Known and Strange Things Page 9
Of the no fewer than 434,500 and as many as 500,000 who were eventually brought to Belzec, two survived. Karl Alfred Schluch of the SS was not at the Berlin concerts, for he was working with Christian Wirth (“Christian the Terrible”) at Belzec. Schluch said, “My location in the tube was in the immediate vicinity of the undressing hut. Wirth had stationed me there because he thought me capable of having a calming effect on the Jews. After the Jews left the undressing hut I had to direct them to the gas chamber. I believe that I eased the way there for the Jews because they must have been convinced by my words or gestures that they really were going to be bathed.”
A composer who loses his hearing can still compose. The real disaster for a composer would be to lose the ability to count.
In a small enclosure in Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart in 1933 (at the time Jacques Derrida is a three-year-old in Algiers) a Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine, paces. His name is Benjamin. He has a doglike head, and stripes on his back like a tiger. But he is neither canid nor felid; he is marsupial. He is also a carnivore, a hunting animal, though not an especially fast or particularly strong one. The thylacine was first described in 1806 by Tasmania’s deputy surveyor-general George Harris. “Head very large, bearing a near resemblance to the wolf or hyaena. Eyes large and full, black with a nictitant membrane which gives the animal a savage & malicious appearance.”
In mainland Australia, the thylacine may have survived until the 1830s, according to the oral history recorded by the Adnyamathanha people of the Flinders Ranges region to the east of Lake Torrens. “Today marrukurli (thylacines) are known only as mammals of the Dreaming. That is, there is no one living who claims to have seen one. Both the Dreaming and other oral tradition, however, suggest the possibility of their bodily existence in the region in the not-too-distant past.”
At moments, you may notice that what you are looking at contains both its own obliteration (the promise of death) and a curious quantity of eternity, like a single body possessed by two spirits. Survival and extinction are both indelibly there. There is a quality of listening in the dead of the night (the “dead” of the night) that is perhaps not conducive to writing or interpretation, but that heightens the possibilities of what can be heard, or that might lead one to believe that there is an unnamed lake underneath all reality, and that there are places where the ground, insufficiently firm, can suddenly plunge one through into the subterranean truth of things.
The thylacine is the quarry of a state bounty in Tasmania between 1888 and 1909. Many thylacines die in that crazed hunt. Then an epidemic finishes off most of the rest. In the year 1933, when he paces for the camera, Benjamin is the last of his species. And when he dies in September 1936, the thylacine goes extinct. There are sightings afterward, but none credible.
When I have a nap or something, Derrida said, and I fall asleep (these words in English, all of a sudden, and not in French; but only these words), at that moment, in a sort of half-sleep, all of a sudden I’m terrified by what I’m doing. And I tell myself: You’re crazy to write this! You’re crazy to attack such a thing! You’re crazy to criticize such and such a person. You’re crazy to contest such an authority, be it textual, institutional, or personal. (His gestures become more animated.) And there is a kind of panic in my subconscious, he said. As if…what can I compare it to?
Perhaps when people talk about liking a man in uniform, they are thinking of someone like Major Patrick Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu, someone both confiding and confident. The interviewer is white. He asks about the events of January 15, 1966. “Did the Sardauna himself attempt to fight?” “No, we didn’t see him until the time we actually shot him. He ran away from his house when we fired the first two rounds from the antitank guns into the building. The whole room was blown up and the place was set alight. Then we went to the rear of the house and started searching from room to room until we found him among the women and children, hiding himself.” Nzeogwu says this part with faint but detectable mockery.
He is young, fit, not yet twenty-nine, the consummate professional in his officer’s cap and short-sleeved uniform. He speaks with astonishing clarity. He is what will change Nigeria at last and for good, there can be no doubt about it. “So we took away the women and children and took him.” By “took him,” Nzeogwu means he himself shot the Sardauna of Sokoto, Sir Ahmadu Bello, who had been serving as the premier of Northern Nigeria. In the same coup on the same day, Nzeogwu’s co-conspirators killed the prime minister of Nigeria, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa; the premier of Western Nigeria, Samuel Akintola; the finance minister, Festus Okotie-Eboh; Brigadier General Samuel Ademulegun; and many others. Blood gushed.
