Silence and Distance in Ishion Hutchinson's War Poetry

A Review Essay By Patrick Eichholz

Ishion Hutchinson, School of Instructions. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023.

Review Essay by Patrick Eichholz

To celebrate the centennial of the 1918 Armistice ending the First World War, both Peter Jackson, the New Zealand filmmaker, and Ishion Hutchinson, the Jamaican-born poet, received commissions to visit the Imperial War Museum in London and develop new artworks out of the archive. The results of these two commissions could not have been more different.

Jackson, the director of The Lord of the Rings movies, quickly assembled a crew to review hundreds of hours of previously unseen footage and listen to hundreds more hours of interviews with British veterans from the Western Front. Jackson’s task was to shape this enormous mass of archival research into a coherent narrative and then enhance it with all the magic of modern cinema. He added color and sound effects to the film, which he then overlaid with one-hundred-and-twenty different voices he had conjured from the archive to create an immersive experience of life at the Front. Jackson said he made the film to get closer to his grandfather and his grandfather’s fellow veterans by “reaching through the fog of time and pulling these men into the modern world.” They Shall Not Grow Old was released to universal acclaim in November 2018, just in time for the centennial.

Hutchinson’s long poem commemorating the West Indian soldiers who fought in British regiments during the First World War, School of Instructions, was not released until November 2023. This delay reflects the difficulties Hutchinson encountered in the Imperial War Museum, where he was not met by a cacophony of West Indian voices, but with a disquieting silence. If you know the archival origins of the poem, you might expect School of Instructions to perform the same type of work as Jackson’s film: collapsing the distance separating contemporary readers from the West Indian soldiers who fought their way across the Holy Land between 1916 and 1918. Such expectations, however, are quickly dashed. We get a lot of descriptions of troop movements and updated casualty numbers, but no sense of what life was like in the regiment. The only West Indian voices we hear are responses to official commands or inquests: a “here, sir” or, in the only full statement by a West Indian soldier: “‘I am troubled / with my head and cannot stand the sound of the guns’ / No. 2776 Pte. Winston Thomas of CLARENDON told the / courts: ‘I reported to the doctor and he gave me no / medicine or anything sir. Everything hurts me sir.’” In the poem, this voice seems to emerge from nowhere, sandwiched between two scenes from Jamaica that are set decades after the First World War. Who was Winston Thomas? What was the source of his pain? What was he on trial for, and what was the verdict? Over the course of the poem, we hear reports of other West Indian soldiers executed by firing squad. Did Winston Thomas meet the same end? School of Instructions continually raises questions it can’t answer. If we were to hold Hutchinson’s work up to Jackson’s standard, it might be criticized for never wresting its subjects from the administrative record of the metropole. The poem’s subjects remain ever at a distance.

All this is to say that School of Instructions defies our traditional standards for judging war literature. It does not invite us to feel our way into the experiences of any individual soldier. Instead, it traces the progressions of a mysterious battalion comprised of “thousands upon thousands of restless shadows” who cast “no shadows on the sand.” When confronted with a conspicuous gap in the archive, Hutchinson could have tried to fill in the blank spaces by imagining the lives behind the recorded names. For instance, from the brief account of Winston Thomas quoted above, Hutchinson could have drawn on his general knowledge of Jamaica under British rule, the various war poems describing post-traumatic stress disorder, or the harrowing stories compiled in the 1922 Report of the War Office Committee of Enquiry into ‘Shell-Shock.’ Doing so, however, would have required Hutchinson to defile the sanctum of the combat zone that was so zealously protected by the veterans of the First World War. In his review of School of Instructions in Commonweal, Phil Klay, a veteran of the Iraq War, describes his initial unease upon first receiving Hutchinson’s book, with its cover design reminiscent of David Jones’s Anathemata and its dedication page modeled on Jones’s In Parenthesis. Jones famously dedicated the latter, his epic poem of the First World War, to the men who fought beside him, as well as “THE ENEMY FRONT-FIGHTERS WHO SHARED OUR PAIN.” Without Jones’ experience or Jackson’s archive of interviews, the temptation to invent must have been quite strong for Hutchinson, and Klay commends him for his restraint. Hutchinson forges an alternative path forward through the unlikely character of Godspeed.

The protagonist of School of Instructions is not a World War I soldier, but a young boy with a striking resemblance to the artist as a young man. Godspeed, “Ishi” on the school roster, shares the young Ishion Hutchinson’s love of encyclopedias and Dub music and, like Hutchinson, is raised by his grandmother in Eastern Jamaica during the 1990s. It is this semi-autobiographical Godspeed that lends School of Instructions its emotional foundation, and it is against Hutchinson’s vividly drawn scenes of Eastern Jamaica that we register the sparsity of Hutchinson’s record of the East Indian soldiers in the Middle Eastern theater during the First World War. Paradoxically, Hutchinson needs Godspeed to slow things down. Without him, there is nothing to check the regiment’s steady progression “into MOUNT EPHRAIM and SHARON then on to / JERICHO and AMMAN then through SAMARIA to / GILEAD and GALILEE then on to DAMASCUS and / finally through the gross darkness of CANAAN to / SHILOH.” Hutchinson developed Godspeed not only from his personal experiences, but from the photographs he found in the archive depicting uniformed East Indian soldiers at play. These young men Hutchinson recognized from his own days in uniform at various schools of instructions, where he too suffered under a foreign code of conscience.

