How poets help America wage war

Ilya Kaminsky, Dunya Mikhail, and a brief introduction to the Poetics of Empire

Ilya Kaminsky's Deaf Republic is a book of poems about a village in an occupied nation (clearly meant to be Ukraine) resisting occupation (by what are clearly Nazis) through passive resistance by pretending to be deaf to them, and essentially just ignoring them. Passive resistance has a long history; what comes to mind off-the-dome is the passive-aggression my grandmother honed through the difficult periods of her life, through a volatile marriage, through being a single-parent, through having biracial children, and so on. I also think of the passive resistance of Black slaves in the United States, who utilized irony and detachment as avenues for expressing their resistance to their masters. But the thing is, I find these means of resistance by their very nature pathetic. I think of the desperation displayed by prisoners of the concentration camp in Robert Antelme’s memoir The Human Race, desperately trying to be “in on the joke” of their captors in order to maintain some semblance of humanity, laughing at their own torment along with their tormentors. It is not, I don’t think, and as Kaminsky seems to display, a very meaningful form of protest.

What poets like this do is effectively what Plato always accused them of: they’re obscuring truth. They are using and manipulating signs and symbols, manipulating representations, manipulating language in order to achieve plainly nonsensical rhetorical, possibly even destructive, aims. Kaminsky displays these skills in his tweets, too, take a look:

Insinuating that gulags were “concentration camps” is a laugh, and particularly rich as a criticism of Trump’s America when we consider the hellhole that has always been prisons in America, a.k.a. the most carceral nation on earth. “Military parades”? America has military parades all the time, it didn’t start under Trump, they’re a generally normal part of a lot of countries—we have them here in Canada in spades! Misogynism? That’s absurd, the Soviet Union had more equality between the sexes than most other nations on earth at the time, even many of its critics often accept that much—sure, they still had misogyn…ism? but the United States in the 1970s had Phyllis fucking Schlafly trying to strip all rights from women altogether. TV propaganda? What the fuck do you think the American media does? Courts following party rule? Preferable to courts following the rule of capital. “Enemies of the people”? Sometimes the people have enemies! And America deems its own people as enemies unjustly all the fucking time! Poets imprisoned for reading poems??? God, I wish someone would throw Ilya Kaminsky in jail! He’s an enemy of good fucking taste!

But hey, I’m so sorry you had such a bad time in the Soviet Union, man. Why is it you left again?

Oh, interesting, you left because of post-Soviet unchecked antisemitic violence. You know, the kind the Soviets had kept at bay. Well… at the very least I’m sure Kaminsky is horrified to see his new home in the United States support the very antisemites who forced his family out of the country.

…oh.

…what the fuck does this even mean? “Why do you support the country that drove you out with antisemitic violence while it arms antisemites to kill the descendants of the people who liberated you from the camps?” [I stare, deeply, smugly, poetically at this small-minded imbecile] “Because I’ve loved and lost it so many times.” WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT??? This is a blatant fucking dodge of the question and it means absolutely fucking nothing! Let me be clear: I don’t “support” Putin or whatever that means, though I’m sure I’ll be accused of that regardless, but, firstly, the war here is principally the fault of US and NATO sabre-rattling in the face of threats of retaliation from Russia for years without trying to settle the tensions, and, secondly, Ukraine deputizes Nazi militias. It’s not hard, people.

As you may be able to infer from the terrible tweet above, Kaminsky’s actual poetry is terrible. The tone is so absolutely unbearable, beings so dense with smugness and self-righteousness. Here’s a poem from Deaf Republic:

Question

What is a woman?
A quiet between two bombardments.

That could have been written by fucking r.h. sin. Let’s compare and contrast:

Yup, checks out. Maybe Kaminsky’s been moonlighting on the ‘gram in Blackface. That was just a taste of Kaminsky’s shit, have a more sufficient morsel:

The children watch us watch:
soldiers drag a naked man up the staircase. I teach his children’s hands to make of anguish

a language—
see how deafness nails us into our bodies. Anushka

speaks to homeless dogs as if they are men,
speaks to men

as if they are men
and not just souls on crutches of bone.

Townspeople
watch children but feel under the bare feet of their thoughts

the cold stone of the city.

