“Pineland has room for whatever the world does to itself,” writes Nomi Stone of the setting of her second collection of poetry, Kill Class (Tupelo, 2019). “In the beginning, Pineland was somewhat like the Soviet Union. Now, Pineland is somewhat like the Middle East.” Pineland is an amalgam of the fake Middle Eastern villages erected at military bases across the United States, which soldiers inhabit as training before their deployment to any of the number of countries the United States has covertly or overtly invaded, or been in open armed conflict with for several decades.
In Pineland, soldiers enter rooms and rehearse invasions, stopping and restarting their interactions with foreign nationals hired as actors to play locals: “Iraqi role-players whispering / in collapsible houses / made for daily wreckage.” These false cities stage complexity to make it seem as if it can be comprehended: what might be an otherwise impenetrable encounter becomes a “situation” or a “scenario” to be navigated, a language to be learned, a code to be processed, a game to be won. Villages and cities in targeted geopolitical zones are appropriated and rebuilt around war’s logic into the relevant parts: “POLICE STATION/JAIL ROOM” and
“MOSQUE/SCHOOL ROOM.” Walls are erected in order to train soldiers to suspect someone behind them, to learn to enter a room with calculated ease. Actors plastered with fake wounds create an opportunity to practice care, or to interrogate a suspect screaming in pain.
Stone’s poems make use of the war-game lexicon she encounters, but she makes clear their embodied stakes, borrowing language from the contents of Simulaids Deluxe Casualty Simulation Kit: “Foreign body protrusion (901), Eviscerated intestines (902), Large laceration, 5 cm (903).” The alienation between this catalogue of prosthetic wounds for purchase and the real wounds these bits of plastic gore are meant to simulate underscores how the choices available in these scenarios are deliberately divorced from the decisions already made: the wounds seem inevitable, like game pieces, their placement on these particular bodies a necessary part of the scene. The actors—hired because of their lived closeness to the characters the military is training its soldiers to interact with: brown, non-English-speaking, and familiar with life in a war-traumatized country—are employed to set the stage with a crude and recognizable symbolism.
Omar tells me the soldiers don’t know it yet, but all
the Iraqis in this village are in cahoots with the militia. The game says
figure out which bodies have turned the bright chill of gold.
In the classroom behind the imam’s chair, a blackboard with drawings—
planes sizzling into the buildings.
Omar shows me the knife, scimitar-curved, that hangs
on the wall at the police station. He takes down that knife, cradles it
like a guitar, plays a song.
The purpose of these rehearsals is to train suspicion: American soldiers learn that apparent civilians can be combatants in disguise, mothers are manipulable, and children can be “compromised” by the enemy. Though the actor might not wield a scimitar, the Omar in the “game” that is the war does. The soldiers learn to read the symbol as threatening regardless of whether the fingers stroking the curve of the knife are miming plucking strings. This lexicon enables the mechanical gesture of the “plug-and-play”: where a game is designed to work perfectly regardless of who is slotted into the positions of “soldier,” “civilian,” and “enemy combatant.” In “The Soldier Takes the Anthropologist to the Shooting Range,” as the anthropologist follows the soldier’s—Billy’s—instructions, the act of shooting is overlaid with the various places a bullet might be directed to pierce: paper target, beating heart.
The targets, once birds: changed into silhouettes with red kill-spots, heart-
shots. Billy knows what it (he) does and did / the hole in the throat /
the eyes
so surprised.
Whether from a keystroke or a bullet, the comb of a perforating machine or a probing question, Stone’s book queries perforations: these openings, tunnels or shafts passing into something else, rows of holes automatically torn for the sake of separation between objects. These war games between nations can be repeated until the soldiers pick the lock of the scene with the right tactics: insistence and threats, but also pleasantries and kindness. A bland liberal reformism might champion such tactics as humane; but as Stone observes, the empathy taught here is always at base about enabling a more efficient kill. Places like Pineland work to maintain an illusion of artifice. Pineland brings people whose bodies are always already racialized and marked as state-enemies into a space where they can be shot at and manipulated seemingly without stakes, where the coffins are fake, where the ambient violence that structures the everyday seems like a game—justified as strategy.
