Anthology of The Second Wellington International Poetry Festival - October 7-11 2004.

Anthology of The Second Wellington International Poetry Festival - October 7-11 2004.

  11:00 AM    Copyright © AVEditor

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The Second Wellington International Poetry Festival took place in October 7-11 2004. The book is the official festival anthology and features all 28 of the poets appearing at the festival. The theme of the festival is human rights. The Second Wellington International Poetry Festival Anthology edited by Mark Pirie, Ron Riddell and Saray Torres.

Antonieta Villamil's poems on pages 87 to 91. The poems are unfinished versions of poems originally written in English: 

A poem is the last frontier of resistance. Letter to the brother errased without trace, The sweatlodge, Tunka Tipi or the stone people’s house, Cumbia dance of freedom.

 

 

A POEM:

A FINGERPRINT

 

December 31, 2001

 

 

A digital

instant taken

of human experience

 

The DNA           of memory

 

A poem:            the power to

show us           in a fraction

of the present

 

the future embedded in the

mirror image of its past

 

A poem:           the last

frontier

of resistance.

Includes: B R Dionysius, Brentley Frazer, Melissa Ashley and Paul Hardacre from Australia; Antonieta Villamil (Colombia), Cecilia Guridi (Chile), Karin Bellman (Sweden), Frank Pervan (Croatia), Cristina Galeata (Romania), Peter Cooley (USA), Louise Warren (Canada), Fleur Adcock (UK), Michael Harlow, Apirana Taylor, CK Stead, Alistair Paterson, Richard von Sturmer, John O'Connor, Leonard Lambert, Brian Potiki, Keith Thorsen, and David Chan (New Zealand).

Title	The Second Wellington International Poetry Festival Anthology
Editors	Mark Pirie, Ron Riddell and Saray Torres
Category	New Zealand Poetry
Format	Paperback
Extent	114 pages
ISBN	0-476-00886-7
Price	NZ$24.95
Release	October 2004

New Zealand, Dissident Voice* #7 - Rhymes of Resistance or Poems of Privilege?

The basis for this rant stems from a single event. I attended a poetry reading at the recent international poetry festival held in Wellington. Antonieta Villamil from Colombia was our draw card; the program indicated that her poetry was fuelled by the oppression and victimization of people opposing the Colombian regime. There were four other poets, a guest poet from India and three from NZ. The session began and the compeer announced that this festival had an underlying theme of human rights. Villamil delivered a strong, impassioned, and engaging recitation, utilizing song and second voice to add dynamics.

Villamil's reading regarding human rights presents a socially connected voice. I love poems that can stir emotion, artistic endeavor and linguistic acomplishment... 

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In the early 80's, within the field of music, there were a few performers that included elements of social commentary and analysis into their work. Songs such as ‘Riot Squad', ‘There is no depression in NZ', and ‘Don't go' were all grounded in some local context. However, since the mid 80's and the redirection of the economy, artistic content has lost that focus.

To my thinking, artists and creative workers have a responsibility to take the situations which surround our environment, complex or otherwise, and reinterpret them back via poems, song, painting, theatre, or any other form of media available. Globally, and historically, artists and entertainers are a central part of a community rather than a perceived segregated elite. And it has not always been a safe career option. Poets have been murdered by various states for publicly presenting opposing or dissenting views, musicians have been banished and outcast, and dance and theatre groups have travelled and engaged local communities, placing themselves at personal risk, to inform, educate, and present alternatives in the days before the internet.

It seems that the greatest social statement of recent days is Dobbyn's tune ‘Loyal'. The national psyche was fed into the groupthink sheep wringer, branding loyalty and indicating patriotic enthusiasm as only being expressible by supporting a rich man’s boring boat race. Globally, when Gulf War II started, many mainstream American artists united to oppose the Bush regime across the artistic spectrum. The same cannot be said for here. Don McGlashen from the Muttonbirds is the only prominent NZ musician who has been actively visible in the anti-war movement. Where are the rest? Why has it taken two years for artists to mobilize for Zaoui?

What are artists responses to the foreshore and seabed confiscation, G.E., civil unions, NZ involvement in Iraq, gender politics, Steven Wallace, or any other situations that need exploration in one form or another? Without these conscious actions, provoking discussion, we become prone to forgetting. Shallow, consumer driven art does not make for deep, evolving, and inspirational cultures. It is a continuation of the disposable mindset that pervades current thinking.

I may have missed others involved in working with social campaigns and my criticism is not intended to attack people's actual efforts. When I mention McGlashen's effort I'm talking about the most mainstream of NZ performers. I have not seen such involvement from others such as Dobbyn, the Finn brothers, Shihad etc in social causes. I also acknowledge that there are areas of creative exploration where issues are explored in depth such as Hip Hop artists like Upper Hutt Posse, labels such as Dawn Raid, painters such as James Robinson and Robyn Kahukiwa, the Skate Board poets, satirical writing like the now defunct Babylon Express, and a number of other independent practitioners within NZ.

The combination of creative aesthetic and social commentary does not equate to loss of artistic integrity or quality, more so the opposite. It broadens the scope of the audience, links history with today, delivers critique and information in accessible formats other that academic tomes. And by this critique I am not suggesting that art needs to only be overtly political in content, the subtlety and nuances of personal exploration are as important as the broad social analysis. Art can be informative and entertaining at the same time. It requires commitment, a perception outside the self and ability to interpret wider issues with personal responses, and a willingness to engage others in dialogue.

