Redeployment
- Home
- / Join our programs
- / Learning Resources
- / N4 Reads
- / Redeployment
 |
"That's the Irish people all over – they treat a serious thing as a joke and a joke as a serious thing."
Sean O'Casey
How can we acknowledge both the good and bad in our past so that we see these experiences for the strength they give us in the present? In this collection of teaching ideas around the memoir Angela’s Ashes, N4 founder and novelist Colum McCann offers a variety of ways of exploring the work of his good friend and mentor Frank McCourt.
“...each person has such a small piece of the war, and that piece will be powerfully shaped not only by when they were there and where in Iraq they were, but also by what job they did. So rather than writing a unified novel about the experience of war, I wanted twelve different voices—voices that would approach similar themes but from very different perspectives. I don't think all my narrators would get along with each other. I don't think they'd agree with each other about what the war meant. And part of my intent was that that would open a space for the reader to come in and critically engage with the sorts of claims the narrators are making.... Also, it's just fascinating to me to step into very different heads. What was the war like for a mortuary affairs specialist? For a chaplain? For an artilleryman, who never sees the bodies of the enemy he has killed?” Phil Klay In his collection of short stories, Redeployment, U.S. Marine Corps veteran Phil Klay takes readers to the front lines of the war in Iraq, asking us to understand what happened there and what happened to the soldiers who returned. N4’s collection of resources created by founder and artist Colum McCann helps students and teachers acknowledge the trauma of war and move towards the necessary healing. Why read Redeployment?
Elliot Woods is a journalist who is a contributing editor at VQR and a correspondent at Outside Magazine. Before becoming a journalist, he served in Iraq with the Virginia Army National Guard and attended the University of Virginia. He studied Arabic at the University of Cairo and then moved to the Gaza Strip to cover Operation Cast Lead in 2009 with the help of a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. From there, he has gone to work all over the United States and around the world, from the Central African Republic to Myanmar, from Afghanistan to Mexico. You can find his portfolio at elliotwoods.com. A Lantern on the Path to Peace By the time Toni Morrison published Beloved, her fifth novel, she had already won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was an acclaimed novelist. Yet it was Beloved that catapulted her career into the stratosphere, so much so that Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 for her body of work. This immense critical acclaim alone is enough to warrant our attention. Yet each of us readers must, at some point, approach the novel for ourselves, forming our own opinion.
When a reader first encounters Beloved, it has a similar effect of being set down in the middle of a corn maze. There is no clear path through, and the effect is profoundly disorienting. Even Morrison commented upon this initial encounter with her work, suggesting that she wanted readers to be thrust into “compelling confusion,” likening our placement into her literary world to the same kind of disorientation of an African being kidnapped and thrust into a completely foreign place.
When I first read the book, I experienced that very confusion. I didn’t understand what I was reading, but I understood it was something momentous. At the end of the second chapter, I flipped back to the beginning of the book and started over. I needed to more fully comprehend this 1873 Ohio setting, this Sethe and Paul D and Baby Suggs. What was this Sweet Home place?
I kept returning to a line of dialogue uttered by Sethe in just the first few pages of the novel: “I got a tree on my back and a haint in my house, and nothing in between but the daughter I am holding in my arms. No more running—from nothing.” Ooh, Sethe! Now this was a character fully formed from the very first page, a Black woman both powerful and vulnerable, filled with pain and rage, but also with the single-minded clarity of a survivor.
Let’s be clear. There is significant trauma in the novel. No wonder it is often referenced by the misguided folks who like to ban books. The story of a family struggling with the memories of enslavement is not a fairy tale to be enjoyed like a warm glass of milk on a cold winter night. In some ways, one might even call the novel an American horror story. It certainly contains elements of horror and gothic and the supernatural. The house on Bluestone Road is haunted by a ghost. In African American parlance, we call them “haints.” But Baby Suggs, the mother-in-law of the main character Sethe, declares there is no point in moving. “Not a house in the country ain’t packed to its rafters with some dead Negro’s grief,” she says.
