatre that I am describing here is the case because social reality
is constantly being turned into theatre anyway, into media images and
news stories and documentaries and blogs and Internet community
themes and so on. These plays became immediately an aspect of the
social reality of the Iraq invasion at the expense of their theatrical make-
up because that is how social reality is nowadays. Contemporary social
reality is intermeshed with, and largely constituted by, the mediatized
and the virtual. The invasion of Iraq was consequently itself theatre
already and these plays simply became blips in that broader public
theatre. That’s one level at which these plays worked.
There is another level though, more distinctively of the Iraq invasion
period and with equally general import, at which such plays were
apprehended. What was at stake here was how specific contemporary
public institutions and political actors and social agents fool people
or are fooled themselves, the deceptions and illusions and misper-
ceptions in the unravelling of social reality itself. That was the, so
to speak, bottom-line of the anxieties and debates that characterized
the Iraq invasion period and figured in the plays. These plays put into
perspective something that was widely perceived at the time: that the
courtroom, the public hearing, the press conference, and the official
meeting are all theatre. These spaces of social reality are used to manage
belief and disbelief in the public, just as theatre manages the belief and
disbelief of audiences. This is not a matter of a generally mediatized
and virtualized postmodern ethos; it has to do with material political
and social functioning in the present. The cumulative effect of these
plays, and such performances, in the Iraq invasion period derived from
highlighting that perception of public theatricality – and also, thereby,
in similarly partaking of the process of managing belief and disbelief.
Such plays could consequently be regarded as part and parcel of the
establishment strategy for managing public belief and disbelief that is
conducted continuously in courtrooms and parliaments and press con-
ferences and so on. This was something that Derek Paget had suspected
for documentaries generally a couple of decades back:
Documents are so potentially dangerous to a hegemony that access

to them is carefully controlled. Even documents embedded within

118 Imagining Iraq
a drama pose a potential threat to a hegemony, unless a means for

control can be found. That means has been readily available in natu-
ralism, the hegemony’s preferred dramatic practice. Hence television
documentary drama tends to be inflexibly naturalistic, depending
on that convention through which it purports to show what is

happening, naturally. Like a documentary proper, documentary
drama’s very posing of a ‘problem’ can effect a kind of closure to that
problem. (Paget 1990, p. 25)
It is arguable that these plays participated in the effort to provide

closure for anxieties of the Iraq invasion period, in somewhat the
same direction as the Hutton Inquiry in Justifying War, by satisfying
the desire for a tribunal about the Gunatanamo Bay detentions in
Guantanamo, by conducting a sort of public inquest into the build-up
to the Iraq invasion in Stuff Happens. Much functioning of public insti-
tutions depends on meeting public demands by presenting a satisfying
public process or display rather than reaching just or desired outcomes.
That the process of a hearing is seen to be undertaken is arguably more
socially expedient than the outcome that is reached. In becoming
aspects of social reality, the performance of these plays served possibly
a similar immediate function within the Iraq invasion period. That is,
they either served that function in themselves by simply being per-
formed and publicly accessed, or emphasized the effect of that function
on behalf of existing political institutions thereby – even while apparently
undermining them.
Perhaps that is an unfair argument, and these plays didn’t have the
effect of contributing to the management strategies of the Iraq invasion
period or working as proxy for them. It is equally arguable that these
had the effect of exacerbating the fissures and anxieties of that period:
that Stuff Happens served to perpetuate the tensions of the build-up to
invasion, that Justifying War actually stopped the Hutton Inquiry from
reaching closure with its January 2004 report, and that Guantanamo
raised awareness of human rights abuses and intensified the campaign
against the detentions. That too would be coherent with their being
regarded as aspects of social reality, in the mould of journalistic or
academic accounts.
Perhaps a bit of both happened.
However that worked, for either direction there is a common ground
in the relation of these plays to their Iraq invasion context which is
relevant here. Indeed, it is this common ground which seems to me to
be of particular interest in thinking about these plays and their place in

the period – distinctly of that period and with broader implications for
such theatre. As I have observed above, the theatrical qualities or liter-
ary artifice of these plays was downplayed in favour of their journalistic
or academic reckoning with social reality. That was quickly registered
or unthinkingly accepted only to be put aside, I have said. But however

expeditiously put aside it was unavoidably and perceivably there – it was
not to be gainsaid. As observed when I outlined the nuances of perform-
ance, every production was deliberately performed and foregrounded
its theatricality or drew attention to its staginess. The verisimilitude
affected by Justifying War was an invitation to compare to the real thing,
which also established a distance from the real thing. The almost bare
stages of Stuff Happens and Guantanamo naturally highlighted, however
subliminally, the starkness of the production and the presence of the
actors. In different ways, Brechtian ‘alienation effects’ were introduced
to create a reflexive distance between representation and audience. It
just took time, given the pressures of the period, for the importance of
those to sink in properly in commentaries on Stuff Happens. The produc-
tions foregrounded their ‘theatreness’ even while authors and recipients
performed the circulation of the plays as academic or journalistic
documents. In fact, these two sides – self-evident staginess and socially
realistic documentary – were played against each other to enhance the
sense of both. Because it was obviously staged, it was more effective as
socially realistic documentary; because it claimed to be socially realistic
documentary, its staginess seemed apt. Out of this paradox there emerges
a contextually relevant observation. Since these plays were critiquing the
theatrical strategies of specific public institutions and actors of the time,
and exposing the dramatic strategies for managing belief and disbelief,
their own self-evident staginess appeared as a sort of contrasting honesty.
Here are all these public institutions who are trying to fool us about our
concerns by pretending that what they are at is not theatre, it was felt,
and here contrastingly is theatre which is obviously theatre speaking
to the same concerns. If the former is deceptive the latter is true, if the
former blurs reality by not acknowledging its theatricality then the
latter sharpens reality because it is obviously and unashamedly theatre. In
other words, in the Iraq invasion period such plays about current social real-
ity (‘tribunal plays’, ‘verbatim theatre’, ‘documentary drama’, ‘history plays’
etc.) seemed to present a higher plane of reality – and correspondingly a higher
access to truth – than socially realistic political and institutional forums. Of
course, such perceptions of higher reality and greater truth were as chimerical
as any theatrical illusion. But there it was, and that says much about the
potential of such theatre generally in the contemporary world.

120 Imagining Iraq
Domestic and national
The ‘publicness’ of the issues which feature in the plays above rubs
with the ‘publicness’ that theatre, as a form and genre, is conceived
with. Whether from the frontline or within the civil sphere, the thea-

tre of invasion collides with the experience of theatre itself in both
preconceived and unexpected ways, so that each puts the other into
perspective. That is the gist of my argument in this chapter so far. But
the invasion of Iraq, I have noted in passing earlier, was also an invasion
into private domains within the civil sphere. The idea of the invasion’s
reality and its mediated unfolding impinged upon everyday commu-
nications and thoughts, among friends and families and colleagues,
within domestic and daily working and living spaces. David Ray’s poetry
collection Death of Sardanapalus charts the interference into the every-
day trenchantly. The presentation of domestic or everyday spaces and
proximate circles in theatre at the time can be expected to work with a
different perspective from the plays discussed above: that is, when such
spaces and circles are shown as disturbed by great public events, and
when such events bear upon what are thought of as ‘domestic drama’
or ‘well-made plays’.
Two plays come to mind which featured the invasion of Iraq as
interference in domestic spaces and intimate circles: Tamsin Oglesby’s
US and Them, first performed at Hampstead Theatre, London, from
28 May 2003; and David Hare’s The Vertical Hour, first performed in the
Music Box Theatre, New York, from 30 November 2006. Neither of
them, in my view, enabled a reconsideration of literary presumptions
or presented a particularly distinctive literary development. But both
employed a familiar theatrical and literary strategy which played out in
interesting ways during the Iraq invasion. Both, to be precise, derived
their dramatic tensions from a cross-cultural encounter between drama-
tis personae defined by nationality, as British and American. In US and
Them this was obviously the substance of the play, and was received
with mixed feelings as such: with approbation in a review by Charles
Spencer, who noted that it was composed of ‘scenes that gleefully skewer
the divergent characteristics of the Brits and the Yanks, two cultures
eternally divided by a common language’ (Spencer 2003), and grumpily
by Sheridan Morley, who observed that, ‘As they plodded through every
transatlantic roadblock – historical, emotional, political, parental, above
all, fiscal – I longed for just one character, even the waiter, who wasn’t a
symbol of the foiled Special Relationship’ (Morley 2003). In an interview
on The Vertical Hour Hare rather unnecessarily reminded his audience

that: ‘One of the things it is about is a traditional Henry James theme

of the difference between the Amercian can-do-spirit and the British
cynicism. And bringing those two points of view together apart from
anything else is quite delicious theatrically’ (Montagne 2006). When
first produced in May 2003 the Iraq invasion was slotted into the domi-

nant theme of British–American differences by Oglesby in one scene, or
rather a couple of pages (Oglesby 2003, Scene 10, pp. 62–3). Hare’s play
presented the tensions of the Special Relationship largely through and
as growing out of a conversation about the invasion of Iraq.
US and Them charts the friendship and breakdown of relations between
an American couple, Ed and Lori, and a British couple, Martin and
Charlotte. Its two acts are set in the USA and UK respectively. The
first and penultimate scenes are actually one continuous scene, in
which the breakup is conducted in a ritualized albeit messy fashion.
In the interim, almost every kind of predictable difference of perspec-
tive and consequent misunderstandings between the two nationalities
is displayed – eloquently summarized in the quotation from Morley
above. However, the children of the two couples, Jay and Izzy, delib-
erately and combatively work through their national differences and
end up expecting a child and contemplating marriage. The argument
between the couples about the developing situation in Iraq in Scene
10 appears to summarize the national differences trenchantly. These
differences appear despite agreement; they argue heatedly while taking
roughly the same position. On the difference between Saddam Hussein
and George Bush (described succinctly as a ‘murderer’ and an ‘arsehole’
by Martin, which Ed elaborates and agrees with) and on the contradic-
tions of ‘enforced democracy’, all seem to agree. But they argue apparently
out of a will towards disputatiousness growing from their national diff-
erences, so that they have to check whether they mean the same things
by saying ‘democracy’ and register awareness of the relative global
positions of their respective nations – USA as the current superpower
and Britain as imperialists of yore. In an otherwise obvious display
of cultural differences between the UK and USA in the play, this scene
offers a fairly subtle reading of those differences in relation to the Iraq
invasion. Though presenting a more complex account of interpersonal
relationships, The Vertical Hour takes a comparatively straightforward line
with regard to national differences. This pits an American professor of
international relations, Nadia, who had supported the invasion and even
been called upon for advice by George Bush, against a reclusive English
doctor, Oliver, who had been vehemently opposed to invasion. They
are brought together in the latter’s home in the Shropshire countryside

122 Imagining Iraq
when Nadia visits with Philip, Nadia’s lover and Oliver’s son, who had
migrated to the USA. A passionate debate about Iraq, where Nadia
calls upon her academic credentials, her experience as a journalist in
war-torn Sarajevo, and her contemporary ethical sensibility, and Oliver
draws on his sense of ethics as a doctor and product of the 1960s left-

wing student movement, establishes a bond between the two. This leads
to a more intimate conversation in Philip’s absence at night, during
which Nadia ponders her troubled love life and traumatic experiences
and Oliver exposes his fraught family life (with his son and dead wife)
and the trauma of being involved in a road accident. This leads to a sort
of healing for both parties, re-establishes understanding between Oliver
and Philip, and breaks the relationship between Nadia and Philip. The
resolutions that are reached at a personal level appear as a counterpoint
to the differences which were articulated in the first instance apropos the
invasion of Iraq. The discussion on Iraq allows the characters to go
through the panoply of national differences and self-locations – those
remain unresolved, or simply remain statically anchored to national
differences. The interpersonal resolutions are a matter of domestic
accord whereas the unresolved differences about the invasion are due to
national environments (the latter is anticipated in the character of the
‘Brit in New York’ in Stuff Happens).
These distinct ways of bridging the private and public of the Iraq
invasion period by over-determining national characteristics or deploy-
ing national stereotypes was entirely of the time. The concerted efforts of
the US and UK governments during the invasion of Iraq were discussed
on both sides of the Atlantic with national differences in mind. While
it was evident that in terms of procedural democracy the invasion was
institutionally sanctioned in both countries, and in terms of polarization
and intensity of advocacy for and against invasion both countries evi-
denced sharp frictions, much was made of the differing public attitudes
at ‘ground level’. Doubtful survey-based evidence of such differences
was constantly cited in unconsidered ways: e.g. that on the eve of the
invasion, according to a Pew Research Centre survey of 20 February
2003 in the USA 58 per cent favoured invasion with a UN resolution
and 33 per cent without, while according to a MORI survey of 17 March
2003 in the UK 42 per cent favoured invasion with a UN resolution
and 24 per cent without. While such indicative differences were not
insignificant they were also not especially significant: they needed to be
analysed in terms of range of coverage of surveys, the kinds of questions
that were posed, the methods of surveying and aggregating, etc. What
was interesting was how much mileage was given in the mass media

and elsewhere to such indicative differences. All sorts of statements

seemed to fall into the glib suspicion of anti-Americanism in Britain
and corresponding American contempt for or condescension towards
Britain. There was a presumption of national differences at work as well
as a construction of national differences in the period which appeared

to have an almost autonomous momentum, and seemed to escalate.
These plays simply gelled with these widespread presumptions and
constructions, using their indefinite structure to tie together public and
private spaces, impersonal and interpersonal articulations, in relation
to the invasion.
That these plays called upon presumptions and constructions of
nationality, so resonant in the invasion period, is only to be expected.
That is not just because of the context-specific resonance, but also
because in fact such presumptions and constructions of nationality are
useful for linking the public and private, the many layers from formal
to informal, from domestic to official, of social life – and importantly,
such linkage is connected to the very conceptualization of nationality
itself. Whether one accepts Benedict Anderson’s (1991 [1983]) historical
account of nationality or not, the logic of his characterization of the
nation as both a closed (territorially and administratively discrete and
definite) and particularly an imagined community (because it is inevi-
tably larger than any interactive community) can scarcely be gainsaid.
A sense of nationality is premised on the constant precedence of the
imagined community, a constantly imagined presumption of a ‘deep,
horizontal comradeship’ (p. 7) which precedes lived experience of time
and place. That this process of imagining is presumptively entrenched
in the construction of history, literature and other cultural forms, all
sorts of institutions, political and economic processes, has been the
subject of considerable scholarly attention. That this process of imagin-
ing is also presumptively performed and reified and reconstructed in
an ongoing fashion amidst the minutiae and banalities of everyday
life – including the private and domestic aspects of it – is a relatively
infrequently studied notion. Tim Edensor’s National Identity, Popular
Culture, and Everyday Life (2002) is a useful exploration in that direction.
Edensor discusses the roles of space and place, performances and mate-
rial culture – in the occasional and the everyday – in the constant
reification of national identity. Unsurprisingly, Edensor’s observations
on such continuous constructions of nationality within the less tract-
able flow of social and individual lives draw upon concepts of theatre.
Theatre provides the metaphor of space and performance and things in
a network of relations; and equally, this understanding of nationality in

124 Imagining Iraq
social and individual lives is amenable to being presented as theatre.

Edensor suggests that nationality is constantly constructed and reiter-
ated through mappings of likeness in behaviour, forms, arrangements,
expressions, etc. as people traverse and engage a domain in the course
of their lives. In theatre such mappings can be condensed to a limited

time and space to evoke nationality, and establish a mapping of theatre
to world. That is in fact what happens in evoking Britain or America
in the above plays. The settings are located as nationally specific, and
props are introduced to allow discussion of national perceptions. The
characters frequently chart their own and others’ nationalities, con-
stantly announce their attitudes and behaviours as derived from their
presumed nationalities, and look to their locales in the plays to map
nationally specific likenesses. Effectively, a dominant perception of
nationality is constantly presumed and continuously constructed in the
plays. In everyday life, of course, such continuous processes of reifying
nationality may not be pushed to awareness; in the banality and nebu-
lousness of everyday life it simply happens and may not be thought
about. When a visitor travels to another country, when people from
different countries meet – when there is a displacement – the national
mappings are likely to be pushed to awareness. Thus, Americans Ed
and Lori have to constantly explain themselves and locate the British
Martin and Charlotte accordingly, and vice versa, and that is what
Oliver and Nadja do also. The presumptions and constructions of
nationality are consequently thrown forth, and even exacerbated. They
perform their nationality more emphatically, draw on its explanatory
advantages more readily, than they might otherwise. The equivalent
moment in Edensor’s consideration of national identity and everyday
life is expressed thus, usefully bringing in theatre as metaphor:
a theatrical performer may be so used to playing out the same role

that it becomes ‘second nature’ – so sedimented in the habitual
bodily enactions required that reflexivity and self-monitoring is no
longer necessary. Equally, habitual performances which have been
performed unreflexively for a lifetime may suddenly be revealed
to those performing them as social constructions. A confrontation
with different cultural codes – perhaps by being misunderstood
in unfamiliar contexts or being challenged by those from outside
one’s everyday community – can reveal that others act differently,
inducing a heightened sense of awareness towards what seemed
common-sense enactions. Reflexivity and unreflexivity are not
properties that are associated with particular kinds of enaction, but

depend upon contexts and the conditions which shape the frequency
of performance. (Edensor 2000, p. 89)
By making such a situation the fulcrum of their narratives, by condens-

ing it starkly into theatre, both US and Them and The Vertical Hour up

the stakes on national differentiation and polarization.
Classics
If the entire repertoire of theatre performances within a recent period

in, say, the city of London or New York is considered, it becomes evi-
dent that not merely the contemporary is performed. Or rather, it is
found that contemporary theatre in performance is also an ongoing
reckoning with the history of theatre. In the performance repertoire,
the present of theatre is constantly put into perspective in terms of its
past and vice versa. It would be difficult to find any recent period in
the theatre calendar when a new performance or adaptation of classi-
cal Greek drama, Renaissance and Restoration drama, or nineteenth-
and twentieth-century plays wouldn’t be available. Such productions
appear with complex intentions and expectations. In some cases,
these are ‘rediscoveries’ of plays which have been relatively neglected
in performance, and the fact of being produced is an assertion of
contemporary relevance. More often, the obviously canonical is recon-
firmed by the repeated display of contemporary resonances, and the
resonances are sometimes emphasized by adaptations from original
texts. Producers and audiences are not only cognizant of the original
nuances of such plays, but also of interim performances. Every new
production of a Shakespeare play, for example, is a multilayered affair
which plays to the audience’s familiarity with the standardized play-script
and a range of other productions and adaptations on stage and screen.
Allusions to and echoes of theatre of the past are frequently offered and
found in new plays or premiering productions. Each production of past
theatre in the present, and every juxtaposing of the past and present
of theatre, becomes grist to the mill of cultural reportage. Inevitably,
academic attention and assessment follow suit. Unlike most other
literary forms, the canon of theatre is not really determined by scholarly
and pedagogic attention. Other genres of literature are so determined
to a significant degree: the canon of poetry, for instance, is largely
maintained by evidence of ongoing scholarly interest and institutional
appropriation in pedagogy (in curricula). With regard to the canon of
drama though, academia plays a less considerable role; the canon of

126 Imagining Iraq
drama is largely maintained in the continuum of theatrical productions

and performances.
All this was as much the case for the Iraq invasion period as it is other-
wise. Interestingly, a sort of centripetal force seemed to draw a wide vari-
ety of canonical drama in performance towards the invasion, implicitly

or explicitly. The invasion of Iraq was such a subsuming preoccupation
of the period, and so emphatically centralized in media and everyday
discourses, that quite different sorts of tried and tested theatre seemed
to have potential connections with it. Indeed, for a while the canoni-
cal status of plays seemed testable by their ability to incorporate the
public drama of the invasion. Naturally, hyper-canonized Shakespearian
drama was exploited. In a broadsheet feature of April 2003, Gary Taylor
pointed to what he regarded as the pro-war attitude of the history play
Henry V to understand the American and British drive towards invading
Iraq: ‘Shakespeare transformed a war that kills, wounds, and traumatises
untold thousands into a sports contest between two morally oppo-
site men (Bush and Saddam, Henry and the Dauphin). Could Rupert
Murdoch’s ministers of misinformation do better?’ (Taylor 2003). This
was written in anticipation of a National Theatre, London, production
of the play, which was duly staged by actors in modern dress in July and
August 2003, directed by Nicholas Hytner. It was obvious to audiences
that this was performed ironically, inserting a clear anti-invasion attitude.
The performance began with the Archbishop of Canterbury speaking to
a dossier to make the case for invading France; and all the parts were
played to render the cynicism of political machinations more opaque
than the play-text might suggest. The degree to which the invasion
context impinged upon the production was testified by the director:
In the theatre, we are entirely opportunistic and the dossier they

hand round is indeed the Iraq dossier. I don’t think that would have
occurred if we hadn’t been rehearsing it at the time we were. The war
started during our first week’s rehearsal. For the two or three weeks
that the war was happening, there were certain things that ultimately
happened that wouldn’t have happened if the war hadn’t finished,
because I was quite simply nervous. As an example, the celebratory
victory video. I don’t think I would have gone there if the war had
been long and bloody and when we opened there were still British
soldiers being killed. As the war finished and as scepticism returned
and we were looking at it with cooler heads, that which is propagan-
distic about the play and that within the play which is hagiographic
about the king felt very familiar. Shakespeare’s scepticism (which

I think in the play runs hand-in-hand with his visceral admiration

of the king’s qualities of leadership and oratory) seemed clearer and
clearer as the rehearsal period went on, and as my frankly ambiguous
response to the war crystalised. (Rosenthal 2003)

Thereafter discussions of Henry V continued to occupy Shakespearian
circles. In May 2004 the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington organized
a public panel discussion on Henry V’s decision to invade France in
1415. Eight panellists conducted the discussion, including industrial-
ists, journalists and scholars. It was widely reported at the time that
this was merely an excuse to discuss the invasion of Iraq, and that it
succeeded as such is amply clear from descriptions of the event (such
as Bob Thompson 2004). At least two scholarly discussions of the man-
ner in which Henry V was performed and received in the context of the
Iraq invasion have appeared since (Henderson 2008 and Lynch 2008).
Apart from the National Theatre production of Henry V, Shakespearian
performances resonating with the invasion period seemed to gather
force a bit belatedly – but they did gather force. An imaginative comic
adaptation from Titus Andronicus directed by Darko Tresnjak at the Old
Globe, San Diego, June–October 2006, deliberately gestured towards Abu
Ghraib torture images (Kanelos 2007, p. 124). In January 2007, the Royal
Shakespeare Company presented Roy Williams’s Days of Significance in
Stratford-upon-Avon, which was loosely inspired by Much Ado About
Nothing (I have commented on it already as ‘frontline’ drama). And
in February 2007 the Royal Shakespeare Company presented Richard
III: An Arabic Tragedy, in Arabic with English subtitles and with a cast
drawn from the Gulf States, directed by Sulayman Al-Bassam. It was set
in the present-day Middle East, and began with a monologue written
by Al-Bassam and delivered by the character of Queen Margaret: ‘I am
Margaret. I would ignore myself if I could but my history will not allow
me. We lost. I don’t want your reconstruction grants, your loans, your
pity but I just ask of you not to question my thirst for revenge’ (quoted
in Usher 2007). An interesting paper by Todd Landon Barnes (2008)
tracked and analysed the various ways in which cultural references to
Macbeth were used both by the Bush administration and anti-invasion
protesters in the invasion period.
In mid-2004 theatre critic Michael Billington observed: ‘Where does
our theatre instinctively turn in times of crisis? Not to Shakespeare or
Shaw but to the Greeks.’ With a number of revivals of classic Greek
drama in the UK in view, he concluded that ‘What these revivals all
have in common is that they are a direct response to the Iraq war’

128 Imagining Iraq
(Billington 2004). Indeed, to an extraordinary degree and far outstripping

relevant performances of Shakeapeare’s plays, productions of translated
and adapted classic Greek drama in the UK and USA and elsewhere
were rendered the repository of anxieties about the invasion of Iraq.
Seamus Heaney’s translation of Sophocles’s Antigone, entitled The

Burial at Thebes, was first performed at the Abbey Theatre, directed
by Lorraine Pintal, in April 2004. Antigone has been pondered and
performed, as George Steiner’s well-known study Antigones (1984)
demonstrates, at defining moments of European cultural and political
history – it has a particularly complex and long-standing tradition of
receptions. While working on the translation Heaney was naturally
aware of this burden of tradition, and observed that he found the
impetus for translating it yet again because of its resonances with the
Iraq invasion context:
One consideration, however, was weighing heavily in favour of a

new start. Early in 2003 we were watching a leader, a Creon figure
if ever there was one: a law and order bossman trying to boss the
nations of the world into uncritical agreement with his edicts in
much the same way as Creon tries to boss the Chorus of compliant
Thebans into conformity with his. With the White House and the
Pentagon in cahoots, determined to bring the rest of us into line over
Iraq, the passion and protest of an Antigone were all of a sudden as
vital as oxygen masks. (Heaney 2005b)
Martin Crimp’s adaptation of Sophocles’s Women of Trachis, entitled

Cruel and Tender, was first co-produced by the Théâtre des Bouffes du
Nord and Ruhrfestspiele Rocklinghausen, at the Young Vic, London, in
March 2004, directed by Luc Bondy. In a 2006 interview, Crimp recalled
his approach to penning the adaptation: ‘We started working on this
piece in 2003 and the War on Terror was in full swing, but I was con-
cerned not to reduce the play into an anti-war diatribe’ (in Sierz 2006,
p. 107). The result is naturally more suggestive than a diatribe, and
I return to Crimp’s – and Heaney’s – efforts below. In June 2004, Don
Taylor’s translation of Euripides’s Iphigenia in Aulis was produced at the
National Theatre, London, directed by Katie Mitchell. The director was
quoted as follows at the time:
I was looking for a play that could have a conversation with the audi-
ence about the situation in Iraq. This is a play that takes a cynical and
satirical look at the actions of public figures and that was written at

a time when Euripides was losing faith in political leaders and their
inability to extricate themselves from an interminable war.
Audiences are very clever so you don’t need to localise events too
much: unlike Euripides’ Agamemnon, who sacrifices his daughter,
Tony Blair is not actually killing his own children. But what we rec-

ognise in this and other Greek plays is the gap between politicians
who talk in moral absolutes and our own sense that everything is
muddy, complex and confused. (In Billington 2004)
Two versions of Euripides’s Hecuba were performed in quick succession

in late 2004 and early 2005. Frank McGuinness’s translation of the play
was first performed in the Donmar Warehouse, London, in September
2004, directed by Jonathan Kent. Reportedly the translation was a
labour of six years: the Omagh bombings in Northern Ireland in 1998
and the terrorist attacks in New York of 11 September 2001 simmered as
much behind its making as the invasion of Iraq. It was, however, written,
produced and received in the period when the Iraq invasion was upper-
most in the minds of producers and audiences, and McGuinness was
quoted in the following vein when the play opened:
It is no accident that that warmonger George W. Bush has never

been to war himself or that Tony Blair has never done service and is
so willing to send his own people to fight lunatic wars. If you create
an environment where the waging of war is your solution, you are in
terrible danger of unleashing something terrifying and demonic that
you will never be able to control.
War plays remind us of that. Hecuba reminds us of that. It is not
a comforting play, particularly not for these dangerous times when
there is so much grief. It shows that there is a dark hardness that we
all possess, and that the impulse for revenge and war comes from
within us all. That means nobody is safe. (In Gardner 2004)
Soon after, in March 2005, the Royal Shakespeare Company at Albery

Theatre, London, produced Tony Harrison’s translation of Hecuba. In
introducing the play prior to its opening, Harrison briefly described its
receptive history and observed:
We may still be weeping for Hecuba, but we allow our politicians

to flood the streets of Iraq with more and more Hecubas in the
name of freedom and democracy. The audience might weep for
Hecuba in Washington when the tragedy plays there, but will they