– Mr Sterile & D.S. Lunchbox, speakers who curiously trace the history of globalization back to the Trilateral Commission. Here in New Zealand, I have seen white environmentalists accuse Maori of “reverse racism” for daring to assert their rights to protect indigenous flora and fauna under threat from bioprospectors and the TRIPs agreement. At other international conferences on globalization, activists have dismissed Indigenous Peoples' perspectives on globalization as “narrow” and “nativistic”, arguing that they do not attach enough importance to class analysis.

Naturally we feel outrage at security clampdowns against popular Mobilizations in Auckland, Vancouver, Seattle, Melbourne, Quebec City and Washington DC. But shock and surprise? Colonial governments hav always used police and military as an army of occupation against Indigenous Peoples. State-sanctioned abuses against indigenous communities have long been a dime-a-dozen but have frequently failed to register with many folk.

I have heard the fairy story, told with passion, authority and a touch of nostalgia, by non-indigenous New Zealanders, North Americans and Australians who speak earnestly of the freedoms and democratic rights enjoyed in their countries. Apparently things were pretty good until the neoliberal ideologues and big business seized control, opened up the economy, started hocking everything off to the transnational corporations, and saw Joe and Jill Citizen dispossessed of things that they thought were theirs. So say dozens of activists, academics, politicians as they state their opposition to the neoliberal agenda. This version of history begins when globalization started impacting non-indigenous peoples. The words “democracy” and “sovereignty” crop up time and time again in their talks, and in anti-globalization literature and campaigns in these countries. What do such appeals to democratic traditions, concepts and values mean when they ignore past and present-day realities of colonization in these countries?

While attending the 1997 Peoples Summit on APEC in Vancouver I remember being struck by how speaker after speaker attacked transnational corporations, and identified them as the driving force behind APEC, yet utterly ignored struggles like that of the Lubicon Cree Nation in Northern Alberta – the next province – against gas, oil and timber transnationals invading their unceded territory with the complicity of the Canadian state. Nor did the fact that a “liberal democratic” government of Canada, like the one which through hosting APEC hoped to influence Asian trading partners with “Canadian values”, had sent more armed forces against Mohawk people defending their lands in the 1990 standoff near Oka, Quebec than it sent to the Gulf War rate a mention. But then again, the Vancouver Peoples Summit itself was part-funded by the same NDP British Columbia provincial government which in 1995 initiated a massive military operation at Gustafsen Lake only a few hours’ drive away, against a small group of Indigenous Peoples defending their sacred lands.

Many critics of globalization play down the role and relevance of the nation-state, attributing power almost solely to transnational corporations and international institutions like the Bretton Woods triplets. Yet this takes the focus away from the nature and power of the state and even romanticizes it. Such global campaigns run the risk of distracting people's gaze from long-standing injustices underfoot. In delegitimizing these global actors we must be very aware of the dangers in uncritically legitimizing nation-states which are themselves based on the dispossession of Indigenous Peoples. We cannot ignore the centuries of resistance by many indigenous nations against incorporation into the colonial state. We cannot ignore the colonial foundations of the countries in which we live. To do so is to mask the true nature of our societies, and the extent to which they are built on colonization and exploitation.

How can Indigenous Peoples be expected to validate, affirm and seek incorporation into national or international movements dominated by non-indigenous activists, organizations and agendas which are reluctant to address domestic issues of colonization with the same vigor and commitment that they put into fighting transnational capital or the WTO?

Of course some important alliances have been forged between Indigenous Peoples and non-indigenous organizations confronting globalization. Many (usually small, under-resourced) activist groups struggle hard to draw the connections between corporate globalization and colonization, to support local indigenous sovereignty struggles and educate non-indigenous peoples about these issues.

Movements to expose and oppose corporate globalization have a very real potential to mobilize support from non-indigenous people for meaningfully addressing the issues of colonization in New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the USA. We should be challenging the jurisdiction of these colonial settler state governments as they move to sign international trade and investment deals, in the light of their continued denial of Indigenous Peoples' rights, jurisdiction, and title.

The centuries-old culture of colonization holds the key to understanding and defeating the current wave of globalization. If we understand how “democratic” governments like Canada can sanction the ongoing assault on Indigenous lands and communities it isn't hard to understand why such governments subscribe to free market international trade and investment policies.

In determining the values and foundations on which we build alternatives to the neoliberal agenda our movements must be prepared to examine our own propensity to oppress. We cannot build alternatives to globalization on the rotten foundations of the denial of occupying indigenous lands and the ongoing suppression of Indigenous Peoples' rights. “The colonizers are always building rotten foundations and expecting us to step into a completed building” says Sharon Venne.

If anti-globalization activists and organizations do not address these questions with some urgency then I fear that the growing resistance to neoliberalism in the global North risks being as inherently colonialist as the institutions and processes which it opposes. Our usage of the term colonization will be little more than empty rhetoric if our analysis does not acknowledge the context in which corporate globalization – and the  worldwide opposition to it – is taking place.

Those of us active in anti-globalization struggles in Canada, the USA, New Zealand and Australia need to examine our role in the colonization and globalization of the earth. Only then can we seriously talk about liberation and real alternatives to the neoliberal agenda. 

-- Aziz Choudry #Aotearoa Dissident Voice - New Zealand's most unrespectable revolutionary rag. Aotearoa Dissident Voice is a free volunteer-run magazine that aims to provide an open space for the free flow of anarchist and libertarian left news, analysis and creativity. www.dissidentvoice.org.nz edcollective@dissidentvoice.org.nz

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WAR’S UNLIKELY PARTNER: POETRY

WAR’S UNLIKELY PARTNER: POETRY

  2:55 PM    Copyright © AVEditor

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By ROBERT W. WELKOS. SEP. 8, 2004, 12 AM. TIMES STAFF WRITER

Antonieta Villamil holds the artwork of painter Joe Bravo 

during the protest against the war in Iraq. 

