by Teju Cole
A second phenomenon, related to the first: torturers expressing their disappointment in the tortured. This disappointment quickly becomes anger. What is the matter with these blacks? The tortured act troubled, it is observed. They consistently fail to live up to the hopes the torturers have for them. Equality has not come, corruption is rampant, and the leadership is disgraceful. An alien visitor might note: the wounded are everywhere singled out for blame, the wounders almost never.
The one forgets to remember itself to its self. It keeps and erases the archive of this injustice that it is, of this violence that it does. The one makes itself violence, it violates and does violence to itself. It becomes what it is, the very violence that it does to itself.*2
The torturer cannot forgive the tortured for having been tortured. And certainly not for having taken on some of the torturer’s characteristics.
It is good to remember that for a brief moment (before reconciliation interrupted the work of mourning) the victims had a say:
After learning for the first time how her husband had died, she was asked if she could forgive the man who did it. Speaking slowly, in one of the native languages, her message came back through the interpreters: “No government can forgive.” Pause. “No commission can forgive.” Pause. “Only I can forgive.” Pause. “And I am not ready to forgive.”*3
The second chapter of the fifth volume of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report is entitled “Victims of Gross Violations of Human Rights.” It contains a long list of names in alphabetical order. The document says there will be more names to come. But this, already, is a rich and representative sample. Take any section, and it could have come from a Johannesburg phone book:
MATISO, Peace
MATISO, Sithembele
MATITI, Zandisile
MATIWANA, Hombakazi
MATIWANA, Nontombi Beauty
MATIWANA, Siphiwe Headman
MATIWANE, David Ndumiso
MATIWANE, Lungisa Welcome
MATJEE, Lawrence
The names run into hundreds. Folded into the neat letters of each name is an invisible horror. We know a little more about one of these names, Lawrence Matjee, because David Goldblatt took a photograph of him in 1985. No one in the history of photography ever captioned photographs more scrupulously than did Goldblatt.
“Yes, they tortured people here,” my friend says. She points out the building. It has a façade of blue tile. This is John Vorster Square, headquarters of the security police. In the old days people went into this building and came out lessened, if they came out at all. It was an evil place.
The victim, by continuing to suffer, irritates the oppressor, who would rather be already past it.
We drive on in silence.
Will there someday be another Truth and Reconciliation Commission? One that features names like Faisal bin Ali Gaber, Nabila Rehman, and Zubair Rehman? Maybe. But should such a day ever come, if history’s any guide, we won’t be ready to forgive those people for what we did to them.
* * *
*1 Catherine Taylor, Apart, 2012.
*2 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, 1996.
*3 Robert Rotberg and Dennis Thompson, eds., “Truth v. Justice: The Morality of Truth Commissions,” 2000.
Break It Down
IN A DRY landscape, men work. With axes, hammers, and other tools, they break stones. It is hard work, from the looks of it, but they do it seriously. They are enthusiastic, and work as a team. Something is being cleared away, perhaps in preparation for something else to be built. A small walled house, made of hardened mud bricks and just a little taller than human height, comes crashing down. When the dust settles, the men, finding the large chunks of rubble unsatisfactory, reduce them further. With a pick, one man hits a flat concrete slab on which inscriptions are visible. At first, the pick glances, unequal to the task. But soon the slab is crossed by hairline cracks and begins to split. Two other men wander near the wall that has just come down. In the sand around their feet are large clay pots, and with effortless little kicks, like bored boys, they break the pots. Stone, mud, clay: patiently they break everything down. And a little distance away, behind the safety of a metal gate, some people watch the men at work. The watchers let the work continue undisturbed. They do nothing, are able to do nothing, about the demolition in process, the demolition of old Sufi shrines. Between the workers and their watchers, there is a difference in power. An automatic gun, resting on some stones, ignored but unignorable, indicates that difference.
