.
Would Tolstoy’s epic 1869 novel have been such a success if it had just been called Peace? There is no doubt that a literature of war is very well established: from the Iliad to the present day, the genre has been influential in shaping our responses to conflict, and some would argue that it has even created the conditions for war. Even if Abraham Lincoln’s famous remark to Harriet Beecher Stowe about her anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (‘So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!') was never actually spoken by the president in 1862, the literature of war has had far-reaching consequences. Not so the literature of peace. What would a literature of peace even look like?
Yet as the Global Peace Index demonstrates, war is only one part of the story. In its section on Positive Peace, the GPI notes that ‘[u]nderstanding what creates sustainable peace cannot just be found in the study of violence.’ The same might be said of literature. As an academic working on literary representations of the American Civil War and Reconstruction, I am naturally interested in what the literature produced during and after a period of war can tell us about what it is like to experience conflict and remember it in peacetime. Robert Penn Warren once called the Civil War ‘our only “felt” history’ – history lived in the national imagination’, which indicates how deeply the memory of war can penetrate into consciousness, because the effects of war and peace are felt not just on the body, but in the mind as well.
In literature, the experience of war is translated into words which bear witness to pain and the most extreme human difficulty. There have been many examples of this kind of writing, but as Carolyn Forché has shown, it is frequently poets who take on this role of witness. According to Forché, poetry has an acute responsibility because ‘the poem might be our only evidence that an event has occurred: it exists for us as the sole trace of an occurrence. Poem as trace, poem as evidence.’ In this way, poetry (and literature more broadly), can help to achieve some measure of postwar reconciliation, since it provides a non-violent mode for feelings of resistance or expressions of trauma related to conflict. It also has the power to bring about societal cohesion as it draws upon established and respected cultural forms to give voice to impulses of peacebuilding, as demonstrated in Somalia, one of the least peaceful countries in the world according to the GPI.
When we think about Positive Peace as representing ‘the attitudes and structures which create and sustain peaceful societies’, I think it is essential that we consider the cultural dimensions of those attitudes and structures. How could a future Peace Index measure how far a country fosters a cultural imaginary to promote reconciliation and peace? Could it look, for example, at the extent of literary censorship in the country, or investigate how far cultural figures were appointed to bodies such as truth and reconciliation commissions?
If in recent years we have entered a Peace ‘Moment’, then now is the perfect time to emphasize the necessity of literature and culture in sustaining that moment and interrogating the rhetoric surrounding it – aspirations that literature and literary criticism can achieve. For if it is to exist and have efficacy, one of the aims of a literature of peace should be, as the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe put it, ‘to make humanity uncomfortable’. A literature of peace must challenge. However recent the conflict, it must insist on its role in the safeguarding of memory and commemoration and it must highlight the need for citizens to acknowledge personal responsibility for their actions.
Drawing on Jean-Paul Sartre’s writings promoting ‘counter-violence’ after World War II, Antony Adolf has argued that ‘peace literature and especially its criticism become counter-counter-violence; that is, they are wholly nonviolent when considered through the paradigmatic prisms of individual, social, and collective peace.’ Literature of this type is not passive. Its dynamic quality comes from the presentation of injustice and the expectation that a reader will respond by assessing his or her own role in perpetrating violence – and then acting to counter such aggression. A recent work of poetry like Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric exemplifies that kind of relationship between reader and writer. Documenting the casual, everyday acts of racism experienced in America, the book particularly derives its power from two aspects of the work: firstly, the calm yet forceful way it presents these experiences – it shows, it does not tell. And then the second-person address of the book: ‘you’ are part of this narrative of discrimination and micro-aggressions whether you have experienced them yourself or not.
It is a profoundly disturbing book, but just as it disturbs, so it simultaneously inspires in a reader a sense of resilience, a key component of Positive Peace. Reading this book and others like it makes us want to be resilient to the kind of violence it describes, and to commit ourselves to its prevention.
As authors and critics seek to fashion a genre of the literature of peace, we need more writing like this, and we need it urgently.
About the author: Dr. Niall Munro is Senior Lecturer in American Literature and Director of the Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre at Oxford Brookes University, UK. He is the author of Hart Crane’s Queer Modernist Aesthetic and is currently writing a book entitled ‘Our only “felt” history’: American Modernism and the Civil War, 1891-1944.
The views presented in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent the views of any other organization.
