The War Works Hard

by Dunya Mikhail, Elizabeth Winslow, Saadi S. Simawe

Book Overview

Revolutionary poetry by an exiled Iraqi woman. Winner of a 2004 PEN Translation Fund Award. "Yesterday I lost a country," Dunya Mikhail writes in The War Works Hard, a revolutionary work by an exiled Iraqi poether first to appear in English. Amidst the ongoing atrocities in Iraq, here is an important new voice that rescues the human spirit from the ruins, unmasking the official glorification of war with telegraphic lexical austerity...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0811216217
• ISBN13: 9780811216210
• Release Date: April 2005
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
• Length: 96 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

A different side

Mikhail's books in an incredible collection of poetry. Her focus is mainly on the ideas of love and war and she addresses each wonderfully. The scope covers poetry written in and about her native Iraq as well as poems written here in the United States. The title poem, 'The War Works Hard' is one of the most moving and poignant poems ever written about war.

Witnessing War

The war works hard by Robert Philbin [ bookreviews ] "We'd all be human, if we could." Bertolt Brecht A journalist covering the Iraq war commented on a late night talk show last night that America's situation in Iraq is hopeless because by now, he said, he doesn't know of a single Iraqi family who has not suffered some tragedy or horror as a result of the US invasion. We have lost something, he commented, in that transition from being "liberators" to becoming "occupiers", and we may never get it back. I don't doubt his insight about the widespread misery, just look at the Iraqi civilian casualty estimates - many as high as hundreds of thousands - but I question that more than a few of us understand what the reporter means by the mass personification of war, or the blame the Iraqi people harbor toward the US government as a result. Very few of us know anything about what war does to perfectly innocent people trapped in its awful geometry. Civilians are always innocent bystanders, and always the most meaningful targets. They are all hearts and minds. The purpose of the bombing of the village of Guernica in northern Spain in 1937 was to undermine the morale of the Basque civilians and their insurgency against Franco. The purpose of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the summer of 1945 was to "break the will of the Japanese people" and to "save American lives". In Vietnam "pacification" meant winning hearts and minds by bulldozing villages and moving populations into distant refugee camps. (Abraham Lincoln understood the impact of a burning cornfield on the civilian populace in the South during the American Civil War.) We experienced what it feels like to suffer war on the home front on September 11, 2001. But many of us still remain immune to government propaganda and a visual history of war, against the daily photographs and reports that bring news of more innocent deaths in Iraq. We may have been safely inoculated against the pain of the innocent by the weight of decades the US has spent at war in our lifetime, and always, it seems, among the poorest and weakest peoples on the earth. Since Homer first mythologized the fall of Troy, thirty centuries ago, poetry and war have been fused in an unholy alliance producing both the propaganda of heroics, and the chilling reality of mass murder. Poets sometimes make the best journalists because only they can approximate a special kind of truth that shapes a state of mind a reader can absorb viscerally, as soon as he or she encounters it: What good luck! She has found his bones. The skull is also in the bag the bag in her hand like all other bags in all other trembling hands. His bones, like thousands of bones in the mass graveyard, his skull, not like any other skull. Two eyes or holes with which he saw too much. [1] I read these lines knowing nothing of the language or traditions of Iraqi poetry, but, after all, what does one need to know? Where else but Iraq could this bleak discovery hav

brilliant and moving

Regardless of your politics, these poetics are just outstanding. As a fairly macho guy not given to over emotionalism, I can say that one piece in this collection nearly brought me to tears. It's moving, artful, thoughtful, and a perspective and a voice that is so important and so silent befoe this. Read it. Buy copies for your friends.

Authentic and Moving

This book is full of eloquent and very forceful poems dealing with life in Iraq and some of its heart wrenching experiences during the last 20 years. Many of these poems have appeared in Arabic in a book with the same title (In Arabic, *Al-harb taamal bijidd*) published by Al-Mada P.C., Damascus, Syria. The translation into English by Elizabeth Winslow is excellent and conveys a lot of the simplicity and force of the original poems. What I admire most in Dunya Mikhail's poetry is her ability to take simple words and turn them into beautiful poems that, alternately, delight, move, surprise, and even baffle her readers. This simplicity of words is more apparent in Arabic than in English. Typical of her poetry and its unexpected effect on the reader is "The Jewel," a poem in which she compares the collapse of a bridge during the 1991 American bombing of Baghdad to the dropping of a jewel by the lady on the Titanic. "It no longer stretches across the river. / It is not in the city, / not on the map. / The bridge that was . . . / The bridge that we were . . . /The Pontoon bridge / we crossed every day . . . / Dropped by the war into the river / just like the blue jewel / that lady dropped / off the side of the Titanic." In another poem she writes, "Yesterday I lost a country. / I was in a hurry, / and didn't notice when it fell from me / like a broken branch from a forgetful tree. / Please, if anyone passes by / and stumbles across it, / perhaps in a suitcase / open to the sky, / or engraved on a rock / like a gaping wound, / ... / If anyone stumbles across it, / return it to me please. / Please return it, sir. / Please return it, madam. / It is my country . . . / I was in a hurry / when I lost it yesterday." Professor Pierre Joris described Mikhail's work as "a poetry of urgency that has no time for the traditional (in Arab[ic] poetry) flowers of rhetoric; ... [Her] lines move at the speed of events--be it war or love." No matter what the subject is, Dunya Mikhail's poetry is always authentic and moving. Fawzi M. Yaqub Fredonia, NY