Bearing Witness: Perspectives on War and Peace from the Arts and Humanities 9780773587632

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Bearing Witness

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Bearing Witness Perspectives on War and Peace from the Arts and Humanities

Edited by Sherrill Grace Patrick Imbert Tiffany Johnstone

M CG I L L - Q U E E N ’S U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S Montreal & Kingston

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London

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Ithaca

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2012 isbn 978-0-7735-4058-3 (cloth) isbn 978-0-7735-4059-0 (paper) Legal deposit third quarter 2012 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec E.J. Pratt’s poems © University of Toronto Press, 1989. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. All quotations from F.R. Scott and his poems have been reproduced with the permission of William Toye, literary executor for the estate of F.R. Scott. All quotations from P.K. Page’s poems have been reprinted with the permission of the Page Estate and Porcupine’s Quill Press.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Bearing witness : perspectives on war and peace from the arts and humanities / edited by Sherrill Grace, Patrick Imbert, Tiffany Johnstone. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-7735-4059-0 (pbk) isbn 978-0-7735-4058-3 (bound) 1. War and literature. 2. War in literature. 3. War in art. 4. Art and war. 5. Peace in literature. 6. Peace in art. I. Grace, Sherrill E., 1944– II. Imbert, Patrick, 1948– III. Johnstone, Tiffany, 1982–

Printed in Canada on acid-free paper This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

pn56.w3b43 2012 809'.933582 c2012-902970-x This book has been designed and typeset by studio oneonone in Sabon 10/13

Contents

List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi Preface: Bearing Witness xiii a r i t h a va n h e r k For What? An Introduction 3 sherrill grace

P A RT I Exploring the Roots of War: Performance, History, Poetry, and Language 1 Warplay: Spectacle, Performance, and (Dis) Simulation of Combat 17 alan filewod 2 Understanding the Motivation to Enlist 28 j o n a t h a n f. v a n c e 3 Canadian Poets on War 41 s a n d r a d j wa 4 Metaphor, Metalepsis, and the Colonial Library: Deconstructing Inyenzi and Ubuhake Metaphors in Gil Courtemanche’s A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali and Julien Pierce’s Speak, Rwanda 53 l au r e n ly d i c

PART II Bearing Witness to War and Peace: The Vocabularies of Literature, Art, and Photography 5 The Georgics of War and Peace: Following Claude Simon, Nobel Laureate 69 mireille calle-gruber 6 “Expressionist-Artillerist”: “Poet” and “Soldier” as Conflicting Role Models in German Avant-Garde Poetry from the First World War 79 martin löschnigg 7 Above or Below Ground? Depicting Corpses in First and Second World War Official Canadian War Art 93 laura brandon 8 Bearing Witness and Cultural Memory: The Wreckage, Burning Vision, and War in the Pacific 107 sherrill grace 9 Emmy Andriesse, Dutch Wartime Photographer: The Hunger Winter of 1945 121 christl verduyn and c o n n y s t e e n m a n m a r c u s s e

PART III Taking Some Lessons from History: Rhetoric, Ethics, and the Search for Peace 10 Underlining the Lies Surrounding the “Holy War” and “Infinite Justice” 147 pat r i c k i m b e rt 11 Comparing South Africa’s Negotiated Settlement with Elusive Peacemaking in Israel/Palestine 163 h e r i b e rt a da m 12 Northern War Stories: The Dene, the Archive, and Canada’s Atomic Modernity 174 p e t e r c . va n w yc k

PART IV For What? Artists’ Reflections on Film, Poetry, and Music 13 Perspectives on War 189 anne wheeler 14 On Active Service, and Let Us Wake from This Dream: A Poem and a String Quartet 204 j a n e t h e n s h aw d a n i e l s o n Notes 213 Bibliography 245 Contributors 261 Index 267

