My mother’s partner keeps a list of the number of people who have died as a result of the United States actions in Iraq following the 2003 invasion. The tracking is intended to be inclusive, with soldiers and civilians regardless of nationality, although it is unable to include those who died outside of the eye of the international organizations he follows—the suicides, the illnesses, the starvation. He writes the updated number down two or three times a week, recording it in the notebook in which he keeps track of the quotidian details of his life, like the temperature and the distances he runs.
I thought of this practice when I reread Etel Adnan’s To Be in a Time of War, which is included in the two volume collected set of her work, To Look at the Sea Is to Become What One Is. Adnan was born in Beirut in 1925, although she currently makes her home in California and Paris. She writes poems and essays and works that defy genre, and often directs her singular voice toward political injustices. She is also an accomplished painter.
“To say nothing, do nothing, mark time, to bend, to straighten up, to blame oneself, to stand, to go toward the window, to change one’s mind in the process, to return to one’s chair…” it begins, this long sentence continuing for the length of the opening paragraph. The essay maintains this conceit of “to” constructions (and their variations) for its entirety, so that “to read that Baghdad is being bombed, to envision a rain of fire, to hear the noise, to be heartbroken, to stare at the trees” comes within the texture of daily repetition, just as “To go to the dentist early in the morning then drive back and come home” does, as does “To transform matter into spirit. To cross the threshold.”
There is a lot that could be said of Adnan’s essay, the way the reality of war and the reality of lived days physically removed from war both pervade one another, layered at the site of language. Today, however, I am struck by how unaware I am, from day to day, of the wars in which I am complicit, that years ago I might have put a great deal of thought into these wars (although not nearly as much as Adnan, or many others), but that through the passing of time I have come to rarely align my attention to the ongoing atrocities. This is one of those choices that many of us make, deciding that whatever ongoing horrors might exist around us and because of us, we can direct our minds away from them, pretending that they do not happen so that others thing can fill our days.
Writing (no matter the genre) can at its best be a remedy to this, I think. It is a way to direct our attention to those urgent things, those things we might otherwise embrace our privilege to ignore, and it can direct the attention of others there, as well. When I read Adnan’s essay, read “To wait for the unknown. To not know that Baghdad’s National Library has been destroyed. To resent the new Barbarians. To bleed for each book,” or read its final lines “To sink in fat. To look at the narrow and long road that leads the world to the slaughterhouse,” I feel something like the weight of awareness and of responsibility. This is also, I imagine, the experience my mother’s partner receives from his recording of deaths, a meditative and attuned awareness. Arguably lacking crafted lyricism, even lacking a clear sense of the writer’s personality, his act of writing still achieves a resonance and importance that a good deal of my own writing lacks.
It is embarrassing to need your attention drawn to injustices such as this. That I profit from the deaths and oppressions of others should be enough of a shame to keep my attention there, which might be a step toward righting things. But as it is possible to forget, writing offers one tool in crafting a reality where the forgetting is made accountable to that which is harmed by the absence of our minds. A way to forge a consciousness that is more complete.