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Towards a Literature of Peace
Antonym concept of PEACE versus WAR written over tarmac road marking yellow paint separating line between words
June 27, 2016
Would Tolstoy’s epic 1869 novel have been such a success if it had just been called Peace? There is no doubt that a literature of war is very well established: from the Iliad to the present day, the genre has been influential in shaping our responses to conflict, and some would argue that it has even created the conditions for war. Even if Abraham Lincoln’s famous remark to Harriet Beecher Stowe about her anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (‘So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!') was never actually spoken by the president in 1862, the literature of war has had far-reaching consequences. Not so the literature of peace. What would a literature of peace even look like?
Yet as the Global Peace Index demonstrates, war is only one part of the story. In its section on Positive Peace, the GPI notes that ‘[u]nderstanding what creates sustainable peace cannot just be found in the study of violence.’ The same might be said of literature. As an academic working on literary representations of the American Civil War and Reconstruction, I am naturally interested in what the literature produced during and after a period of war can tell us about what it is like to experience conflict and remember it in peacetime. Robert Penn Warren once called the Civil War ‘our only “felt” history’ – history lived in the national imagination’, which indicates how deeply the memory of war can penetrate into consciousness, because the effects of war and peace are felt not just on the body, but in the mind as well.
In literature, the experience of war is translated into words which bear witness to pain and the most extreme human difficulty. There have been many examples of this kind of writing, but as Carolyn Forché has shown, it is frequently poets who take on this role of witness. According to Forché, poetry has an acute responsibility because ‘the poem might be our only evidence that an event has occurred: it exists for us as the sole trace of an occurrence. Poem as trace, poem as evidence.’ In this way, poetry (and literature more broadly), can help to achieve some measure of postwar reconciliation, since it provides a non-violent mode for feelings of resistance or expressions of trauma related to conflict. It also has the power to bring about societal cohesion as it draws upon established and respected cultural forms to give voice to impulses of peacebuilding, as demonstrated in Somalia, one of the least peaceful countries in the world according to the GPI.
When we think about Positive Peace as representing ‘the attitudes and structures which create and sustain peaceful societies’, I think it is essential that we consider the cultural dimensions of those attitudes and structures. How could a future Peace Index measure how far a country fosters a cultural imaginary to promote reconciliation and peace? Could it look, for example, at the extent of literary censorship in the country, or investigate how far cultural figures were appointed to bodies such as truth and reconciliation commissions?
If in recent years we have entered a Peace ‘Moment’, then now is the perfect time to emphasize the necessity of literature and culture in sustaining that moment and interrogating the rhetoric surrounding it – aspirations that literature and literary criticism can achieve. For if it is to exist and have efficacy, one of the aims of a literature of peace should be, as the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe put it, ‘to make humanity uncomfortable’. A literature of peace must challenge. However recent the conflict, it must insist on its role in the safeguarding of memory and commemoration and it must highlight the need for citizens to acknowledge personal responsibility for their actions.
Drawing on Jean-Paul Sartre’s writings promoting ‘counter-violence’ after World War II, Antony Adolf has argued that ‘peace literature and especially its criticism become counter-counter-violence; that is, they are wholly nonviolent when considered through the paradigmatic prisms of individual, social, and collective peace.’ Literature of this type is not passive. Its dynamic quality comes from the presentation of injustice and the expectation that a reader will respond by assessing his or her own role in perpetrating violence – and then acting to counter such aggression. A recent work of poetry like Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric exemplifies that kind of relationship between reader and writer. Documenting the casual, everyday acts of racism experienced in America, the book particularly derives its power from two aspects of the work: firstly, the calm yet forceful way it presents these experiences – it shows, it does not tell. And then the second-person address of the book: ‘you’ are part of this narrative of discrimination and micro-aggressions whether you have experienced them yourself or not.
It is a profoundly disturbing book, but just as it disturbs, so it simultaneously inspires in a reader a sense of resilience, a key component of Positive Peace. Reading this book and others like it makes us want to be resilient to the kind of violence it describes, and to commit ourselves to its prevention.
As authors and critics seek to fashion a genre of the literature of peace, we need more writing like this, and we need it urgently.
About the author: Dr. Niall Munro is Senior Lecturer in American Literature and Director of the Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre at Oxford Brookes University, UK. He is the author of Hart Crane’s Queer Modernist Aesthetic and is currently writing a book entitled ‘Our only “felt” history’: American Modernism and the Civil War, 1891-1944.
The views presented in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent the views of any other organization.
