Free What Would Lynne Tillman Do? by Lynne Tillman Page B

believe any nation is better than any other on that score. But what attracted me to this violence was my knowledge: the young men who kidnapped, tortured and killed her, I had grown up with them. I knew Phalangists, and she was Christian too. Through her they wanted to teach a lesson to the various factions. People use religion to excite people and send them to war, like Bush withthe word “democracy.” It’s dogma misuse. The Phalangists were, in their minds, defending Christian values, but in fact they were defending their power against the Muslims. There are orthodox Christians in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon. The majority of Christians in Lebanon are Catholic, so they had links with Rome, and the French, a Catholic nation. The French created a place where these Christians would have their own country—after World War I when the big powers carved up the Middle East. But if everybody were Christian, the new country would have been too small. So they included territory inhabited by Muslims. This is the key to the Lebanese problem—the Christians of Lebanon say, and it’s true, the country was created by the French for them. But after two generations, the Christians found they were no longer a sizable majority. Today they are not the majority. It’s the source not of hatred but of the antagonism in Lebanon.
    LT: Your novel shifts and flows, from politics with its varied discourses, through voices and styles. One of the brilliant inventions is the deaf-mute schoolchildren.
    EA: What you call a silent majority.
    LT: [laughs] They are taught by Sitt Mary Rose, they don’t speak; she is the only one who is kind to them. The four male characters, who represent various factions of the Christians, speak; they are all anti-Muslim. Sitt Mary Rose is sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.
    EA: Which was why she was killed.
    LT: The deaf children are presented “speaking” in the first person. Throughout all the formal changes, I was able to understand where I was, who was speaking; you included politics but didn’t re-create politics per se. You reimagined everything. Desire, impressions, feelings.
    EA: And the description of the state of war in a specific place. Politics is such an important part of our lives, whether we like it or not. Why shouldn’t it enter novels? In poetry, people mostly avoid politics. They think it’s not poetic. But the Iliad is a political work. I became an American poet by writing against the Vietnam war, I joined the movement by writing against the war, spontaneously. I feel the first thing is to be true to oneself. Now you will say what if you are a monster and are true to yourself? [laughing] If you’re a monster, you’re going to be true to that self anyway. But a movement of poets against the war didn’t happen about Iraq, which is as monstrous a war and as long. Why? We are in a period when there is, funnily enough, more poetry being written in proportion to the population than during Vietnam. Poets have followed the general apathy of the Bush and Reagan years.
    LT: Maybe that speaks about where poetry is in terms of its relationship to society. Some writers may feel themselves at a great distance.
    EA: It’s because of the kind of poetry they are writing—a very abstract poetry. They are discovering new forms, by complicating form and by avoiding anything that would smack of a message. And, like all great writing, it can defend itself beautifully.
    LT: In Virginia Woolf’s essay, “The Death of the Moth,” she observes a day moth, which lives 24 hours, and watches it die. By looking at it, she understands the struggle to live, the finality of death.
    EA: You’re right, one can express anything, in the most unexpected way.
    LT: What I want to claim is that fiction and poetry need not be specific to a political event to embrace the effects and depredations to life because of war, violence, injustice.
    EA: No. I went to Iraq twice, and, in spite of Saddam’s dark side, there was great