130 Imagining Iraq
squirm with regret for Iraq, or the re-election of George Bush, or

pause for a moment before going for the gullet of Iran? (Harrison
2005b, p. x)
In the New York fringe theatre, Sheila Morgan’s Electra Votes, directed

by Rhonda Dodd, opened at the Blunt Theatre in August 2005. This was
adapted from the Electra myth, on which there are plays by Sophocles
and Euripides and which is covered in the second of Aeschylus’s Oresteia
trilogy (The Libation Bearers), and featured a screen as chorus display-
ing images from battle-torn Iraq. By December 2006 Iphigenia 2.0,
Charles Mee’s adaption from Euripides’s play, was being performed for
the first time in the City Garage, Santa Monica, directed by Frederique
Michel; it premiered in New York at the Signature Theatre in August
2007, directed by Tina Landau. Mee’s numerous adaptations of classic
Greek plays have reflected on contemporary wars and the passage of
the American ‘empire’, and it was clear to audiences that Iphigenia 2.0
was particularly addressed to the invasion of Iraq. In various interviews
Mee said as much in a laconic fashion, observing in December 2007
that another adaptation, ‘Orestes was occasioned by the first Persian
Gulf War and Iphigenia obviously has some very direct resonance with
the current war in Iraq’ (Signore 2007). An interview at the time of the
premiere in New York gave Mee the opportunity to explain those direct
resonances, noting particularly that among the contemporary sources
he had used in his adaptation were blogs by ‘young soldiers in Iraq
today’, so that ‘what soldiers in the play say are what real soldiers say
today’ (Mee 2007).
The authors – translators and adapters – of these classical plays, and
those involved in bringing about their performances, were obviously
motivated by the contemporary resonances with the Iraq invasion.
Most were conscious of making an intervention in the ongoing
exchanges about the invasion, and of exposing their plays to a par-
ticularly polarized environment of advocacies for and against. Most
were also circumspect about giving their efforts an explicitly partisan
turn. While Harrison and McGuinness were unambiguous about their
anti-invasion positions, they undertook translation with a broader histori-
cal sense of the source text and its transmissions; Crimp’s and Mee’s
adaptations were decidedly more than of-the-moment diatribes; and
in translating Antigone Heaney evidently expected some of its ambigui-
ties to bear upon international politics of the time. These translations
and adaptations, in other words, pushed against the overwhelming
concern of the time not only to reflect on it but also to draw it into a

wider apprehension of history and humanity. In interesting ways the

resonances of these plays with the invasion of Iraq were effectively
underlined in performance. In almost all of these the dialogues, with
their overt or covert classical origins, were deliberately bounced against
the contemporary staging. These productions were usually in modern

costume; some were deliberately set in modern war zones, occasionally
evoking a Middle Eastern or African location; multimedia devices and
props were used in some to draw direct correspondences with invaded
Iraq. The numerous reviews that these plays attracted immediately
picked up those gestures towards Iraq, and either paused on the result-
ing insights or castigated the productions for such obviously mar-
ket-friendly ploys. The authors and directors gave evidence, as noted
above, of an Iraq connection. It was widely noted that a juxtaposition
of past and present, classic and contemporary, was being thoughtfully
conducted with the Iraq invasion in view. But the precise nuances of
that juxtaposition were not really teased out in reviews, and are only
just beginning to be charted in academic scholarship. The classic/con-
temporary juxtapositions in relation to the Iraq invasion period were
noted but barely analysed, or were recognized without being much
considered. If they had been considered carefully it is likely that some
distinctive aspects of contemporary theatre’s negotiations with the
classical would have surfaced.
The classic/contemporary juxtapositions in question involve a notion
of the classical text and performance, and adjustment of that notion to
a contemporary environment (refracted through the Iraq invasion here).
Inevitably, the notion of the classical is itself reflexive of the present
and the adjustment of that notion is little more than a strategy for
putting the present into perspective. The performance of the classical
play in translation or adaptation now is, in other words, a performance
of two present-day ideas: a contemporary sense of what is classical
theatre (what theatre of antiquity means to us), and thereby finding a
theatrical way of coming to grips with the present itself. A classicist’s
approach to such plays – excavating the evidence of what antiquity
and classical theatre really was like and how far adaptations and
translations depart from that reality – is not much to the moment from
this perspective. That classicist’s project is an important scholarly one,
of course, but not for this study: this is concerned with the construc-
tion of the present in the present. These are somewhat abstract obser-
vations, which are easily given flesh by considering how to engage
the texts and performances noted above within the space available
here. Two directions suggest themselves. On the one hand, we can

132 Imagining Iraq
look closely at the sorts of juxtapositions and negotiations involved in

specific translations and adaptations. All the productions mentioned
could be usefully examined to this end, but that would take too long.
For the sake of brevity, therefore, I focus on two below: a translation,
Heaney’s The Burial at Thebes; and an adaptation, Crimp’s Cruel and

Tender. On the other hand, we can consider the implications of the
unusual frequency of such productions of classical theatre in the Iraq
invasion period in a general way. Some remarks along those lines bring
this section to a close.
As observed above, when translating Antigone as the invasion of Iraq
unfolded Heaney felt he could perceive a parallel between Creon and
George Bush. It was a point he emphasized severally, in the Guardian
article quoted above, and in his earlier working notes: ‘Just as Creon
forced the citizens of Thebes into an either/or situation in relation to
Antigone, the Bush administration in the White House was using
the same tactic to forward its argument for the war on Iraq’ (Heaney
2004, p. 227). These asseverations seem to establish a thematic link
between the drama of the build-up to invasion and the Greek tragedy,
but Heaney’s claim in this regard is questionable. The central theme of
the play, to state it briefly, is the opposition between Antigone, who
is determined to bury her dead brother Polyneices (vanquished in
his recent assault on Thebes) with the usual rituals, and Creon, king
of Thebes, who had expressly forbidden burial. Antigone appeals to
‘higher’ laws of respect for the dead to justify herself, and Creon appeals
to the prerogatives of social order and his position as ruler. Arguments
are offered at length on both sides, and the Chorus (citizens of Thebes)
find themselves swayed in both directions. Irrespective of how these
arguments might have been weighed in antiquity (in Sophocles’s play
it appears that Creon suffers the wrath of the gods, though Antigone is
not spared either), at least since Hegel’s (1998, pp. 1217–18) interpre-
tation of the play equally understandable moral grounds have often
been perceived on both sides. Nevertheless, the figure of Antigone – a
rebellious individual opposed to the power of the state – has consist-
ently been attributed a heroic stature as opposed to the repressive head
of state Creon. Numerous politically nuanced adaptations and inter-
pretations have ploughed the rebellious versus repressive associations
of the two figures, without however succeeding in denying either some
claim to moral reason. With this in mind, Heaney’s reading of a parallel
between Creon and Bush has been subject to disagreement. On the one
hand, some critics have been inclined to accept it and see it as coeval
with Heaney’s sense of an Irish tradition of resistance to repressive power

(e.g. Younger 2008). So Stephen Wilmer has no difficulty in discerning

the following:
Creon’s phraseology calls to mind the post-9/11 climate of fear,

loyalty (to the government), and vengefulness, which was encour-

aged by the U.S. president through the adoption of the U.S.A. Patriot
Act, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the
invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. Moreover, there is an underlying
parallel between Creon’s treatment of Polyneices and Bush’s denial
of human rights in the interrogation and imprisonment of anyone
labelled as a terrorist. (Wilmer 2007, p. 225)
On the other hand, critics like Michiel Leezenberg have voiced objections
to suggesting such parallels:
Depictions of George Bush as a Creon or Pentheus who brings dis-

aster to himself, his family, and his country, by refusing to heed
good advice, are as misleading as they are tasteless. In general, the
comparison with such classical models confers on contemporary
rulers an aura of aesthetic and moral grandeur that they do not
necessarily possess or deserve: unlike the tragic rulers, for example,
their policy decisions do not generally plunge their own families
into misery. Worse, such comparisons come perilously close to the
ways in which Iraqi government propaganda tried to glorify Saddam
as a hero comparable in stature to Gilgamesh, Nebuchadnezzar, or
Saladin. (Leezenberg 2007, p. 269)
Behind the somewhat stuffy tones of a scholar who wishes to keep

classical antiquity as far as possible from the banality of the contem-
porary, this latter seems to me to be closer to audience perceptions of
Heaney’s version of Antigone. I suspect that the Creon–Bush parallel
would not have occurred to audiences if Heaney hadn’t mentioned
it, and failed to be a meaningful parallel despite Heaney’s mention-
ing it. Creon may not arouse the audience’s sympathy, but it is clear
even in Heaney’s translation that he at any rate has arguments he
believes in. Creon’s integrity is never in doubt, and there is no doubt
about Antigone’s responsibility for her actions. Debate about the
invasion of Iraq arose precisely because the Bush administration’s
and Blair government’s integrity was questionable, and the existence
of the ‘weapons of mass destruction’ in Iraq was in doubt. It seems
to me that, in the Iraq invasion context, there was an inevitable

134 Imagining Iraq
slippage between Heaney’s expectations (and intentions) in translat-

ing Antigone and the manner in which it appeared to audiences in
production and as text.
Such a failure of expected and intended parallels is legion in the trans-
lations and adaptations of classical plays in the Iraq invasion period, and

conversely some parallels unexpectedly hit home (though not in Burial
at Thebes). The point, however, is that failure of parallels is as productive
as aptness of parallels: at the least, they give rise to a contemplative
consideration and clarification of the situation at hand. The level at
which Heaney’s translation worked against the backdrop of the Iraq inva-
sion is also shared by all the translations and adaptations in question.
This was simply at the level of language, or at the level of phrasing – the
matter closest to the heart of translating. Phrases which particularly
resonated with the current political environment and which were never-
theless not out of synch with the classical text acquired a significant ring
in the juxtaposition of classical and interim and contemporary. This was
not so much a matter of registering inter-lingual translation between the
classical Greek and contemporary English, but more of registering the
context-specific nuances of the English language at the level of intralin-
gual shifts. By way of a brief demonstration, consider Heaney’s version
alongside the following recent English translations, roughly divided by
a decade each, of the passage where Creon announces his suspicions on
being told that Polyneices has been administered burial rites:
For a good while now I have had reports

Of disaffected elements at work here,
A certain poisonous minority
Unready to admit the rule of law,
And my law in particular.
(Heaney 2005a, p. 14)
From the moment the edict was proclaimed, there were men
in this city who were whispering against me, who were
tossing their heads defiantly, instead of submitting their
necks to the yoke, as they should in justice – honouring me.
(Sophocles [trans. Wertenbaker] 1992, p. 100)
No, from the first there were certain citizens

who could hardly stand the spirit of my regime,
grumbling against me in the dark, heads together,

tossing wildly, never keeping their heads beneath

the yoke, loyally submitting to their king.
(Sophocles [trans. Fagles] 1982/1984, p. 73)

Fagles’s translation finds Creon using the inclusive ‘citizens’ for the hypo-
thetical culprits and asserting his position as ‘king’, while Wertenbaker’s
Creon chooses the neutral ‘men in this city’ and demands the ‘honour’
that is his due ‘in justice’. Both evoke an image of the culprits as restless
conspirators or an unruly herd or chariot horse-team. By contrast, in
Heaney’s translation Creon employs a pair of loaded phrases to charac-
terize the culprits – ‘disaffected elements’, ‘poisonous minority’ – and
contradicts himself by colliding the ‘rule of law’ (which doesn’t allow
individual assertion) with ‘my law in particular’. Each of these phrases
were redolent with significance in the context of the invasion of Iraq, and
indeed since the so-called ‘war on terror’ after September 2001, and each
gave the received translated sense of Sophocles’s text a quite new turn
without quite transforming it. Numerous other such examples can be cited
from this play, and indeed from the other translations of classics in the
Iraq invasion period mentioned above. So, significantly, it was at the level
of phrasing that Heaney offered a reading within the act of translating
which played against the invasion context. This wasn’t a simple matter of
offering straightforward parallels, but of making the play chime with the
political environment of the time. The same could be said of the other
translations (Harrison’s and McGuinness’s, for instance), and insofar as the
adaptations (such as Crimp’s and Mee’s) can be regarded as translations.
Adaptations are obviously more flexible than translations. Or, more
precisely, adaptations can be regarded as the relatively free end of the
process where translations are the relatively constrained. The process
that both belong to involves reference to a source text within a specific
linguistic/cultural/geopolitical/historical domain, and most importantly
a contemporary domain – i.e. the present in which the translation or
adaptation takes place. Where the translation is constrained by focusing
on changing the language while maintaining an attitude of fidelity to
other aspects of the source text, adaptations take the liberty of chang-
ing any aspect of the source text without losing a sense of continuous
reference to it. Both are inevitably part and parcel with updating, with
evoking the source text in the language of the present and in the cir-
cumstances of the present. Martin Crimp has both translated plays (by
Ionescu, Genet and Marivaux) and tested the fine balance between
adapting and translating (particularly in his updated version of Molière’s

136 Imagining Iraq
The Misanthrope, 1996) before basing Cruel and Tender on Sophocles’s

Women of Trachis. In an interview with Dominic Cavendish (2004) when
Cruel and Tender premiered, Crimp traced his sense of the difference
between translating, described as ‘trying to act as a window of the French
language’, and adapting, which is ‘a rewriting of the original play […]

in reaction to the original text’. Crimp illustrated the relation between
translation (with its linguistic focus) and adaptation in Cruel and Tender
by observing that his writing of the General’s speeches in the third part
was inspired by Hercules’s speech in Sophocles’s play – where the ‘verse
goes completely mad’. Interestingly, this connecting point between the
language of Women of Trachis and of Cruel and Tender can also be used
to clarify the adaptive shifts (in the plot, in characterization, in the reac-
tive rewriting) from former to latter. Women of Trachis mainly focuses on
Deianira’s inadvertent poisoning of her husband, Hercules. Hercules had
conquered and sacked a city because of his desire for the ruler Eurytus’s
daughter Iola, whom he sends to Deianira’s care before he returns home.
Deianira pities the girl and takes her in, but feels nervous about losing
Hercules’s love and sends him a love-potion. The love-potion actually
turns out to be a deadly poison which causes Hercules’s slow agonized
death. The larger part of the play depicts Deianira’s anxieties as she
discovers first the motives for Hercules’s absence and then realizes that
she has poisoned him, and finally commits suicide. Hercules appears in
the latter part of the play and makes arrangements for his own demise
amidst excruciating pain (that’s where the ‘verse goes completely mad’).
Cruel and Tender is set amidst the ‘war on terror’ where the General cor-
responds to Hercules, and his wife Amelia to Deianira. The sacked city
is now in Africa, and naturally the General’s razing of the city can
only be regarded as a devastating war crime (and not his first). As in the
original, the General appears late in the adapted play, and is shown as
disintegrating psychologically and physically – his final articulations are
no more than a frenzied repetition of his being ‘not the criminal / but
the sacrifice’ (Crimp 2004, pp. 68–9). The words of the dying Hercules in
Women of Trachis and of the maddened General in Cruel and Tender are
both similar in effect and different in import – and from that difference
the shift of the adaptation from the original can be grasped. Hercules
vividly describes his own physical and psychological suffering; in a way,
he draws in all the anxieties and violence surrounding the play, the
domestic and political violence, and concentrates and embodies it in his
agony. Everything else becomes silent before or distant from Hercules’s
suffering: Deianira, whose tremulous doubts and tensions occupied the
early part of the play, is already dead; the eponymous chorus are no

more than echoes of Deianira and Hercules throughout; the captives

of the sacked city (including Iola) have only silent parts. In Cruel and
Tender the maddened and dying General mostly speaks of the cruelties
he has perpetrated in the name of the ‘war on terror’, and instead of
embodying and concentrating the violence around him gradually appears

to emanate it and become hemmed in by it. The only straightforward
expression of his own suffering is in the stuck-record-like reiteration of
‘not the criminal / but the sacrifice’ – an inadequate loss of words. It is
clear that while the General is the representative of crude violence and
cruelty, there is violence and cruelty and suffering all around him in a
pervasive way which cannot be made remote or silenced. There is sim-
mering sexual violence at every corner of the play (the General’s lustful
demolition of a city is in a way but a crystallization of this environment),
from the first lines by Amelia: ‘There are women who believe / all men
are rapists’ (Crimp 2004, p. 1). The counterpart of the deferential mes-
sengers and attendants of Sophocles’s play here are devious political
actors who control the ‘war on terror’. The chorus here are three women
(Housekeeper, Physiotherapist, Beautician) who are aware of their class
difference and interests, and cannot sympathize with the main protago-
nists. The captives here (especially Laela, the Iola of the play) are not
silent background figures, and are shown as assimilating themselves
to the casual manipulativeness and callousness of consumer society.
In brief, Crimp uses the structure of Sophocles’s play to describe the
pervasive multi-layered cruelty and violence of modern society at large,
of which the ‘war of terror’ (and the implicit invasion of Iraq) is simply
one particularly brutal manifestation.
Behind the nuances of producing and receiving adaptations and trans-
lations of specific classic Greek plays in the Iraq invasion period – briefly
gauged here through The Burial at Thebes and Cruel and Tender – there
lies the general question: why was particular recourse to classic Greek
drama taken during that period? Why did theatre at that time of crisis
turn particularly to the Greeks (to echo Billington)? All responses to
such a question will necessarily be speculative, but each speculation
acquires a bit more weight here because of the clear evidence of turning
to the Greeks in the invasion period. In the conventional understand-
ing of the ‘classic’ in literature as standing the test of time, there are
no more venerable literary texts than classical Greek drama. To pick
on such drama could be regarded as an attempt to co-opt some of its
undeniable respectability, or its unquestionable literary authority. That
authors and audiences felt such authority needed to be called upon not
once or twice but severally during the Iraq invasion is probably a measure

138 Imagining Iraq
of the pressures that were felt then. To some degree this was a moral
pressure: classical Greek drama has often been recalled as presenting
a basic humanistic perspective when such a perspective was deemed
lacking. Thus, with American involvement in Vietnam in view in the
1960s, philosopher Walter Kaufman had observed:

The inability of the American President and his chief advisers to see
the point of view of their opponents – and of most of mankind – and to
see the enemy as human beings, with fathers and mothers, wives
and children, instead of crowing over the daily, weekly, monthly
numbers of those killed, stands in appalling contrast not only to the
avowal that the United States is the champion of humanity but also
the infinitely more human attitudes of Homer’s Iliad, Aeschylus’
Persians and Euripides’ Trojan Women. (Kaufman 1968, p. 317)
Taken in itself, this is a rather idealized apprehension of the classics (and

on the whole Kaufman’s argument is much more than that). More prag-
matic pressures were undoubtedly at work also. In an especially polarized
political environment, authors and audiences may have turned to the
classics as a relatively non-committal method for driving home disquiet
without being overly partisan. As Rabinowitz has recently put it: ‘as a
result of [their] status, the ancient plays have been employed as a way of
safely questioning authority. They offer protective cover to critical writers
since they have an irreproachable pedigree’ (Rabinowitz with Blundell
2008, p. 183). At any rate, however imaginatively the translations and
adaptations were undertaken, and with however postmodern or contem-
porary a sensibility, their relatively frequent appearance under those pres-
sures gestures towards one element of the contemporary literary milieu:
the idea of the venerable and the authoritative has a theatrical purchase which
is proportional to the anxieties and uncertainties felt in the present.
Performance and statement
The complexity of the relation between a political and human pres-

sure zone like the Iraq invasion period and the theatre that appeared
in relation to it is ultimately difficult to convey. The relation tests the
boundaries of perceptions of political reality and forms of theatre in
numerous ways. The implications for contemporary literature that I have
tried to tease out above – in terms of the modifications of ‘frontline’,
the representation of recorded reality and theatre as record, the play
of constructing nationality, the recourse to classical authority – seem

disparate. But to my mind there is an underlying unity, which has to do

with the flickering and inescapable and intermeshed duality of talking
about political reality and the happening of reality, of representation and
performance. Theatre modifies political reality just as political reality
modifies theatre under such circumstances, and though the boundaries

of the stage and the world seem clear they also blur. The pervasiveness
of such blurring seems to me to distinguish the period in question. In
the Iraq invasion period theatre could be seen everywhere in the public
sphere and political reality could be found in every kind of theatre in a
concentrated tractable way.
Perhaps the most succinct and self-reflexive performance and state-
ment (both together) of the kind of blurring I have in mind appeared in
Harold Pinter’s Nobel Lecture Art, Truth and Politics of December 2005.
This was a statement on American foreign policy (especially with the
invasion in mind) as the ‘greatest show on the road’, on Pinter’s own
life and plays, on the relation of drama to politics. Unsurprisingly, it was
roundly denounced as ‘anti-Americanism’ from the usual quarters. But,
that aside, it was a dramatic statement on theatre of various sorts – on
the stage, in life, in global politics. At the same time it was a perform-
ance, it was theatre, which was only to be expected from a playwright
and actor of considerable experience. There was a clear audience, that of
the Nobel Prize Ceremony, to whom it was presented as a video record-
ing (circumscribing an audio-visual theatrical space). It was also made
available on video and DVD for public consumption (Pinter 2006). The
setting was a blue illuminated background with a screen featuring a
photograph of the younger Pinter. Pinter appeared in a wheelchair in
a black suit with a red blanket on his knees there, speaking in a husky
passionate voice. Inevitably this set-up recalled a Beckettian scenario – this
could be Krapp or Hamm from Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape or
Endgame (and the echo was fitting since Beckett was a sort of artistic
progenitor for Pinter). And yet there is no ostensible effort at theatre,
it is simply the reality of Pinter being and expressing himself: Pinter
looks straight at the audience, he needs the wheelchair, he speaks what
he believes, and there is no distraction from what he has to say. And
yet again, it is theatre in that this is a performance, there is a setting,
there is a practised theatre professional delivering lines, and these lines
are dramatic (there is self-reflection, poetry, denunciation, metaphors,
anecdotes in there). Harold Pinter’s Nobel Lecture both spoke about
the complicity of drama and political reality and life, and performed the
complicity of drama and political reality and life – and these became
so inextricably mixed up that it was difficult to take them apart. In a

140 Imagining Iraq
way, the whole performance-cum-statement acts as a metaphor for the

preoccupations of theatre in the invasion period. The metaphor that
Pinter employed himself in the lecture grasps this situation perfectly,
and the desire he expressed through the metaphor seems to me to be of
the moment too for litterateurs at large:

When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us
is accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are
actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But some-
times a writer has to smash the mirror – for it is on the other side of
that mirror that the truth stares at us. (Pinter 2006)

5
A Joint Enterprise: Fiction

Action thrillers
I have argued in previous chapters that in literature the invasion of Iraq

has been unquestioningly constructed as ‘war’ (i.e. implicitly as a more
or less equitable military engagement between opposed alignments),
largely by drawing upon a tradition of war literature. Thus, anti-invasion
poetry in 2003 found it expedient to allude to past ‘anti-war’ poetry,
and theatre of the Iraq ‘frontline’ assimilated pre-existing conceptions
about the theatre of ‘war’. This argument gives the impression that
the pat construction of the invasion as ‘war’ works through some kind
of internal literary logic. That is, however, not quite right, especially in
the USA and UK: it is obvious that the invasion of Iraq has come to
be constructed as the ‘Iraq War’ generally, in the mass media as much
as in various kinds of retrospective accounts as in academic writing
as in popular discourse. The ‘Iraq War’ is now standard shorthand for
the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003–4. Modes of mediating
perception are evidently at work in this preference for ‘war’: ‘war’ sug-
gests a somewhat regulated affair, for which there are principles and
procedures and laws to fall back upon, whereas ‘invasion’ is a messier
and more intractable business, with a rawer sense of power politics and
brute force at work. ‘War’ suggests a predominantly military engagement
and involves highlighting military operations, while ‘invasion’ suggests
that the integrity of a civil domain has been disturbed. Designating the
invasion as ‘war’ shows a preference for confining attention to the military
aspects and having the reassurance of regulatory principles to refer to.
Contemplation of ‘invasion’ is more disturbing, blurred, unregulated,
intractable. Preferring ‘war’ is a matter of rhetorical management or
rhetorical choice.
141

142 Imagining Iraq
The construction of the invasion as the ‘Iraq War’, and the consequent
highlighting of military operations and procedures, is naturally more
outside literature than within. On the surface that involves simply focal-
izing (or selectively focusing on) the realities of the military operation
as such: in the mass media, in government reports and statements, in

retrospective accounts by participants, in academic writing, in a range
of public forums. To that extent, one may think that literary texts reflect
such focalization, insofar as these dwell on the military at all, as a mirror
of wider public discourses. However, further reflection suggests that
focalization is only a small part of the picture. The military operation is
not simply conveyed by selectively highlighting the realities, but actu-
ally in terms of moulding perceptions of the military within the public
sphere, for the benefit of civil society. What relation this moulded public
perception has to the realities is a moot issue. But it is arguable that the
impression of the military and of war that is publicly put about has an
autonomous structure – is a kind of imagined structure – which pertains
more to the imperatives of civil society than the reality of military
engagements. To gauge the public impression of military operations
and war and discern the imaginary strands therein needs no special
insight into the realities of war. A particular sort of literature plays a not
insignificant role here and mediates the fictive side of public impres-
sions. Attention to this type of literature enables a reasonably clear
sense of how war and military engagements are moulded for public
consumption, with the exigencies of civil perception in mind, and for
the purpose of dispersing impressions within civil society. As might be
expected, the type of literature I have in mind – action thrillers – circulates
particularly well, considerably better by all accounts than the genres
I have been discussing so far. Action thrillers have a wider reach than
the literature touched on so far, and certainly reach readers who may
not read poetry or plays often: these texts simply correspond to and bear
upon widely held public impressions more surely than the ostensibly
elite forms discussed above.
The nuances of thus constructing war and the military for civil pur-
poses in the Iraq invasion period is best approached by noting features
of action thrillers of the time. Before doing so, however, I need to fore-
ground some preliminary considerations. I need to register, for instance,
that to address action thrillers in an analytical spirit is to enter an as yet
fluid critical field. Prior to the 1980s such texts received only sporadic
and at best condescending critical attention, and though attitudes have
changed the terms in which they are analysed continue to be vague.
These are nevertheless indicative terms which point in directions which

A Joint Enterprise: Fiction 143
are pertinent to this study. The broad area of literary production that
action thrillers belong to is variously thought of as ‘bestsellers’, ‘mass
market fiction’, ‘popular fiction’, ‘pulp fiction’, ‘genre fiction’, ‘formula
fiction’. These terms seem to run into each other and be distinguished
from each other in a variety of ways, and are in any case not precise but

blurred designations. The first three emphasize the reach of these texts;
they are defined to some degree by their appeal to a large number of
readers. ‘Pulp fiction’ correspondingly refers to the production values
of such texts, often produced in bulk and sold cheap. ‘Genre fiction’
and ‘formula fiction’ gesture towards the manner in which this field
of production is disposed for consumption: it is divided into categories
according to themes/styles and reader expectations, and is packaged
and marketed and bought and read accordingly. Thus the ‘genres’ of
‘genre fiction’ (not the conventional formal divisions which I have been
referring to as ‘genre’ here) are identified by certain broadly repetitive
themes and styles of fictional texts, such as horror, detective, romance,
fantasy, etc. – action thrillers are one such ‘genre’ of ‘genre fiction’, or
follows a specific sort of ‘formula’ of ‘formula fiction’. Actually, the kind
of ‘genre fiction’ that I am calling ‘action thrillers’ here can be captured
by other terms too, such as ‘military or espionage fiction’ or ‘combat
novels’, but ‘action thriller’ seems to catch both theme and effect,
the mores of production and consumption, nicely. ‘Genre fiction’ and
‘formula fiction’ also allude to segmented readerships, often characterized
by cohesion in terms of fandom or followings. Each of the above terms
has a touch of the pejorative about it: as disposable, not written or read
seriously, and generally kept outside critical attention, unworthy of the
application of too many grey cells. The various rather serious complexities
that nudge those multiple terms and the texts they apply to become
clearer as I plunge into some such texts: action thrillers which in some
way refer to or draw upon the Iraq invasion.
Given the high frequency with which new action thrillers appear in
the market, and keeping in mind the degree of public interest in Iraq
from 2002 to 2005 (what I consider the high pressure period of the
invasion), relatively few were directly addressed to Iraq in that period.
This is interesting in itself, and I return to this in a speculative manner
below. Since 2007 a considerable number of action thrillers set in or
around the Iraq invasion have appeared, but the ground for those was set
in the few that did appear between 2002 and 2005 – and in this section,
as in this study generally, I focus primarily on those. Prolific action
thriller authors like Dale Brown and Jim DeFelice registered a timely
concern with weapons being produced in Iraq in Razor’s Edge (2003).

