anti-war

Picara

admin — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 17:02:00 +0000

Here’s the truth: right up front I judged Picara by its cover. The cover, a photo of a young girl sitting on a rail guard with a sideways gaze and unreadable emotion on her face, conjured up one word in my mind: Angst. Well, two words: Teenage angst. Having lately been exhausted by over-publicized Twi-hard* Sturm und Drang, I was anticipating a broken, lonely adolescent heart coupled with an empty highway metaphor to round out the cliché. Sans vampires, though.

I was wrong—about the angst part, not the “no vampires” part.

Eli Burnes is not your typical hurting heroine. For one, she was raised by her opera singing step-grandmother, Mattie, and their family maid, Miz Johnny. Her parents are not around; Mattie stole Eli away from her alcoholic mother when Eli was only two, and her father, Willie, has started a life as an anti-war activist in Missouri, light years away from the sheltered life Eli lives in Georgia under the doting care of Mattie and her cadre of opera friends. Many nights, she falls asleep under the piano listening to their voices, singing, and laughter.

However, when Mattie succumbs to cancer, Eli is faced with starting over. Unable to imagine life with her father and his other family, Eli takes off with a draft-dodging friend to try her luck in Canada. When plans go awry, Eli has only her insight and instincts to find herself a home.

MacEnulty does a wonderful job of capturing the dichotomous cultural forces at work in Eli’s travels, which are set mainly in the ’70s. She portrays the warmth and hospitality of the South alongside the escalating tension and violence of race relations there. She captures the hippies’ ideals of love and peace, but doesn’t shy from the bitterness of their resistance against the government and the war. Throughout, Eli provides a wide-eyed yet remarkably sage witness to race riots, Woodstock, and political turmoil.

My main qualm with the book is the fact that Eli is so perceptive and mature that it seems to belie her age (and hormones, in the case with her first boyfriend, Zen). In general, though, I welcomed her insight and, at times, marveled at their beauty. For example, when a friend tried unsuccessfully to kill herself, Eli reflects: “I wondered why she wanted to die. True, life was sad, but there was something nice about its sadness, something good enough to make you want to wake up and be sad for a little more.”

Yes, she is an adolescent, and yes, her life is characterized by loneliness and loss, but Eli’s resilience, levelheadedness, and knack for linking up with quirky, interesting folks helps this road trip novel escape most of the truisms associated with the genre.

Don’t hate, Twilight fans. I’ve got nothing against you. I just feel like there has been pale, undead bathos everywhere I turn as of late.

Written by: Jo Ristow, December 5th 2009

When I Forgot

admin — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 09:23:00 +0000

By Elina Hirvonen, Douglas Robinson

Tin House Books

This kind of forgetting does not erase memory, it lays the emotion surrounding the memory to rest. – Clarissa Estes

The protagonist of this short, dense novel is Anna Louhiniitty, a twenty-something Finnish journalist. It’s a slushy April day in Helsinki. Anna sits at a café table. She’s supposed to be transcribing an interview.

On the table sits a copy of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, that famous novel of war, suicide, and society parties. Anna’s lover, Ian, an expatriate American who teaches modernist literature at the local university, has given her the novel. But just as Anna cannot work, she cannot read the book either. Instead, she thinks of Woolf’s demise. Thus Anna spends the day alone gulping coffee and campari and reliving the events of her childhood and adolescence, her dysfunctional family, and Ian’s dysfunctional family. This remembering forms the substance of the novel’s scenes and trajectory.

Elina Hirvonen, author of When I Forgot, is a Finnish TV host, documentary filmmaker, and producer of current affairs programmes. She is also editor-in-chief of a feminist magazine, Tulva (The Flood). This fiction, her first, has become the most successful debut novel ever in Finland. Hirvonen’s writing style is spare and pithy. Her handling of the fractured narrative—temporal discontinuities, flashbacks within flashbacks, brief letters, imaginings, and other voices telling their stories—is skillful. The consequence of this style is that the reader, like Anna, must work to assemble the pieces from the past in order to understand the present.

