Imperial Past Returns to Haunt the Netherlands

In July 2012 a Dutch national newspaper, de Volkskrant, published two photos on its front page showing Dutch soldiers brutally shooting dead unarmed victims in a mass grave. The images were shocking to a nation that prides itself as being upright and humanitarian.  Never mind that the photos were nearly 70 years old. Found in a rubbish tip, they were, in fact, the first ever photos to be published of Dutch soldiers killing Indonesians during a war of decolonization that is still euphemistically referred to as “Police Actions.”  

To read the rest of my article click here to visit the Centre for Imperial and Global History at the University of Exeter.

Sri Lankan War Crimes

This month the United Nations Human Rights Council is meeting in Geneva. One of the items on the agenda is the investigation of possible war crimes carried out by Sri Lankan authorities against the civilian Tamil population in 2009.  The government of Sri Lanka has so far refused to allow an independent investigation to take place. Some of my students made this short video, which they've sent to the UN, asking for an impartial investigation into possible war crimes to be carried out.

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Ranjan Ghosh - A Lover's Quarrel with the Past: Romance, Representation, Reading.

The International Institute for Asian Studies has just this week published my review of Ranjan Ghosh's A Lover's Quarrel with the Past: Romance, Representation, Reading. It is an intriguing, provocative and sometimes irritating work, written in dissent and flavoured with indignation, analyzing how myth-makers have come to dominate Hindu collective memory. You can read my review right here.

I hope you enjoy it.

Amputated Memories

Places bear traces of memory for those who inhabit them. In the absence of place, these memories remain beyond recollection.  Aleida Assmann [Cultural Memory and Western Civilization, Cambridge University Press, 2011] writes: “Even if places themselves have no innate faculty of memory, they are of prime importance for the construction of cultural memory. Not only do they stabilize and authenticate the latter by giving it a concrete setting, but they also embody continuity”.  Removed from places that could stabilize their collective memory, the exiled, the trafficked, the economic migrants and entire groups fleeing from conflict, face a discontinuity that is difficult to bridge. Their new homes, their new streets and cities are not conducive to remembering. At the most, descendants of uprooted communities create substitute spaces - places of commemoration. But commemoration replaces what is being remembered, it marks the end of continuity.  Commemoration marks absence.

Anthroplogist Paul Connerton [ How Modernity Forgets, Cambridge University Press, 2009] brilliantly argues that “the locus [of memory] is more important than the memorial.”  The memorial is a deliberate work, born out of a fear of forgetting.  It calls out for attention to its explicit message. A simple, inattentive glance at a memorial is not enough. Otherwise, as Connerton, summarizing Robert Musil, says: “nothing is more invisible than a memorial”.  Likewise, memorials conceal as well as trigger memory, especially war memorials which “conceal the past as much as they cause us to remember it.”  This is because of the partiality of their representation of the past. After all, “their image is designed specifically to deny acts of violence and aggression. They conceal the way they died: the blood, the bits of body flying through the air, the stinking corpses lying unburied for months, all are omitted.” 

Connerton argues that, on the other hand, the house and the city street both provide powerful loci of memory.  The house is a “memory device” or an “aide-memoire”, a medium of representation and, as such, can be read effectively as a mnemonic system.”  The house, or home, is a mnemonic structure that has a certain taken-for-grantedness until a house-moving or, worse, a fire or war deprives one of one’s house. Even the furnishings within the home “remind us of the shared history and the body” , while on a larger scale the city street forms, over time, “a web of contacts and memories that eventually lead to a web of public trust.”

My father's chair

 

Allow me two personal examples. Firstly: at the age of 18 I left the house that I had lived in since shortly after birth. At the same time I left my family, my city and my country, never to return for any extended period of time. Over the decades that passed I have infrequently returned. At each visit I am confronted by an old armchair in the kitchen, made by my father with his own hands. When I sit on this armchair, even now, despite its imperfections and discomfort (or perhaps because of these) I am transported back to the times when, as a teenager, I sat there with Misty, my cat, on my lap and rooted behind a cushion and under a cushion to find the lose pages of newspapers that my father had stuck here. This memory comes to me with immediate force, like a Proustian involuntary memory, and it brings to me the almost physical presence of my father, who died nearly thirty years ago in that very room. Such is the power of the house and its furnishings as a locus of memory. Walter Benjamin [Illuminations, Random House, 20111] would describe the room as having an aura – “If we designate as aura the associations which, at home in the memoire involuntaire, tend to cluster around the object of a perception”.  In this particular case, the aura is made stronger because my father made the old armchair (it is why it is so uncomfortable!) and it therefore bears what Benjamin calls “traces”.