144 Imagining Iraq
This appeared in the Dreamland series, and details how a crack air force
team of the US research centre ‘Dreamland’ manage to defuse in May
1997 the threat of a deadly laser weapon for destroying aircraft (a rep-
lica of the Dreamland’s own Razor weapon) which had apparently been
developed in Iraq. It turns out though that the weapon was not really

developed in Iraq at all but in Iran (where mysterious Chinese military
connections are evident), which was using it deliberately to implicate
Iraq and distract the USA and its allies. Subsequent novels by Brown and
DeFelice – particularly Armageddon (2004), Satan’s Tail (2005), End Game
(2006) – and by Brown alone – such as Strike Force (2007) – move around
a ‘volatile’ Middle East, amidst threats from terrorist organizations, and
Iranian and Chinese military alignments, without quite managing to
focus on the invasion of Iraq, and it is only in Rogue Forces (2009) that
Brown sets a novel squarely in post-occupation Iraq, in an imaginary
future. The idea of the imaginary future, however, had already been used
in Richard A. Clarke’s The Scorpion’s Gate (2005), of which more soon.
Meanwhile, Oliver North and Joe Musser’s The Jericho Sanction (2004)
appeared to exploit concerns of the time in a similar way as Razor’s Edge.
Here we have US Marine Peter Newman striving single-handedly in early
1998 to bring out three nuclear warheads, obtained from Russian arms
dealers and hidden in Iraq unbeknownst to Saddam Hussein by his
son-in-law Hussein Kamil before his defection to Jordan. Despite Saddam
Hussein’s son Qusay Hussein’s search for the warheads, the discouraging
attitude of the US civilian administration, the Israeli government’s deter-
mination to launch a nuclear attack on Iraq (that’s the Jericho Sanction),
and the unfortunate inconvenience of Newman’s wife being kidnapped,
Newman succeeds in getting hold of the warheads (and rescues his wife
too). In 2004 this was meant to be received as a clear indication of the
realistic threat that the presence of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ in Iraq
had posed; unlike Razor’s Edge, the weapons here were unambiguously
in Iraq (and not really in Iran) and the plan to use them against Israel
and the West was unquestionably the Iraqi government’s (and not a
ploy from Iran). If the above novels fed current interests by looking at
the recent past (1997, 1998) of possible acquisitions of ‘weapons of mass
destruction’ in Iraq, Richard A. Clark’s The Scorpion’s Gate (2005) did so
by presenting a possible future. In this future the post-occupation insta-
bility in Iraq has led to the installation of a puppet government under
Iranian control, and the House of Saud has been deposed from power
and replaced by an idealistic Islamic state (and consequently Saudi
Arabia has been renamed Islamyah). A ‘hawkish’ US Defense Secretary,
clearly reminiscent of Donald Rumsfeld, is determined to remove the

‘al-Quaeda’ related government of Islamyah at all costs and reinstate

the Sauds and take control of oil resources; oil motivates a militarily
ambitious Chinese government to send warships armed with nuclear
missiles to the region; and a scheming Iranian military and clerisy, bent
on extending global influence, mastermind a series of terrorist attacks

to implicate Islamya and encourage a US attack. Fortunately, a small
coterie of patriotic and idealistic US and British and Islamyah spies see
through the self-interested machinations of all parties, and cooperate to
avert any drastic military engagement over Islamyah (thus stopping
the ‘scorpions’ at the ‘gate’). Following a somewhat different tack, i.e.
neither looking back to years before the invasion nor looking forward
to an uncertain future, appeared Andy McNab’s Deep Black (2004), set
largely and squarely in occupied Iraq in October 2003. This features
world-weary secret agent Nick Stone, a battle-scarred witness of atrocities
in Bosnia in 1994, who finds himself disenchanted with his US secret
service employers and consequently employed by a friend, photographer
Kerry, as protector for a trip to Baghdad. Their quest is apparently to
meet a potential saviour of the Muslim world, a Bosnian person named
Nuhanovic, reputed to have the ability to unite all factions and under-
mine the hold of Western capitalism in the Middle East – both Nick and
Jerry admire him. Their search for Nuhanovic in Baghdad gives plenty of
scope for detailing the violence and dangers of occupied Iraq, and they
even encounter (in a typically brutal way) US officers eager to get rid of
reporters with an interest in Iraq reconstruction contracts. They catch
up with Nuhanovic not in Baghdad, though, but near Sarajevo; Nick
realizes that Nuhanovic is actually not a saviour but a human trafficker
(selling young women into prostitution) and, amidst much bloodshed,
arranges his assassination. With a similar interest in the present, Chris
Ryan’s Ultimate Weapon (2006) actually places his two British heroes,
much-battered former solider Nick Scott and efficient active soldier Jed
Bradley, in the dungeons of Saddam Hussein’s palace as the invasion is
launched in March 2003. They find their separate ways there in search
of Sarah Scott, Nick’s daughter and Jed’s lover. Sarah is a talented nuclear
scientist who has been kidnapped and taken to Iraq to help develop
nuclear weapons. Along the way the reader finds out much about the
mendacity and duplicity of British government officials and agents, and
by the end Sarah is rescued and able to confirm that the Iraqis weren’t
close to developing nuclear weapons (by 2006 it was clear that none
were being found) – but they certainly intended to.
Those give a fair sense, in summary, of action thrillers related to the
Iraq invasion when it was uppermost in the public view. That these

146 Imagining Iraq
follow certain set patterns of plot construction, and presume a similar

understanding of the military (and espionage and international politics)
sphere, is pretty evident even within the brief set of summaries above.
There are two types of indestructible heroes, cynical and scarred or able
and keen; the heroes are driven by love or ideals; there’s little doubt that

Saddam Hussein’s government was trying to obtain ‘weapons of mass
destruction’ before 2003; Iran and China are the real threats lurking in
the background, and Russians are still bad news; civilian governments
are to be viewed with suspicion while the military has dependable
sectors; states determine what happens in international politics most
powerfully; the Middle East is rife with terrorists, violence and extreme
religiosity. None of these set patterns is actually particularly distinctive
to the action thrillers summarized above, and indeed these are merely
a subset of a range of familiar patterns of considerably longer standing:
such textual patterns have been oft-noted in critical studies; and the
patterns are not just in the texts but in the manner in which they are
packaged and marketed. The physical appearances of action thrillers
(armaments and devastated landscapes figure on the dust-jackets of my
copies, and all are announced boldly as ‘bestsellers’) are familiar, akin to
and yet distinctive from other ‘genre fiction’. Claims of authority and
truthfulness on behalf of the authors are an important aspect of their
marketing: on dust-jackets, in advertising, in reviews. Oliver North is a
former US Marine Officer who has been involved in covert operations
(notoriously associated with the Iran–Contra affair), and has been a war
correspondent for Fox News (an embedded reporter in Iraq). Richard A.
Clarke has held government posts in the White House, Pentagon and
State Department under four US Presidents. Dale Brown served in the US
Air Force. Both Andy McNab and Chris Ryan were soldiers in the British
Special Air Service, and both have written memoirs of their experiences
during the Gulf War. North and Clarke claimed to give real ‘inside
information’ in a disguised form in their novels, and readers expected to
find coded truths therein. From Brown, McNab and Ryan readers expect
authentic descriptions of war and frontlines. That the revelations their
personal standing might bring can be dressed up in the set patterns
of action thrillers – the promised play of reality/truth and fiction – is
largely what’s marketed in the form of such action thrillers.
The promise of insights in terms of these authors’ military experience
or insider knowledge in these texts is actually propped up by a standard
rhetorical strategy of action thrillers. In an examination of the language
of ‘action stories’, Walter Nash had observed (with particular attention to
Fredrick Forsyth’s action thrillers) a penchant for presenting compendiums

of names and ‘facts’. He attributed several functions to such strategies

beyond simply demonstrating a grasp of ‘reality’, perceiving therein a
mode of ‘fixedly and repeatedly formulated’ identity which ‘triumphs
over the shifting truths and fugitive potential of characters’ – thereby
deflecting any expectations of ‘subtle, perceptive examination of char-

acters and relationships’ (Nash 1990, pp. 62–3). More interestingly, in
such intensive relating of names and ‘facts’ Nash discerned a strategy
for drawing in the reader by presenting the world as full of ‘complicating
objects’ which the reader can apprehend without understanding: ‘This
is the author’s way of telling us that the problem is big enough for his
hero to solve’ (p. 72). These observations fit the novels summarized
above perfectly. In all of them many technical terms and names of
machines and organizations are liberally scattered across the texts
(North’s novel even usefully begins with a glossary, mainly of acronyms
and abbreviations). Around the same time as Nash’s book, several essays
on action thrillers (e.g. Jones 1990; Palmer 1984) argued that such rheto-
rical strategies are part of a larger strategy of centring professionalism
as the heart of such texts: essentially a reassuring military professional,
alongside bureaucracy and amateur victims and onlookers. This is clearly
evidenced in the thrillers in question here at various levels. The heroes
through whose eyes the stories are told, or whom the stories follow, are
particularly professionally adept in the technical implements of warfare,
in gauging battle-zone situations, in dealing with physical violence, etc.
But beyond that, the professional air of these narratives is embedded
within the form of the text: without exception each is presented in
chapters or sections in report form, labelled with date, place and time
(or some combination of these). The illusion of the report format of
course breaks down in the descriptions and dialogues contained within.
Numerous critical works (recently and illuminatingly Baker 2006 and
Gallagher 2006) have examined the most obvious aspect of such thrillers:
that they construct the military or action domain as a predominantly
male one, wherein masculine values are formulated and tested. I have
already noted the two kinds of indestructible male heroes who dominate
in the above-mentioned thrillers: the cynical and scarred, the eager and
keen. These are masculine types with a considerable history, variously
referred back to action thrillers from Ian Fleming to Tom Clancy and
Clive Cussler. But the masculine sphere is not only described by the
individual male hero; perhaps more potently, it has to do with the group
dynamics of the professional military or militarized zone. In McNab’s
Deep Black, loner Nick Stone immediately finds a network of other former
soldiers (all male) on reaching occupied Baghdad who help and assist

148 Imagining Iraq
him in various ways. Male camaraderie in the echelons of the secret

service and the military hold the action thriller worlds of Oliver North
and Richard A. Clarke together. In the former there are kidnapped
women to be rescued and a female secretary of state to be countered;
in the latter a female journalist is used as observer, lover, and finally

victim. Ryan’s Ultimate Weapon also has two male heroes joining forces
to rescue a kidnapped female character, and fighting off a manipulative
female operative (she is finally killed off). Perhaps most interesting from
this perspective is Brown and DeFelice’s Razor’s Edge, which features
a mixed group of warriors. The main female heroine here, Breanna
Stockard, is distinguished by her ability to hold her own amongst men
as a fighter pilot and otherwise. In a concession to gender complexity,
the eager and ever-ready male heroes are shown to have a nurturing
side as they collectively first help a Kurdish couple to deliver a baby and
then care for it most affectionately. Around the particularly patriarchal
military and action domain, there’s naturally an implicitly patriarchal
worldview in such thrillers. In Cold War times, John Sutherland was
able to discern in his serious critical survey (a relatively early one) of
1970s ‘war and espionage novels’ a consistent view of history:
History, as those novels conceive it, is a thing of drastic possibilities and

hairbreadth chances. There is no ‘inexorability’, no ‘forces’, no ‘weight
of history’. Everything, in the final analysis, is a matter of risky, per-
sonal interventions at the right moment. (Sutherland 1981, p. 174)
The terms of reference might have changed from Cold War to ‘war on
terror’ and ‘preventive war’, but the action thrillers of the Iraq invasion
present precisely the same view of history. Indeed the point of these
thrillers is that behind the public perception of the invasion, disquietingly
heavy with the ‘weight of history’, there is a confident lightness of
history which has been withheld from public knowledge, incorporating
a plethora of secret histories that have been contained in the military
domain. For Sutherland the compendia of names and facts with which
I started this rather long paragraph are modes of authenticating such
secret histories: ‘The main narrative device of these novels is that of pseudo
authenticity. Secret histories go to extraordinary lengths to tantalize
readers on the matter of their facticity’ (p. 175).
What I am saying here then is that there is nothing distinctive in the
texts and production and marketing practices of action thrillers that
appeared in and with regard to the Iraq invasion period. They firmly
followed strategies that were already tried and tested and established.

They perpetuated a view of the military domain for civil consumption

that was already in place, already familiar to readers. They subscribed
closely to features that critics had already described in detail for action
thrillers in general. If there was anything distinctive about the appear-
ance of these at the time, it is not to be found in the texts but perhaps in

their receptive field – in how they were received within the civil sphere.
To pose the question that is implicit there: were they received in the Iraq
invasion period with the jaded familiarity and habitual gratification
which is usual, or was there anything off-tune in how these rang to
readers’ ears at the time?
To engage with that question is necessarily to enter a speculative area,
where arguments can be offered only as plausible though uncertain.
This is all the more so since these texts received few reviews – most
action thrillers are scantly reviewed – and no systematic surveys of
their readers or reliable breakdown of consumption patterns are available.
I fall back then on broad formulations on what reading such popular
fiction (particularly action thrillers) entails, and how that might have
worked in the invasion period for the above texts. It is evident from the
summaries and observations above that by and large action thrillers,
and certainly those in question here, present a conservative worldview:
patriarchal and usually heterosexual-normative; with sharp polarities of
good and bad which are mapped on to individuals, ethnicities, regions,
organizations and states; and designed to confirm the indispensability
and autonomy of the military (often demonstrating that these work
effectively away from civil regulation or by self-regulation). Indeed, such
worldviews characterize a large proportion of popular fiction generally,
not just action thrillers. However, it has been argued that irrespective of
the overt content of such texts, their consumption may in fact manifest
more complex ideological tendencies and incorporate a spirit of resist-
ance to establishment or bourgeois values. The paradox of the kind of
extreme conservatisms that may be found in such texts and the sub-
versive tendencies that might nevertheless underlie their consumption
was put as follows by Clive Bloom:
It is an interesting irony that pulp thrives on the fantasy representation

of authoritarian, fascistic figures and situations, situations simplified
to violence and erotica. […] pulp represents an anarchic edge on the
margin of bourgeois propriety and at the centre of modern consumer-
ist multiplicity. This, if anything, is the totalitarianism of an unrealized
and groundless space of endless choices and no consequences. (Bloom
1996, p. 16)

150 Imagining Iraq
Bloom felt convinced that ‘No really authoritarian states can stand pulp
culture – it reeks of anarchy and nonconformity and subversion’ (p. 15);
and that the ‘illicit pleasure’ of reading pulp ‘comes from reading for the
wrong reasons and knowing it’ (p. 133). These are enthusiastic words,
and perhaps they tell us more about the critical context of the mid-1990s,

when this was written, than about the popular fiction and readership
in question. Though popular fiction did receive a modicum of serious
attention since the 1970s, this was subject initially to the condescension,
if not dismissiveness, of a literary academy that was still taking on board
the implications of Theory and its emerging emancipative political aspi-
rations for the established literary canon (I have described this process
briefly in Chapter 1). By the 1990s, however, Theory had become insti-
tutionalized in the literary academy, its ‘radical’ political aspirations
(especially along the lines of identity politics) taken on board, and the
established literary canon was being opened up and alternative canons
put in place. A marked move towards cultural studies within literary
studies was symptomatized, at one level, by a new interest in mass market
cultures and new media. These newly admitted areas of academic atten-
tion were recruited to scholarship (and pedagogy) with a celebratory air,
a sense of being progressive or emancipatory moves – as much to guard
against scepticism as to sell itself as a worthy enterprise. The rhetoric of
subversion and emancipation, of being in touch with the people’s pulse
and the contemporary, was regarded as a necessary boost to formerly
looked-down-upon texts. It wasn’t regarded as enough to say that analyti-
cal attention can be revealing and useful with regard to any literary text,
without presuming the intrinsic value of those that are analysed. Nor
did it seem enough to say that scale of popular consumption itself is a
sufficient reason for looking at such texts closely. As Bloom did, popular
fiction often had to be celebrated as somehow constitutively in an
emancipative direction. A similar tendency is seen, even more persistently,
in critical studies of fandom from Lawrence Grossberg (1992) to Henry
Jenkins (2006) – I have examined that elsewhere (Gupta 2009c, Part 3,
ch. 4). But it would be over-endowing Bloom’s views of 1996 to regard
them as representative; around the same time Scott McCracken, for
instance, was taking a more temperate line when he decided to leave
aside the matter of ‘cultural value’ and focus on the ‘relation between a
particular reader (or coalition of reader groups) and a particular text or
genre’ (McCracken 1998, p. 5).
Back to the point: the quotation from Bloom above, though addressed
to popular fiction in general, has a special relevance for consumption of
action thrillers. Action thrillers are often tendentiously conservative, and

this quotation gives an optimistic account of the consumption thereof.

A similarly optimistic account is given by Mark Gallagher a decade later
(the invasion of Iraq has happened in the interim) with particularly
action thrillers in view, but the terms are different and therein lies the
interest. Gallagher recognizes the conservative underpinnings of many

action thrillers and the reassurance they may provide for readers who
are so inclined ideologically, and also argues the following:
Progressive readers and viewers cognizant of their ideological oppo-

sition to the premises and institutions that many action films and
literary thrillers celebrate – police violence, vigilantism, military and
espionage activity, subordination of women, and punishment of non-
white or gay characters – can find pleasure, diversion, and cultural
critique in the exaggerated and conflicted nature of such texts, not
to mention the sometimes comic level of transparency. Action films’
glorification of violent spectacle or popular novels’ overemphasis of
patriotic, prosocial values, for instance, can offer solace to viewers
or readers who recognize the somewhat desperate quality of such
formal or normative strategies. Action films that explicitly promote
conservative ideologies can provide disturbing spectacles, but their
reductio ad absurdum of historically rooted social and political conflicts
may demobilize conservative positions, to the relief of progressive
viewers. (Gallagher 2006, p. 15)
Where Bloom extolled the pleasures of subversive consumption, Gallagher

resorts to the relief and solace of the ‘progressive reader’s’ critical distance
from and recognition of contradictions and exaggerations within the
obviously conservative text. Gallagher, in brief, makes a virtue of critical
readership and, by a clever twist, presents that as to the advantage of
action thrillers. To me this seems like trying too hard to reconcile pro-
gressive critical reading and conservative action thrillers – indeed trying
harder than Bloom. More interestingly, the shift from Bloom’s mid-1990s
view of popular fiction representing totalitarianisms and violence being
consumed for subversive pleasure to Gallagher’s mid-2000s view of action
thrillers being consumed for reassurance, solace, relief, appears to me an
indicative one. Ideologically, Bloom and Gallagher are not particularly
differently positioned – both subscribe to a liberal left critical awareness
of popular cultural forms, and both feel a need to validate their objects
of study as worthy from that point of view. But their perceptions of con-
suming imperatives are divided by a decade and their perceptions of
attitudes to action thrillers are markedly different.

152 Imagining Iraq
There was of course plenty of reason for the shift in readers’ attitudes
from hoping for better to fearing the worst between the mid-1990s and
the mid-2000s: accruing anxieties from the 11 September 2001 terrorist
attacks in the USA to the case in point here, the prolonged tensions of
the Iraq invasion. In the latter period, it simply was harder for progres-

sive critical readers to take ‘police violence, vigilantism, military and
espionage activity, subordination of women, and punishment of non-
white or gay characters’ blithely as ‘subversive pleasure’ and consumer’s
choice: all that was tainted and grated by the ‘war on terror’ and the
tensions of the Iraq invasion. And frankly, I don’t think it at all likely
that with these in view progressive critical readers – or indeed many
readers generally –- could read conservative action thrillers for solace
or relief, however sophisticated their critical discernment. No wonder
Gallagher seems to be trying too hard with this argument. With regard
to critical thinking, the very awareness that such action thrillers are
supposed to appeal to a wide range of consumers and are designed for
uncritical consumption would have caused many readers to feel uneasy
about them. In fact, there arguably emerged in the invasion period an
analytical attitude to all kinds of texts and at all levels of civil society
(as I have argued in the opening chapter), and moreover an analytical
attitude that was constantly honed by debate, which may have been
unfriendly to such action thrillers. That might explain why so few action
thrillers set in the Iraq invasion appeared while it was the hot topic,
why most skirted around the hot topic. Only diehard thriller-writing
professionals who were convinced of their military-centred worldviews
braved the public environment to venture in that direction between
2003 and 2006, precisely writers like Oliver North, Richard A. Clarke,
Dale Brown, Andy McNab and Chris Ryan.
Speculatively then, and in metaphoric terms that are somewhat diff-
erent from those employed so far, this is how action thrillers of the Iraq
invasion might have fared in the receptive field of the invasion period.
Action thrillers crowd, so to speak, the forefront of the reader’s attention
with hectic action: with the speed of developments, with the machina-
tions of different actors, with facts and names that construct a dense
pseudo-reality. These absorb the reader’s straightforward engagement
with the thriller. Implicit in this crowded and forefronted area are a
series of presumptions which are in the background, and which operate
as a sort of backdrop screen or white noise for the reader’s attention.
That background is where a view of history, geopolitical assumptions,
political ideologies, ethical norms etc. are tacitly placed – the reader
usually accepts these quickly to keep up with the speedy and crowded

front of action. There may be a willing suspension of disbelief involved

in accepting the background presumptions; mostly though, they are
unthinkingly absorbed as the reader focuses on the forefront of action
and because the reader is habituated to such presumptions being ‘out there’,
often presented in different public forums and news media and entertainment

media and indeed other similar thrillers. The regular reader is habituated to go
along with that background of presumptions. Insofar as a civil conception
of the military domain is constructed in such action thrillers, it is built
between the forefronted action and such background presumptions.
The reader’s interest in the action, the very integrity of the action that
holds the reader, guarantees the reader’s unthinking acceptance of the
salience of the military domain which is usually familiarly out there. In
the Iraq invasion period, however, a sort of static crackles on the fore-
front and thereby interferes with the background when the Iraq context
is directly referred. It so happens that directly evoking Iraq in the inva-
sion period throws amidst the forefronted action an already forefronted
matter: the plethora of debates, texts, anxieties about the invasion that
are out there now. The hectic action at the front of the novel is interfered
with by the intense drama of the invasion out there, these collide in
the reader’s attention, and these are unavoidably brought to bear on
each other by the reader. Since the public sphere itself is troubled by
the closeness and intensity of the Iraq invasion context, anxieties spill
into the reading of the crowded action thriller which directly evokes the
invasion context. In doing so, anxieties also spill into the background
presumptions which are usually unthinkingly accepted. The relationship
between forefronted action and background presumptions within the
action thriller are troubled just as the forefronted drama of the Iraq
invasion out there is already troubled. The failure of the action thriller’s
effect, which is usually a habituated thrill, a routinized acceptance of
background presumptions, almost inevitably follows. The action thriller
simply seems inadequate before the enormity it has evoked, and the
integrity of the thriller’s action and presumptions is ironically dimin-
ished before the complexity of the present. The effect of the action
thriller fails because its presumptions become subject to analysis. The
tacit acceptance of the salience of the military domain is undermined
by the analytical interrogativeness that has gripped the civil sphere
already and which magnifies civil anxieties. Irony tends to overstep
the thrill of action thrillers under these circumstances. Their deep-set
militarism seems suspect. Real worldly wisdom and irony characterizes
naturally the few reviews that the above-mentioned thrillers attracted,
that mainly (for obvious reasons) Oliver North’s and Richard Clarke’s

154 Imagining Iraq
efforts attracted: ‘was the Iraq War – and is it – a struggle between good
and evil? According to Oliver North’s new novel The Jericho Sanction,
you’d better believe it’ (Llull 2003, p. 26); in The Scorpion’s Gate Clarke
‘displays the usual attitudes of recent US governments’ (Clawson 2006,
p. 88); ‘The Scorpion’s Gate is unlikely to alter American foreign policy

and as a thriller it is not going to set anyone’s hair on fire’ (Finder 2005,
p. 12); and so on. Possibly action thrillers which didn’t directly allude to
the Iraq invasion were more successful. Perhaps the Iraq invasion was
more significantly brought to bear tangentially and unthinkingly upon
numerous thrillers, and numerous thrillers were designed to encourage a
tangential, almost unthinking, gesture towards the Iraq invasion – and
as such, in an indirect way the anxieties out there enhanced the thrills
of action within because of their lack of obvious connection. But that
might be a speculation too far, and is at any rate outside the scope of this
study. This study delimits its coverage to literary texts which addressed
the Iraq invasion directly.
‘Literary fiction’
There’s an unwritten but well understood contract between authors

(texts), publishers, distributors and readers which distinguishes ‘genre
fiction’ of the sort discussed above from the ‘literary fiction’ I now move
on to. In literary studies this contract is often thought of as established
in the encounter between text and reader: in the linguistic, structural
and formal disposition of the text and the reader’s responsive recognition
and decoding of the text. It is in terms of this encounter, for instance,
that semiotician Umberto Eco influentially distinguished between ‘closed’
and ‘open’ texts (Eco 1979), which can be roughly correlated to ‘genre
fiction’ and ‘literary fiction’. However, it has become increasingly clear
since that such an explanation is far from satisfactory. The account of
distinguishing between texts according to their make-up is plausible
enough, but the contract is not simply established between text and
reader. A large number of extrinsic and tacit factors mediate and indeed
pre-empt that encounter. Such factors have much to do with the manner
in which authors and publishers and distributors target markets, and in
which consumers regulate their expectations and choices according to
the market. A more precise way of understanding the contract which
distinguishes ‘genre fiction’ from ‘literary fiction’ could be put thus:
increasingly authors write, publishers design and produce, distributors
disseminate, and readers choose and read texts with the presumption
that some texts can be read unthinkingly and others need to be read

thinkingly. Those that can be read unthinkingly, such as ‘genre fiction’,

come with familiar structures which are built upon and varied slightly
by authors, gestured towards in book designs, highlighted in marketing,
recognized and consumed accordingly and effortlessly by readers. Those
that are apt to be read thinkingly, such as ‘literary fiction’, are more inde-

pendently conceived by authors, packaged and produced and marketed
to underline their originality, and test readers’ preconceptions in some
way – or at least readers pick them up on the understanding that they
might. But that is still too neat an opposition. In fact, both ‘literary
fiction’ and ‘genre fiction’ are market terms, originating in publishers’
and retailers’ firms, and both in fact formalize the consumption of fiction
for marketing purposes. The market mediation of ‘literary fiction’ is as
carefully managed as that of ‘genre fiction’: for instance, particular kinds
of reviewing spaces, book designs, modes of recognition and celebrity
attach to the former as to the latter. The very fact that ‘literary fiction’
exists as a market category suggests not so much greater openness or
thinkingness, but well-formulated corporate management of authoring
and reading. From a rigorous critical perspective, of course, neither phrase
makes much sense: all fiction is literary, and all can be examined in
generic terms. But when a critic plays along with the broad market
division – as I am in this chapter – it is a matter of factoring in a critical
awareness of market mediations when analysing texts.
In thinking about ‘literary fiction’ of the Iraq invasion, the factoring
in of market mediations has a critical importance. The kind of ‘genre
fiction’ I have examined above, the action thriller, has its market ambi-
tions written on its sleeves. But the ‘literary fiction’ of the Iraq invasion
does not – its claims are deeper and more self-consciously literary. Such
works of literary fiction promise to engage the reader’s analytical and
aesthetic sensibilities in distinctive and unexpected ways. So it is of parti-
cular interest whether the hidden hand of the market can be discerned
in these, and whether their foregrounded literariness can be regarded as
derived from or responsive to market conditions. I argue below that in a
subtle way my examples do hold their literary ambition in a careful bal-
ance with the market construction of literariness, and that this balance
is woven deep into their structures. But before going into that, a brief
account of the fiction in question is needed: they are, within the inva-
sion period this study focuses on, Noah Cicero’s The Human War (2003),
Nicholson Baker’s Checkpoint (2004) and Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005).
The Human War tracks the thoughts of a 22-year-old resident of
Youngstown, Ohio, Mark Swift, interspersed with conversations he has
with various persons, after he leaves his parents listening to the news two

156 Imagining Iraq
hours before the Iraq invasion is formally due to begin. Mark’s thoughts
appear with the randomness of everyday thoughts and touch on various
personal circumstances and general observations, but invariably revolve
around the upcoming invasion. His sense of the violence that is about
to be unleashed is acute and it disturbs him deeply, and he is simply

unable to let it go – it seems to crystallize his personal dissatisfactions,
his philosophical anxieties, his feelings of restlessness and uncertainty.
He first meets his casual lover Kendra and has sex with her (and talks
about Iraq). Then Mark comes across a Vietnam veteran in a fast-food
restaurant where he stops for coffee, and receives the following advice
from him: ‘Listen to me kid, never go into the military. Read your books,
go to college, have sex, but never go into the military, they’ll brainwash
you, and make you believe that fighting for America has meaning, it
doesn’t’ (Cicero 2003, p. 36). Afterwards Mark meets up with his friend
Jimmy and has the kind of purposeless conversation friends hanging
out together often have (and much of it revolves around Iraq); they go
to a strip joint, then a bar, and meet various women, and as the evening
progresses Mark becomes progressively drunk (and all Mark’s conversations
and ruminations return obsessively to Iraq). As his inebriation mounts,
Mark starts shouting obscenities about President Bush and the war, then
vomits in the bathroom, is accosted by a ‘really stupid hot girl’ who is
entirely in favour of the invasion on the grounds that ‘It’s pretty selfish
for America to keep freedom to themselves’, and leaves Mark on the
floor with his final thoughts for the novel:
I sit there confounded.