What if the things that happened could be seen again as apparitions before us? And the people who did these things could speak as they spoke in life, and move about like the people you see in dreams?
Nzeogwu smiles as he gives his answers: the future is bright. But within a year and a half, he will be killed in an ambush during the Biafran war. In the three years of the war, more than a million of his Biafran compatriots will be dead, too.
Imagine a child who does something horrible, Derrida said. Freud talks of childhood dreams where one dreams of being naked and terrified because everyone sees that they’re naked. In any case, in this half-sleep, I have the impression that I’ve done something criminal, disgraceful, unavowable, that I shouldn’t have done. And somebody is telling me: “But you’re mad to have done that.” And this is something I truly believe in my half-sleep. And the implied command in this is: Stop everything! Take it back! Burn your papers! What you’re doing is inadmissible! But once I wake up, it’s over.
On August 4, 2014, the MV Pinak-6 ferry, with more than 250 passengers, was crossing the Padma River near Mawa Ghat in Munshiganj, Bangladesh. It was high tide. The ferry was headed to Dhaka. It became inundated with water and capsized, sinking in a matter of minutes. A man on the audio track, presumably the same person recording the video from the shore, can be heard calling out God’s name, in shock and in fear, and then reciting the shahada: Lā ilāha illā-llāhu, Muhammadur rasūlu-llāh. The ferry was approved for only eighty-five passengers. The death toll is well over a hundred. The event sinks into the handheld camera recording it, the amateur videographer calling out God’s name.
What if the event were recorded on video, and could be summoned up out of the depths for helpless viewing again, and again, and again?
What this means, Derrida said, or how I interpret this, is that when I’m awake, conscious, working, in a certain way I am more unconscious than in my half-sleep. When I’m in that half-sleep there’s a kind of vigilance that tells me the truth. First of all, it tells me that what I’m doing is very serious. But when I’m awake and working (he raises his hands and lifts his head, like a conductor about to give a downbeat), this vigilance is actually asleep. It’s not the stronger of the two. And so, he said, I do what must be done. Jacques Derrida died on October 9, 2004, and I am watching the video in the wee hours on October 9, 2014; a good coincidence, but history has few dates into which to fit everything.
“I realize the tragic significance of the atomic bomb,” said President Truman, after the first bomb had been dropped, but before the second. “It is an awful responsibility which has come to us. We thank God that it has come to us, instead of to our enemies; and we pray that He may guide us to use it in His ways and for His purposes.”
The footage shows the island of Tinian in the Northern Mariana Islands on a sunny afternoon in August 1945. Men prepare a bomb—the second bomb, the pilot of the first having just returned to base—for deployment. They paint it, check its seals, and position it into place. Some of the men wear tan fatigues, others are shirtless. (Are they being exposed to radiation without even knowing it?) The atmosphere is cheerful and tropical. The bomb, bright yellow, looks like a school project. The large ovoid plutonium bomb is about the size of a small car. The president invokes God. I am half-asleep, and therefore more awake than if I were completely awake. The fo
otage is in vivid color.
What if it were visible? What if you could rise from your restless bed and switch on a machine and see it all again?
Major Charles Sweeney pilots the plane, called Bockscar, from which the bomb, called “Fat Man,” is dropped at 11:00 A.M. on August 9. Thirty-five thousand people below in the city of Nagasaki are killed instantly. They “took” them, brought whatever it is they had been, into instantaneous extinction. Another fifty thousand are to die later, in greater pain. But all that, and much else besides, is now in the time of the Dreaming.
Wangechi Mutu
WHEN WANGECHI MUTU first became aware of the sea mammal that coastal Kenyans call nguva, she knew she’d found the key to her next project. The nguva, or dugong, is a large mammal related to the manatee. It grazes on sea grass, and has a hippolike head and fishlike tail. This chimerical appearance was part of the attraction. An even stronger pull came from the way the nguva was conflated with mermaids in stories told about errant fishermen and what they’d seen at sea. So she began to think about this other sense of nguva: the sirens and their mysterious power.
