Refractions Volume 22:Operation Homecoming: Epistles of Injury

Operation Homecoming: Epistles of Injury
Makoto Fujimura
Refractions Volume 22




I recently found myself at New York’s Symphony Space, listening to the voices of soldiers. As a National Council on the Arts member, I was representing the National Endowment for the Arts for the release of “Operation Homecoming” (Random House, edited by Andrew Carroll). The N.E.A. gave returning soldiers from Afghanistan and Iraq an opportunity to write down their war time experiences in workshops lead by Pulitzer winning Vietnam era writers. With actors highlighting the evening, (Matthew Modine, Joan Allen, and, most memorably, Stephen Lang) and sitting next to one of the soldier/writers, I had a strange and uncomfortable revelation: a revelation that surely had been bubbling up in me in recent years -- How much of the world’s art and literature is linked to wartime experiences?

The writings of soldiers, or writing about wars in general, has indeed defined our literature and the arts, from Homer to Dante to Hemingway. If you remove works of art that do not in some way relate to, or respond to wars, our cultural landscape would be full of holes (think of Picasso’s “Guernica”). Perhaps that's what Jesus meant, when he warned us “such things (wars) must happen.” He did not validate wars by saying this, but he wanted to make sure we understood the inevitability of them: that our inner malaise will surely be translated into greater conflicts. But to have the Prince of Peace tell us that wars must happen is more than troubling. Must we be haunted by wars as part of God’s plan of redemption? Must art exist as primarily funerary?

In modern times, Rothko, Mondrian and other 20th Century masters wove the horrors of the atomic age into their work, as if to visit Hiroshima over and over again. Rothko gave that post-Atomic glow an ethereal transcendence even as Mondrian stubbornly, and valiantly, insisted on the order of grids against the approaching chaos. In both cases, they were exiled to New York, because of the dark specters of evil marching into their homelands. Surrealism (as the recent MOMA/National Gallery exhibit showed) screamed against the insanity of fear birthed in the trenches of WW1. These artists are often remembered for their anti-patriotic rants, or at best being ambivalent observers, and most definitely being anti-establishment. It is ironic that they are now seen as the establishment in the institutions of museums and academia. But the best of arts still can rise above the institutions and establishment that gave permission for them, or the conflicts that they escaped. The arts speak into a void, creating a moment of clarity, a pause in the frenzy.

Then there are the J.R.R. Tolkiens and C.S. Lewis of the world, whose front line experiences gave birth to the most resonant, faith-filled literature of our last century. Tolkien imagined through the dark trenches, surrounded by dying friends, and chose to speak directly against his own fear by naming one by one characters and places of imagined reality that would later form the basis for The Lord of the Rings. Lewis too, injured in the war, later recounts that his journey from atheism to faith was paved by his sense of loss, inconsolable violation (“the problem of pain”, he called it) that he felt in his bones. Having gone through such horrors is no guarantee of a recovery of faith, but it does suggest that faith and culture are linked to the crisis that surrounds us.

T.S. Eliot would have found this dialogue not so unfamiliar. His war-time journey to write the “Waste Land” could also describe our survey of Darfur and Afghanistan. In the “Four Quartets,” he describes “The unimaginable Zero Summer” of the atomic devastation but ends hopefully in the “still point of the turning world”, producing a rare articulation of the heart’s navigation from fear to love. But today, in the shadows of our current chaos in Iraq, and bullet holes in an Amish school still fresh in our minds, such sentiment can come across as too optimistic and even unkind.

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I read recently that most of early Christian art (at least the examples that have survived) were funerary in nature. Apparently, even in the world of faith, art is obsessed with death. Surely, it would be the darkest of confessions for any artist working today to admit that his/her visions are driven by the haunts of war and death, and, like Dante, that imaginative reality is filled with a vision of purgatorio. On the contrary, our recent contemporary art scene is rushing to escapism, lacking in engagement with the present darkness, and even without the disciplined skill to describe the horror. So such a confessional would seem welcome in today’s climate of superficiality. Pausing to listen to the writings of soldiers in “Operation Homecoming,” though, I have begun to see a glimpse of a new kind of realism.

