Arms, or the Arm?: The Problematics of 'Violent' National Anthems

Mashrur S Hossain

"When we spoke, nobody listened to us, / So we have taken the noise of gunpowder as our rhythm / And the sound of machine-guns as our melody" - one might wonder if these words are taken from an Anurag Kashyap film. The answer is: these lines form the second stanza of _Qassaman_ (We Pledge), the national anthem of Algeria. The present research project offers a critical-affective reading of the lyrics of some select national anthems of the world that appear to be 'violent' in diction, imagery, and allusion. It explores if 'violent' national anthems testify to the inevitable contingency of violence: what is praised by one nation as necessary bonding of the 'arms' (e.g. fellows hand in hand during war) might appear to others as nothing more than uncritical adoption of 'arms' (ammunition, violent mechanism). . The present reading is premised upon three questions: first, if and how violence constructs and preserves national identity and self-identity; second, if the invocation of 'violence' (e.g. "May the tyrant"s foul blood water our furrows" in France"s _La Marseillaise_) in a song that may have fit the turmoil of the emergence of a nation suits the same way when that song is adopted as a national anthem and being sung by, say, the school children every day; and, third, how a national anthem takes into account the 'other.' The paper unfolds in two core sections. The first one, on the poetics and politics of 'violent' national anthems, locates and interprets violent words and images in 17 national anthems. The second section addresses the problematics of 'violent' national anthems: it locates and critiques the negotiation between violence and revolution and that between violence and nation-formation. Reviewing Tagores' conceptualization of the 'visva,' Fanonian constructive violence, Levinas' alterity, Butler's grievability, and Appiah's rooted cosmopolitanism, the paper explores the tension between a country's 'chauvinistic' national anthem and projected cosmopolitanism. It demonstrates how a national anthem often foregrounds the hierarchies of the other: while it upholds the ethnic and spatial identities of the 'internal' others and finds the loss of their rights and lives as grievable, it tends to discount the existence of the 'external' others and consider the violation of their rights and lives as non-grievable. Such biased if not entirely unethical propositions jeopardize the questions of humanity, of cosmopolitanism, and of 'visva.' . Apropos of the contemporary rise in ethno-chauvinism and refugee crisis, the paper reasons that increasing critical ethical-empathic understanding of the contingency of nationalist discourses is likely to generate culture of critical tolerance and environment of conciliation.