In July 2009, British Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy invited more than ten poets to write seventeen poems, thinking about the Iraq War and Afghanistan War from various angles, published above the Guardian. At this time, the war on terror initiated by the United States has entered its eighth year. The British have just lined up in Wootton Bassett, Wiltshire, to welcome four British soldiers who died in action returning home from the battlefield in Afghanistan. Congress is about to launch an investigation into the Iraq war to investigate the real reasons for the Blair government's entry into the war. In the preface to the series of poems, Duffy explains the causes of this "poetry project", quoting Plato: "It is the poet's duty to witness." This is the first conscious and organized literature in the Western world. Action, with the help of mainstream media platforms, to record, reflect and criticize war with the voice of poetry. Many commentators believe that the poems of the Northern Irish poet Paul Muldoon are the most prominent among the seventeen poems, not only in superb poetry but also in original ideas. The key word "exit wound" ("exit wound", that is, the wound left by the bullet after the body is shot) was extracted by Duffy as the title of this collection of poems. The poem, titled "Afghanistan," consists of only two lines in the traditional "heroic double-line" form: It's getting
dark, but not dark enough to see
An exit wound as an exit strategy.
Black, but faintly visible A wound from a
bullet is like a strategy for an army to withdraw.)
Born into a Catholic family in County Armagh, Northern Ireland in 1951, Maldon was deeply touched by the political turmoil and terrorist attacks that ripped apart Northern Irish society from the 1960s to the 1990s. This life experience keeps his creations extremely sensitive to politics and war. Years after immigrating to the United States, Muldoon once mocked himself in a poem: "You can take this man out of Armagh, but ask yourself, can you take Armagh out of this man wearing a large Armani. rmani)?" During his studies at Queen's University Belfast, Malden studied under the tutelage of famous contemporary poets or literary critics in Northern Ireland such as Seamus Heaney, and attended the poet and critic Philip Hobb. The famous "Belfast Poetry Creation Group" organized by Philip Hobsbaum. He won the TS Eliot and Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry in 1994 and 2003 for his poetry collections The Annals of Chile and Moy Sand and Gravel, respectively. . From 1999 to 2004, following Heaney and James Fenton, Malden was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford, England. Currently, he teaches at Princeton University and has been the poetry editor of The New Yorker for many years. In 2006, at the invitation of the then UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Malden gave a speech at the UN entitled "The Use of Language in War and Peace". In Muldoon's view, post-September 11 American politics is becoming more and more consistent with what Northern Ireland has experienced, he said in an interview: "Although I have been away from Northern Ireland for 15 years, Always an important part of the depths of my mind, even the surface of my mind. Living in post-September 11 America, the experience here is in some peculiar ways more and more like Northern Ireland at the time. For example, we When walking into a building, I will subconsciously raise my hands for inspection." This feeling also paved the way for the writing of the poem "Afghanistan".
In 2009, the U.S. military operations on the frontal battlefield seemed to have ended long ago, but the war has not been extinguished. In March of this year, the Obama administration officially announced a "comprehensive new policy for Afghanistan and Pakistan" and launched the "exit strategy" with great fanfare. Since then, the curtain has been drawn to end the war in Afghanistan and withdraw troops from Afghanistan. The process since then has been twists and turns. Civilian casualties caused by bombing, occupation, and targeted strikes aroused extreme anger among the local people, pushing them to hatred and extremism. The war in Afghanistan led by the US military has not only failed to solve the problem of terrorism once and for all, but has created more breeding grounds for terrorism. Although the Taliban regime was overthrown, it also tore apart the local social structure. In this poem, the poet connects the body politics at the individual level with the national politics at the public level. The trauma of individual life and the crisis at the social level are presented to us as two sides of a coin. The poet uses wounds as a metaphor, implying that neither the life of an individual nor the political conception of a country can be safe after a war. Although the war will eventually come to an end, it will always leave a wound that cannot be healed.
In terms of form, the neat, antithetical heroic duo is an ironic contrast to the unhealing wound it describes in its delicate, finished form. Initiated by Chaucer and perfected in Dryden and Pope, the poetic style here ironically expresses events in which there is nothing heroic in poetry. Double body is a superb technique of balancing and reconciling language. Its perfect and neat form reflects a restrained and restrained ideological standpoint and aesthetic orientation. Here, the art of poetry and the political craftsmanship it implies seem to be the perfect ending to everything, but only to reflect the never-healing wounds left by the catastrophe of war. The contrast between the two forms the powerful expressive effect of this poem. The poet asks this question, how should we deal with the trauma of the past? Neither the art of poetic shaping nor the technique of political withdrawal can bring an end to the war.
