In wars … there is life amidst death, survival amidst destruction, [and] music, drums and celebration amidst sounds of explosions.Footnote 1
In the fall of 1995, a few weeks after the war in Bosnia ended, I sat with friends who had suffered horribly … Yet all [they] … did that afternoon was lament the days when they lived in fear and hunger … They did not wish back the suffering, and yet, they admitted, those days may have been the fullest of their lives.Footnote 2
Introduction
In recent years, and predominantly among feminist scholars, there has been a growing body of work within International Relations (IR) that researches, writes, and understands war through the prism of ‘experience’.Footnote 3 In contradistinction to the grand and abstract theorising about war that can occur within the discipline of IR, these ‘experiential’ scholarsFootnote 4 argue ‘understanding people’s experiences with/in war is essential for understanding war’.Footnote 5 War, in this body of scholarship, is not something that is exceptional or disconnected from the everyday lives of people. Rather, there is a focus on its ‘ordinariness’ and the ways in which it is interwoven with the day-to-day tapestries of people’s lives. Such scholarship has generated numerous important insights into war as a phenomenon, practice and ‘politics of injury’,Footnote 6 with these approaches reminding us ‘war cannot be fully apprehended unless it is studied up from the people and not studied down from places that sweep blood, tears and laughter away’.Footnote 7 Notwithstanding the richness of this research, the focus of attention has, however, tended to remain on wars’ violences, those responsible for enacting them, and the effects of such violence.Footnote 8 Indeed, as a discipline borne from the horrors of the First World War and out of a desire to better understand the international system in order to ensure peaceful relations, (critical) research in IR that draws attention to the violent ‘realities’ of war and challenges its practice is no doubt crucial.
War, however, encompasses a plurality of experiences and works across a range of affective registers. While experiences of war no doubt include those of violence, trauma, and injury, as it has long been noted (and by numerous disciplines) so too is it a site that has historically, artistically, and conceptually been imbued with a range of meanings and emotions,Footnote 9 among them: honour, glory, excitement, the existential test, becoming, manhood, hell,Footnote 10 and so on. In this article I take joy and pleasure as my starting point, drawing attention to the range of affective registers that war experiences work across. Locating the argument in this recent ‘turn’ to experience and the literature on emotions and affect in international politics, I draw on insights from Elina Pentinnen and Debbie Lisle to consider how ‘there is more to war than suffering’,Footnote 11 and that it should be engaged with ‘through the broadest and the most complex repertoire of emotions available’.Footnote 12 After all, for those who practice and live through war, it may not be uniformly horrifying or traumatic, holding instead moments of laughter, joy, compassion, humour, excitement, optimism, friendship, love, and kindness. I argue that placing joy and pleasure at the centre of the study of war can work to decentre war as the focus of our attention, reminding us that war is never the only thing going on, that it is not totalising or universalising in its experience, and can redirect our attention to the experiences of those who have lived through it.
Drawing on three war novels – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2007), Tahmima Anam’s A Golden Age (2012), and Cara Hoffman’s Be Safe I Love You (2014) – the article tracks three recurring themes of pleasurable and joyful experiences related to war that are found within the texts. The first details bodily pleasures in and of war experienced through individual bodies, exploring sex-for- and sex-as-pleasure in war, and how combat and the capability of a military body can elicit feelings of wellbeing and joy. The second turns attention towards experiences of joy felt between collective bodies in the form of marches, chanting, and political rallies, and how these affective spaces can work to motivate and sustain war. The final theme explored is those experiences of joy and pleasure that escape war’s reach: the interpersonal relations and small, everyday moments of happiness. This attention to joy and pleasure reveals the range of affective registers war works across and is integral to understanding how those who live through and practice war survive, sustain and resist it.
There is, of course, an obvious tension in associating joy and pleasure with something as violent and horrifying and destructive as war, and it is worth spending some time at the outset of this article addressing this tension, my own ‘war experience’, and the politics of the piece. I have spent the vast majority of my adult life living in the UK and while for almost all of that time Britain has been ‘at war’ (in Afghanistan 2001–14, Iraq 2003–11, and more recently carrying out ‘air support’ missions over Iraq and Syria), I have not personally experienced any of war’s horrors. To borrow Christine Sylvester’s phrasing, war ‘touches’Footnote 13 me only gently: while I think, research, and write about war, no one I care deeply about lives in or has been deployed to a warzone these past 16 years and my own life has been altogether undisrupted by its occurrence. To some, I am a ‘spectator’ of warFootnote 14 rather than participant. In writing about joys and pleasures related to war, therefore, it is not my intention to suggest that war is desirable or to fetishise it in anyway, or to occlude its very real violences and the sufferings it engenders. Rather, my reason for researching and writing about war has always come from the recognition of its profoundly injurious character and a desire to challenge its practice. As noted above, however, war is both imbued with and elicits a range of experiences and emotional responses, including those that appear at odds with its violent and frequently horrifying realities. Following Linda Åhäll and Thomas Gregory’s proposition to think about politics as ‘political puzzles’,Footnote 15 I believe it is important to give notice to experiences of joy and pleasure in war. This is because
[i]f one thinks that that emotions or the emotional can help shed light on the particular puzzle in question, then it is not only legitimate methodologically, but it would be a serious omission to leave out, precisely because a focus on emotions and emotionality would add yet another piece to the puzzle in question.Footnote 16
Thus, if joy and pleasure are recognised as part of war’s practice and affective landscape then they – just as grief, violence, or injury – will shed light on this particular (and enduring) puzzle of global politics. As such, there is a need to engage with the full range of experiences and emotions present in war. Furthermore, despite its horrors, violences, and even excitements, war is never the only thing going on. For many of those caught up in war – either voluntarily or against their will – life does not come to a grinding halt. By redirecting attention to these people and the full range of their experiences, another piece of the 'war puzzle' may be found.