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List of Illustrations

7.1 Charles Sims, Sacrifice, c. 1918. 97 7.2 Aba Bayefsky, Belsen Concentration Camp Pit, 1945. 101 7.3 George Pepper, Hitler’s Youth, German Cemetery at Louvigny, Calvados, Normandy, 1944. 103 7.4 Charles Comfort, Dead German on the Hitler Line, 1944. 103 7.5 Alex Colville, Bodies on a Road, 1945. 105 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 9.5 9.6 9.7 9.8 9.9 9.10 9.11 9.12 9.13 9.14

Emmy Andriesse, Boy with a Pan, 1945. 128 Emmy Andriesse, Another Boy with a Pan, 1945. 131 Emmy Andriesse, Boy and Girl with Bicycle, 1945. 133 Emmy Andriesse, Rebuilt Bicycle, Jewish Quarter, 1945. 134 Emmy Andriesse, Old Woman, 1945. 135 Emmy Andriesse, Old Woman’s Feet, 1945. 135 Emmy Andriesse, Old Woman’s Hands, 1945. 136 Emmy Andriesse, Slumped Man, 1945. 137 Emmy Andriesse, Sieving for Coal, 1945. 138 Emmy Andriesse, Landwacht/German Collaborator, 1945. 139 Emmy Andriesse, Star of David, 1945. 140 Emmy Andriesse, Returning Prisoner, 1945. 141 Emmy Andriesse, Return from Camps, 1945. 142 Emmy Andriesse, Arnhem, 1945. 144

13.1 13.2 13.3 13.4

Film still from A War Story, 1981. 193 Film still from A War Story, 1981. 194 Film still from Bye Bye Blues, 1989. 195 Film still from Bye Bye Blues, 1989. 197

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13.5 Photograph taken during the filming of The War Between Us, 1995. 199 13.6 Robert Ito as Mr. Kawashima in The War Between Us, 1995. 200 13.7 Ian Tracey as Jig Parnum in The War Between Us, 1995. 200 13.8 Scene of detainees in transit in The War Between Us, 1995. 201

Acknowledgments

It is always a pleasure to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for their support of research; in the case of this volume it is especially important to do so. On 14 November 2008, the Royal Society of Canada held its annual symposium in Ottawa. The topic was the “Cultures of War and Peace,” and the Academy responsible for organizing the event was Academy I, the Academy of Arts and Humanities. The event was ground-breaking in many ways, and it could not have achieved its goals without Council’s support. Likewise, this book would not have reached fruition without sshrc’s support, not only of the original event but also of the publication itself. The support of John Hepburn, ubc Vice-President Research, is also greatly appreciated. The editors also want to thank the Royal Society of Canada because without rsc: The Academies, we would not have had the opportunity to bring the perspectives represented here together. It is a pleasure to thank our colleague Dominique Yupangco for her help with technical aspects of the final typescript. We extend our thanks as well to McGill-Queen’s University Press and to the original readers of the manuscript, one of whom made especially helpful and creative suggestions, to our wise copy-editor, Susan Glickman, and to Jan Lermitte for her help with the index. To all the symposium participants, including those who are not represented here – most notably Roméo Dallaire, who opened the event in his powerful and unforgettable address, and the two writers, Joseph Boyden and Vern Thiessen – our thanks and appreciation. It is also a pleasure to thank our participants, translators, and contributors, and those who have granted permission for quotations and reproductions, notably the Canadian War Museum, Matthijs Holwerda of the Special Collections at Leiden University, and Canadian filmmaker Anne Wheeler. We extend

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warmest thanks to Martin Löschnigg, Lauren Lydic, and Patrick Imbert for adding their voices and research to this volume and to Aritha van Herk for making time to prepare her moving preface. Very special thanks are owing to Christl Verduyn and Connie Steenman Marcusse for finding and then arranging permission to reproduce fourteen outstanding photographs by Emmy Andriesse, to Janet Danielson and Eleanor Henshaw (Harry’s sister) for permission to publish, for the first time, Lt. Harry Percy Saunders’ poem, “On Active Service,” and to Margaret Atwood for permission to quote from her poem “The Loneliness of the Military Historian.” Finally, special acknowledgment must be made of Tiffany Johnstone’s scrupulous and patient editorial work on the manuscript. Tiffany was there from the start as a coorganizer of the 2008 Symposium and as each contributor can testify, she has been a courteous and helpful colleague throughout the long process of preparing the manuscript.

