The Tangled Threads Of Colonialism

 Public sculpture is one way a society says, “This is who we are.”   Statues of faded past heroes are out in the open for anyone to take potshots at, and the shots are usually deserved.  Sometimes it is a relief to see a statue’s day of reckoning comes earlier than its exhibition. The City of Edmonton recently decided not to place the two sculptures they had commissioned for each end of the Walterdale Bridge because after they were finished and ready to be mounted, someone had second thoughts and canceled the project.  One half of the work was a simple buffalo standing on a rock, an expressionless lump that could have been laser-printed using a child’s toy as a model. The other half of the work was a fur trader sitting on a small mountain of buffalo hides.  What is surprising is not the cancellation, but that the design was approved in the first place.  The artist chosen was a Chinese Canadian American, a representative of a people the Indigenous tribes considered unwelcome interlopers who had claimed everything except the air for themselves, and pushed the buffalo to extinction, a disaster for those who relied on the animal for survival.  The sculptor was aware he was recreating an image from time when the buffalo were on the urge of extinction, but how he thought anyone would enjoy a public exhibit of a massacre is beyond belief.  He claimed that by putting the buffalo on one side of the river and the hunter on the other, that it would illustrate the gulf between the two sides. Though the fur trader is sitting on a lump that raises him to the same height as the buffalo, that almost featureless hillock should have been rendered in colour so we see it for what it is, a heap of fur, blood, and gore. Apparently the artist wanted to demonstrate that man-made disasters like the near-extinction of the buffalo and other acts of colonial vandalism are not confined to the past.   The fact that these sculptures are for a bridge and not a museum of shame, compounds the planner’s deafness.  People don’t wish to be reminded of tragedies on their way to work every day.  If they want their hearts broken they can visit a military cemetery.  The artist’s original theory about colonialism being alive and well, was substantiated when at the same time the Edmonton officials cancelled the buffalo sculpture, the mayor of Calgary approved a statue of Winston Churchill.

Perhaps these figurative sculptors imagine that their work will go down in history as new Michelangelo’s.  Michelangelo lived 500 years ago and though his work is sublime, public art has moved on from the literal to the abstract, though for the initiated even the most detailed figurative work can be loaded with symbols and ideas.  It's a direct line from Michelangelo to Anish Kapoor, whose public works can be appreciated at face value without having to work for their meaning, but what message, either subliminal or literal, does a man sitting on a pile of dead animals convey?  If the sculptor wanted to express the tragedy better he could have stood a European entrepreneur holding hands with the Prime Minister at the time, standing on a pile of aboriginal skulls.   The artist’s intention was admirable but the expression of it is unworthy and offensive.  It’s just as well the project was cancelled because it would have been rapidly defaced and the trader pulled down from his stinking prize.

Sculpture is not only a European habit.   There are carved stone reliefs from Mayan Central America to Angkor Wat.  Like Northwest totem poles, they have been created to commemorate ancestry, history, people, or events.  A spirit of a bird by a Haida sculptor is still recognizable as a bird to a Nigerian, though it wouldn’t be one he knows.  A piece of sculpture is relevant to the place it was meant to be exhibited, but in its specificity, it should also have an element of universality.  In western societies we erect up statues of those we think are deserving of honour, but as any human knows, things change.  Individuals who were once celebrated by certain segments of a population, are found later to have no right to be on a pedestal.  Whether this is for past crimes or because the culture has moved on and has deemed certain deeds to be criminal.  Regimes come and go. Whenever statues have been accessible to the public they have had their noses broken or their eyes gouged out.  The damage is done by warring elements in a society or by invaders who wish to not only occupy the lands of the losing side, but to obliterate the old culture by breaking its icons and planting their flags on the new territory.  Christians knew what they were doing when they built churches on the sites of ancient temples. Whether it is zealots like the Taliban blowing up Buddha statues in Afghanistan, or Christians chiselling crosses into the marble foreheads of Greek statues, there is a long tradition of cultural vandalism.  

The colonization of North and South America, Africa, as well as the Near and Far East began when man learned how to navigate the oceans.  There had already been similar invasions and assimilations, biblical conflicts, the expansion of the Roman Empire, the Norman invasion of England, countless religious wars,  and royal wars of succession.   In many of these conquered territories, the local people were no more than slaves in their own land, oppressed not only by having their freedom of movement limited, but by the psychological trauma of having their cultural touchstones smashed to pieces. These pre-colonial patterns of conquest were the blueprint for the occupation of worlds that were once unknown to Europeans.  To aboriginal societies, the strange men who showed up on beaches, would have been like visitors from another planet, but it wouldn’t take long for them to understand how little power they had against the invader’s weapons and diseases.

There is a mural near my home that shows Queen Victoria on a bicycle with a Canada goose riding in her basket.  The artwork resisted graffiti a while, but when it crept in, it was all directed to the face of Queen Victoria.  The artist has now repaired it by painting an octopus stuck to the queen’s face so she can’t see where she is going.  So far the mural is unblemished.

Statues erected by conquerors are always at risk of being overthrown.  Shelly’s Ozymandias must have secretly known that his mighty image would eventually be toppled and swallowed by sand.  Statues are transitory things, loved by one faction, hated by another, but because they are exhibited in public places they are the easiest targets.