The fullness of war experience
As Elina Pentinnen notes, ‘In the field of international relations it is not customary to focus on how individuals experience flow, beauty and love in the midst of extreme violence.’Footnote 17 Rather, attention is often directed towards wars’ horrors, pain, and trauma. For Pentinnen, such a focus is understandable as
War is undesirable, it represents suffering … It is something that disrupts peace and upsets continuity, scars personalities and destroys societies. It represents chaos, and reminds us of the uncertainty and precariousness of life.Footnote 18
This focus, however, relies on, and risks rearticulating, what Debbie Lisle has referred to as a ‘restrictive emotional grammar’Footnote 19 in and to our interrogations of global politics. While like Pentinnen, Lisle recognises the understandable nature of these emotional pathways, Lisle is also interested in examining ‘how misery, horror, and suffering’ are translated through a much broader emotional landscape, including ‘absurdity … slapstick … and laughter’,Footnote 20 and that this may hold enormous potential. As Lisle states, ‘Lurking within the experience of tragedy are a whole range of unruly, excessive, and in-between emotional states’,Footnote 21 and examining these may lead to alternative insights or even alternative responses to the horrors IR as a discipline frequently confronts. This call to engage with a broader emotional landscape in our approaches to global politics is echoed by Pentinnen in her innovative text that promotes joy as a new methodology for IR. In the text Pentinnen suggests looking for joy and happiness ‘in places traditionally viewed as being defined by suffering and trauma’,Footnote 22 arguing that joy and empowerment are always there to be found, even in the most extreme of conditions. In her own research Pentinnen finds stories of German soldiers’ ‘kindness, compassion and mutual friendliness’Footnote 23 during their posting to Finland in the Second World War, while in her research on genocide and extreme violence, Pentinnen focuses on ‘the human potential for self-healing, resilience and empowerment’Footnote 24 rather than trauma and mere survival.
While Pentinnen’s ‘joyful ontology’ encourages the most direct engagement with experiences of joy and wellbeing in war, others within the discipline of IR have also challenged the common-sense approach to war that posits it as exclusively a site of suffering.Footnote 25 Likewise, those who are most intimately involved and associated with war are often those who most readily admit its excitement and allure.Footnote 26 As the recent proliferation of solider memoirs have narrated, the exhilaration, excitement, and ecstasy of combat remains an enticing elixir for the (predominantly) young men who join and fight in militaries.Footnote 27 War journalists – those who chase wars across continents – similarly struggle to reconcile the popular refrain that ‘war is hell’ with their own desires to be among it. Chris Hedges, a foreign correspondent for The New York Times for 15 years, describes war as ‘a drug’, endowed with the qualities of ‘excitement, exoticism, power, chances to rise above our small stations in life, and a bizarre and fantastic universe that has a grotesque and dark beauty’;Footnote 28 while Sebastian Junger, a journalist and filmmaker who was embedded with US troops in Afghanistan, has said that ‘people would have a more honest, realistic relationship to the important topic of war … If they could … acknowledge that part of themselves that responds to it positively’.Footnote 29 While none of these authors are the first to recognise the complexity of the emotional landscape of war, nor that war is not a site of universal or total suffering, all gesture towards the plurality of war experiences and affective grammars. In this article, I argue that by not just recognising the emotional complexity of war, but placing experiences of joy and pleasure at the centre of analysis both redirects attention away from wars’ violences and focuses attention on people and the ways in which they survive, sustain, and resist war.