“I am fascinated by these ocean-grown folks,” she says. “On the coast, there’s all this cross-pollination of ideas. Someone thinks they saw something. One person’s madness is reiterated by another, and a story is born. The rumor becomes a substitute for news.”
Since the mid-1990s, Mutu has been exploring what could be called in-betweenness. She was born and raised in Nairobi, before going to Wales and then the United States to study, going on to make work addressing feminism, ecology, metamorphosis, colonialism, and technology. She credits her American experience—particularly the exhausting task of attempting to evade foolish stereotypes—for how she finally found a way to incorporate African imagery in her work. Many Americans know little about African culture beyond images of Maasai warriors in National Geographic. This ignorance became fertile ground for Mutu’s explorations. The resulting images are visually arresting, both easy and difficult to look at, seductive in their patterning, grotesque in their themes.
“To make things make sense, I have to make things up,” says the artist, whose work is now held in major collections worldwide, including New York’s MoMA and London’s Tate. “I’m not a documentarian, I’m not a photojournalist.” Early on, Mutu drew on her experiences in a girls’ Catholic school in Nairobi and on a number of violent events in Africa’s colonial and postcolonial history. Influenced by artists such as Hannah Hoch and Richard Hamilton, she made collages exploring how state violence shows up on people’s bodies. The links between Belgian atrocities in the Congo, war crimes in Sierra Leone, and her many armless—or otherwise amputated—figures become obvious once they’re pointed out.
As her work evolved, Mutu began to make collages out of ethnographic photography, nineteenth-century medical illustrations, and the pornography printed in magazines. She calls herself “an irresponsible anthropologist and irrational scientist.” Her images underscore the way female bodies can act as measuring devices of any society’s health. Her women respond to their environments with both intelligence and agony. Some are skinless, the rush of veins and colors alarmingly visible. Many are powerful, muscular, lithe, in heels, half-cyborg at times, often erotic, sometimes dangerous. Several are influenced by real women: Sarah Baartman (the so-called Hottentot Venus who was shown in European fairgrounds), Josephine Baker, Eartha Kitt, Grace Jones, and Tina Turner. It’s an all-star lineup of black women who had fiercely ambiguous relationships with the racial and gender tropes imposed on them, women at war with history’s impositions.
Mutu’s work is sensual, delighting in the materiality of its media (paper, paint, mica, wool, Mylar). Seen in a gallery, the organic forms, hybrid anatomies, wild hair, machinelike forearms, delirious patterns, and compound eyes coalesce in a way that no digital reproduction can quite match. And what is true of the pictures is doubly true of the sculptures and installations, which also make use of smell and sound: dripping bottles, fermenting wine, rotting milk.
Nguva na Nyoka (Sirens and Serpents), made for an exhibition at London’s Victoria Miro Gallery, comprises a video, a large sculpture, and about fifteen paintings. What’s new is the focus on mermaids and their marine environment. Metamorphosis, one of Mutu’s past concerns, is now foregrounded. “The ocean is the source of life,” she says. “We all come from there. I think about these one-celled creatures and I think about the planet. It is related to my obsession with biology, even if it’s only a layperson’s obsession. The way I visualize what’s at the bottom of the ocean is very much to do with how I feel when I’m swimming in the sea.”
This surrender to both microcosm and macrocosm is visible in the waterworlds of the new images. There’s an abundance of blue and purple, and the detailing is intricate and seductive, appropriate given the sirenic theme. There’s also an abundance of tendrils, tentacles, and snakes. Forms swirl, curl, and proliferate, and seem to oscillate between the vegetal and the animal.
