But what impressed me most about These Dark Skies was her curation of the voices of artists, writers, historians, human rights activists, psychologists and theorists from all over the world.Ĭannupa Hanska Luger/Courtesy of Garth Greenan Gallery “I began this book trying to write about violence and connection,” Zwartjes writes in the prologue, “which really means it was about what it means to be human … what it means to be mortal and to live in a body that is subject to violence.” Zwartjes and I met as colleagues at the University of Arizona, and I had read her earlier book, Detailing Trauma: A Poetic Anatomy, so I was prepared for both the emotional depth and intellectual rigor of her writing. It was in this raw state that I started reading These Dark Skies: Reckoning with Identity, Violence, and Power from Abroad by Arianne Zwartjes. But in both cases, it seemed to me, children’s deaths were being shrugged off as collateral damage.
There’s no need to repeat what an AR-15 can do to children’s bodies. And then the mass murder at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, happened. Later, looking at the photos of the bombed-out buildings, I knew that neither sandbags nor books could have helped those children were dead. In preparation for bomb blasts, the mothers were teaching their toddlers to pretend they were turtles: to fall to the floor on their bellies, cover their ears with their hands, and open their mouths, a game reminiscent of the Cold War’s “duck and cover.” If you fall to the ground with your mouth open, she explained, it helps protect your lungs during an explosion. I’d just listened to a podcast interview with a woman in the suburbs of Kyiv, who described how children were helping to fill windows with books because no one had sandbags. Air Force jets circled in the skies above us as I watched my 5-year-old grandsons on the playground. I was visiting Tucson, where I’d lived for over 40 years, when the Russians invaded Ukraine. These Dark Skies: Reckoning with Identity, Violence, and Power from Abroad
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