Poetry takes a minimalist attitude. In our current world, the explosive dissemination of information transmits images and words that can be quickly consumed to the crowd, and the excess information bombards people's senses all the time. A disaster may cause surprise and tremors in the crowd, but it will be instantly replaced by another, more explosive news. As Duffy puts it in the preface to this collection of poems: "Poets of the early twenty-first century are no longer fighting like Keith Douglas and Edward Thomas. . . Today, like most people, poets are Experiencing the war largely through emails or text messages from friends or colleagues in the war zone, on the radio, in newspapers, or on TV, through blogs, tweets, or media interviews—regardless of where it broke out.” As opposed to massive, uninterrupted news According to the report, compared to the vast sea of images and words, poetry adopts a strategy of few words, such as an isolated island in the ocean of words, abrupt, detached and "extraordinary". What we read here is the infinite approach of language to silence, which condenses great compassion into a sore wound.
Maldon once said that to read poetry is to read the language that is absent in the poem. The words on the paper are just the end of the poet's arduous creative process, while the key words, images and intentions fade out at the moment when the words of the poem are presented in brush and ink, lingering in the field opened by the poem in the form of absence. . This determines that our reading should not only focus on the final presentation of the poem, but also explore the generation of the poem. All kinds of contradictions, antagonisms and their tensions are temporarily relieved at the end of the poem, but if we want to interpret the confrontation in the poem, we must look at its dynamic generation. Here, we might as well "evaluate" his own creations with Maldon's approximate deconstruction attitude. Is there a powerless, tragic subtext in the almost silent gesture of the poem? Did the two lines inadvertently convey the weakness and helplessness of the poem, implying the poem's exit and silence? What we witness between the lines is the poem's private confession, and the poet's unconscious sigh for the changing times. Poetry is more about personal inner feelings and life experience, and it is difficult to obtain the broad resonance that it may have caused in the past era. The poet inadvertently wrote the poem's exit—Yoshimitsu Kataha was helplessly drowned in the noise of media discourse and images in the information age. In this way, the words "retreat" and "strategy" illustrate the paradoxical position of contemporary poets. On the one hand, they have the weapon of the long-established text, on the other hand, they are facing the decline of the poetic art that the times have spawned. Hidden by the huge blank space beyond the two solitary lines is the predicament of poetry. The short words tore open a huge wound. This wound is a physical wound, a social wound, and a poem. In the face of this huge trauma, this short poem is a trivial Band-Aid. Exit is the exit of military power, but also the exit of poetry. It is not only a political and military crisis, but also a crisis of poetry. The cultural function of poetry has declined, and poetry is questioned and questioned here. The word "retreat" refers to the poet's subconscious anxiety about poetry. Its affectation and prudence seem so out of place.
Just six months before the poem was published, Obama was sworn in as president of the United States. The Afghan war triggered by "September 11" has been fought for nearly eight years. This is not only the political legacy of George W. Bush's "war on terror", but also the entry point for the new government to make great fanfare and implement changes. Americans could not see the end of this war, and began to grow weary. Muldoon has high hopes for the Obama administration. He has accepted Obama's invitation to be a guest at the White House and recite poetry. Four years later, in a poem titled Barack Obama: His Second Inauguration, Malden wrote about the CIA's "dark prison" and the "lawful" torture of being moved outside the United States, Called on Obama to "shut down Guantanamo", "firmly oppose/detention without trial", against so-called "enhanced interrogation" and "waterboarding as a game".
Five months after inviting Malden to write the poem "Afghanistan," Duffy himself wrote a poem called "The Twelve Days of Christmas" at the request of the Radio Times. In this poem, Duffy rewrites the traditional ode of the same name to include social concerns. This carol has been circulating in Europe for a long time. The original line is: "On the first day of Christmas, my true love was given to me, a partridge on a pear tree." , full of joy. Duffy rewrote the line as:
On the first day of Christmas, a bald eagle lands on a branch.
In Afghanistan, there are no partridges and no pear trees; but my love sent me a card from home.
I sat alone, curled up in the loess, and stroked the smiles of the children with my thumb.
One day in the future, for another father, husband, brother, son, prepare a bullet with his name on it.
