AQA Power and Conflict: Kamikaze

This poem, by Beatrice Garland,  explores the idea of choice and conflict in warfare, and examines the emotional traumas that war creates, carried down through the generations. Interestingly, as the title suggests, it looks at war from the viewpoint of a Japanese kamikaze pilot, an unusual subject for a western writer. 

The pilot in question has failed to carry out his mission, and is ostracised by his community, even his wife, as a result. The poem examines the ways in which cultural expectations of courage and sacrifice in war can be disabling. You can read the poem on Garland's website, which offers additional interesting information about the poet, her work, and her context.

'Kamikaze' is framed as a simple narrative, with the frame of a story within a story, imagining a woman telling a story about her father. Little hints throughout the poem remind us of this narrative distance, which thus distinguishes between the narrator's perspective, and the direct speech of the mother. Interestingly, in the copy of the poem on the BBC Bitesize site, the italicisations on the original (seen in Garland's website) are not reproduced. This is a pity, as the italicised portions of the poem make clear where the poem is reflecting the direct speech of the mother telling the story, and where the story is seen as filtered through the eyes of its listeners, adding a depth and subtlety to the layered narration. It's an interesting example of why details such as italicisation matter. (See what I did there?)

Before looking at the poem it's worthwhile reflecting on what a kamikaze pilot was, and why they existed. The phrase kami kaze 神風 means 'divine/spirit wind', and indicates something of the spiritual nature of the role. Wikipedia will give you a useful introduction, but in brief, kamikaze pilots were a small and select group, employed by the Japanese in the closing stages of World War 2, whose purpose was to carry out suicide missions, generally involving crashing their explosive-laden planes into a larger target, such as a warship, and so inflicting great damage upon it.  You can see footage of a kamikaze attack in the video above to give you an idea of what it involved. 

Pilots who were selected to be kamikaze pilots were treated with great honour, and the prestige of serving the emperor in this way was thought to more than compensate for the sacrifice of one's own life. Some authorities think that the idea of kamikaze flights arose from situations where pilots flying crippled warplanes decided to crash into a target so as to inflict maximum damage, in a situation where they felt that they were unlikely to survive in any case--this was something done by pilots on all sides. The Japanese also had a tradition of seppuku, or voluntary suicide, where taking one's own life was seen to be an honourable act, and this may have made the idea of kamikaze easier to develop in cultural terms. In contrast, in most western cultures, suicide was seen as a grave sin, and one which brought dishonour in itself, so the idea of voluntary suicide in a non-fatal battle situation would have been harder to justify. The Guardian's article 'How they Cheated Death', which features interviews with two surviving kamikazes, is well worth reading in this context.

The poem consists of seven stanzas of six lines each, varying in length, generally unrhymed, with some notable exceptions where rhyme or half-rhyme at the end of a line draws attention to key words (for instance ‘history/sea’, ‘swathes/safe’). It has lines ranging from six syllables to twelve, and is written in an informal, conversational style that mimics the recounting of a story, in three long sentences. The final two stanzas, and a line from the fifth, are italicized, so as to reinforce the sense that this is an account, a twice-told story that has been passed down through the family.

The first stanza characterizes the father through a list of items that he takes with him on his mission, both practical (a flask of water…enough fuel’) and symbolic (‘a samurai sword …a shaven head …powerful incantations’), almost as though he was leaving from the village itself. The dual nature of his ‘one way’ mission is thus immediately clear—he is like a Samurai warrior of old, trained and skilled, knowing that he must sacrifice himself, yet also he is a pilot of a modern machine, thinking about fuel levels as he considers his quest towards an honourable suicide.

The juxtaposition of these images highlights the curious nature of the kamikaze cult at the end of the war—the soldiers were taught to think of themselves as warriors, with a special code of dedication and sacrifice that linked to the Samurai tradition, and encouraged to believe that they would be making 'history' through their sacrifice.  The detail of bringing a samurai sword with them on the mission is historical. As The Guardian article reveals, there was huge pressure to fulfil the mission: “We didn’t think too much [about dying],” Horiyama said. “We were trained to suppress our emotions. Even if we were to die, we knew it was for a worthy cause. Dying was the ultimate fulfillment of our duty, and we were commanded not to return. We knew that if we returned alive that our superiors would be angry.”

In the face of this weight of expectation it is interesting that the crucial decision in the poem--the decision to turn back (which must have been made 'half-way' , given that the pilot has only enough fuel for 'a one-way/journey') is not explained. The substance of the poem--the reflection on the beauty of the sea, and the beauty of everyday life in a fishing village--is actually conjectural, signalled by 'she thought' and 'he must' in the second stanza. In other words, the mother has not actually discussed with her father his reasons for returning, or has not heard from him why he made this crucial decision. There is something deeply touching about the idea of the mother imagining her father's motivations in this way, and it tenderly also emphasises her actual distance from him, and her lack of knowledge of his real motivations.

