The Book of Collateral Damage by Sinan Antoon
“Most people who tackle history record centuries, decades, and years. I’m interested in minutes, especially the first minute.”
This book is about observing and realizing, mostly about objects that we otherwise take for granted. The book asks uncomfortable questions especially when you are an audience, shielded from the mayhem unfolding on ground zero.
What are the things you generally catalogue? What are the things you would catalogue when you stand on the brink of destruction, looking into abyss? Do you catalogue your emotional upheaval or just look around, try and catalogue everything that continues to disintegrate?
The author, Sinan Antoon is tragically poetic. His book charts more than the devastated landscape of Iraq and it’s wars since 2003, it talks about people and objects, it portrays the history of all that was good and all that was destroyed.
War-torn landscapes don’t need much. The need is limited to ammunition and explosives, science and food, men to labour. Above all, there is a need to retain one’s sanity. Amidst this, where lies the need for poetry and written word? Are they necessary? Many such questions are posed by the narrator.
When thought about in words and visual imagery, a list of collateral damage contains within it more than just death by friendly fire and botched bombings. If the history of everything in the land is taken into account, it would also contain birds, books, Ziziphus tree(s), fetuses, carpets, sanity, lives, graves and bones. It (would) contain within it an illusory past, a tumultuous present and an uncertain future.
As we sees Nameer “navigating the divide of his home and host cultures views of war” we also observe him treading the line between nostalgia and longing simultaneously collecting pieces of “American news stories of the war and files them as collateral damage.”
First published in Arabic titled “Fihris” (meaning indexing or catalogue) the book talks about homeland both native and foreign, loss, trauma, PTSD, identity and the violence that is imbued in them all, after years of neglect. The book talks about uncertain peace that comes laced with a burden that is carried by one whole generation.
“Learning is intended to be acted on, and deeds are intended for salvation.”
