Local Woman Uses Art to Express Feelings about War

| Submitted by admin on January 26, 2006 - 1:11pm.
Editor’s note – Rose Musacchio, a retired English teacher, moved to Dunkirk in 2003.  For a sculpting class she audited at SUNY Fredonia, she created a sculpture that reflected her feelings about war and its misery.   Rose wrote the following to describe the work.  Although photos could not be adequately reproduced here, Rose’s words are eloquent and evocative.  She brought the piece to the January 31 CPJ meeting and discussed its meaning. 

“The Spirit Groans”

This sculpture is a response to the suffering of the innocent people in Iraq who are caught in yet another war, another struggle for power. In particular it is a response to a newspaper photograph of two Iraqi women, both of their faces expressing profound pain and suffering. What horror have they seen? How have their lives been torn apart? Are there experiences that destroy our souls? Are there sights that we as human beings should never see? Is there grief that wounds us beyond healing? The man with them is trying to prevent them from seeing whatever it is before them, but it is too late. Now they must go forward in life with whatever strength they can draw from. How are we here, in our lives full of comfort, to comfort them?


I don’t know how we can comfort them, unless it is that for a moment we enter into their pain.  But to do that we need to draw upon our own painful experiences, allow our own pain to come to the surface again. No anesthetizing of feelings allowed. We look at the outstretched arms, we see the agonized expression on the face. Can we pick up that mask, hold it up to our own face, and just for a moment, be the suffering woman in the photograph? Please feel free to place the mask on your face if you are moved to do so.


Although the sculpture is in part a political statement against a war I do not understand, or that I perhaps understand only too well as a struggle to maintain American dominance, it is also a response to the suffering that is always a part of human life. War is a constant event.  There are many wars going on in the world, between and within countries which we as a nation see as unimportant because they are of no strategic importance to our global power. But war has many other forms beyond the military as well: wars between factions in communities, between strangers, between friends, between family members, and ultimately within ourselves, within our own beings. That is the inescapable horror of war. As Pogo once said, “We have met the enemy, and it is us.”

Lord have mercy on us for what we do to one another.

* The title of the sculpture, The Spirit Groans, is taken from Romans 8:26 which reads as follows: “Likewise the Spirit also helps us in our weaknesses. For we do not know for what we should pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself makes intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered in words.”

[Rose played the following music in the background as her fellow students viewed the sculpture:]

Maria Callas singing the aria, La Mamma Morta, from the opera Andrea Chenier, by Umberto Giordano. The aria is an expression of a woman’s profound grief following the murder of her mother during the French Revolution of 1789, a peasant uprising against the injustice of poverty in the midst of the obscene wealth and power of the aristocracy. This aria was also used as the theme music for the movie “Philadelphia,” in which Tom Hanks played a young lawyer, a homosexual with AIDS struggling for justice in an uncaring world.
                                                                                - Rose Marie Musacchio