The central part of the poem creates vividly the ordinary life that the pilot has left behind. The vivid similes of the fishing boats ‘like bunting’ and fish ‘like a huge flag’ connote gaiety and celebration—though the image of the flag is also reminiscent of the national flag, and so reminiscent of duty to his country. Perhaps here the sheer size of the ‘flag’ of fish outweighs the nationalism that he has been taught. It seems to be signalling to him, as though waved in a figure of eight, perhaps as a warning, and it is this image, the speaker theorises, which calls him home.

The lifegiving image of the fish ‘flashing silver’ is emphasised by the ways in which they are described almost like a radar beacon, ‘swivelled towards the sun’. The image of the sun, of course, has powerful connotations for the Japanese, as the kanji which represent the name of their country, 日本,  also means ‘sun origin’, leading to the name of ‘Land of the Rising Sun’ and their flag represents the sun. So here it is as if the natural world recognizes a deeper priority than the training the pilot has had, one which responds to the land and its people, and so succeeds in calling him back. The soft rhymes ‘swathes/eight/safe’ emphasise this connection between what he sees and what he does.

The vivid memory of the children on the seashore—the pilot and his brothers—building cairns of stones that seemed to summon back his father from sea becomes lyrical, the stones described in terms of precious jewels, and the descriptions of the fish richly metaphorical: ‘cloud-marked’, ‘feathery’. There is a semantic field of wealth here also, building from the ‘pearl-grey pebbles’, through ‘loose silver’ to ‘the dark prince’ of the tuna fish. The devotion of the brothers, and their silent prayers for their father's safe return influence the pilot's decision, it is suggested, which heightens the irony of what awaits his own return.

The endstopped ‘dangerous’ at the end of stanza five seems to predict the consequences of the pilot’s decision to turn back to this rich life, and the language becomes immediately changed to reflect the reaction to this decision, with a repeated string of negative words: ‘though…never…. nor… no longer.. never… no longer’ describing what happens once he returns to his village.  The behaviour of the pilot's wife seems almost to mimic the behaviour of a deferential, traditional Japanese wife: 'never spoke again /in his presence, nor did she meet his eyes', but it becomes clear how this is actually a brutal exclusion 'as though he no longer existed'. As the children ‘gradually’ pick up the adult response, the pilot becomes increasingly isolated, the ‘chattered and laughed’ that finishes the penultimate stanza silenced in the next, the half-rhyme ‘laughed/learned/loved’ accentuating the shift from past happiness to  present misery.

The gradual silencing even of the children illustrates how children learn cruelty from adults and well as kindness. The natural spontaneous joy they feel is 'educated' out of them as they 'learned / to be silent, to live as though / he had never returned'. Although this is a very historically specific moment that is being described, there's a sense in which Garland speaks here also of any parent who has in some way let down their spouse--adult feelings are transferred to children, who then feed then back to parents in a terrible form of punishment. The kamikaze pilot has down something of which we imagine we should be proud--saved his own life and returned to the family he loves more than his reputation--and yet this is seen as shameful and selfish. This alienation of the father is expressed as though it were a failing in him: 'this / was no longer the father we loved', suggesting the ways in which social disappointment transforms character: as the father is treated as being unlovable, so he actually becomes unlovable, 'as though he no longer existed'. 

The final thought of the poem is accentuated by the parenthetical ‘she said’, as though distancing the perception from the narrator. The bitterness of the reflection ‘which had been the better way to die’ emphasises the pain of the pilot’s return, not to find gladness at his escape, but to discover shame at his choice, and so accentuates the damage of the war for all concerned. Of course, the final irony is that he has avoided 'respectable' suicide in order to suffer a different kind of suicide. His actions have condemned him, so that he is slowly killed by the lack of love from his family.

AQA Power and Conflict: The Emigrée

This poem, by Carol Rumens, is taken from her 1993 collection 'Thinking of Skins'. It describes, in the first person, the situation of a person who has left their native land for reasons that are not made clear, and who romanticises the image of their native city.

The title indicates the focus on a single speaking voice. An emigrée would normally be someone who has left their own country unwillingly, perhaps because of political pressure, or economic reasons. It was first used popularly to refer to French people who left France as a result of the 1789 revolution; refugees from the French Revolution in eighteenth-century England were known as 'émigrés' rather than refugees.The rather old-fashioned and refined term both indicates that it is a female speaker (the male form is émigré), and suggests times past. Although it is often used as an equivalent for words such as 'migrant', the term implies perhaps more choice about the manner of leaving than the use of 'refugee' would suggest. In strictly etymological terms, the word suggests more agency--a refugee seeks refuge, an emigre leaves or migrates from their country.

The poem has three stanzas in a rough pentameter, imitative of the speaking voice, of eight, eight and nine lines each. There is not a clear rhyming-scheme, but there are occasional half-rhymes that rely on assonance for their effect, such as 'break / weight', and sometimes end-rhymes, as for instance in the final stanza (city/me/city), create a striking effect when they occur. The repetition of 'sunlight' in the final line of each stanza has a slightly deadening effect, and the repetition is a slightly heavy-handed way of reiterating the central theme of the poem. The patterns are more stressed than syllabic, with between ten and thirteen syllables, but five clear stresses in each line. Although many of the lines show enjambement, this is not immediately evident, with lines often appearing end-stopped at first reading (for example 'I left it as a child / but my memory of it..' or 'my city takes me dancing through the city / of walls'. This creates a curiously multi-layered effect, as though the speaker is constantly adding on ideas and explanations to her original statements. In the final stanza it gives the effect of a final word, as the concluding 'extra' line seems to answer and reject the negativity of the preceding lines.