Souls on crutches of bone. [Gagging sounds] The bare feet of their thoughts. [Dry heaving] That’s… that’s enough of that, I can’t try to read that shit again.

Anyway, since Kaminsky’s such an ardent and outspoken activist against injustice, so impartial that he sticks to it even when the victims tried to kill him, what’s his take on Israel?

Ah. So Hamas is indefensible for committing “pogroms” but, as we saw above, Ukraine is defensible for… committing pogroms? Kaminsky can forgive Ukraine for that, but certainly can’t forgive Hamas. I thought Kaminsky hated when people illegally occupy other people’s lands?

lol. lmao even.

Let’s move on to our second exhibit, Dunya Mikhail. Mikhail, unlike Kaminsky, is at the very least a competent writer. She writes what I might deign to call actually alright poetry. This does not, however, mean she isn’t likewise full of shit.

Dunya Mikhail was born and lived in Iraq where she worked as a journalist for the Baghdad Observer until, in the especially paranoid post-Gulf-War years, her writing was labelled as subversive by the government and she was forced to flee. Landing in America, Mikhail continued to be a vociferous Saddam critic. Mikhail also wrote about the Iraq War, of course. In 2004, one year after the beginning of the Iraq War, Mikhail published the collection The War Works Hard. Let’s begin with “Bag of Bones” from that collection, a nearly poignant poem when you begin it because it sounds as though it might be about the American complicity in the war. Well… it’s not. Halfway through, the reader realizes the actual subject:

…To depart without death or birth certificates
because the dictator does not give receipts
when he takes your life?
The dictator has a heart, too,
a balloon that never pops.
He has a skull, too, a huge one
not like any other skull.
It solved by itself a math problem
That multiplied the one death by millions
to equal homeland
The dictator is the director of a great tragedy.
He has an audience, too,
an audience that claps
until the bones begin to rattle—
the bones in bags,
the full bag finally in her hand,
unlike her disappointed neighbor
who has not yet found her own.

[Emphasis my own]

The dictator was the director of a great tragedy in Iraq in the context of “the war,” Dunya? Let’s try again, honey, let’s try to write one single poem at the very least which casts aspersions on the United States. Ah, here’s one, the titular “The War Works Hard.”

How magnificent the war is!
How eager
and efficient!
Early in the morning,
it wakes up the sirens
and dispatches ambulances
to various places,
swings corpses through the air,
rolls stretchers to the wounded,
summons rain
from the eyes of mothers,
digs into the earth
dislodging many things
from under the ruins...
Some are lifeless and glistening,
others are pale and still throbbing...
It produces the most questions
in the minds of children,
entertains the gods
by shooting fireworks and missiles
into the sky,
sows mines in the fields
and reaps punctures and blisters…

Ah! Okay! Here we go! Alright, so, let’s get to whose fault all this war is—

It inspires tyrants
to deliver long speeches,
awards medals to generals
and themes to poets.
It contributes to the industry
of artificial limbs,
provides food for flies,
adds pages to the history books,
…
and paints a smile on the leader's face.

WHAT??? Not a SINGLE reference to the United States??? It’s as if the bombs were manifested out of thin air, apparently at Saddam’s insistence and somehow for his pleasure. How does this make any fucking sense? Why would Saddam want Iraq to be invaded? Dunya, what the fuck are you talking about? It’s okay though, she originally wrote that in 1994 in Arabic, so it’s not actually about the Iraq War. At that time she wrote it about Desert fucking Storm. Well if she’s drawing on the Gulf War, surely she’ll say something about, oh I don’t know, bulldozers for instance?

Oh well.

One poem, “The Prisoner,” reveals to us the mother of a prisoner of conscience in Iraq is sad because she doesn't understand why her son is in prison (bit condescending to assume she doesn't understand this, innit?) when her visit with him is cut short :( …but it is maybe worth mentioning that she is finally publishing this in translation after photos emerged of prisoners of the Americans in Abu Ghraib—most of whose mothers probably didn't know that they were even there, let alone were allowed to fucking visit—being tortured, raped, and smeared with feces? What the FUCK is wrong with you, Dunya?