That past has its redemptive moments, but is generally not a happy one. Anna’s wan mother is given to hectoring her only daughter. Her father, a minister, has beaten his son, Joona—until Joona grows enough to retaliate. Anna’s grandfather has been ruined by his soldiering in WWII, just as Ian’s father is from participating in the Vietnam holocaust. (Strong anti-war sentiments pervade the novel.) Ian’s mother becomes a basket case until she becomes a Republican (same thing in different guise?). Ian is plagued by 9/11 because he was living in New York when the planes hit the towers. Anna has scars on her wrists. This overlapping of themes and lives gives the novel great resonance. Traumatic experience and suffering, Hirvonen suggests, may seem different in particulars, but is universal in its visitation and effects upon us all.

This brief sketch could make When I Forgot appear to be yet another examination of the depressif realities of northern peoples (the literatures of Canada and Russia, for example, are replete with downbeat narratives). As a child, Anna prays to God; as an adult, she imagines Hollywood endings; both strategies prove fatuous. Yet the spring season, which is the present tense in this novel, hints that all will not be lost in Helsinki.

Anna’s childhood bond with Joona has been crucial; she has also been twisted by it. His mounting insanity drives her to the brink, too. Meeting Ian and falling in love with him helps Anna to break free from Joona and from her parents. Ian is no paradigm of mental health himself; however, the lovers’ connection ultimately directs them from their pasts and allows them to journey together renewed. Does this sound simplistic or romantic? Anna and Ian overcome so much personal detritus that their hard-won victory seems convincing enough. In this way, Anna’s story is an honouring of Mrs. Dalloway and its author—via themes and method—and a rebuff. Take those rocks from your pockets, Virginia. Happiness lives though it’s a tough go to get there.

In sum, when was the last time you read an excellent Finnish novel? Never, right? Well here’s your chance, and well worth the read it is. For this we have Tin House Books to praise. This little publishing concern up in Oregon, like Dalkey Archive in Illinois, is keeping the faith by printing interesting, somewhat experimental fiction that isn’t remotely like Dan Brown's or any other mega-seller like him. Yippee!

Written by: Neil Flowers, October 9th 2009

Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times as a Weatherman

admin — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 12:35:00 +0000

By Cathy Wilkerson

Seven Stories Press

Despite the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan no one mistakes the rallying cry of today's Starbucks-toting, Hot Topic sporting protesters with the mobilized and systematic protests of the 1960s and 1970s. With not a small touch of nostalgia, those who were there for Vietnam, Civil Rights and Cambodia lament the laziness of present-day youth to fully posit themselves in the movement (as if that responsibility belongs solely to folks without many responsibilities), while young people today tune-out the nagging and lectures of their middle-class, once hippie parents. In much the same way that intergenerational silences ebb and flow through suburbia, urbania, and rural towns alike, Cathy Wilkerson's [Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times as a Weatherman]](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1583227717?ie=UTF8&tag=feminrevie-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1583227717) details—sometimes in excruciating detail—the rise and fall (and rise) of a former SDS member who, in 1970, survived the accidental bombing of her parents' townhouse, when three others did not. Even Wilkerson, however, fails to carry through the spirit and message of the counterculture of her youth beyond the spectacular flame of '60s and '70s activism.

Wikerson must be credited for her vigilance towards cross-sections of race, socio-economics and gender in her memoir, as well as her attention to the eventual realization that the progression among some activists from peaceful protest to bombings of government and non-government buildings was no different than the operations of Nixon, Kissinger and the like. Wilkerson's meticulous detail of the events of her life, from childhood in New England to her involvement in grassroots activism, gives the prose a meandering style neatly captured by chapter divisions. Wilkerson is a woman trying to find herself in changing era, adrift in relationships, war policy and her white privilege, all of which receive equal weight and importance in the threads of her memoir.

While knowing everything about her early childhood slows down the first portion of the book considerably – not that we don't care but, well, we don't—once Wilkerson hits on personal and political events, the narrative dashes through essential persons, locations, conferences, marches and protests like a "Not For Tourists" guide of the era, losing itself only at the moment when it counts most—connecting the lessons of the past to the present in order to shape the future. Maybe Wilkerson feels she can't speak to activists today because the apparent apathy of youth is so at odds with her own formerly youthful self. Or maybe Wilkerson, who performs her activism through education now, is subtly telling us that of everything accomplished in a turbulent era, those things and people who were lost cannot justify the means. This subtlety doesn't cause the book to flop at the end, but it does sputter and then just stops, standing bewildered among all that remains and how little, after forty years, has really changed.