War novels and stories from the ‘ground’
Concerned not only with depicting war, but also with evoking the feelings, emotions, and sensations associated with it, this article uses war novels in its exploration of wartime pleasures. In doing so I build on the work of numerous IR scholars who have made use of fictional sources in order to rethink political dilemmas.Footnote 30 While Roland Bleiker has written about the ‘turn’Footnote 31 to the aesthetic in International Relations, as Åhäll and Gregory note, ‘aesthetic interventions in the study of IR, politics and war go beyond a focus on aesthetic sources’.Footnote 32 Rather, ‘approaching the study of IR with an aesthetic sensibility encourages scholars to pay analytical attention to affect rather than reason, judgement rather than fact, sensation rather than intellectualism’.Footnote 33 In this respect, while war novels will not provide clear answers or advice on how to stop or prevent wars and other forms of political violence, they do engage and capture our human and emotional relationship with them.Footnote 34
Novels are also uniquely suited to exploring the ‘experiential’ aspects of war. Embedded in the personal, they are a key resource for expressing and illuminating human emotions. Readers are encouraged to take up positions subliminally, to identify with at least one of the protagonists and, as such, share something of the read experience.Footnote 35 Furthermore, unlike the majority of political analysis within IR, literature’s orientation is personal. While the so-called ‘mainstream’ (and indeed some of the critical approaches with – as SylvesterFootnote 36 points out – their focus on metanarratives such as ‘globalisation’, ‘capitalism’, and ‘militarisation’) remains concerned with grand narratives of war and conflict, fiction can provide a window into the lives of ‘ordinary’ people who live in, through and between these grand narratives. As Bleiker has written:
[Although] the grand narratives of international relations, from colonialism to revolutionary progress, shape the lives of people … these people – the unnamed and often forgotten objects of international relations – are not entirely defined by the events we often identify as the sole political reality. Everyday struggles seep into, around and through grand narratives. But these transgressions are only rarely explored and theorised in prevailing scholarly approaches.Footnote 37 , Footnote 38
Thus, while ‘War’ writ large may be the ultimate grand narrative that serves as a centrepiece to so much of IR’s scholarship, it is simultaneously made up of innumerable smaller stories and accounts. These smaller narratives, often told from the ‘ground’ and found in fiction as well auto/biographical accounts, offer a very different perspective to those told from the top down.Footnote 39 Fiction, therefore, discourages the tendency ‘to generalize war’ and can present ‘bodies, emotions, and ambivalences difficult for researchers and other war spectators to conjure or register on their own’.Footnote 40 In particular reference to what I am interested in uncovering, novels have the time, space, and the forensic focus on the lifeworlds of individuals to explore the lesser-told experiences of war, including those that may be humorous, joyful, or pleasurable. Fictional accounts can ‘depict the shallows and depths of violence and injury, the unexpected mundanities and inconveniences, the bits of gallows humor that can hit one in war, the moments of joy, and the contexts in which particular wars unfold’.Footnote 41
Three war novels
I draw on three war novels in my tracing of joyful and pleasurable experiences related to war: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun; Tahmima Anam’s A Golden Age; and Cara Hoffman’s Be Safe I Love You. Half of a Yellow Sun tells the story of three individuals – Ugwu, a houseboy for a university professor; Olanna, the beautiful and privileged lover of the professor; and Richard, a shy Englishman in love with Olanna’s twin sister – whose lives intersect over the course of the Nigeria-Biafra war in the late 1960s. A Golden Age is set during the 1971 Bangladesh War of Independence, and centres on the family of a widowed woman, Rehana, and her two patriotic children. Be Safe I Love You is set in recent-day United States and the protagonist is Lauren, a young North American woman recently returned from a tour of duty in Iraq. I have chosen these novels, in part, because they document three different conflicts, across three different continents, but also because they are books about war written by women and with women as central characters. Reflecting broader war imaginings and the practitioner and academic worlds of warfare, when war novels are thought of (and ‘great’ or ‘classic’ war novels in particular), they tend to be those written by men and concerned largely with the experiences of fighting men (Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Heller’s Catch 22, Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five…). When women have written about war – for example, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway or (albeit not a novel) Anne Frank’s diary – such books are often not considered stories or books about war in the same way as those tales imagined and documented by men. As feminists have long noted,Footnote 42 this has led to a writing out of women’s experiences of war and a failure of policymakers, practitioners, and academics to capture the fullness of wars’ experiences and reach. Furthermore, when women’s experiences in/of war have emerged, more often than not they have been experiences of horror, suffering or trauma. As Pentinnen writes:
I had been taught … that in war it is the women who always suffer more. Women are part of the nation that needs to be protected, but which is also violated, raped, tortured and humiliated … Women were depicted in wars like the living dead, forever traumatized and violated, vulnerable and weak, wandering around almost aimlessly in refugee camps, with no hope, no dreams and no capacity for making decisions or recreating their lives after atrocities or in exploitative conditions.Footnote 43
To what extent does this capture the entirety of women’s lived experiences in war? While not denying the very real violences and suffering that women (and men) face in war, how might they also experience moments of unexpected joy in the most challenging of environments? And how do these three novels offer insights to these moments?
At first reading there is little to suggest that these novels could tell us anything about the possibility of, or potential for, joys in and of war. Sexual violence, torture, enforced starvation, the loss of loved ones, post-traumatic stress disorder, and violent death all appear on the novels’ pages. The stories of horror linger long after the books have been put down, as does the fact that all three novels are very much anchored in the ‘real’ world and based on ‘true’ events. However, among the one thousand-odd pages, and in the close detailing of the lives of the characters, moments of physical pleasure, emotional wellbeing, and positive affects are documented. Three recurring themes of joy and pleasure that emerge within the three novels will be traced: bodily pleasures, the ‘togetherness’ of war, and moments of joy that escape war’s reach. Tracking these experiences presents both a conceptual and methodological challenge. What, for example, can be counted as a ‘war experience’? As will be shown below, the experiences detailed include those that war has made possible, those that take place despite of or in excess of war, sometimes the experiences simply take place during war, and at other times war is these pleasures. Broadly then, for the purposes of this article the ‘war experiences’ discussed are those experiences that take place within the novels, all set (at least partially) in what would conventionally be referred to as ‘warzones’ and during conflict and its immediate aftermath.Footnote 44 The novels are also concerned with the lives of those very immediately ‘touched’ by war: combatants and their friends and families, civilians living through war and/or in refugee camps, and those killed, injured, or tortured as a result of war. As Sylvester notes, however, the ‘touch’ of war and its experience is much broader than those in wars’ ‘line of fire’:Footnote 45
people feel the war touch directly, through news reports, aid and relief campaigns, books, films, visual art, discussions in schools and universities, through philosophical inquiry, or by knowing someone who is or has been involved in war.Footnote 46
In this respect, then, everyone – soldiers, state leaders, academics, students, peace activists, spectators, citizens – experiences war in some form or other. Furthermore, all of the experiences detailed below (and arguably anything that might be termed a ‘war experience’) are not just ‘war experiences’ – they could also be understood as (among others) sexual, familial, combat, political, everyday, and/or banal experiences. That there isn’t a clearly demarcated definition of what ‘war experience’ (or, indeed, ‘war’) is does not matter for the argument forwarded here. Rather, these joyful or pleasurable experiences are used analytically to redirect attention away from the horrors of or within war, revealing the range and complexity of wars’ affective landscape, as well as the recognition that for those who live in and through it, war is not totalising or universalising in its experiences.