But that’s obviously why all of this was published when it was. Dunya had lived and written in America for nearly a decade, she could have published these translations at any time—or she could have waited until, you know, later. Kaminsky appears more likely to be a vacuous and bafflingly-stupid brainlet without the mental wherewithal to even understand what he’s actually doing or contributing to, but Mikhail appears to have at least some amount of sufficient brains in her head and more likely falls into the category of fully-willing and intentional accomplice. The very point of this book was to cheerlead for American intervention in Iraq. That is all. For further evidence, check out this bit from Saadi Simawe’s asinine introduction to the book—again, published in fucking 2004:

To many Iraqis, the American war against Iraq actually started on February 8, 1963 when the Baath junta, aided by U.S. intelligence from Kuwait, took over Baghdad.

…this is the extent that the United States receives critique in the entire introduction. The only ire tossed America’s way is to suggest that, actually, Saddam Hussein was America and it’s actually one war dating back to 1963 (??????????), so really, when you think about it, it’s America vs. America! So, you know, when you think about it, none of it means anything! What a bunch of ahistorical nonsense. You know what, when you really think about it, World War II started in 1870 with the Franco-Prussian War, since that created the German Empire, so when you think about it France actually declared war on Germany before Germany invaded France in 1940. Ergo France was the aggressor in World War II. I should also say that I was actually pretty close to an Assyrian family growing up, and I don’t think I ever heard them—or literally any other person from Iraq—claim that the Iraq War started in 1963 in spite of even their own feelings about Saddam. How many does he mean exactly when he vaguely says “many”? Has anyone heard this claim other than Simawe?

Simawe would later say in an interview after the fall of Saddam:

[The Iraqis] view the Westernized exiles as Western agents, at times attributing them secret connections to the CIA and other Western and Israeli agencies. Frankly, that is one of the reasons that makes me wary of going back, even for a short visit.

Yeah, I bet he was fucking wary. Maybe the “many” Iraqis he was talking about were all Iraqis he talked to through the bags over their heads at black sites?

Mikhail once said “here, in America, a word does not usually cost a poet her life.” Poets? Maybe not. However, in America, you might suddenly lose your life under suspicious circumstances if you happen to be someone saying the wrong things or simply being a political inconvenience like, say, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Fred Hampton, Gary Webb, Tupac Shakur, Russell Poole, literally anyone in the Kennedy family, Lee Harvey Oswald, Orlando Letelier, Jean Seberg, Marilyn Monroe, Manuel Paez Terán, Darren Seals, Deandre Joshua, Bassem Masri, MarShawn McCarrel, Edward Crawford Jr., Dayne Jones, Filiberto Ojeda Ríos, Michael Reinoehl, Walter Reuther, John Huggins, Bunchy Carter, Robert W. Spike, Viola Liuzzo, Jonathan Daniels, Louis Allen, Herbert Lee, Danny Casolaro, and who knows how many others—but sure, a word does not usually cost a poet her life. Something cost Hemmingway his life, and he was sometimes a poet, but it was actually his associations and opinions that made them drive him to kill himself. What Mikhail means is that in America a word will never cost Mikhail her life, because Mikhail says all the things that the administrations wants her to say. Do you suspect America will ever drive Mikhail to kill herself for writing something like The War Works Hard again? Unlikely!

None of this is anything new. Writers and artists have been instruments of empire for a very long time; the entire creative writing graduate system was created by the CIA, plenty of writers were directly or indirectly involved with or financed by the CIA (the Rockefeller and Ford foundations, PEN International, etc.), writers like Kesey and Ginsberg were even effectively used as arms of MKUltra, and even that shining crown jewel of the world of literary magazines, The Paris Review, was created as a front for one of its founders’ intelligence activities.¹ The goal is to infiltrate the Western intelligentsia and promote the myth of American “freedom of expression” and individuality while propagandizing about the “illiberal” nature of America’s enemies (thereby manufacturing consent for intervention). By miring the subject of America’s foreign policy in abstractions, petty “nuances,” subjective experience, and emotional rhetoric, “facts” may be disposed of in favour of the nebulous act of “listening to voices” while disregarding who it that is promoting these voices and what they gain from it. Shelley once called poets “the unacknowledged legislators of the world” and he was more right than he even realized. The thing is, this international shadow legislature is just as vulnerable to lobbying and shadow money as its real world counterparts, and its “votes,” however convoluted and even seemingly radical, tend to parallel the interests of the bourgeois governments that give those legislators their lunch money.