I don’t know what to make of this war.
I don’t know what I should do.
You know what, FUCK THIS WAR, FUCK BUSH, FUCK GOD, AND
FUCK AMERICA.
I’ll just be drunk. (p. 86)
On a similarly despairing note begins Baker’s Checkpoint, where two

friends, Ben and Jay, meet in a hotel in Washington DC in May 2004
after having lost touch for a considerable period. Jay sets off the con-
versation by declaring that he has decided to assassinate US President
George Bush ‘For the good of humankind’ (Baker 2004, p. 5). The
entire novel is the conversation that follows, in which Jay lays out his
reasons and Ben tries to dissuade him, and in the process they reveal
something of their personal circumstances and preoccupations. Jay’s
decision derives from his bitter disenchantment with the invasion and

its results, and he justifies it by recounting the various incidents of

civilian killings and torture of Iraqi prisoners that occurred in gruelling
detail. Ben, though determined to dissuade Jay from such a rash step,
shares Jay’s sense of outrage about the invasion, and, as a historian, is
able to see the lines of complicity reaching back into post-Second World

War US foreign policy. As their conversation develops it becomes clear
that Jay’s and Ben’s agreement on the Iraq invasion doesn’t arise from
shared ideological convictions. On the contrary, they hold opposed
views on most matters. Jay turns out to be vehemently anti-abortion,
Ben is firmly pro-choice; Jay tends to leap to wildly implausible con-
spiracy theories, while Ben is methodical and informed in his analysis
of the Iraq invasion. It becomes apparent that Jay and Ben are very dif-
ferently located in their personal and professional lives, and that this
might have a bearing on Jay’s passionate and Ben’s relatively stoical
response to the situation in Iraq. Jay is in financial difficulties, and has
moved from a teaching job to working as a day labourer. He has con-
sequently lost his intellectual interests, is separated from his children,
and has been unable to sustain relationships with a series of partners.
Ben has a steady job as an academic, a stable family life, has cultivated
his research interests and developed new hobbies. Ben suggests, and it
seems increasingly likely, that Jay’s vehement hatred of President Bush
and rage at the injustice being perpetrated in Iraq may be driven by the
deficiencies of his personal and professional circumstances. Likewise,
if Ben is able to temper his sense of outrage it is because his personal
and professional stabilities enable a more temperate disposition, or at
the least a more cautious and restrained one. But however intermeshed
the personal and the political might be, their shared unease about the
invasion cannot be denied by either, so that when Ben appeals to Jay’s
humaneness the latter is able to do the same with contrary effect:
Ben: But don’t you think that if you – I mean, you’ve seen the tape of
when Kennedy was shot. You’ve seen the frames that were cut out
of the film because all that blood was blasting from his head? A spray
of brain? I mean it’s a horrifying sight. It’s a human being that is now
just nothing. You want to be a part of that?
Jay: That’s the thing. I have allowed myself to feel that feeling with
the people in Fallujah, in Karbala, in Nasiriyah, in Basra, in Baghdad,
in Mosul – all these cities. And Afghanistan before that. I’ve seen the
pictures. And I feel that they – I mean Bush, any Marine sergeant,
any soldier – all these guys are in the war business, one way or

158 Imagining Iraq
another. So they know that there’s a certain risk involved. You can
become a casualty of the wars you incite, or that you volunteer for.
But these kids who are having their limbs blown off, they don’t know
what’s going on. There’s just a sudden sound of jet engines. (Baker
2004, pp. 108–9)

At the end Ben accepts this but still prevents Jay from carrying out his
assassination attempt, presenting Jay with a picture of Bush instead to
vent his rage on in a ritual fashion. This is not so much a resolution
of anything, simply an assertion finally by the successful and stronger
personality over the vulnerable and weaker personality.
Where despair or helplessness are the predominant notes of the above
two novels, a fairly upbeat note is struck in McEwan’s Saturday. This
describes an eventful day, 15 February 2003, in the life of a London
neurosurgeon Henry Perowne, through his eyes and thoughts. The novel
begins with Perowne rising at dawn and witnessing a plane crashing from
his window, then details his interactions with his family and colleagues,
his memories, his social and philosophical attitudes, his professional
activities, and is gradually structured around two events: an encounter
with a gang of aggressive youths after a minor car accident, and the
reappearance of this gang at his home to wreck an evening family
get-together. Perowne obviously belongs to the affluent professional
middle class, lives in an up-market house in central London and drives
an expensive car, and his view of the world and life is circumscribed by
his circumstances. The two encounters with the gang of youths, particu-
larly their leader Baxter, turn out to be encounters across a class chasm,
infused with the desire and aggression that the less solvent Baxter feels
towards Perowne and his family. Baxter’s disadvantages are underlined
by his having inherited a genetically transmitted disease, which Perowne
discerns in their first meeting (thus establishing a kind of authority). The
novel ends with Perowne, the authority figure and devoted family man,
overcoming Baxter, and then, as healer and humanist, saving his life by
performing surgery on him (though unable to cure him). Throughout,
the invasion of Iraq is in the background, both as a pressing reality – for
this is the day of the largest ever anti-invasion marches in London – and
as a nagging preoccupation in Perowne’s mind. Mostly Perowne’s preoc-
cupation with the pros and cons of the coming invasion is in an almost
subliminal stratum of his consciousness: he finds himself thinking of
Saddam Hussein as he watches his sleeping wife, for instance. Despite
qualms about the motives of the US–UK led drive to invade Iraq, Perowne
is not against it. On the contrary, and largely due to a personal encounter

with a professor who was tortured in Iraq, he rather thinks it might lead
to desirable outcomes. While watching the protesters from his car he
lists in his mind all their arguments against war and recognizes their
veracity, and yet ‘can’t feel, as the marchers themselves probably can,
that they have an exclusive hold on moral discernment’ (McEwan 2005,

p. 73). Or, as he later explains in an argument with his daughter:
No rational person is for war. But in five years we might not regret it. I’d
love to see the end of Saddam. You’re right, it could be a disaster. But it
could be the end of a disaster and the beginning of something better.
It’s all about outcomes, and no one knows what they’ll be. That’s why
I can’t imagine marching in the streets. (McEwan 2005, p. 187)
From the perspective of this study, in brief, the novel demonstrates how
deeply embedded the upcoming invasion was in the routine consciousness
of people in London (and presumably elsewhere), how enmeshed in the
domestic, personal, everyday preoccupations of people like Perowne (and
others, presumably both the protesters and those who didn’t protest).
The forms of these three works of ‘literary fiction’ were designed to
address the invasion and appear in the market of the invasion period
with considerable caution. They came with the deliberation of fictional
texts of immediate relevance in a divided context, aware of the weight
of contextually determined attention. At a time when, as I noted in the
first chapter, every statement by any notable person or in any forum was
apt to be received as advocacy for or against invasion, as denunciation
or approval of occupation and aftermath, these novels used formal strat-
egies to evade easy fixing in those terms. All three were, in other words,
carefully designed to write out any authorial perspective, or to simply not
allow the reader an opportunity for discerning an authorial narrative voice
and attributing a political position to it. Not even apparently innocent
passages of description or summary were given in the voice of an omnis-
cient narrator, thus evading critical readings for which no passage is
innocent and no omniscience is impregnable. The ingenuity of critical
reading now is often devoted to teasing out the ideological or ethical
nuances of apparently neutral descriptions or summaries. McEwan’s
Saturday might appear to present the most scope for such reading,
where Perowne’s day and musings are reported in the third person, but in
fact that is an invitation which is thwarted by the determination with
which the narrative sticks to Perowne – largely saying what he thinks
and perceives, occasionally flicking into his interlocutors’ view (but that
may just be Perowne’s sense of the interlocutor), and sometimes giving

160 Imagining Iraq
dialogues verbatim. There is no moment at which the voice which speaks

of Perowne’s day can be distinguished as saying anything more than what
Perowne felt, saw, thought or said. But there is an invitation to the
reader to see whether an authorial view can be distinguished – the third-
person narrative is an invitation – and the reader is consequently kept

on her toes, alert for any extrinsic authorial perspective on Perowne. But
it doesn’t come. The narrative flows seamlessly as Perowne’s day unrav-
els without summative pause or comment. It seems to me that some of
the tautness of the prose derives from the third-person narrative which
refuses to articulate a third-person position. Cicero’s The Human War
doesn’t offer the invitation that McEwan’s third-person narrative does: it
is given in the first person of the character being portrayed, Mark Swift,
and moves in the haphazard and bitty fashion of thoughts. The impres-
sion created for the reader is of almost unmediated access to Mark’s
thoughts – occasionally interspersed with dialogues given verbatim, but
mostly as if the reader eavesdrops into Mark’s mind. This impression is
strengthened by the liberty with syntax and sentence connectives that
the narrative takes, so that as Mark becomes drunk his sentences seem to
become more fragmented and disjointed. In fact, Saturday and The Human
War deliberately throw readers back to familiar fictional techniques of
the early twentieth century, to the period of Édouard Dujardin, James
Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson. With the latter in view,
the ‘stream of consciousness’ and ‘interior monologue’ techniques were
succinctly defined in 1950 as follows:
the stream of consciousness technique may be defined as that nar-

rative method by which the author attempts to give a direct quotation
of the mind – not merely of the language area but of the whole
consciousness. […] The only criterion is that it introduces us directly
into the interior life of the character, without any intervention by
way of comment or explanation on the part of the author. If the
author limits his direct quotation to that area of consciousness in
which the mind formulates its thoughts and feelings into language,
the method may still be called by the comprehensive term the stream
of consciousness technique, but in this case it would be more exact to
apply the more restricted term interior monologue. If, however, the
author intervenes in any way between the reader and the character’s
consciousness in order to analyze, comment, or interpret, then he is
employing not the stream of consciousness technique but a funda-
mentally different method which may correctly be designated internal
analysis. (Bowling 1950, p. 345)

The application of such definitions to McEwan’s and Cicero’s novels

seems self-evident: both employ the stream of consciousness technique,
and Cicero’s particular method is close to interior monologue. Both care-
fully eschew any internal analysis. Baker’s Checkpoint, however, adopts
a quite different technique which is equally successful in concealing

any authorial position: it is composed entirely of dialogue. If the cover
didn’t announce it as ‘a novel’ beside the title, it could well be regarded
simply as a play. That it is announced as a novel though draws attention
to how comprehensively shorn of fictional prose it is, how carefully its
two characters are allowed to subsume the narrative space.
It is possible that these are novels which singularly replay a late
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century aesthetic quest in the fraught
early twenty-first, the sort of aesthetic achievement that James Joyce’s
would-be artist Stephen Dedalus understands as: ‘The personality of the
artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent
narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalises itself, so
to speak’ (Joyce 1964 [1916], p. 219). Given that the Iraq invasion is the
common denominator of these, it seems likely that actually the quest
is more to keep readers at bay than to reach artistic impersonality, or
more to protect the artist from political pigeonholing than to reach an
aesthetic goalpost. The ‘personality of the artist’, at any rate, is not so
much ‘refined out of existence’ as simply not allowed space. The central
characters so crowd the view, are put so close up to the reader, that there
is little space to register the artiness of the novels. In this these are quite
unlike Joyce’s or Woolf’s efforts, where the hand of the impersonal
artist is conveyed in carefully weighed words, and always in the tacit
choices made: of juxtapositions of scenes and thoughts, of deliberate-
ness in pacing and resonances. The latter have, at the least, a deliberate
‘arranger’ behind the impersonalizing techniques of the novel. So, of
course, do the three in question here (an ‘arranger’ is inevitable), but
it is a less deliberate one: the arrangers of these novels hide behind
Aristotelian unities which seem to leave minimum scope for arranging.
These are compressed in time and space so that each has to follow the
logic of unity of time and space to a considerably greater extent than is
usual in novels: the logic of what’s possible for one person in one day
in Saturday, one person in one evening in The Human War, for recording
every word that two people spoke over something like an hour and a
half in Checkpoint.
The formal precautions taken in these novels to write out any autho-
rial perspective were justified insofar as their initial reception can be
traced. Unfortunately, such reception was uneven, and the intervention

162 Imagining Iraq
of market processes is salient here. The main recorded source for early
responses is naturally the book review. How well-established the author
is, how influential the publishing firm, how determinedly the publicity
is managed, what policies the reviewing outlets (broadsheets, magazines,
etc.) follow, how accessible the book is from retailers, and a large number

of such other factors skew the traceable receptive field of book reviews
in numerous ways. Naturally, established novelists like McEwan and
Baker publishing with an international corporation like Random House
attracted (or manipulated) the notice of a wide range of respectable
broadsheets and literary journals. Cicero’s first novel was published in
the USA by the small publisher of ‘experimental fiction’ Fugue State
Press in 2003, and received no significant notice in the usual review-
ing spaces – but it was noticed in a more dispersed space of electronic
literary magazines and websites and blogs. In the UK it appeared five
years later in 2007 published by the somewhat larger independent firm
Snowbooks, which got it only marginally more attention in terms of
belated reviews.
For the former two, their reception through book reviews was generated
by controversy which was precisely against the grain of their careful
author-erased forms. Controversy here sounds so much like newsworthy
publicity that it is difficult to pin to the texts in question; such contro-
versies appear to have an autonomous media rationale and purpose.
In this instance the controversies had to do squarely with the Iraq inva-
sion context and immediately played against the obvious cautiousness
of the forms and the authorial anticipations those forms suggest. The
November 2004 issue of the online Complete Review conducted a useful
accounting and analysis of reviews of Baker’s Checkpoint (‘Nicholson
Baker’s Checkpoint: The Reaction and Reviews’ 2004). Surveying 27
reviews of the book in the USA, UK and Germany, the following note-
worthy points were made here. First, reviewers pronounced judgement
about the novel when pre-publication information was released and
before reading the novel:
Over- and premature reactions were the order of the day, the public
(or rather their pundit-representatives) quickly split into only two
extreme camps: those who thought the book (meaning, to them, the
idea – presidential assassination – presented in the book) was unaccept-
able, versus those who thought that, since it was a work of fiction,
anything goes. Meanwhile, almost no one on either side – at least
not the most vociferous opponents and defenders – appears to have
actually read the book. (‘Nicholson Baker’s Checkpoint’ 2004)

Second, with occasional exceptions, even after publication the book was
reviewed in simplistic ways to be fitted into the frame of being for or
against invasion, often simply misrecognizing or neglecting the narrative
strategies and fictional vision it offered: in the Complete Review’s terms,
‘So far, […] rather than being considered a fiction providing an insight

into the times it has become a symbol of them; in the near future it
seems unlikely to be seen any differently’. And third, despite the pre-
publication controversy and timing of publication (not just with Iraq
in the news, but connectedly the upcoming US presidential elections),
interest in the novel waned almost as soon it was published:
The great media interest led publication of the book – already

rushed, and (adding to the controversy) originally scheduled for just
before the Republican National Convention – to be moved up from
24 to 10 August [2004], with an initial print run reported to have
been 60,000 (or 75,000). Media interest continued – the book was
widely reviewed – but did not translate into sales-success. By the
end of August, only some 6,500 copies had been sold, a very poor
performance for a book receiving so much attention. (‘Nicholson
Baker’s Checkpoint’ 2004)
Possibly the novel’s formal and structural resistance to simplistic render-

ing in the immediate invasion context made it expedient for readers to
neglect it rather than engage with it.
McEwan’s Saturday had a quite different reviewing experience, and yet
that was marked by controversy too. The novel was received on publi-
cation in January 2005 with extravagantly laudatory reviews in the UK
and USA, was soon placed on bestseller lists, and seemed headed for the
Booker Prize for which it was nominated. Its ambiguities were noted,
and it was widely regarded as the definitive literary expression of the
post-11 September 2001, or most immediately post-Iraq invasion, ethos
in most ‘quality’ broadsheets and literary magazines. Mark Lawson’s
review in The Guardian was characteristic in noting that: ‘Most of the
fictions provoked by post-9/11 politics have taken up positions as clearly
as a party spokesman. But Saturday […] is subtle enough to be taken as
a warning against either intervention or against isolationism. […] As in
the best political novels, the evidence and arguments are distributed
with careful ambiguity’ (Lawson 2005). Its upbeat ending and tone
were particularly valued amidst what had been a prolonged and grim
reckoning with the consequences of invasion: ‘There is indeed grandeur
in this view of life, matter giving rise to minds which create the modern

164 Imagining Iraq
wonders’ (Kohn 2005, in The Independent); ‘Saturday is about feeling

good rather than feeling bad’ (Sophie Harrison 2005, in New Statesman);
‘McEwan slows or freezes the dramatic action to better emphasise the
rituals of daily violence that surround, and sometimes even protect,
our elusive experience of happiness’ (Scurr 2005, in The Times); and so

on. Reviewers seemed to have decided to celebrate the ‘happiness’ of
the novel in view of the Iraq invasion if not to find an authorial for-or-
against position (the desire to find happiness from a novel is not much
different from determination to discover a political position in a novel),
until John Banville’s review appeared on 26 May 2005 in The New York
Review of Books. Banville didn’t mince words: he regarded Saturday as
‘a dismayingly bad book’ in terms of plotting and characterization;
observed that ‘if Tony Blair – who makes a fleeting personal appear-
ance in the book, oozing insincerity – were to appoint a committee to
produce a “novel for our time”, the result would surely be something
like this’ (p. 14). With the background anti-invasion protests in mind,
Banville found evidence for McEwan’s ideological perspective early in
the novel – quoting the following sentiment pronounced by Perowne’s
son Theo from it:
When we go on about the big things, the political situation, global

warming, world poverty, it all looks really terrible, with nothing
getting better, nothing to look forward to. But when I think small,
closer in – you know, a girl I’ve just met, or this song we’re doing
with Chas, or snowboarding next month, then it looks great. So this
is going to be my motto – think small. (McEwan 2005, pp. 34–5)
and succinctly observing that, ‘It might also be, amazingly, the motto
of McEwan’s book’ (Banville 2005, p. 12). The observation that ‘think
small’ is McEwan’s ‘motto’ (i.e. the author is so close to his subject
Perowne that he can deliberately circumvent the larger political issues
that the novel is ostensibly set amidst) did precisely what the strategy
of the stream of consciousness novel was designed to avoid: it found a
deliberate mode of political evasion which could be attributed to the
author (as ‘arranger’) within that strategy itself. It also implicated all
those reviewers who were pleased to find an upbeat tone in the novel
in the same kind of political evasion, and Banville gave them an earful
too. It was too precise an observation to be easily countered, and in
fact it wasn’t – but controversy followed on other grounds. As it hap-
pened, Banville’s novel The Sea was also heading towards the Booker
Prize and had been nominated, and it was unusual for one contender

to undermine another in this fashion. Now the Booker Prize, as novelist

Gilbert Adair had observed back in 1986, is more an annual market-
ing event than an indicator of quality. It has consequently thrived on
being able to generate controversies which draw public attention, and
such ‘Bookerization’, critic James English (2002, p. 18) noted, could be

thought of as a modern literary and art market phenomenon which
has caught on. John Sutherland, chairman of the Booker Prize commit-
tee, published a letter (23 June 2005) in response to Banville’s review
objecting that it was too harsh and picking on a trivial factual error
(really small thinking), and Banville’s response on the same page was
scathingly dismissive. As it happened, McEwan’s Saturday did not make
it to the Booker shortlist announced in September 2005 while Banville’s
The Sea did, and in fact the latter went on to win the prize that year.
A downward slide in McEwan’s popularity as an author, not in the literary
establishment but among the reading public, has been noted since. In
a 2009 article, David Sexton observed a groundswell of attacks against
McEwan’s novels among bloggers: noting ‘an astounding outpouring of
bile against him’, Sexton put it down to ‘just unthinking class-antago-
nism and political fault-finding’ stirred largely by Saturday. When
Cicero’s The Human War appeared in the UK in 2007, the well-known
novelist Ellis Sharp in his blog-site (9 July 2007) and Lee Rourke in his
Guardian book-blog (8 August 2007) recommended it strongly for its
contrasting approach to the Iraq invasion compared to Saturday.
Let me draw some of the threads of the above observations together.
In distinctive ways, the novels in question by Cicero, Baker and
McEwan were about the environment of the Iraq invasion period and
were meant, in the first instance, to provoke the interest of readers
within that environment. Possibly because of their awareness of the
polarized ways in which readers were reading anything about Iraq at
the time, these authors tried to structure their texts so as to play with
readers’ expectations without taking any clearly attributable autho-
rial position about the invasion. They attempted, in other words, to
anticipate and thwart readers’ expectations by structuring their novels
so as to write out the author. The books were naturally produced and
appeared in the market to capitalize on the charged atmosphere of the
Iraq invasion period and the extraordinary interest among readers in
anything to do with Iraq. Judging by the run of reviews, the authors
anticipated readers’ expectations correctly but didn’t quite manage to
thwart those expectations. Despite, and sometimes through unexpected
engagement with, the author-erased forms of these novels, reviewers
sought to impose their contextually predetermined readings. This was

166 Imagining Iraq
manifested variously in single-minded efforts to read the novels as

pro- or anti-invasion statements, in trying to find the panacea for the
bitterness caused by the invasion therein, and in bickering amongst
reviewers according to their own stances apropos the invasion. In vari-
ous ways and at various levels – in the authors’ sense of the market and

the readers’, in the production and dissemination processes, in the man-
ner in which reviewers received them and the controversies generated,
in the mediated ways in which readers consumed them – the structures
of the literary market of the time were apparent. In fact, I feel that this
argument could go one more step. Though the reviews are uneven
indicators of consumption and reception, they are indicative enough
to suggest some broader features of the complicity of authors, texts and
readers in market mechanisms of the time, and indeed in general for our
time. As for the action thrillers in the previous section, some plausible
but speculative thoughts in this regard draw this chapter to a close.
The slippage between what the authors of these texts attempted and
what the readers found in the texts can be considered, somewhat tan-
gentially, in terms of another formulation in and about early twentieth-
century fiction. Aldous Huxley’s notion of a ‘novel of ideas’ is still evoked
as a familiar one every now and then, but on the whole it has almost
disappeared from serious critical discussions. Like Joyce’s would-be artist
Stephen Dedalus in his novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man theoriz-
ing the artist’s erasure, Aldous Huxley’s would-be novelist Philip Quarles
in Point Counter Point defines the phrase in his notebook:
Novel of ideas. The character of each personage must be implied, as

far as possible, in the ideas of which he is the mouthpiece. In so far
as theories are rationalizations of sentiments, instincts, dispositions
of the soul, this is feasible. […] The great defect of the novel of ideas
is that it’s a made-up affair. Necessarily; for people who can reel off
neatly formulated notions aren’t quite real; they are slightly mon-
strous. Living with monsters becomes rather tiresome in the long run.
(Huxley 1947 [1928], pp. 409–10)
Putting the novelist as theorist within the novel (another strategy that
Quarles interestingly ponders) is a kind of explicit announcement of the
aesthetic quest which Joyce articulated through Dedalus – a self-reflexive
moment when the work of art both performs and labels this quest.
Nothing of the sort happens in any of the novels in question here, but
the idea of the ‘novel of ideas’ could be regarded as pertinent to them.
The Iraq invasion period was afloat on a limited but absorbing range

of ideas to do with the justifications and fallacies of invasion: limited,

but complex considerations to do with the nature of national and
international regimes and prerogatives, and the responsibilities towards
and of peoples, were involved. The polarizations that I have mentioned
frequently were to do with accepting or being convinced by these ideas,

with unresolved discussions of these, and particularly with seeking con-
firmation for one or the other side of contending ideas. While trying
to withhold any easy identification of authors with political ideas and
sides under discussion, Cicero, Baker and McEwan nevertheless let loose
fictional characters who could be identified by readers as representatives
of specific ideas and therefore holders of specific positions regarding the
invasion. Mark in The Human War brings his sense of the world, a down-
to-earth philosophical bent, to express his revulsion at the invasion;
Perowne in Saturday does the same from a different social position to
clarify his acceptance of the invasion; and Ben and Jay in Checkpoint are
personifications of two ideational positions against the invasion. Instead
of presenting their own political positions, in other words, the authors
used their texts to put the political positions out there – which would be
immediately grasped and recognized at the time – in the form of charac-
ters for readers to reckon with. So far then, the authors wrote texts which
could be thought of as ‘novels of ideas’, with characters as mouthpieces
for contextually relevant ideas. However, this ploy slipped, in that read-
ers in that heated environment read the texts as ‘novels of ideas’, but
quite differently. Readers searched for confirmation of their ideas rather
than sitting back and considering the ideas, distanced though personi-
fied mouthpieces, as such. Put otherwise, readers looked for one definitive
idea in each text, to be able to attribute an idea to the novel as a whole
or its author which could then be accepted or refuted. This was at odds
with the careful designs of the novels, indeed this was precisely what the
novels were designed to discourage, but readers did it anyway: they won-
dered whether this novel isn’t offering a ray of sunshine in dark times,
whether that character isn’t in fact the author, whether such-and-such a
passage doesn’t reveal what the author/text is ultimately saying. In view
of and with a view to engaging the charged political atmosphere of the
time authors offered effectively ‘novels of ideas’ and readers looked for
‘novels of ideas’, but what authors intended and texts presented and
readers read didn’t quite gel. The contract of ‘literary fiction’ with which
I began this section was implicated both in the production of ‘novels of
ideas’ and in the (mis)readings of ‘novels of ideas’ in this context.
Beneath such particular negotiations of the contract of ‘literary fic-
tion’ in the Iraq invasion period lie the general features of that contract

168 Imagining Iraq
and the general character of the contemporary literary market: the

latter form the ground on which the specific experience of these Iraq
invasion ‘literary fictions’ was built. In an interesting essay recently
(well, more recently than Huxley), Timothy Bewes has sought to make
a distinction between the ‘novel of ideas’ and the ‘philosophical novel’

by taking account of the intervention of the literary market. Bewes
thinks of regard for the literary market amongst authors and readers
and in texts as introducing ‘philosophical dishonesty’ in the encounter
between authors/texts and readers. His moralistic distinctions follow
accordingly:
What distinguishes the [‘philosophical novel’] from the [‘novel of

ideas’] is: (1) the absence of authorial predetermination or ulterior
motives. The philosophical novel should be a meditation which
engages the reader philosophically, in which the author and reader
are embarked upon a joint enterprise – not one in which the author
is leading the reader by the nose. […] In the philosophical novel the
author writes out of a formal principle; from a position that is not
elevated above the reader, but one in which the reader meets the
author halfway; (2) the existence of a point of resistance to the values
of the objective world, a temperament of refusal towards the instinct
to play to the gallery, to appeal to the market, rather than to a more
rarefied and unquantifiable idea of literary creation, or aesthetic
harmony. In other words, the author of the philosophical novel
appeals to the reader from a position which is at least as elevated
as the reader, and not from a position subordinate to the sovereign
reader-consumer.
If the literary work violates these conditions of the philosophical
novel, the writer can be said to be engaged in a technical task (the
phrase which Kant uses of the political moralist), and to have pro-
duced merely a ‘novel of ideas’; that is to say, a work for the market,
or one which is concerned to reiterate an intellectual conviction that
is apparent (retrospectively or otherwise) in the work from the open-
ing page – a conviction to which the text itself is therefore merely
incidental, extraneous, supplementary. (Bewes 2000, pp. 427–8)
If such a moralistic factoring in of the literary market and consequent

distinctions were accepted, the situation of the three novels in discus-
sion here grows more complicated. A number of questions arise. Let me
pose some of them: Given that the Iraq invasion had predisposed the
literary market in certain ways, could the very fact that the invasion was

engaged in these texts be regarded as an appeal to the market? Was it

possible for any literary fiction about Iraq not to have appealed to the
market in predetermined ways, irrespective of philosophical probity?
Was it possible to write and publish a ‘philosophical novel’ during the
Iraq invasion period particularly, and is it generally possible any longer?

Is it possible that ‘philosophical novels’ in the above terms could have
been received as ‘novels of ideas’, i.e. that readers (who don’t necessar-
ily hold a moral high ground) inserted their market-led expectations in
their readings? Wouldn’t certain agents of the literary market (which
includes literary agents, publishers, book designers, distributors, retail-
ers, advertisers, reviewers) inevitably and actively skew the passage of
a pristinely ‘philosophical novel’ from author to a philosophically sus-
pect ‘novel of ideas’ for the reader – in view of market features (such as
interest in Iraq) when the book is released? On the last, Bewes seems to
incorrectly assume that the market is in the hands of authors and read-
ers/consumers, and all mediators are passive subsets of one or the other.
And here’s another one: Is Bewes’s understanding of a ‘philosophical
novel’ an idealistic and anachronistic reiteration of the early twentieth-
century aesthetic quest à la Joyce?
It seems to me sufficient to raise these questions here, rather than to
try and answer them. Answers would inevitably stray far from the thrust
of this study. In those answers, I suspect, the terms of the contract of
‘literary fiction’ are to be found. And unless those terms are clarified
the practices of contemporary ‘literary fiction’ in their specific contexts
cannot be adequately analysed. Without the benefit of those clarifica-
tions, the bearing of a specific context, such as that of the Iraq invasion
period, can only be taken so far and no further: perhaps only somewhat
further than the discussion of the three novels which occupy this sec-
tion. To go somewhat further would be to take account of fiction that
I have not touched on here, and that’s a dense area of fiction. This sec-
tion has been confined to what I have thought of as the high-pressure
period of the Iraq invasion, from 2003 to 2005. Many relevant novels
have appeared since. I have unwarrantably neglected short stories, a
simply enormous area of Iraq invasion productions. I have stuck to texts
in English, circulating primarily in the UK and USA. A great deal more
remains to be considered and analysed than this section, this chapter,
and indeed this study generally can extend to.