Written by: Lacey Dunham, October 31st 2007

How Nonviolence Protects the State

admin — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 18:48:00 +0000

By Peter Gelderloos

South End Press

Do anti-war protests really stop the United States from invading another country? Do pro-choice marches affect legislation on abortion? Did sit-ins during the Civil Rights movement help to end racism? These are the questions that Peter Gelderloos asks in his new book How Nonviolence Protects the State. With a wealth of experience in anti-prison work, prisoner support organizations,and the anti-war and anti-globalization movements, Gelderloos brings his seasoned perspective to these important issues.

Drawing on large historical events, such as the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement, Gelderloos shows how pacifists and nonviolent protests have not achieved the same results that active resistance has. At a time when everyone in the world, except for the US government, is realizing that US troops need to leave Iraq now, Gelderloos’ book argues how ineffective the current peace movement has been at stopping the war and creating any sort of political change. Before the war broke out over four years ago, “[s]ome groups, like United for Peace and Justice, suggested the protests might avert the war. Of course, they were totally wrong, and the protests totally ineffective. The invasion occurred as planned, despite the millions of people nominally, peacefully, and powerlessly opposed to it.” So how do we switch our peace movement from marching in the streets to actually resisting our government and creating change?

It is this question that Gelderloos has a difficult time answering. How Nonviolence Protects the State _is not meant to change any minds. Instead, it reads as a reassurance for those who already know the ineffectiveness of peace movements. Gelderloos’ language is aggressive at times, as he conflates peace activists with “good sheep.” But perhaps this is his point. Maybe if we started to realize that marches and nonviolent protests were ultimately tools of society to make people feel as if they are creating change, then we would actually find a way to resist our government and create the change we want on our own terms. Covering a diverse range of topics, from how nonviolence is racist to how nonviolence is patriarchal, _How Nonviolence Protects the State is an important book to read for anyone who recognizes the ineffectiveness of peace activism today. And while the text doesn’t provide many answers, it does inspire the reader to reconsider her notions of “activism” and “change.”

Written by: Chelsey Clammer, July 17th 2007

Make Believe Not War Tank

admin — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 18:33:00 +0000

By No Star Clothing

My favorite new tank top comes from No Star Clothing. It is black with the slogan “Make Believe Not War” printed on a military helmet - a helmet that holds crayons. Swoon. All of my academically-inclined, left-leaning coffee-shop customers loved this tank top. One cynically suggested that the only way to make any sense of our current military endeavors is to, in fact, make believe. I think this tank top brought me bigger-than-usual tips and even bigger smiles. Certainly it doesn't hurt that it fits me perfectly, washes well and doesn't show stains. Like I said, I am in love.

The other t-shirts offered by this cool company are equally smart and sassy. They are a welcomed alternative to other “funny” women's t-shirts, many of which have recently come under heavy feminist critique. So far No Star appears, with few possible exceptions, to be funny and critical without being needlessly offensive or sexist. Nice!

Written by: kristina grob, June 4th 2007

Mission Rejected: U.S. Soldiers Who Say No to Iraq

admin — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 12:42:00 +0000

By Peter Laufer

Chelsea Green Publishing

Mission Rejected explores the lives and motivations behind soldiers who have refused to serve in Iraq—either by finding a way out before their tours began or by returning home, devastated by what they saw in the desert and finding ways not to return when called. The first half of the book deals with soldiers who have actually gone AWOL (Absent Without Leave) fleeing to Canada while the second half of the book portrays soldiers who have found other ways of being released from their commitment to fighting, such as filing for Conscientious Objector (CO) status. Laufer takes on a broad interpretation of what it means to reject the war in Iraq and includes stories of would-be soldiers, who never even got as far as basic training before opting out of military service. The common theme among the soldiers who actually did serve is that once they were in Iraq, they saw the futility of the war and felt as if they were just there killing innocent civilians for no reason at all. One of the most disturbing elements of the soldiers’ accounts is how similar they are. The soldiers were sent to Iraq where they saw their fellow "freedom fighters" killing innocent civilians without compunction. They saw right away that there were no "weapons of mass destruction," or even many weapons at all. They saw that the US-led coalition was there raping and pillaging a very poor country that has virtually no means to defend itself. They saw the futility, the rage and the hopelessness in the Iraqi people we were supposedly "liberating," so they exercised their right of will and conscience and got out. Laufer paints a picture of men and women who are heroes in the truest sense, because they dared to think for themselves and opted out of a situation that compromised every value they had learned as citizens of this country, and as human beings.

Written by: Shana Scudder, November 27th 2006