“The Baby Tank”: An Interview with St. Helena Artist & Writer Peter Martin
Peter Martin is an artist and writer who grew up in St. Helena, California.
In the spirit of Jean de Brunhoff’s 1939 classic children’s book “Babar”, Peter Martin’s “The Baby Tank” is a controversial commentary on our country’s focus on the machinery of war. Peter Martin has created a unique 21st Century character that reflects the soul of innocence in this time of terrible destruction and terror that has propelled the U.S. into two wars of Empire.
Women in Black (WIB) interviewed Mr. Martin via email about the creation and the inspiration for “The Baby Tank”, and he graciously gave us permission to link to the first four chapters of his creation. The book raises the question “What are we teaching our children by our institutional acts of violence?”
The Up Valley Women in Black Interview with Peter Martin
WIB: When did you first start thinking about creating “The Baby Tank?” What was going on in the world, in your life, in your personal world?
PM: It started with a photo. There had been a string of bombings in Varanasi, India and they had set the bomb off in a place that I recognized from when I had been there just shy of two years previous.
In front of the temple there was a huge banyan tree and surrounding it I just remember thousands of shoes. It was the spot where people take off their shoes and pay a guy a couple rupees to hold on to them while they go do their temple stuff in bare feet. I remember how crowded that scene was. Thousands of people crammed into this little space; thousands of shoes around this huge tree. So I remember the moment seeing the picture–that very same tree and just chaos. It punched me in the gut in a way I can’t describe.
At the time I was in school. I was stuck in academia listening to people workshop their high school love stories wondering what the hell I was doing. All the while trying to reconcile my experiences backpacking through India and Nepal. India had been very tough… Nepal sucked. UN Observers. Checkpoints. Armed patrols. Bombings in Katmandu. Worst night of my life was when Maoist rebels attacked the checkpoint outside of my hotel. I hid under my blankets, watched the flashes through the yak-wool weave. It was bad.
I was at a point of despair when I began writing Baby Tank. A comfortable life growing up in the Napa Valley doesn’t prepare you very well for seeing a ten year old kid, covered in dust, dragging himself down the street with no legs. A quiet, introverted life reading literature and studying Caravaggio is possibly not the best background to have–confronting the look in that kid’s eyes.
Simply put I remember mutilated kids and wanted to put their spirit into something that wasn’t so easily torn apart by the toys of man. I remember kids flying kites, playing cricket, just running around being kids–ignoring the armed patrol, so to speak.
I was tortured by the irony that I really had just been a tourist–a stone skipping across their pond…. While these kids continued on - playing — being kids. The younger ones still have that warm-star sparkle in the eyes but once they get older, say nine or ten–this hardness creeps in: Cold eyes.
And of course there was the war in Iraq… I’m not saying that in March of ‘06 it had hit an all-time stupid point but I definitely remember… despair.
So… I didn’t really know where I was going when I started writing the thing. Just had a bunch of vague ideas and a lot of angst to fall back on…
WIB: In the second chapter, Baby Tank discovers a magic lamp. But when he tries to take it around to his family, they’re too busy. Did that have any special meaning to you, in the context of the overall theme of the piece?
PM: When I started writing that chapter I was really just playing with the stock ‘3 wishes’ formula. But then I was completely stymied by the question of, ‘What would the baby tank wish for?’
So in a sense I was just looking for a way of getting out of the corner I had painted myself into. I guess sometimes by chickening out you stumble on a deeper message.
So yes- it does have a special meaning. A very, very special meaning. It means that we should neglect our kids as much as possible. Builds character.
WIB: There are many allusions to the idea of “play” in “The Baby Tank”: Playing soccer; running down sand dunes; making sand castles, etc. All these things are reminiscent of the childhoods that we, as American children, probably experienced growing up. Yet, for Baby Tank, these activities are set against a background of constant, perpetual, horrible war. Still, what Baby Tank always wants to do is grow tall enough to “play in the war.” Were there friends of yours, growing up in St. Helena, who also embraced this narrative of war as play? If so, how did their decisions inform your ideas about Baby Tank?
PM: I grew up feeling militarized….At scout camp we had this thing called the staff hunt. The staff of the camp would go hiding in the woods and then all of the little troops of kids would run around in the dark and try to find them. When they found one of them they’d ‘tag’ the staff member and he would docilely go back to the center of the camp with the one or two kids that had found him and that troop would get 1 point. The troop with the most points wins, so on and so forth.
We were so brainwashed … Our uniforms were crisp. We chanted songs. We had a special, Lord of the Flies military zeal to us. So when it came time for the staff hunt we all dressed in black & camouflage and had war painted our faces. We had worked out search routes and angles of attack. When we would find a staff member, we would go wild and give chase.
Things got a little out of hand, I’d say. But we won that staff hunt, and that’s all that mattered in the long run.
But yeah, I think most of my childhood I grew up with sort of a pornographic idea of violence.
WIB: You build a mythology of tanks as gentle, innocent wild creatures that were accidentally domesticated by humans. “Misunderstood” is a term that you use. And yet, the humans that domesticate them are also wild. Does this have any particular significance to your thoughts about who we are, as creatures, conducting war?
PM: I think by talking about ‘wild’ vs. ‘domestic’ I’m trying to talk a little about how with domesticity comes a certain amount of cultural programming–and we have to be wary of ourselves.
The ‘wild’ hasn’t’ been taught to hate. Only with the ‘domestic’ do we start thinking in such grandiose terms as ‘The Cartheginian Solution’ and what not.
I gotta go with Chris Hedges, author of ‘War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning’ on this one.
We’re drawn to conflict because it acts on us like a drug. It’s seductive. It gives us a sense of shared purpose in what would otherwise be a very boring, sheltered, consumer world.
It tickles our old, tribalistic urges. It imposes the myth of a shared dialogue of ‘us’ verses ‘them.’
So yeah: We have primitive urges but our programming determines how we act on those primitive urges. That’s what I mean by ‘misunderstood’.