As Eyal Weizman observes of the vocabulary and digital warfare scenarios that Stone’s poetry addresses, these tactics are often employed by policymakers to hide the stakes of increasingly deadly military interventions: “Highly euphoric military theoretical and technological ‘talk’ seeks to describe war as remote, sterile, easy, quick, intellectual, exciting and almost cost-free (to the military that is). Violence can thus be projected as tolerable, and the public more inclined to support it.” Stone discerns how the operative simplicity of the game naturalizes varieties of violence into tactics. The questions are simple: are the people good, bad, or useful? Do the soldiers let them live, kill them, or use them to kill others?
…The people speak
the language of a country we are trying
to make into a kinder country. Some
of the people over there are good /
others evil / others circumstantially
bad / some only want
cash / some just want
their family to not die.
The game says figure
out which
are which.
In her critical writing on her ethnographic fieldwork, Stone astutely parses the institutionalization of empathy and mimicry as a military tactic, arguing that “imperial mimesis,” as she terms it, has been used as a way of lubricating interactions with locals and civilians in war zones to turn those individuals into informants. In Kill Class she dwells in the particular violence of that act of translation and transformation, as in the opening poem “Human Technology”:
Choose a person
who knows who is bad. Make them
slice open the skin of their country…
The book witnesses Stone teasing the edges of things, tracing holes in the narrative, tonguing a sore that will not close, wondering what to say into a silence that opened up, examining scraps of memories shot through with holes. The bodies inhabiting positions in this game are subjects of the binary logic of the war machine (open/closed, empty/full, hit/miss, kill/let live, dead/alive) haunting each gap. The audience gazes through appointed peepholes. Cameras catch certain things through their circular lenses. In “Soldiers Parachuting into the War Game” Stone plays with the pixelated texture of these sometimes literally digital and programmatic scenarios. The scenes progress like a choose-your-own-adventure story or a ghostly sort of video game: a list of endlessly repeatable, erasable, but limited options.
In one room:
a tiny fake coffin no
isn’t here a body no, nowhere
here my body. Input: say
a kind word to the villager / output
villager soaked clean of prior forms
of place. It is (subtract
this footprint) snowing. Now
fade.
The grammatical ligatures and punctuation scaffold a repeatable, almost mathematical scene. Given a room with an empty child-sized coffin, the user-soldier-player might speak kindly to those who might be grieving, an interaction summarized brusquely with “Input: say.” These lines read like a Mad Libs word game, where players connect given objects into a narrative by providing verbs, adjectives, and nouns when prompted. There are holes in this script to ad-lib, but the usual signals that what follows is an answer or additional information—such as colons and indexicals—open onto spaces not wholly empty: photo negatives and haunted shapes. The body in the poem is denied existence, it is nowhere and also still here, enjambed onto the next line. The corpse of a child flickers in and out of the closed void of the coffin-like Schrödinger’s cat or a digital glitch, the soldier has stepped into the gameplay of a fictional desert, built in a forest in which it is snowing, and left a mark that can be subtracted, deleted. Stone extends her use of the colon and other punctuation throughout the document into rows that break the poems into sections, flashing like the dots on a binary card: “::: ::: :::.”
In addition to functioning as a technique of warfare, these perforations are appropriated as a critical and communal tactic for creation: a piece of fabric perforated enough forms a net, a hole in the body can provide occasion for adornment, the space where the body is supposed to be does not have to define the body or its relation to it:
Her purple earrings sparkle, Nafeesa’s do,
in the sun, there is sun,
I touch her arm. That is all,
but / and / still, it is spring: light
catches in my chest. Whatever bad did
happen, she is dancing too. We are
none of us made of holes.