March 23 of 2003, California section of Los Angeles Times newspaper. 

The 74-minute documentary not only explores how poetry and war have been intertwined from the time of ancient Babylonia and Troy to the conflict in Iraq, but includes the words of Homer, Tennyson, Walt Whitman, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and other poets who have written powerfully about war and its consequences. 

The film also features a number of lesser-known living poets, including:

* Colombian-born Antonieta Villamil of Los Angeles, whose poem “My Name Is Pedro” is about her 27-year-old brother, who left home one day in 1990 in and vanished. She believes he was kidnapped by one of the warring factions in that troubled South American nation.

“It’s the most horrible way to lose a loved one,” Villamil said in a recent interview. “You have no place. You are left only with memories of that person. You have to create a place for mourning. There is no body. And always you have the hope that that person might come back some day.”

Antonieta Villamil reading poetry against war during 

the Poetry Marathon Against War at the Veteran´s 

Arlington West Memorial in Santa Monica Beach, California.

* Seattle poet Emily Warn, whose father was a D-day paratrooper who suffered combat trauma and numbed himself with alcohol, which led to his early death. Warn is shown on-screen reciting a poem she wrote called “California Poppy,” which recalls the fragments of cherished memories she retains of her dad and a eucalyptus grove. “Come back, moment in the grass,” the poem goes. “Come back, momentary father.”

* Sherman Pearl of Santa Monica recites his work “The Poem in the Time of War,” which he wrote with lines in mind from William Carlos Williams’ poem “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” which reads, in part, “It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.”

“That is what my poem tries to do,” Pearl said. “It’s not a battlefield experience. It’s an expression of how poetry responds to something as large and disturbing and painful and impacting as war.”

“This is not a film about famous poets,” said executive producer Andrew Himes. “It’s a film about poetry in wartime and this natural, powerful, human impulse to write poetry to express your emotions, to tell a story.” The film grew out of a grass-roots protest that made headlines in early 2003, when some poets opposed to the invasion of Iraq protested First Lady Laura Bush’s invitation to some noted poets to attend a White House symposium celebrating the works of Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Langston Hughes. Mrs. Bush canceled the session.

Sam Hamill, who edits the Copper Canyon Press, an influential poetry publisher, was one of those who declined the White House invitation.

“I just said, ‘Wait a minute,’ ” Hamill recalled. “These people cannot possibly be reading the Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Langston Hughes that I’ve read all my life. These are three poets that would have despised this administration.”

Hamill, who lives in Port Townsend, Wash., then asked about 50 fellow poets to “reconstitute a Poets Against the War movement like the one organized to speak out against the war in Vietnam.” Within four days, 1,500 poets had responded and a website was set up to handle the influx of responses.

“Organizing poets is like herding chickens,” Hamill joked. “Every one of them is a totally independent mind and everyone wants to speak from a totally independent point of view.” An invitation to poets around the world to send in videos of their poetry readings led to the film.

The movie begins with grainy war footage that has become all too familiar: Battleship Row belching thick, black smoke over Pearl Harbor; bombs dropping from the bellies of warplanes; American soldiers opening up on an unseen enemy in the jungles of Vietnam.

And then comes what is perhaps the most jarring image of all: the superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Lt. Gen. William J. Lennox Jr., discussing combat ... and poetry.

Poetry?

“For an infantryman or a soldier in combat, it’s very hard for them sometimes to articulate what they experience,” says Lennox, who holds a master’s degree and doctorate in literature from Princeton University. “They go through a whole series of emotions: joy, elation, horror, fear. What literary genre allows you to portray that feeling but poetry? I don’t know.”

The Lennox interview forms part of a new documentary, “Poetry in Wartime,” which features poets from around the world sharing their views and experiences of war.

On Saturday, libraries and colleges in more than 100 cities across the U.S. and Canada will screen “Poetry in Wartime.” In the Los Angeles area, a screening is scheduled at 3 p.m. at the Redondo Beach Public Library. Other locations can be found on the www.poetryinwartime.org website.

The producers say they are in discussions with distributors in hopes of releasing the film theatrically in the year 2005. 

“A lot of it was pretty badly shot,” Himes recalled. “I had this huge box full of videotapes and felt somebody ought to make a film about this. There’s some kind of story to be told. I couldn’t find anybody else to do it.”

Himes, who formerly worked at Microsoft as founding editor of Microsoft Developer Network and who also helped Microsoft pioneer the subscription software business, had never made a movie before. Through co-producer Jonathan King, a Web/communications consultant and writer for nonprofit organizations, Himes met King’s brother, Hollywood filmmaker Rick King, who came on board as writer and director. Rick King’s credits include numerous television documentaries and directing the feature films “Hard Choices” and “Off the Wall,” as well as co-producing and sharing story credit on the 1991 film “Point Break.”

“I’m not an expert on poetry and I’m not an expert on war,” Rick King said. “Coming at it from the outside, I felt like I usually do in making a documentary. I felt I was the audience. I asked, ‘What is the information I need and who do I go to get it?’ We wanted it to be an examination of war and poetry both.”

While the film contains graphic images of war’s carnage, King believes the poetry gives humanity to these images. “The story we tried to tell is a challenge because it really is trying to talk about an experience more than a recitation or a series of facts.”