These men and women chose to write staring into the abyss: to record both their fears and hopes, in this time of certain chaos, grieve over lost lives and opportunities; but they also speak well of their pets and ordinary sun-lit days. Theirs is a stark realism, observing the life surrounding the turmoil, wrestling against the fading memories of loved ones, comrades, and the stenches of war. So many of Operation Homecoming pages are filled with emails, which like radio dispatches, they will remain deeply etched in our minds as immediately potent. These are voices that are directed toward our private spheres, but now allowed to be make public: They deserve our hushed attention for their honest grappling with inner turmoil. Their accounts are true “Survivor” tales but without any shred of sensationalism. Told sometimes gingerly, sometimes in expletives, the soldiers seem to dwell, after a while, in my consciousness as my imaginary neighbors, people whom I might encounter in my street, or kick a soccer ball around with. I am surprised at how much humor fills these pages, not the sanitized kind, but the raw, grimy kind that belongs in beer halls and late night comedy shows. Refreshingly free of showmanship, in our glitz-filled cultural universe, their writings serve more than to recount the war: they speak into our lives with authenticity, and remind us somehow that, despite it all, humanity can still reign in a cruel kaleidoscope of fear called war.

There are poignant lessons, of a soldier writing home as he flew over Iraq, a geography lesson that span some 3000 years. “Have you heard of Mesopotamia?” writes Lieutenant Colonel Cohoes to his sons, “ Two great rivers of the word, the Tigris and the Euphrates, flow together here then empty into the Persian Gulf….King Nebuchadnezzar (I can’t say it either) build the hanging Gardens of Babylon about 2,600 years ago.” Of course, in the reading that took place at Symphony Hall, Matthew Modine could not pronounce “Nebuchadnezzar,” either.

There’s an account of a soldier of Korean descent who recounts his adoptive American father and grandfather fighting in their wars. Echoed throughout the book is generational lineage to wars, that it is not an isolated experience to one generation. Then there is Christy De’on Miller, in an essay she called “Timeless,” a single mom/soldier mourning over the loss of her only son, Aaron:

At times I believe I can learn to live a life without my son. After all, I must. I am certain there are other mothers who have lost their boys – car accidents, war, illness – who can shop for dinner at the local grocer’s without the macaroni-and-cheese boxes suddenly causing them grief. Moms who can roll sausage balls without tears; perhaps the festive food would even cause a smile. But the memory of him is planted in everything around me. Inside of me. So much is gone. Him, or course. But so much of him has been lost, is fading, breaking down. His blanket, his watch, his uniform…

The writings amplify the details of life, not just theirs, but ours. They let us into the writers’ worlds, to share in their grief, their loss, and their confusion.


Here was another revelation, then, after listening to the account after account of Afghan and Iraqi soldiers and their families that I, too, lived in a war zone. A different, milder version for sure, sanitized and packaged better. Photos of the bright new facades of “you can have it all” condominiums, to be completed in 2010, tell us that we are all better in downtown Manhattan. Their airbrushed architectural renderings are what a friend calls “architectural porn”. But nevertheless I live and raise my family in a place called Ground Zero, and reading the book opened my eyes to see the invisible collateral of a war far away shadowing us everywhere. Yes, even if there is no visible war around, there are less visible battles going on everywhere.

There are visible scars in culture though. The battle is about the imaginative territories of hope against fears, the sacrifice of love against a misplaced devotion, the anger of revenge against forgiveness. It is a battle that rages in the minds of youth as they negotiate the labyrinth of a techno frenzied universe, sharing a communion of broken promises. When the manifestation of such collateral damage ambushes us, like in the pastoral Amish landscapes recently, or in Littleton, Colorado in 1998, in a high school named after a delicate wild flower, we are astonished.

John Hewett, the development director of the N.E.A., and who also happens to be an ordained minister, told me a poignant story recently. When the evil struck the sleepy Amish community near Lancaster, when a gunman/milkman systematically shot girls one by one, there was a hidden story, in what he called “A Miracle Nobody Noticed.” He wrote:

I’m convinced most of us get through most days without thinking about God much. I was having one of those days a few weeks ago, until I heard about Marian and Barbie Fisher, two of the ten girls in the West Nickel Mines Amish School. Marian, the oldest, was 13. Her sister Barbie, who lived, is 11. When it became obvious what was about to happen that ghastly morning, Marian turned to the killer and said, “Shoot me and leave the other ones loose.” “Shoot me next,” Barbie said. “Shoot me next.”

