{"id":9,"date":"2011-03-07T21:28:24","date_gmt":"2011-03-07T21:28:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mtls.ca\/test\/?page_id=9"},"modified":"2019-03-29T20:01:54","modified_gmt":"2019-03-29T20:01:54","slug":"editorial","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue12\/editorial","title":{"rendered":"Editorial"},"content":{"rendered":"

Easing the Arab Spring <\/strong><\/h1>\n

Amatoritsero Ede<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

“Naming of Parts” is Henry Reed’s long poem about the Second World War and the first of five related sections in his 1942 collection, Lessons of the War.<\/em>  In the narrative poem under focus a drill Sergeant instructs recruits in the use of simple weaponry in a matter-of-fact and conversational tone:<\/p>\n

This is the lower sling swivel. And this
\nIs the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see,
\nWhen you are given your slings. And this is the piling swivel,
\nWhich in your case you have not got<\/p>\n

A second voice, that of a distracted recruit who is also a poet, mentally echoes the clipped military speech of the first speaker. The repetitive echo of the daydreaming soldier-poet’s meditative ruminations matches or even surpasses the Sergeant’s calm and conversational tone. But the soldier-bard transforms the prosaic and colloquial thoughts of the drill Sergeant into impassioned poetry. The Sergent’s running commentary and monologue is married to the soldier-poet’s poignant observations about a sublime spring environment, which fires the latter’s wandering imagination:<\/p>\n

To-day we have naming of parts. Yesterday,
\nWe had daily cleaning. And to-morrow morning,
\nWe shall have what to do after firing. But to-day,
\nTo-day we have naming of parts. Japonica
\nGlistens like coral in all of the neighboring gardens,
\nAnd to-day we have naming of parts<\/p>\n

The poet-recruit denotes the brilliance and bloom of spring as a counterpoint to the drill Sergeant’s mechanical and toneless chatter about the cold brutality of guns and their deadly functions. The ensuing parallelism and contrast casts a shimmering glow over the whole, has a defamiliarising effect on diction, expands the field of signification, and imbues us with a sense of the overwhelming beauty of spring and, life – yes, life; even in the tragic situation of impending war. That is just one out of the many subtle ironies pervading this lyric.<\/p>\n

Henry Reed’s classic poem on soldiering is apt in thinking about Bashar al-Assad, Syria, and the Arab Spring. Al-Assad is like Reed’s soldier poet-persona, if only in the sense that both give military instructions; the one, towards the training of recruits in a World War II setting and the other, towards invading his own people in peacetime. The contrast does not end there. While the second protagonist in the poem under discussion is a recruit with a poet’s sensibilities, al-Assad is a politician with a psychopathic killer’s instincts. The distinctions are that Reed’s soldier prepares recruits for a desperate and necessary Second World War campaign, while al-Assad, the mindless politician and egomaniac, directs his murderous troops to unleash mayhem under no threat from a Hitler.<\/p>\n

Irony is an overriding but silent rhetorical strategy in the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Naming of Parts,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d in al-Assad\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s massacre of his own people and in the unprincipled global political response to it. Unchecked, al-Assad the experienced political gamer and predator \u00e2\u20ac\u201c with his own people as game \u00e2\u20ac\u201c is forever on the prowl. \u00c2 He ignores the moral of \u00c2 the need for imparting military discipline to inexperienced recruits in the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Naming of Parts,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00c2 which is that the \u00e2\u20ac\u02dceasing\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 \u00c2 of the spring of a gun can shatter the beauty of spring, the season. Guns should be discharged only when necessary in heat of battle against marauding enemies, not in the repressing of political dissent or decimation of protesting civilians. The last is precisely what Assad does \u00e2\u20ac\u201c murder\u00c2  those civilians who he, as leader of Syria and as befitting his office, should be duty-bound to protect. Understandably he is no statesman but a murderous thug and his acts equals a ‘civicide.’<\/p>\n

And the United Nations, established in 1945 towards global peace and stability, is itself too troubled internally to enforce real and sustainable peace in Syria. Due to a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153politics of the belly\u00e2\u20ac\u009d amongst UN member states, particularly China and Russia, the NATO-led military solution to Muammar Gaddafi\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s \u00e2\u20ac\u02dccivicide\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 in Libya is not applicable in Syria. As such al-Assad, the sad man and sadist of the Arab spring, becomes a modern day Australopithecus Africanus<\/em>, a killer ape wielding a deadly club. That gangling, ungainly, birdlike but \u00e2\u20ac\u0153unfeathered two-legged thing,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d as John Dryden would have it, continues to maim and to kill.\u00c2  This is why the opposition is forced to fight a losing and undignified battle against a home-grown Hitler. And that opposition seems to collectively listen to the voice of our drill Sergeant in Lessons of the War: <\/em><\/p>\n

