Warring with Innocence

Shaindel Beers’s second collection of poetry, The Children’s War and Other Poems, solidifies the horrors of war with a precise kind of universality, one derived from the vantage point of those who are especially vulnerable to its unexplainable violence. Comprised of a series of ekphrastic poems written from the perspective of children who have witnessed unspeakable atrocities, the first section of The Children’s War and Other Poems renders the images children make from experiences of war legible as a limit: of what our imagination can comprehend. Such an approach to representation draws upon one convention of ekphrasis in which the imagined perspective of the artist becomes crucial to the way the poem moves through its descriptive process. The poems of Beers’s The Children’s War and Other Poems interact closely with this convention, which one can find in W. H. Auden’s famous—perhaps even archetypal—ekphrastic poem, “Musée des Beaux Arts” (1940). Auden’s poem, which takes as its occasion of utterance Brueghel’s The Fall of Icarus (c. 1558), begins by acknowledging the vantage point of the maker of the painting, a creator who belongs to a category of highly trained artists: “The old Masters: how well they understood / Its human position.” (Elizabeth Bishop’s “Large Bad Picture” [1946] also begins with an acknowledgement of the maker, though, of course, of quite a different skill level.) What The Children’s War and Other Poems brings to the tradition of ekphrasis—where the idea of the maker is important to the descriptive process of the poem—is the idea that the child artist, as witness, also provides a valuable perspective—one that is able to render the world’s injustices with an honesty that exposes the very challenge of representing the universality of human suffering. In doing so, Beers’s collection invites an important question: how do we, as readers and also as beholders, construe meaning from the images created by such witnesses of political violence?

The collection begins with a meditation on resemblance in the poem, “I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars” (which takes its title from a quote by the novelist E. M. Forster). “Sometimes the airplanes resemble planes,” the poem begins, comparing a vehicle of war—by way of the vehicle of smile—to one of the more abstract geometric concepts. In this way, Beers begins the ekphrastic section of her book with a maneuver that is as ingenious as it is subtle for this poem (a four-line vignette) addresses the difficulty of even describing how the machines of war appear:

Sometimes the airplanes resemble planes; sometimes they congeal in the distance, like ticks stuck to the page. Always, the upside down people are dead. Always, there is a mother screaming.

In doing so, this poem ingeniously undermines its own literary mode. Description, which is at the heart of ekphrasis, functions within this poem—as image—as an ongoing process. The parallelism of the repeated adverb “sometimes” even further destabilizes the act of description though it is balanced with the repeated, emphatic “always” statements that maintain that death and suffering are constants within the flux of perceptive and interpretive processes.

These poems of the “Children’s War” section of the book are, themselves, vignettes, tightly compressing a complex world into the details that the voice (or voices) carry. In “From an eight-year-old Darfurian girl’s drawing” (reproduced in its totality), italicized questions explicitly mark shifts in voice in which the adult is presented almost as a neutral presence that must always ask “why” and yet is prohibited from anything other than a surface interaction with the subject of the drawing:

The tank, bigger than the hut, fires and all of the colors explode from the hut. Why is this man green? Because he is from the tank. Why is this woman red? Because she was shot in the face. And why aren’t you colored in? Because it is like I...