Two children willing to lay down their lives for their friends. Wonder where they got an idea like that? That’s another miracle nobody noticed



Perhaps a new renaissance will be birthed out of the “mouths of babes” like these: “shoot me and leave the other ones loose.” Or it may flow out of a grieving mother/soldier like De’on grieving for Aaron, a Marine who lost his life protecting his wounded comrades. Perhaps we will see that whether we are soldiers, or housewives or Pulitzer Prize winning writers (or all of the above), we need to realize that we are not home, at least not yet. That’s the only faith that can compel us to say: “shoot me.” The girl did not complain that “this is unfair,” or argue, “this is unjust:” she just said “shoot me.”


Such fragile, but heroic, voices in the face of violence can easily be ignored, or simply not audible with our doomed ears. It certainly did nothing to stop a milkman from unloading his anger by pulling the trigger. Perhaps such otherworldly gestures look as pathetic, or beautiful, as the string quartet that played on as the Titanic sank. But I submit to you that here, in a miracle nobody noticed, is a bugle call also directed towards us artists. It begins in a belief that our lives are to be lived for others. Arts should let “the other ones loose” from the bondage of decay, apathy and loss. To the extent we are able to do that, to that degree we will see a new language of expression that is not self-centered, but self-giving and generous. Yes, I believe that art can, and ought to, exist apart from wars. But in only place where this has been the case in the history of the world, a place called Eden where a poet named Adam dwelled, is today hidden inaccessibly beneath, or above, the rubble of Iraq.

Operation Homecoming gives us authentic voices that seek be a responsible steward of their experiences. Why would that simple gesture seem so foreign and refreshing? Has our culture become so cynical that we no longer have the capacity to listen without having a wry, critical distance? Or has the media become so profit driven and sensationalistic that they no longer can mediate information responsibly? Because the soldiers have faced certain death, and stood over the rubble that might have crushed them, but having lived, they owned the experience, and chose to tell the tale artfully and carefully. If we all live in a war zone of some kind, should we not do the same? Words alone can impregnate promise or despair in such a precipice: the arts can inspire or despise humanity.

In Jesus’ realism of “these things must happen,” he was also reminding us that our sacrifice, either for just or unjust reasons, would not be the last word. Our efforts, however noble, will not end the cause of injustice. But we are all given a call for self-sacrifice nevertheless. None are exempt, not even a pacifist thirteen-year-old secluded as far away from Iraq as humanly possible. And Jesus knows, first hand, what it means to die an unjust death without picking up a stone, or a spear. Instead, he continues to breath life into us in our funerary songs. By listening to these soldiers/poets, though, we may even begin to feel that life-breath, a hint of a culture of self-giving. Despite the anguish, De’on writes with the same quiet surrender of the Amish sisters :

My faith doesn’t equal that of Job’s. I question. Why has God cut the fruit from my vine? Taken the only child that remained? Left me with no hope for a grandchild? I‘m certain there can be no more. No more children.

And yet I have no particular animosity for my son’s killer. He’s a nameless and faceless combatant to me. Should I ever have the opportunity to meet him, I hope that I’d forgive him. To me, the buck stops with the Father. His power stings at times. But He’s listened to me; perhaps He’s even cried with me. And yes, I do know what I’m talking about here. It’s a belief, man. Aaron’s words. You either believe in God or you don’t. Yes, I’d forgive. I do forgive. There is absolutely nothing I’d do to keep myself from spending eternity with God and Aaron.

Our path back to Eden is blocked, but there is a way in to the feast of the selfless. Only in these words of forgiveness, utterly stripped down to the core of faith, can echo the Timeless, or the Time-ful, promise of an Easter morning. That is our true Homecoming. Even if the condition is unbearably chaotic, or simply cruel, these authentic voices refracts in our fear dominated cultural landscape, mediating how we can choose to face a new day, and breathing certain hope into our stricken hearts.

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1/13/07 post script: Go and see "Pan's Labyrinth" (though not for children). The movie deals with themes of war and imagination, with echos of eternal longing. A must see.

Refractions Volume 18: How the Beast Stole Christmas

How the Beast Stole Christmas
Could King Kong be a better film than The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe?


It is said that J.R.R. Tolkien disliked the Narnia stories, written by his closest literary comrade, C.S. Lewis. He found them to be a "a hodgepodge of myths.” This December, two films vie for a permanent place in our imaginative landscapes, offering two distinct visions for moviemaking. We should not be surprised that Lewis’ Narnia story, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, so faithfully translated by a Disney team, is pitted against King Kong, a passionate offering by a director who so triumphantly translated, and transformed, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Narnia was a good film: but not a great film. King Kong is the better film -- And quite possibly a great film.