In August 1566, an angry Calvinist crowd in the Flemish town of Steenvoorde attacked the pilgrimage church of Sint-Laurensklooster, destroying its art and architecture, and killing several of its priests. In the weeks that followed, the violence spread to the major Flemish cities of Antwerp and Ghent. And though there had been periodic outbreaks of iconoclasm all through European history—in Byzantine times, and then with renewed frequency in the age of Reformation—there had never been anything quite like the “Beeldenstorm,” the Dutch “storm of statues” of the late sixteenth century. Sir Richard Clough, a Welsh merchant then living in Antwerp, was an eyewitness to the destruction, and, in a letter to London, he wrote of what he saw:
“All the churches, chapels and houses of religion utterly defaced, and no kind of thing left whole within them, but broken and utterly destroyed, being done after such order and by so few folks that it is to be marvelled at.” He described the Church of Our Lady in Antwerp as looking “like hell with above 10,000 churches burning and such a noise as if heaven and earth had got together, with falling of images and beating down of costly works; in such sort, that the spoil was so great that a man could not well pass through the church.”
Images are powerful. They can bring people into such a pitch of discomfort that violence ensues, and iconoclasm carries within itself two paradoxical traits: thoroughness and fury. The men (they are in Timbuktu), in their hardworking but boyish ways, and with their automatic weapons, are a good example of this thoroughness, and this cheerful, impish fury.
In early 2001, in the Bamiyan valley of central Afghanistan, a pair of monumental statues of the Buddha, intricately carved into the sandstone of a cliff in the sixth century, were dynamited and reduced to rubble. The larger of the statues was 180 feet high. The destruction was not easy: it took weeks. This act of straightforward iconoclasm was done at the direct order of Mullah Omar, leader of the Taliban. He had thought the Buddhas had some tourism value in 1999, but he changed his mind less than two years later, declaring them idols. And so the dynamite was laid, and where the Buddhas were, where they stood in their graceful embodiment of Gandhara art, in their fine blend of Greek and Buddhist artistic ideals, there now stands only silence, emptiness, a pair of monumental alcoves.
Iconoclasm is nominally about theology. Images that represent the wrong ideas must be expunged. But why be so furious about ideas? And, so, how are we to understand the destruction of Sufi shrines in the north of Mali? Ansar Dine, the rebel group that now controls Timbuktu, believes itself to be doing the will of God. The United Nations doesn’t matter, Ansar Dine has said, UNESCO is irrelevant, only God’s law matters. The locals are helpless, and horrified. Short of witnessing grievous bodily harm, few things are as astonishing as seeing the casual, physical destruction of what one holds sacred.
Surely, the Muslim piety of “the city of 333 saints” (as Timbuktu is known) should correspond to the Muslim piety of Ansar Dine, should it not? So far, eight mausoleums have been broken, many tombs destroyed, and the rebels are determined to continue the destruction. Their version of Islam—Salafist, fundamentalist—considers the syncretic practices of Malian Sufism, with its veneration of saints and incorporation of vernacular practices, haram. There is no direct Qur’anic proscription on image making, but the Traditions of the Prophet, the Hadiths, object to using images to usurp God’s creative power. From those Hadiths come such narratives as the one in the ninth-century Book of Idols:
When on
the day he conquered Mecca, the Apostle of God appeared before the Ka’bah, he found idols arrayed around it. Thereupon he started to pierce their eyes with the point of his arrow, saying, “Truth is come and falsehood vanished. Verily, falsehood is a thing that vanisheth [Qur’an 17:81].” He then ordered that they be knocked down, after which they were taken out and burned.
On French radio, Sanda Ould Bouamana, a spokesman for Ansar Dine, expressed their activity in strikingly similar terms: “When the Prophet entered Mecca he said that all the mausoleums should be destroyed. And that’s what we’re repeating.” And that is why, more than a thousand years after he died, the tomb of the saint Sidi Mahmoudou has, in this past week, been destroyed and desecrated.