The juxtaposition of Godspeed’s youthful misadventures and the Middle Eastern Campaign, however, are often more jarring than elucidating. Take this passage, for example, in which Hutchinson uses disgust to link a scene from Jamaica in the 1990s with war-torn Palestine:

          A great compost of The Gleaner and The Observer and The Star
             grew by the pit latrine of his grandmother’s house.
             Having his weekend morning shit Godspeed objected
             to the realist’s prayer as he softened a page to tissue in
             his hands which became marked with the black ink of 
             newsprint. Picric sand. Legions of flies flourished on
             the dead and on the living.

This passage begins with an homage to James Joyce, evoking the famous scene in Ulysses where Leopold Bloom repurposes a page from Matcham’s Masterstroke while asquat the cuckstool. In The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot attempted to place his own “white-armed Fresca” in a similar position, reading Clarissa amidst her morning “labours,” before Ezra Pound dismissed the passage as derivative and unnecessary. In this context, it is difficult to say what Hutchinson, an admirer of Eliot, hoped to gain by momentarily slipping into the Joycean register before introducing the “legions of flies” that accompanied the East Indian battalion. While Godspeed’s morning ritual is certainly tinged with disgust, the image of a boy spending a few minutes in the latrine doesn’t really get us any closer to the experience of living alongside the mangled corpses of one’s comrades and being forced to breathe in the decomposing flesh that feeds the flies crawling down your neck. It seems as though Hutchinson’s bridge between these two narratives is designed to fail, accentuating the gap that remains between the poet and the men he seeks to memorialize.

Alongside Godspeed, Hutchinson also calls forth various historical allusions in his effort to understand the experience of the East Indian soldiers at the center of his poem. In a section called “The Anabasis of Godspeed,” a title that evokes Xenophon’s ancient account of another foreign army fighting its way across equally forbidding terrain, Hutchinson also explores the Biblical resonances of his narrative:

          Proceeded from MASADA to RHESAINA and then marched 
              through blizzard like young Herod and his mercenaries
              marching to JERUSALEM under barrage of missiles in
              the winter of 39-38 B.C. Then in a mighty dry day of 
              frost they proceeded to APAMEA where many dug 
              trenches with their bare hands. Two were admitted to
              hospital for bronchial affections. It was like the Verdala
              débâcle all over again. Godspeed coughed and his chest
              was suddenly an exploding stone quarry. He wore the
              wrong coloured shoes to school. Rin tin tin tin. Darkness
              covered all of JUDAEA. He shook his jam jar of blinky 
              blink fireflies.

The East Indian regiment’s movements, which are echoed in the story of Godspeed, also cross a number of historical paths through the Holy Land, not only Herod’s conquest of Galilee and siege of Jerusalem, but Mary and Joseph’s later flight from Herod and Moses’s earlier course through the Sinai Peninsula. At times, Hutchinson even manages to allude to future wars with images of “RAFA which was bombed into baffled prayers” and the piled corpses “N. OF GAZA.” Hutchinson’s various allusions create a multiple-echoing poetic, in which the names of cities evoke all the sounds from the Biblical narrative (the rams’ horn trumpets that fell the walls of Jericho, for instance, or the clamorous banquet in Machaerus where Salome danced for the head of John the Baptist). It is “in MACHAERUS,” Hutchinson notes, that “Pte. James Davidson ‘C’ boy was beheaded,” but this event is narrated without context or audial accompaniment. All we are shown is the blood bespattered sand. Much like the story of Godspeed, the Biblical allusions fail to fill the yawning gap at the center of the poem: they cannot speak for the silenced soldiers. In School of Instructions, we hear the Dub pulsating through Pipecock Jackxon’s turntables and the bawling of Godspeed under Count Lasher’s cat-o’-nine-tails. But the members of the East Indian regiment, whether killed in batches or executed in isolation, all pass from life to death in silence, their names are simply moved from one side of the ledger to the other.

In the end, Hutchinson had to accept silence as his theme. If he could not bring his subjects up close, as Jackson had, he would have to memorialize them from a distance. His poem both begins and ends in the capitalized form and tone of a war monument. Its epigraph is taken from the forty-fourth chapter of Ecclesiasticus just before the verse Rudyard Kipling famously selected to be inscribed on British war memorials across the Empire: “Their name liveth for evermore.” Hutchinson selects a much bleaker verse for his own monument: “AND SOME THERE BE, WHICH HAVE NO MEMORIAL; WHO ARE PERISHED, AS THOUGH THEY HAD NEVER BEEN; AND ARE BECOME AS THOUGH THEY HAD NEVER BEEN BORN; AND THEIR CHILDREN AFTER THEM.” In School of Instructions, Hutchinson displays great restraint, abstaining from adding anything that might mitigate the historical erasure at the center of his poem. While researching in the Imperial War Museum, Hutchinson heard echoes from the ancient world and his own childhood, but he was never able to access the voices he had come to London to recover. To mark this absence in the poem, he begins each section with the Hebrew letter ayin. Rory Waterman notes that in Modern Hebrew an isolated ayin makes no sound; it represents a glottal stop. In the marked silence between sections, the historical and the eternal aspects of Hutchinson’s poem intersect. In his translation of Ecclesiastes, Robert Alter notes that the famous refrain from the King James Bible, “vanity of vanities,” misses the literal meaning of the Hebrew word havel. Alter’s Qohelet repeats instead “all is mere breath, and herding of wind.” In the end, Hutchinson’s School of Instructions plays upon this same theme as the poet searches in vain for the irretrievable voices of the forgotten men whose “blood still echoes” behind his temples and courses through his living hand.

Patrick Eichholz teaches English at the Virginia Military Institute.