 July/August 2002
American Friends Service Committee Peacework Magazine Patrica Watson, Editor Sara Burke, Assistant Editor Pat Farren, Founding Editor 2161 Massachusetts Ave. Telephone number: Fax number:
pwork@igc.org Peacework has been published monthly since 1972, intended to serve as a source of dependable information to those who strive for peace and justice and are committed to furthering the nonviolent social change necessary to achieve them. Rooted in Quaker values and informed by AFSC experience and initiatives, Peacework offers a forum for organizers, fostering coalition-building and teaching the methods and strategies that work in the global and local community. Peacework seeks to serve as an incubator for social transformation, introducing a younger generation to a deeper analysis of problems and issues, reminding and re-inspiring long-term activists, encouraging the generations to listen to each other, and creating space for the voices of the disenfranchised. Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC. |
From the editor's desk This Fourth of July, Wynton Marsalis, the great jazz musician, led a holiday festival concert in Lower Manhattan's Battery Park, just blocks from where the World Trade Center once stood. Before the concert the NPR announcer asked him how it felt to play his music on this national anniversary made newly somber by the year's events. It felt exactly right, Marsalis replied. "Jazz was begun in the shadow of slavery, so we just go deeper into what we're about." A book review issue in the midst of a time of great peril and appalling suffering? Yes, of course. We didn't suggest to the friends who have written for us that they should tailor their choices in any particular way. But they've dug deep. If Peacework decided someday to do all reviews all the time, we would still never lack for strong material. A host of releases flood the internet and pour into our mailbox; review copies overflow our shelves. We wish we could alert you to all the riches we hear about, but that would make Peacework a very different publication. We mourn our omissions. But at 30 (we mark an anniversary this year), we're not inclined to change. This summer's selections, as in past years, are idiosyncratic--new, old, predictable, surprising. You can't 'arrange' this kind of material--what do they say about herding cats?--so we settled for grouping it by genre: poetry; fiction and non-fiction for a general audience; stories intended primarily for young people; and a little section on alternative publishing, getting books into prisons, and defending independent media. We put last year's Peacework Index here for the librarians and archivists among you. And we start out with a gentle, quixotic essay by novelist Elaine Mar on the familiar rituals of reading and remembering, seen anew in the light of this strange year. There are treasures here and we wish you the joy of them. One upcoming gift, for those who live near Boston, is the Farren Lecture coming in September--a yearly evening of reading and discussion instituted in honor of Peacework's founding editor Pat Farren. Read the sample of poet Mart'n Espada's work on the back cover, and plan to join us September 19 to hear more. Thinking still about that concert and Battery Park and the shadow of the World Trade Center, we'll conclude this introduction with a few paragraphs from an essay by writer and critic John Berger which appeared in the Guardian of London on June 29. Now that the number of innocent civilian victims killed collaterally in Afghanistan by the US bombardments is equal to the number killed in the attack on the Twin Towers, we can perhaps place the events in a larger, but not less tragic perspective, and face a new question: is it more evil or reprehensible to kill deliberately than to systematically kill blindly? (Systematically because the same logic of US armed strategy began with the Gulf war.) I don't know the answer to the question. On the ground, among the cluster bombs dropped by B52s or the stifling smoke in Church Street, Manhattan, perhaps ethical judgments cannot be comparative. When, on September 11, I watched the videos on television, I was instantly reminded of August 6, 1945. We in Europe heard the news of the bombing of Hiroshima on the evening of the same day. The immediate correspondences between the two events include a fireball descending without warning from a clear sky, both attacks being timed to coincide with the civilians of the targeted city going to work in the morning, with the shops opening, with children in school preparing their lessons. A similar reduction to ashes, with bodies, flung through the air, becoming debris. A comparable incredulity and chaos provoked by a new weapon of destruction being used for the first time--the A-bomb 60 years ago, and a civil airliner last autumn. Everywhere at the epicenter, on everything and everybody, a thick pall of dust. The differences of context and scale are of course enormous. In Manhattan the dust was not radioactive. In 1945 the United States had been waging a full-scale, three-year-old war with Japan. Both attacks, however, were planned as announcements. Watching either, one knew that the world would never again be the same; the risks everywhere, to which life was heir, had been changed on the morning of a new unclouded day. 
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