A peculiarity of the Timbuktu iconoclasm is that these shrines are architectural rather than representationally sculptural. They are generally modest in size, and usually made of mud. There is little of the opulence that might have maddened the sixteenth-century Flemish mob, and none of the lifelike mimesis of human form that offended sensibilities in the Bamiyan valley. In Timbuktu, a once vital trading city, in a place once fabled for both its riches and learning, now swallowed up by the Sahel, these mausoleums are expressions of local practice: simple and old beliefs in a land of griots and marabouts, the kind of syncretism common to all the big world religions, owing as much to universal edicts as to what works for the people in their land, in their language, and according to their preconversion customs of veneration.
There is in iconoclasm an emotional content that is directly linked to the iconoclasts’ own psychology. The theological pretext for image destruction is that images are powerless, less than God, uneffective as a source of succor, and therefore disposable. But in reality, iconoclasm is motivated by the iconoclasts’ profound belief in the power of the image being destroyed. The love iconoclasts have for icons is a love that dare not speak its name.
Iconoclastic hostility is complex. It expresses itself in different ways all through history. But what is generally true of iconoclastic movements is that they are never about theology alone. They include politics, struggles for power, the effort to humiliate an enemy, and a demonstration of iconoclasts’ own neuroses. Behind iconoclastic bravado is a terror of magic, a belief in dead saints no less than that of iconophiles, and, crucially, a historical anxiety that, in the Timbuktu case, is about presenting the bona fides of Ansar Dine to its Wahhabi models in Saudi Arabia and to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.
That which doesn’t speak dumbfounds. After all, who can tell what such objects are thinking? Best to destroy the inscrutable, the ancient, if one is to truly usher in a pure new world. So, the invaders continue their work in Timbuktu with enthusiasm and good cheer, smashing pots, breaking bricks, rattling at the doors of the mosque. It takes a lot of work to silence silent objects. But already it is clear that not only the people watching from behind the gate are consumed with fear.
The White Savior Industrial Complex
AFTER I WATCHED the Kony 2012 video, which in a short period of time had become a “viral” sensation, I wrote a brief seven-part response to it, which I posted in sequence on my Twitter account:
1- From Sachs to Kristof to Invisible Children to TED, the fastest growth industry in the US is the White Savior Industrial Complex.
2- The white savior supports brutal policies in the morning, founds charities in the afternoon, and receives awards in the evening.
3- The banality of evil transmutes into the banality of sentimentality. The world is nothing but a problem to be solved by enthusiasm.
4- This world exists simply to satisfy the needs—including, importantly, the sentimental needs—of white people and Oprah.
5- The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice. It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.
6- Feverish worry over that awful African warlord. But close to 1.5 million Iraqis died from an American war of choice. Worry about that.
7- I deeply respect American sentimentality, the way one respects a wounded hippo. You must keep an eye on it, for you know it is deadly.
These tweets were retweeted, forwarded, and widely shared by readers. They migrated beyond Twitter to blogs, Tumblr, Facebook, and other sites; they generated fierce arguments. As the days went by, the tweets were reproduced in their entirety on the websites of The Atlantic and The New York Times, and they showed up on German, Spanish, and Portuguese sites. A friend emailed to tell me that the fourth tweet, which cheekily name-checks Oprah, was mentioned on Fox television.
These sentences of mine, written without much premeditation, had touched a nerve. I heard back from many people who were grateful to have read them. I heard back from many others who were disappointed or furious. Many people, too many to count, called me a racist. One person spoke of me Mau-Mauing. The Atlantic writer who’d reproduced them, while agreeing with my broader points, described the language in which they were expressed as “resentment.”
Not long after, I listened to a radio interview given by the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Nicholas Kristof. Kristof is best known for his regular column in The New York Times, in which he often gives accounts of his activism or that of other Westerners. When I saw the Kony 2012 video, I found it tonally similar to Kristof’s approach, and that was why I mentioned him in the first of my seven tweets.
