When poets take up arms: combating (hyper)real wars under the abstractions of the new empire.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Date: 01 January 2005
• Author: McCarthy, Bridie

Abstract

This article charts the emergence of a contemporary political movement in Australian poetry-one which responds to the West's involvement in Iraq with a creative and critical activism-whose poetry represents a calling to arms for the realisation of a responsible, ethical citizenship. Here, an analysis of the poetry of John Forbes, Robert Adamson and Jennifer Maiden is structured around the lexicon and philosophy of Baudrillard's hyperreality, as is an accompanying critique of the psycho-social manifestations of "the New Empire" (the contemporary Western program of neocolonialism) and its orchestration of conflict in Iraq, which has overwhelmingly relied on the efficacy of the virtual This article argues for the particular insurgency of poetry as a representational device-especially in the face of the contemporary omnipresence of the image-as it exposes how the West seduces itself with the idea of war and how war preforms the deferral of global relations in hyperreal times.

**********

From beneath the mantle of 'lyricism' that conceals their ideological fervour and phrenic energy, Australian poets have emerged in what is perhaps an unexpected guise--as human rights activists, ethicists and dexterous critics of world politics. The Western presence in Iraq, for which Australia is strongly accountable, has fired the imaginations of Australian poets, whose work fills a discursive/critical space that much of the Western media has kept blank. These poets sift through the rubble of recent global relations, writing back to the West (from the West) with a tirade of verses that canvas trans-global ethics and postcolonial responsibility.

The reciprocal relationship between politics and poetry is an intriguing one, especially in this case. The cognitive and literary allure of the spectacles of the Western occupation of Iraq is obvious. What is much more poignant is the Australian poetic response to these situations--where war is understood discursively as a struggle for supremacy within the realm of representation. Following this hypothesis--that Western interference in the Middle East has occurred on both physical and virtual terrain--much contemporary Australian poetry consciously unearths this agenda; detailing it in lines of sophisticated critique. (1)

Beyond this being an unlikely quarter from which such analysis has emerged (for some), the potency of this poetry lies in its ability to retaliate against the assaults on freedom and democracy which these indiscretions in representational politics signify, by brandishing an elegant mastery of discursive manipulation of its own. (2)

Not only does this current war provide evidence of a newly forged Western transnational empire (3)--whose colonising practices have written anew the texts of political manipulation and ideological and religious cleansing--the spectacularly aggressive way in which Iraq has been 'freed' has given poets the lyrical ammunition for an onslaught of verses that are focussed on these atrocities (4). These verses operate in both the literal and figural orbits, dissecting the physical, political and discursive casualties of the war in lucid detail.

Here, via an analysis of the work of John Forbes, Robert Adamson and Jennifer Maiden, I wish to make a case for the effectiveness of Australian poetry in scrutinising the terms of global politics and in focussing so acutely on the mediatised reception of Western initiatives in Iraq in countries like Australia, which are complicit in these processes. As I will demonstrate, this poetic activism often situates itself within the ideological geography of Jean Baudrillard's 'hyperreality'--the (anti)theorem whose lexicon lends to these poets an active and germane mode of analysis. Following Baudrillard, it is possible to elucidate, amongst the intricate structuring and metaphoric complexity of this poetry, the sophistication and frequency of the 'fatal strategies' (5) of these poets, as they linguistically force the 'New World Order' to its hermeneutical extremes.

John Forbes: Seduced by the Simulacrum

Forbes thought of himself as a public poet--his frequent recourse to the ode, and his penchant for both satirical scorn and celebration, testify to this. Yet increasingly he portrays the poet, not as the bearer of a public vocation, but as an affront to the society which denies this vocation. (6)

In 1992, John Forbes documented the Gulf War in his 'Love Poem', postmodernising poetic and historical traditions in his deconstruction of this global event. Forbes characterised this war as a simulated hyperreal performance, strongly emphasising the dangerous surplus of misplaced desire that, in certain permutations, manifests itself as war. His 'Love Poem' is ostensibly constructed as a letter to a lover, where the personal fuses with the national and the virtual, as his narrator relies on the context of the Gulf War for both romantic context and contrast. (7) Years after this conflict, it is easy to see how predictions such as those embedded in Forbes' poetry (about the Western lust for domination of the Middle East and its extraordinary program of colonisation) have played themselves out as reality.