Don’t get me wrong. Georgie Henley, whose debut makes an indelible mark in the Narnia movie, playing Lucy, deserves much praise and recognition (the Academy Awards should create a new category – call it, let’s say, the Drew Barrymore E.T. Phone Home Award for the most iconic child actor of the year). Narnia should be seen by all of us if only to witness the light of Narnia wonderment refracted in Lucy’s face, and truly magical wardrobe scenes. The movie came out, to the relief of many Narnia fanatics, very much faithful to the text and imagery of C.S. Lewis. The depiction of the White Witch captured the intensity of conflicts, both spiritual and physical, and her cold stealthy fingers of evil were felt reaching into our hearts. And the twist in the end can unlock a mystery of redemption that we long to understand and describe as Christians.

But it’s the depiction of the beast that gave pause.

Can you really compare Aslan the lion, the Christ figure of Narnia with King Kong? You might ask. Isn’t Narnia the most redemptive, Christ-focused work on the screen today? And don’t you want any ventures related to the writings of C.S. Lewis (a writer I deeply love) to succeed?

Yes, no, and definitely yes.

We can, and need to, compare the two beasts, because the movies beckon us to do so. While the original text of Narnia is most redemptive, the movie pales in comparison: and I venture to say that Kong somehow manages to create a need for redemption better than Narnia as a film. Yes, I do want anything associated with our beloved don of Oxford to succeed. But, I came away convinced that Peter Jackson’s King Kong delivers the beastly quality best, while Disney’s Aslan felt tame and not the fierce Lion/King of Lewis’ original Aslan. Therefore Narnia’s redemptive quality suffered. I wonder if Lewis himself would have agreed: after all Lewis was "absolutely opposed" to a live-action version of "Narnia." (“according to an unpublished 1959 letter he wrote to a BBC producer. ‘Anthropomorphic animals, when taken out of narrative into actual visibility, always turn into buffoonery or nightmare,’” (http://www.classical1035.com/index.php?sid=324631&nid=65&template=story_print))


In King Kong, we witness the transformation of the Beast to glimpse love and to experience beauty. We see the Beast be destroyed because of, and in spite of, that response. This transaction is deeply truthful, and even Biblical. He convinces us of the lack of a way out of that beastly existence. Romans chapter eight of the New Testament tells us “the creation was subjected to frustration…in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God” (Romans 8:20,21). Kong exactly captures this frustration. And in that gap between what may be possible and what is actually not, Christians can see our need to appear on the scene as children of God: we are to be Princes and Princesses of the great King. Narnia could have told this royal appearance most powerfully in the cinema, not just as a mandatory Star Wars like last scene, but as a layered character development that evolves over the course of the film. It is after all, a story of children who are literally destined for thrones. Psychological elements, the inner tension between the weight of the call and the actualization of that call, could have been explored much deeply.

Kong became truly dangerous and remained untamed even until the end. Andy Serkis, who “played” Kong deserves an Oscar (again, let’s create a new category – maybe name it after him, the Serkis Award for the best acting-via-CG. There are sure to be many more given in the future.) His depiction, his movement breathes life into a previously undeveloped beast as a tragic hero. After initiating us in incomparable Gollum in the Lord of the Rings trilogy to how technology can morph the art of acting as we know it, he follows the same uncharted beastly path in Kong. His depiction of emotional depth and range of a wild monster turned to sacrificial protector is utterly unrivaled in modern cinema, excepting, possibly in a much smaller way this year, Gromit the claymation dog by Nick Park in Wallace and Gromit: the Curse of the Were Rabbit.

And then there’s the Empire State Building. I may love King Kong simply because New York City, wearing her 1932 Art Deco gown in the midst of The Depression, appears in the film as a central character, as important as any other actors, with the freshly built Empire State as her crown. From the misty East River to Times Square’s snowy theatre district, King Kong shows the city as wild as Skull Island, but also romantic and dreamy, and certainly much more dangerous than dinosaurs and poisonous spiders. The movie captures the monstrous power and sophistication of the City to make a plaything, a mere spectacle, out of a pure beauty called Ann Darrow, who is just as much of a misfit in NYC as a savage 50 foot beast.

