By Tom Robotham

 Last week, ODU held its annual literary festival. To my mind, it was one of the best in the event’s history.

I hadn’t expected to feel that way. When I first saw the schedule, in fact, I was a bit disappointed. While previous festivals have included giants of contemporary literature—William Styron and Edward Albee come to mind—this year’s lineup included no one of that stature.

The festival’s theme was “Writers in Peace and War.” This in itself marked a break from earlier festivals, almost all of which have had more ambiguous titles. (“The Call of Stories” and “The Spirit of the Word,” for example.)

Festival co-directors Michael Pearson and Janet Peery, both faculty members in the university’s MFA program in creative writing, felt it was time to try a theme that was more clearly rooted in the socio-political realities of our time.

By mid-week, they were so pleased with the proceedings that they knew they’d made the right choice. In fact, they already have a tentative theme for next year’s festival. (Alas, I’m sworn to secrecy; if I told you, Mike would likely have me banished from campus—or at least kick my ass even more thoroughly than he usually does next time we step onto the tennis court.)

Ironically, some of the best presenters were the ones with relatively low profiles. The biggest name among the visiting writers was Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down. While his achievement with that book was significant—it is widely respected by writers and soldiers alike for its realistic depiction of war—his presentation got mixed reviews from audience members I spoke with afterward. I was among those who thought it was no more than adequate. He spent much of his time talking about an early and rather tepid review of the book—so much time, in fact, that he seemed to be saying, in essence, “I got the last laugh.” He did make some important points in the formal presentation—that a lot of literary war reporters put themselves in the middle of the story, and that there’s something to be said for letting the soldiers take center stage—but the anecdotes he told during the Q&A period were far more compelling than his prepared remarks.

In the grand scheme of things, however, this is neither here nor there. The rest of the festival was more than intellectually stimulating—much of it packed an emotional punch that will linger with audience members for a long time.

The first event I attended was a panel on torture in the age of terrorism. Moderator Joyce Hoffman, a professor of journalism at ODU, commented that the practice of torturing prisoners for any reason is fundamentally at odds with our nation’s core values—a view that is shared by many Americans who have been victims of torture themselves, John McCain among them. All of the panelists agreed; Jacob Weisberg, former editor of Slate, and author of The Bush Tragedy, underscored the point by noting that one of the reasons America embraced racist depictions of Japanese during World War II was Japan’s reputation for brutal treatment of its own prisoners of war.

The panel members were also seemed united in their general disdain for the Bush Administration, noting that its formal authorization of torture was unprecedented in American history.  But Weisberg made another important point—one that would become a sub-theme of the day, if not the festival as a whole. Blaming Bush and Cheney, he said, let’s us off the hook too easily. Many of us knew what was going on, and as citizens of democracy we must share in responsibility for what took place in our nation’s name. (Those among us who didn’t know what was going must take equal responsibility for abdication of our responsibility to stay informed.)

Those are important points. But abstractions can take us only so far. The beauty of this panel discussion is that it balanced detached intellectual inquiry with emotionally charged accounts of war from people who’ve been there. One was poet Brian Turner, who served in the Army for seven years and spent a year as an infantry team leader in Iraq. Echoing the theme of collective responsibility, Turner told the audience—the students, in particular—that whether they supported the war or not, they’re “part of it.” Alas, he suggested, most of us don’t seem to feel that weight of history. “When I walk out on campus, I don’t see any protests,” he noted.

One reason for this, of course, is that Norfolk is a military town. Many of the students have some connection with the military; one of my own students, in fact, has already done a tour in Afghanistan. These folks were well-represented in the audience. One young woman stood up during the Q&A and passionately expressed her frustration that the American public and the mainstream media do not understand what it’s like to be on the ground in Iraq; either they do not grasp or choose to ignore all of the notable accomplishments of the U.S. troops—and the degree to which the Iraqi people are grateful for their presence. She had scarcely gotten three words out when she choked up and began to cry, bringing tears to the eyes of many audience members as well.

The moment was moving, not only because of her heartfelt testimony and obvious pain but also because of the atmosphere of mutual respect and the commitment to honest dialogue. No one on the panel had more respect for the troops than Turner; but he encouraged the audience not to get caught up in blind support of the war. He noted that when the photos documenting torture at Abu Ghraib were released, he and many of his fellow soldiers were furious. Some were upset simply because they had been made public; but many were outraged that it had happened, if not for moral reasons then at least for practical ones. “We were trying to establish a relationship with the people of Iraq,” he said. “That incident put our lives in greater danger. There was a palpable shift in the way the Iraqi people looked at us after that.”

The tragic fact of our obliviousness to these realities was underscored again and again, but at no point more eloquently than when Turner called us “a bleeding nation that doesn’t even know” how deeply wounded we are.

TURNER HAD THE STAGE TO HIMSELF later in the day, reading a number of poems from his award-winning collection, “Here, Bullet.” The title poem is especially powerful. “If a body is what you want,” the poem begins, “then here is bone and gristle and flesh…, / here, Bullet, / here is where I complete the word you bring / hissing through the air… / triggering / my tongue’s explosives for the rifling I have / inside of me, each twist of the round / spun deeper, / because here, Bullet, / here is where the world ends every time.”

