Enduring War: Stories of What We’ve Learned

Editor Frank Stewart.

The stories, essays, and poems in this volume render the effects of war in our time and the shadows they cast, from the Pacific campaigns of World War II to genocide under the Khmer Rouge to hostilities in the Middle East. Soldiers, however, are not in the foreground in most of these works. More often, the writers depict war as a destructive force on the lives of children, women, and other civilians, and capture the lasting, complex ways in which innocent individuals and communities are harmed.

Works such as those in Enduring War tell the truths that history and politics hide. We see that wars brutalize victors and vanquished alike, thus sowing the seeds for future conflict.

Authors are Chester Aaron, Yehuda Amichai, Ayukawa Nobuo, Vladislav Bajac, Shepherd Bliss, Ch’oe Yun, Peter Cole, Shmuel HaNagid, Leo Litwak, Sharon May, Naomi Shihab Nye, David Shulman, Tamura Ryuichi, Galsan Tschinag, Yumiko Tsumura, and Shahaduz Zaman. Translators are Sonia Amin, Peter Cole, Bruce Fulton, Benjamin and Barbara Harshav, Kichung Kim, Leza Lowitz, Randall Major, Shogo Oketani, and Katharina Rout.

Also in this issue are images from Darfur by Hawai‘i photographer Shinji Salmoiraghi and from Sardinia by Italian photographer Ferdinando Scianna.

A response from Kathy Phillips, professor of English at the University of Hawai‘i: “Thanks for putting together the fine issue of Enduring War. All the poems are excellent, with Amichai’s and Nye’s especially striking. The fiction ‘Heartless Willy’ and the excerpt from The Gray Earth are unforgettable, though it’d be more comfortable to hide them. I think I appreciated most David Shulman’s essay on Palestine. To see non-violent Israelis and Palestinians persisting in their brave, vulnerable, and tiny protest actions says something good about humans, and to me Shulman’s essay is very inspiring.”

Extracts

My child, it’s a war out there. Always a war, whatever the year, whatever the hour, whichever the continent. No matter how hard you try to escape it, and whatever defenses you put up, the smell of war seeps through the cracks in every door—you can’t hide from it. It’s a horrible smell, hard and sticky, and it cuts up the world in straight lines.
—from “Whisper Yet ” by Ch’oe Yun

“Madam, there is a terrible war raging outside, and I have been running for hours. Can you give me some water to drink?”
    She clapped her hands and cried out with joy,  “War? Oh, what fun! Where?” She rushed to the window.
    From behind her, I saw that the procession outside had re-formed. Some people were shouting joyously, “Downfall!” while others were burning an effigy of the head of state.
—from “The Story That Got Away” by Shahaduz Zaman

184 pp., winter 2008 (20:2), $20
ISBN: 978-0-8248-3378-7
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