7 September 2009 By Dahr Jamil
“Throughout history, culture and art have
always been the celebration of freedom under
oppression.”
- Author unknown
Soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan have
tough truths to tell, and it has been well
demonstrated that the establishment media does not
want to broadcast these. Given the lack of an outlet
for anti-war voices in the corporate media, many
contemporary veterans and active-duty soldiers have
embraced the arts as a tool for resistance,
communication and healing. They have made use of a
wide range of visual and performing arts - through
theater, poetry, painting, writing, and other creative
expression - to affirm their own opposition to the
occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.
The first Warrior Writers Project workshop was led
by veteran Lovella Calica. To help other veterans deal
with their experiences in Iraq, she encouraged them to
write. Those who were willing to do so were asked to
share their writings with the group. An anthology of
these compositions was produced as the book “Warrior
Writers: Move, Shoot and Communicate.” Calica has
since gone on to lead three writing workshops with
veterans, and has published a second book, “Warrior
Writers: Re-making Sense.”
The goal of the Warrior Writers Project is to
provide “tools and space for community building,
healing and redefinition … Through writing/artistic
workshops that are based on experiences in the
military and in Iraq, the veterans unbury their
secrets and connect with each other on a personal and
artistic level. The writing from the workshops is
compiled into books, performances and exhibits that
provide a lens into the hearts of people who have a
deep and intimate relationship with the Iraq war.”
Warrior Writers has also created exhibits that
showcase artwork by members, and photographs taken by
them in Iraq. It is a largely self-supporting endeavor
wherein the funds generated from the sale of books and
artwork help sponsor veterans to travel around the
country, reading from and displaying their work, as
well as funding other workshops. It has now grown into
the Combat Paper Project.
Iraq veteran Drew Cameron and artist Drew Matott
co-founded People’s Republic of Paper (PRP), a
paper-making studio in Burlington, Vermont. PRP offers
artist residencies and also houses the Combat Paper
Project. Cameron’s commitment to the unique venture is
premised primarily upon the need he experienced “for
catharsis and reconciliation,” and on his conviction
that people must hear the soldiers’ side of the story.
As he wrote in one poem,
If I say nothing, I have failed.
If I do nothing, I am guilty.
If I live by these ideals of democracy I can see
that war is failure.
A war of opportunity rather than necessity is
unjust.
War is the antithesis of peace, prosperity,
democracy and freedom.
Let us hear the stories of these young men and
women.
Let us see through the eyes of the Iraqis
and the minds of the soldiers
what has occurred under the auspices of freedom and
democracy.
Let us then ask ourselves if conflict has brought
peace.
Let us be challenged by the horrific atrocities that
no one should
have to bear, and then ask ourselves if they were
worth it.
The idea of integrating the Warrior Writers and PRP
into Combat Paper evolved from a workshop at Green
Door Studio, which combined photography, artwork and
readings from the first Warrior Writers book. During
an evening reading session, the participants realized
there was a lot of potential to extend the intense
experience to far more people than any workshop could
include. On the second day of that workshop, Cameron
assembled a group of veterans and began making paper
of the uniform he wore during the occupation by
shredding, beating, and pulping it to form sheets of
paper, and his friends loved it. That was the genesis
of the Combat Paper Project.
In Cameron’s words, “The residual anger from being
used as tools for an immoral and illegal occupation
finds release when shredded pieces of the uniforms are
cooked and macerated in a Hollander beater to produce
paper pulp.” Cameron told Truthout, “The fiber of the
uniform, replete with the blood, sweat, and tears from
months of hardship and brutal violence in Iraq, tells
its tale through these sheets, which are then turned
into books, broadsides, personal journals, or works of
art composed by the veterans. The entire process is
aimed at enabling veterans to reclaim and transform
their uniform as a piece of art. It is a step toward
reconciling veterans with their traumatizing
participation in the occupation. This symbolic act
gives them the hope to carve a path through which to
reenter civilian life, not by distancing themselves
from their experience and the accompanying guilt, but
by taking responsibility for their actions. In 2007 we
put together the second anthology, ‘Re-making Sense.’
