Aftermath

Published in conjunction with a major exhibition, Aftermath: The Fallout of War--America and the Middle East captures the response of artists to the impact of war on people and their environments. Writers, poets, and photographers band together to transform destruction into enlightenment, aggression into love, and scars into hope. The collection of photographs, essays, and poems offers an immersion in the human costs of war, revealing the toll war takes on individuals and families in the United States and the Middle East. There are no flags or guns here, only the shared survival tactics of people across numerous borders.

The images are at times disturbing and uncomfortable, but they are also powerful and intimate. Carol McCusker, the Harn Musuem of Art's curator of photography, organized the exhibition that is a companion to this volume. The artists--Lynsey Addario, Jananne Al-Ani, Stephen Dupont, Jennifer Karady, Gloriann Liu, Ben Lowy, Rania Matar, Eman Mohammed, Simon Norfolk, Farah Nosh, Suzanne Opton, and Michal Rovner--are active in the United States, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Palestine. Through photography and video installations they comment on issues that confront each of us daily, whether through the barrage of reports in the media or through personal experience of the aftermath of armed conflict. Writers and poets Dexter Filkins, Aida Hozic, Kirun Kapur, Phil Klay, Lisa Suhair Majaj, Carol McCusker, Terje Ostebo, and Phillip Prodger lend their words and verses, their insight and experience to the task of opening eyes and hearts. They bring us face to face with the Other, with hardship and loss, and history's long shadow. They offer brief respites from old narratives that keep us estranged from one another.

Aftermath is an ode to hope--a hope that, in seeing our shared path, we might steer our new century away from conflict toward possibility for everyone and for the planet's survival.