The Yellow Birds
November 2012
The Yellow Birds is an earnest and powerful first novel about the experiences of a young American solider during the American-led war in Iraq. It was written by Kevin Powers who was himself a combatant in that war.
The Yellow Birds recalls, with an honest and ravenously poetic tongue, the experiences of a young soldier named Bartle in the lead up to and following the death of his buddy, the younger and far-less experienced Murph, in Iraq’s Nineveh province in 2004. In alternating chapters that lead up to and emanate from Murph’s death, the story recounts both the horrors of the war from the micro-perspective of the occupying US force (it never pretends to observe anything mildly geopolitical) and the absurd moral contortions its on-the-ground players devise to endure it, or to imagine they are enduring it.
In Bartle’s reckoning there are two outcomes for the soldier: to imagine death and by so doing suffer survival, or to imagine survival and suffer death. It’s a perversity that delivers some of the best concrete images of violence in a consistently well-written book. When Bartle drunkenly imagines his own death, he imagines that ‘first I had to become a body, so that there would be something to be shot, but more likely there would be an explosion, more likely there would be metal made into sheets with jagged edges folded over into my skin and my skin would be torn.’
Of course in the Iraq War more US soldiers survived than didn’t, but whether or not they did so because they so embraced their anticipation of death, their capacity to ‘stay deviant in the motherfucker,’ as the boys’ combat leader Sergeant Sterling puts it, is another matter. Certainly the reportedly high rates of post-traumatic stress suggest they might have. The value of a fiction of this colour is to bring to the imagination of those who weren’t there something of the psychological experience of those who were.
It’s a book whose wisdom is such that we forget sometimes to remember it has been configured as a fiction. But it sometimes does reveal its own contrivance. When Bartle’s flight back to the US crosses the coast, for example, he struggles to find the words to articulate what it is he wants. It is of course ‘home’ but there is a conscious sense of narrative tidiness to his inability to find the word. And on a larger level Murph and Bartle are, of course, more than just soldiers, they are a mythological Janus: Eros and Thanatos, their trajectories are fixed. It reminds us that we find a need to make sense, even if it is a deviant one, from an experience we cannot ever hope to control.
I wonder if it’s too cynical to point out that even before I started reading The Yellow Birds I had understood that it would be fine and worthy, a novel that would fit more-or-less successfully into the tradition it so obviously draws on: All Quiet on the Western Front, The Things They Carried. The novel is everything I expected it to be, a kind of fulfilment. Every war, it seems, has its novel, its gaze into the abyss. And while The Yellow Birds might be the novel of the Iraq War to date, a first-person shooter that extends into the soldier’s traumatised moral and psychological certainties, extending it beyond the simple visual and aural realism we’re already too familiar with from YouTube and gaming, I wonder if it might still be worth waiting for something else to surpass it.
Other Articles You May Like
Fleshy Husks and Brittle Bones: Visible Ink 24
Fleshy Husks and Brittle Bones: Visible Ink 24 is RMIT’s contribution to the array of literary journals being produced every…
The Best Australian Essays 2012
Ramona Koval (ed.) / Black Inc.
New Finnish Grammar
Diego Marani / Text Publishing
Galleries
Weather
20°Latest Edition
