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Memorial returns to
Homer, and in a series of vignettes almost, strips away the narrative, the
epic, to describe the manner of each soldier's death from the The Iliad. As I read it I
was haunted - appropriately enough - by several things: the small war
memorial I pass as I walk my dog, in the tiny village of Treslothan; our
younger son insisting that the soldier on the cenotaph in Truro was the
great-grandfather of his school friend; a friend's complicated anger at the
blandness of a war memorial which listed her father amongst thousands of
others. Too tidy, too ordered, the memorial's list of names allowed only the
pieties of national remembrance. My friend, whose father was lost in WWII,
has little or no memory of him. The memorial gave her none, but merely
confirmed the nation's possession of him all over again.
But this is what war memorials do: they tidy away the mess of both living and
dying; and they offer the dead for further consumption. We tried to explain
to our younger son that the Truro soldier was no-one and yet every one of
those who have died in conflict. For if we erected a statue for each soldier
lost, and moreover, in the manner of his or her dying, we could not move for
the piles and bits of dead. That would be a memorial worth the name, which
had to be negotiated every day. But this not what war memorials do. In fact,
they allow us to forget, by putting remembrance in its place, physically and
temporally, as one day a year, we gather at that site, bow heads, pray/sing
etc. and then return to forgetting. My local memorial, its wreaths refreshed
every November, is spare of names; sadly this is indicative of the size of
the parish rather than the loss which would be all the keener
proportionately. The names are also blank comprising only initial and
surname, not even rank or regiment; a democratizing gesture, but one which
compounds the erasure as we cannot even hazard ploughboy, farmer, gentry. The
paradox of the war memorial: remembrance as the anodyne of forgetfulness.
So, reading Oswald's Memorial is an exercise in undoing that
paradox. The first eight pages offer the very sort of list we now encounter
as street furniture: the names, all in upper-case, of those who were killed
in action. Reading Memorial is like revisiting one's local
memorial to find however, under each name, a short biography, a description,
an anecdote or two, and finally, most significantly, a graphic account of
that soldier's death. In short, the memorial of memories. And in attendance,
the raised voices of lament of lovers, mothers, sons and daughters - those
who have lost and now only have memories. But reading Memorial also reveals
the blankness of the public war memorial to be perhaps a blessing. For the
long poem briefly resurrects the soldiers (Trojan and Greek) only to kill
them again:
Beloved of
Athene PHERECLES son of Harmion
Brilliant
with his hands and born of a long line of craftsmen
[...]
Died on his
knees screaming
Meriones
speared him in the buttock
And the point
pierced him in the bladder
Then there is, or was
ILIONEUS
[...] an only child ran out of luck
He always
wore that well-off look
His parents
had a sheep farm
They didn't
think he would die
But a spear
stuck through his eye
He sat down
backwards
Trying to
snatch back the light
Or, LYCAON:
He was the
tall one the conscientious one
Who stayed
out late pruning his father's fig trees
Who was kidnapped
who was ransomed
Who walked
home barefoot [...]
[...]
Lycaon naked
in a river pleading for his life
Being
answered by Achilles No
Lycaon's mother sees this over and over again, we are told. Imagine reading
that on the town's cenotaph.
Each death is waited upon by a lament, a series of similes which, in anguish,
seek to repair or explain, through repetition and analogy; more often than
not, they deal with the natural world, the elements, and creatures or natural
phenomena haplessly caught in an indifferent force or cycle:
Like bird
families feeding by a river
[...]
When an ember
of eagle a red hot coal of hunger
Falls out of
the sky and bursts into wings
The lament (for I think it can be read as continuous and single, like a
chorus) piles up its sorrow as the bodies pile up, and is marked often by the
sheer mass of the event it draws upon: 'thousands of names thousands of
leaves'; 'locusts lifted rippling over fields on fire'; 'the shine of a
sea-swell' that 'dreams of its storms'. Hunger too, insatiable hunger,
features frequently: 'a deer in the hills wounded/Keeps running in pain [...]
gives up / And the dogs set about eating her'; 'restless wolves never run out
of hunger // Lapping away [...] blackness with thin tongues / And belching it
back as blood / [...] killing and killing'. The lament also repeats itself -
as this war and all wars do. Oswald intended the repeated stanzas as relief
from the rawness of the grief; but we are not allowed to sink thankfully into
the blindness of repetition for its own sake. At one point, the Oswald lists
several names without biographies, dropping them on to line after line, then
suggests that they fall '[l]ike thick flocks of falling snow' which buries
and blots out 'every living twig' until the very world is wiped out: 'That's
how blank it is when the world succumbs to snow'. This blankness of names,
this mass of leaves, bodies: this is what Oswald's poem reverses, scribbling
the blankness away. And if you miss this the first time, somehow the
repetition snags your glance second time around. We cannot succumb.
In a slightly grumpy or disappointed review of the poem/s, Steven Matthews (Poetry
Review
Winter 2011) observes that it is a 'strange enterprise' in 'method' and
'results', failing to help us 'rethink our understanding either of war or of
Homer'. This misses the point, for me. Oswald has said that her project was
to free Homer's epic from its 'heroes', Agamemnon and Achilles, and throw
light on the stories of those others, who only appear as they die. For Homer
does not flinch from the pity and brutality of war, as any reader of The
Iliad
knows; his Achilles in his grief-maddened rampage is no hero either. But
their absence here, throws a relentless light on the repeated futility of
lives cut short, compels us to confront how conflict robs us of those we love
best, privately and particularly, by refusing to give them back even in
death. In this sense, Memorial does not simply rewrite Homer, but
every war memorial you have ever seen.
© Kym Martindale
2012
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