adam piette
The white space of the printed page, identified since Dickinson with the spectral
afterlifeof the voice after death, is ‘gray’ now with the Cold War’s polluting
influence, the poet’s page gritted, pocked, and filmed over with the other more
sinister continuities of the endless, ‘background’ wars of Levertov’s generation:
‘The same war||continues.’
Anarchist-pacifist feminism was an important field of energy at the key site of
resistance to the special relationship’s most hated and feared secret: the Trident
bases. And it was at Greenham Common where that field of energy took form,
especially after the ‘Embrace the Base’ action on 12 December 1982, when more than
30,000 women converged on the base and linked hands to encircle the nine-mile
perimeter fence (also linking the nine camps at the nine gates—code-named after
the colours of the rainbow). The peace camp’s song-book is a touching memorial
of the camp’s collective songs of protest. Activist artists joined the camp at crucial
times to offer their support—an example being the Irish artist Alanna O’Kelly, who
gave a live performance of her ballad ‘Chant Down Greenham’, which mixed the
sounds of protest and peace chants with sounds from the base. The song may not
be very impressive as a poetic text: ‘35 thousand Women for peace,|Embracing
the base|So there’ll be no more War.’^60 It is as a document of theperformanceof
anti-nuclear protest that it still has affectionate power.^61 It is such performances
which constitute the true core resistance to the Cold War called for by anti-war
leaders such as Edward Thompson.^62
The third group of poets occupying the intermediate zone between the East
and West nuclear poles were the poets of Northern Ireland. The Troubles may
have been a continuation of the liberation struggles of Ireland, but they were
nevertheless importantly inflected by Cold War considerations. Funded partly
by American money, drawing ideological support from the Marxist decolonizing
liberation movements in the Third World, the IRA had revolutionary appeal at its
hard left core which drew directly on Cold War energies. Conversely, the British
government deployed in Northern Ireland the tactics and counter-intelligence
(^60) Alanna O’Kelly, ‘Chant Down Greenham’. See the S ̃ao Paolo Bienal website on O’Kelly:http://
www1.uol.com.br/bienal/23bienal/paises/ipie.htmThe Greenham Common song-book is online
through the Danish Peace Academy website:http://www.fredsakademiet.dk/abase/sange/greenham.
htm
(^61) Greenham Common also convinced male writers to change their tune: witness Ian McEwan’s
libretto written for Michael Berkeley’s 1983 oratorio,Or Shall We Die?, which he published inThe
Comfort of Strangers, and which sings of ‘womanly times’against the Cold War and a rainbow embrace
around the whole of the UK: ‘Make a circle round this land|Shall There Be Womanly Times or
shall we die?|Join heart and hearts and hand in hand|There will be womanly times, we will not die’
(McEwan,Or Shall We Die?: Words for an Oratorio Set to Music by Michael Berkeley(London: Jonathan
Cape, 1983) ).
(^62) Edward Thompson, quoted in Nicholas Humphrey and Robert Jay Lifton (eds.),In a Dark Time
(London: Faber, 1984), 151: ‘We can match this crisis only by a summoning of resources to a height
like that of the greatest religious or political movements of Europe’s past. I think, once again, of 1944
andofthecrestoftheResistance.’