6
Windows into Life-Worlds: Blogs
and Conclusion

Fear and two blogs
Often the most knowledgeable informants about relatively distant coun-

tries and cultures in the UK and USA are émigrés from those countries.
This is understandable; they can be expected to have a close awareness
of both their countries of origin and domicile, some degree of allegiance
to both, and a stake in mediating between them. And indeed an ‘insider’
perspective, which an émigré informant is likely to have, is regarded as
valuable in cultural and scholarly works. For instance, the perspectives
of ethnographers from within the culture being studied, or ‘autoethno-
graphy’, are often received as more authentic than those from a different
culture engaging in field research (on this, particularly in relation to literary
narratives, see Buzard 2003 and 2005; Ellis 2009; Pratt 1992). In addition
to possessing an insider perspective, émigré informants may derive advan-
tages from their outside position unavailable to those within the country
of origin: they may have better resources at their command, the benefits
of a comparative perspective, or the freedom to engage with areas which
are unpopular or denied within the country of origin. However, there are
also obvious problems with uncritically accepting what such informants
say. To some extent, these are problems which may apply to any insider
perspective (and those cited above have debated this apropos autoethno-
graphers’ claims to ‘authenticity’): for example, an inside position is not
necessarily unbiased, and could variously distort observations in terms
of internal political or social allegiances. Beyond these, the émigré’s
position as informant is apt to arouse suspicion on other grounds. Her
migration might be motivated, for instance, by dissatisfactions with her
country of origin which are not necessarily shared by those who live
there – and these dissatisfactions may well colour the kind of information
170

Windows into Life-Worlds: Blogs and Conclusion 171
she provides. Since her livelihood and economic interests are within the
adopted country of domicile, she might feel called upon to subscribe
or be pressured into subscribing to attitudes and prejudices that prevail
there. However well-informed she may feel about her country of origin,
the fact of domicile at a distance is not a discountable factor: inevitably, the

information she provides will gradually lose touch with the experience
of living in that country, will not be borne upon and conditioned by
the textures of everyday life there, will be given to generalizing in ways
which look unrealistic for the citizens living there. In literature and
criticism addressed to postcolonial and diasporic contexts such issues
have caused numerous quarrels: émigré authors have occasionally been
at odds with those who live in their countries of origin, émigré post-
colonial critics in Western academies and postcolonial critics within
postcolonial countries often regard each other with suspicion (both
sides feel they occupy a moral high ground).
As Bush’s ‘war on terror’ and the invasion of Iraq unfolded, literature
about the Middle East that circulated in the UK and USA was variously
discussed along the above lines. A spate of well-publicized ‘literary fiction’
and memoirs (sometimes balanced on the boundary between those)
by émigré writers made their way to the market, those about Iran and
Afghanistan circulating most widely: for example, Azar Nafisi’s Reading
Lolita in Tehran (2003); Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite-Runner (2003); Marjane
Satrapi’s graphic novel Persepolis (Vol. 1, 2003, first French issue in 2000);
Christopher de Bellaigue’s (whose Iranian connections are very close) In
the Rose Garden of the Martyrs (2004). These generated an anxious debate
on their veracity and the effect they had on, particularly, American per-
ceptions of the Middle East in the invasion context. An essay by Hamid
Dabashi entitled ‘Native Informers and the Making of American Empire’
(2006) observed, with Nafisi’s book in view, that such memoirs served the
invasion ethos by cultivating collective amnesia and selective memory,
and Syed Mohammed Marandi (2008) charted the various inaccuracies
of Nafisi’s book. Fatemeh Keshavarz’s book-length study Jasmine and Stars
(2007) discerned the features of a New Orientalism for American con-
sumption in such books, at a time when, ‘since 9/11, knowing about the
Muslim Middle East is not a luxury, it is a matter of life and death’ (p. 2).
In the November 2009 issue of the Journal of Multicultural Discourses, Coeli
Fitzpatrick and Melissa Lim argued respectively the cases for and against
these books. Fitzpatrick confirmed that, ‘these works function as active
producers of meaning within American society in that they take up pre-
vious Orientalist assumptions about the Middle East and Muslims, giving
these assumptions rejuvenated force with authorship by natives and near

172 Imagining Iraq
natives’ (p. 244); while Lim found ‘mitigating circumstances’ (p. 261)
for them, primarily with reference to their gender and sexual politics.
This debate was primarily about books addressed to Iran and circulating
in the USA, at a time – following the invasion of Iraq – when it seemed
to many that Iran may well be the next target. But literary works by

émigré Iraqi authors, in various languages, had also played their part in
the book market of the invasion period – I come to some of these in the
next section. In English, a less-noted novel by Khalid Kishtainy, Tomorrow
is Another Day: A Tale of Saddam’s Baghdad (2003), appeared in the UK. This
dark satire is set in Baghdad during the Iraq–Iran war of the 1980s, and
describes the picaresque adventures of Muhammad Zabib after his release
from Abu Ghraib prison, where he had been incarcerated for his commu-
nist convictions. He starts up a successful business of marrying war widows
for a generous reward (offered by a government decree), finds himself
forcibly recruited to the war, starts up various lucrative enterprises after
the war (gallows, mobile mosques, illegal migrants), and eventually finds
his way to Europe and settles there with his wives. In the last lines of the
novel Mohammad discovers a wholly new sort of freedom as émigré: ‘for
the first time I feel secure and free from worry. No one will come and
knock at my door with a rifle at dawn. No one will come and take from
me all that I may or may not have and leave me with nothing I can call
my own other than the clothes I stand up in’ (Kishtainy 2003, pp. 198–9);
and he ends contemplating living ‘the rest of our lives off the bounteous
munificence of good old imperialism!’ (p. 199). The picaresque novel,
true to its form, succeeds in presenting Iraq – in an amusing way –
as a thoroughly corrupt and brutalized society under Saddam Hussein’s
arbitrary and repressive regime. It also succeeds in demonstrating that
this corruption is not merely top-down but fully assimilated at ground
level: persons are not merely obliged by circumstances to be corrupt, they
cultivate corruption unabashed themselves; all are compliant subjects of
the brutality and hypocrisy generated by the state, and complicit with
the state; and the blanket moral bankruptcy of the whole goes hand in
hand with the unmitigated moral bankruptcy of every individual, with-
out exception. The only realization of the pressure of repression becomes
possible from the outside, when Iraqi protagonists leave the country and
look back (and in the process export corruption).
Tomorrow is Another Day appeared in September 2003. This picture
of the comprehensively bleak environment in Iraq under Saddam
Hussein – sustained from top to bottom, from state to individual, from
macroscopic whole to microscopic part – had already been widely cir-
culated before and during the invasion in the USA and UK, and was

familiar. Perhaps that is why Kishtainy’s novel received little notice.

This picture was cited as the ethical justification for invasion, and
sought to convey the terror which grips every aspect of life in Iraq
under Hussein’s regime: the unavoidable hold of terror on every indi-
vidual and family, who suffer without reprieve. One of the infamous UK

government dossiers to make the case for invasion in December 2002,
Saddam Hussein: Crimes and Human Rights Abuses, had set the tone.
It was introduced with the words: ‘Iraq is a terrifying place to live. People
are in constant fear of being denounced as opponents of the regime.
They are encouraged to report on the activities of family and neigh-
bours’ (Foreign and Commonwealth Office 2002, p. 4); and concluded
by noting the contributions made to it by refugees and claiming to be
‘a faithful representation of what ordinary Iraqis face in their everyday
lives’ (p. 20). Reports supporting the ethical case for invasion reiterated
this picture variously. A March 2003 Newsweek report observed: ‘It is one
of the last truly totalitarian states, in the tradition of Germany under
Adolf Hitler or the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, whom Saddam
is said to admire greatly. […] Throughout Iraq one is surrounded by
what Hannah Arendt, writing of the Nazis, called the “banality of evil”’
(Dickey et al. 2003, p. 35). Incidentally, the quotation from Arendt’s
report on the Eichmann trial in 1961 (Arendt 1963/1964) was off the
point. Misconstrued quotations were fairly common in journalism on
the invasion. Arendt’s observation was of the banality she perceived
in Eichmann’s person and psyche contrasted with the enormity of his
crimes during the trial – it wasn’t really about the ‘banalization of anti-
Semitic violence’ in Nazi Germany. The latter has to do with a habitual
acceptance of violence in a society, which this report was actually trying
to get at. Arendt’s observation on the ‘banality of evil’ was more aptly
evoked during Saddam Hussein’s trials in 2005 and 2006. Anyway, along
similar lines a BBC report of April 2003 by Stephen Sackur observed:
‘Saddam’s Iraq was like Stalin’s Soviet Union – a republic of fear in which
truth-telling was punishable by death. Even within families there could
be no trust, no honesty. You could never, ever, be sure who was being
blackmailed, squeezed, by the mukhabarat, the secret police’ (Sackur
2003). The comprehensive depth of terror here was also captured by a
resonant phrase, ‘republic of fear’, in this instance more meaningfully
applied. It was the title of the émigré Iraqi academic in the USA, Kanan
Makiya’s book (first published under the pseudonym Samir al-Khalil in
1989, reissued 1998), detailing how under Hussein’s regime ‘horror
stories became the norm inside a hitherto ordinary developing country’
(Makiya 1998, p. xi).

174 Imagining Iraq
This picture of Iraq under Saddam Hussein, so effectively characterized

for the invasion and testified by émigré Iraqi writers (whose integrity
there is no reason at all to doubt), is easiest put into perspective by
drawing attention to some distinctions made in rigorous examinations
of such repressive conditions. The notion of a ‘banalization of violence’,

which I have mentioned in passing, has been much examined for
various contexts where violence has been rife and has come to be a key
instrument of control. With colonial African experiences in view, Achille
Mbembe has formulated this succinctly as the form of violence that is:
[…] designed to ensure the authority’s maintenance, spread, and

permanence. Falling well short of what is properly called ‘war,’ it
recurred again and again in the most banal and ordinary situations.
It then crystallized, through a gradual accumulation of numerous acts
and rituals – in short, played so important a role in everyday life that
it ended up constituting the central cultural imaginary that the state
shared with society, and thus had an authenticating and reiterating
function. (Mbembe 2001, p. 25)
The significant point in this formulation is in the emphasis Mbembe

puts on ‘imaginary’: violence becomes an active agent in the manner in
which government and governed understand each other and envision
their expectations of each other in an everyday way, or are constructed
and reconstructed daily with regard to each other – hence ‘imaginary’ (in
the psyche of such a society). This does not mean that each and every
person involved in this situation regards it as normal, or accepts this
situation without a resistant thought, or is gripped by unthinking pas-
sive voiceless fear. That would render such a condition unalterable from
within, and, with Mbembe’s view in mind, render decolonization move-
ments (for instance) inexplicable. The question is always how far can
everyday resistant feelings and fear of the pervasive everyday violence be
contained by the ‘imaginary’ shared between state and society, and when
could it become unacceptable and implode. From within such a situation,
that always depends on the complexities of everyday life: there are usually
let-outs in everyday life from the imposed ‘banalization of violence’ where
the everyday fears and resistant misgivings can be assuaged or forgotten;
the textures of individual pleasures and sufferings remain variegated, and
so indeed are loyalties and suspicions. At worst, the response to such a
‘banalization of violence’ could be a sort of habituation of fear. But that
too is a fragile thing, and not a one-dimensional fear that subsumes the
consciousness and makes it unthinking and inarticulate – more, it seems

to me, it is in line with what Michael Taussig described as a ‘doubleness

of social being’:
a state of doubleness of social being in which one moves in bursts

between somehow accepting the situation as normal, only to be

thrown into a panic or shocked into disorientation by an event, a
rumour, a sight, something said, or not said – something that even
while it requires the normal in order to make its impact, destroys it.
[…] people like you and me close their eyes to it, in a manner of speak-
ing, but suddenly an unanticipated event occurs, perhaps a dramatic
or poignant or ugly one, and the normality of the abnormal is shown
for what it is. Then it passes away, terror as usual, in a staggering of
position that lends itself to survival as well as despair and macabre
horror. (Taussig 1992, p. 18)
The possibility and impossibility of normality, a horizon of imagined

normality, in other words, shadows everyday life under a repressive and
violent political order, and in its interstices critical thinking and human
intelligence remain always active. The comprehensive grip of a politics
of violence doesn’t mean that the political subject becomes uniformly
fearful and passive, and doesn’t mean that everyday lives lose their
complex textures and assume one taut colour of fear. Moreover, different
classes and different occupations in a repressive society have quite dif-
ferent views on its condition, even if repressive violence is endemic. The
simplistic view of a repressive society being coloured by fear constantly
and uniformly and daily can, however, seem plausible from an extrinsic
position.
The Iraqi émigré’s account of Saddam Hussein’s regime – such as Kanan
Makiya’s or, in a different way, Khalid Kishtainy’s – might have been
truthful in essence and detail, but it was removed from and removed the
complex textures of everyday life within Iraq. Also, some such accounts were
perhaps not devoid of political vested interests and over-determination
of personal experiences. In the American and British dispensations
where invasion was programmatically lobbied for, these were received
not simply as truthful in essence and details, but as comprehensive
characterizations of a uniformly fear-ridden and victimized population
in passive submission – to the core of individual and domestic and
everyday existence. In the USA and UK, it seems to me, a perception of
a population paralysed by fear in Iraq was promoted which comprehen-
sively wiped out the critical intelligence of Iraqi subjects. This erasure
was certainly accepted by the pro-invasion lobby, and actually also

176 Imagining Iraq
among many who were opposed to the invasion. Such erasure could be
regarded as a particular way of regarding Iraqis in general under Saddam
Hussein as, somehow, different from – or other than – (free and democratic)
Americans and British citizens because of their social and political
condition: different by dint of a psyche that has been moulded by repres-

sion and everyday violence. Both pro- and sometimes anti-invasion
proponents sought to reach across this barrier of otherness: the former
by their generosity in liberating them from Hussein; the latter by their
virtuousness in trying to protect them from Bush and Blair. The sense of
a deeply traumatized and paralysed society seemed to be supported by
reliable Iraqi émigré informants in the USA and UK. To a great extent the
invasion and occupation was conducted ostensibly on the back of Iraqis
abroad: for instance, in the puppet Iraqi Governing Council during the
occupation period, 10 of the 25 variously appointed council members
had been abroad for significant periods before the invasion, and of the
12 persons who held the rotating presidency 8 had been exiles or émigrés.
Under these circumstances the appearance of two blogs from Iraq made
something of a stir during the invasion period: Salam Pax’s blog started
appearing from September 2002 and continued through the build-up to
the undertaking of the invasion, and the book published from this, The
Baghdad Blog (2003), covered up to June 2003; Riverbend started blog-
ging on Pax’s pages before setting up her own, and covered almost the
entire occupation phase from August 2003 – the first published book
based on these (2005) reached to September 2004, and another volume
has been published since (2006). Both have continued to write blogs,
and – apart from the published books – their blogs have passed into
other media: Salam Pax made four 15-minute reports for the BBC after
Saddam Hussein’s fall, which have been collected and produced on DVD
(2006); Riverbend’s blog has been turned into theatre performances, by
the Six Figures Theatre Company, New York, in March 2005, and in other
countries. In terms of the above observations, the effect these blogs had
could be summarized in three points. First, these came with evidence of
articulateness and critical intelligence which undermined any presump-
tion of otherness or difference, or of victimized paralysis. Second, they
constructed and conveyed an impression of everyday life and individual
lives in Baghdad which was as complex and irreducible as everyday life
anywhere, and not captured by the monotones of pervasive fear. And
third, they traced an ever-intensifying path of everyday violence and fear
in Baghdad as being actuated by the invasion, and at every point refused
to let this violence become banalized or the resulting fear to become
habitual (and that undermined the preconception of the Iraqi people’s

psyche as having become deeply habituated to violence and fear under

the prolonged regime of Saddam Hussein).
Each of these effects, or rather the cumulative effect along these three
lines intertwined, could be understood in terms of the literary form of
the blog. Blogs (digital diaries) such as these are, of course, as much a

literary form as published texts of diaries and journals are now regarded
as being, and yet their electronic character renders them distinct from
the conventional diary in ways which are of moment here. I trace the
literary qualities of the diary generally, and their distinctiveness in the
electronic form of blogs, in describing the singular three-fold effects of
Pax’s and Riverbend’s writings in the invasion period here.
The conventional diary seems to present the process of the diarist’s
writing about her life as she lives it. The diary develops with the unpre-
dictability of everyday life, touches upon this thought or that experience
or such and such observation of the diarist as it occurs, without overall
predetermination or closure. Since there isn’t a holistic design in the
diary, the consciousness of the diarist – her persona – seems to provide
the unifying thread. These are consequently the two poles of the diary
form: on the one hand, it seems to provide an ongoing record of the
process of living; on the other hand, it thereby conveys the character
(self) of the diarist. From a literary perspective these are both textual
constructions. By that I do not mean that the diarist’s existence is doubt-
ful or the veracity of her record questionable (those can be checked), but
that the diary form itself – in its layout and structures and expressions
as a text – creates a powerful impression of the reality of the diarist and
the veracity of the record. The unpredictable day-by-day process of the
diary text resonates with, so to speak, the complexity of living from day
to day; and the necessity of a unifying consciousness to hold the diary
entries together conveys a strong sense of the integrity of the diarist.
Since the conventional diary is usually read retrospectively, probably in
a published form (as the books from Pax’s and Riverbend’s blogs may be),
there might be some suspicion of its having been moulded or adjusted
with hindsight. The electronic form of the blog adds further emphasis
to the impression of everyday reality and the diarist’s integrity. The
blog enables the intertwining of the process of writing with the proc-
ess of reading, i.e. as the blog is written piece by piece it is read piece
by piece. So the formal impression of a process of writing in the diary
form is more than an impression in the blog form: here the process of
writing and the process of reading do unfold side by side. Further, not
only do they unfold side by side, writing and reading interact with each
other – readers can post comments and bloggers can respond to readers

178 Imagining Iraq
in their blogs, so that the blog becomes a dynamic communicative

space, and the processive blog text is formulated somewhere between
a process of writers and readers writing to and reading each other. The
interactiveness of readers and writers of such electronic texts has been of
considerable interest to literary theorists, who have consequently sought

to modify conventional notions of authorship, readership and texts
(e.g. see Bolter 1991, p. 121, on ‘interactive fiction’, and Gaggi 1997,
p. 122, on ‘interactive literature’). Moreover, readers’ sense of the integrity
of the blogger as a person is also sharpened beyond the possibilities of
the diarist. Bloggers often announce their constructedness by assuming
fake blogging identities (as Pax and Riverbend do, both pseudonyms),
but capitalize on the persuasiveness of their texts and their interactions
with readers to construct themselves gradually too (it is like reader and
blogger living together in cyberspace). The blog therefore comes with
a particularly powerful sense of both the blogger’s presence and of the
everyday life presented, along the lines of the conventional diary but
more emphatically so. In brief, as Campbell and Kelly (2009) have put
it in their discussion of two other bloggers in ‘post-Saddam Iraq’, blogs
provide ‘a real-time, unfolding, reflexive, and often interactive window
into particular life-worlds’ (p. 22). To understand the effects of Salam
Pax’s and Riverbend’s blogs in the invasion period, the form of the blog
needs to be kept firmly in view. The books published on their basis are a
reduction of the blog form to the conventional diary form, and shadow
the blog form inadequately. The effects are because of the blog form.
The above observations are particularly relevant here because both
blogs were in fact received unusually sceptically. The perception in the
USA and UK of the otherness of Iraqis in Iraq, of the passivity moulded
by repression under Hussein’s government and simply of political and
cultural distance, was such that the verve and accessibility of these blogs
simply seemed implausible. Not only were they approached sceptically,
in many quarters they caused resentment. The critical thinking they
evidenced seemed to undermine the doubtful but acceptable ethical
basis (leaving aside the obvious mendacities) of the invasion, that terror-
struck Iraqis needed to be rescued from tyranny – these both said or
argued they didn’t need rescuing and sounded like they didn’t, without
making any concessions to Saddam Hussein’s regime. Every sort of
doubt was aired by readers. Their command of the English language
seemed suspicious, and both explained. There were speculations about
which agency these blogs were propaganda for – ‘Which is sexier? To
be a CIA put-up or a propaganda ploy?’, asked Pax (2003, p. 25). Both
received numerous comments and emails which were described by

Riverbend as ‘full of criticism, cynicism, and anger’ (2005, p. 10). And

this is where the blog form came into play. Much of both blogs were
responses to these, writing back to lack of information with information,
to mindless abuse with satire, to points of debate with arguments. The
blogs were largely conversations: of these bloggers with those responding

to their observations and with other bloggers and with each other and
with, importantly, news reportage which formed a common backdrop for
participants in the blogosphere on all sides. In the books based on these
blogs numerous interlocutors are implied and shadowed within Pax’s and
Riverbend’s texts, directly addressed, quoted and annotated, referred and
so on – fragmented or implied voices around the fringes of the text. In the
live blog, all the interlocutors were, so to speak, there, a click of a button
away, conducting a textualized conversation in real time. Every interac-
tion between Pax and Riverbend and these interlocutors was within a pro-
gressively accruing concretization of the integrity of Pax and Riverbend,
and a confirmation of their thinking presence. A prolonged conversation
between persons – even a hostile one, it seems to me – involves mutual
agreements and progressive clarifications which establish a kind of friend-
ship, a mutual recognition of each other’s presence.
The shared backdrop of news reportage was particularly important,
because the sense of the everyday in Baghdad that Pax and Riverbend
conveyed was built around it. News reportage is a constant and shifting
flow, and blogs can be a constant responsive flow to news. The news
that was being followed and sieved and analysed in the UK and USA was
being similarly followed in Baghdad too, and Pax and Rivebend could
put some of that contextually specific reception amidst the contextu-
ally specific receptions in the UK and USA. The slippages were the spur
of interactions. News reportage is not merely provided and received in
contextually nuanced ways, it is moulded or framed in ideologically
predetermined ways. To some extent this could be put down to the
well-known ‘propaganda model’ of how news is produced, formulated
persuasively by Herman and Chomsky (1988), and in some part to the
disposition of the market: what sort of news is consumed most vora-
ciously, what readers want or what sells. Behind what is said, a much
larger part remains unsaid or hidden by rhetoric and inflection. Apart
from analysing what was said in contextually specific ways, Pax and
Riverbend constantly sought to provide the unsaid details, give the links
and connections which were missing or misplaced, correct the tacit mis-
conceptions fostered in the news. From arguments about the location of
‘weapons of mass destruction’ to the ‘precision strikes’ of the invasion
to the Iraqi Governing Council’s and Coalition Provisional Authority’s

180 Imagining Iraq
declarations to the reconstruction contracts to the reality of women’s

experiences in Baghdad before and after invasion, Pax and Riverbend
sought to articulate the unmentioned or neglected in the news, and
make it matter for debate.
But this goes deeper. News reportage follows a quite distinctive regis-

ter, one that enacts the differentiation of news from the everyday. The
language of news – its rhetorical tricks are familiar to all newsreaders –
arguably makes a highlighted and reported event seem newsworthy. The
language of news confers significance on what is reported, and takes it out
of the indistinguishable flow of the everyday which is not newsworthy,
which is captured in everyday and routine exchanges and records.
News is conceived thus as the opposite of the everyday, highlighted
as opposed to the passing blur, memorable as opposed to forgettable,
the significant big thing as opposed to trivial little things. This implied
separation of the everyday from the newsworthy doesn’t, however, hold
water – the relationship of the newsworthy and the everyday is extremely
porous: reported policies bear upon individual and domestic lives, reported
events float up from the mesh of individual and domestic lives, and so
on. Alongside responding to the news as news, Pax and Riverbend
maintained a running record of their individual and family lives which
couldn’t be separated from the newsworthy. The ordinariness of family,
neighbourly, friendly get-togethers and festivals and daily relationships
described with humour and affection by both complicated the news-
worthy highlightings of a terror-struck population in the news. What
seemed like an Olympian recording of the experience of invasion and
occupation – of bombings, raids, abductions, crumbling of basic ameni-
ties and infrastructures, unemployment, religious factionalism and vio-
lence, repression and dispossessing of women – in the news, was given
a visceral and emotional content when viewed through dislocations
within everyday life. In both blogs these were feelingly described. The
ongoing common backdrop of news provided a boundary and a screen
against which or in terms of which the everyday life of Baghdad could
be articulated in both blogs and presented to widely dispersed and
removed readers/respondents. At various points both bloggers expressed
their disgruntlement at the misperceptions and misinformations being
generated by the news; their attempts to convey their everyday lives
within Baghdad was their retort, as if that could be a corrective. The
intensity with which the news was followed in the invasion period
served both blogs well.
The fear in the everyday, or of the dislocation of the everyday,
because of (and during) the invasion could be effectively conveyed by

both because of the above-noted textual features of the blog form: the
integrity and presence of the bloggers constructed through interaction
(readers and respondents were concerned about them at various times as
friends would be); and the strong impression of everyday life in Baghdad
woven against the common backdrop of news. The resonance of that fear

can only really be conceived within the conversational blog form. The
simplicity of Salam Pax’s 2 April 2003 entry beginning with: ‘Actually
too tired, too scared and burnt out to write anything. Yes, we did go out
again to see what was hit. Yes, everything just hurts’ (2003, p. 143); or
the poignancy of Riverbend’s finding out that she had lost her job simply
because she’s a woman, and walking through her colleagues and noting
on 24 August 2003 that, ‘Suddenly, the faces didn’t look strange – they
were the same faces as before, mostly, but there was a hostility I couldn’t
believe. What was I doing here?’ (2005, p. 24) – the effect of these seen
retrospectively in the published book is momentary, gives a pause, but
within the flow of blog interactions momentous, sinks in. The fear after
invasion, which emanated from the crumbling of everyday stabilities,
could only be partially accounted in terms of regimes (despite the
powerful pressure to do so in the USA and UK and elsewhere). It couldn’t
merely be disposed off as the transition from a repressive regime to a
promised liberal order, or in terms of the contrast between the repression
that prevailed there in Iraq and the freedoms and securities that ‘we’
enjoy ‘here’. Fear after invasion conveyed by the blogs was only partially
apprehended in terms of stateless anarchy or violence on the Iraqi civil
sphere contrasted with the secure comfort ‘we’ have here. Ultimately, it
appears to me, the apprehension of an environment of fear that became
possible through these blogs was of a reflexive nature. An environment
of fear in the USA and UK was, it has been widely observed, both at large
since 11 September 2001 and programmatically exacerbated in the build-
up to invasion. The whole ‘war on terrorism’ business, with the open-
endedness of that abstract enemy ‘terrorism’, was undertaken ostensibly
to manage terror within the USA and UK and elsewhere. Quite possibly, the
presumption of terror ‘within’ made sense because it captured something
deeper than the particularity of the 11 September 2001 attacks. The pre-
sumption made sense because it intermeshed with, and gave a coherent
shape to, a plethora of small to large everyday fears which are managed
by the panoply of small to large strategies and implements of managing
fears. The structure of social stability, it can be persuasively argued, in
societies such as the USA and UK is based on a political economy of
playing on fears and consuming against fear – the raison d’être of
sociologist Ulrich Beck’s formulation of ‘risk society’ (1992). It is an

182 Imagining Iraq
argument that Brian Massumi put (somewhat forbiddingly, but suggestively

nevertheless) as follows:
Fear is not fundamentally an emotion. It is the objectivity of the subjective

under late capitalism. It is the mode of being of every image and com-

modity and of the groundless self-effects their circulation generates.
[…] [Fear] is the most economical expression of the accident-form
as subject-form of capital: being as being-virtual, virtuality reduced
to the possibility of disaster, disaster commodified, commodifica-
tion as spectral continuity in the place of threat. When we buy, we
are buying off fear and falling, filling the gap with presence-effects.
(Massumi 1993, p. 12)
Translated into what I am getting at in this context: the fear of the

crumbling of everyday life in Baghdad through the blogs was appre-
hended by their followers in the USA and UK as a terrifying removal of
the possibility of buying security, consuming to protect oneself, which
is the everyday life ‘here’. It was understood in terms of the security
of being able to buy oil, electricity, water, insurance, education, medi-
cine, surveillance systems, arms, gates, houses, legal recourse, and so
on – and the impotence of imagining not being able to do so. It parti-
cularly made sense as such because of various levels of ongoingness
that surround and mesh within the blog form: the process of writing
and reading and writing which is the blog form, along with the process
of following continuously updated news, along with the process of living
from day to day ‘there’, along with the process of living from day to
day ‘here’.
I have given the impression above that the blog in published diary
form is a less substantial thing, a shadow of the interactive electronic
text as it appears. This is obviously motivated by the thrust of this
study, designed as it is to get to the nuances of literary production of
and within the Iraq invasion period – and to understand the possibili-
ties of the blog form now. From the perspective of literary studies, the
published diary derived from a blog is of interest in itself. First, as
I have observed in Chapter 1, literary publication is a kind of literary
gate-keeping. Since literariness is largely constructed institutionally (by
corporations, academia, media), the seal of approval and the attention
publication brings cannot be dismissed lightly. Second, and more impor-
tantly, the published book form enables discriminate archiving amidst
the sheer excess of the electronic archive. Third, and most importantly,
the published book form enables a kind of critical reading that processive

engagement with the blog does not. Retrospective and linear organization
in the diary form, with a beginning and ending and annotations and
editing, allows for discernment of textual patterns and strategies which
the dynamic blog form renders unlikely. As critical readings of texts, the
former is not necessarily less perceptive than ongoing reading-writing.