When I ask Mutu about this serpentine imagery, she tells me a story about living on the Swahili coast. She was just nineteen, but had become interested in the culture of her Mijikenda villager neighbors, finding in it “a social contract of belief” that was far removed from the skeptical thinking she was used to in Nairobi. She watched them kill a python. The snake’s body, left out in the open, was unexpectedly gone by the next day: it had refused to die and had wriggled away. The villagers found it and they killed it a second time. Mutu asked them to skin it for her. “I don’t know why,” she says. “It just seemed like the thing to do. I wouldn’t do it now.” She hung the skin out to dry. But for weeks, the snake’s skin stayed soft. It began to rot rather than dry: the snake had refused to cooperate. Something about this incident stayed with her. Years later, she has incorporated the stubborn and ungovernable form of the snake into her thinking about nguva: the power of women, the fear of the unknown, the possibilities of regeneration, the mysteries of coastal life.
On this last point, she notes the way exhausted fisherfolk out in their boats can hallucinate. Her images of nguva are themselves like hallucinations: female bodies, fish bones, porcupine spines, impossible anatomies, internal organs writhing like unkillable snakes. She draws a link between these Mijikenda stories, Chinese mermaids, and the waterwomen in Arab folklore, contrasting the intense and occasionally malevolent power of the nguva to the sanitized mermaid of popular European culture.
“Out there on the coast where I stayed, just outside Lamu, there are bats flying around, there’s the sound of the ocean, and there’s this magical atmosphere. This is the way the stories get under your skin.”
Age, Actually
GEORGES AND ANNE, a Parisian couple in their eighties, are at breakfast, talking amicably. All of a sudden, Anne falls silent. For a few long moments, she seems to have vanished and left her body behind. Her husband, distraught but calm, tries everything to get a reaction from her: he waves his hand, questions her repeatedly, daubs water on her. Nothing. Only when he hurries off to change out of his pajamas and get help does she revive, just as suddenly as she blanked out. She has no memory of what happened and has to be convinced, in fact, that anything happened at all. This sequence occurs a few minutes into Michael Haneke’s Amour and is a clue to the question at the heart of this masterful film: What does it mean when someone—particularly someone vital and beloved—becomes no one?
Haneke is rightly celebrated as one of the best filmmakers now at work. In film after film, he explores violence, prejudice, eroticism, loss, and fear in ways that seem to transcend cinema’s limitations. He likes to shock, it’s true, but his serious engagement with fundamental questions gives his work a bracing quality that links it less to the work of his contemporaries than to that of an earlier generation of auteurs. Amour, like Haneke’s previous film, The White Ribbon (2009), won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Both were deserving of the accolade, but what is striking is how different they are. The White Ribbon is a polyphonic histo
rical drama shot in gorgeous black and white in a rural German setting. It is a big film. Amour, on the other hand, is small, and looks almost like the work of a different filmmaker. Its action is confined almost entirely to a single Paris apartment, and its characters are few. Georges (played by Jean-Louis Trintignant, who is eighty-two) and Anne (Emmanuelle Riva, eighty-five) take up the bulk of the screen time, and their dialogue feels circumscribed, as though written for the stage. Haneke’s films tend to have a hectoring emotional intensity. An atmosphere of menace, which can occasionally edge into sadism, suffuses films like Funny Games, Code: Unknown, The Piano Teacher, and Caché. This is much less true of Amour, which unfolds like a simple domestic drama. We see the lives and daily rituals of a pair of retired piano teachers. One of them has had a stroke, and the other cares for her. It is sad, but it isn’t vicious or unsettling. At moments, with its steady camera gaze, repetitive domestic chores, and tiny kitchen, Amour evokes Chantal Akermann’s radical 1975 study of tedium, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. At other times, the tenderness between Georges and Anne brings to mind tastefully made films of decline like Sarah Polley’s Away from Her. But this is Haneke. We suspect and fear that he won’t keep up either the tastefulness or the tedium for very long.
“When we look at the image of our own future provided by the old we do not believe it: an absurd inner voice whispers that that will never happen to us—when that happens it will no longer be ourselves that it happens to.” Thus did Simone de Beauvoir’s The Coming of Age address the fundamental disbelief with which we regard old age. It is something that happens, unquestionably, but it only happens to other people. In Amour, Haneke shows us that this disbelief remains even for those who are no longer young. One is intact to oneself, and the inevitability of one’s radical diminishment is hard to credit.