On the one hand, she replaced the image "partridge on the pear tree" in the first line of the original poem with "vulture on the branch"; on the other hand, she expanded this line into a stanza, adding details, What was originally a terse, unfixed verse is dramatized and turned into the opening of a story. This "watching under the tree" scene seems to contain a bit of Beckett-style color. The imagery "a bullet with his name written on it" in the last line of this section heralds an inevitable death, giving the narrative a fatalistic tone to the story. In this way, a poem that was originally "unsupported" between the lines has become a narrative with a certain coherence. In the following stanzas, Duffy did the same, expanded and rewritten, including various topics such as language and culture in different regions, ecological crisis, climate change, indefinite detention, etc., mentioned Obama, football coach Capello, women Actor Joanna Linley and other figures from all walks of life, the Afghan clues at the beginning seem to come to an abrupt end. In the ninth verse, though, the thread reappears in a relatively obscure form:
but the dead soldier's woman is not dancing.
But the women in the detention center did not dance.
But the woman who was killed in honor of disgrace did not dance.
…………
But the woman of the other dead soldier did not dance.
The fate of the soldiers who appeared in the first section has now been clearly explained. Other imagery also renders the social background of this ending: the “detention center” refers to suspected terrorists who were detained indefinitely in the “war on terror”, and the woman killed because of honor humiliation refers to certain Middle Eastern regions controlled by extremist forces. The last sentence "another dead soldier" reinforces this endless death and cycle of tragedy. After the ninth stanza, the poet moves on to other topics. The last stanza, the twelfth stanza, recreates the scene of world leaders attending the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen, seemingly unrelated to the Afghanistan theme of the first stanza, but there is a sentence: "They are going around their Do you have a thumbs up? / Or hear the drums, hear the drums, hear the drums?" On major occasions, twitching your thumbs boredly is a small gesture that readers may have experienced first-hand. Through this seemingly casual image, the whole poem forms a closed cycle. The details of the unnamed warrior caressing the child in the photo with his thumb are echoed here. On the one hand, the world leaders are bored and posing for pictures, and on the other hand, unnoticed deaths are quietly being staged in Afghanistan. In the media spotlight, there are only high-profile, ceremonial performances by politicians. Two excellent imagery of the caressing thumb and the circling thumb underscore this set of contrasts, arranging the entire poem into a complete narrative. The poet repeatedly asked if they heard the drumbeat, both in reference to the drumbeat of climate change and alluding to the other marginalized crises in the poem. The apparent discord between the poetic description of death and the festive, festive form of the original poem has a jarring, dissonant effect. In contrast to Maldon's minimalism, the poem is full of content and parasitically attached to the traditional and popular song "The Twelve Days of Christmas". What it expresses is the helplessness and sadness at the individual level, as well as the systemic indifference and numbness of the social environment.
Duffy spoke highly of Malden's poem "Afghanistan", and used the key words in it as the "poetry eye" of the poem series. Her poem about Afghanistan, written five months later, can be seen as a reconciliation with Malden across the Atlantic. One of the two poems cherishes the words like gold, and wants to stop talking, only takes a scale and a claw, and then returns to silence; One is the American perspective, like a meaningful battlefield photo, and the other is the British perspective, like a montage of movie videos. The two poems both wrestle and complement each other, presenting to the reader the trauma of the US-British-led war in Afghanistan. For the British, the shadow of the war in Afghanistan was especially heavy, because in this shadow there was another long shadow of history. Duffy is not the first Poet Laureate to write poetry about the war in Afghanistan. More than a hundred years ago, the young poet Kipling wrote the Anglo-Arab war into his poems and novels. The imagery of the "drum" at the end of Duffy's poem also points to the high-pitched, aggressive drumming of Kipling's poems and novels.
During a meeting with Hillary Clinton about the war in Afghanistan, former Singapore President Lee Kuan Yew read to her a few lines from Kipling's poem "Young British Soldier":
When you are wounded and abandoned on the plains of Afghanistan,
women will Come forward, chop your wreck,
roll over to your rifle, smash your head, and
walk into heaven like a soldier. (See Lee Kuan Yew's One Man's View of the World.)
Lee Kuan Yew then pointed out to Hillary that Afghanistan today is not substantially different from Afghanistan in Kipling's time. He hopes that the United States can learn from history and withdraw its troops from Afghanistan as soon as possible, instead of expecting to change the system of other countries. The tragic situation described in the poem should serve as a warning to the U.S. military.