That legacy of hauntings is taken up again in Angela Flournoy’s 2015 novel The Turner House, when one of the main characters, Frances Turner, disputes the idea of a haunted house in 1958 Detroit. “There ain’t no haints in Detroit,” he insists. Yet if you have read that contemporary novel, one written in the literary legacy Morrison left behind for all writers, but especially for African American writers, you know that our country is still haunted by its history and many old houses still possess some version of cultural memory.
Yet Beloved is not a novel lacking hope. The characters are rebuilding their lives after a painful past, and in that gap they try desperately to hold on to the tenuous threads that connect them to each other. Morrison does not offer simple platitudes for her characters’ faith in the future; instead, she embraces their full humanity and complexity.
As my grandmama would say, You say that to say what, child? What I’m saying is that this is the kind of book that can change the way you think of history, the way you think of America, and the way you think of yourself. It is a book that reminds us of the resilience of African American people, the strength of spirit in all of us who call this country home.
In every book I have written, I have tried to capture that remarkable spirit. In my latest novel Take My Hand, I have crafted two sisters whose love for each other and deep connection sustains them throughout the book. When my main character Civil Townsend first meets them in the excerpt you will read, she is only just beginning to understand how the bonds of family will empower these young girls to survive a life-altering event.
It was as if Morrison was saying to me, to us—let me tell you what the novel can do that no other art form can accomplish. Let me show you how a painful tale can be told with heartrending beauty. Let me speak to you of communities and the individuals that inhabit them. Morrison taught us that history was not something to sweep away and dismiss as something shameful. In Beloved, the greatest historical novel ever published in the English language, Morrison challenges us to more fully understand what it means to be American.
I first came across Phil Klay’s titular story, “Redeployment,” in 2011, in a special issue of Granta devoted to exploring the global aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and was profoundly moved by it. The story follows a Marine who comes home from Iraq to a strained marriage and the news that his beloved dog is nearing death. I knew immediately I had encountered a singular literary voice from my generation of American veterans, a voice that I had been searching for, and one that I hoped would reach as many of my fellow citizens as possible. The story reminded me of Odysseus, whose faithful dog Argos is the only one to recognize him when he returns to Ithaca after 20 years of wandering on his way home from war. There’s no welcome home party for Odysseus in Homer’s Greek epic, only a new battle of a different sort. The ending of “Redeployment” foreshadows a similar struggle on the part of the narrator, whose war is far from over. In just a few pages, Klay manages to connect a story rooted in the language and imagery of the 21st century American war experience to what is probably the oldest and most influential veteran homecoming story in western literature. Like all great literature, the story precisely captures a specific moment in time and speaks to timeless elements of human experience. “Redeployment” develops deeply-rooted themes that predate Homer and would find resonance in every human culture on Earth: the shock of reentry into the peaceable world; the strain that war and prolonged separation place on intimate partners and families; the shameful, unclean feeling that follows many veterans home, whether they return in defeat, victory, or neither; the painful process of shedding the moral ambiguity that’s required to commit and survive violence in the service of political ends; and, the enduring feeling of being an exile in one’s own country, estranged even from oneself. I’m an Iraq War veteran myself, and when I first read “Redeployment,” I was a young writer using stories to grapple with the meaning -- or meaninglessness -- of America’s post-9/11 wars. For me, it felt like an urgent task: the U.S. had active wars in two countries and shadowy military operations in dozens more. Yet, Americans back home seemed blissfully disconnected from all of it. It was encouraging to know that someone with Klay’s sensitivity, range, and grasp of military vernacular was out there, revitalizing the ancient genre of the war story to suit the needs of a new and confounding era. When Klay’s National Book Award-winning collection Redeployment debuted in 2014, I rushed to buy a copy. But then something strange happened: I put it on my bedside table, and then onto a bookshelf, where it stayed for several years. I could not remember being more desperate to read a newly published book, and yet, something powerful prevented me from opening the cover. Deep down, I knew what was behind my apprehension: it was grief. I knew that in those pages I would find stories