Bodily pleasures
Sex-as- and sex-for-pleasure is featured across all three novels.Footnote 47 Both Be Safe I Love You and A Golden Age feature only one explicit sex scene, appearing close to the beginning and close of the novels, respectively. In the first chapter of Be Safe I Love You, the protagonist, Lauren, returns to her hometown from her tour of duty in Iraq and immediately seeks out her former boyfriend, engaging in a sexual encounter with him, presumably both he and sex being the first thing she seeks out upon arrival home. In A Golden Age, the only sex scene forms part of a slowly building love story between Rehana and a Bangladeshi Army Major who she has been hiding from the Pakistani authorities.
It is, however, in Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun in which sex and characters’ sexual relationships occupy a more central role. The novel switches between the early 1960s (the pre-war years) and late 1960s (the Nigeria-Biafra conflict), and throughout ‘Adichie offers sensual and detailed accounts of sexual desire and intercourse between her principle adult characters’.Footnote 48 This is despite the fact that in the late 1960s’ sections, civil war, internal displacement, famine, death, and multitude of other hardships are simultaneously present. Despite these horrors, desire, intimacy, and sex-as-pleasure continue. Zoe Norridge has argued that sex in Half of a Yellow Sun ‘plays an integral role in the characters’ response to the onset of war’, with the sexual encounters marked not only by reciprocal pleasure and matched desire, but also as something that offers empowerment and support. For example, at times, sex is ‘pictured as a haven, a space for joy in the midst of tragedy’:Footnote 49
They would go out to the veranda and he [Richard] would push the table aside and spread out the soft rug and lie on his naked back. When she [Kainene] climbed astride, he would hold her hips and stare up at the night sky and, for those moments, be sure of the meaning of bliss. It was their new ritual since the war started, the only reason he was grateful for the war.Footnote 50
Adichie’s characters also engage in sexual encounters during intense moments of grief, where the bodily pleasure of the act is juxtaposed and intermingles with grief, sadness, and the unbearability of war. When Olanna and Odenigbo are told of their friend’s death, Olanna feels as if ‘something in her head was stretched taut’ and she is being ‘attacked, relentlessly clobbered, by loss’.Footnote 51 When her and Odinigbo make love that evening, Odenigbo is still on top of Olanna,
so still she thrashed around and pulled at his hips. But he did not move. Then he began to thrust and her pleasure multiplied, sharpened on stone so that each tiny spark became a pleasure all its own. She heard herself crying, her sobbing louder and louder … He was crying too; she felt the tears drop on her body before she saw them on his face.Footnote 52
Even in this moment in which war’s traumas have built and multiplied on top of one another to a point where Olanna feels physically and emotionally incapable of coping with them any longer, bodily pleasures remain. However, while Olanna derives pleasure from this sexual embrace, it occurs as coextensive to the grief and unbearability of war. My use of the term ‘coextensive’ here draws on Zoë Wool’s use of it to think expansively about war, militaries, and militarisation. For Wool, thinking coextensively means not thinking about love (Wool’s example) in the contxt of war, or as war providing a new context for love, but instead thinking about how both love – or joy or pleasure – and war ‘are both part of one broader arrangement of life and death’.Footnote 53 Thus, in this instance of Olanna’s bodily pleasure and grief, both are part of and both are constitutive of Olanna’s war experience. As Norridge notes, the depths and complexity of sensations experienced by Olanna – grief, loss, helplessness, and bodily pleasure – are revealed through attention to her physicality.Footnote 54
The second bodily pleasures in/of war I want to draw attention to are the pleasures associated with the soldiering body and its capabilities. In Be Safe I Love You significant attention is given to Lauren’s ‘war body’Footnote 55 and what it can do. Lauren’s friends and family recognise how her time in the military has made her physically and mentally ‘strong’,Footnote 56 that she is ‘fit and alert’,Footnote 57 and that the very movement of her body communicates authority and confidence:
There was always something about how she moved – like her body had an authority, an ability that made it possible for her not to worry. You didn’t worry if you could run twenty miles, if you were coordinated, if knew how to fight – you weren’t concerned about things in the same way other people were.Footnote 58
Lauren herself appears to derive satisfaction from what her body can do, how she can control it and physically train it: she notes that ‘[b]uilding strength is its own addiction’,Footnote 59 and when jogging enters ‘into the rhythm of her body, her breathing, her heart’.Footnote 60
This sense of wellbeing derived from the body and its physical movements has been previously noted in relation to military life. William McNeill recounts his experiences of military drill in 1940s America, noting that, ‘What I remember now … [is a] sense of pervasive well-being’, and that ‘[m]oving briskly and keeping in time was enough to make us feel good about ourselves … and vaguely pleased with the world at large’.Footnote 61 More recently, Synne Dyvik has explored the presence of emotions such as ‘relief, elation and excitement’ that are present in combat, as well as the proclamation by one Norwegian soldier deployed in the recent conflict in Afghanistan that ‘war is better than sex’.Footnote 62 While it goes without saying that these experiences of military drill, combat, and the capability of a soldiering body are different both in relation to one another and to the bodily sensations of sex-as- and sex-for-pleasure detailed above, what I want to think through is how in all of them it is the body that serves as the locus for the physical and emotional experiences of pleasure and satisfaction. Across these experiences, physical sensations of movement, intimacy, and strength are tied to emotional sensations of wellbeing, bliss, and relief. In this respect, across all of the bodily experiences there is a sense of an ‘overflowing of … physical and emotional senses’Footnote 63 that intermingle and converge through physical bodies.
