The Tangled Threads Of Colonialism

Public sculpture is one way a society says, “This is our past, and this is who we are now.”   Statues of faded heroes are out in the open for anyone to take potshots at, and the shots are often deserved.  It is a relief to learn that sometimes a statue’s day of reckoning can come in anticipation of its exhibition. The city of Edmonton, Alberta, recently decided not to place two sculptures they had commissioned for each end of the Walterdale bridge because, when they were finished and ready to be mounted, someone had second thoughts and cancelled 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 atop a heap of buffalo hides.  What was surprising was not the cancellation, but that the design was approved in the first place.  Beyond the banality of the work itself, the artist who made the sculpture was a Chinese Canadian American, an individual with roots in three nationalities that Indigenous tribes considered unwelcome interlopers, people 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 a time when the buffalo were on the verge of extinction, but how he concluded that viewers would be enlightened by a representation of a massacre is beyond belief.  He must have believed that by putting the buffalo on one side of the river and the hunter on the other, 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.   That may be, but these sculptures were made for a bridge and not a museum of shame, which compounds the planner’s deafness.  People don’t wish to be reminded of past tragedies on their way to work every day.  If they wish to have their hearts broken, they can visit a military cemetery.  The artist’s original theory that colonialism is alive and well was substantiated when, at the same time the buffalo sculpture was cancelled, the mayor of Calgary approved a statue of Winston Churchill, another questionable hero, thanks to his violent colonial policies, racist rhetoric, and his belief in the superiority of Anglo-Saxons.  

Perhaps these figurative sculptors imagine that their work will go down in history as a new Michelangelo.  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 animal skins convey?  If the sculptor wanted to express the tragedy better, he could have stood a European entrepreneur holding hands with the Prime Minister of the day, 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 atop 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 with which he is familiar.  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 statues of those we think are deserving of honour, but as everyone 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 once thought to be in the natural order 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 not only to 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 statues of the Buddha in Afghanistan, or Christians chiselling crosses into the marble foreheads of Greek statues, there is a long tradition of cultural vandalism.   

The colonization of Africa, North and South America, 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 the conquered territories, the local people were no more than slaves in their own land, oppressed not only by having their freedom of movement restricted, 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 natives to understand how little power they had against the invaders’ 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 for a while, but when it crept in, it was all directed at 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, a few years after the mural was retouched, the mural is unblemished by graffiti.

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, and because they are exhibited in public places, they are the easiest targets. 

People are more gentle with some public art, perhaps because fewer phallic towers are emerging from the pavement, replaced by a proliferation of gigantic hands, ears, or noses, which 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.”  It is an idea that doesn’t take a political position 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 the victims, it is a lifetime of inner torment.  Another 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 century they occurred in, none of these invasions was justified.  They were planned and financed for economic gain, with the invaders expecting to put their foot on new territories with exploitable resources, and declare them the property of their king or queen.   Any indigenous societies that existed at the time of the invasion were nuisances to be overcome, like swamps or blackflies. 

Although we think of colonialism as a thing of the past, there are still powerful nations like Russia and China, which 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 influence worldwide, is to gain access to other cultures through television, computers, and mobile phones.  That way, they can promote the American way of life as the apex of existence.  Any nation’s attempts to limit internet access and content are as unsuccessful as trying to catch lightning with bare hands.  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 and Central 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 hand-held 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 cultural colonialism.  This instant access to all information is changing the rules of conflict and showing that there is no need for physical invasion since the enemy has already conquered their country by more insidious means, like marketing strategies.    

It is said that man’s time on earth started its countdown to extinction when agriculture was first practiced.  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 families 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 ensued, tribes conquered other tribes, and soon they became nations.  We have now arrived at a tipping point on the planet where there are so many people that 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 that 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. The land was not owned by anyone, and to think it could be was as strange a concept as ownership of the air and water.  Indigenous people must have been puzzled when they saw new arrivals put fences around their homesteads and say, “This belongs to me.”  It was like saying, “Don’t breathe my air.”

Colonizing other people is not a practice of nomadic tribes, but it is one in which agricultural societies 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.  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, and expect an occupied people to worship them. They have their own icons that are more suited to them than ours are.

Pushing over statues doesn’t erase the damage done by colonization because its nerve-threads run deeper than bad seasons, but in a healthy organism, in the absence of further aggravation, wounds heal. My hope is that we learn, like Asian cultures, to bow our heads as a sign of respect for the spiritual divinity in the other.