Published four months after her death, the poet’s reflections on mortality are both agonising and profoundly life-affirming
There are no atheists in foxholes, goes the saying, and indeed social scientists and evolutionary biologists have argued that the experience of war or conflict drives religious belief; in 2019, Joseph Henrich and others surveyed almost 2,000 people in three post-conflict societies – Uganda, Sierra Leone and Tajikistan – and concluded that their experience of conflict had prompted them to participate in Christian and Muslim rituals and groups. Atheism, it seems, may be as fragile as faith.
“No matter how attached you are to your own rational worldview, your rationality won’t survive long under the threat of imminent death,” writes the former Dutch poet laureate Lieke Marsman in her book On Another Planet They Can Save Me. Part scream, part song, it charts the gradual dissolution of her own rational assumptions, which govern everything from her views on God to extraterrestrial life. It is a brilliant, playful, layered and humane plea for openness and hope in the face of her own foxhole of intolerable suffering.