Drawing on the theory and concept of ‘flow’Footnote 64 provides one way of thinking about the wellbeing, satisfaction, and even joy a soldier may derive from their body or experience during combat. ‘Flow’, one of the leading psychological theories of wellbeing, refers to an ‘experience which seamlessly unfolds from moment to moment’.Footnote 65 Actors in flow are ‘fully concentrated on the present moment … action and awareness merge; [and] reflective self-consciousness is lost’.Footnote 66 Flow thus provides a way to think about the embodied experiences of Lauren and William McNeill training their military bodies and building strength, as well as the combat experiences of the Norwegian soldiers that Dyvik documents. It describes an experience in which ‘one’s entire awareness is absorbed in the present moment’,Footnote 67 and can elicit sensations of satisfaction and exhilaration. For the military historian Yuval Harari, flow theory may be a ‘powerful tool for understanding military experiences’,Footnote 68 helping to explain the so-called ‘joy of combat evinced in almost every warrior culture from Homeric Greece to medieval Europe’.Footnote 69 The intention here is not to suggest that the presence of flow and subjective feelings of wellbeing in war are ‘good’ (and by extension that they and war should be sought out). Indeed, in his own discussion of flow in war, Harari details a number of political and ethical issues that arise when thinking about flow in relation to military and combat experience. Rather, thinking about experiences of flow reveals the multiplicity of war experiences, sensations, and feelings felt through the body. As Dyvik notes, it is only by taking these sensations and emotions into account that ‘the discipline [of IR] is … better equipped to understand war’s continued seduction and continuation for those who choose to practice it’.Footnote 70
The ‘togetherness’ of war
While pleasure and satisfaction can be experienced during war in and through the body – whether in the capability of a military body or through sexual encounters whereby the body and its pleasures are central – positive affects in war also travel between and among bodies. In this section I want to specifically focus on the ways in which the potential excitement or promise of war is something that is collectively felt.
Both A Golden Age and Half of a Yellow Sun detail ‘the kind of joy in war that can grip people who start a glorious war against oppression’.Footnote 71 There is excitement, promise, optimism, and a feeling of justness. In A Golden Age, both of Rehana’s children are enthralled with the revolutionary possibilities of conflict. Rehana’s son Sohail leaves home to join the Bengali national liberation army, and on a visit back to the family home Sohail is brimming with enthusiasm and excitement for his experiences:
‘Everyone has joined. Everyone.’ And his eyes shone. ‘All the young men, fighting side by side. No one cares who anyone is. They’ve all joined, the peasant and the soldier, together, just as we’ve been dreaming.’Footnote 72
This optimism is shared by Maya, Rehana’s daughter, who asks her mother, ‘Aren’t you even a little excited? A whole nation, coming together.’Footnote 73 Similarly, in Half of a Yellow Sun, the potential and possibility that war offers can be traced in the voices of the Biafran radio presenters (‘youthful, eager, confident’),Footnote 74 and among Olanna, Odenigbo, and their friends who gather to discuss the forging of the Biafran state (‘Their voices were urgent and excited, each person barely waiting for the last to finish speaking.’)Footnote 75 Tellingly, such enthusiasms are most keenly felt close to the start of war’s outset, before ‘[w]ar becomes a gaping injury to spirit, body, convictions, emotions, and honor’,Footnote 76 and as Sylvester notes in the case of Half of a Yellow Sun, such enthusiasm and delusion ‘is maintained mostly by those of privilege and education, who are not actually fighting’.Footnote 77
In both novels the excitement and promise of war is acutely present in scenes that are filled with people, and in which there is a sense of the force of feeling associated with the war and the like-mindedness and ‘togetherness’ it engenders. Political rallies feature in both novels and capture the embodied sensations of righteousness, empowerment, and camaraderie driving the beginning stages of the conflicts. From A Golden Age:
By the end [of the rally] she [Rehana] found herself chanting Joy Bangla, Joy Bangla, Joy Bangla with the crowd, the rhythm of her words chiming with the hard thump of her chest, and she recognized at once, the incendiary thrill of shouting … Rehana suddenly felt young, plunged into a world of limitless possibility.Footnote 78
And from Half of a Yellow Sun:
Olanna was filled with a delicious exuberance … They were Biafrans. She was Biafran … Olanna watched them and relaxed with a sweet surge that they all felt what she felt, what Odenigbo felt, as though it were liquid steel instead of blood that flowed through their veins, as though they could stand barefoot over red-hot embers.Footnote 79
The chanting was constant now … The rhythm was heady. Richard glanced across at Phyllis, thrusting a fist in the air as she shouted, and he looked around for a little while at everyone else, intense and intent in the moment, before he too began to wave and chant.Footnote 80
In all of these excerpts, excitement, elation, and exuberance are experienced through and alongside the physicality of chanting, thumping chests, and thrusting fists. While Rehana, Olanna, and Richard all experience these sensory regimes individually, they are also experienced collectively between the bodies present at the rallies. Indeed, it appears that the ‘togetherness’ of the rallies – the mass of bodies and a sense of a shared goal or identity – is central to the force of feeling experienced by the individuals. Returning to Dyvik’s analysis of Norwegian combat soldiers and the embodied narratives found within their memoirs, Dyvik argues that combat is made intelligible both ‘through the senses experienced individually, but also through and between [soldiering] bodies bounded by gendered and militarized bonds’.Footnote 81 Similarly, in these instances, the excitement and exuberance of war are not just experienced by the individual characters, but move, circulate, and multiply among bodies. And while the Norwegian soldiers are bounded by the ‘myths’ of militarised masculinity,Footnote 82 for those in the rallies, it is through the imaginaries of nation communitiesFootnote 83 that they come together and that sensations resonate and multiply.
