Black Watch

In a comment on a previous discussion, Drew alerted me to a very recent play, Black Watch. The play follows in the tradition of Journey's End, and The Long and the Short and the Tall, stage plays which described the horrors of war. Black Watch, based partly on interviews with real soldiers, does it for the current Iraq war.

Towards the end, one of the officers offers a monologue including this comment:

We in the West have failed to understand the logic of suicide terrorism. The choice to become a religious martyr is the outcome of a struggle to establish an identity in adolescence. The possibility of death, once accepted, presents an alternative idea of the self as a religious warrior. They're looking for glory, and they seem to be finding it in martyrdom. Glory, however, is something which my boys are very unlikely to emerge with. The controversy around this war means there'll be no victory parade for us... (p. 58)

I am interested that this text connects some of the themes of my study. Interestingly, the play is about the struggle for identity and an idea of self in the young soldiers on the Western side...Of course, I think Christian martyrdom evades this characterisation. This comment is revealing as to the extent that martyrdom is understood as a flashpoint... it's the possibility of death. In the West, it isn't accepted that this could present an alternative and valid idea of the self...