In “Living the Role” Stone asks: “Does anyone have a translation for any of this? If your face is a mirror / (depending on whom you face), behind you is a splinter. This is one proverb.” Stone’s attentiveness to the ambivalence of symbolism reveals the ambivalence of the employee within this empire, who inhabits and willingly sells the racialized commodity of their experience as victim, whose employer—the US government—is also the soldiers’ employer. Just as soldiers are killing machines for the state, the actors are made into citizens of a deterritorialized, impossible, amalgamated fiction of the enemy state, “somewhat like the Middle East,” but which is, in fact, nothing like it, never actual. Stone herself experiences the dizziness and frail certainty of being a character “in the game”:
Sense is an edge, see
if you dare look
over into the white
falling We are in
a role-play
but if you feel it in there, you feel it. What is it
you think I am lying
about, Commander?
In a now familiar, postmodern anthropological move—which also reads like a responsible research tactic—Stone is attentive to her position as observer. In fact, it seems thrust upon her in the more prosaic moments where she is directly addressed as anthropologist: “So, what do you study? Is this part of a class for you?” Stone’s discomfort with her participation in these war games manifests as one of the strongest repeated themes of the collection. In struggling to parse the scene, the frontlines between nations in an ongoing war, and the sheer fascinating fact of her access to these spaces as a scholar, Stone often passes through:
But the camera burned
the hole. We fell through.
Anthropologist, why are you in this story?
Her positionality both enables her participation and interpolates her as outside of it, someone who should only watch and cannot be a part: an observer, a white, American academic, a “civilian,” not a soldier. But how is she merely observer when she writes and sets scenes, when her whiteness and watching is that against which these scenes unfold, when it is nominally in her name qua civilian that these wars are fought against these bodies in these places? The attempt to fill the circumscribed positions with answers—who are you, why are you here—forefronts her attempts to take responsibility for her involvement. The effect is somewhat like watching someone stand behind a comic panel at a fair and stick their head through the hole cut out above a painted scene: uncanny.
Stone’s self-conscious interrogation of her complicity and her modes and materials of observation are well-handled and in keeping with other works of political poetry produced in the past decades. This archive includes works like Solmaz Sharif’s Look (2016), which puns with and explores the lexicon of euphemisms in the Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, Philip Metres’s Sand Opera (2015), which erases and reinhabits the Standard Operating Procedures for the US Department of Defense, and Travis Macdonald’s erasure of the 9/11 Commission Report, titled The O Mission Repo (2008). Like many of these works, a lot of the momentum of the collection relies on the circumstances of its creation, laid out clearly in the titles alone, such as “Former Iraq War Interpreters Role-Play Executioners.”
Stone’s work stands out for its insistent attention to the aftermath of that complicity and how it corrupts. Having perforated, she peers through, witnessing what ghosts and light might emerge from these wounds, from these cropped perspectives of a decades-long “War on Terror” largely eclipsed in the news by the sheer fact of its everydayness. As Stone helps a friend practicing for the US naturalization exam, she marks how the words on the form that defines and translates citizenship carry this perforating violence with them:
Renounce now, on oath, all prior loyalties. It is natural, friend,
to want to live. How neutral you wished to be, hired to bring
your country to life. No preparing for how the bomb packed
with ball bearings & nails denatured the body. The acronym,
neutered, turns blank into a lot, but how
we counted them,
row by row.
Stone’s poems hold up these holes and find them haunted by those who have to keep making them, those who live in the honeycombed aftermath. She traces how we might make those openings sacred with strange rituals and visions of “wounds circled by bees.” But even as she attempts to probe and sanctify individual openings she finds that these shapes are not singular and discrete: holes create new holes, create networks and tunnels of complicity. There is no end. In fact, there are jobs available to those who are willing to continue variously perforating a variety of bodies and spaces:
From the darkness come the lightdrunk hole
out of the whitehot nerve; came keepers
People from the Middle East are paid to play, soldiers are paid to perforate those bodies, the anthropologist is effectively paid to observe. The readership buys the book to read about the various holes bored into those bodies, rotten through. The “I” is uncompromising but already compromised: the uncomfortable squirming of the anthropologist is also the guilty evasion of the citizen turning away from the ugliness of their complicity, “the white worm of pain / inside your skin, the almost-lit / match in your chest, / in that moment you did not speak.”