Walking the Wall

I have been interested in the question of what it means to be human, especially in the midst of cruelty or violence, such as in war, since reading Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. My recent reading of Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids has followed through on many of the same themes and questions. As I have been mulling over moderating a themed book club this summer, I decided to go ahead with it and do a four month (May, June, July, August) club based on the theme of what it means to be human in the midst of war–with a little redemptive violence tossed into the mix. The book list so far:

1. The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien (short stories)
2. A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah
3. He, She, and It by Marge Piercy (I wanted a purely novel in the bunch, this one fits the bill well on a very different level than the others)
4. Hiroshima Notes by  Kenzaburo Oe (Nip the Buds might be too offensive/uncomfortable for some readers—so I’m leaning towards the Hiroshima Notes)

Doing some digging around for supplemental material, I came across an image and a letter that emphasizes things I’m  thinking on:

To destroy a mother & child is to destroy the basic unit of ALL humanity. Yet the soldier, too, is a child destroyed - destroyed by a system that took a young boy from HIS mother & emptied HIM of life, snuffed out HIS humanity. Who was he? What were his interests? Did he play the piano? Did he enjoy sports? Did he have a girlfriend? Was he married? - None of those questions matter. The child wearing that uniform is dead.

I think it is important to continually ask ourselves what it means to be human, not just in the safe, every day life most of us live in–but in the dark places that humanity goes to, the dark places that are happening in many places around the world. When we start to see humanity and inhumanity on both sides of the fence, the lines begin to blur and somewhere in that space we catch glimpses of different ways to be.