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Our need for beauty in the midst of war
Flowers in war are a kind of beautiful obscenity, an attempt to
create Paradise in Hell
By Robert Fisk
05/12/07 "The
Independent" -- - During the 1975-90 civil war, a clammy
joke regularly made the rounds on both sides of the Beirut front
line. God, the old saw went, created Lebanon as the most
beautiful country on earth. But it looked so like Paradise that
God became jealous - so He put the Lebanese there.
Yet the Lebanese, amid all their suffering and destruction,
continued to care for their cedar trees and to plant vines and
wheat and apple orchards and jasmine. Even on my own Beirut
balcony, there was saxifrage and a single bougainvillea and a
couple of miserable palm trees. I remember wanting to feel the
warmth of plants but I cared for them in a half-hearted way
because shells fell regularly around my apartment and I was
never really sure if they - or I - would survive.
In Baghdad a couple of burning summers ago, I did the same,
setting off through the dangerous streets to a market garden of
fountains and pink flowers - run by an ex-Iraqi soldier who had
seen the gassed and putrefying Kurdish bodies at Halabja - and
bought three two-foot pot plants. These I ceremoniously put on
the balcony of The Independent's room at the Hamra Hotel in
bleak memory of my Beirut flowers, the imaginary Mediterranean
opposite, in reality occupied by a sinister, cracked apartment
block. The plants consumed litres of dirty water each day, but
eventually successive colleagues let them die, just as Baghdad
was dying. And who could blame them? Flowers in war are a kind
of beautiful obscenity, heaven amid disaster, an attempt to
create Paradise in Hell.
Yet this month once more, we set off to the Beirut market garden
called Exotica - I always nicknamed it Erotica - to renew the
balcony flowers amid Lebanon's latest and dangerous crisis. And
yes, the old bougainvillea, no longer flowering, has been
replanted. But three more - blazing with orange and scarlet and
pink - have taken its place. There are now African violets and
chrysanthemums and clostridia on the balcony. And why?
Well, by extraordinary coincidence, my latest mail package from
The Independent contains the 26 April issue of The London Review
of Books and as I sat reading it on our newly flowering balcony,
there - incredibly - was Brian Dillon's review of a book by
Kenneth Helphand, Defiant Gardens: Making Gardens in Wartime. I
shall, of course, buy it. The extracts were enticing enough, for
Helphand had discovered that French and British troops in the
trenches of the First World War - my father Bill's war - also
created miniature gardens.
In May 1915, The Illustrated London News actually published a
full-page drawing entitled "Beauty Amid War". As Dillon writes,
"A sign that reads 'Regent Street' has been nailed to a
blackened tree, and in the foreground, two soldiers tend a pair
of perfectly rectangular beds of daffodils. A photograph taken
the previous winter, in the Ypres salient, shows a soldier of
the London Rifle Brigade posing in what is clearly intended ...
to be an approximation of a traditional English cottage garden."
As Dillon says, idealised gardens obviously did really exist,
"an unlikely pelago of tidy plots that stretched across the
front itself".
And I began to wonder, reading this, if flowers did not soften
war for us. Wasn't "The Roses of Picardy" a wartime song? Don't
we still immortalise the blood-red poppies of Flanders Fields?
Didn't Gracie Fields mock the 1940 Blitz with "The Biggest
Aspidistra in the World"? And for that matter, more gloomily,
didn't the British codename Arnhem "Operation Market Garden"?
Of course, Britons in wartime London cultivated kitchen gardens
for food other than flowers and it's probably true, as Dillon
suggests, that the wartime garden is as much a symbol of
desperation as a spiritually sustaining stretch of earth.
Helphand's book records how the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto - long
forbidden from public parks - could see from their windows
"young girls with bouquets of lilac walking on the 'Aryan' part
of the street". Mary Berg recorded in the ghetto in 1941 how she
could "even smell the tender fragrance of the opening buds. But
there is no sign of spring in the ghetto".
And for symbolism of America's collapse in Iraq, what could be
more profound than the story of US Warrant Officer Brook Turner,
at an army base north of Baghdad, trimming a tiny lawn less than
a metre across and a couple of metres long with a pair of
scissors. Turner was acting out of nostalgia for the grass of
his native Oregon. But it was an "artificially sustained
territory", threatened from within by a tenacious enemy of
insurgent ants.
I was originally inspired to place plants on my own balcony by
my landlord Mustafa who used to raise fig trees, olives and
roses on the shell-smashed vacant lot next door. (Palestinians
later buried rockets a few metres away.) Now a grim parking lot
covers Mustafa's little orchard, but he dutifully rescued most
of his flowers and now they hang from 24 white boxes on the
front railing of his home.
And after all, was it not the late Ryszard Kapuscinski, in his
magnificent book on the Shah, who realised why Iranians made
such beautiful carpets. They wove birds with splendidly coloured
wings on to silken trees and rivers and blossom-covered
branches. And they would throw their carpets to the ground,
creating a garden in the desert.
An army of lovebirds now flocks past Mustafa's garden and hides
in the palm trees of the Corniche. But there was one persistent,
ratty bird with no sense of music that would wake us all before
dawn each morning. "Cheep - cheep - cheep - cheep - cheep," it
would go, monotonously, ruthlessly off key. Even the howl of
shells would have been more musical, Wilfred Owen's "choir" of
artillery rounds.
For months Mustafa would emerge in his pyjamas and dressing gown
and storm on to the road with an ammunition pouch of stones.
These he would fling into the trees in an attempt to hit the
wretched bird which prevented our sleep. He always missed and in
the end, of course, he simply gave up, and now the same bird's
descendants sound the same ghastly chorus at 4.30am. There is
nothing we can do. Nature has won over humanity.
© 2007 Independent News and Media Limited
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