Himes believes the conflict in Iraq, like past wars, could see its own flowering of great poetry: “There are lots of soldiers right now writing poetry because they’ve been through experiences that they do not know how to communicate in any other way.”

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Antonieta Villamil in documentary Voices in Wartime: The role of poets during time of war

Antonieta Villamil in documentary Voices in Wartime: The role of poets during time of war

  10:24 PM    Copyright © AVEditor

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=KBU9MVZN4PA

Voices In Wartime - 12 Minute Preview

Voices in Wartime is a feature-length documentary (56-minute or 74-minutes) that sharply etches the experience of war through powerful images and the words of poets -- unknown and world-famous. Soldiers, journalists, historians and experts on combat interviewed in Voices in Wartime add diverse perspectives on war's effects on soldiers, civilians and society. In Voices in Wartime, poets around the world, from the United States and Colombia to Britain and Nigeria to Iraq and India, share their views and experiences of war that extend beyond national borders and into the depth of the human soul.

Antonieta Villamil in Voices in Wartime - Documentary film by Andrew Himes regarding poets against war and an interview to Antonieta Villamil regarding the Role of Poets In Society, The Irak War and the conflict in Colombia.

THE BEGINNING OF THE END MUST BE ENDED, AND THE BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE OF THE END IS NOW. —Wilfred Owen.

No matter how significant Poets Against War was, it’s still a tiny movement, in comparison to world history. This film is about the power of poetry to explore the reality of war, the emotional essence of war and how is experienced across borders from different perspectives. We have a lieutenant general from West Point for example, we have a woman poet from Colombia who lost her brother to disappearance, and we have a Vietnam veteran who returned from the war to face thirty years of nightmares.

The idea is to help the audience understand war in a new way. It is not going to change history to tell the story of Poets Against War. What might change history is if people come to the next decision point about whether to go to a war and they have a different point of view, because they understand the reality of war at a deeper level.

The Role of Poets and the Iraq War

This interview was reproduced 

from an interview for the film 

Voices in Wartime.  





What was the connection that you felt between the disappearance of your brother and the war in Iraq?



The war in Iraq made it feel very personal because I saw in it the pattern of the unfortunate foreign policy of the United States repeated. With this war in Iraq I knew many innocent people were going to be killed for something that from the beginning was a lie. 

I was very worried and uneasy thinking that a country can go to another country and just basically take away, by means of lying, their natural resources, which in this case is oil. That happens in Colombia too. 





Did you feel that you could do anything about the United States invading Iraq? 





I took to the streets. I took to all the possibilities. I went to Answer; I went to meetings with Not in Our Name, with Latinos Against War.  We organized a big march in East L.A.  I went to all the marches that I could. Prior to the war in Iraq was 9-11 and we were left for a few months with our mouths open thinking it just could not be true. It could not happen here. It was not possible. It was as if a nightmare was repeating itself. I felt like I was back on a street in a third world country. How could it be happening here? 

Then everything started building up, and building up to the war in Iraq. It was one mistake and one overlaying of wording and stupid reasons after the other. It was unbelievable. You were seeing these big, fat, unreal lies being built in front of our own noses and we could not do anything about it. We felt so impotent. I could not believe that we fell into this collective karma. How long did we think we could get away with it?



How did you hear about Poets Against War? 



I am a founder member of Latinos Against War, where we were in contact with lots of people that were against the war. I know many poets. I do not know Sam Hamill personally but I knew Ram Devineni from Rattapallax Press in New York. We did Dialog Among Civilizations and Poets Against Violence. 

I organized a Poetry Marathon Against War in Iraq in Los Angeles. Since the war in Iraq I’ve been writing a lot. I had all these poems about my brother and other poems about the war in Colombia. I wrote poems about different experiences of war and what it does to people. And I write about the disappeared a lot. We are witnesses and how can we not write that? 

I started communicating with a lot of people through the Internet and I sent the first poem I wrote in English “My Name is Pedro” to Poets Against War and they published that poem.

When you sent your poem, did it make you feel that something was happening? 



Sending the poem to Poets Against War and knowing the stand that the poets took made me feel better. However, I knew that even if we could not stop the war this is the place where poets should be. I felt this is what we should be doing, even if at that point, this war was going to happen. What we were doing was part of something bigger. 
All the machinery put into creating this war did not start a few months ago or since September 11. It started way before that, because of many accumulated events. I knew that once the machine reached that boiling point it was just the warmongers, the dogs of war letting the people know that this is going to happen despite whatever you do. 
That was very clear. For us it was just a way of telling people what was happening and a way of saying no. This is what we should be doing, saying NO.

What do you think is the role of the poet? 



Poets are the critics of feelings and experience. We do pretty much what the mathematicians do with numbers, but we do it with language. Poetry for me is at the foundation of culture. 

At this moment we are speaking of poetry but we are also recording. We are recording a memory of the human experience that will last a long time. That memory has to be into words first, of image and color, and then our human experience takes off to a place in time and permanence. 
I think poets are witnesses in charge of making human experience permanent. One of the funny things about poetry is that you will never see a bestseller poet. Maybe, after 50 to 100 years, you can make it into the news, like Neruda. I feel very lucky if people hear a little bit of that experience coming through me. You cannot help but to realize that what you are writing, even though it may sometimes sound deep or dense, you are writing for a child in the future. Children, for the poet, are the eyes into the future.  I hope that they will be reading those poems when they are 40 or 50. I have seen poems change and help people’s lives.

Is the role of writers and poets in Latin America more vital than here in the United States?