Frederick Varley, For What?, c. 1918, oil on canvas, 147.4 ⫻ 180.6 cm. Beaverbrook Collection of War Art, cwm 19710261-0770. © Canadian War Museum

Charles Sims, Sacrifice, c. 1918, oil on canvas, 416 ⫻ 409 cm. Beaverbrook Collection of War Art, cwm 19710261-0662. © Canadian War Museum

Aba Bayefsky, Belsen Concentration Camp Pit, 1945, oil on canvas, 91.6 ⫻ 121.8 cm. Beaverbrook Collection of War Art, cwm 19710261-1394. © Canadian War Museum

George Pepper, Hitler’s Youth, German Cemetery at Louvigny, Calvados, Normandy, 1944, watercolour on paper, 35.6 ⫻ 50.7 cm. Beaverbrook Collection of War Art, cwm 19710261-5287. © Canadian War Museum

Charles Comfort, Dead German on the Hitler Line, 1944, watercolour, chalk, carbon pencil, and ink on paper, 38.8 ⫻ 56.8 cm. Beaverbrook Collection of War Art, cwm 19710261-2179. © Canadian War Museum

Alex Colville, Bodies on a Road, 1945, watercolour on paper, 26.1 ⫻ 35.6 cm. Beaverbrook Collection of War Art, cwm 19710261-2035. © Canadian War Museum

Preface: Bearing Witness a r i t h a va n h e r k

Peace and its doppelgänger, war, orchestrate an integral part of our ongoing conversation with the past and the future. But as Sherrill Grace, an editor of this volume, wisely observes, war and peace comprise no easy binary. We separate the two, place them at polar opposites, but century after century fail to recognize that they are connected, irreducible evidence of the fallibility of humanity. We seem, despite our best intentions, unable to reconcile our “propensity for war” with our “longing for peace.” A savagely inventive species, humans are able to contrive endlessly new ways to combat one another, even though we know suffering will result. Most telling and most useful about the following collection of essays, which essai a valuable arts and humanities perspective of this enormous field, is its emphasis on the personal. The machinery of war is massive and complex, tied to persistent greed, xenophobia, territoriality and ruthlessness, and more and more determined by technological, economic, or mechanistic agents. Yet all of these elements belie our shared mortality, abrogate the foundational truth that we are creatures who require sustenance and rest, who experience both tenderness and fear, and who yearn for the same outcome: a safe home. Historically, cultures take care to document the details of armed conflict, record particular battles and weapons, tactics and logistics. From gunpowder to the ghostly silhouettes of stealth aircraft, the science of war demands an intricate mathematics, a prognostication of numbers synopsizing death. At the same time, in this nation that has hosted only a few skirmishes and suffered no occupation or widespread destruction, Canadians do so from a safe distance, an almost impregnable complacency. In a broader context, we can question whether we have come to a place where this world regularizes war, accepting its inevitability, John Keegan’s argument that conflict is a universal phenomenon, an inescapable cultural

