In the collection of linked stories I’m currently writing an unexpected character has appeared. He is a veteran from the war in Afghanistan, injured on his second tour of duty and now struggling with life at home. He is unexpected in that I hadn’t reckoned on him turning up. But it’s perhaps not surprising he’s emerged as I find that the war and the effect it has on the men and women who fight in it is something I cannot ignore.
The BBC recently screened an episode of Imagine ( surely must be one of the best programmes in the schedule) – which chronicled the making of The Two Worlds of Charlie F – a play about the war, written by Owen Sheers and first performed at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket by Bravo 22 Company –the majority of whom are soldiers who have served and been injured in Afghanistan.
It was without doubt the most moving programme I’ve seen on television in years. Watch again runs out tomorrow (sorry about that my timing could have been better) but you can buy the DVD of the play itself HERE or Theatre of War [The Making of The Two Worlds of Charlie F] [DVD]
Don’t miss it – we have a duty to understand the experience of these men and women.
Profits from the sale of the DVD will be donated to The Royal British Legion and The Theatre Royal Haymarket Masterclass Trust, the founding charities of the Bravo 22 Company.
Wittgenstein said ‘there’s nothing so remote as the immediate past’. And yet the great war is now at such a distance, most of us comfortably romanticise war poetry. I don’t believe we can understand war, it is obscene, a total unthinkable catastrophe of the symbolic order. Only in my view, Iraq and Afghanistan are not wars, the army here, nothing more than mercenaries persuading an epoch of post-modernity in places that will not bend into a linear history of international capitalism whether that proves for better or worse.
And the red top rag campaign ‘Help the Hero’s’. How the same papers’ would say of them ‘benefit scum’, because most of the military demographic would be unemployed at home in an post-industrialist age. Obscene how those who are required to kill and be killed are those that have the least to lose. Let’s send our political representatives and business leaders to the front line, they have the most to lose if we were inundated with terrorist activity at home as they say we would be.
I find that there is something highly obscene about what Owen Sheers has done. Precisely because the arts re-integrates trauma back into the symbolic order, the real of this horror becomes politically impotent by such gestures. As a writer, I pour my own blood, sweat and tears into my work, but this retroactive tidying up of my subjectivities cannot exceed the symbolic. Ongoing war must refuse this memorization. We have now even surpassed voyeurism in the 21st century, in my view those unclean international media images are a continuous commentary of appeasement and memorization simultaneous with the event.