2012 may prove to be the annus mirabilis for Iraq and Afghanistan war fiction. A year that saw the publication of Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, Kevin Powers’ The Yellow Birds, and David Abrams’ Fobbit is not to be sneered at. Many years may go by before we see even one more war novel as good as any of those three.
Also published in 2012 was Home by Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, the author of acclaimed novels such as The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, and Beloved. Home is an odd one whose inclusion in a discussion of Iraq and Afghanistan war literature is not an easy fit. The story of a traumatized African-American Korean War vet who returns to a racist 1950s United States, it invites the question why this novel now? What is Morrison asking us to think about? The only thing that seems to recommend it as an interjection in the national conversation about the current wars is the date of its publication.
I don’t know exactly what Morrison is up to, but I think the answer lies in a long non-fiction essay she published in 1992 called Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. In Playing in the Dark, Morrison chides literary scholars for not recognizing the “Africanist presence” in American literature and culture. By the “Africanist presence,” Morrison does not mean just black characters in American fiction, such as Jim in Huckleberry Finn. Nor does she indict American authors for not including more black authors or addressing racial issues. Rather, she claims that American letters (and culture, too), start to finish everywhere is informed consciously and unconsciously by the nation’s five-hundred year history of a biracial existence. In Morrison’s view, über-American concepts such as individualism, preoccupation with evil and sin, and anxiety about our nation’s social cohesion owe their distinctiveness and power to white misgivings about the black American presence in the midst of their lived lives and imaginations.
So, according to Playing in the Dark, the Africanist presence is always already everywhere in literature, even in novels where there are no black characters.
Which brings us to Iraq and Afghanistan war literature, which by and large features few African-Americans and presents itself as not particularly concerned with racial matters. Whatever is important to note about the war, it suggests, it certainly is not America’s tortured history of race relations. If anything, we should applaud ourselves that whatever the hell has happened in Iraq and Afghanistan, black-white issues haven’t been the problem.
Morrison wouldn’t have it, I feel. If we think we have written race out of our national narrative of war and its aftermath, she suggests, we should probably think again. Home asks us to think that a whites-only story of Iraq and Afghanistan is much less than the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
Time Now: The Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in Art, Film, and Literature 
Lynn’s Walk is indeed to be sneered at. Marlantes’ referred to it as worth the bother and I grant that it would have made a good graphic novel as it is a cartoon.
I didn’t notice this comment when it first arrived, and it’s not especially germane to the topic of the post. Plus there seems to be an obvious typo in it (“Marlantes referred to it as [not] worth the bother….”). Still it raises a good question about the reception and enduring legacy of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. Me, I like(d) it, but there are definitely those who didn’t like it in its time and it hasn’t exactly fared well in the academic scholarship about GWOT literature.
Thank you for the correction.
The book does take a comic or cartoonist’ view of a great portion of America’s inhabitants. Invariably they (those civilians their world that the author condescends to describe) reveal themselves to be buffoons, opportunists, hypocrites. Escapees from a poorly written sitcom, blowhard Christians, and capitalistic money grubbers.
I have read much Vietnam-era literature concerned with that war and even the most anti-war fictionalizations (I haven’t read The Strawberry Statement since ’69 or ’70) are not as broadly drawn nor as self-satisfied as Billy Lynne.
In recent years (I’m ’69) I’ve revisited and extended my acquaintance with the writing of that period. Almost all of that body of work is more sympathetic and understanding of America and Americans whether we deserve it or not.
I write now as one sickened by the Bush wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and that repulsion does much to inform my response to Fountain’s ham-handed effort.
I live in the same part of the country in which Mr. Marlantes was raised. A year or so ago I drove to Skomokawa 10 miles down the road to listen him speak of his book Deep River, a stream about 20 miles beyond my place. I have enormous respect for his leadership in combat, his successful post-war life, his writing, and what I know of him as a father. I suspect What It Is like to Go to War will be his most lasting written contribution to literature.
Why in heaven’s name he embraced this dumbo kid’s stuff … I do not understand