The title comes from the goal of remaking sense of our
relationship with the war, of our lives, of what we do
now, as veterans.”
He says that combat uniforms that just sit in
closets or boxes in the attic can remain associated
with subordination, warfare and service. The Combat
Paper Project redefines them as something collective
and beautiful. The slogan for the project is “From
uniform to pulp, Battlefield to workshop, Warrior to
artist.”
Cameron, who hails from a military background, was
raised by his father to value the ideals that the
military professes: loyalty, integrity, and honor. His
trip to Iraq altered everything, and “it wasn’t until
after I came back that the truth hit me. I would keep
to myself, and try to block out my experiences in
Iraq. In the course of processing my memories I
realized we had destroyed … [Iraq's] infrastructure
and were not there to help. I realized it was not
about freedom and democracy, and recollecting the way
we had conducted ourselves, and the way we had
brutalized the people turned me against the
occupation. We were trained to fight and win battles.
I was in the artillery, trained to blow shit up. We
were not there to re-build anything or help the Iraqi
people.”
Cameron was frustrated and aghast at the
whitewashing of the situation in Iraq that the
corporate media was engaged in. At the massive US air
base Camp Anaconda, just north of Baghdad, he had
access to satellite television and he realized that
the images and stories coming out were different from
what he was seeing on the ground.
“I remember intelligence reports that briefed us on
attacks against us and how we were going to be hit
were almost never in the news. I remember being hit
for seven consecutive days by mortars, but that did
not make news. As the violence escalated, we went from
being able to go outside the gate to get sodas to not
allowing Iraqis within two miles of the base because
of fear of mortars and bombs. The American mainstream
media coverage was always this spectacular type of
reporting, full of the visual splendor of tanks and
such, and not much content.”
That discontent with the media influenced Cameron
strongly, spurring his desire to bring out the truth
about what the US government has done in Iraq. “The
fundamentals of civil society and infrastructure have
been so changed and altered in Iraq that it is
absolutely devastated. To get your mind around that is
challenging.”
The art projects have been instrumental in
assisting Cameron to come to terms with his experience
in Iraq and in helping him heal.
“I can see it in my own writing, how the anger,
gore, and frustration flows out graphically before
transitioning into a deeper reflection and
contemplation about how to approach the cultural
relationship between militarism and our society. I
have been able to purge all that stuff that made me so
anxious, and now I’m more deliberate and patient in
trying to understand what is happening in this
country. It has helped me understand war-making and
how this country works. My dad was in the military. It
is so deeply rooted in us, it’s in our subconscious,
and we have to root that out and be able to transcend
it.”
He believes that the power of the written word and
of artwork can achieve what few other channels of
communication can. “You can tell people through a
didactic political conversation or panel how brutal
the whole thing is, but it is not the same. What we
are now doing through our art and our writing gives
people the full picture.”
The Combat Paper Project is the culmination of
collaboration between combat veterans, artists, art
collectors, and academic institutions. It is mostly
displayed in public places, even on the street, which
often attracts other veterans. Cameron is hopeful that
with continued touring of exhibits and ongoing
outreach, more veterans will join in. “We are trying
to reach out beyond that … Last weekend, we had
art-hop [where businesses allow artists to showcase
their work], and I met four vets. One was a Vietnam
vet who remained AWOL for over twenty years before
returning home. They all want to be part of the
project.”
Cameron intends to continue work with both the
Warrior Writers and Combat Paper projects, and hopes
that “eventually one of these is started with the
veterans on the West Coast. The commonality of
experience that connects vets is really eye-opening.
We’ve worked with vets from Vietnam, Gulf War, Bosnia
… and the paper-making ritual has been transformative
for everyone who has participated in it. For some it
is an end and a rebirth.”