The start of the poem creates a sense of childlike innocence with the narrative gambit ‘There once was a country’. The inverted syntax and ellipsis powerfully suggest the conventional ‘once upon a time’ formulaic opening to a fairytale. This opens out the key contrast between the poem, between the darkness and struggle suggested by the semantic field of war, with the implicit and symbolic winter suggested by ‘that November / which…comes to the mildest city’, and the enchanted world of the child’s memory, illustrated by images that suggest toys, such as ‘the bright, filled paperweight’ or  the ‘hollow doll’ or paper plane. This contrast is enacted by the opposition between the repeated, positive image of ‘sunshine’ (the repetition of ‘of sunlight’ at the end of each stanza is a use of the rhetorical figure known as epistrophe) and the negative semantic field that opposes it.

Words such as ‘war’, ‘tyrants’ and ‘tanks’ undermine the idealistic ‘sunlight-clear’ memory, and suggest that the child knows that their memory is fantastical and unreliable, even as she clings to it.  The repetition of the provisional ‘may’ in ‘it may be at war, it may be sick with tyrants’ foreshadows the inevitable ‘but’ that follows. Regardless of the reality of the city, its metaphorical illness, the memory of happiness is a ‘brand’ that cannot be forgotten. Ironically the negative word 'brand' is here used to imply a positive--perhaps suggesting the ways that even apparently negative experiences can be positive if they are linked strongly to something highly valued.

In the second stanza, the 'tanks' of war are seen as objects--perhaps even toys-- owned by a personified time, which roll through the city. Despite the 'tanks of time' flattening memory, and the barriers this creates, the memory of the city is seen as 'even clearer', idealised with a 'glow  in recollection. The speaker has been absent from her homeland for such a long time that she has only 'a child's vocabulary' which she worries may be inaccurate--'a lie, banned by the state'. Nonetheless it persists, in much the same way as language persists in Sujata Bhatt's 'Search For My Tongue'. The image of the hollow doll, like a Russian doll, containing within it many smaller dolls, suggests something smuggled out of the country, the image of 'every coloured molecule' making the memory of language seem like a drug or sweet that is attractive to the taste--something picked up in the final line of the stanza. The 'mother tongue' of the speaker cannot be removed, and in a synaesthetic reference 'tastes of sunlight'.

In the final stanza, it is made clear that the exile is unable to travel back to their homeland, perhaps because of political or practical reasons, 'I have no passport'. The city, though, is then personified as something that comes to the speaker 'in its own white plane...docile as paper'. In an effect known as zeugma, the author here has made both the city and the plane possible referents for the phrase 'docile as paper'--the image of the paper plane, or the paper city (with its 'white streets') perhaps includes the paper on which this poem is written. Paper becomes an agent of memory.

The personified city seems almost like a pet (or a doll?) that the speaker tends to: 'I comb its hair and love its shining eyes', and this peaceful domestic image of calmness contrasts with what is probably really happening to the childhood city. In the final lines of the poem we discover indeed that it has become a 'city / of walls', threatening. 'They' in l.6 of the final stanza may refer to the walls, but equally may refer to a mysterious 'they' who accuse the speaker of abandonment. As such, 'they' may represent all the children who did not escape the city before 'that November'. The dancing child consoled by her happy memories is nonetheless circled by walls, or other children, a threatening gang who repetitively 'accuse' her of 'being dark in their free city'. The darkness here is of course a strong contrast to the 'sunlight' with which the speaker surrounds herself, and may suggest an element of Orwell's 'doublethink', in that her accusers accuse her of being 'dark', say that the city is 'free' while acting as though they are oppressive and restrictive, and threatening death.

The personified city is sheltered by the speaker in the face of this threat against memory: 'my city hides behind me'. The implication here is surely that even if the memory that the child cherishes is false to the way that the city now is--even if the city is in fact full of people angrily proclaiming freedom, furious at emigrees who have 'abandoned it', over-run with tanks and 'sick with tyrants', that nonetheless, what the child cherishes is in fact more true to her homeland's spirit than its current condition. In the final, complex image, as 'they mutter death' it is as though the city behind her glows brightly again, casting a shadow onto 'them' and throwing back the accusation of 'being dark'. The shadow is 'evidence of sunlight', just as perhaps, the sadness and threat is also evidence of a brighter future embedded in the memory of a brighter past 'of sunlight'.

The poem was one of those chosen for the 'Poetry by Heart' project and you can see a copy of it, and some further information about it on the 'Poetry by Heart' website. This interview by Lidia Vianu gives some additional context for the poem that you may find helpful, and Carol Rumen's own website also gives some additional context to her work which you may find interesting.