Such an observation as the following, for instance, about Riverbend’s
blog could only be possible with the book in hand – and its implications
are worth considering:
Riverbend’s continuous reversals of mainstream US frameworks of

knowledge are certainly strategically viable and compelling as a form
of opposition. In fact, they are so compelling that the book collection
of her weblog ends with the entry about 9/11/04 in Fallujah, presum-
ably because it is a particularly salient point for U.S. audiences.
Moreover, the book is largely marketed as an insider perspective on
the real status of Iraqi women, and the fact that they are losing rights
and opportunities, as opposed to being liberated. However, because
her blog entries are organised and framed as a set of reversals, her
counter-narrative engages in a dichotomous logic that ultimately
reifies the very categories she wishes to dismantle. […] In fact, the
way in which Baghdad Burning is framed for U.S. reception suggests
that her story of the Iraq war actually enacts a parallel regime of
truth organized around the notion of giving voice to othered, ‘Third
World’ women. (Jarmakani 2007, p. 42)
With the book in view, a complete rather than accruing text, Jarmakani
argues for quite a different sense of the veracity of the text and integ-
rity of the author from the one suggested to me by the blog form. To
Jarmakani the text appears to be deliberately structured in opposition to
an equally complete (retrospective) view of the ‘mainstream U.S. frame-
work of knowledge’, and is confirmed as such in the marketing and
reception history of the published book. And to Jarmakani, Riverbend
seems to construct herself as an ‘othered “Third World” woman’, rather
than establishing her integrity through a communication process.
Consequently, a somewhat different effect (that is, in the USA) is found
for the blog here than the one I have described: not one of disturbing
readers’ preconceptions in the invasion period, but of reification of the
invasive presumptions which it sought to oppose. If the distinctiveness of
the blog form is forgotten and the whole published diary text remains
as the dominantly archived record, this may well come to be the critical
consensus on Riverbend’s efforts.

184 Imagining Iraq
Conclusion: in other languages
In moving towards a conclusion for this study, I do not attempt to draw

together the various half-baked tendencies noted in the preceding
chapters. As observed in Chapter 1, I had started with the expectation

that the literature of the Iraq invasion may enable clarifications about
literature in general now. For reasons enumerated there, I delimited my
scope to literature in English which was produced, circulated and received
within the Anglophone sphere, primarily within the UK and USA, and
focused on the high-pressure invasion period between 2003 and 2005
(though I have occasionally strayed beyond into 2006 and 2007). By
looking closely at such works of different genres, I have gestured towards
observations which are possibly of moment to contemporary literature
in general: the deep moral expectations of, and strategies for collectiv-
izing, protest poetry; the possible reconfigurations of poetry through
anger; the parameters within which the everyday and the contemporary
are expressed in individual collections of poetry; the emerging features
of frontline drama; the current appeal of verbatim or documentary or
testimony theatre; the manner in which theatre appeals to concepts of
nationality and the classical; the degree to which markets are implicated
in the production and reception of ‘genre’ or ‘popular’ fiction (action
thrillers) and ‘literary fiction’; the distinctive literary qualities of blogs;
and other more incidental observations in passing. I don’t see any need
to draw these together into some sort of grand synthesis. The reader can
make the connections between the various points in numerous ways –
some of which I may not be able to foresee – and openness in trying
to conceive of as dynamic and fluid a field as contemporary literature
seems desirable to me. Indeed, it would actually be disingenuous of me to
attempt a linked-up final statement on contemporary literature because,
obviously, such a study as this cannot possibly be regarded as finished.
There is simply a great deal of relevant material which hasn’t figured
here. Too much is left out to say anything sufficiently generalized for
contemporary literature – I am happy to make gestures in that direction,
but don’t feel I can pronounce. In fact, this cannot even be regarded as a
reasonably wide survey of the literature about and of the Iraq invasion.
I have occasionally marked omissions within the field of literature in
English in the above; considerably more importantly, that this study is
limited to literature in English is itself reason enough to be modest. The
literature about and of the Iraq invasion was substantially produced
and circulated and received outside the Anglophone field, in numerous
languages and linguistic territories.

In conclusion then, I present a few notes on the inconclusiveness of

this study by drawing attention to relevant literature in languages other
than English. Some of these have been translated into English, many
haven’t yet. My inconclusive conclusion is necessarily an exercise in
indicating some patterns and exemplifying with a few instances from

a simply enormous volume of texts. The patterns that I mark out here
resonate with some that are analysed above, and equally show the limi-
tations of the above. To continue in an analytical vein a great number
of geopolitical perspectives and cultural traditions need to be taken into
account. My inconclusive notes are therefore necessarily not analytical,
they are indicative and descriptive.
The most ‘othered’ of languages other than English for the Iraq
invasion context is unquestionably Arabic. An article in the English edition
of the Arabic daily Asharq al-Awsat in December 2006 observed:
With a few exceptions of Iraqi writers and artists, the continuous

bloodshed in Iraq has failed to elicit any poetry or prose from the
Arab men of letters. While political writers expounded and analyzed,
the literary writers and artists did not channel this harrowing Arab
tragedy into creativity, and neither did they attempt to engage with
it. Some attribute this absence to the obscurity of the events taking
place, while others fear that their expression might be misconstrued
as advocating or commemorating the dictator’s bygone era [by writing
against the occupation]. So many different reasons all converge into
one question: Where is the Iraqi war literature? (Muhanna 2006)
The article also noted the following:
Iraqi novelist Shaker al Anbari believes that there is a substantial

amount of contemporary writing in Iraq, particularly poetry and
novels, which are published in the daily newspapers. They deal with
topics that range from human suffering in Iraq to emigration and the
killing that takes place – but they do not reach an Arab readership.
He explained that they were rushed and emotional for the most part
because the writer inside Iraq does not have the suitable living condi-
tions to continue his/her creative production. (Muhanna 2006)
The Arabic literary productions of writers inside Iraq are still relatively
inaccessible from without as this is written, but some Iraqi writers,
mostly émigrés in different parts of the world (like Kishtainy in the UK),
have been productive. The poetry of Dunya Mikhail (whose collection

186 Imagining Iraq
is discussed in Chapter 3) and Saadi Youssef (featured in The Guardian

and in the Faber anthology 101 Poems Against War, 2003) has already
been mentioned. Quite a few novels by émigrés and exiles described life
under Saddam Hussein’s regime (to that extent like Kishtainy too, but
with very different ideological and aesthetic visions), and the travails

of emigration, in ways which were particularly meaningful in the inva-
sion period. Sinan Antoon, who migrated to the USA, wrote the Arabic
novel I’jaam [Diacritics] (2004), translated into English as I’jaam: An
Iraqi Rhapsody (2007). This is presented as a manuscript found in 1989
in an Iraqi prison, which is prefaced and annotated by the Mukhabarat
(military intelligence under Hussein). The fragmentary text is by a
Chaldean Christian student of Baghdad University, Furat, and describes
the hardships and abuse of life as a student and as a political prisoner
during the Iran–Iraq war of the 1980s, with the footnotes giving the
official rhetoric where the narrator’s account contradicts the establish-
ment view. Najem Wali, who is settled in Germany, offered the Arabic
novel which appeared first in German translation as Die Reisenach Tell
al-Lahm [Journey to Tell al-Lahm] (2004). Here two characters, Najem and
Ma’ali, are found driving to the Iraqi town of Tell al-Lahm in pursuit
of their partners, who have run off together. The stories they tell each
other on the way, and their experiences in the eponymous town, paint
a bleak picture of Iraq in the 1990s. Alia Mamdouh’s Al-Mahboubat
(2003), translated into English as The Loved Ones (2006), is set amongst
Iraqi immigrants in Paris, where the author lives. This centres on the
life of a 50-year-old woman, Suhaila, and her connections with various
protagonists – focusing particularly on female perspectives and experi-
ences, with a significant role for her son Nadir – after she suffers a brain
stroke and lapses into coma. Through a variety of registers (conversa-
tions, diary, letters) a picture of the Iraqi diaspora and their attachment
to Iraq is conveyed. Stories of the past and of migration, with the Iraq
invasion behind them, have been written by Iraqi émigré authors in lan-
guages other than Arabic too. Noted Iraqi-Israeli author Sami Michael’s
Hebrew novel Aida (2008) describes the relationships of Baghdad-based
Jewish journalist Zakhi Dali, a woman named Aida whom he takes in,
and his friend Nazar al-Sayad who works for the Mukhabarat. The story
revolves around the gradual discovery of Aida’s Iraqi-Kurdish iden-
tity, and Zakhi’s sense of isolation and feeling for the Iraqi landscape
amidst a city in ruins after the Gulf War. Iraqi resident in Germany,
Abbas Khider’s German language novel Der falsche Inder [The False
Indian] (2008), describes various readings of a manuscript found on the
Berlin–Munich train. The manuscript tells the story of an Iraqi student

who escapes from prison in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and undertakes

a journey through various countries of North Africa and Europe before
settling in Germany. Along the way he encounters numerous migrants
like himself, and in Germany feels the dislocations of being an immi-
grant keenly. Turkish author Semra Beken in her novel Kocamın Bekçisi

[My Husband’s Guardian] (2008) recounts the experiences of an Iraqi
Turkman woman, Naza, with her three children, after her husband dies
in the Gulf War. Based on the real experiences of a woman the author
met in Vienna and interviewed over six months, the novel details her
sufferings as member of a minority in Iraq, and as a stranger in Turkey
and eventually an immigrant in Austria.
Arabic literature addressed to Iraq of the invasion and occupation
period, and such literature in other languages from the so-called
‘Arab world’ (in the Middle East and North Africa), form a somewhat
distinct category. The French poetry volume, A Bagdad à Bassora:
Amulette [Baghdad to Basra: Amulet] (2003), by the Algerian poet Chekib
Abdessalam is worth noting here. Perhaps the most widely circu-
lated novel on the conflict from the region is the Algerian novelist
Mohammed Moulessehoul’s French novel, written under the pen-name
Yasmina Khadra, Les Sirènes de Bagdad (2006) – translated into English
as The Sirens of Baghdad (2007). This describes the experiences of an
unnamed student of Baghdad University after he returns to his village
Kafr Karum when the invasion begins. Formerly a peace-loving person,
a series of experiences – the killing of a simpleton at a check-point, the
accidental bombing of a wedding party, and the humiliation of his family
during a house raid by American soldiers – brings about a transformation
in the main protagonist, an uncontainable rage and desire for revenge.
He consequently returns to Baghdad and joins an anti-occupation resist-
ance organization originating with people of his home village, and sinks
into a spiral of terrorism and bloodshed which exacerbates the inhu-
manities of invasion and occupation. Taking up the female perspective
of the invasion zone, the Iraqi author (living in Paris) Inaam Kachachi’s
Arabic novel Al Hafida al Amerikiyya [The American Granddaughter] (2008)
is about a Christian Iraqi American, Zeina Behnam, who goes to Iraq
with the invading American army as an interpreter. She works in the
Green Zone, close to the home of her grandmother Rahma, widow of a
colonel in the Iraqi army. The difference of perspectives between Zeina
and Rahma remain unresolved to the end; Zeina is unable to win the
trust or love of her grandmother and relatives and is unable to regain
her Iraqi identity because she sees herself as an American. Iraqi novelist
Ali Bader’s Haris al Tabigh [Tobacco Guard] (2008) in Arabic, describes the

188 Imagining Iraq
life of Iraqi Jewish musician Kamal Midhat, who was kidnapped and
killed in the city of Al Mansur in Baghdad in 2006. This reflects both on
Midhat’s past struggle to integrate in Iraqi society and the problems of
post-invasion Iraq. Though not from the ‘Arab world’, German novel-
ist Sherko Fatah (whose father was Kurdish Iraqi) wrote a novel which

resonates with some of the themes described above, Das dunkle Schiff
[The Dark Ship] (2008). Here the adventures of a cook, the Kurdish Iraqi
Kerim, in invaded Iraq are recounted. Kerim is picked up and obliged to
join a group of terrorists, God’s Warriors, but escapes them and journeys
to Europe, where he gets asylum in Germany.
A number of literary works from elsewhere probed the frontline experi-
ences of those who participated in the invasion alongside USA and UK
troops. Spanish author Fernando Marias’s novella Invasor [Invader] (2004)
tells the story of a doctor, Pablo, sent to Iraq on a peace mission in August
2003 (the Spanish Prime Minister of the time, José María Aznar, was one
of the firm supporters of invasion). There he gets caught in an ambush
which he survives, but with serious injuries and at the expense of the
lives of those who gave him refuge. Back home in Madrid he begins to
feel a change in himself. His guilt about the crimes he committed in Iraq
manifests itself in feeling possessed by his Iraqi victims, and he begins
to entertain violent impulses towards his family and himself. Denis
Gorteau’s French novel A Mort L’Irak [Death to Iraq] (2006) follows the
invasion over three weeks, from Kuwait to Northern Iraq to Baghdad,
through the eyes of an American soldier and war criminal. Having joined
up to escape the dead-end life of his hometown in Oklahoma, the inva-
sion gives him the opportunity to play out his violent desires – justified
to his mind as taking revenge for the terrorist attacks in the USA of
11 September 2001. A Puerto Rican play in Spanish, Irak en mi [Iraq in Me]
(2007) was written by Roberto Ramos Perea, and directed by the author in
its first performances at the El Ateneo Puertorriqueño y su Conservatorio
de Arte Dramático, San Juan, in January–February 2008. This tells of the
anguish of two Puerto Rican soldiers, part of the invading US forces, after
their return from Iraq. Their participation in the invasion plays in trou-
bling ways against the ambiguous political status of their homeland as an
incorporated territory of the USA, and both feel alienated. The Bengali
playwright from India, Sangram Guha, wrote Operation Flush (2004), first
performed in Rabindra Sadan, Kolkata, by Spandan group/Indian People’s
Theatre Association (IPTA) under the direction of Samudra Guha in July
2004. This was based on newspaper reports and public records of the
trials of US soldiers for torturing prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison in the
occupation period, and was advertised as one of the first ‘documentary

drama’ staged in India. The play is set in a courtroom convened by the

United Nations in an army camp in Iraq, and follows the hearings of Lt.
Colonel Nathan Sassaman, in charge of the Abu Ghraib prison, and cell
commander Luke Harding, accused of torture. Cross-examinations of the
prisoners and various witnesses by human rights lawyer Nicholas Terse

reveal that torture extended to civilians, and was motivated by a sinister
experiment to perpetuate terror at a biological level. Though found guilty
the accused are handed extremely lenient sentences.
In line with the revival of classical Greek plays resonating with the
invasion context (examined in Chapter 4), Atropa: De wraak van de vrede
[Atropa: The Vengeance of Peace] (2008) was adapted by Flemish playwright
Tom Lanoye from plays by Euripides and Aeschylus on the Trojan War,
and first performed during the Avignon Festival in July 2008, and then
at the Tonnelhuis, Antwerp, in August. This focused on the female char-
acters of the Greek myth and Agamemnon, and weaved into the lines of
the latter statements by George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld during the
build-up to invasion. Anti-invasion satire also played its part in perform-
ances in many places. In India the Jana Natya Manch (People’s Theatre
Association) produced satirical plays in Hindi for different performance
spaces. These included the street theatre Zulm Phir Zulm Hai [Oppression
is Oppression] (early 2003), performed in various spots in Delhi, and the
proscenium play Bush ka Matlab Jhadi [Bush Means a Thick Shrub – ‘jhadi’
is the Hindi translation for ‘bush’ in the vegetal sense] (2004), commis-
sioned by and performed at the Mumbai World Social Forum, January
2004, directed by Sudhanva Deshpande. Pierre Grou’s French play Le
brave soldat Chvéïk dans la guerre d’Irak [Brave Soldier Schweik in the Iraq
War] (2006) took the son of the intrepid anti-hero of Czech writer Jaroslav
Hašek’s famous satirical novel The Good Soldier Schweik (1923) to the inva-
sion frontline. This Schweik follows the build-up to invasion avidly, goes
to Iraq to fight, looks for ‘weapons of mass destruction’, tries to deter-
mine whether the purpose of achieving security and democracy in Iraq
was being achieved, and unhappily returns to Prague. Talking of satire,
a Norwegian novel by Knut Nærum, Krig! [War!] (2004) also spoke in a
tangential fashion to the concerns of the Iraq invasion period. Here a war
between Norway and the Netherlands is envisaged, growing out from a
trivial skating accident, and pulling together every kind of absurdity that
war rhetoric presents.
And finally, there was popular ‘genre fiction’ set in the Iraq invasion
too. Controversially, two Turkish action thrillers (through the invasion
period relations between Turkey and the USA deteriorated) imagined
invasions of Turkey by US forces. Burak Turna and Orkun Uçar’s Metal

190 Imagining Iraq
Fırtına [The Metal Storm] (2004) was a bestseller, and describes a US

invasion of Turkey to gain control of deposits of borax, followed by an
attempt to divide Turkey between Greece and Armenia. Under these
circumstances, naturally, the Turkish armed forces fight back valiantly,
make alliances with China, Russia and Germany, and even manage to

steal a US nuclear warhead and detonate it in Washington DC. An inter-
national alliance against the USA finally ends the invasion. Condoleeza
Rice and Donald Rumsfeld figured as such on the invading side. Not
long afterwards, Alaettin Parmaksız’s Türk-Amerikan Savaşı – Kanlı Deprem
[Turkish-American War – The Bloody Earthquake] (2007) also describes a
war between the two nations, arising largely from Turkish disapproval
of US interference in the internal affairs of Northern Iraq, and the stout
defence against US invasion put up by Turkish armed forces. Less com-
batively, two detective novels and one work of fantasy fiction appeared
in Germany against the backdrop of the invasion. Andreas Albes’s Der
Schatz [The Treasure] (2005) has war correspondent Michael Bellow inves-
tigating the looting of treasures from the national museum in Baghdad
and the operation of aid organisations. In Code Freebird (2006) by Roman
Rausch, the investigation of a series of bombings in Hamburg and
Frankfurt takes profiler Baltazar Levy to invaded Iraq despite the inves-
tigating team’s scepticism about his methods. And Michael Pfrommer’s
fantasy, Das Zweite Buch [The Second Book] (2007), moves back and forth
between Babylon of 568 BC, when Ezekiel’s prophecies were recorded,
and Iraq during the invasion in 2003, when the second book of those
prophecies is found there.
These are but a selection of literary texts in languages other than
English about the invasion of Iraq which appeared within or around the
invasion period. With these in view, the conclusions of this study can
only remain inconclusive. There are many more literary works about the
invasion out there already than this study has covered, and undoubtedly
many more to come. Critical reckonings with this area of literary pro-
duction and reception are certainly more in the prospect than behind.
These will necessarily continue to modify the features of contemporary
literature in general.

References
All website references were downloaded between December 2009 and April 2010.

Abdessalam, Chekib (2003). A Bagdad à Bassora: Amulette [Baghdad to Basra:
Amulet]. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003.
Albes, Andreas (2005). Der Schatz [The Treasure]. Munich: DTV Deutscher
Taschenbuch.
Al-Musawi, Muhsin (2006). Reading Iraq: Culture and Power in Conflict. London:
I. B. Tauris.
Alper, Loretta and Jeremy Earp (dirs.) (2008). War Made Easy. DVD, Disinformation
Company.
Anderson, Benedict (1991 [1983]). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the
Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.
Antoon, Sinan (2004). I’jaam [Diacritics]. Beirut: Dar al-Adab. In English: I’jaam:
An Iraqi Rhapsody. San Francisco: City Lights, 2007.
Archibald, David (2008). ‘“We’re just big bullies …”: Gregory Burke’s Black Watch’.
The Drouth 26: 8–13. http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/3896/1/The_Drouth3896.pdf
Arendt, Hannah (1963/1964). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of
Evil. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Bader, Ali (2008). Haris al Tabigh [Tobacco Guard]. Beirut: Arab Association for
Studies and Publication.
Baker, Brian (2006). Masculinity in Fiction and Film: Representing Men in Popular
Genres 1945–2000. London: Continuum.
Baker, Kenneth (ed.) (1996). The Faber Book of War Poetry. London: Faber and
Faber.
Baker, Nicholson (2004). Checkpoint. New York: Knopf.
Banville, John (2005). ‘A Day in the Life’. New York Review of Books 52(9), 26 May:
12–14.
Barnes, Todd Landon (2008). ‘George W. Bush’s “Three Shakespeares”: Macbeth,
Macbush, and the Theater of War’. Shakespeare Bulletin 26(3), Fall: 1–29.
Barrington, Judith and Ursula K. Le Guin (2003). ‘Introduction’. In Duane Poncy
and Patricia McLean (eds), Raising Our Voices: An Anthology of Oregon Poets
Against the War. Portland, OR: Habit of Rainy Nights, v–vii.
Barthes, Roland (1977). ‘The Death of the Author’. Image, Music, Text. Selected
and trans. Stephen Heath. London: Fontana.
Bassett, Kate (2003). ‘Unsettling, Ambitious, Bold’. The Independent, 9 November.
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/
madame-bovary-lyric-hammersmith-londonbrjustifying-war-tricycle-london
brtrue-west-old-vic-bristol-735258.html
Baudrillard, Jean (1995 [French edn 1991]). The Gulf War Did Not Take Place.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Bawer, Bruce (2004). ‘A Plague of Poets’. Hudson Review 56(4), Winter: 737–46.
BBC (2003a). ‘Million March Against Iraq War’. BBC News, 16 February. http://
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/2765041.stm
191

192 References
BBC (2003b). ‘Peace Poetry Volume Rushed Out’. BBC News, 19 February. http://
news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/entertainment/2779593.stm
BBC Newsnight Review (2003). ‘War: Newsnight Review discussed the war poetry
of Harold Pinter’, 16 June. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/
review/2994364.stm

Beck, Ulrich (1992 [1986]). Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage.
Begg, Moazzim, with Victoria Brittain (2006). Enemy Combatant: The Terrifying
True Story of a Briton in Guantanamo. London: Free Press.
Beken, Semra (2008). Kocamın Bekçisi [My Husband’s Guardian]. Istanbul: Siyah
Beyaz.
Bellaigue, Christopher de (2004). In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs. New York:
HarperCollins.
Bellavia, David with John Bruning (2007). House to House. London: Simon &
Schuster.
Berry, Bonny (1999). Social Rage: Emotion and Cultural Control. New York: Garland.
Bewes, Timothy (2000). ‘What Is “Philosophical Honesty” in Postmodern
Literature?’ New Literary History 31(3), Summer: 421–34.
Bibby, Michael (1996). Hearts and Minds: Bodies, Poetry, and Resistance in the
Vietnam Era. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Billington, Michael (2004). ‘Terror of Modern Times Sets the Stage for Greek
Tragedy’. The Guardian, 19 June. http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2004/jun/19/
theatre.iraq
Bloom, Clive (1996). Cult Fiction: Popular Reading and Pulp Theory. Basingstoke:
Macmillan.
Bly, Robert and David Ray (eds) (1966). A Poetry Reading Against the Vietnam War.
Madison, MN: American Writers Against the Vietnam War.
Bolter, Jay David (1991). Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of
Writing. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Bottum, J. (2003). ‘The Poets vs. The First Lady’. Weekly Standard 8(22), 17 February.
http://theweeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/002/228
qjtzx.asp
Bowling, Laurence Edward (1950). ‘What is the Stream of Consciousness Technique?’
Periodical of the Modern Language Association (PMLA) 65(4), June: 333–45.
Brittain, Victoria (2004). ‘Questions and Lies’. The Guardian, 24 May. http://www.
guardian.co.uk/stage/2004/may/24/theatre.guantanamo
Brittain, Victoria (2006). ‘Guantanamo: A Feminist Perspective on U.S. Human
Rights Violations’. Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism 6(2): 209–19.
Brittain, Victoria and Gillian Slovo (2004). Guantanamo: ‘Honor Bound to Defend
Freedom’. London: Oberon.
Brown, Dale (2009). Rogue Forces. New York: HarperCollins.
Brown, Dale and Jim DeFelice (2003). Razor’s Edge. London: HarperCollins.
Brown, Dale and Jim DeFelice (2004). Armageddon. New York: Jove.
Brown, Dale and Jim DeFelice (2005). Satan’s Tail. New York: HarperCollins.
Brown, Dale and Jim DeFelice (2006). End Game. New York: HarperCollins.
Browning, Sarah, Michele Elliott and Danny Rose (eds) (2004). D.C. Poets Against
the War. Washington, DC: Argonne House.
Burden, Matthew Currier (2006). The Blog of War: Front-Line Dispatches from Soldiers
in Afghanistan and Iraq. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Burke, Gregory (2007). Black Watch. London: Faber and Faber.

References 193
Butcher, Justin (2003). The Madness of George Dubya. Unpublished.

Buzard, James (2003). ‘On Auto-Ethnographic Authority’. The Yale Journal of
Criticism 16(1): 61–91.
Buzard, James (2005). Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth
Century British Novels. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Buzzell, Colby (2005). My War: Killing Time in Iraq. New York: G. B. Putnam’s Sons.
Campbell, Donovan (2009). Joker One. New York: Random House.
Campbell, Kerri and Peter Kelly (2009). ‘“Explosions and Examinations”: Growing
Up Female in Post-Saddam Iraq’. Journal of Youth Studies 12(1), February:
21–38.
Carroll, Andrew (ed.) (2006). Operation Homecoming: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the
Home Front in the Words of U.S. Troops and Their Families. Washington, DC:
National Endowment of the Arts.
Casanova, Pascale (2004). The World Republic of Letters. Trans. M. B. DeBevoise.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press [first French edition 1999].
Cavendish, Dominic (2004). Interview with Martin Crimp. Theatre Voice, 11 May.
http://www.theatrevoice.com/listen_now/player/?audioID⫽179
Certeau, Michel de (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Chattarji, Subarno (2001). Memories of a Lost War: American Poetic Responses to the
Vietnam War. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Chrisafis, Angelique and Imogen Tilden (2003). ‘Pinter Blasts “Nazi America” and
“Deluded Idiot” Blair’. The Guardian, 11 June. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/
2003/jun/11/books.arts
Cicero, Noah (2003). The Human War. London: Snowbooks.
Clarke, Richard A. (2005). The Scorpion’s Gate. London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons.
Clausewitz, Carl Von (1873). On War. Trans. J.J. Graham. London: N. Trübner [first
German edition 1832].
Clawson, Patrick (2006). ‘The Scorpion’s Gate’ (review). Middle East Quarterly 13(4),
Fall: 88.
Claycomb, Ryan (2006). Review of Brittain and Slovo, Guantanamo. Theatre Journal
58(4), December: 703–5.
Cole, Juan (2006). ‘Civil War? What Civil War?’ Salon, 23 March. http://www.
salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/03/23/civil_war/
Coombe, Rosemary J. (1998). The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties: Authorship,
Appropriation, and the Law. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Crawford, John (2005). The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell. New York: Berkley.
Crimp, Martin (2003). ‘Advice to Iraqi Women’ (extract). The Guardian, 10 April.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2003/apr/10/theatre.artsfeatures1
Crimp, Martin (2004). Cruel and Tender. London: Faber and Faber.
Croft, Andy (2004). ‘Pure Doggerel’. New Statesman, 6 December: 42–3.
Croft, Andy and Andy Mitchell (eds) (2003). Red Sky at Night. Nottingham: Five
Leaves.
Dabashi, Hamid (2006). ‘Native Informers and the Making of American Empire’.
Al-Ahram, 18 July. http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/797/special.htm
Damrosch, David (2003). What Is World Literature? Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Dickey, Christopher, Scott Johnson, Donatella Lorch and Mark Hosenball (2003).
‘The Banality of Fear’. Newsweek 141(10), 10 March: 34–6.

