A Quaker Woman Writes about War

World War 2 propaganda poster, Treidler, c. 1943

What complicated times we live in: so many thorny issues need to be acknowledged before we can responsibly or sensitively begin a discussion. As Roxana Robinson—a Quaker who opposes war—told her audience in her 2014 address, “The Warrior and the Writer,” at the United States Air Force Academy shortly after the publication of her deeply researched and compassionately imagined novel , “You might be surprised that I wrote a book about a twenty-six year old Marine: I’m the wrong gender, the wrong generation, and the wrong religious genre.” Although she avoided the term “cultural appropriation,” it’s clear both from this address and from her other essays that she’s seriously grappled with this problem: the potential violence those of us with the resources to have our voices heard can do to those with less access to telling stories. Writer and activist Nikesh Shukla instructs that anyone “writing ‘the other’ ” should both do the research properly and “ask yourself: why am I telling this story?” In this regard, Robinson is a model citizen, but she never wavers in her conviction that it is the job of writers to be curious about and then “render precisely what it means to be alive.” We would not have , Robinson writes, had Tolstoy’s protagonist, Conrad.