Sand and Bullets

             Turners Here, Bullet and Helen Benedict’s Sand Queen are both a like yet different. The two compare in that both works focus on the war in Iraq as well as the American struggle in the Middle East. Sand Queen seems to show a different side to the Iraqi culture as well as women in which the American perceptive does not see thanks to the media. Kate Brady as an American soldier gets to see Naema Jassim an Iraqi woman medical student as an educated woman who lives more for marriage and having children, something we as American civilians fail to recognize in Middle Eastern women in general. Sand Queen also shows the darker side to the classic image of the heroic American military through the eyes of an Iraqi perspective. Naema witnesses American soldiers as brutal and harassing other Iraqis. Here, Bullet has a similar technique in which both quiet and violent moments are shown having to do with war through the word of poetry. The poems are a collaboration of natural and relatable instances that can be seen as even beautiful or glorious, meanwhile showing the less human side of war which is not glorifying or heroic at all but rather brutal, gory, and violent. The two works overall portray the side of war civilians will always fail to see being we cannot all be physically on the battle field. The two obviously contrast in that Sand Queen is more of  story focusing on feminine elements since two of the main characters are females in a man’s war, meanwhile Here, Bullet is more of a collection of stories in the form of poems in which it is unclear whether they are related or not. The two also both have a common theme about contemporary warfare. The theme that there is a whole other side many of us are ignorant to when it comes to war, the same could be said for different cultures separate from ours. Though the Iraqi culture is depicted as oppressive especially towards women this cannot always be the case as exemplified by characters like Naema, who claim there is much more to their country than just war and violence.