Just as in this year’s Pride and Prejudice (another highly recommended film to see) a pure range of emotions of romance is explored without pandering to cheap, sensationalistic sex scenes. Compassion, to see beyond the veneer of our beastly existence, defines Naomi Watts’ performance. And Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody) is seen mirroring his complex emotional connection in his act of creativity as a playwrite. In Skull Island, he is a “dare- to–save the girl” triathlon hero and not very credible (I certainly do not know many playwrites who can move that fast). But back in the NYC theatre, revelation he has, echoed in his own play, was one of the most important moments of the film. There is a great overlap between the dashed hopes of an imaginative, creative soul and the falling Ape. Both face an incomparable Empire State building and must climb to the top. And romance has everything to do with it.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in 1939:

From the ruins, lonely and inexplicable as the sphinx, rose the Empire State Building and, just as it had been a tradition of mine to climb to the Plaza Roof to take leave of the beautiful city, extending as far as eyes could reach, so now I went to the roof of the last and most magnificent of towers. Then I understood—everything was explained: I had discovered the crowning error of the city, its Pandora’s box. Full of vaunting pride the New Yorker had climbed here and seen with dismay what he had never suspected, that the city was not the endless succession of canyons that he had supposed, but that it had limits – from the tallest structure he saw for the first time that it faded out into the country on all sides, into an expanse of green and blue that alone was limitless. And with the awful realization that New York was a city after all and not a universe, the whole shining edifice that he had reared in his imagination came crashing to the ground.


A year before his death, the beast of the literary world stood on top of the Empire State building and saw his own limitations. He saw the world crumble down, including his love for his beloved wife Zelda. Kong, in the same way, represents not just a beast, but a “Heart of Darkness,” (Joseph Conrad’s novel of African journey is often quoted both explicitly and implicitly in the film). And the tale is about our darkened hearts, and our Pandora’s box opened. We struggle to retain the wilderness, or fail to tame it. That’s why romances in our lives either destroy us or ultimately fail to satisfy us. Therefore, Kong was seen as a necessary villain residing deep within our hearts, a victim of our dark presumption. In the climactic scene of the movie, in a “Christina’s World” like stretch, the body of Naomi Watts reaches into the beast’s eyes of surrender. On top of the world, the beauty is held together still, for but one single moment, with the beast.

This beast truly proved dangerous, and beautiful at the same time: the way Aslan should have been. Kong stood on top of the Empire State and roared against the incoming fighter planes and even against his own death: Aslan’s willingness to suffer and be sacrificed for the betrayal of Edmund could have been equally as compelling visually, but it was not.

Lewis stated in Mere Christianity about Beauty and the Beast “The girl, you remember, had to marry a monster for some reason. And she did. She kissed it as if it were a man. And then, much to her relief, it really turned into a man and all went well…” He continues in the essay to woo us to realize that these stories of old are really a means for us to tap into the great, deep longing of our hearts, and our need for the gospel, the Good News of Christ. It is that suspense we wish for, what we deeply desire that is captured in Kong: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe needed to capture that better than it did.

It may be that Narnia was so wedded to the original text that it lost some of its mythic power. The Chronicles of Narnia is indeed a great story (and especially to read aloud to our children): and it does not need to be a film to add to its integrity. If the film makes us re-read these great stories, to appreciate Lewis’ myth-filled imagination, so be it. They may have seemed a “hodgepodge” to Tolkien, but to us in this age of uncertain fears, they are more like color-filled lights refracted in Lewis’ multi-faceted prism, filling our hearts with secure hope.

On the other hand, King Kong has to be a film. There’s no other way to communicate this beauty and beast visual drama. It’s a film that needs to be a film: that’s why it can be a great film.

Finally, it’s Peter Jackson’s love for movie making that prevails. He clearly believes in the art form called film: And he loves it deeply as a myth-making medium. It is that love for the medium that convinces us of a movie as not a mere translation, but as a transformational piece. Narnia is a faithful translation with a few magical moments. But it did not, ultimately, transform the text (that would require much more freedom to the movie makers). Kong transformed the tradition of movie making as an art form. He thoroughly explores that potential to the extent that some have complained on the time length of the Kong movie: to that I say… Narnia should have been at least three hours as well! See, Peter Jackson knew that the story was worth our time – such great stories of transformation take time to steep in our hearts.


Image: Scott Kolbo, "Faster Couple," Intaglio print, 20"x8", used by permission