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"Erasing the Inheritance of War"

Notes on the Iliad and Ellen Kombiyil’s upcoming book

My Prayer a Slit Throat: Erasing the inheritance of war.

 

At WCP we have always had a special interest in hybrid books.  Works that in form, subject, or process, stray from the purity of poetry, prose, fiction or non, visual or textual. While on the surface such books often have the advantage of novelty or aesthetic surprise, the deeper possibility is that the hybrid can seek out and help us see something that couldn’t be seen otherwise. The hybrid in our minds is like a secret agent, travelling incognito to infiltrate foreign lands.


In Ellen Kombiyil’s forthcoming book My Prayer a Slit Throat, (the winner of our 2025 new Constructions Hybrid Book Contest) the author investigates the territory of Homer’s Iliad along with other military texts.  This landscape extends far beyond the 24 books of the Iliad, into 2,800 years of ongoing human struggle.  Starting somewhere at the edges of bronze-age Greek mythology and stretching in America in our war with Iran in April of 2026, this “language of war” remains tragically, a vast territory. We talked with Ellen recently about how she began the project.


“The short answer to how this project began is that it began by accident. Early in 2021, at the start of Russia’s war on Ukraine, I was asked by Katherine Hollander, editor at the journal Consequence, to write a lyric essay on The Iliad for a special themed issue. I began erasing The Iliad purely as a warm-up exercise, as a way of re-entering Homer’s language. But I became fascinated with what these erasures were able to accomplish: in a small space they could capture a startling clarity and energy, tenderness and horror. And so the project began in a mode that surprised me: erasure and collage.

 

The project quickly broadened in scope, by bringing in other war ephemera that I had been collecting. I was interested in exploring how often unexamined attitudes still shape our cultural narratives around war.

 

The longer answer to this question is that this is the book I was born to write. My maiden name is Achilles, so I grew up steeped in the hero story of Achilles and the larger narrative of The Iliad. In fact, during my first day of college when a classics professor assigned The Iliad as our first book, and we went around the room to introduce ourselves, he thought I was having him on when I said that my name is Ellen Achilles and I’m from Syracuse (New York), Ellen being a variant of Helen (of Troy), and Syracuse being one of the great classical Greek city-states. But it’s all true and people assume I’m of Greek origin, but I am not. My father’s family is Scots-Irish. Family legend tells that during the Crusades, our family traveled to Greece and stayed for two years with a family by the name of Achilles, and upon returning home, took the name out of friendship. Our “original” last name has been lost.

 

My process in making the erasures and collages for the book kept evolving. After writing my first erasures using the Fagles translation, I knew I wanted to include visual elements. I had been a visual artist in high school and college, but had stepped away from that practice for about 25 years, focusing instead on my poetry. I began taking art classes again and relearning my art practice, which has been a great joy with this project.



In terms of process, different modes of erasure are explored throughout the manuscript, with new “rules of engagement” for each text. The Fagles translation is used for single-page visual erasures in the mode of Sarah Sloat, whereas the Lattimore translation is erased an entire ‘book’ at a time. This mode of longer erasures—notably without collage elements—relies on the spareness of the white space and allows a speaker to emerge—a war-torn mother who has lost her daughter. 

 

Guidebook for Marines is also erased by chapter, but I allow myself one revision: to swap out the chapter name, so the chapter on “small arms weapons” becomes a chapter about “babydolls.” The ROTC Manual is used for creating surreal battle formations/maps, while LIFE Magazine acts as a cross-pollinator across all texts. (Listed below):

 



The Iliad, trans. Richmond Lattimore

The Iliad, trans. Robert Fagles

Guidebook for Marines, 1957

LIFE Magazine, November 16, 1942

The ROTC Manual, Freshman Course, 1st Year Basic (1921)

New York Public Library Digital Pictures Collection










In a way, the manuscript became a book-length lyric essay on the inheritance of war, through the modes of erasure, collage, skewed additions, and docu-poetics."


 

 

My Prayer a Slit Throat led me back to the Iliad, as we hope it will other readers. The female presence Ellen plays with in her versions made me curious to explore Emily Wilson’s 2023 translation of the Iliad, the first full length English version by a woman. I wanted to like it more than I have so far, the language is startlingly plain. In interviews Wilson talks about her efforts to make a version that is lean and unpretentious, though it seems a bit flat to my ear, and really are battles of clashing armies ever unpretentious?  But, in relation to "My Prayer" it is very interesting to read what Wilson has to say about the feminine energy she finds in the story.


“I want to point out first that cruelty, rage and the yearning for glorious triumph over others is absolutely not presented in the Iliad as an exclusively masculine quality. Rage and violence are functions of power, not gender, in the world of this poem. Enslaved mortal women don’t get to express rage, even when terrible things are done to them, because they don’t have the power to get vengeance or kill their enemies. But goddesses certainly do. Rage and violence are not confined to male characters.” (1)


 In my initial reading of the Iliad some years ago, I was most moved by the plight of Achilles and took his side until the end, despite his vengeance. While the strength and courage of the warriors, Hector, Patroclus, Achilles, et al. are sung loudly in the Iliad, the song of grief that ensues, was for me the deeper through line.  In many ways,  the Iliad is the quintessential anti-war story. It is full of the human pain and lasting distress that are the results of war;  the destruction that comes not just to cities or nations, but to the human body, and to people’s morals and ethics. As it always has, the Iliad warns of the moral degradation of war, as we’ve just witnessed around the conflict in Gaza and now Iran.

 

At the opposite end of violence and conflict is love. Achille’s story turns on the loss of what is loved. At the start of the story he loses his girlfriend, at the end he’s lost his best friend, and in between is no fun either.  The pain and loss of life that is chronicled in the Iliad is never generalized, each spear thrust, encounters an actual body, each sword cuts into flesh that really bleeds. Each body belongs to someone whose name we learn, maybe where they came from, maybe who their parents were. No one in the Iliad is anonymous.  The fact that we get to know each soldier for a moment, before their lives are gone, is what gives the work so much tragic power and pathos.


In contrast, the  headlines we get about America’s current conflict with Iran, counts on us believing that there are no actual humans bearing the brunt of the violence. We read of drones, missiles, incursions, “retaliatory capabilities.”  But the deaths of those 150 young Iranian girls, who we’ve heard so little about, are simply “collateral damage”.  This new “language of war” has very few people in it. There might be an argument that this reflects some progress from killing troops to destroying “infrastructure” but the tragedies in Gaza showed us something else. 


Some months ago, I was hiking in the forested mountains of NC where I live, when I slipped and broke my collar bone. It was clear to me right away that the bone was broken, and that two miles out, I would still somehow have to walk back to my car. I don’t know why, but among my first thoughts after pulling myself to an upright stance, was that “this must be like what happens to people in war zones.” I thought of the people in Gaza, in Ukraine “injured”, and what it means to be alone and in pain, suddenly uncertain of what will follow, to feel a brokenness inside of your body. Somehow images of these people, accompanied me in a sort of solidarity, (we are the ones who carry pain) as I walked back. I began to consider the additional agonies that a mother in Gaza would have, not knowing if her children were safe, being hungry, having no safe car and house to eventually return to. Pain on pain, unimaginable.  Of course, my fall was nothing in comparison to being in a war zone, but the experience helped me to understand something more deeply. That the human body is always the final site of war. It occurs to bodies and resonates in through memory. Works like My Prayer a Slit Throat, are essential in helping us to remember this.

 

 
 
 

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