Things may be the same again; and we must fight
\nNot in the hope of winning but rather of keeping
\nSomething alive: so that when we meet our end,
\nIt may be said that we tackled wherever we could,
\nThat battle-fit we lived, and though defeated,
\nNot without glory fought.<\/p>\n

As the shadows of a spring day and the drill Sergeant’s dreadful monotone lengthen, some of the rather oblivious recruits\u00c2 \u00e2\u20ac\u201c mere boys \u00e2\u20ac\u201c coming to a realisation of the terror ahead of them, begin to snivel or weep while they listen to the dispassionate, frank and terrible voice of the drillmaster. The Sergeant, agent of death, bemoans their weakness:<\/p>\n

I have no wish to be inconsiderate,
\nBut I see there are two of you now, commencing to snivel.
\nI do not know where such emotional privates can come from.
\nTry to behave like men.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, “[o]n the fields of summer the sun and the shadows bestow\/ [v]estments of purple and gold”\u009d and the recruits, overwhelmed as it were by the beauty of life around them, continue to mourn their own impending deaths. Many of them would probably never see another spring day after a first campaign. Syria mourns its dead and dying every day while the UN gives Al Assad reprieve because there may be dead ground in between\u00e2\u20ac\u009d diplomacy and the UN\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s military might and economic will.<\/p>\n

One of the ‘lessons of the war’ is that these recruits, who have yet to fire a bullet or see an enemy formation, are already casualties. And so is every Syrian on the battlefront or in some quiet peaceful corner of the earth because “for the far removed there is wailing”, says the poet, Christopher Okigbo. For every fallen Syrian in Homs or Damascus, there are tears to be reaped in Dachau. The casualties are not those who are dead.\/They are well out of it\u00e2\u20ac\u009d according to another poet, John Pepper-Clarke, writing about another civil war. Those recruits are being prepared to die and mourn their own deaths even before they have seen an enemy gunner. War, an unpleasant business is described by the drillmaster, in the most pleasant and calmest of tones just as the UN calmly plays \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcnumbers\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 with Syrian lives.<\/p>\n

The prospect of Henry Reed\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s recruits killing and being killed is frightening \u201cespecially against the background of a bright spring day with flowers blooming all over the earth. The lessons of the war are that you will not survive it. The weight of irony invokes tears in the recruits, crushed as they are between spring day and imminent death. Never to see all this spring beauty again! And to be sold death in this cheap way of naming it as chivalry. This is also the tragedy of Syria. Death presented as chivalry: that is what the UN does when it prevaricates and leaves Syrian civilians and an embattled, ill-equipped opposition to bite the bullet, in a manner of speaking.<\/p>\n

Al-Assad and the UN do not allow an easing of the Arab spring, that is, a release of the promised democratic flowering in a revolution which began with Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation in Tunisia and inflamed the whole region. Although it is still inconclusive \u201c in Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Tunisia, Algeria and so on, Syria alone clearly epitomises the indecision and false starts of the Arab Spring. Al-Assad is a conscienceless, unromantic criminal (masquerading as leader) under the unwritten moral laws that guide the soldier-poet, who tries to capture the terror of the moment in the beauty of spring:<\/p>\n

And this you can see is the bolt. The purpose of this
\nIs to open the breech, as you see. We can slide it
\nRapidly backwards and forwards: we call this
\nEasing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards
\nThe early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers:
\nThey call it easing the Spring.<\/p>\n

The bees bring in the spring season as they flirt with flowers. Syria’s spring is trapped in a wintry one-sided war and the fading of a hoped-for liberal democracy and, an egalitarian society. And the UN’s diplomatic efforts resemble that of a bumblebee cavorting desperately amongst a bush of wilting blooms. It cannot ease in the Arab spring. \u00c2 That August body appears more and more confused and helpless in May. Every day lost to al-Assad by the opposition brings the nation closer to the old status quo ante bellum<\/em>. And all is to no avail because somethings only seem to be things as the world fails Syria daily and a heartless dictator seats in Damascus. Meanwhile, the moral voice of the ghostly soldier-poet mocks the (Un)United Nations:<\/p>\n

They call it easing the Spring: it is perfectly easy
\nIf you have any strength in your thumb: like the bolt,
\nAnd the breech, and the cocking-piece, and the point of balance,
\nWhich in our case we have not got; and the almond blossom
\nSilent in all of the gardens and the bees going backwards and forwards,
\nFor to-day we have naming of parts.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Easing the Arab Spring Amatoritsero Ede   “Naming of Parts” is Henry Reed’s long poem about the Second World War and the first of five related sections in his 1942 collection, Lessons of the War.  In the narrative poem under focus a drill Sergeant instructs recruits in the use of simple weaponry in a matter-of-fact […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":2,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"authorpage.php","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-9","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue12\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/9","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue12\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue12\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue12\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue12\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9"}],"version-history":[{"count":44,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue12\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/9\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1407,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue12\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/9\/revisions\/1407"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue12\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}