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configuration. Those who contend the necessity of war say that it purges evil, serves as a necessary inoculation against tyranny, even an antidote to boredom. Military historians are themselves an impressive squadron, forging a discipline from the facts and fragments of what remains after conflict. Does this focus on particularities make necessity of war, advance a self-perpetuating study? And how can so much discussion of the vanquished and the victorious avoid the ineffable, less quantifiable cost of conflict? Can we afford to forget or ignore the shrapnel of history? Does what we know contribute to a clearer reading of the effects of war? Certainly, as the title of this volume suggests, bearing witness enables us to ask difficult questions, some of which have no conspicuous answer. The separation between moments of war and peace and their concomitant affect is a gap, a lacuna that we must, in observing how war and peace are represented in the arts and humanities, negotiate. That window is the portal for an artist, for it is there where the creative spirit wrestles with the angels that teach us our own insignificance. At the same time, the drive to chronicle le genre humain is ongoing and unceasing. The artist’s practice is thus encoded as a life-long struggle, and while the rhetoric of conflict is one that I would dearly like to evade, it is present, even pervasive. So, what then, compels the artist to represent war and peace in all their difficult duality? These are master narratives, difficult to evade because they propose positionalities, compass points that orient the artist’s stake in her work. If nothing is risked, the art seems hollow, narcissistic, and without relevance. We might conjecture that the artist is imprisoned by the need to make art significant, and significant art has historically been art that concerns itself with the sweeping terrors of death, displacement, and grotesque injustice. The terrible aesthetics of war are thus seductive to artists and critics alike, a reminder that we must always question context and motivation. Does the artist use war to dress his skill or does the artist use his skill to critique war? Cultural critics need to ask why we favour war over the ritual corners of domesticity, the way that floors need to be swept and soup must be stirred, gardens require compost and socks matched once they are washed. Such daily trivialities appear far too benign, even if those exhausted by war crave them beyond measure. Sturm und drang tempt a pitch of violent expression that has infected the arts, steered as they are by a precipitate desire to embrace the terrible. And so we cycle back to the ubiquitous origins of war, revenge, with Marcus Antonius in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar proclaiming, And Caesar’s spirit, raging for revenge, With Ate by his side come hot from hell, Shall in these confines with a monarch’s voice

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Cry “Havoc!” and let slip the dogs of war, That this foul deed shall smell above the earth With carrion men, groaning for burial. (Julius Caesar III.iii. 270–5) “Let slip the dogs of war.” An inimitable phrase; and Julius Caesar a perfect example of the argument of Aristotle’s Poetics that the aim of great work is to evoke pity and woe. We have perhaps forgotten that the philosopher also warns against the “wanton production of misery” as unworthy of a good writer. Peripety, that elemental change in action, is a constant companion to the winds of war and their representations. War then is a subject rife with grit, chaos, pain. It automatically companions horror, grave loss, and the ultimate end-game of all humans: death. It is thus irresistible to an artist in search of content, for it bestows on the unimaginative an always already conflict; the lazy artist does not have to invent obstacles or terrors for they are encoded in the situation, ready-made hostilities which can elide the subtle distinctions that make art original. This enticement of the extreme is a temptation difficult to resist, for after all, it provides such great subject matter. But as Claude Simon declares, “cadavers and literature” are materially different.1 War being used as fodder, bloody romance, stress, guilt, upheaval, and high drama makes its employment as culpable as those inventions that seek to soothe trauma through simplistic resolutions. The metaphors that adhere to war and peace – and how they become tools to understanding – must bear witness to more than mere aesthetic artifact. Here is the crux for every artist: art must bear witness but without appropriating its own arbiter. Perhaps the peace in Tolstoy’s masterpiece, War and Peace, is too benign (despite the number of women who die in childbirth or who are unfaithful), which serves to exaggerate the power of the destructive episodes. We remember best the scenes from that novel that describe war’s aftermath, the battlefield strewn with bodies, the retreat from Moscow. Yet, here might rest an answer to our fascination: the real focus of war and peace should be the aftermath, the epilogue to conflict. It is the work of clearing the bombed fields so that they might again grow food. It is the act of re-building, making whole once again homes and shops. It is the silence after great pain, Emily Dickinson’s “formal feeling” when all must be re-calibrated. It is the ward of a hospital where soldiers who have lost limbs or are haunted by post-traumatic stress try to find their balance. And it is the realm of grief. For all that we assign it a topic sentence, war is not abstract but deeply personal. Hundreds of monuments dot the Western Front in Belgium and France; visiting them is a sobering pilgrimage. They range from the most stunningly aesthetic, Canada’s Vimy Memorial, to little cairns remarking clusters of