Those tweets, though unpremeditated, were intentional in their irony and seriousness. I did not write them to score cheap points, much less to hurt anyone’s feelings. I believed that a certain kind of language is too infrequently seen in our public discourse. I am a novelist, and my goal in writing a novel is to leave the reader not knowing what to think. A good novel shouldn’t have a point.
But there’s a place in the political sphere for direct speech, and, in the past few years in the United States, there has been a chilling effect on a certain kind of direct speech pertaining to rights. The president is wary of being seen as the “angry black man.” People of color, women, and gays—who now have greater access to the centers of influence than ever before—are under pressure to be well behaved when talking about their struggles. There is an expectation that we can talk about sins but no one must be identified as a sinner: newspapers love to describe words or deeds as “racially charged” even in those cases when it would be more honest to say “racist”; we agree that there is rampant misogyny, but misogynists are nowhere to be found; homophobia is a problem, but no one is homophobic. One cumulative effect of this policed language is that when someone dares to point out something as obvious as white privilege, it is seen as unduly provocative. Marginalized voices in America have fewer and fewer avenues to speak plainly about what they suffer; the effect of this enforced civility is that those voices are falsified or blocked entirely from the discourse.
It’s only in the context of this neutered language that my rather tame tweets can be seen as extreme. The interviewer on the radio show I listened to asked Kristof if he had heard of me. “Of course,” he said. She asked him what he made of my criticisms. His answer was considered and genial, but what he said worried me more than an angry outburst would have:
There has been a real discomfort and backlash among middle-class educated Africans, Ugandans in particular in this case, but people more broadly, about having Africa as they see it defined by a warlord who does particularly brutal things, and about the perception that Americans are going to ride in on a white horse and resolve it. To me though, it seems even more uncomfortable to think that we as white Americans should not intervene in a humanitarian disaster because the victims are of a different skin color.
Here are some of the “middle-class educated Africans” Kristof, whether he is familiar with all of them and their work or not, chose to take issue with: Ugandan journalist Rosebell Kagumire, who covered the Lord’s Resistance Army in 2005 and made an eloquent video response to Kony 2012; Ugandan scholar Mahmood Mamdani, one of the world’s leading specialists on Uganda and the author of a thorough rip
oste to the political wrongheadedness of Invisible Children; and Ethiopian American novelist Dinaw Mengestu, who sought out Joseph Kony, met his lieutenants, and recently wrote a brilliant essay about how Kony 2012 gets the issues wrong. They have a different take on what Kristof calls a “humanitarian disaster,” and this may be because they see the larger disasters behind it: militarization of poorer countries, shortsighted agricultural policies, resource extraction, the propping up of corrupt governments, and the astonishing complexity of long-running violent conflicts over a wide and varied terrain.
I do not accuse Kristof of racism, nor do I believe he is in any way racist. I have no doubt that he has a good heart. Listening to him on the radio, I began to think we could iron the whole thing out over a couple of beers. But that, precisely, is what worries me. That is what made me compare American sentimentality to a “wounded hippo.” His good heart does not always allow him to think constellationally. He does not connect the dots or see the patterns of power behind the isolated “disasters.” All he sees is hungry mouths, and he, in his own advocacy-by-journalism way, is putting food in those mouths as fast as he can. All he sees is need, and he sees no need to reason out the need for the need.
But I disagree with the approach taken by Invisible Children in particular, and by the White Savior Industrial Complex in general, because there is much more to doing good work than “making a difference.” There is the principle of first do no harm, and the idea that those who are being helped ought to be consulted over the matters that concern them.
I write all this from multiple positions. I write as an African, a black man living in America. I am every day subject to the many microaggressions of American racism. I also write this as an American, enjoying the many privileges that the American passport affords and that residence in this country makes possible. I involve myself in this critique of privilege: my own privileges of class, gender, and sexuality are insufficiently examined. My cellphone was likely manufactured by poorly treated workers in a Chinese factory. The coltan in the phone can probably be traced to the conflict-riven Congo. I don’t fool myself that I am not implicated in these transnational networks of oppressive practices.