Kipling's poem, published in 1890, is part of a collection of poems, Barrack Room Ballads, published after returning from India. Many of his poems and novels take the Anglo-Afghan war as the theme. The poem "Shoal of the Kabul River" published in the same year describes the tragic situation in which an officer and forty-six soldiers of the Tenth Hussars drowned in the Kabul River in Afghanistan on March 31, 1879; The Man Who Wants to Be King" tells the story of a Westerner who came to Afghanistan to become king, and was found out later. "Sikunder Burnes" (Sikunder Burnes) by Craig Murray believes that this novel is partly a reference to the deeds of Alexander Burnes, a pawn in the British Empire's Afghan cause and a key figure in the First Anglo-Afghan War. . In the poem "Young British Soldier", the scene of the British wounded being hacked to death by the Afghans also vaguely points to the ending of Burns being hacked to death by the Afghans. Burns's life is very legendary. It can be said that he was one of the most critical figures in the game between Britain and Russia and China in the 19th century. He appeared frequently in various historical works on the Anglo-Arab war. His own book, "Travels into Bokhara", is the most famous of many travel notes about Afghanistan and Central Asia, which made the British people fascinated by Central Asia. In 1859, Marx wrote in "The New War against China" that Burns's letter, a blue book falsified by then foreign secretary and later British prime minister Palmerston, constituted the Key documents of an Anglo-Afghan War (1838-1842). An uprising broke out in Kabul in 1841, and Burns died tragically. The British army withdrew in January 1842, but the Afghan armed forces were interspersed all the way, divided and encircled, and the whole army was destroyed. 4,500 soldiers and 12,000 soldiers were slaughtered, and only one military doctor was left covered in blood, who managed to break through the siege on a dying horse. This "single-handed" scene was presented in the famous painting "Remnants" by the painter Elizabeth Thompson (Lady Butler), which became the most humiliating moment of the British Empire in the hearts of the British people.
Thompson specializes in military-themed paintings. Her paintings of the Crimean War and the Napoleonic War were popular in England in the 1870s. On the one hand, she is the first female painter to depict military subjects, and her painting skills are exquisite; on the other hand, her paintings do not advocate heroism and war glory, but depict the cruelty of war and the suffering of soldiers. The soldiers in her paintings are three-dimensional and vivid. Whether it is a dazed expression or a sleepy posture, they guide the viewer to recognize the complex conflicts under the appearance of war. However, this also led to her paintings no longer being popular with the public after 1880. Just after the creation of this painting, Britain entered the Boer War, the patriotic enthusiasm of the people was high, and the aesthetic tendency changed suddenly, turning to those paintings with heroic colors.
A history of the conquest of Afghanistan, but also a history of the humiliation of an empire. This almost cliché judgment is often enjoyed by critics, and it has its own sharpness and fairness, and also implies a bit of sarcasm and ridicule. However, if viewed from the opposite side, it unknowingly stands on the side of the empire, disguising the perspective of the conqueror with its specious grand pattern. After the Taliban seized power, President Biden delivered a speech on the situation in Afghanistan, eloquently defending his troop withdrawal policy, in which he mentioned the metaphor of "the cemetery of the empire". The so-called "cemetery of the empire", this seemingly clever metaphor, whether it makes people feel a sense of slap in the face, or the sigh of the rise and fall of the empire, behind it is the history that people talk about and joke about. The tragedy of the war and the trauma of the war have been weakened. It shows the gloomy backs of Macedonia, Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States, not the devastated homes of Afghans. The macroscopicity and drama of it and similar expressions point to its emptiness and vainness. It is reminiscent of a term "Great Game" used in the 19th century when Britain and Russia fought against Russia. As a result, the turmoil and division caused by the war and the misery of the people have turned into a game of wrestling between empires. Whether it is a cemetery or a game, what this discourse ignores is the world of the living people behind the military map. Whether it's Thompson's "Remnant" on display at the Tate Gallery, or "the endless columns of tombstones in Arlington National Cemetery" mentioned in Biden's speech, or the countless dead bodies that the conquerors couldn't see. The Afghan people, in the depths of the imperial cemetery, are buried with "fathers, husbands, brothers, sons" caught up in the war. "Exit wound", which can also be translated as "exit wound", also defines the situation of the withdrawal of US troops today.
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