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white crosses at their feet. But none is less heroic, more heartrendingly effective than the one that sits in Vladslo’s German war cemetery, close to Ypres. More than twenty-five thousand dead are buried at Vladslo (gathered from other graves and combined here in the mid-50s); and at the end of the cemetery, a dark sea of flat stones enclosed by lines of trees, are two unsoftened blocks of granite which resolve themselves into human shapes, a man and a woman, both kneeling. The man clenches his arms around his chest as if holding in his pain, resisting what must be endured. The woman, beside him, but separated, is bent in anguish, her body an emblem of the grief that will never bring back the child she nurtured and loved, now mouldering in the ground. Käthe Kollwitz’s The Grieving Parents speaks beyond her personal grief for her son Peter, killed in 1914 and interred there, echoes past the sheer numbers of names on the black stones. It encapsulates the results of war, the woe that follows battle. The corpses in the ground (those carrion men) are depicted better in the profound pain of their loved ones than any heroic rollcall. A word and a corpse are not the same, but it is possible to show the rupture of helpless grief, its enduring presence. Ultimately, war and peace must be key concerns to artists and thinkers because they alter lives in profound ways. I confess that, in my case, war brought me good fortune. My father was one of those defeated in May of 1940 by the Wehrmacht; he was one soldier in the tiny, ill-prepared Dutch army overridden in four days by a military force far greater than their own. The bombing of Rotterdam clinched the nation’s trauma, and the Dutch, terrified that the beautiful cities of The Hague and Amsterdam would suffer the same annihilation, surrendered. My father miraculously managed to return home. During the five-year occupation of the Netherlands, he and my mother and my two older siblings struggled to survive. As farmers they had some access to food, although most of what they grew was taken away and they starved along with the rest of the country. But on a sunny day in early May of 1945, tanks and companies of men patrolled the country lane where my parents lived. My oldest brother, who had been told to stay away from the road, could not resist, and watched, wide-eyed and curious. When a tall, kindly Canadian soldier stepped down from a jeep to give him a stick, he ran inside to show my mother; at four he had never seen a chocolate bar. That kindness was amplified by the soldiers who camped in my parents’ neighbourhood and who quietly helped to clear the debris of war. Most important of all, they offered my parents a suggestion that would change their lives and mine, a suggestion that surely coded their own homesickness: “Why don’t you immigrate to Canada?” Five years later, my parents did exactly that, joining many thousands of Dutch migrants to this peaceful and never-occupied country. And

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so it was war that cemented my good fortune, for I was born here, Canadian and blessed. The desire for peace and the impetus toward war, the yearning for stability and yet the embrace of war’s chaos, the tenets of idealism versus the gritty pain of war, all speak to conflict’s upheavals. It is ultimately possible to understand war only if we understand love. Perversely, love is often depicted as a version of battle, and the tolerance and gentleness of love are readily sidelined in favour of the adrenalin-fuelled excess of combat. History can become a skewed archive of what we choose to ignore, what we choose to highlight, what is told and what is kept secret. The tension between memory and the desire to forget is one of its bitter fruits. Are we all collaborators then? How can we critique war when it is, once past, an element that we seek to erase or transcend and when peace, so elusive, is a yearning more than an accomplishment? Artists and humanities scholars must somehow elude those easy dichotomies. In representing war and peace, in bearing witness, we must not hesitate to include hope, that elusive aperture, so utterly fleeting and yet so profoundly illuminative.

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Bearing Witness Nous connaîtrions-nous seulement un peu nous-mêmes, sans les arts? Could we ever know each other in the slightest without the arts? gabrielle roy, 1909–1983

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For What? An Introduction sherrill grace

In the interests of research I have walked many battlefields that once were liquid with pulped men’s bodies and spangled with exploded shells and splayed bone. All of them have been green again by the time I got there. […] But it’s no use asking me for a final statement. As I say, I deal in tactics. Also statistics: for every year of peace there have been four hundred years of war. Margaret Atwood, “The Loneliness of the Military Historian” (52–3)

The inspiration guiding this volume is twofold. In a practical sense, these essays emerged from the 2008 annual symposium of the Royal Society of Canada; in a creative sense, they represent a selection of responses to issues surrounding war and peace as these activities are perceived – and challenged – by scholars in the humanities and by artists. The 2008 symposium, called “The Cultures of War and Peace/Les cultures de la guerre et de la paix,” was