The role of the poet everywhere, not only in the United States but also in the rest of America, and the world is to be the conscience of the culture, of the community; not only by writing, but also by reading. There are many young poets performing their poetry now because we have mass communication like radio and movies. That seems to be getting people to listen to poets. 
It is a challenge but I think that poets resort to all kind of mediums. We collaborate with painters, with musicians, with dancers, with filmmakers. Therefore, there is this active, organic life of the writer and the poet within the community. Besides that, many of the ideas for music, dance, film, visual art, etc, go though a written form before you perform it in public.

What else can poets do?




Organize and be aware of their surroundings. 

One very important thing that poets can do is bring poetry from up in the clouds and put it on earth. Put jeans, tennis shoes, and a T-shirt on poetry and send it walking the streets to notice what is going on in the present. I hope that poetry at that moment can find the same rhythm as that of the human breath.



The Conflict in Colombia

This interview was reproduced 

from the film Voices in Wartime.

  



Tell us a little bit about yourself.
 

I was born in Bogota, Colombia in 1962 in the month of the comets. In the Chinese horoscope, I am a tiger. These are the monkey years so usually tigers have a very slow difficult time in a monkey year. I started dancing before walking and at ten years of age, I took on poetry. 
I just love words and music. My father used to play a lot of music while I was in the womb. He always played music in the morning, so I always woke up to music. I think that I noted the rhythms. We talk in Colombia like Italians, very fast and when we talk, we look like we are fighting. However, we are just talking. 





Why did you leave Colombia? 



I left Colombia out of some kind of strange destiny, because I had to be here talking with you today. One thing I was always glancing a little bit ahead into the future, reading the signs around me. I became aware of all the injustices. I knew that if I stayed I would have to go to the mountains or I would probably be disappeared eventually like many activists. Deep inside I saw no other way. I had a great feeling of running and running away. That is what I did. 

Like a puzzle, I saw it unfolding, the pieces one by one until I got out. I went to Miami. It has become the longest vacation. Before I left Colombia I remember looking at every bird, every tree, every street, at faces, houses, buildings, and I knew I was saying goodbye for a very long time. I knew that I would never leave otherwise. 

It is as if I left because I wanted to stay. That was a way of surviving beyond and before it happened. I saw it coming and I said that I was not going to let it happen to me, and I wanted to write poetry. Poetry saved me.

Tell me about the conflict in Colombia. 



The conflict in Colombia started a very long time ago, more than 50 years ago. Colombia is a very rich country. It is one of the richest countries in its biodiversity. It has a lot of petroleum, 24-karat gold, and emeralds. It has very rich soil. You throw into soil a seed and the next thing you see is a tree with very sweet, exotic fruit. 

It is a country with a very long history of corrupted governments. All the rich land and all the opportunities are in the hands of very few. You can just handle so much humiliation, hunger, and lack of opportunities. What do you do with all these frustrations, wanting to do what we would be able to do in a normal environment? 

People have to fight for their rights and have to fight for justice. Until social justice is achieved in Colombia, you can kill everyone and the situation is not going to change. Hunger and injustice is like the sun; you cannot just put your finger up to block it and then try to say see? It is not there. It will always be there until justice is done.

This conflict is between the government and the paramilitary groups in the countryside? 



The conflict in Colombia is very complicated. In the beginning, it was about people with few opportunities fighting against government corruption. Then the middle and upper classes that own all the land needed people to defend them, so along came a group called the paramilitary. The government is a suspect of having ties to the paramilitary. The military erases whole generations of people that have leftist ideas about where the country should go. 
Whole generations in Argentina, Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay and Colombia disappeared in this way. Then the narco-traffickers appeared and have ties to parts of the government. The guerrillas are suspect of having ties to the narco-traffickers – not all of them, but enough to make the fight very complex, then you lose your objective, your reason. 

The guerillas say they defend the poorest people who have been taken advantage of for over 100 years. Then where do you draw the line? It is very complex. It is almost like we had our own Vietnam War in Colombia.



Do people in America know about what is going on in Colombia? 



I don’t think that enough people in the United States are aware of what’s going on. People are a little more aware lately with the help of technology like e-mail and digital cameras that can capture certain realities, but there are a lot of things that still seem like well kept secrets. For example a lot of people don’t know that we have a School of the Americas in Texas, which provides training to the military and mercenaries that go all over Latin America in a witch hunt against people with left ideas. I hope that more people will get to know because it is important to put a stop to the School of the Americas. United States is Not America. America goes all the way from Alaska to the Tierra del Fuego in Argentina. Central America and Mexico are America. Colombia is America. The military trained in the School of the Americas resort to the worst weapon that you can use against Civil Democracy and the social unification of Latin America, which is disappearance against people of leftist ideas. A conscientious democracy cannot exist without the participation of either right or left. It is like allowing a giant to pick on its own arms and legs or allowing the legs and arms to pick on its own brain. And if we don’t take care of the fire in our neighbor’s house, our brother’s house, it’s only a matter of time until it starts raining fire on our heads.

How has the political situation that you grew up with in Colombia affected your poetry? 



The political situation I grew up in affects my writing, and I write about social content a lot. I also write about love. However, when I write about love, even an erotic poem, I speak of something that exists within a social context. 
We are individuals, but we are also part of a collective community. Everything that has to do with social issues influences our individual lives. Love, things we see, daily life, is influenced by what is going on around you.

Tell us about your poem “Letter To the Brother That Went to War”. 