194 References
Eberhart, Richard and Selden Rodman (eds) (1945). War and the Poet: An Anthology
of Poetry Expressing Man’s Attitude to War from Ancient Times to the Present.
New York: Devin-Adair.
Eco, Umberto (1979). The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Edensor, Tim (2002). National Identity, Popular Culture, and Everyday Life. Oxford:
Berg.
Eliot, T. S. ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1951 [1919]). Selected Essays.
London: Faber and Faber, 13–22.
Elkins, James R. (2004). ‘An Anthology of Poetry by Lawyers’. Legal Studies Forum
28(1/2): 1–19.
Ellis, Carolyn (2009). ‘Fighting Back or Moving On: An Autoethnographic Response
to Critics’. International Review of Qualitative Research 2(3), November: 371–8.
English, James F. (2002). ‘Winning the Culture Game: Prizes, Awards, and the Rules
of Art’. New Literary History 33(1), Winter: 109–35.
English, James F. (2005). The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation
of Cultural Value. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.
Ensler, Eve (2001 [1998]). The Vagina Monologues, 2nd edition. New York: Villard.
Euripides (2005). Hecuba. Trans. Tony Harrison. London: Faber and Faber.
Euripides (2005). Iphigenia in Aulis. Trans. Don Taylor. London: A&C Black
(Methuen).
Ezard, John (2004). ‘Pinter Awarded Wilfred Owen Prize for Poetry Opposing Iraq
Conflict’. The Guardian, 4 August. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2004/aug/04/
iraq.books
Falk, Richard (2004). ‘The Iraq War Begins’. Legal Studies Forum 28(1/2): 493.
Farmer, Paul (2005). Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War
on the Poor. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Fatah, Sherko (2008). Das dunkle Schiff [The Dark Ship]. Salzburg: Jung und Jung
Verlag.
Feather, John (2003). Communicating Knowledge: Publishing in the 21st Century.
Munich: K. G. Saur.
Fick, Nathaniel (2005). One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer. New York:
Houghton Mifflin.
Filkins, Dexter (2008). The Forever War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Finder, Joseph (2005). ‘He Told Us So’. New York Times Book Review,
18 December: 12.
Fitzpatrick, Coeli (2009). ‘New Orientalism in Popular Fiction and Memoir: An
Illustration of Type’. Journal of Multicultural Discourses 4(3), November: 243–56.
‘For or Against?’ (2004). The Guardian, 3 September. http://www.guardian.co.uk/
stage/2004/sep/03/theatre.iraq
Foreign and Commonwealth Office (2002). Saddam Hussain: Crimes and Human
Rights Abuses. A Report of the Human Cost of Saddam’s Policies, 2 December.
http://www.fco.gov.uk/Files/kfile/iraqdossier.pdf
Freud, Sigmund (1960). The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Trans. Alan Tyson.
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Fussell, Paul (1975). The Great War and Modern Memory. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
G2 special issue (2009). The Guardian, 14 April. http://www.guardian.co.uk/
theguardian/2003/apr/09/g2

References 195
Gaggi, Silvio (1997). From Text to Hypertext: Decentring the Subject in Fiction, Film,
the Visual Arts and Electronic Media. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press.
Gallagher, Mark (2006). Action Figures: Men, Action Films, and Contemporary
Adventure Narratives. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Gardner, Brian (ed.) (1964). Up the Line to Death: The War Poets 1914–1918. London:
Methuen.
Gardner, Brian (ed.) (1966). Terrible Rain: The War Poets 1939–1945. London:
Methuen.
Gardner, Lyn (2004). ‘I’m Certainly Not a Pacifist’. The Guardian, 14 September.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2004/sep/14/theatre3
Gentzler, Edwin (2002). ‘Translation, Poststructuralism, and Power’. In Maria
Tymoczko and Edwin Gentzler (eds), Translation and Power. Amherst: University
of Massachusetts Press, 195–218.
Gitlin, Todd (ed.) (1971). Campfires of Resistance: Poetry from the Movement. Indiana-
polis: Bobbs-Merrill.
Glass, Loren (2004). Authors Inc.: Literary Celebrity in the Modern United States
1880–1980. New York: New York University Press.
Goffman, Erving (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Harmondsworth:
Penguin.
Golding, William (1965). The Hot Gates and Other Occasional Pieces. London:
Faber and Faber.
Gorteau, Denis (2006). A Mort L’Irak [Death to Iraq]. Montigny-le-Bretonneux:
Yvelinedition.
Grasso, Linda M. (2002). The Artistry of Anger: Black and White Women’s Literature
in America, 1820–1860. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Grossberg, Lawrence (1992). ‘Is There a Fan in the House? The Affective Sensibility
of Fandom’. In Lisa A. Lewis (ed.), The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular
Media. London: Routledge.
Grou, Pierre (2006). Le brave soldat Chvéïk dans la guerre d’Irak [Brave Soldier Schweik
in the Iraq War]. Paris: Editions Syllepse.
Guha, Sangram (2004). Operation Flush. Play-script unpublished.
Gupta, Suman (2002). The Replication of Violence: Thoughts on International Terrorism
After 11 September 2001. London: Pluto.
Gupta, Suman (2006). The Theory and Reality of Democracy: A Case Study in Iraq.
London: Continuum.
Gupta, Suman (2007). Social Constructionist Identity Politics and Literary Studies.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Gupta, Suman (2009a). ‘From Crowds to Transnational Massing: Presence and
Representation’. Storia della Storiografia 55: 128–43.
Gupta, Suman (2009b). Globalization and Literature. Cambridge: Polity.
Gupta, Suman (2009c). Re-Reading Harry Potter, 2nd Edition. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Hamill, Sam (2003a). ‘Introduction’. In Hamill (ed.), Poets Against the War. New York:
Thunder’s Mouth Press and Nation Books, xvii–xxi.
Hamill, Sam (ed.) (2003b). Poets Against the War. New York: Thunder’s Mouth
Press and Nation Books.
Hardwick, Lorna and Carol Gillespie (eds) (2007). Classics in Post-Colonial Worlds.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.

196 References
Hare, David (2006 [2004]). Stuff Happens. London: Faber and Faber.
Hare, David (2008). The Vertical Hour. London: Faber and Faber.
Harlow, Barbara (2006). ‘Crossroads Guantanamo’. New Formations 59: 158–65.
Harrison, Sophie (2005). ‘Fiction Special: Happy Families’. New Statesman,
24 January. http://www.newstatesman.com/200501240041

Harrison, Tony (2003a). ‘Baghdad Lullaby’. The Guardian, 9 April. http://www.
guardian.co.uk/world/2003/apr/09/iraq.writersoniraq
Harrison, Tony (2003b). ‘Iraquatrains’. The Guardian, 1 April. http://www.guardian.
co.uk/world/2003/apr/01/iraq.writersoniraq
Harrison, Tony (2004). ‘Reading the Rolls: An Arse Verse’. Arion 12(1), Spring–
Summer: 91–9.
Harrison, Tony (2005a). Under the Clock. London: Penguin.
Harrison, Tony (2005b). ‘Weeping for Hecuba’. Euripides. Hecuba. Trans. Tony
Harrison. London: Faber and Faber, v–x.
Harsent, David (2005). Legion. London: Faber and Faber.
Hartley, Jason Christopher (2005). Just Another Soldier. New York: HarperCollins.
Haughton, Hugh (2007). ‘Anthologizing War’. In Tim Kendall (ed.), The Oxford
Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 421–44.
Heaney, Seamus (2004). Programme Note for the Abbey Theatre Production of The
Burial at Thebes. In Richard Danson Brown (ed.), Cultural Encounters. Milton
Keynes: Open University Press, 2008, 226–9.
Heaney, Seamus (2005a). The Burial at Thebes (trans. of Sophocles, Antigone).
London: Faber and Faber.
Heaney, Seamus (2005b). ‘Search for the Soul of Antigone’. The Guardian,
2 November. http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2005/nov/02/theatre.classic
Hegel, G. W. F. (1998). Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Volume II. Trans.
T. M. Knox. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Henderson, Diana E. (2008). ‘Meditations in a Time of (Displaced) War: Henry V,
Money, and the Ethics of Performing History’. In Ros King and Paul J. C. M.
Franssen (eds), Shakespeare and War. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 226–42.
Herman, Edward S. and Noam Chomsky (1988). Manufacturing Consent:
The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon.
Hesford, Wendy S. (2006). ‘Staging Terror’. TDR: The Drama Review 50(3), Fall:
29–41.
Higgins, Charlotte (2004). ‘Pinter’s Poetry? Anyone Can Do It’. The Guardian,
30 October. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2004/oct/30/books.booksnews
Hollis, Matthew and Paul Keegan (eds) (2003). 101 Poems Against War. London:
Faber and Faber.
Hosseini, Khaled (2003). The Kite Runner. New York: Riverhead.
Huxley, Aldous (1947 [1928]). Point Counter Point. London: Chatto & Windus.
Huze, Sean (2004). The Sandstorm: Stories from the Front. Unpublished.
Innes, Christopher (2007). ‘Towards a Post-Millennial Mainstream? Documents
of the Times’. Modern Drama 50(3), Fall: 435–52.
Iraq – Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception and Intimidation (2003), 3 February.
http://www.number-10.gov.uk/files/pdf/Iraq.pdf#
Jana Natya Manch (2003). Zulm Phir Zulm Hai [Oppression is Oppression]. Play-
script unpublished.
Jana Natya Manch (2004). Bush ka Matlab Jhadi [Bush Means a Thick Shrub].
Play-script unpublished.

References 197
Jarmakani, Amira (2007). ‘Narrating Baghdad: Representing the Truth of War in

Popular Non-Fiction’. Critical Arts 21(1), July: 32–46.
Jenkins, Henry (2006). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide.
New York: New York University Press.
Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) (2002). Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction: The

Assessment of the British Government, 24 September. http://www.ukonline.gov.
uk/featurenews/iraqdossier.pdf
Jones, Dudley (1990). ‘Professionalism and Popular Fiction: The Novels of Arthur
Hailey and Frederick Forsyth’. In Clive Bloom (ed.), Spy Thrillers: From Buchan
to Le Carré. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 160–84.
Joyce, James (1964 [1916]). A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. London:
Heinemann.
Kachachi, Inaam (2008). Al Hafida al Amerikiyya [The American Granddaughter].
Beirut: Dar Al Jadeed.
Kanelos, Peter (2007). Titus Andronicus (review). Shakespeare Bulletin 25(1), Spring:
123–7.
Kaufman, Walter (1968). Tragedy and Philosophy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univer-
sity Press.
Kavotsky, Bill and Timothy Carlson (eds) (2003). Embedded: The Media at War in
Iraq. Guilford, CT: Lyons.
Kendall, Tim (2006). Modern English War Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kendall, Tim (ed.) (2007). The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kent, Pam (2005). ‘Arts, Briefly; Silencing the Poet’. New York Times, 2 March: 2.
Keshavarz, Fatemeh (2007). Jasmine and Stars: Reading More than Lolita in Tehran.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Khadra, Yasmina (2006). Les Sirènes de Bagdad. Paris: Julliard. In English: The Sirens
of Baghdad. Trans. John Cullen. New York: Nan A. Talese, 2007.
Khider, Abbas (2008). Der falsche Inder [The False Indian]. Hamburg: Nautilus.
Kishtainy, Khalid (2003). Tomorrow is Another Day: A Tale of Saddam’s Baghdad.
London: Elliot and Thompson.
Kohn, Marek (2005). ‘Grandeur of the Mind Over Matter’. The Independent,
4 February. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/
saturday-by-ian-mcewan-746885.html
Kulish, Nicholas (2007). Last One In (P.S.). New York: HarperCollins.
Kuti, Elizabeth (2008). ‘Tragic Plots from Bootle to Baghdad’. Contemporary Theatre
Review 18(4): 457–69.
Lanoye, Tom (2008). Atropa: De wraak van de vrede [Atropa: The Vengeance of Peace].
Play-script unpublished.
Lawson, Mark (2005). ‘Ian McEwan gives a global dimension to the details of a
neurosurgeon’s day in Saturday’. The Guardian, 22 January. http://www.guardian.
co.uk/books/2005/jan/22/bookerprize2005.bookerprize/print
Leezenberg, Michiel (2007). ‘From the Peloponnesian War to the Iraq War:
a Post-Liberal Reading of Greek Tragedy’. In Lorna Hardwick and Carol
Gillespie (eds), Classics in Post-Colonial Worlds. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 265–85.
Left, Sarah (2003). ‘Anti-War Poets Force Scrapping of White House Symposium’.
The Guardian, 30 January. http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2003/jan/30/
antiwar.uk1

198 References
Levertov, Denise et al. (1967). Out of the War Shadow: An Anthology of Current
Poetry. New York: War Resisters League.
Lewis, Justin, Rod Brookes, Nick Mosdell and Jerry Threadgold (2005). Shoot First and
Ask Questions Later: Media Coverage of the 2003 Iraq War. New York: Peter Lang.
Lichtenstein, Jonathan (2004). The Pull of Negative Gravity. London: Nick Hern.

Lim, Melissa (2009). ‘The Politics of Fiction: A Response to New Orientalism in
Type’. Journal of Multicultural Discourses 4(3), November: 257–62.
Litz, Robert (2005). ‘Iraq: The Dirty Story’. World Socialist Web Site, 6 May. http://
www.wsws.org/articles/2005/may2005/sand-m06.shtml
Llull, Eduardo (2003). ‘Preventing Nuclear Armageddon’. Human Events 59(33),
29 September: 26.
London, Rick and Leslie Scalapino (eds) (2003). Enough: An Anthology of Poetry
and Writings Against the War. Oakland, CA: O Books.
Lynch, Jack (2008). ‘The Politics of Shakespeare, the Shakespeare of Politics’.
Rutgers Newark Website, 17 February. http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/
Papers/politicalshakespeare.html
Makiya, Kanan (1998 [1989]). Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Malcolm, Noel (2003). ‘Stanzas and Sound-bites’. The Telegraph, 7 July. http://
www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3598509/Stanzas-and-sound-bites.html
Mamdouh, Alia (2003). Al-Mahboubat. Beirut: Dar al-Saqi. In English: The Loved Ones.
Trans. Marilyn Booth. New York: The American University in Cairo Press, 2006.
Marandi, Syed Mohammed (2008). ‘Reading Azar Nafisi in Tehran’. Comparative
American Studies 6(2): 179–89.
Marcus, Jane (1988). Art and Anger. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
Marias, Fernando (2004). Invasor [Invader]. Madrid: Editorial Destiono.
Massumi, Brian (1993). ‘Everywhere You Want To Be: Introduction to Fear’. In
Brian Massumi (ed.), The Politics of Everyday Fear. Minneapolis, MN: University
of Minnesota Press.
Mbembe, Achille (2001). On the Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
McCracken, Scott (1998). Pulp: Reading Popular Fiction. Manchester: Manchester
University Press.
McEwan, Ian (2005). Saturday. London: Vintage.
McGuinness, Frank (2004). Euripides’ Hecuba. London: Faber and Faber.
McNab, Andy (2004). Deep Black. London: Corgi.
Mee, Charles (2006). Iphigenia 2.0. Script available at http://www.charlesmee.
org/html/iphigenia.html
Mee, Charles (2007). Interview with Kurt. Studio 360, 28 September. http://www.
studio360.org/episodes/2007/09/28
Melo, Carla (2009). ‘Live from the Front: A Poetics of Slamming the “Truth”’. TDR:
The Drama Review 53(3), Fall: 85–97.
Metres, Philip (2007). Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American
Homefront Since 1941. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.
Michael, Sami (2008). Aida. Kinneret: Zmora Bitan.
Middleton, Peter (2005). Distant Reading: Performance, Readership and Consumption
in Contemporary Poetry. Raleigh: Alabama University Press.
Mikhail, Dunya (2005). The War Works Hard. Trans. Elizabeth Winslow. Manchester:
Carcanet [first shorter American edition 2003].

References 199
Mirzoeff, Nicholas (2005). Watching Babylon: The War in Iraq and Global Visual
Culture. New York: Routledge.
Montagne, Renee (2006). ‘David Hare on his Play “The Vertical Hour”’. NPR, 30
November. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId⫽6559220
Moretti, Franco (2000). ‘Conjectures on World Literature’. New Left Review 1,

Jan.–Feb.: 54–68.
Morgan, Sheila (2005). Electra Votes. Unpublished.
Morley, Sheridan (2003). ‘Crossing the Great Divide’. New Statesman, 16 June.
http://www.newstatesman.com/200306160041
Motion, Andrew (2003). ‘Afterword’. In Matthew Hollis and Paul Keegan (eds),
101 Poems Against War. London: Faber and Faber, 135–7.
Muhanna, Nazim (2006). ‘Where is the Iraq War Literature?’ Asharq Al-Awsat,
13 December. http://www.aawsat.com/english/news.asp?section⫽3&id⫽7322
Murdoch, Brian (1990). Fighting Songs and Warring Words: Popular Lyrics of Two
World Wars. London: Routledge.
Nærum, Knut (2004). Krig! [War!]. Oslo: Cappelen.
Nafisi, Azar (2003). Reading Lolita in Tehran. New York: Random House.
Nash, Walter (1990). Language in Popular Fiction. London: Routledge.
Neruda, Pablo (1970). ‘I’m Explaining a Few Things’. In Pablo Neruda, Selected
Poems. Ed. Nathaniel Tarn. London: Jonathan Cape, 102–7.
Neruda, Pablo (1980). A Call for the Destruction of Nixon and Praise for the Chilean
Revolution. Trans. Teresa Anderson. Cambridge, MA: West End Press.
Newey, Adam (2003). ‘Howl of Disapproval’. New Statesman 132(4646), 14 July, 54–5.
Nichols, Robert (ed.) (1943). Anthology of War Poetry 1914–1918. London: Nicholson
and Watson.
‘Nicholson Baker’s Checkpoint: The Reaction and Reviews’ (2004). Complete Review:
A Literary Saloon and Site of Review (Complete Review Quarterly) 5(4), November.
http://www.complete-review.com/quarterly/vol5/issue4/checkpt.htm
North, Oliver and Joe Musser (2004). The Jericho Sanction. New York: Avon.
Norton-Taylor, Richard (2003a). ‘Courtroom Drama’. The Guardian, 4 November.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2003/nov/04/theatre.politicsandthearts
Norton-Taylor, Richard (2003b). Justifying War: Scenes from the Hutton Inquiry.
London: Oberon.
Noujaim, Jehane (dir.) (2004). Control Room. DVD, Lions Gate Studio.
Oglesby, Tamsin (2003). US and Them. London: Faber and Faber.
Olsen, Elizabeth (2004). ‘Arts Briefing: Highlights, Veterans as Writers’. New York
Times, 21 April, 2.
Olsen, Stein Haugom (1978). The Structure of Literary Understanding. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Paget, Derek (1990). True Stories? Documentary Drama on Radio, Screen, and Stage.
Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Palmer, Jerry (1984). ‘Thrillers’. In Christopher Pawling (ed.), Popular Fiction and
Social Change. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 76–98.
Parenti, Christian (2004). The Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq.
New York: New Press.
Parmaksız, Alaettin (2007). Türk-Amerikan Savaşı – Kanlı Deprem [Turkish-American
War – The Bloody Earthquake]. Istanbul: Bilgi.
Parsons, Ian M. (ed.) (1965). Men Who March Away: Poems of the First World War.
London: Chatto & Windus.

200 References
Paterson, Don (2003). Landing Light. London: Faber and Faber.

Paterson, Don (2004). ‘The Dark Art of Poetry: T. S. Eliot Lecture 2004’. http://
www.poetrylibrary.org.uk/news/poetryscene/?id⫽20
Patterson, Christina (2003). ‘Anthology of Peace Poetry Rushed Out in Three Weeks’.
The Independent, 19 February. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/

books/news/anthology-of-peace-poetry-rushed-out-in-three-weeks-598096.html
Pax, Salam (2003). The Baghdad Blog. London: Guardian.
Pax, Salam (2006). Baghdad Blogger. DVD, Guardian Films.
Perea, Roberto Ramos (2007). Irak en mi [Iraq in Me]. Play-script unpublished.
Pfrommer, Michael (2007). Das Zweite Buch [The Second Book]. Mainz: Philipp
von Zabern.
Pick, Daniel (1993). War Machine: The Rationalization of Slaughter in the Modern
Age. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Pinter, Harold (2003). War. London: Faber and Faber.
Pinter, Harold (2006). Art, Truth and Politics, 2005. DVD, Illuminations for More
4. Available also at the Nobel Prize Website. http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/
literature/laureates/2005/pinter-lecture-e.html
Plekhanov, Sergei (1963 [1912]). Art and Social Life. London: Lawrence and
Wishart.
Poncy, Duane and Patricia McLean (eds) (2003). Raising Our Voices: An Anthology
of Oregon Poets Against the War. Portland, OR: Habit of Rainy Nights.
Pratt, Mary Louise (1992). Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation.
London: Routledge.
Prichard, Rebecca (2003). Delir’ium. Unpublished.
Pritchard, Tim (2005). Ambush Alley: The Most Extraordinary Battle of the Iraq War.
New York: Presidio.
Quickley, Jerry (2005). Live from the Front. Unpublished.
Rabinowitz, Nancy Sorkin with Sue Blundell (2008). ‘Epilogue: Modern
Performances’. In Rabinowitz, Greek Tragedy. Oxford: Blackwell.
Rausch, Roman (2006). Code Freebird. Reinbek: Rowohlt.
Ray, David (2004). The Death of Sardanapalus and Other Poems of the Iraq Wars.
Berthoud, CO: Howling Dog Press.
Rich, Adrienne (2004). The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000–2004. New York:
W.W. Norton.
Rich, Adrienne (2007). Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth: Poems 2004–2006.
New York: W.W. Norton.
Riverbend (2005). Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog from Iraq. New York: Feminist Press.
Also published under the title Baghdad Burning: A Young Woman’s Diary From a
War Zone. Delhi: Women Unlimited.
Riverbend (2006). Baghdad Burning II: More Girl Blog from Iraq. New York: Feminist
Press.
Robbins, Tim (2004). ‘Embedded’ (excerpt). In These Times, 2 March. http://www.
inthesetimes.com/article/embedded/
Robbins, Tim (2005). Embedded. Available on DVD as Embedded Live, Cinema Libre.
Rosenthal, Daniel (2003). ‘Nicholas Hytner on Henry V’. National Theatre Website,
20 June. http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/16746/platform-papers/nicholas-
hytner-on-henry-v.html
Rottmann, Larry, John Barry and Basil T. Paquet (eds) (1972). Winning Hearts and
Minds: War Poems by Vietnam Veterans. Brooklyn, NY: 1st Casualty.

References 201
Rourke, Lee (2007). ‘The Gulf War Novel That Still Delivers Urgent News’.
Guardian Blog, 8 August. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2007/
aug/08/thegulfwarnovelthatstill
Ryan, Chris (2006). Ultimate Weapon. London: Arrow.
Sackur, Stephen (2003). ‘Painful Memories of Home’. BBC, 12 April. http://news.

bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from-our-own-correspondent/2940591.stm
Said, Edward (2004). ‘A Monument to Hypocrisy’. In From Oslo to Iraq and the
Roadmap. London: Bloomsbury, 250–5.
Sands, Philippe (2005). Lawless World: America and the Making and Breaking of Global
Rules from FDR’s Atlantic Charter to George W. Bush’s Illegal War. New York: Viking.
Sartre, Jean-Paul (1974 [1967]). ‘Vietnam: Imperialism and Genocide’. In Between
Existentialism and Marxism. Trans. John Matthews. London: New Left Books,
67–83.
Sartre, Jean-Paul (1994 [1962]). Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions. Trans. Philip
Mairet. London: Routledge.
Satrapi, Marjane (2003). Persepolis: The Story of an Iranian Childhood. London:
Jonathan Cape.
Schiffrin, André (2000). The Business of Books: How International Conglomerates
Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read. London: Verso.
Scurr, Ruth (2005). ‘Happiness on a Knife-Edge’. The Times, 29 January. http://
entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article
507285.ece
Sexton, David (2003). ‘Anti-War of Words’. Evening Standard, 17 March. http://
www.thisislondon.co.uk/showbiz/article-3852045-anti-war-of-words.do
Sexton, David (2009). ‘The Backlash Against Ian McEwan’. Evening Standard,
15 December. http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/lifestyle/article-23784084-the-
backlash-against-ian-mcewan.do
Sharp, Ellis (2007). ‘Noah Cicero, The Human War’. The Sharp Side (blog), 9 July.
http://ellissharp.blogspot.com/2007/07/noah-cicero-human-war.html
Shaw, Martin (1996). Civil Society and Media in Global Crises: Representing Distant
Violence. London: Pinter.
Sierz, Aleks (2006). The Theatre of Martin Crimp. London: A&C Black (Methuen).
Signore, John Del (2007). Interview with Charles Mee. The Gothamist, 19 December.
http://gothamist.com/2007/12/19/charles_mee_pla.php
Simawe, Saadi (ed.) (2003). Iraqi Poetry Today. Modern Poetry in Translation
19. London.
Simawe, Saadi (2005). ‘Introduction: A Poetic Vision Out of the Iraqi Ashes’. In
Dunya Mikhail, The War Works Hard. Trans. Elizabeth Winslow. Manchester:
Carcanet, vii–xiii.
Simon, Sherry (1996). Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of
Transmission. London: Routledge.
Sophocles (1982/1984). The Three Theban Plays: Antigone, Oedipus the King, Oedipus
at Colonus. Trans. Robert Fagles. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Sophocles (1990). ‘Women of Trachis’. Trans. J. Michael Walton. In Plays: Two.
London: Methuen.
Sophocles (1992). The Thebans: Oedipus Tyrannos, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone.
Trans. Timberlake Wertenbaker. London: Faber and Faber.
Soto-Morettini, Donna (2005). ‘Trouble in the House: David Hare’s Stuff Happens’.
Contemporary Theatre Review 15(3): 309–19.

202 References
Spencer, Charles (2003). ‘New York Drolls’. Telegraph, 30 May. http://www.telegraph.

co.uk/culture/theatre/3595728/New-York-drolls.html
Stallworthy, Jon (ed.) (1984). The Oxford Book of War Poetry. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Stauffer, Andrew M. (2005). Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.
Steiner, George (1984). Antigones: The Antigone Myth in Western Literature, Art and
Thought. Oxford: Clarendon.
Stephens, Simon (2006a). ‘I Wrote Motortown in Four Days’. Royal Theatre
website. http://www.royalcourttheatre.com/archive_article_detail.asp?Article
ID⫽17&play⫽419
Stephens, Simon (2006b). Motortown. London: A&C Black (Methuen).
Stone, Andrew (2003). ‘Enterprise Network: Faber Aims for the Write Stuff’. The
Sunday Times, 23 November. http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/
article1101748.ece
Sutherland, John (1981). Bestsellers: Popular Fiction of the 1970s. London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Sutherland, John (letter) and John Banville (response) (2005). ‘Squash’. New York
Review of Books 52(11), 23 June. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18099
Swift, Todd (ed.) (2003a). 100 Poets Against the War, 27 January. http://www.
nthposition.com/100poets0.pdf
Swift, Todd (ed.) (2003b). 100 Poets Against the War Redux, 3 February. http://
www.nthposition.com/100poets1.pdf
Swift, Todd (ed.) (2003c). 100 Poets Against the War 3.0, 10 February. http://www.
nthposition.com/100poets.pdf
Swift, Todd (ed.) (2003d) 100 Poets Against the War. London: Salt, 24 February.
Swift, Todd (2004). ‘Letters: Poets at War over Pinter and Politics’. The Guardian,
2 November. http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2004/nov/02/guardian
letters1
Symons, Julian (ed.) (1942). An Anthology of War Poetry. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Szirtes, George (2004). Reel. Tarset, Northumberland: Bloodaxe.
Szirtes, George (2005). ‘Thin Ice and The Midnight Skaters: T. S. Eliot Lecture
2005’. http://www.poetrylibrary.org.uk/news/poetryscene/?id⫽168
Taranto, James (2003). ‘A Day of Poetry for the War’. Wall Street Journal Opinion,
12 February. http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id⫽110003063
Taussig, Michael (1992). The Nervous System. New York: Routledge.
Taylor, Gary (2003). ‘Cry Havoc’. The Guardian, 5 April. http://www.guardian.co.uk/
stage/2003/apr/05/theatre.classics
Taylor, Paul (2004). ‘Rough Justice in Paradise’. The Independent, 27 May. http://
www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/guanta
namo--honor-bound-to-defend-freedom-tricycle-theatre-london-564789.html
Thompson, Bob (2004). ‘The King and We: Henry V’s War Cabinet’. Washington
Post, 18 May. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A34918-2004
May17.html
Turna, Burak and Orkun Uçar (2004). Metal Fırtına [The Metal Storm]. Istanbul:
Timaş.
Turner, Brian (2005). Here, Bullet. Tarset, Northumberland: Bloodaxe.
Usher, Sebastian (2007). ‘Shakespeare in Arabic Hits Stratford’. BBC, 19 February.
http://news.bbc.uk/1/hi/world/middle-east/6375547.stm

References 203
Venuti, Lawrence (1995). The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. London:

Routledge.
Virilio, Paul and Sylvère Lotringer (1997 [1983]). Pure War. New York: Semiotext(e).
Wali, Najem (2004). Die Reise nach Tell al-Lahm [Journey to Tell al-Lahm]. Trans.
Imke Ahlf-Wien. Munich: Hanser Verlag.

