The Creative Process: The Arts of War (Spring 2017)

The Creative Process
I feel my own brother died.” Being a silent spectator, too, is a
cooptation of the pornography of killing (Georges Didi-Huberman),
and for Daaniyal, even when one person is killed as the result of
violence and war, the seven billion people of the world who are
standing “in the field” must hang their heads in guilt and shame. We
all have the blood of the dead on our hands, and we are complicit in
their killing, either by consuming this pornography of killing, or by
doing nothing about it. While Daaniyal acknowledges that War is
inherently universal, he insists on grounding his poetry in more
specific terms. His case in point is Syria and Yemen, two previously
prosperous nations ravaged by recent conflict, and he considers that
the world is already fighting the Third World War. His poetry is a
plea for peace, and for democracy.
Some of Daaniyal’s work also focuses on the war going inside India,
in our hinterlands: the war of religion, and of communal
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