JOIN USThe yellow birds, Kevin Powers, Hachette, 2012, pp 226., Rs 695
The author, Kevin Powers, who served in the US Army in Iraq, has probably penned one of the most poignant anti-war novels of recent times. The title of this novel and the bright yellow birds on the cover can lull the reader into a sense of complacency, until he or she reads the opening verse in which the yellow bird figures.
The violence perpetrated on this little bird is shocking and offers a pointer to what this book could be about. The opening paragraphs of the first chapter leave no room for doubt, with the introductory, “the war tried to kill us in the spring”, followed a little later by, “It tried to kill us every day, but it had not succeeded”.
The coverage of the Iraq war by the Western media was always biased, with “embedded” journalists writing in favour of the invading army and glossing over the unspeakable violence inflicted by them, upon the local population. Powers, with his gut-wrenching narrative coupled with poetic language, has managed to write a deeply personal story that not only covers the futility of war, but also looks at its psychological impact on soldiers.
These young men sign up hoping to become heroes and find that they have turned into something that they would never have imagined in their wildest dreams.
Powers turns his very powerful lens on the lives of three young soldiers, one of whom is Private Bartle, the first-person narrator. The story delves into Bart’s deep friendship with fellow soldier, Murphy, and the attempts by these two young men to keep their sanity, whilst death and destruction haunt every moment of their sleeping and waking lives. In their first introduction to death, these two young soldiers are splattered with the blood of a translator they were conversing with.
Bart speaks about his sense of ambivalence towards this death and the many others that he encounters, in the course of his army service at Al Tafar in Iraq. He explains it thus, “War is the great maker of solipsists: how are you going to save my life today? Dying would be one way. If you die, it becomes more likely that I will not.”
The story keeps shifting non-chronologically, between war zones and Bartle’s home environment. The juxtapositions, between the external devastations of war, and the inner conflicts of these three young men, are related in masterly fashion and could be attributed to Powers’s experiences as a soldier.
The young author must be commended for his heart-touching honesty in recreating the horrors of war, for those who have never gone there. His powerful words and imagery bring alive all the horrific moments and one can only weep for the plight of those who have actually faced it.
Powers has interspersed his lyrical writing with the unselfconscious use of abusive language, which is in place with all the physical and emotional havoc wreaked by the war. His detailed descriptions of blood and gore often sound dispassionate and succeed in conveying the distance that a soldier is forced to adopt, to keep his sanity in the midst of the mindless violence around him. But nowhere does the narrative make excuses for war in all its bizarre manifestations. Rather, what is unsaid but felt throughout is the “why” of going to war.
The author also uses the prism of war to touch upon deeply felt human emotions like friendship, the end of a romance, and the sense of guilt and helplessness that can result from the death of a war buddy, and the inability to keep a promise.
Murphy is portrayed as the soldier who fights for his sensitivity, even at the cost of isolating himself from his army buddies. The listlessness and lack of interest in life, which is an offshoot of post-war trauma, has also been effectively dealt with.
Powers has tried to go into reasons for why young men sign up for war and writes, “We’d had small lives, populated by a longing for something more substantial than dirty and small dreams. So we’d come here, where life needed no elaboration, and others would tell us who to be.”
The author’s poetic descriptions act as a perfect foil for the intensity of his tale. Some examples are the rising of smoke “through a gently tattered canopy of leaves” or how white flags “formed an odd crochet where the window’s dark recesses were framed by jagged glass”.
The story is compelling enough to be finished at one read, but may require a couple more, to understand the nuances and piece together what is left unexplained. But the one message that comes through loud and clear is this one — “The war would take what it could get. It was patient. It didn’t care about objectives, or boundaries, whether you were loved by many, or not at all.” At the end of the day, “the war would have its way”. This book is a must-read for peace activists as also those who send young men into battle.