that would harness all of fiction’s power to make the real more than real—stories that would simultaneously conjure the violence and sensory brutality of the war I had served in, along with its crushing psychological, moral, and emotional weight. When I finally mustered the courage to pull Redeployment off the shelf, I read it cover to cover in a sitting, almost in a trance. I marveled at Klay’s ability to move deftly across a bewildering emotional and physical landscape, from dark humor to sinking despair, from rage to quiet resignation. I filled the margins with notes and called friends to talk about scenes and snatches of dialogue that made me feel as if I were there, sitting around a smoke pit in the roasting Iraqi heat with a squad of burned-out Marines, or sensing the livewire anxiety of a patrol down a deserted alley strewn with IEDs, or back home, feeling like an alien in a place that was once familiar. Redeployment forced me to reckon with my grief, and yet it also renewed my faith that art can be a potent counterweight to violence and a defiant protest against meaninglessness. Art may not stop wars, but it can be a lantern on the path to peace. At a time when Americans cannot afford to continue to turn our backs on the violence committed in our country’s name—at home and abroad—Redeployment is a bright lantern indeed. Questions and Understandings for a UnitStudents could explore the following questions: What happens when the past and present intersect? What is the impact of our history on our present identity?
How does what we remember reveal who we are?
What does it mean to heal? What does one need to begin healing, even while in the midst of suffering?
How do we create and maintain a community?
How does the social outcast help us understand what we’re trying to ignore? What do they ask us to change in our communities and in ourselves?
How do we cope with deep longing? How do we move on? How do we decide when it’s time to move on?
How does an environment influence populations of people over multiple generations?
What does it mean to be free?
What responsibility (if any) does the individual have to the family? When does that responsibility end (if it does)? When should it end (if it should)?
Students could investigate the following understandings:
Stories we believe about ourselves impact the way we navigate the world.
Becoming free is a process. As Morrison said, “[f]reeing yourself is one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self [is] another.”
Communities are integral in shaping and reshaping the stories that humans share.
Stories are living and ever-evolving. Students could explore the following questions:
Students could investigate the following understandings:
Sample Teaching IdeasCREATIVE WRITING Switch It Up Character Narration
Starting with Chapter 20, there are a series of chapters narrated by individual characters. We get to hear Sethe, Denver, and Beloved through their own words. What makes the characters sound different in these chapters?
ACTIVITY List the distinguishing characteristics of each character’s voice. Discuss with a partner the elements that make each of the women’s voices distinctive.
Next, select a neutrally-narrated chapter and rewrite a portion as if it were narrated by a character. For example, you may write about finding Sethe in the woods from Amy’s perspective, or you may allow Sixo to explain his thoughts about freedom as he walks to meet the thirty-mile woman. How would Amy sound? How might Sixo explain the principle behind his trips? What would their verbal tics be? Would they use witticisms, religious imagery, or humor? Use what you gather from observing and listening to your selected character to inform your writing.
Take one of the stories from Redeployment and rewrite it from another perspective. It could be a character within the story, an outside observer, an inanimate object (a gun, tank, camera), an Iraqi civilian, or you. How does the tone of the story change? How much of the story was dependent on the narrator’s perspective? Does your retelling depend on the perspective of your new narrator? MATH Seeing Shouldn’t Always Be Believing In 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell presented a series of satellite images to the United Nation to show that Saddam Hussein was creating weapons of mass destruction. The U.S. used these images to justify war in Iraq. But two years later, it became clear those claims were false. Research how satellites work. How are they used for intelligence? How many satellites are over your head right now? Can their orbits be controlled? Which nation has the most satellites? SOCIAL SCIENCE Military Divorces In “Bodies,” the protagonist gives his thoughts on military divorces: “In the military, the thing women are supposed to do if they love you is stay with you at least through deployment.” The military has the highest divorce rate of any profession. What challenges do military marriages face? Can you describe the challenges that military families have to endure, either in general or by finding a specific military family? What would be hard for you if your loved one went abroad and you didn’t have much contact? |
