“I don’t believe in ghosts that come rattling to your bedside,” says the Canadian photojournalist Paul Watson in this haunting new book. “Because truth is I live with one.”
In October 1993, Watson was on the ground in Mogadishu when the body of an American serviceman, William David Cleveland, was dragged through the streets and desecrated by a Somali mob. Watson clicked his shutter on Cleveland’s death, and the resultant photos won him a Pulitzer Prize. They would also frighten the Clinton administration into beating a hasty retreat from its intervention in Somalia. From that moment on, Watson would hear Cleveland’s voice in his head: If you do this I will own you forever.
In 2007, Dan O’Brien heard Watson interviewed about his experiences as a journalist in war-racked countries. He felt a curious kinship with the reporter, and wrote to him. Their resulting correspondence led to friendship, to the writing of O’Brien’s critically acclaimed play The Body of an American (2014), about the traumatic aftermath of Watson’s infamous picture, and also to a book of poems, War Reporter (2013). The material of play and poems alike is, in part, faithful journalistic transcription, with the poet chiefly shaping the form and order of what he has been given. O’Brien sought to reproduce not just the spectacle imprinted forever by Watson’s camera, but the effect of those images as they were burned into Watson’s memory and pursued him ever after.
The reality of war and the uncanny, unpredictable power of the representations of war grip and circle about one another in Watson’s life and in O’Brien’s work, neither capable of letting go. What is true for these men is true for the world: The American retreat Watson’s photograph inadvertently provoked would embolden al Qaeda. What once looked like the United States extricating itself from a quagmire on the East African coast now appears to us as a prelude to the war on terror and a first eruption of the anarchic violence that has now overtaken the Middle East.
It may have been inevitable that O’Brien should return to his subject in New Life. The publisher’s description tells us that this latest volume of poems picks up where the previous one left off, with the Arab Spring—and this is, in a sense, true. In the early pages, we encounter episodes of Muammar Qaddafi’s maniacal reign in Libya now buried in dust, Bashar al-Assad’s bombardment of Aleppo, Watson’s musing on the prospect of being “beheaded in Syria,” Afghan refugees visiting Niagara Falls, the reporter’s firsthand account of the protests in Tahrir Square. O’Brien captures the sprawling scope of terror and uprising as it spreads from failed state to failed state by concentrating it all into brief narrative fragments, shrapnel scattered in the dust.
But as William Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” O’Brien’s fascination with Watson lay not so much in the choice Watson made one day in Mogadishu as in the way he (and we) live with it still: “Dear Dan,” we find Watson writing, “sometimes my flashbacks arrive like neatly stacked rhymes in a bad poem.”
Much as rhyme forms an alogical string of resonances as words pass in a column and down a page, each one summoning in memory of what we had thought was left behind us, so New Life leaps between present and past to form a collage of visions and voices, at the center of which are the two men: Watson trying to make peace not only with what he has seen but with the willfulness and excuses of professionalism that led to the seeing; and O’Brien working over the materials of the reporter’s life again and again, unable to dissolve the mystery it refuses to surrender.
“Why do I write back to you? Why do you write to me?” we hear late in the volume. But the answer has already been given—on the first page:
The refusal of the past to go away, it seems, is the only explanation for the present. Woven through all of this are the ambitions of both men to carve a future for themselves from the materials of the past. O’Brien’s wife is pregnant with their first child, and he needs to figure out how to make for her a “splendid world.” Watson, meanwhile, confronts an age where war reporters are as useful to ISIS dead as alive. “Why should I risk my life?” he asks, “They’re just going to upload [their atrocities] to YouTube anyway.”
Indeed, Watson’s employers have concluded that insuring a reporter in a war zone is not so much too dangerous as too expensive—one more sign that the life of journalism is not what it used to be. Where “once there’d been like these feeding frenzies of men in vast cacophonous pens,” Watson sighs, “now you see coffee-stained carpets and huddled masses of mourners wishing farewells to colleagues quitting or fired.”
O’Brien and Watson plot a prudent course. They take a meeting with Hollywood executives and pitch a television series called The Zone. A female character will have a taste for “combat sex.” Perhaps the protagonist will have inclinations of his own. In truth, they do not know what the plot will be, the moral is “ambiguous,” and at last, one perky executive cuts them off: No less than war reporting, war stories “cost too much.”
Dan O’Brien’s style is at once an obstacle and a thing of genius. At every opportunity he flattens his authorial voice to that of amanuensis—most of the sections include Watson-the-war-reporter doing something or other—and one poem startles us with rhymed couplets, as if to accentuate the telegraphic style of the rest, where only the juxtaposition of past and present brings order to what otherwise would seem to be passively recorded details.
Another poem, in which the photographer Lynsey Addario recounts her kidnapping in Syria, during which she was subject to sexual abuse, ends with something like a sententious moral: “I won’t talk to anybody who can’t understand what it’s like to be a woman at war.” However just, such a tidy summary statement falls flat and, to my mind, provides the final justification for O’Brien’s whole technique. Even the raw facts of war come to us packaged and neatly summed up, no less in newspaper headlines and videos on telephone screens than in Hollywood blockbusters.
To capture Watson’s inability to reduce experience to memory, to dampen his sense of guilt with the repetition of platitudes, to reflect in a faithful way the blunt mystery of war and the mediation of the present by the past, reality by representation, moral seriousness by frivolity in pursuit of a buck, Dan O’Brien has contrived a narrative at once postmodern montage and old-fashioned history. Straight narration would have been too easy; it would allow us to settle into the comfort of spectators, and the messiness of war into the easy moral or self-righteous pronouncement.
Can such a work as New Life accomplish what Watson desires, can “the imagination . . . lift one out of this post-traumatic slough” and make sense of everything? Watson himself provides us the answer: “Ha ha ha.” Poetry does not do therapy. It only winds and rewinds the truth until we see it straight.
James Matthew Wilson teaches literature at Villanova. His new book The Vision of the Soul: Truth, Beauty, and Goodness in the Western Tradition will be published in June.