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organized by Academy I of the rsc, the Academy devoted to Arts and Humanities, and the theme was chosen both for its urgent timeliness and because it seemed then, as now, that the voices and views of people working in the areas included in the broad category of “arts and humanities” were rarely heard in contemporary discussions of war or peace. And yet, a quick glance at the history of cultural production in the West demonstrates that artists in all disciplines, as well as historians, literary scholars, philosophers, and writers, have long struggled to represent and reflect critically upon a host of questions raised by humanity’s seeming propensity for war and longing for peace. Writers as different as Shakespeare and Tolstoy, or Ondaatje and Atwood, painters as distinct as Goya, Edouard Detaille, Käthe Kollwitz, and Picasso, and most of the great composers – from Beethoven or Prokofiev (whose opera War and Peace premiered in 1946), to Benjamin Britten or Gabriel Fauré – have depicted the horrors of war, mourned the losses in war, celebrated those who can achieve peace (as well as conquering heroes and kings), and protested the greed, raw ambition, appalling prejudices, and ruthless aggression that fuel war. It seemed to us, the editors of this collection and its contributors, that a multi-disciplinary volume, which could make room for the voices of just a small number of humanists and artists on these subjects, was needed. This collection contributes these voices to the wider discussion of issues usually considered the purview of government policy makers, political scientists, scholars in peace and conflict studies, in international law and in the development of human rights. Although we also recognize the limitations of any single collection of essays that attempts to embrace such large and complex issues, we offer it as a starting point in what we believe should be an on-going debate on this subject in the humanities. The papers presented at the symposium have been revised, expanded, and developed into carefully argued interventions in the discussion, and we are pleased to be able to include two new essays (by Löschnigg and Lydic). In the case of visual artists’ works we have included a number of illustrations to assist in the representation of their perspectives. My title for this introduction – For What? – is borrowed from the painting by official Canadian First World War artist Frederick Varley (see the first colour plate in this volume), but Varley’s title and handling of the subject represent the book as a whole. All the contributors consider versions of Varley’s haunting question – why, for what purpose, for whose benefit, are wars fought? – and also his implicit questions, posed in the language of pigment: how do we end up in such tragic circumstances and how can we end this senseless cycle of violence? To be sure, Varley is not the only twentieth-century painter to depict the Great War (or later twentieth

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century wars), but his pictorial protest is powerful and, as a Canadian painter, his is a fitting image to stress in a volume edited and published by Canadians. There are many things these fourteen essays, with their illustrations, cannot address. They do not intervene, for example, in the peace debates of organizations like the un, Pugwash, or unesco, and they do not weigh the pros and cons of specific peace movements or military operations.1 Instead, they explore the rhetoric of prejudice and aggression, the trauma and grief experienced by soldiers and civilians, some of the cultural causes of war, the motivations that persuade peaceful human beings to take up arms, the literary and artistic representations of war, and the many degrees of bearing witness to events that must not be forgotten in what Andreas Huyssen called a late twentieth-century “culture of amnesia.”2 Readers will find that there are many common themes and concerns running through these essays, and I will mention some of the most salient ones shortly. But first a word or two is necessary to describe the organization of the essays in this volume. After considerable reflection, it seemed to us that it would be a mistake – a misrepresentation of the contributors’ work, in fact – to divide the essays into separate categories of war and peace. All of the essays struggle to understand war and they provide varying degrees of warning against taking the road that leads to conflict. Most of the essays demonstrate their authors’, or the artists’ whose work is under discussion, personal witnessing of the suffering caused by war, even though none of the contributors actually participated in a war. This last point is an important one to stress because so much of the contemporary representation of war, and certainly the reflections of the scholars and artists who speak in the following pages, involves looking back and remembering from a temporal and geographical space well removed from scenes of past conflict. All of the essays are grounded in thoughtful research, a point to keep in mind when reading what artists themselves say about their work. Given these commonalities, we have chosen to group our contributors in four categories and trust our readers to think and imagine across these divisions. The four essays in Part I examine aspects of why people choose, or find themselves caught up in, violent conflict, whether their reasons can be traced to the complex seductions of computer games and military reenactments, located in a personal desire to save or protect friends and family, grounded in the ethics of defending democratic freedoms, or fomented by an escalation of long-standing ethnic hatred. The five essays in Part II address and analyse what artists have said about the two world wars and how they say it. In this sense, their focus is quite precise because the art they consider

