The enemy, the Other, is what nations need to distract attention from internal tensions.
By Pramod K Nayar
In 1919, WB Yeats drew the portrait of a soldier, specifically an air-force fighter pilot:
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love
Wole Soyinka echoes Yeats when he has his speaker ask the soldier:
Do you friend, even now, know
What it is all about?
Who exactly are the people condemned to die at your hands? And who are the people you swear to protect? Is the latter contingent on the former?
These are questions raised by Yeats in ‘An Irish Airman Foresees his Death’ and Soyinka in ‘Civilian and Soldier’. These are reflections on the injurable Other in war but also about the self. How to represent the enemy, and oneself, is a question that haunts poets.
The face of the enemy
In William Blake’s famous ‘A Poison Tree’, the speaker admits that he never told his foe how much he despised him. By suppressing this confession, the hate grew inside him. The toxin is a plant, and it grows:
And I waterd it in fears,
Night & morning with my tears:
And I sunned it with smiles,
Constantine Cavafy’s ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ depicts an entire kingdom awaiting the barbarians who are ‘due today’. Everyone is on a holiday, preparing for the arrival. When the poem ends, the people have dispersed, disappointedly, because the barbarians never turned up:
Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven’t come.
And some of our men just in from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.
Like Cavafy’s barbarians, constructed out of necessity, Czeslaw Milosz’s speaker in ‘A Task’ describes a situation where one dominant voice has subsumed all others:
We were permitted to shriek in the tongue of dwarfs and demons
But pure and generous words were forbidden.
The shrieks construct the enemy/Other, the barbarians.
The Enemy Within
The hate of the enemy, says Blake in ‘A Poison Tree’, defines us. Our enemies are, then, within us. Cavafy concludes ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ thus:
Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.
The enemy, the Other, says Cavafy, is what nations need so that we project our anxieties on to them. Rulers use the Other to distract attention from internal tensions. Nations generate myths, illusions and nightmares – what Czeslaw Milosz in ‘Child of Europe’ describes as the injunction to ‘grow your tree of falsehood from a small grain of truth’ – about the Other and in the process, define themselves: we need an enemy.
Denise Levertov puts it bluntly in her ‘Weeping Woman’, narrated from the perspective of a soldiering woman with one arm to use a ‘rifle/to shoot down the attacking plane’. The speaker, obviously one maimed by enemy fighters, says to America, the invader:
Cruel America,
When you mutilate our land and bodies,
It is your own soul you destroy,
Not ours.
In Mahmoud Darwish’s ‘Earth Poem’, the singer croons of the past. The speaker describes how they examine the singer:
And they searched his chest
But could only find his heart
And they searched his heart
But could only find his people
And they searched his voice
But could only find his grief
And they searched his grief
But could only find his prison
And they searched his prison
But could only see themselves in chains
In the songs (Darwish) and the ‘shrieks’ (Milosz), as we build enemies, we become the demons we decry.
Uses of the Dead
In some cases, the poets believe the dead will and should haunt their past oppressors. Primo Levi in ‘For Adolf Eichmann’, asks:
Will you at the end, the industrious man
Whose life was too brief for his long art,
Lament your sorry work unfinished,
The thirteen million still alive?
Unlike Blake’s speaker, he does not wish death for his enemy, rather, he wishes this:
Oh son of death, we do not wish you death.
May you live longer than anyone ever lived.
May you live sleepless five million nights.
And may you be visited each night by the suffering of everyone
who saw,
Shutting behind him, the door that blocked the way back,
Saw it grow dark around him, the air fill with death.
But in most cases, history does not bother with the dead Others for
History counts its skeletons in round numbers.
A thousand and one remains a thousand,
As though the one had never existed.
(Wislawa Szymborska, ‘Hunger Camp at Jasło’)
We do not bother about the dead because they are simply that: dead. In ‘What Were They Like’, Denise Levertov ponders over the identity of those whom soldiers have decimated as the enemy. The poem opens with a series of questions about the Vietnamese who have been wiped out:
Did the people of Viet Nam
use lanterns of stone?
Did they hold ceremonies
to reverence the opening of buds?
There are no answers because:
All the bones were charred.
it is not remembered. Remember,
most were peasants; their life
was in rice and bamboo.
War has annihilated them:
When bombs smashed those mirrors
there was time only to scream.
Milosz concludes ‘Child of Europe’ with the appropriation of dead enemies to the cause of the demagogues:
He who invokes history is always secure.
The dead will not rise to witness against him.
You can accuse them of any deeds you like.
Their reply will always be silence.
Their empty faces swim out of the deep dark.
You can fill them with any feature desired.
The name of the enemy suffices, their histories rewritten, and faked, the Other serves us unendingly. What kind of people were the Others? Levertov’s ‘What Were They Like’ concludes with this answer
Who can say? It is silent now.
(The author is Professor of English and UNESCO Chair in Vulnerability Studies at the University of Hyderabad, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society)