Crack open the copyright section of Kaminsky’s book and you can see just how “principled” “poets of conscience” like him are. His books are paid for with extremely dirty money that no poet with any shred of integrity would ever take—bloodsuckers like Amazon, Wells Fargo, Target, and the corporate McKnight Foundation, among others (he’s not an outlier! Crack open half the lauded works of American poetry these days and you’ll find the same results! Claudia Rankine does it to!). “Oh, so what? You’d rather poets turn down this dirty money and not be able to create?” Yes! Get a real fucking job! Take a more direct presence in the American imperial project and just enlist, get sent overseas, and die.

Kaminsky makes up stories about invading Nazis oppressing a whole Ukrainian village, erasing the fact that most of those villagers would have welcomed those Nazis with open arms. They would have likely gladly signed up for the Waffen-SS, because Ukrainian nationalist ideology was inherently fascist genealogically. The resisting “deafness” in the book mirrors not only the literal deafness of the author’s own irl disability, but the metaphorical “deafness” of the book to reality and to history and to politics, and the “deafness” it inspires in its readers as it fills their ears with fluffy cotton words. The villains of history are turned into its heroes, and active (material) resistance is supplanted by (symbolic) passivity. This is the Poetry of Empire, an aesthetic obfuscation of the present, past, and future. Don't be tricked into mistaking wishy-washy poetic sentimentality for political insight. It's not.

For his own part, Saddam wrote his own poem while awaiting his execution at the hands of the Americans:

Unbind It

Unbind your soul. It is my soul mate and you are my soul’s beloved.
No house could have sheltered my heart as you have
If I were that house, you would be its dew
You are the soothing breeze
My soul is made fresh by you
And our Baath Party blossoms like a branch turns green.
The medicine does not cure the ailing but the white rose does.
The enemies set their plans and traps
And proceeded despite the fact they are all faulty.
It is a plan of arrogance and emptiness
It will prove to be nothing but defeated
We break it as rust devours steel
Like a sinner consumed by his sins
We never felt weak
We were made strong by our morals.
Our honorable stand, the companion of our soul,
The enemies forced strangers into our sea
And he who serves them will be made to weep.
Here we unveil our chests to the wolves
And will not tremble before the beast.
We fight the most difficult challenges
And beat them back, God willing.
How would they fare under such strains?
All people, we never let you down
And in catastrophes, our party is the leader.
I sacrifice my soul for you and for our nation
Blood is cheap in hard times
We never kneel or bend when attacking
But we even treat our enemy with honor.

Ultimately, it is “the dictator” who has the last laugh at Mikhail’s expense. This expression of love for the people of Iraq feels far more earnest and heartfelt than anything Mikhail has ever written for them, and moved me more than anything she could ever express. Say what you will about him, but at the gallows at “Camp Justice” they hanged a poet who died for Iraq. In 2016, Dunya Mikhail, a poet who will never die for anything, returned to Iraq and asked her friends if the “department of censorship” still existed.

No, they told me. It’s not a building any more, but it’s a mysterious existence like a shadow that follows you and may kill you if you go against the current. Nobody knows where the red line is any more. You can be guilty merely because of your name. I met an Iraqi artist in Jordan whose name is Saddam. He left Iraq because he was persecuted and threatened because of his name.

Refleciting on “freedom” in America in the same interview, Mikhail sounded more jaded than she had previously.

My first impression of Americans was that “they are nice and they don’t tell you something’s inappropriate.” But thinking of this simplistic statement intellectually, I started realizing that speech here is usually restricted to what is “acceptable.” Censorship in America is implicit and it precedes speech.

Mikhail got on a plane and returned to the United States, where she still lives, far from the “freedom” in her home country she had so long advocated for, while those who still live there get to “enjoy” it on her behalf. Just two years later she would translate The Beekeeper, this time preaching against those who swept into the power vacuum and instability that Saddam left behind. She was right. The war does work hard. It spends its sleepless nights typing poetry.

1. For more on all of this I recommend the books Finks by Joel Whitney and Workshops of Empire by Eric Bennett, whose research I will likely return to in a future post on this exact topic.