The imagery of physical wounds—of ripped flesh and cracked bone—reinforced the equally important truth that, in Turner’s words, “many people are going to come back with psychologically explosive material inside them. What,” he asked the audience, “can we do to help them?”

What struck me about Turner was the way in which he tempered his eloquence with humility and recognition of the limitations of language. “I have no words to speak of war,” he writes in his poem “Night in Blue,” which he read to the audience. “I never dug the grave in Talafar / I never held the mother crying on Ramadi / I never lifted my friend’s body / when they carried him home. // I have only the shadows under the leaves / to take with me.”

Clearly, Turner has plenty of words to speak of war, and we owe him our gratitude for giving us—those of us who spend our mornings cursing at tunnel traffic and our evenings sipping cocktails on the backyard deck—some glimmer of what’s going on in Iraq and Afghanistan. But his point is well taken.

The idea that language must ultimately fall short was echoed by Norfolk-based poet Jon Pineda in reading on Friday. Indeed, in the title poem of his new collection, The Translator’s Diary, he suggests that “the truth…never survives its translation.” Elsewhere he writes of “this bright distance between us.” He is speaking of someone in particular, but also, it seems to me, of the distance between us all, and the desire to close the gap. Reflecting on all of this, I was struck by the bright distance that exists these days between American civilians and the victims of the wars being fought in our name, not to mention the vast chasm that exists among us in this country as we entrench ourselves ever more deeply into our respective positions on war.

The misunderstandings and intolerances that characterize our national “discourse”—the knee jerk reactions that have displaced thoughtful conversation— were highlighted by Steve Almond in the festival finale on Friday night. The Boston-based writer had the audience in stitches for a fair portion of the evening, reading excerpts from some absurdly vicious hate mail he’d gotten after he wrote a column in The Boston Globe on Sept. 18, 2008.

“Perhaps the most insidious byproduct of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001,” he wrote, “has been a reflexive sanctification of the military. To put this in bumper stickerese: Support the Troops.

“Well, I have an ugly confession to make: I don't support the troops—at least not unconditionally. When somebody tells me they serve in the military, my first impulse isn't to say, "Thank you for your service!" like those insufferable chickenhawks on talk radio.

“My first impulse is to say, "I'm sorry to hear that." Because I am. I'm sorry to know that the person I'm talking to might someday be maimed or killed on the job, or might someday kill someone else. Or refuel a plane that drops bombs on buildings.

“I can't see how anyone who calls himself or herself Christian—or human, for that matter—wouldn't be sorry.

“The fact that we have an army, that we need an army, is inherently tragic. It's an admission that our species is still ruled by fear and aggression.”

The hateful reaction to his column (at least one reader made disparaging remarks about a photograph of his daughter) reminded me of hundreds of mail I used to receive when I was editor of Port Folio Weekly. It always struck me then, and it struck me again when Almond was talking, that the pervasiveness of ignorance and hypocrisy in this nation is mind-boggling. Super “patriots” talk incessantly about freedom but want to kill (Almond received more than a few thinly veiled death threats) anyone who questions our “right” to wage war whenever we please. That this intolerance of dissent is fundamentally at odds with the very essence of the American experiment seems to escape many people.

Almond’s responses to these readers were witty and biting, but underlying his satire and sarcasm were arguments that are difficult to refute. I defy any of these readers—and any of mine—to respond in a thoughtful manner to the points he makes, especially the one about the inherent conflict between Christian values and war of any kind.

None of this is meant to suggest that we shouldn’t support our troops in more meaningful ways. Indeed, it’s clear that Almond has profound compassion for wounded soldiers and the families who have lost loved ones in the war. His point, with which I agree wholeheartedly, is that our mindless repetition of the phrase “Support the Troops”—our reduction of patriotism to yellow-ribbon bumper stickers on the backs of our SUVs—bolsters a dangerous kind of moral superiority and numbs us to the realities of war.

Those of us who really want to support our men and women in uniform owe it to them to question American policy, even as we honor individual soldiers, sailors and Marines for their sacrifices and weep for the parents, spouses and children they’ve left behind. The devastating effect of war on military families was brought home as the festival in a presentation by Pulitzer-prize winner Jim Sheeler who followed a casualty-notification officer as he delivered devastating news to families of Marines who’d been killed in battle. The photographer he worked with won a separate Pulitzer, and Sheeler augmented his presentation with some of the pictures that ran with his series and are included in his book Final Salute. Two of them, in particular, summed up the most important points made during this festival. One showed Marines unloading a flag-draped coffin from the cargo area of a passenger jet as oblivious passengers looked out the window. Another showed a widow—a pregnant woman—sleeping on an air mattress in front of her husband’s coffin inside a chapel. She stayed there overnight because she couldn’t bear to leave his body alone. The truth expressed in this photo—and in all of the readings at this year’s ODU literary festival—is that we have each day a choice to make: we can recognize the ways in which our common humanity binds us together, and try to take more responsibility for our collective heartbreak, or we can fall back on our own comforting sense of righteousness and foment more fear and hatred in the process. Either way, we owe it to ourselves and to our fellow human beings to face current realities, not with shallow sentiment and hollow patriotism but with deep contemplation and the great eternal question of humankind: Isn’t there a better way?