A playwright sets out to discover the reasons for nuclear armament, a former army nurse rallies against business as usual, the poet and activist Adrienne Rich reminds us that we are responsible for our actions – the stories and poems in the Commonweal Collection address the barriers to peace and the denial processes in which we engage in a world filled with war. Through their stories, we are forced to confront the crises of concentrated power and psychological detachment.
Peace Plays is an anthology curated in 1990 held in the Commonweal Collection. It features four plays, including a lesser known play by the American playwright Arthur Kopit. The play from 1984, End of the World, tells the fictional story of Michael Trent, a playwright, who has been commissioned to write about annihilation by a business man, Philip Stone, who is increasingly concerned with nuclear proliferation.
At first Trent is wary of the request, seeing it as liable to commercial failure. Convinced by his agent to give it a go, he agrees and sets out to discover what must be surely serious reasons for possessing weapons of mass destruction. Once in Washington D.C, he instead meets an enthusiastic general who lays out the policy of nuclear deterrence during the Cold War:
“The soviets get jumpy and start thinking: maybe we’d better hit these guys before they get any stronger. We get jumpy and ‘cause we know what they’re thinking, mostly ‘cause it’s what we’d be thinking if we were them. So, by and by, we start thinking that maybe we’d better do what they think we’re going to do – even though we don’t want to, ‘cause otherwise they will.”
In an earlier scene, Philip Stone, the play’s sponsor, invites Michael Trent to his high rise apartment where there is an open window. Rather hypnotically Stone suggests that Trent wants to jump out of the window, reasoning that the urge comes not from despair, but “curiosity”. It’s a clear metaphor for the destructive urge that underpins war.
The play was reviewed by the New York Times, with one critic writing that this scene intends to show the fact that “no peace conference, no treaty, no fail-safe device can fully allow for that sensation-hungry lunatic who lives at the back of the human head and wants to find out what the ultimate catastrophe is actually like”. We are left questioning whether it is human impulse – a genetically encoded desire for wanton destruction – that lies beneath the creation of weapons, and whether the zealous military men who have the power to push the red button are critically engaged with its consequences.
Being reminded of this situation is uncomfortable but forces audiences to get their heads out of the sand. Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film Dr Strangelove, is perhaps the most famous example of an anti-nuclear satire. In a 1966 interview the film director Stanley Kubrick revealed his intentions behind the film, saying “by now, the bomb has almost no reality and has become a complete abstraction, represented by a few newsreel shots…The longer, the bomb is around without anything happening, the better the job that people do in psychologically denying its existence”
In Dr Strangelove, world destruction unfolds through nuclear war. It takes place across three parallel scenes: an army general who sends the emergency war order, the air force that carries out the order, and the war room where military leaders and politicians try to mitigate the results of impending doom. What’s striking about the film is that, whilst it is definitely funny, equally, the portrayal of men with unchecked power making impulsive decisions is definitely alarming. We are forced to reckon with uncomfortable truth – the reality lurking in the background that this could be a real situation.
In the midst of satirical productions, poets and activists had also reckoned with this idea of disengagement and denial, as well as unchecked and concentrated power. Consider the lines below which encapsulate this feeling:
“talking of the danger
as if it were not ourselves
as if we were testing anything else.”
These are the final lines of a 1971 poem written by Adrienne Rich. Rich was a feminist and lesbian activist and poet who frequently used writing as a creative way to express her views. Through poetry not only do we awaken to a cause we also connect to it.
In a similar vein, Lyn Kozma’s poem “As Usual” uses a sensory landscape of blaring radios, honking horns and bursting balloons to ground the reader in reality before revealing the crisis before us. Acknowledging our physical removal from war, it is “half the world away” where “missiles rise” and “bombs fall”. However, through invoking a structurally similar sensory landscape, Kozma redraws the line between our disconnect and the reality that faces us:
At the dentist’s office, teeth are being drilled.
Police patrol their designated streets.
We are instructed to have a good day
by cashiers at each market place.
Radios blare, horns honk, balloons burst,
clocks chime, classes convene. Trucks thunder
down highways. Traffic lights blink on and off.
[…]
And half the world away missiles rise
swiftly in desert air. Bombs fall
with bruising regularity. Skies explode
altering landscapes forever. Sanity recedes,
hatreds flare. The cycle has come round
again, sending the world awry.
Kozma was a nurse in the Army Air Force, whose direct experience of the suffering of war motivated her to rally against the disconnect in which people might engage. In social movements and protests, poetry has been used to ignite passion and connect activists together in their common cause. Penny, a member of the West Hampstead peace group and activist at the Greenham Women’s Peace Camp discussed her experience in the camp, describing poetry as an important part of her experience.
Penny’s poem Herrings are Radioactive Dear can be heard in an interview from 2021 as part of the Greenham Women Everywhere archive which is available online here. The poem plays out as a conversation between her and her child, she responds to his questions about a future wreaked by nuclear pollution. The men who are responsible are safe in their underground shelters. It is her child who cannot eat his favourite fish for tea, or go outside to play. The poem grounds us in a future reality. It is a different kind of uncomfortable feeling to the one produced by a satire, which whilst also based in real life futures, retains its distance through far fetched satire and humour.
This summer The Peace Museum is showcasing an exhibition on the Greenham Common Peace Camp movement that was active from 1981 to 2000. The exhibition focuses on its position as a symbol of creativity. It is a chance to see the creative projects made by the women that go beyond poetry and to understand the role of creativity in social change movements.
The emotional response that forms of storytelling create differs. For all of the poets discussed in this blog, there is little desire to represent the psychological disengagement many of us engage in, but rather to challenge it through visceral and emotional descriptions that redraw the line between disbelief and reality – between action and consequence. Although satire in plays and films can awaken audiences to crises through creating discomfort, it is the creative outlets such as poetry which seeks to remedy this dissonance through emotional expression, in turn engaging our emotions in a different way that can activate change and encourage resistance.
By Josie Mulligan, Commonweal volunteer.
References
Bernstein, Jeremy, “Profile: Stanley Kubrick” in Stanley Kubrick: Interviews, (ed.) Gene D. Philips, University Press of Mississippi, 2001.
Kopit, Arthur, End of the World with Symposium to Follow, 1984 in Peace Plays, Methuen Drama, 1990. Available at Commonweal – check it’s available here.
Kozma, Lyn, As Usual, in We Speak for Peace: An Anthology, (ed.) Ruth Harriet Jacobs, Knowledge Ideas & Trends, 1993. Available at Commonweal – check it’s available here.
Nightingale, Benedict, “Stage View; Kopit’s ‘End of the World’ is Serious Urgent Drama”, The New York Times, May 20th, 1984.
Raymond, Jill, “Penny Interview”, Greenham Women Everywhere Archive, December 2021. Available online here.
Rich, Adrienne, Trying to Talk with a Man, 1971 in Atomic Ghost: Poets Respond to the Nuclear Age, (ed.) John Bradley, Coffee House Press, 1995. Available at Commonweal – check it’s available here.