Words against war: Capturing the horrors of conflict

A Bertolt Brecht verse published in 1939 captures the role of anti-war literature : “In the dark times will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing. About the dark times.” It seems frail compared to weapons and realpolitik. But to give voice to the case for peace, when govts and populism try to silence it, is a very courageous act. Very resiliently humanist. Instead of death, it embraces the power of life.

Notes on the killing

In giving voice to the despair, dislocation and trauma that is minimised in war-makers’ calculations, anti-war literature has an ageless, universal quality. Saadat Hasan Manto ’s short story Toba Tek Singh calls out the lunacy of neighbours killing neighbours. Erich Maria Remarque ’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front underlines how primeval ideas of valour first seduce young men, then betray them with brutal mutilations (‘They stagger on their splintered stumps into the next shell-hole’), and finally shrink them into emotionally empty shells. Today’s wars are newer. But Slaughterhouse-Five to Catch-22 , A Farewell to Arms , The Tin Drum and Train to Pakistan , the classics haven’t grown old.

Connecting millions

Many anti-war books have autobiographical underpinnings. Some disguise this more, like Bertha von Suttner’s Lay Down Your Arms: The Autobiography of Martha von Tilling and some disclose it more, like Ron Kovic’s Born on the Fourth of July . But by far, it is Anne Frank ’s Diary of a Young Girl that is the modern world’s most influential first-person anti-war book, even if this was not something it set out to do. In a hidden nest of rooms she quarrels with family, crushes on a boy, does schoolwork… and worries about the Gestapo knocking on the door. Why did she write it? What if she hadn’t? The horrors of war cannot be captured in statistics alone. For countless readers, it is one account, one life, which connects them to the suffering of millions.

Verses against tyrannies

From Sahir Ludhianvi’s Parchaaiyaan to Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach and Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est , poetry can carry its messages more elliptically. Or not. How straight is Siegfried Sassoon being in Does It Matter?, “You can drink and forget and be glad, and people won’t say that you’re mad; For they know that you’ve fought for your country, and no one will worry a bit.” Or Faiz, resisting the tyrannies that torment the politics of protest, here: “If a seal were put upon my tongue, what does it matter? For I have put tongues into the links of my chains.” And here: “There where you were crucified, so far away from my words, you still were beautiful.”

In 2023, a few weeks after Gazan poet Refaat Alareer shared this 2011 poem, “If I must die/you must live/to tell my story,” he was killed in an Israeli airstrike. To sabre-rattlers and philistines, that would convey the powerlessness of literature. But what they are deaf to, the rest of us hear loud and clear.

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