West, Bing (2005). No True Glory: A Frontline Account of the Battle of Fallujah.
New York: Bantam Dell.
Wheatley, David (2003). ‘Posturing for Peace’. The Guardian, 24 May. http://www.
guardian.co.uk/books/2003/may/24/featuresreviews.guardianreview8
Wheatley, David (2007). ‘“Dichtung und Wahrheit”: Contemporary War and the
Non-Combatant Poetry’. In Tim Kendall (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of British
and Irish War Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 653–66.
Whitaker, Raymond (2004). ‘The Truth About Camp X-Ray – In Black and White’.
The Independent, 30 May. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/
theatre-dance/reviews/guantanamo—honor-bound-to-defend-freedom-tricycle-
london-565362.html
Whitehead, Anne (2005). ‘Tony Harrison, the Gulf War and the Poetry of Protest’.
Textual Practice 19(2): 349–72.
Williams, Roy (2007). Days of Significance. London: A&C Black (Methuen Drama).
Wilmer, Eleanor (2004). ‘Poetry and the Pentagon’s Unholy Alliance?’ Poetry 185(1),
October: 37–42.
Wilmer, Stephen E. (2007). ‘Finding the Post-Colonial Voice of Antigone: Seamus
Heaney’s Burial at Thebes’. In Lorna Hardwick and Carol Gillespie (eds), Classics
in Post-Colonial Worlds. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 228–42.
Winterbottom, Michael (dir). (2006). Road to Guantanamo. DVD, Cinema Club.
Woodcock, Bruce (1990). ‘Classical Vandalism: Tony Harrison’s Invective’. Critical
Quarterly 32(2), Summer: 50–65.
Wordsworth, William (1974 [1800, 1802]). ‘Preface and Appendix to Lyrical Ballads’.
In Wordsworth’s Literary Criticism. Ed. W. J. B. Owen. London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 68–95.
Wright, Quincy (1942). A Study of War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Younger, Kelly (2008). ‘Antigone and Terrorism: Seamus Heaney Sends a Letter to
George W. Bush’. In Stratos E. Constantinidis (ed.), Text and Presentation 2007.
Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 205–12.

Index
11 September 2001 terrorist attacks Baghdad Blog, The (Pax) 12, 17, 30,

11, 20–1, 28–9, 48–9, 75, 83, 129, 176–82
152, 166, 181, 188 Baghdad Burning (Riverbend) 12, 17,
15 February 2003 anti-war protests 30, 176–83
6, 158–9 Baker, Kenneth, The Faber Book of War
100 Poets Against the War (Swift ed.) Poetry 60, 63
3, 12, 22, 35–6, 38–41, 45–59, 62, Baker, Nicholson 22; Checkpoint 30,
65 155, 156–8, 159–63, 165–6, 167
101 Poems Against War (Hollis and Banville, John 164–5; The Sea 164–5
Keegan eds.) 12, 21–2, 35, 36, Baradei, Mohamed El 25
39–40, 60–5, 89, 186 Barnes, Todd Landon 127
300 (Miller; Snyder dir.) 64 Barrington, Judith, and Le Guin 53, 59
300 Spartans (Maté dir.) 64 Barthes, Roland 23, 69
Al-Bassam, Sulayman 127
Abdessalem, Chekib, A Bagdad à Bawer, Bruce 47, 57
Bassora 187 Beck, Ulrich 181
Abu Ghraib prison torture 49, 75, Beckett, Samuel 139
91, 188–9 Begg, Moazzam, Enemy Combatant
Adair, Gilbert 165 (with Brittain) 116
Addonizio, Kim 57–8 Behind the Lines (Metres) 43–6, 48, 52
Advice to Iraqi Women (Crimp) 105 Beken, Semra, Kocamın Bekçisi 187
Aeschylus, Oresteia 130 de Bellaigue, Christopher, In the Rose
Aida (Michael) 186 Garden of the Martyrs 171
Albes, Andreas, Der Schatz 190 Bellavia, David, House to House 22
Allende, Salvador 78 Berry, Bonny 76–7, 79
Althusser, Louis 23 Bewes, Timothy 168–9
Ambush Alley (Pritchard) 22 Bibby, Michael, Hearts and Minds 43,
al Anbari, Shaker 185 48
Anderson, Benedict 123 Billington, Michael 127–8, 137
Anthology of War Poetry (Nichols) 42 Black Watch (Burke) 99, 100–1, 103
An Anthology of War Poetry (Symons) Blair, Tony 15, 66, 71, 74, 104, 106,
42 129, 164, 176
Antigone (Sophocles) 128, 132–5 Blake, William 81
Antigones (Steiner) 128 Blix, Hans 25, 39
Antoon, Sinan, I’jaam 186 The Blog of War (Burden) 12
Archibald, David 101 Bloom, Clive 149–51
Arendt, Hannah 173 Bly, Robert, A Poetry Reading Against
Arnold, Matthew 61 the Vietnam War (with Ray) 43
Art and Social Life (Plekhanov) 7 Bottum, J. 46–7
Atropa (Lanoye) 189 Le brave soldat Chvéïk (Grou) 189
Bremer, Paul 15
Bader, Ali, Haris al Tabigh 187–8 Brittain, Victoria 112–13; Enemy
A Bagdad à Bassora (Abdessalem) 187 Combatant (with Begg) 116;
204

Index 205
Guantanamo (with Slovo) 106, Coalition Provisional Authority 15,

107, 109–19 19, 25, 75, 100, 104, 179–80
Brown, Dale 144, 146, 152; Razor’s Code Freebird (Rausch) 190
Edge (with DeFelice) 143–6, 148; Communicating Knowledge (Feather)
Rogue Forces 144 8–9

Bufford, Bill 66, 70 Cook, Robin 114
Burden, Matthew Currier, The Blog of Correlates of War project (Singer) 19
War 12 Crawford, John, The Last True Story
The Burial at Thebes (Heaney) 128, I’ll Ever Tell 22
132–5, 137 Crimp, Martin 22, 130, 135–6;
Burke, Gregory, Black Watch 99, Advice to Iraqi Women 105; Cruel
100–1, 103 and Tender 128, 132, 135–7
Bush, George W. 15, 24, 67, 71, 74, Croft, Andy 3; Red Sky at Night
85, 87, 91, 104, 106, 121, 129, 130, (with Mitchell) 3
156–8, 171, 176, 189; compared to Cruel and Tender (Crimp) 128, 132,
Creon 132–4 135–7
Bush ka Matlab Jhadi (Deshpande dir.)
189 Damrosch, David, What is World
Bush, Laura 39 Literature? 51
The Business of Books (Schiffrin) 8–9 Das dunkle Schiff (Fatah) 188
Butcher, Justin, The Madness of George David, Gavyn 114
Dubya 104 Days of Significance (Williams) 99,
Buzzell, Colby, My War 12 101, 127
Byron, George Gordon 81 The Death of Sardanapalus (Ray) 83–7,
88, 91, 93, 120
Campbell, Alastair 106, 108 Deep Black (McNab) 145–6, 147–8
Campbell, Donovan, Joker One 22 DeFelice, Jim 144; Razor’s Edge
Campbell, Kerri, and Kelly 178 (with Brown) 143–6, 148
Campfires of Resistance (Gitlin) 43, 52 Delir’ium (Prichard) 105
Carroll, Andrew, Operation Homecoming Derrida, Jacques 23
50 Deshpande, Sudhanva 189
Casanova, Pascale, The World Republic Dickinson, Emily 89
of Letters 51 Donne, John 89
Casey, Michael 61 dossiers 24–5, 107–8, 126, 173
Celebration (Pinter) 72 Dr Strangelove (Kubrick dir.) 104
de Certeau, Michel 86 Dujardin, Édouard 160
Chattarji, Sampurna 58
Chattarji, Subarno, Memories of a Lost Eberhart, Richard, War and the Poet
War 43, 48 (with Rodnan) 42, 60, 63
Checkpoint (Baker) 30, 155, 156–8, Eco, Umberto 154
159–63, 165–6, 167 Edensor, Tim, National Identity, Popular
Cheney, Dick 106 Culture, and Everyday Life 123–5
Chomsky, Noam, and Herman 179 Electra Votes (Morgan) 130
Cicero, Noah 22; The Human War Eliot, T. S. 1, 76
30, 155–6, 159–62, 165–6, 167 Eliot, Valerie 1
Clarke, Richard A. 146, 152; The Elkins, James R. 33
Scorpion’s Gate 144–6, 148, 153–4 Embedded (Robbins) 97, 99, 103
Clausewitz, Carl von, On War 19 embedded reporters 102–3; books
Claycomb, Ryan 116 by 22; in plays 97, 102–3

206 Index
Enemy Combatant (Begg and Brittain) Gould-Wartofsky, Michael 53–5

116 Grasso, Linda M. 80
England, Lynndie 91 Grayer, Michael 67
English, James 165 The Great War and Modern Memory
Ensler, Eve, The Vagina Monologues 46 (Fussell) 41–2, 96, 97

Euripides 130; Hecuba 129–30; Greer, Germaine 66–7, 71–2, 77
Iphigenia in Aulis 128, 130 Grou, Pierre, Le brave soldat Chvéïk
everyday life, in blogs 176–8, 179–82; 189
de Certeau on 86; Freud on 86; Guantanamo (Brittain and Slovo) 106,
Goffman on 86; in Harsent’s 107, 109–19
poetry 94; and nationality Guantanamo Bay detentions 75, 107,
(Edensor on) 123–5; and news 113, 115–16
179–81; in Ray’s poetry 84–7, 88, Guha, Sangram, Operation Flush
93, 120; under repression 174–5 188–9
Gulf War, and media 103; poetry of
The Faber Book of War Poetry (Baker) the 44, 66, 67–8
60, 63
Fagles, Robert 134–5 Al Hafida al Amerikiyya (Kachachi)
Falk, Richard 33–4 187
Der falsche Inder (Khider) 186–7 Hamill, Sam, Poets Against the War
Fatah, Sherko, Das dunkle Schiff 188 12, 22, 35–6, 38–41, 45–59, 62, 65,
Feather, John, Communicating 93
Knowledge 8–9 Hare, David 12, 22; Stuff Happens
Fick, Nathaniel, One Bullet Away 22 30, 106, 109–19; The Vertical Hour
Fighting Songs and Warring Words 30, 120–5
(Murdoch) 42 Haris al Tabigh (Bader) 187–8
Filkins, Dexter, The Forever War 22 Harrison, Tony 22, 67–78, 105;
First World War, poetry of 21, 41–2, Gulf War poetry by 67–8; Hecuba
62; theatre of 96 translation 129–30; Iraq invasion
Fitzpatrick, Coeli 171–2 poetry (esp. Under the Clock)
The Forever War (Filkins) 22 67–78, 81
Forsyth, Fredrick 146 Harsent, David, Legion 72, 93–5
Freedom, The (Parenti) 22 Hartley, Jason Christopher, Just
Freud, Sigmund 86 Another Soldier 22
Fussell, Paul, The Great War and Hašek, Jaroslav, The Good Soldier
Modern Memory 41–2, 96, 97 Schweik 189
Haughton, Hugh 42
Gallagher, Mark 151–2 Haw, Brian 6
Gardner, Brian, Terrible Rain 42; Up Heaney, Seamus 12, 22, 61, 130; The
the Line to Death 42 Burial at Thebes 128, 132–5, 137
Gilbert, Sandra M. 55–7 Hearts and Minds (Bibby) 43
Gilligan, Andrew 107–8 Hecuba (Euripides) 129–30
Gitlin, Todd, Campfires of Resistance Hegel, G. W. F. 132
43, 52 Here, Bullet (Turner) 18, 87–8, 90
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 51 Herman, Edward S., and Chomsky
Goffman, Erving 86 179
Golding, William 64 Hollis, Matthew (with Keegan) 101
The Good Soldier Schweik (Hašek) 189 Poems Against War 12, 21–2, 35,
Gorteau, Denis, A Mort L’Irak 186 36, 39–40, 60–5, 89, 186

Index 207
Hoon, Geoff 74, 108 Kelly, David 107–8

Hosseini, Khaled, The Kite-Runner 171 Kelly, Janice 108
House to House (Bellavia) 22 Kelly, Peter, and Campbell 178
The Human War (Cicero) 30, 155–6, Kendall, Tim, Modern English War
159–62, 165–6, 167 Poetry 47, 68, 70, 72

Humboldt, Wilhelm von 22 Kermode, Mark 66–7, 70
Hussein, Saddam 15, 68, 70, 71, 91, Keshavarz, Fatemeh, Jasmine and
121, 133, 144, 145, 158, 172–4, Stars 171
175–7, 178, 186–7 Khadra, Yasmina (pen-name for
Hutton, Brian 107–8 Mohammed Moulessehoul),
Hutton Inquiry 107–9, 110 Les Sirènes de Bagdad 17, 187
Huxley, Aldous 166–7 Khider, Abbas, Der falsche Inder
Huze, Sean, The Sandstorm 97–8, 99 186–7
Hytner, Nicholas 106, 109, 126–7 Kishtainy, Khalid 185; Tomorrow is
Another Day 172, 175, 186
I’jaam (Antoon) 186 The Kite-Runner (Hosseini) 171
In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs Kocamın Bekçisi (Beken) 187
(de Bellaigue) 171 Krig! (Nærum) 189
Innes, Christopher 115 Kubrick, Stanley, Dr Strangelove 104
Invasor (Marias) 188 Kuti, Elizabeth 115
Iphigenia 2.0 (Mee) 130
Iphigenia in Aulis (Euripides) 128, 130 Landing Light (Paterson) 1
Iraq en mi (Perea) 188 Lanoye, Tom, Atropa 189
Iraq Body Count 17 The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell
Iraq Coalition Casualty Count 17 (Crawford) 22
Iraqi Governing Council 19, 176, Lawson, Mark 66
179–80 Le Guin, Ursula, and Barrington 53,
Iraqi Poetry Today (Simawe) 16–17, 89 59
Leezenberg, Michiel 133
James, Henry 121 Legion (Harsent) 72, 93–5
Jana Natya Manch 189 Levertov, Denise, Out of the War
Jarmakani, Amira 183 Shadow (with others) 43
Jasmine and Stars (Keshavarz) 171 Lichtenstein, Jonathan, The Pull of
Jericho Sanction, The (North and Negative Gravity 99
Mussler) 144–6, 153–4 Lim, Melissa 171–2
Johnson, Lyndon B. 41 Litz, Robert 98
Joker One (Campbell) 22 Live from the Front (Quickley) 98–9,
Jones, Brian 108 103
Joyce, James 84, 160, 161, 166, 169 Lowell, Robert 41
Just Another Soldier (Hartley) 22
Justifying War (Norton-Taylor) 30, The Madness of George Dubya (Butcher)
106, 107–9, 110–19 104
Al-Mahboubat (Mamdouh) 186
Kachachi, Inaam, Al Hafida al Makiya, Kanan, Republic of Fear 173,
Amerikiyya 187 175
Kaufman, Walter 138 Malcolm, Noel 67, 72
Keegan, Paul (with Hollis) 101 Poems Mamdouh, Alia, Al-Mahboubat 186
Against War 12, 21–2, 35, 36, 39–40, Marandi, Syed Mohammed 171
60–5, 89, 186 Marcus, Jane 80

208 Index
Marias, Fernando, Invasor 188 Newey, Adam 67, 70–1, 72

Massumi, Brian 181–2 Nichols, Robert, Anthology of War
Maté, Rudolph 300 Spartans 64 Poetry 42
Mbembe, Achille 174 Nixon, Richard 78
McCracken, Scott 150 No True Glory (West) 22

McEwan, Ian 22; Saturday 14, 30, North, Oliver 146, 152; The Jericho
155, 158–66, 167 Sanction (with Mussler) 144–6,
McGuinness, Frank 129, 130 153–4
McNab, Andy 146, 152; Deep Black Norton-Taylor, Richard 110, 113–14;
145–6, 147–8 Justifying War 30, 106, 107–9,
Mee, Charles 130; Iphigenia 2.0 130 110–19
Melo, Carla 98–9
Memories of a Lost War (Chattarji) 43 Oglesby, Tamsin 22; US and Them
Men Who March Away (Parsons) 42 30, 120–5
Metal Firtina (Turna and Uçar) 189–90 On War (Clauzewitz) 19
Metres, Philip, Behind the Lines 43–6, One Bullet Away (Fick) 22
48, 52 Operation Flush (Guha) 188–9
Michael, Sami, Aida 186 Operation Homecoming (Carroll ed.) 50
Middleton, Peter 83 Oresteia (Aeschylus) 130
Midhat, Kamal 187–8 Out of the War Shadow (Levertov and
Mikhail, Dunya, The War Works Hard others) 43
17, 88–91, 92, 185–6 The Oxford Book of War Poetry
military, and civilian 17–18, 37–8, (Stallworthy) 60–1, 63
101–2, 142; Virilio on 37–8
Miller, Frank 300, 64 Paget, Derek 117–18
Mirzoeff, Nicholas 103 Parenti, Christian, The Freedom 22
Mitchell, Katie 128–9 Parmaksiz, Alaettin, Türk-Amerikan
Modern English War Poetry (Kendall) Savaşi 190
47 Parsons, Ian M., Men Who March
Moretti, Franco 51, 83 Away 42
Morgan, Sheila, Electra Votes 130 Paterson, Don 1, 77; T. S. Eliot
Morley, Sheridan 120 Lecture 1–13, 19, 23, 24, 67
A Mort L’Irak (Gorteau) 186 Pax, Salam, The Baghdad Blog 12, 17,
Motion, Andrew 40, 61–2 30, 176–82
Motortown (Stephens) 99–100, 101 Perea, Roberto Ramos, Iraq en mi 188
Murdoch, Brian, Fighting Songs and Persepolis (Satrapi) 171
Warring Words 42 Pfrommer, Michael, Das Zweite Buch
al-Musawi, Muhsin, Reading Iraq 90 190
Mussler, Joe, The Jericho Sanction Pick, Daniel 20
(with North) 144–6, 153–4 Pinochet, Augusto 78
My War (Buzzell) 12 Pinter, Harold 3, 4, 5, 7, 12, 66–78;
Celebration 72; Gulf War poetry
Nærum, Knut, Krig! 189 by 66; Nobel Lecture 78, 139–40;
Nafisi, Azar, Reading Lolita in Tehran War 2–3, 19, 66–78, 81
171 Plekhanov, Sergei, Art and Social Life 7
Nash, Walter 146–7 A Poetry Reading Against the Vietnam
National Identity, Popular Culture, and War (Bly and Ray) 43
Everyday Life (Edensor) 123–5 Poets Against the War (Hamill) 12,
Neruda, Pablo 78 22, 35–6, 38–41, 45–59, 62, 65, 93

Index 209
Powell, Colin 25, 106 Sartre, Jean-Paul 49, 79–80

Prichard, Rebecca, Delir’ium 105 Satrapi, Marjane, Persepolis 171
Pritchard, Tim, Ambush Alley 22 Saturday (McEwan) 14, 30, 158–66,
The Pull of Negative Gravity 167
(Lichtenstein) 99 Der Schatz (Albes) 190

Schiffrin, André, The Business of Books
Quickley, Jerry, Live from the Front 8–9
98–9, 103 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 23
The School Among the Ruins (Rich)
Rabinowitz, Nancy Sorkin 138 92–3
Rausch, Roman, Code Freebird 190 Scorpion’s Gate, The (Clarke) 144–6,
Ray, David, The Death of Sardanapalus 148, 153–4
83–7, 88, 91, 93, 120; A Poetry The Sea (Banville) 164–5
Reading Against the Vietnam War Sexton, David 165
(with Bly) 43 Shakespeare, William 101, 112,
Razor’s Edge (Brown and DeFelice) 126–7
143–6, 148 Sharp, Ellis 165
Reading Iraq (al-Musawi) 90 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 81
Reading Lolita in Tehran (Nafisi) 171 Simawe, Saadi 89; Iraqi Poetry Today
reconstruction contracts 25, 50, 75, (ed.) 16–17, 89
127, 145, 180 Simon, Sherry 89
Red Sky at Night (Croft and Mitchell) 3 Simonides 63–4
Reel (Szirtes) 3 Singer, J. David, Correlates of War
Die Reisenach Tell al-Lahm (Wali) project 19
186 Les Sirènes de Bagdad (Khadra) 17,
Republic of Fear (Makiya) 173, 175 187
Resolution 1441 25 Slovo, Gillian 112, 113; Guantanamo
Rice, Condoleeza 74, 106, 190 (with Brittain) 106, 107, 109–19
Rich, Adrienne, The School Among the Snyder, Zack 300, 64
Ruins 92–3; Telephone Ringing in the soldiers, civilians as 38; Iraq
Labyrinth 93 invasion narratives by 18, 22; in
Richardson, Dorothy 160 frontline drama 96–102, 130; as
Ritter, Scott 114 poets 42–3, 49–50, 87–8
Riverbend, Baghdad Burning 12, 17, Sophocles 130; Antigone 128, 132–5;
30, 176–83 Women of Trachis 128, 135–7
Road to Guantanamo (Winterbottom Soto-Morettini, Donna 115
dir.) 116 Spencer, Charles 120
Robbins, Tim, Embedded 97, 99 Springsteen, Bruce 49
Rodnan, Selden, War and the Poet Stallworthy, Jon, The Oxford Book of
(with Eberhart) 42, 60, 63 War Poetry 60–1, 63
Rogue Forces (Brown) 144 Stauffer, Andrew 80–1
Rourke, Lee 165 Steiner, George, Antigones 128
Rumsfeld, Donald 24, 106, 107, 144, Stephens, Simon, Motortown 99–100,
189, 190 101
Ryan, Chris 146, 152; Ultimate Straw, Jack 106, 107
Weapon 145–6, 148 A Study of War (Wright) 19
Stuff Happens (Hare) 30, 106,
Said, Edward 23, 85 109–19
The Sandstorm (Huze) 97–8, 99 Sutherland, John 148, 165

210 Index
Swift, Todd 3; 100 Poets Against the Wali, Najem, Die Reisenach Tell al-Lahm
War 3, 12, 22, 35–6, 38–41, 45–59, 186
62, 65 war, and invasion 19–20, 22–3,
Symons, Julian, Anthology of War 103–4, 141; concept of 19–21, 22,
Poetry 42 37–8, 91, 93; machine 20; rhetoric

Szirtes, George, Reel 3; T. S. Eliot of 19–21, 32, 37–8, 91, 94, 141–2;
Lecture 3–4 theatre of 96–7
War (Pinter) 2–3, 19, 66–78, 81
Taussig, Michael 175 War and the Poet (Eberhart and
Taylor, Don 128 Rodnan eds.) 42, 60, 63
Taylor, Gary 126 The War Works Hard (Mikhail) 17,
Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth 88–91, 92
(Rich) 93 Wertenbaker, Timberlake 134–5
Terrible Rain (Gardner ed.) 42 West, Bing, No True Glory 22
Tomorrow is Another Day (Kishtainy) What is World Literature? (Damrosch)
172, 175, 186 51
translation 16–17, 63, 87–8, 89–90, Wheatley, David 62, 68, 70–1, 72
134–6 Whitehead, Anne 68
Tresnjak, Darko 127 Widdecombe, Ann 114
T. S. Eliot Lecture, Paterson’s 1–13, Williams, Roy, Days of Significance
19, 23, 24, 67; Szirtes’s 3–4 99, 101, 127
Türk-Amerikan Savaşi (Parmaksiz) 190 Wilmer, Eleanor 50
Turna, Burak, Metal Firtina (with Uçar) Wilmer, Stephen 133
189–90 Winning Hearts and Minds (Rottmann
Turner, Brian, Here, Bullet 18, 87–8, 90 et al.) 43, 50
Winterbottom, Michael, Road to
Uçar, Orkun, Metal Firtina (with Turna) Guantanamo 116
189–90 Wolfowitz, Paul 106
Ultimate Weapon (Ryan) 145–6, 148 Women of Trachis (Sophocles) 128,
Under the Clock (Harrison) 67–78, 81 135–7
United Nations Security Council Woodcock, Bruce 78
(UNSC) 25, 34 Woolf, Virginia 160, 161
Up the Line to Death (Gardner ed.) 42 Wordsworth, William 76
US and Them (Oglesby) 30, 120–5 World Republic of Letters (Casanova) 51
Wright, Quincy, A Study of War 19
The Vagina Monologues (Ensler) 46
Venuti, Lawrence 89–90 Youssef, Saadi 61, 186
The Vertical Hour (Hare) 30, 120–5
Vietnam War poetry 21–2, 41, 42–5, Zulm Phir Zulm Hai (dir. Deshpande)
48–50 189
Virilio, Paul 37–8 Das Zweite Buch (Pfrommer) 190

Gupta - Imagining Iraq Literature in English and The Iraq Invasion (2011)

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Gupta - Imagining Iraq Literature in English and The Iraq Invasion (2011)

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Imagining Iraq

10.1057/9780230298118 - Imagining Iraq, Suman Gupta

AESTHETICISM AND MODERNISM: Debating Twentieth Century Literature

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08

THE CULTURES OF ECONOMIC MIGRATION: International Perspectives

ENGLISH STUDIES ON THIS SIDE: Post-2007 Reckonings (Edited with M. Katsarska)

GLOBALIZATION IN INDIA: Contents and Discontents (Edited with T. Basu and

INDIA IN THE AGE OF GLOBALIZATION: Contemporary Discourses and

GLOBALIZATION AND LITERATURE

MARXISM, HISTORY AND INTELLECTUALS: Toward a Reconceptualized

V. S. NAIPAUL (Writers and their Work)

NIGERIA AND GLOBALIZATION: Discourses of Identity and Social Conflict

THE REPLICATION OF VIOLENCE: Thoughts on International Terrorism

RE-READING HARRY POTTER

SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONIST IDENTITY POLITICS AND LITERARY STUDIES

THE THEORY AND REALITY OF DEMOCRACY: A Case Study in Iraq

A TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE READER: Texts and Debates

TWO TEXTS AND I: Disciplines of Knowledge and the Literary Subject

10.1057/9780230298118 - Imagining Iraq, Suman Gupta

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08

10.1057/9780230298118 - Imagining Iraq, Suman Gupta

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08

10.1057/9780230298118 - Imagining Iraq, Suman Gupta

10.1057/9780230298118 - Imagining Iraq, Suman Gupta

10.1057/9780230298118 - Imagining Iraq, Suman Gupta

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08

2. ‘Laws’ for Poets: Poetry Anthologies 32

3. Exacting World: Individual Poetry Collections 66

4. To Smash the Mirror: Theatre 96

5. A Joint Enterprise: Fiction 141

6. Windows into Life-Worlds: Blogs and Conclusion 170

10.1057/9780230298118 - Imagining Iraq, Suman Gupta

Numerous meandering conversations, more for the pleasure than to any

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08

10.1057/9780230298118 - Imagining Iraq, Suman Gupta

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08

10.1057/9780230298118 - Imagining Iraq, Suman Gupta

‘professionals’ eventually in the same way as plumbers and roofers.

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08

The way forward, it seems to me, lies in the redefinition of ‘risk’. To

Irrespective of how Paterson proceeded to define ‘risk’ in poetry, this

10.1057/9780230298118 - Imagining Iraq, Suman Gupta

time was troubling on two counts. First, it seemed to make a particularly

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08

10.1057/9780230298118 - Imagining Iraq, Suman Gupta

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08

10.1057/9780230298118 - Imagining Iraq, Suman Gupta

In a fundamental way Paterson and the critics of his lecture were on

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08

10.1057/9780230298118 - Imagining Iraq, Suman Gupta

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08

10.1057/9780230298118 - Imagining Iraq, Suman Gupta

been noted in the line of long-drawn debates mentioned. Influentially,

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08

This is a little bit rudely expressed, but clarifies Paterson’s objections to

10.1057/9780230298118 - Imagining Iraq, Suman Gupta

to do: defend the exclusive institutional spaces of the establishment

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08

10.1057/9780230298118 - Imagining Iraq, Suman Gupta

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08

10.1057/9780230298118 - Imagining Iraq, Suman Gupta

of archives, the degrees to which authors and readers can interact or

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08