The co-facilitator of the project, Drew Matott, is
not a veteran, but an artist who has been involved in
paper-making since 1998. Matott is interested in
creating a dialogue with the public about the
occupation of Iraq. One method he uses is to juxtapose
art pieces that veterans created before a workshop
against post-workshop pieces by the same veterans to
underscore the transformation that has occurred in
them.
“Usually the first pieces are very, very dark, when
they first came in. Their latter projects reveal the
healing that has taken place,” says Matott, who hopes
the project will soon go international. In late 2008,
he was in dialogue with the Ottawa School of Art,
which was interested in bringing the group up to do a
Combat Paper Project with AWOL soldiers in Canada.
“Then we’re looking at taking some guys to the United
Kingdom, to work with vets from Iraq and Afghanistan
there, simultaneously opening the project up to wars
other than the ones fought by the United States,
involving soldiers from the United Kingdom who have
been involved in other conflicts, also bring it near
bases for active-duty folks to attend as well … I
think it is making a difference.”
The project has had exhibitions around the country,
in cities such as Minneapolis, Chicago and San
Francisco, with many more to come.
Writing is also a primary means of both catharsis
and resistance for soldiers returning from both
occupations. Brian Casler spoke with Truthout about
the immense relief from PTSD that participating in the
Warrior Writers had brought him.
“For the marine, that was the first ‘ah ha!’
moment. We were sitting there, a small group of people
at Fort Drum when Calica, who was leading the
workshop, read out a letter written by a soldier to
his family. She asked the group to guess where the
letter was from. Everyone guessed Iraq or Afghanistan,
and were stunned to hear that it was in fact from a
French soldier in the trenches during World War I. He
was an anti-war soldier and he was writing home about
all the problems they were facing. It was verbatim the
same crap we have going on. And then I read up on the
Vietnam letters home, and that was also verbatim the
same crap we have going on. Then, I listened to my
fellow veterans at the workshop and said to myself,
‘That’s me. That’s me. Those words feel like they’re
coming out of me. Your poetry speaks a piece of my
heart.’ And every time I push Warrior Writers, I say
this is the anti-war veteran’s heart right here on
paper. Get it. I got a piece of me in there, but you
know what, every piece feels like it’s a piece of me
in there.”
Jon Michael Turner, a former US Marine Corps
machine-gunner, became an icon of the anti-war
movement when at the Winter Soldier hearings in Silver
Spring, Maryland, in March 2008, he leaned into his
microphone and said in an emotion-choked voice,
“There’s a term ‘Once a marine, always a marine.’”
Ripping his medals off and flinging them to the ground
as the room exploded in applause he added, “But,
there’s also the expression ‘Eat the apple, fuck the
corps, I don’t work for you no more.’”
Turner was the first veteran after Cameron to
become part of the Combat Paper Project. He was still
in the military when he moved to Burlington and heard
about the effort. “My first night in Burlington I
started to make paper out of the stack of uniforms in
my trunk.”
It was an accumulation of his experiences over time
rather than any single event in Iraq that had turned
Turner against the occupation. He remembers:
“Halfway through my second tour, things started
to click with me. One of my close friends was
killed, and another close friend, I don’t know how
the fuck he survived it, but he got destroyed by a
mortar. It was also about how much we were pushing
people out of their houses. We would kick them out
of their houses and they had nowhere to go. Seeing
this, and interacting with the people and seeing how
our actions affect them did it. Plus, I was scared
for my life each time I went anywhere, wondering if
that was going to be the day. Finally it hit me. It
sucks that it took three years, but I realized
things happening there were not right.”
Turner has found a genuine conduit to release the
havoc that his time and actions in Iraq have wrought
upon him, and to heal himself:
“All the experiences I’ve gone through, and all
my built-up frustration and thoughts and anger …
instead of taking it out on another person, I can
put it into my art, and this allows me to reclaim
those experiences. I can take part of my military
uniform and cut it up, and turn it into a piece of
paper. On that blank piece of paper I put one of my
poems for other people to experience it, and for
that moment when they read it, they can see it all
through my eyes.”