That poem had a different title: “What December 1990 Brought Us.” It is a poem written to my brother. I changed the title because suddenly it was not only my brother but our brothers and sisters – when I looked closely it was a whole generation that was disappearing and with the war in Iraq it was clear that generation was going to grow. We have to start serious investigation regarding the disappeared in Colombia. There is a sickening silence around this theme in Colombia. 


What was your brother like?  

I am very close to my brother. Pedro is his name, Pedro Villamil. I came to the United States in 1984 and I promised him I was going to take him with me a little later. I struggled here in the United States, coming to a new country, to a completely different culture and a completely different language. For a poet, that was a lot to take. Then I had to start putting it off. I did not see my family for eight years. In the ninth year I lost him to disappearance. Disappearance means we do not know where, we do not know how, we just do not know. He went out one day, like anybody else, and never came back. He had no reason to leave. He just never came back.

Do you think about Pedro a lot? 



I have dreams about him. I think that a family cannot recover from disappearance. Not knowing what happened, not having a place to mourn. 
My mother, Alicia is a very fervent Catholic. She never wanted to give a mass in the church for him. We told her that we probably ought to have a place in the cemetery for Pedro but she refused. She said, no, Pedro is coming back one day. 
He would never have left my mother. Pedro was the kind of son that a mother dreams. Always making her laugh, helping her. Mamma you want this, but it broke, so I will fix it, do not worry. Pedro was 32-years old when he disappeared. He was the light of the house, the light of my mother’s eyes.


What do you think happened?  

When I went back to Colombia I started asking friends and people I knew, about the disappearance of my brother. I found myself not only asking about my brother Pedro but also asking, “Where is Julieta? Where is Chaparro? Where is Juan? Where is Maria? Where is Magdalena?  Where is…”

I was afraid to ask. I was very afraid to ask because the answer was always the same. I realized it was a whole generation.

The answer was always that the people disappeared?  

Yes, or it was, “So-and-so was tired of the corruption and what was going on and they took up arms and went to the mountains. Or he was taken by the paramilitary. Or he’s in jail. Her, she’s… we do not know. She disappeared. She went to the corner just to buy bread and never came back. Last time we saw him was at a party and these men that came in a car took him.” “Oh, and where is so and so?” “Well, I think he’s somewhere in a country very far away.” Suddenly a whole generation I knew was not there – they were all away or lost.

In this poem, does Pedro become a symbol of all the people who have disappeared? 



In the poem “My Name is Pedro” he is a symbol of all the people disappeared in Central and South American countries. Pedro died of this disappearance and it is not like other people you know who died of cancer, or of AIDS, which is terrible. People who die suddenly, who go to sleep and never wake up, so you can say he died of this or he died of that. But when you don’t know, when you don’t find a place to go to mourn that loss, what did they die of? 

That is why I said Pedro died of disappearance. He is in the long list of people that disappear every day in Central and South American countries.

The first stanza, “What can I tell you dear brother, mutilated in silence,” is so hopeless and so deeply sad. Were you talking to your brother?  

I feel like I am talking to my brother every time I write about him. It is a way of communicating with him, with his memory. A way to reconcile with the idea of not seeing him getting older, having children… 