The ways in which these experiences of war do not merely reside ‘in’ a body, but track and circulate among bodies can be understood in relation to Sara Ahmed’s work on the ‘sociality’ of emotionsFootnote 84 and Kathleen’s Stewart’s exploration of ‘ordinary affects’.Footnote 85 Both these authors ask questions about how these bodily sensations move or ‘ripple’Footnote 86 between bodiesFootnote 87 and how they ‘stick’ and/or generate intensities. In this respect, Ahmed and Stewart are less concerned with what emotions and affects are, than with what they do.Footnote 88 For Ahmed this means tracking how emotions accumulate ‘affective value’ through the effects of their circulation, as well as how they ‘stick’,Footnote 89 while Stewart writes, that it is ‘not about one person’s feelings becoming another’s but about bodies literally affecting one another and generating intensities’.Footnote 90 Significant for my analysis here is both authors’ concern with a body’s encounters with others. That emotions and affects ‘work’ through their contact with others and their ability to move, and that the more they circulate, ‘the more affective they become’.Footnote 91 In relation to the excerpts above, it is through the characters’ encounters with others – in this case, the mass of a crowd – which their excitement and elation is experienced and accumulates. Here, while the excitement and possibilities of war are still felt in an individual body, it is bodies’ togetherness that means these sensations resonate and multiply.
Turning directly now to Ahmed and Stewart’s concerns with what these emotions do, I argue that these affective spaces and the experiences of elation and exuberance by those within them work both to motivate and sustain war’s practice. For example, as the sensations of righteousness, justness, and the ‘incendiary thrill’ of forging a new nation build and accumulate within the rally, the ‘stickiness’Footnote 92 of these emotions allows this affective atmosphere to move and ripple outwards. Such emotions travel in and between bodies bounded through a shared history of oppression, as well as the seductions of a new nation and all that it promises. The strength of this feeling – its affective value – is essential for both motivating and sustaining individuals to support the war, endure its hardships, and offer themselves to its fighting forces. While in A Golden Age, the excitement and enthusiasm for Bangladeshi independence drives Rehana’s children to fight and support the war effort (which is eventually successful in granting Bangladesh self determination), in Half of a Yellow Sun, enthusiasm prevails even in the face of ‘blockades, air attacks, starvation tactics, mounting fear, and increasing evidence of defeat engulfing them’.Footnote 93 Such blind enthusiasm is seen, for example, in the aftermath of an air raid in which Olanna and her neighbours shelter in a bunker. When they emerge a neighbour declares, ‘Our anti-aircraft fire was wonderful!’, and another starts to sing ‘Biafra win the war’, with most of the street joining him.Footnote 94 In this terrifying moment, the neighbour’s outward and initial response is not one of terror, shock, or fear as may be expected, but of optimism, enthusiasm, and conviction in Biafra’s ultimate success. As Sylvester notes, this optimism takes a long time to dissipate in the novel – ‘way past the time the blockade reduces incoming food … past the time hospitals run out of drugs, and even after so many people’s hair turns red from malnutrition … and falls out by the fistfuls’Footnote 95 – and, in the face of so much suffering, is crucial for war’s continuance.
In excess of war
While the previous section explored experiences of joy made possible through war – the excitement of rallies and the promise of victory – in this final section I focus on moments of joy that remain in spite or in excess of war. Such moments can range from small bursts of laughter and unbidden smiles, to the momentary pleasure of hearing a piece of music or eating food that hasn’t been tasted in a long time, to the rebuilding or deepening of relationships between friends, family, and loved ones. Two ‘excesses’ will be explored in particular: the interpersonal relations between those who live through war and smaller everyday pleasures that make room for snapshots of joy. Attention to experiences such as these remind us that while war may ‘touch’ all, it is also never the only thing going on, and that for those who live through it, war itself may not be the most important or defining feature of their experience.