He is not fully relieved of his trauma.
“I still struggle. The problem is [that] there is
so much I need to reclaim. The Warrior Writers
Project has taught people that they can express
themselves through writing, and as traumatic as the
experience may be, it’s coming out in a beautiful
way.”
He is hopeful that the healing will continue as the
project grows, and not for him alone.
In January 2003, Aaron Hughes was studying
industrial design at the University of Illinois when
he was called up by his National Guard Unit. After
being trained in Wisconsin, he was shipped to Kuwait,
where he spent fifteen months with a transportation
company hauling flatbed tractor-trailers full of
supplies to contractors, marines and other units. He
regularly took supplies from camps and ports in Kuwait
to bases in Iraq, such as Camp Anaconda, Baghdad and
Talil Air Base.
After his tour, Hughes returned to college and
decided to major in painting. He created more than
fifty works of art from the nearly two hundred photos
that he’d shot while in Iraq. Rather than attempting
to provide a narrative of his experience in the
occupation, he wanted his art to depict a deeper
reality. Discussing his art with journalist Tatyana
Safronova, he expressed the view that “narrative
creates absolutes and I don’t have one.” Instead,
Hughes sought forms of expression more similar to
memory, with the “abstractions and complexities that
exist in images or in poetry too.”
Safronova describes one of Hughes’s oil paintings,
in which Hughes portrays a kneeling soldier in black
and white, in uniform and holding a gun, unaware of
two silhouettes of Iraqi boys standing behind his
shoulder. The children are ghost-like, faceless, their
images blurred into the desert. “It was very huge
disconnect between us and them,” Hughes said.
A charcoal and watercolor piece titled “Do Not Stop
… ” represents the consequences of the orders given to
drivers in convoys not to stop when children were on
the road. The painting shows a soldier’s boot next to
the body of a dead child. “Safwan is the city that you
cross the border into, in Iraq, and I’d say there’s a
convoy going through about every ten minutes, or less
actually …” Hughes explains to Safronova, “and these
convoys have between 20 and 100 trucks in them. So
that’s like between a quarter mile to two miles long
convoys, and these trucks are huge trucks. And there’s
a lot of kids on the road and … it was really hard to
control those kids. So there were some things that
happened there with kids getting hit by trucks.” In a
poem that accompanies the piece, Hughes writes: “Keep
the truck moving and don’t stop. Forget the kids! Now,
now I can’t forget the kids. Damn kid. I’m not even
there. Hundred thousand miles away and it’s still in
my fucking head.”
Hughes uses his art in other ways, as well. During
fall 2006, he went to a busy street intersection in
Champaign, Illinois, and began “Drawing for Peace.” In
the performance, he set a sign in the street that
read:
I am an Iraq War Veteran.
I am guilty.
I am alone.
I am drawing for peace.
Expanding on his action, on his website, Hughes
wrote: “It is an attempt to claim a strategic space in
order to challenge the everyday and its constant
motion for a moment of thought, meditation, and
PEACE.” The video recording of the same action shows
how Hughes had effectively shut down a street by
drawing on it. Several buses stop for ten minutes.
Many people exit the bus and stand on the street to
watch him work before strolling away. Cars drive by
him, seemingly unaware, but he works on, kneeling to
draw, ignoring them, engrossed in his work. A
motorcycle policeman appears and demands that Hughes
leave the road and then pulls him off by his arm.
Hughes returns and continues working on the dove he is
drawing, until the cop again pulls him off the road,
yelling at him. Hughes, dressed in his desert
camouflage jacket, listens to the policeman patiently,
then takes his sign and walks away. The camera pans
back to show traffic resume, and cars and buses
driving over the dove Hughes has left on the street.