Letter to the brother that went to war

Listen to this poem: mp3 / windows media



·         Voices in Wartime: 74-minute version

·         Voices in Wartime: 56-minute version

·         Voices in Wartime: 12-minute preview

·         Audio Poetry from Voices in Wartime

·         News & Reviews of Voices in Wartime

·         Poems in the Voices in Wartime Film

·         Who Made the Voices in Wartime Film

·         Who is in the Voices in Wartime Film

o    Ali Habash

o    Antonieta Villamil

o    Arthur Miller

o    Cameron Penny

o    Chris Abani

o    Chris Hedges: Journalist

o    Craig White

o    David Connolly

o    Dominic Hibberd

o    Emily Dickinson

o    Emily Warn

o    Enheduanna

o    Garrison Keillor

o    Hashim Shafiq

o    Jon Stallworthy

o    Jonathan Schell

o    Jonathan Shay

o    Langston Hughes

o    Marie Howe

o    Marilyn Nelson

o    Pamela Hale

o    Paul Mysliwiec

o    Peter Levitt

o    Poets Against the War

o    Rachel Bentham

o    Randall Jarrell

o    Sam Hamill

o    Sampurna Chattarji

o    Saul Williams

o    Sherman Pearl

o    Siegfried Sassoon

o    Sinan Antoon

o    Todd Swift

o    Walt Whitman

o    Wilfred Owen

o    William Lennox

·         Video Shorts from Voices in Wartime

·         Beyond Wartime film

·         Curricula for Voices in Wartime

·         Voices in Wartime Anthology

1.    The Documentary Film "Voices in Wartime"

Who is in the Voices in Wartime Film

		Chris Abani Nigerian war survivor, human rights activist and refugee, author of three poetry collections and two novels, recipient of the 2001 PEN USA Freedom-to-Write Award and a Lannan Literary Fellowship. Read the interview
		Sinan Antoon An Iraqi poet, novelist, filmmaker and translator, published a collection of poems Mawshur Muballal bil-Huroob (A Prism; Wet with War) and a novel, I`jam. Read the interview
		Rachel Bentham Poet and novelist from Bristol, England, is widely published in the small press. Her stories and dramas are often broadcast on the BBC. Read the interview
		Sampurna Chattarji Born in Africa, she is award-winning poet and short-story writer. Her work has appeared in Poetry India: Millennium Voices and 100 Poets Against the War, among others. She lives in Mumbai (Bombay), India. Read Chattarji's poetry
		David Connolly A poet who lives in South Boston and served with the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment in the Vietnam war. He is author of the poetry collection Lost in America. Read the interview
		Emily Dickinson 1830-1886. Reclusive and influential Massachusetts poet. Read Dickinson's poetry
		Ali Habash Iraqi poet who lives in Baghdad. Read Habash's poetry
		Pamela Talene Hale Poet from Houston and Seattle. Read the interview
		Sam Hamill Author of many volumes of poetry, essays, and translations, co-founder of Poets Against the War, editor of Copper Canyon Press. Read the interview
		Chris Hedges A longtime New York Times war correspondent who covered conflicts in places such as El Salvador, the Balkans, and the Persian Gulf. He shared a 2002 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of global terrorism. He is author of War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. Read the interview
		Dominic Hibberd Author of Wilfred Owen: A New Biography and several other books about poets and poetry of the First World War. He lives in the United Kingdom. Read the interview
		Marie Howe Poet and professor at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. Read more
		Langston Hughes 1902-1967. Eloquent and influential U.S. poet, essayist, playwright, storyteller, and activist for peace and social justice. Read Hughes' poetry
		Randall Jarrell 1914-1965. U.S. poet, soldier, and control tower operator during the Second World War. His poetry book, Little Friend, Little Friend, bitterly and dramatically documented the intense fears and moral struggles of young soldiers. Read Jarrell's poetry
		Lieutenant General William Lennox, Jr. Superintendent of the United States Military Academy at West Point. General Lennox, wrote his PhD dissertation on American war poetry. Read the interview
		Peter Levitt Poet, author, translator, and lifelong peace activist from the U.S., now living in British Columbia, Canada. Read Levitt's poetry and personal statement
		Paul Mysliwiec U.S. Army First Lieutenant who led his unit through the invasion and first months of occupation of Iraq in Spring 2003. Read the interview
		Marilyn Nelson Poet Laureate of Connecticut and professor at University of Connecticut Read Nelson's poetry
		Wilfred Owen 1893-1918. Soldier poet and British Army officer during the First World War, killed in action a week before the Armistice in 1918. Read about Owen
		Sherman Pearl Poet and art activist who lives in Santa Monica, California. Read the interview
		Jonathan Schell The Nation's peace and disarmament correspondent, and the author of The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People and The Fate of the Earth. Read the interview
		Siegfried Sassoon 1886-1967. Siegfried Sassoon served as a soldier in the British Army during the First World War. Known for his bravery in battle, he was a friend and mentor to fellow poet Wilfred Owen. Read about Sassoon
		Hashim Shafiq Iraqi poet who lives in Baghdad. Read Shafiq's poetry
		Jonathan Shay Psychiatrist for the United States Department of Veterans Affairs in Boston, Shay treats combat veterans with severe psychological injuries and is the author of Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character, and Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming. Read the interview
		Jon Stallworthy Well-known expert on war poetry at the University of Oxford and author of a biography of Wilfred Owen and editor of The Oxford Book of War Poetry. Read the interview
		Todd Swift Canadian poet, essayist, screenwriter and international literary activist, editor of 100 Poets Against the War published in Britain in March 2003. Read the interview
		Antonieta Villamil Colombian poet, editor and translator. International Poetry Award "Gastón Baquero 2001" with her book Los Acantilados del Sueño. Read the interview
		Emily Warn Poet, teacher, and activist; author of The Novice Insomniac and three other collections of poetry; co-founder of Poets Against the War. Read the interview
		Craig White NBC cameraman embedded with the 3rd Infantry Division, one of the first U.S. Army units to enter Baghdad in April 2003, witness to a horrific firefight as he was trapped for hours under a bridge in Baghdad. Read the interview
		Walt Whitman 1819-1892. Groundbreaking U.S. poet, writer, teacher, journalist, and Civil War nurse. He is the author of Leaves of Grass. Read Whitman's poetry

Movies

Poetry personalizes war in riveting documentary

By Tyrone Beason

Seattle Times staff reporter

Related

• Poetry "Voices" from a powerful film

In the new documentary about war poetry and the trauma caused by armed conflict, "Voices in Wartime," U.S. Army 1st Lt. Paul Mysliwiec recites part of Alan Seeger's ominous World War I poem, "I Have a Rendezvous with Death," about the sacred duty of the warrior: And I to my pledged word am true / I shall not fail that rendezvous.

But in a contrasting segment, Jonathan Shay, a psychiatrist for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, makes a remark about soldiers that resonates in a completely different way: "In combat, men become each other's mothers."

The warrior as nurturer, tortured soul and poet. "Voices in Wartime," a symphony of war poems, taped interviews, graphic war footage and heartfelt analysis, clearly has an agenda, but perhaps not what one might expect.

The film sprang out of the Internet-based Poets Against the War movement of 2003, during the contentious run-up to the Iraq war.

Executive producer Andrew Himes, a former Microsoft web-page developer, wanted to make an anti-war film that capitalized on the debate sparked by that campaign, during which his friend, the poet and publisher Sam Hamill, organized writers and amateur scribes nationwide against the invasion. Himes set up the original Web site for that effort.

An avowed opponent of war who grew up in the racially polarized South and spent time there working as a civil-rights activist in the 1960s, the Internet-savvy Himes had used technology to expound on his views and encourage discussion, but he'd never contemplated making a film before this project came along.

Still, "it feels very organic and natural, because it's so connected to what I believe in," Himes said recently.

On Friday, more than two years after the Poets Against the War campaign and the start of the Iraq invasion, Himes' film opens at the Guild 45th Theatre in Wallingford, where he also lives.