Starting with the interpersonal relationships featured within the novels, in the close detailing of characters’ lives and embedded in the personal, the intimate relationships of and between characters are central to all three novels. In Be Safe I Love You, two principle relationships are featured. The first is between the protagonist, Lauren, and her brother, Danny. Danny is the reason Lauren joins the military, the reason she needs to survive her deployment, and her focal point upon her return home. The second are the relationships Lauren has with her fellow soldiers while stationed in Iraq, and with one soldier – Daryl – in particular. In this respect, the novel works through two familiar frameworks for understanding military service in a contemporary North American and European context: that military service offers a degree of economic stability and career opportunities for those from precarious or vulnerable socioeconomic contexts,Footnote 96 and that military service inculcates bonds and relationships stronger than any previously experienced.Footnote 97 While such comradeship between soldiers is always gendered, sexualised, and racialised, and can be productive of gratuitous violences against ‘others’,Footnote 98 these friendships also reveal the complexity of war’s affective landscape. In the everyday experiences of a tour of duty in which soldiers watch films together, work out together, exchange books, tell stupid (and often bleak) jokes, and make one another laugh, war is rendered visible as not only a site in which death, injury, and violence occur, but one in which friendship, humour, and support are also present.Footnote 99
In A Golden Age and Half of a Yellow Sun, the respective violent conflicts provide the backdrop for blossoming love and the rebuilding of familial relationships. In A Golden Age, Rehana falls in love with an army Major, while the war also allows for a softening in her relationship with her daughter. Likewise, in Half of a Yellow Sun, a tender romance is told between Ugwu and a young woman named Ebrechi, who he meets after he, Olanna, and Odenigbo are forced to flee their home; and Olanna and her twin, Kainene, become close again after falling out in the early 1960s’ parts of the novel. What unites all of these relationships is the significance of them to the characters involved: that in the midst of the chaos and uncertainty of war, it is often these relationships that assume the greatest import in individual lives. When, for example, Olanna and Kainene begin speaking and spending time together after years with no communication, this thawing of relations has a profound effect on Olanna: ‘Inside Olanna, something calcified leaped to life.’Footnote 100 Similarly, when living in sparse conditions, where bombing raids were frequent and Ugwu was in constant threat of being kidnapped and forced to fight for the Biafran cause, Ugwu’s thoughts were frequently preoccupied not with hardship but with Ebrechi, and the time he spent with her was joyful: ‘She rubbed her eyes and laughed, a happy sound that made Ugwu happier.’Footnote 101 In these interpersonal moments, war recedes and it is the relationship that is centred and that occupies the primary position in the character’s lifeworld. While war has often been noted as a radically relational act, the relations in/of war that are most frequently paid attention are those that make possible its violences; be that the ‘warrior brotherhood’Footnote 102 of militaries or the ‘Radical Othering’Footnote 103 of those across enemy lines. The interpersonal relationships detailed here reveal individuals not only to be entangled in war’s violent relations, but also in love, friendship, desire, lust, and their concomitant comforts, joys, and excitement.
The second ‘excess’ explored are the small, often one-off, moments of pleasure that emerge during war. Such fleeting moments of joy include the thrill of finding or receiving rare or rationed goods; the immersion or escapism that music, film, or schooling can offer; and new or adapted daily routines that bring comfort in the face of war’s uncertainties. While in many ways unremarkable, these snapshots of pleasure show that war is not totalising in its experience. That while it is inarguable that war causes death and destruction, for those who live through it, life does not come to a grinding halt. Living, laughing, loving, caring, eating, drinking, washing, dancing, singing, working, all continue, and that in and of themselves may be key practices in surviving and even resisting war. None of the novels I review are concerned with relating ‘The Story’ of the war they are located within, rather, they document how violent conflict ‘reconfigures the daily lives of their characters’.Footnote 104 In this way they provide a window into routines, rhythms, and experiences of war often ignored or paid scant attention. All three novels, for example, detail the smiling and laughter of their characters at various points: From the Major smiling ‘so widely his scar stretched across till it touched the tuft of hair beside his ear’Footnote 105 when Rehana presents him with a gramophone; to Olanna and Odenigbo ‘laughing, raucously, almost falling off the bench’Footnote 106 at the simultaneous awfulness and absurdity of war; and to Lauren and Daryl sharing a joke about Girl Scouts being ‘bloodthirsty supporting-the-troops motherfuckers’.Footnote 107 Both A Golden Age and Half of a Yellow Sun tell of the small pleasures and excitements acquiring provisions otherwise hard to come by – the Major looking as if he had received ‘a trunk full of gold’Footnote 108 when a dish of chicken is presented to him and Olanna ‘gasp[ing]’Footnote 109 when she finds toilet tissue in a care package sent by a friend. Such fleeting moments of joy do not, of course, compensate for the loss of loved ones, starvation, or any of the other everyday privations and horrors of war. They may, however, provide insights into how the seemingly unliveable is rendered bearable, as well as how war becomes familiar, how new daily routines emerge, and a new tempo of life and living are established. Be Safe I Love You depicts the ‘routine, reflexive, comforting’Footnote 110 patterns of life on the frontline, while Half of a Yellow Sun recounts the determination of Olanna to continue teaching in the face of ever more challenging circumstances. In all of the novels, then, war and living within it becomes normal:
[From A Golden Age:] It was May. They had been at war since March. What was strange had become unstrange. They were used to seeing the green uniforms wherever they went; they were used to returning obediently to their homes at the peal of the curfew siren; and they were used to dusty, empty streets, the closed shops, the hospital with locked gates, the half-full baskets of the fruit vendors. The landscape of war was becoming familiar, and they had all found their ways to live with it.Footnote 111
What all these small moments of pleasure or simply ‘getting on’ reveal is that in-between and among the catastrophe of war, a form of everyday life continues: life does not come to a grinding halt for all and war is not all-encompassing in its experience. While there may be happiness in unhappy moments (and vice versa) wherever they occur in international politics, including war, and that this should not negate the overall suffering that war, the ‘ongoingness’Footnote 112 of everyday life amid the chaos should not be completely discounted either. For Lauren Berlant, simply ‘getting by, and living on’Footnote 113 amid the dramas and crises that mark the dominant narratives of modern life is an act of agency and resistance. Drawing on Berlant, Lisle has also noted how the ‘rhetorics of crisis, catastrophe, and apocalypse’ that characterise the contemporary condition ‘occludes the repetitive, much slower, and more familiar rhythms of everyday life’.Footnote 114 In this respect, not only do these moments signal towards the expansiveness of wars’ emotional and experiential landscape, but they also draw attention back to the lives of those who live in and through war, and how they survive, enact agency, and resist its hardships.
