QUEST FOR PEACE IN
LITERATURE AND FILM: PACS 312
WENDY YU: 00165108
Reflections on the Force
of History
Through the works of Ai,
Stephen Dunn, Kurihara Sadako & Carolyn Forché
What is History? How do
we live with it? How can we learn from it? Different poets present different
views.
In “The Testimony of J.
Robert Oppenheimer”, Ai speaks of “the third eye of History.” In the Hindu
tradition, the glance of the third eye of Shiva is said to reduce everything to
ashes, keeping only what is pure and eternal. In this piece, History is our
journey towards “transcendent annihilation.” The need to know is driven by the
urge to destroy and, if you are the father of the atomic bomb, “it is better to
leap into the void”.
In “The Cocked Finger”,
Stephen Dunn accuses History of “pretending / it just wants to be understood.”
In this piece, History is larger than God, a force created by past struggles
and a source of future conflicts. In our attempt to understand History, we
point fingers and identify sides, “as if there were / a side when it comes to
imagining the end of sides”. Like Ai, Dunn offers corrosive cynicism, but no
answer as to how to deal.
Walter Benjamin's answer
to the past is the hermeneutics of restoration. He believes that History is not
a set of dead facts but a living journey towards a just social order. In his
essay entitled "Theses on the Philosophy of History", History becomes
an angel who looks into the past and sees one single catastrophe.
In reference to
Benjamin, Carolyn Forché wrote a book of poetry called “The Angel of History”
and in it we find “The Garden Shukkei-en”. Unlike Ai and Dunn, Forché writes
about the survivors, not the perpetrators. “In the postwar years”, the bombed
woman “thought deeply about how to live.” With the destruction of the original
garden, she lost true happiness and real life. She is only aware of the
imperfectly reconstructed present in its semblance of the past. Again, we are
told that God is asleep and left us here overwhelmed by History. Again, the
poet assumes the role of the witness and does not provide answers.
The one poet that does
address ways of redeeming the past is Kurihara Sadako in “When We Say
Hiroshima.” It speaks of “the arms we were supposed to lay down” and the
“foreign bases of foreign nations.” It urges us to “cleanse / our filthy
hands.” It tells us that we cannot draw a line between the oppressor and the
oppressed, we cannot wage a war to end all wars, and we cannot create a bomb to
create eternal peace.
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