The veteran, who has participated in marches,
rallies, and the Operation First Casualty program, is
seeking to publish his book “Dust Memories,” a visual
documentary of his journey through Iraq. His work has
been exhibited in the National Vietnam Veterans Art
Museum in Urbana, Illinois, as well as in galleries in
Chicago, Champaign and New York.
Truthout asked Hughes why he chose art as his means
of protest.
“I see creative expression as one of the closest
ways we can touch our humanity. By finding outlets for
this, we can break through the structures that have
been set up to encourage us to dehumanize each other.”
Hughes believes that art can be used to create a
culture of a politically educated democracy because
“As long as we have a culture that is depoliticized,
we can’t deal with the occupation of Iraq
effectively.”
When he was deployed to Iraq, Hughes carried with
him the culturally constructed ideas of America as the
great helper.
“But when I got there, I saw we were oppressing and
dehumanizing the Iraqis. Seeing that first-hand, and
recognizing the structures that allow this to happen,
I had my perspective flipped around on me, and I saw
how rooted in hate, greed, and racism this war
actually was. People are making billions of dollars
while other people are dying, and I don’t know how to
respond to that but through revolt and by finding a
language to fight against it. And that is where art
comes in. I can use this to speak out against what is
happening in Iraq. Through my art I have even found
ways to work with the population I used to oppress in
Iraq. I now work with a group that gets prosthetics to
Iraqi kids who need them, and kids who have lost their
eyesight because of us. These children are still
willing to embrace me as a human being. That degree of
forgiveness is something that is difficult to
reconcile without being pushed into finding ways to
break through the hatred and sustain hope in humanity
through love.”
Theatre has been a tool for resistance and social
transformation across cultures and ages. American
soldiers have used it too, with the objective of
exposing the reality of the occupation to the general
population, and to exorcise themselves of the dark
experience.
Truthout interviewed Jeff Key while he was driving
from his home in Salt Lake City to Denver to perform
“The Eyes of Babylon,” the one-man play that he has
developed from his Iraq war journals. Writing down his
experiences in a notebook he carried in the cargo
pocket of his uniform kept him sane, says Key. For
entertainment, he would read his entries aloud to
fellow marines. After returning home, Key was inspired
to turn his entries into a play when friends who heard
him read encouraged him to do something with his
writings. He wrote the play, and a workshop version of
it opened at the Tamarind Theatre in Hollywood,
California. It ran there for eight months and closed
to full houses. Since then, Key has toured “The Eyes
of Babylon” nationally and internationally.
Key mentioned that he had two more plays in the works.
“We’re going to continue touring this one for a year,
and I’ve just been busy with the charity foundation,
but the play is my principle form of activism.” The
charity is the Mehadi Foundation, a non-profit
organization founded by Key that serves “as a support
network providing assistance to United States Armed
Forces veterans” enlisted during the invasion and
occupation of Iraq “who seek help dealing with issues
of PTSD, drug and alcohol concerns and other issues.”
The organization also provides “aid and assistance to
Iraqi civilians as they attempt to rebuild in the wake
of the conflict, with specific emphasis on the
alleviation of hunger and rebuilding homes and schools
destroyed by the War.”
The lack of coverage of the occupation of Iraq
worsened in December 2008, when major US television
networks ceased sending full-time correspondents to
Baghdad. In Afghanistan, as the situation has spiraled
out of control, independent media coverage there has
become more sparse as well. The door is now left open
wider for veterans to use alternative methods to get
their message out. With countless stories to tell, in
increasing numbers, veterans stirred by their
conscience are using creative outlets and artistic
expression to articulate their opposition to the
occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Art and literature sublimate the human experience.
They have the power to transform those who create, as
well as those who experience the creation. It is not
short of any miracle that despite having been through
some of the most life-threatening and morally
appalling experiences, so many soldiers and veterans
have retained their sanity and emotional intelligence.
It is even more commendable that they have found
within themselves the energy and resolve to deploy
those precious assets to accomplish the two-pronged
objective of healing themselves and reclaiming the
ideals of democracy by making public their resistance.
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