PAVE PEACE THROUGH LITERATURE AND CULTURE

ELECTRONIC MAGAZINE

Volume 1 number 1

Founder and Editor: Ada Aharoni

Technical Editor: Paul Smoker

I PREFACE

One of the important decisions of the "Peace Through Literature Commission" - at the 16th Ipra General Conference at UQLD, Brisbane, Australia (July 7-1, 1996), on "Building Non Violent Futures" - was to found an electronic magazine to promote the paving of Global Peace through international literature and culture.

I have the pleasure to open the first issue of this newly established magazine, which covers some of the major subjects discussed at the Founding Board Meeting of the "Peace Through Literature Commission" and the inauguration of its magazine, and in the seven ensuing sessions of the commission. The Founding Board Meeting of the Peace Through Literature Commission was attended by: Karlheinz Koppe, Ralph Summy, Johan Galtung, John Synott, Sanaa Osserian, Kaz Okamoto, Teruhisa Horio and myself. After warm and encouraging addresses by the first four board members mentioned above, and a Keynote Lecture by Johan Galtung on the importance of establishing this new PTL commission at IPRA, Karlheinz Koppe read a congratulation message from President

II MESSAGE FROM PRESIDENT KEVIN CLEMENTS

"Owing to the vagaries of international air travel I very much regret that I am unable to attend the inaugural meeting of the Peace Through Literature Commission, rest assured, however, that I will be with you in spirit as you map out the core problematic that will guide your discussions over the next week and into the future.

Art and Literature are powerful determinants of how we see the world and interpret it. These media can be used for good and ill. It is vital when understanding the deep conflicts that exist between peoples that we do justice to the underlying sources/grievances while maintaining a realistic optimism for the future. Literature is one means of doing this since it involves a sharing of stories, myths experiences. It also entails a graphic portrayal of the now mediated by what might be, the resulting tension is what produces the central dilemmas that lie at the heart of good art and great literature. Once again I very much regret that I cannot be with you at the inauguration of this Commission, I am sure that it will prove to be a lively one because of the passion, energy, intensity and literary wisdom of the people who have joined this commission.

In peace, Kevin P. Clements, President International Peace Research Association

III OPENING OF DISCUSSION ON PROGRAM OF THE PTLC

In the following part of the Board Meeting, as convener of the PTLC, I opened the discussion concerning the program of the commission and its magazine with the following: "On September 15, 1995, I was invited to lecture on our research on "Paving Peace Through Literature and Culture," and to present some "International Peace Stories and Poems," in a mixed panel of Moslem, Christian and Jewish scholars and writers - from different countries in the Middle East - at the UN NGO Conference in New York in celebration of 50 years to the UN.

The rich cultural climate diffused by this panel was harmonious and fruitful, and on this occasion, we realized again, what an important vehicle literature and culture are, for bridging the ethnic gaps between nations. We also realized as well, how important it is for scholars, peace researchers, writers and literary critics, to set up a global Peace Through Literature Commission and an Electronic Magazine which would research and present the best international literary and cultural harvest of global and regional artistic works on peace, and set up an effective infra-structure which would promote, spread and diffuse such works.

We were glad when IPRA agreed with the initiative and took up the challenge. Honored members of the Board, we are gathered today to inaugurate both the founding of the PTLC, and the founding of its magazine: PAVE PEACE, which we feel assured will indeed contribute to the crucial effort of building non violent futures. Our general aim is a very ambitious one: to pave A WORLD BEYOND WAR BY YEAR 2000, through the building of a global cultural climate of peace, and through the outlawing of the concept and practice of War - hence the title of the magazine: Pave Peace.

IV DECISIONS OF THE BOARD

The following suggestions and decisions were endorsed by the Board. They were also thoroughly discussed and endorsed, by the 42 members of the PTL commission in its first session on Monday July 8.

The program of the PTLC and the PAVE PEACE electronic magazine will include:

1. International and regional research on Peace Literature, Art and Culture. Presentation of such art to the wide public.

2. Research of electronic media programs that deal with peace and with violence. Presentation of such research to the wide public, universities, schools, etc.

3. The building of an infra-structure and institutes to promote the writing and distribution of peace literature, TV and film scripts, etc. and to discourage violence on TV, movies, and books.

4. Organize and diffuse the "Turn Off Violence on TV" Project, which discourages sponsors of violent programs.

5. We will establish a PAVE PEACE Literary and Movie Contest to enhance the writing and publishing of stories, poetry, myths with the theme of peace, and the production offilm scripts and movies promoting the climate of peace.

6. We will attempt to establish an International Translation Institute and Fund for the translation of Peace Literature.

7. We will strive to promote Peace Education, non-adversial and non-violent culture, for all ages, including adults - through creativity and creative works.

