Poetic encounters with war’s ‘others’

Abstract: War art, like poems spoken by Pashtun women in Afghanistan, can tell our emotions things we did not know about war. For some time, this piece was titled ‘The other side of Western war’. I’d wanted to express an attempt to move beyond soldier-centric understandings of the recent war in Afghanistan, to imagine how it might be lived by Afghans. Eventually, I changed the title, unsatisfied with my designation of the war as ‘Western’ and thus belonging to ‘us’. The question I wish to pose, clearer now than it was when I started, is this: can art, poetry, in this case, break down the binaries that cleave apart the humans of war into separable categories like ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘self’ and ‘other’, and ‘grievable’ and ‘un-grievable’.