The rollout of the $350,000 film, financed by Himes and other investors, has snowballed into a nationwide word-of-mouth campaign.

This winter, Himes used his Web site, www.voicesinwartime.org, to call on members of the public to hold "house parties" in homes and other settings to screen the documentary and discuss it afterward. The Web site includes a dialogue forum as well as writing samples from dozens of living contributors and past literary greats like Walt Whitman ("Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field") and Homer ("The Iliad").

A 230-page anthology, "Voices in Wartime" (Whit Press, $16.95), including verse and interview material that couldn't be used in the movie, is set for release May 1.

But the centerpiece is the film itself, which also premieres in cities such as Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and New York this month. The film rides a recent wave of moody, jaundiced depictions of war told through first-hand accounts, images and writing.

The recently released Iraq-war documentary "Gunner Palace," shot with U.S. troops in Baghdad, and the newer "Occupation: Dreamland," shot with troops near Fallujah, have both won critical acclaim for going beyond the politics of the Iraq war to the personal experience of fighting it.

"Voices in Wartime" is more of a meditation on the history of war and its emotional cost. It uses verse written through the ages to capture the nuances of war sometimes passed over in historical or journalistic accounts: What it feels like to kill, to witness the slaughter of comrades and to return home from war unable to mentally leave the battlefield.

From the earliest war poetry written in ancient Sumer (present-day Iraq) to esoteric verse from Emily Dickinson to bitter accounts penned by Iraqi poets after the American invasion two years ago, the film traces a well-trod path leading to the same age-old truth its two most recent predecessors reach in their own way — that war is hell for the soul as well as the body.

In this film, British poet Wilfred Owen's disillusionment over fighting in World War I rubs against the contemporary Colombian writer/activist Antonieta Villamil's anger and grief over the "disappearance" of her brother Pedro Villamil in that country's 50-year civil conflict.

The film, directed by Rick King, whose brother Jonathan King is a co-producer and close friend of Himes, is quietly yet assuredly anti-war, with a whole segment on the rise of Poets Against the War.

But its most transformative moments come from accounts of battlefield chaos and compassion told by those who've lived through it, from "shell-shocked" British soldiers during World War I to Vietnam veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder to weary soldiers fresh from the front lines in Iraq to haunted embedded journalists to the local victims of conflict.

The film cleverly employs the superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Lt. Gen. William Lennox Jr., who just happened to write his doctoral dissertation on American war poetry, to drive home the theme of poetry as the ultimate medium for chronicling war's impact on humanity.

"We did not design it to be a political polemic," Himes said of the film. "Instead, I wanted it to be the kind of film I could talk about with all of my Republican relatives."

Independent Seattle film critic Warren Etheredge, founder of the online Warren Report movie site, commended "Voices in Wartime" for its nuanced, apolitical tone.

"What I appreciated about the film is the filmmakers' dedication to finding balance on a subject that can be painfully partisan," said Etheredge, who organized a house party screening of the film at the Seattle Art Museum last month. "It's putting great poetic spin on what is the tragedy of any war, from either side."

"I've watched so many left-leaning documentaries in the past year — and I am left-leaning — and even they can become distracting at some point," Etheredge explained.

"This is not another anti-Bush or anti-Iraq war movie," he added. " 'Voices in Wartime' " is as close to a 'Ken Burns' look at this movement as one can get, without Ken Burns."

Producing the film shifted, rather than reinforced, Himes' personal biases.

Before making the film, he said he didn't feel much sympathy for the people who fight wars.

But that comment about soldiers becoming each other's mothers, which equated the concern a soldier has for a comrade in harm's way to that of a mother for her child, opened his eyes to the warrior's complex point of view.

"I think for the first time in my life, I really got it," Himes said. "That phrase altered me, reading it in the transcript. I typed those words and I started crying. It helped me get a sense of profound compassion for soldiers in combat that I don't think I'd felt before.

"It didn't change my stance toward war, but it changed my stance toward soldiers."

When Himes described his transformation to a staunch anti-war activist during a house party screening organized by PoetsWest at the Penny Café in Ballard last month, the woman seemed less than impressed, even though she said she enjoyed the film on an artistic level.

But Stacy Bannerman, of Kent, whose husband, National Guard Sgt. Lorin Bannerman, just returned from Iraq where he led a mortar platoon near Baghdad, sees potential for films like "Voices in Wartime" to bridge the chasm between war opponents and troops that developed during the Vietnam era.

"That breach is being healed in a sense," said Bannerman, an anti-war activist who attended a screening of the film at the Seattle Art Museum last month. "The warrior needs to understand the peacemaker and the peacemaker must understand the warrior. Historically, we have not had a recognition that that was possible. This film shows us that it is possible."

"There is a grace and a beauty and an honor and a courage to people that sign up to serve this country — I didn't see it before," she said.

Of course, being married to a National Guardsman just home from the front has influenced Bannerman's thinking, too.

"I've had the opportunity to come to see that with my husband, who is just such a good and decent human being — the best human being that I know," Bannerman said. "The first-hand experience with my husband forced me to see if I was going to see him that way, then I have to see all of them that way."

Himes, the executive producer, is nervously waiting to see whether a public fed a steady diet of war headlines for two years running will respond to "Voices in Wartime."

And if they do, Himes, the activist, can only hope that they respond with the same level of engagement that people like Bannerman and Etheredge have shown, even if they don't share the same political leanings.

"This is part of the core of who I am," Himes said of his project, "what my life is about."

Tyrone Beason: 206-464-2251 or tbeason@seattletimes.com

Copyright © 2005 The Seattle Times Company

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