V GEMS FROM THE PTLC SESSIONS

During the lively discussions in the PTLC seven sessions, several important things were said by the participants, the following gems were among them:

"Ethnic differences can only be bridged by culture and education and not by guns..."

"It is our culture which makes us different, and it is our education which makes us erroneously believe that our culture is the best there is." " Exposure to other cultures may show us how wrong we were and make us more modest, open and tolerant ..."

"I have always been a lover of literature and a peace activist, but before I came to the Peace Through Literature Commission, I had never put them together before!" " I come from a very conservative background, and I know today that I got most of my liberal ideas from literature - from the stories, novels and plays I read and absorbed."

VI ROUNDTABLE AND PAPERS DELIVERED AT THE PTLC COMMISSION

Sixty seven participants attended the PTL commission, and they participated in lively discussions after the opening of 5 Roundtables and 7 Papers.

In addition, a PEACE POETRY READING session hosted by the PTLC, and chaired by John Synott, drew a lively crowd of participants who enjoyed the poetry of Roberta Sykes and many other poets, as well as the music and singing of Karl-Eric Paasonen and his cheerful band. Several people commented that the poetry reading was a moving experience and a refreshing innovation at the conference. It was suggested that we should have such peace poetry readings, peace plays, and peace story telling, as well as international singing and dancing from our global village, at every Ipra Conference. All the papers and roundtables were interesting and involving. Among those which drew the liveliest discussions were the following:

1. The Culture of the Peace Concept: Thinking, Feeling, Creating and Acting - by Ada Aharoni (A joint Session with the Peace Theories Commission- Convener Paul Smoker).

2. Building a Non Violent Cultural Climate Through Peace Marches - by Karl-Eric Paasonen.

3. Stories and poems from the Middle East written by Khalil Jubran, Naguib Mahfouz and Sofia Abdullah.

4. Roundtable Discussion on : "Is Story Telling a Powerful Tool in the Furtherance of War and Peace?" Opened by Robert Arjet.

5. Conflict Resolution in Children's Literature - by Wendy Parsons.

6. Japanese Peace Stories for Children and Adults - by Kazuyo Yamane.

7. "The Peace Flower: A Nuclear Space Adventure," and the peace play: "The Coming of Godo," a tragicomedy, by Ada Aharoni.

8. The Andaluz Project - by Sanaa Osseiran, and the presentation of the first children's book published by the project.

9. Peace Poetry - by John Synott.

10. Roundtable Discussion on: Visions of Nonviolent Futures in Male and Female Authors.

Conclusions Roundtable

1. Promoting of Nonviolent Literature and Culture through our research, in our hometowns and cities by every means possible: contests, letters to the editors of major journals, letters to editors of violent TV program and their sponsors.

2. Organize and promote the "Turn off violent TV."

3. Founding the PAVE PEACE THROUGH LITERATURE ELECTRONIC MAGAZINE, which would allow us to keep in touch, and to promote the Cyberwave of Peace by the building of an international peace literature and cultural climate beyond war and violence.

VII IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT

Each of the issues of PTLE Magazine the PAVE PEACE LITERARY ELECTRONIC MAGAZINE will include a part, or summary, of the papers presented to the PTLC during the 16th IPRA conference. Participants who read papers in this commission (as Johan Galtung and John Synott), or opened a roundtable discussion (as Robert Arjet and Sanaa Osseiran), and/or delivered a Board Meeting address (as Karlheinz Koppe and Ralph Summy), are kindly requested to send their presentations to the editor of PTLC, so that they can be included in future issues. This issue will present part of the paper on the British peace poet Wilfred Owen.

VIII PEACE POET WILFRED OWEN (1893 - 1918)

"I am the enemy you killed my friend," Wilfred Owen

One of my favourite poets who has greatly influenced my outlook on life and my creative work, is the British peace poet Wilfred Owen, who died in the trenches in World War I, at twenty-five. His beautiful poetry is the background of the moving film "All's Quiet on the Western Front," which has through the years become a classic.

Wilfred Owen is thought today to be one of the greatest British poets. He left poems and sonnets that are reckoned among the most moving peace poems ever written. He was educated at London University, and was a tutor in France for some time. At the outbreak of World War I he was mobilized to the front in the rifle corps, and a month before he was shot, he was awarded the Military Cross for gallantry. A week before the armistice, Owen was killed in action, November 4, 1918. His work was published only two years after his death. Owen has influenced some major poets that followed him years later, suc as W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender. His condemnation of war is well illustrated in poems such as "STRANGE MEETING," perhaps th most powerfully projected of all peace poem.

STRANGE MEETING

It seemed that out of the battle I escaped

Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped

Through granites which Titanic wars had groined.

Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,

Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.

Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared

With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,

Lifting distressful hands as if to bless.

And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall;

By his dead smile I knew I stood in Hell.

With a thousand pains that vision's face was grained;

Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground,

And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan.

"Strange friend," I said, "here is no cause to mourn."

"None," said the other, "save the undone years,

The Hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,

Was my life also; I went hunting wild

After the wildest beauty in the world ...

I mean the truth untold:

The pity of war, the pity war distilledd

Now men will go content with what we spoiled,

Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled.

They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress,

None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress.

Courage was mine, and I had mystery,

Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery;

To miss the march of this retreating world

Into vain citadels that are not walled.

Then when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels

I would go up and wash them from sweet wells,

Even with truths that lie too deep for taint.

I would have poured my spirit without stint

But not through wounds; not at the cost of war.

I am the enemy you killed, my friend.

I knew you in this death; for so you frowned

Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.

I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.

Let us sleep now ...."

Through such moving and authentic universal peace poems, which powerfully condemn war, Wilfred Owen succeeds to instill in the hearts of his readers that the very concept and practice of war should be anachronistic. He likewise succeeds to convince us that poetry is one of the most powerful and effective vehicles to describe the horrors of war and that it can help in building the cultural climate of peace, needed for banning war from the earth. His poems such as "Anthem for Doomed Youth," and "Futility," as so many others, deal with the delicate nuances of the deepest thoughts, feelings and truths concerning war and peace, through moving lyrical and graphic concrete human experience concerning the abomination and senselessnes of wars. He addresses not only our minds and hearts but also all our senses through the process of empathic imagination.

His poems are most relevant and actual nowadays, when more than fifty wars are still ravaging our world. Even after Peace Treaties or arrangements are signed, as in Israel, Bosnia, Rwanda, Ireland and South Africa - there are deep layers and levels of mistrust and residues of hatred and emotions remaining in the hearts of the people who had been former enemies. These ethnic differences and mistrusts can mainly be bridged by a vehicle of culture and emotions, and not by guns. They can be gapped by the understanding and respecting of the "other's" cultural ethnicity, which leads to tolerance and acceptance. And what could be more suited for that than poetry and literature that have the ability to delve deeply into the essences of the cultural ethnicity of both sides of a conflict.

However, we must remember that good poetry should be authentic, and really express not only some specific reality but true deep feelings and aspirations, and not as is sometimes seen in so called "avant-garde" poetry - mawkish and charlatan outpouring or pseudo self-pitying. We see none of this in Wilfred Owen. His friend, the peace poet Siegfried Sassoon rightly said of him: "He pitied others; he did not pity himself."

Some literary critics have expressed their concern in recent years, at the phenomenon that poetry does not have the same status and impact nowadays as it did in the past. One of the main reasons I think, why poetry's status has gone down the drain in recent years, is the fact that it has not dealt enough or with the same intensity and depth, as Wilfred Owen for instance, with the main problems facing our generation. Poetry has ceased to aspire to being at the forefront of our true and urgent human aspirations. What could be a greater aspiration of humanity today, than to get rid of the danger of being blown up by the nuclear arsenals around the world, which as we are told, are more than a hundred times the amount needed to blow us up! As foremost scientists have often warned us - when something exists, one day it will be used! Do we want to let it happen, and just go on discussing "Lyrical Poetry" and "Narrative Poetry", or should we try to do something through our art, not to let it happen? As Wilfred Owen through his impressive poetry, and Tolstoy through his monumental masterpiece "War and Peace."

Wilfred Owen, as several other peace writers around the world, dedicated his short life to try to ban and outlaw war. Evelyne Hardy, the wife of the British writer Thomas Hardy, says of him in her biography covering his life, that he always felt that, "One day soon, war will come to an end, not because of our growing humanity - but because of war's growing absurdity...." Every peace researcher, conscientious writer and human being should take it upon himself or herself, to persevere in the road Wilfred Owen, Thomas Hardy and Tolstoy have paved for - us until wars are banished from our earth. In doing so, let us remember Virginia Woolfe's wise words:

"We cannot use your words and your methods,

and we have to invent new words and new methods...."

Three Guineas

In the following issues of the PAVE PEACE LITERARY ELECTRONIC MAGAZINE, more Wilfred Owen poems will be published and discussed, as well as other peace poems and stories from around the world.

IX POEMS READ AT THE CONFERENCE

Two of the peace poems I read at the PTLC, concerned the conflict in the Middle East. During the Yom Kippur War (October 1973), letters and biographies were found on the bodies of two dead soldiers, an Egyptian in the Sinai, and an Israeli in the Golan. During my research on these documents, I was deeply touched by both. These were two young men who had just started their adult lives and they were cruelly cut down by war, before their full leaves and branches had sprouted. The two expressed more or less the same thoughts and feelings - they did not want to die, they wanted to live for their beloved, for the accomplishment of their creative aspirations, and for their families. Yet they were both killed in this senseless war, which could have ended with the same results - a Peace Treaty between Egypt and Israel, if the two sides had agreed to sit together and negotiate an agreement, before killing their children on the battlefield.