Concluding remarks
This article has used three war novels in its exploration of joyful and pleasurable experiences of and in war. Novels, through their location in the personal, are particularly suited to exploring the experiential aspects of war, and Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, Anam’s A Golden Age, and Hoffman’s Be Safe I Love You all detail the ways in which people’s lives are reconfigured by conflict. While none of these novels tell a ‘joyful’ story of war, all of them depict the fullness of wartime experiences, with its complex assemblages of pleasure and pain, laughter and trauma, and aliveness and despair. Three recurring themes of pleasurable and joyful experiences were tracked through the novels. First, bodily pleasures in and of war were explored through sex-for- and sex-as-pleasure in war, and how combat and the capability of a military body can elicit feelings of wellbeing and joy. Through the coextensiveness of pleasure and unbearability in war, and drawing on the concept of ‘flow’ to think through the ‘joy’ of combat, a multiplicity of sensations and feelings are felt in and through individual bodies in times of war. The second theme explored positive affects that flow between and among bodies, detailing how the promise of war is something that is collectively felt during political rallies. In these instances, the excitement of war travels, sticks, and is generated between bodies, with these affective spaces working both to motivate and sustain war’s practice. Finally, the small moments of pleasure and the ongoingness of everyday life that escape wars’ reach were explored. From the interpersonal relations that endure and make war bearable, to moments of joy and everyday comforts, for those who live in and through war, life and living continues in spite of and in excess of it. Such moments reveal not only wars’ broad emotional and experiential landscape, but can also help to explain wars’ continued seduction for some and are strategies of survival, agency, and resistance for others.
The joys and pleasures detailed in this article relate to war in varying ways: sometimes they are experiences that war has made possible (its ‘togetherness’); sometimes the experiences take place in spite of, or in excess of, war (the ongoingness of everyday life); others simply take place during war (the rebuilding of familial relations/falling in love); and there are some experiences in which war is the pleasure (the coextensiveness of joy, pleasure, grief, and pain). Through these different relations to war, joyful and pleasurable experiences serve different ends. Joy and pleasure can work to motivate war through their bringing of people together in a shared sense of purpose; they can sustain war through the seductions and excitements that can be found in its practice; and joy and pleasure can be acts of survival and resistance through their making of life liveable in the most extreme of conditions. Starting with experiences of joy and pleasure thus not only reminds us that war is never universalising in its experience, it also works to displace war as a focus of analysis, redirecting attention to the experiences of those who live in and through it.
Associating experiences of joy or pleasure with war is likely to make many (as it makes me) uncomfortable, however, if we wish to confront the political ‘puzzle’Footnote 115 of war and people’s experiences in it, then we need to not only ‘employ the full register of human insight and intelligence’,Footnote 116 but also engage with the spaces, sites, and experiences that make us feel uncomfortable or appear antithetical to the politics we wish to engender. Doing so may better equip us as scholars of international politics for understanding the complexities of war and – and this is what I have been more concerned with in this article – for directing attention towards those who live in and through wars’ violences. As Pentinnen writes, while war may create ‘unliveable spaces’, IR scholarship’s focus on its spectacular violence means how people actually survive in these unliveable spaces is forgotten or paid scant attention.Footnote 117 After all, while war unquestionably destroys and disrupts the normalcy of people’s peacetime lives, splitting up families, causing the loss of loved ones, and affecting a whole range of physical, structural, emotional, and economic violences, nor is war the sole political ‘reality’.Footnote 118 Taking seriously Christine Sylvester’s entreaty to ‘people’ the discipline of IR’Footnote 119 means being attuned to the lived experiences of people’s lives in all their multiplicities. Confronting wars’ violences, its grief, and its physical and emotional injuries is one way of populating the discipline with the bodies and experiences of those it researches. Extending this analysis to joy and pleasure broadens these sites of understanding, provides insights into what animates wars’ potential and practice, and may produce strategies of resistance, agency, and survival in the face of these ‘unliveable spaces’.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Cristina Masters, Sanna Strand, and Paul Kirby for their generous and insightful comments on earlier drafts of this article. Thanks also to the collegial and encouraging comments from two anonymous reviewers, as well as remarks from the editorial team at the Review of International Studies. The article is much improved for all of this feedback and any mistakes or omissions remain my own. The research for this article was generously funded by a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship (ECF-2016-513).