Secondly: aged 18, I worked for some time in southern France, together with labourers who were Irish, Arab, Chinese and Latin American.  Months later I moved to Paris. One day I was approaching a green newspaper kiosk on Boulevard Saint Michel, at the point where the broad avenue crests the hill at the large intersection outside the Jardin de Luxembourg, when I happened to run into a Venezuelan who I had worked with down south. We stopped and chatted amicably for ten minutes of so. Now, whenever I am in Paris, which is at least once a year, and I happen to walk by this intersection (the Luxembourg Gardens are obviously still there, the cafes and shops have perhaps changed, but the intersection seems to be as it was then, even the green newspaper kiosk still remains) I recall running into my Venezuelan acquaintance. Most importantly, the memory is almost physical – I can almost feel what I felt then, aged 18 – and it invariably stimulates scores of other memories of happy encounters I had on the streets of Paris during the late 1970s.

These two examples demonstrate the remarkable importance of the role of place in personal memory. Memory is not simply triggered by place, it is triggered by place because that which is remembered happened in place, was emplaced. We say that events take place. In fact events take place in place. The event takes place within a topography that is sensed, that has become meaningful and that is appropriated by ones identity – not only the event has been lived but the place too has been lived.

Therefore, to lose the place can be catastrophic, for one’s memory and one’s self-identity. To be unable to return, as is the case often with political refugees, can provoke profound sadness. Connerton formulates this well: “As I know my way around the limbs of my body, as a pianist knows her way around her piano, as I know my way around my own house, so I know my way around the paths, landmarks and districts of my city” and to lose one’s way around one’s limbs “is tearfully distressing, an aching catastrophe” but so too, to lose one’s way around one’s house or city “would be a defamiliariztion that would shake my very being.”

How greater the catastrophe therefore, for memory, when an entire social or ethnic group, through forced trans-location, lose their houses and their cities, the primary loci of their memories, and instead, find themselves transported to a new, alien world that knows nothing of their former homes and towns and, furthermore, demonstrates only a profound disinterest in their past, their experiences and their memories. Such people's  memories have been amputated.

New ebook

I published my first e-book the other day. So, if you have a kindle, iPhone or iPad, you can purchase it for $3:99 at any amazon store. The book is called James Joyce and Zurich's Fair City - And other historical reflections on Switzerland..It collects a number of published and unpublished essays and, as the blurb says "offers a series of anecdotal historical essays that will enhance your stay in Switzerland's beautiful city of Zurich. Stagger in the footsteps of James Joyce, drop in at the zany Cabaret Voltaire, get to grips with the philosophy behind Wagner's operas, discover Zurich's connections with Tom Waits, Thomas Mann, Will Self, Herman Hesse, Empress Sissi and many more.

Get you copy at this link now before it sells out!

Reflecting Venice

Last month I spent a few days in Venice, city of stone and water.

Peter Ackroyd has written (Venice: Pure City, Vintage Books, 2010), that "there has been a continuing association between Venice and the mirror".

View of Venice

 Ackroyd also writes: "Venice seems to have no foundations except reflections. Only its reflections are visible".

View of Grand Canal

Nineteenth century American writer W. D. Howells wrote of Venice: "Never did a city seem so dream-like and unreal".

Portrait of Liz

Rilke agreed: "this dream like city."

At the Biennale

Brian Jolley - Zurich Triptych

Zurich Triptych by Brian Jolley

Here is a photograph of one of my favourite views in Zurich. On the left, the Neo-Gothic city hall and the towers of the Fraumunster and Saint Peters churches. On the right, the two towers of the Grossmunster. The River Limmat divides both banks, yet unites the photograph, muscling its way out of the lake and moving northward to the Rhine. The deep blue of the sky and darkness of of the river bind all three panels together. This work is from the American photographer, Brian Jolley.

It is a painterly photograph, the work of an artist who uses modern technology while displaying an awareness of tradition. The left panel is almost abstract, with layers of blues, a hint of brown stone and slash of crimson red. Moving across the work, from left to right, the scene brightens, like night into day. The middle panel captures the magic of the river, steadily receding into light, where the white water almost meets the white of the horizon, bordered by the ancient stone embankment. The darkness at the bottom of the work is balanced by the darkness at the top, the eye is eventually led into the pool of light that forms the photograph's centre.

The secret of Jolley's work, is that he has allowed time, duration,to insert itself into his photograph, drenching the work with a glaze of light and colour. The colours have been impressed upon the piece, layer after layer. This is not a view that you will ever find with the naked eye, no matter how hard you try. The effect comes from using a camera obscura.  Jolley has made his own version of a cardboard shoe box. A pin hole at one end of the box allows the light to enter and the image falls across a layer of tissue paper. Jolley has cut a larger hole at the other end of the box, into which he inserts the lens of his digital camera. With a long exposure, he then photographs the image that is on the tissue paper.

The effect not only impresses duration into the image, but the technique marries the old and the new. The camera obscura has been known for centuries and was made use of by, for instance, Vermeer. So Jolley is in good company. In the nineteenth century primitive images were captured using various photographic papers. Since the late 20th century Cuban photographer Alberdo Morrell  has been using the camera obscura to photograph tantalizing urban scenes from hotel rooms in a variety of cities. Jolley uses modern high tech - a digital camera. But his use of the camera not only is enriched through this technique, but is in itself a performance that demonstrates a respect for tradition.