Forbes parodied this lust--this excess of desire for domination that is almost carnal in nature (8)--by enveloping his 'Love Poem' in an acutely sardonic register. As such, 'Love Poem' functions as an ironic objection to the Gulf War, and, as it documents the scale of these events, flirts dangerously with the magnetism of their execution. Poetry becomes another form of military technology in Forbes' complex seduction, as his narrator documents the start of the encroachment of this war into the arts. Following 'Love Poem', poetry exhibits war, as it exhibits its own art(ifice):

 But what they don't show, until

now, is how at ease I can be with military technology: e.g.

matching their feu d'esprit I classify the sounds of the Iraqi AA--the thump of the 85 mil, the throaty charter of the quad ZSU 23. (9)

Forbes exhibits an awareness of the incommensurability of imagination and reality in this poem, subtly pointing to the genesis of war in the imaginary--even the national imaginary, as is often the case--and its devastating performance in the real. (10) As archetypal climaxes in history, there is a sense (which Forbes alights on also) that wars are called for by the collective imaginary; a concerning realisation which functions in such a way that it either motivates or satisfies this desire for war. Baudrillard hints at this collective inauguration of war, but structures his analysis in terms of our inculcation of the virtual:

By dint of dreaming of pure war, of an orbital war purged of all local and political peripeteias, we have fallen into soft war, into the virtual impossibility of war which translates into the paltry fantasia where adversaries compete in de-escalation, as though the irruption or the event of war had become obscene and insupportable, no longer sustainable, like every real event moreover. Everything is therefore transposed into the virtual, and we are confronted with a virtual apocalypse, a hegemony ultimately much more dangerous than real apocalypse. (11)

Retrospectively, what Forbes' 'Love Poem' uncovers, is the inherent repetitiveness of wars, their inevitability. Like entertainment, they light up history with their spectacular effects, simulating an interchange (which is ultimately both virtual and physical) between two powers which deny their inability to connect in the real. As 'Love Poem' demonstrates, wars can operate on the same ideological trajectory as love as both events are linked by desire. Hence, the more intimate the connection (or, in the case of war, the more invasive) the more any real knowledge of the other is deterred:

 Spent tracer flecks Baghdad's

bright video game sky as I curl up with the war in lieu of you ... (12)

For this reason, the narrator of 'Love Poem' might as well replace the lover with the battle, particularly within the symbolic realm, since this is the principal geography of the poem. Following the poem's logic, what love and war are about is addressing (and failing to address) an unbridgeable distance--and here Forbes' resonant 'in lieu' is particularly effective--which is contradicted endlessly by the mediatised closeness of these events to their subjects. Like Jean Baudrillard, it appears that Forbes' narrator sees simulations everywhere usurping the (fallacious and impossible, if we agree with Baudrillard) 'real'.

The intimacy of the Gulf War--here represented by and contrasted with the lover--which is at once immediate and simulated (via media), tugs at the inherited desire for war within the collective imaginary and also slyly exposes it. If mimicry can be a mode of activism, Forbes achieves a sophisticated protest here, by unveiling the degree to which the West is seduced by the idea of war. As Ivor Indyk observes of Forbes' work: 'What we have in abundance is irony, springing from a deep sense of limitation, and intractability.' (13) When applied to 'Love Poem', this contention can refer to the duplicity (in both senses of the word) of the Gulf War as both intimacy and distance--a complex relation that was, as Forbes' sardonic mimicry suggests, obfuscated from the public. As with the construct 'love', the intimacy of war necessitates a denial of its opposite: a profound sense of alienation. (14)

Accordingly, wars occur in lieu of global relations; battles occur in lieu of human contact; explosions, bombs and other output of weapons occur in lieu of manto-man combat; mediatised representations of war occur in lieu of actual attendance; poems about all of these simulations occur in lieu of love poetry, which here seems to have been both replaced and misplaced by the great excess of desire involved in the production, reproduction and reception of wars. (15) Forbes personalises such hyperreal existential conundrums (16) by aligning the effects...