REMEMBER ME WHEN THE SUN SHINES OVER THE PYRAMIDS

AND THE MOON OVER THE SPHINX

Inspired by an Egyptian Soldier's Yom Kippur War Diary, found on his dead body

Dear Leila, I am afraid I am about

To die, for Egypt and Allah,

But this is not what I want -

What I want to do is live for you

My Leila, my love -

Remember me every time the sun shines

Over the Pyramids

And the moon over the Sphinx

And ask Allah WHY?

The Israeli soldier has a kind of epiphany. He too suddenly knows he is about to die, as he is encircled by Syrian soldiers on the Golan. He is surprised that he feels no hate for the Syrian soldier who is about to kill him. He asks himself, how come I do not hate the Syrian soldier who is about to shoot me? The answer comes like in a flash of dismal light: "Because we are both toy soldiers of shopkeepers who want to sell,

SELLING US IN THIS CURSED, CURSED WAR."

THIS CURSED WAR

Inspired by an Israeli Soldier's Yom Kippur War Diary, found on his dead body

The night creeps long

funeral throng,

darkens. Memories rush

and flood

blood.

Blossoming lists of dead

thumps red.

Every name pins mind

With writhing missiles.

Cursed, cursed war

In a jeep, on Golan Heights

loneliest I have ever been,

I watch skeletons of tanks

Crowned with names of friends.

Sinister row, black graves

fresh bodies - old smell.

Cursed, cursed war

It doesn't look at all like wars in films, this war.

Here we do not get a chance to shoot

Or wave a flag

Shrieking shells, hyena lightning

Pour on us and we run backwards

or forwards

Or to the side

And some are saved

and some are not,

Not all, not always

But always cursing

This cursed, cursed war.

In an English centurion

Holding Belgian guns,

We watch two American-made airplanes

Shot down by Russian-made missiles.

I cannot hate the Syrian on the other side

Who holds a French gun and shoots Soviet SAMs.

AH! Now I have it, now I know -

We are both toy soldiers of shopkeepers

Who want to sell -

Selling us, in this

Cursed, cursed war!

God, let it stop, let it end,

Let the nightmare end!

Cursing is the only womb shelter

We can creep into,

Not to crumble

Before thoughts in the dark.

Cursed are those who force me to be here

In this cursed, cursed war!

CLOSING CEREMONY POEM

At the closing ceremony of the IPRA Conference, I was asked to read the poem which appears in the SOCIAL ALTERNATIVES JOURNAL dedicated to the Conference. At the opening of the reading of the poem, I suggested: "Let's prove that the pen is not only stronger than the sword, but even stronger than the nuclear bomb." Let's tell this belligerent century, that we are -

NOT IN YOUR WAR ANYMORE

War is as anachronistic as cannibalism, slavery and colonialism.

Rosalie Bertell

I am not in your war anymore,

surely we cannot paint war green

when even the long Cold War has died.

So let's paint it in all its true

foliage colors, to help its fall.

First, flowing flamboyant crimson blood

on throbbing temples and hands,

russet, bronze fiery metal cartridges

stuffing the crevices of young hearts

while golden lazer Napalm dragon tongues

gluttonously lick the sizzling eyes and lips

of our children, under the giant mushrooms

freshened by mustard and acid rain.

Surely, at the close of our

great atomic century

we will soon find the archaic

history tree, where we can dump

our fearful Nuclear bottle legacy

And our grandchildren will ask their parents

What were tanks for, Pa?

What were Nuclear Bombs for Ma?

And with eyes

full of wonder, they will read the story of the

glorious imprisonment of the Nuclear Giant

corked for ever, and will rapturously exclaim:

Well done Pa, well done Ma,

WELL DONE IPRA!1

1. PS: The last line was added spontaneously while I was reading the poem at the closure of the Conference, and it came from the heart. The Conference organizers have indeed accomplished a marvellous enterprise, and I thank them heartily in my name and in the name of the PTLC. May IPRA's impressive peace efforts be blessed by the ripest fruit.

Ada Aharoni Convener of the PTL Commission Editor of Pave Peace Literary Electronic Magazine

Dr. Ada Aharoni Conflict Studies,

Technion, 57 Horev, Haifa,

Israel 34343

Tel: 972-4-8243230

Fax: 972-4-8261288

E-Mail: ada@iflac.com

This page last updated October 19, 1997
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