People are more gentle with some public art, perhaps because there is a proliferation of gigantic hands, ears, or noses, and fewer phallic towers emerging from the pavement, so they are less political and less likely to be vandalized.  A clever trick of some of Anish Kapoor’s popular sculptures is that they are reflective, so doing damage to them is like doing damage to oneself.  Since the observer sees a reflection of his society with him in it, the message is less polarizing, as if to say “Here you are,” an idea that doesn’t take a stand one way or the other.

Public art may be the visible face of a culture, but there are more insidious ways of colonization, like the devastating practice of rape as a weapon.  This is not a new phenomenon, and though it is a reprehensible thing, it only affects a portion of the population, but for them it is a lifetime of inner torment.  The more effective way to wound a culture's heart is through its language.  Besides physical repression, it has always been in a conqueror's interest to suppress the defeated side’s dialect and promote his own.  When I spent time on the Greek island of Rhodes I learned that when the Italians took the island from the Turks in the 1930’s, schools were required to conduct lessons only in Italian.  Priests and parents had to teach Greek to children in secret.  This happened less than a century ago when Germans, Italians, French, and Dutch were expanding their empires in an attempt to replicate the centuries-old British and Spanish occupations that had stretched around the globe. 

No matter what the century, none of these invasions were justified.  They were planned and financed for economic gain with the sponsoring countries expecting to put their foot on new territories with exploitable resources, and declare it belonged to them, or their king or queen.   Any indigenous societies that existed at the time of the invasion were nuisances to be overcome, like swamps or black-flies.

Although we think of colonialism as a thing of the past, there are still powerful nations like Russia and China, who believe that putting a soldier’s foot on a people’s neck and occupying their land, is a valid way to conquer.  This way of gaining control began to fade when the United States came into existence.  Their foreign policy was to play the anti-communist policeman in many international conflicts and to topple figures they saw as dictators, but they never occupied anyone’s land beyond their borders.  They did not try to seize Canada or Mexico.  Alaska was acquired as a business purchase.  Hawaii voted to become a state.  What the Americans have done, in an effort to expand their businesses worldwide, is to gain access to other cultures through television, computers, and mobile phones.   Those who protest about American hegemony are probably making their ideas heard on iPhones.   Any nation’s attempts to limit internet access and content, are as unsuccessful as trying to catch lighting with bare hands.  Even the lowly fax machine has been used in censorship busting.  When UK newspapers were requested to suppress royal scandals in the 1980’s, faxed articles sent from other countries were available to anyone who had a machine.  The news was out no matter what the powers-that-be wanted.  These days mobile phone footage documenting wars and invasions is available to anyone with the technology to watch it.

I have noticed in news reports of immigrants arriving in Italy from North Africa, that many of the young men who arrive have mobile phones.  Their phones may be all they possess except for the clothes on their backs, but phones are not just phones.  A refugee can send a message to his relatives to say he arrived alive and he can watch his own rescue from a sinking rubber boat on a television news report.  He can listen to whatever music he likes from anywhere in the world.  He can see how much things cost in Italy and what time the trains leave for Stuttgart.  This small handheld device, with its access to dissident voices in Russia, right wing politician’s threats to close borders, immigration rules, and job opportunities, is a powerful invention, with marketing ploys that encourage a kind of cultural colonialism.  This instant access to all information, is changing the rules of conflict and showing there is no need for physical invasion, the enemy is already in their midst.  

It is said that man’s time on earth started its countdown to extinction when agriculture was first practised.  Until then nomads had survived by moving with the seasons, but when men planted seeds near their doorsteps and they grew into food, they realized there was no longer a need to battle the beasts and other tribes to survive.  However, as his family grew and flourished they needed a greater food supply.  Outgrowing their traditional territories, they expanded onto other land which was often occupied by others.  Wars insured, tribes conquered other tribes, and soon they became nations.  We have now arrived at the point when there are so many people on the planet we struggle to feed them all.

Nomads were not without troubles and had battles with each other over hunting grounds, but overall they were stable societies who didn’t need to take over their neighbours' lands to feed themselves.  Each had his area, his customs, habits, and diet, and anyone who suggested stealing from another tribe was voted down by wiser minds. Although each tribe had its traditional hunting grounds, the land was not owned by anyone.  Land ownership was as strange a concept as ownership of the air.  It belonged to everyone.  Native people must have been surprised when they saw the new arrivals put fences around their land and say “This is mine.”  It was like saying, “Don’t breathe my air.”

Colonizing other people is not a practice of nomadic tribes but it is one in agricultural societies who require ever expanding resources to meet their needs.  I would argue that with the demise of manufacturing and lifetime jobs, we have become a new kind of nomadic people, moving to wherever the work is, becoming proprietors of ourselves, without an ancestral attachment to any one place that goes back further than our grandparents.  We are learning that when we encounter another culture we should let it be, appreciate it for what it is, and not impose our own suppositions and prejudices onto it.  We travel more lightly these days, in pressurized cabins with our ubiquitous cellphones.  I would hope this wide overview of the world, the sight of the earth from the moon, leaves us less inclined to leave public statues and images of ourselves, even ephemeral digital ones, for a conquered people to worship. They have their own icons that are more suited to them than ours.

Pushing over statues doesn’t erase the damage done by colonization because its nerve-threads run deeper than physical pain, but in a healthy organism, in the absence of further aggravation, wounds heal, and we learn to bow our heads as a sign of respect to the God in the other.