Dreaming the End of War by Benjamin Alire Sáenz (review)

2 2 0 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e S u m m e r 2 0 0 8 Dreaming the End of War. By Benjamin Alire Saenz. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2006. 71 pages, $15.00. Reviewed by Herb Thompson Emory & Henry College, Emory, Virginia The twelve poems in this book address the concept of war and humanity as it exists along the border between the United States and Mexico and, in a deeper way, delve into wars that are more personal, cultural, and spiritual. In his prologue, Saenz questions how to confront the remnants of war in a time of peace and how these remnants relate to the present. He urges readers to somehow find a way to address the past, simultaneously forgetting and remem­ bering the bombs and evil in the world, thereby moving to a place where war and conflict are no longer necessary. In “The First Dream: Learning to Kill,” Saenz explores how the death of a mosquito is more complex than humans realize. We take life for granted, and we do not practice Albert Schweitzer’s “Reverence for Life.” In “The Second Dream: Killing and Memory of War,” he explores how we convince ourselves that if we kill for a good reason, then such killing is just and good when, in fact, it is just killing: “In the age of informa­ tion, we choose / to live without information” (15). In “The Third Dream: The Names and Their Gods,” he contends that to the degree we must try to define terrorism and love, we must also learn how to define “enough,” in the sense of how much evil and/or war is “enough.” Through dreams that border on magical realism to experiences that are personal to the speaker in the poem (and ones we all can relate to), Saenz takes us to where our past comes into contact with the lives we are now living, where we occasionally reconnect with images of our youth and life and, as we do, are forced to determine if we can tolerate more war. Saenz wants people to see peace as a vision: “Peace / is like the horizon. We can see it in the distance / but it is always far and we can never touch it” (47). He asserts that poets and writers can’t make peace happen. He believes that it takes people who actually do something, not just think and wonder about it: “No poet, no engineer, no / Politician, no philosopher, no artist, no novelist, has ever / Dreamed a solution. I am tired of living in exile. I am tired / Of chasing others off the land. // Let me say this again. Again. Again. / I want, I want this war to end. To end” (48). By sharing images from the speaker’s life in the war between cultures, Saenz makes the case that only dreams originating from lives fully lived may be able to end war. We must first dream peace so that it becomes a part of our vision for the future, and then we can move toward peace. This is a powerful book that addresses a part of the Southwest many of us seem to want to forget. It is a book worthy of further thought and serious study. ...