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stems from and responds to those two wars. The essays in Part III occupy a different, more abstract, albeit deeply personal, position because they examine the ways in which language is used to promote peace or war and how the evidence of manipulation can be camouflaged or hidden from public scrutiny. The final part of the volume is reserved for two of the practicing artists who presented their work at the 2008 symposium, filmmaker Anne Wheeler and composer Janet Danielson.3 So many of the other contributors discuss the arts as academic specialists that it seemed entirely appropriate to give the last words – as we give the first ones – to artists. Where Varley sets the stage, as it were, by bearing first-hand witness to war and asking one of the most profound and lasting questions of our time, van Herk, Wheeler, and Danielson show how an artist who has not seen war first hand attempts to represent what defies representation. In sharing their reflections on their own practice, they provide compelling evidence for the possibility of remembering the past while believing in the hope for understanding and peace, perhaps even for forgiveness, in the future. To stand back and contemplate these essays from a distance that blurs the four-part division, however, is to be struck by the many things that unite the authors and what they wish to say. Many of these essays present a personal perspective; indeed, they are often written in the first person. This perspective is not, I believe, an accident because for many in the humanities today, the claim of impersonal objectivity, even when meticulous research informs a study, is suspect. For Alan Filewod, Mireille Calle-Gruber, Peter van Wyck, Conny Steenman Marcusse, and Christl Verduyn, to speak in their own voices is, in a sense, to bear witness to their subjects and to their search for those subjects. It is also a way of bringing what they witness home to the reader in the present. All of the contributors avoid setting up easy binaries of war versus peace, and all explore that elusive no man’s land that seems to separate the two domains despite efforts to reach across and erase such divisions. Indeed, I would say that all the essays trouble that binary, contest the trap of thinking in terms of opposites, and invite their readers to imagine ways of moving beyond dualities. In each essay, to varying degrees, the writers also examine the phenomenon of othering, the subtle or blunt ways in which one group of people designates another group – those not like them, those to be attacked or eliminated – as less than human, as the enemy, as Other. And finally, all these essays speak to each other; they establish a conversation across disciplinary divides which the editors hope will include readers, and they do this by collectively embracing an interdisciplinary scope and methodology. History is fundamental to all the essays and each author is observant of the facts; language is essential not only because even the film-

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maker and the composer write for us on this occasion, but also because language must be examined for its complicities and its failures, as well as for what it might achieve. In “Warplay: Spectacle, Performance, and (Dis) Simulation of Combat,” theatre specialist Alan Filewod analyses the phenomenon of contemporary computer war games, their global popularity, and the attractions they hold for those who play them, and he links this activity to actual battle reenactment performances. Using the theoretical concepts of performance studies, he identifies what he calls a contemporary “reenactment culture” in today’s Western societies. But he does not stop with the mere identification of this “warplay.” He opens by acknowledging the presence of these games in his own life, in his home (where his son plays them), and in current affairs, and he moves from there to an exploration of the ethical and behavioural consequences of “warplay,” whether in computer games or actual reenactments. Filewod argues that the human activity of role playing, when focused on war, reveals important aspects of gender identity, of a masculinist desire for power, and a belief (illusory in the final analysis) in personal agency that is severed from interpersonal responsibility. Historian Jonathan Vance takes us back to the real theatre of the Second World War to examine the history of Canadian enlistment and to see if it is possible to locate the reasons some men had for taking up arms. In “Understanding the Motivation to Fight,” he asks if films alone, or other forms of social discourse, can influence otherwise peaceful citizens to fight, and then he brings this large question down to the most individual level of decision-making. He turns to available letters and memoirs to consider what such documents might reveal about a man’s decision to enlist, and his two examples are very unlikely soldiers indeed. John Kenneth Macalister and Frank Pickersgill enlisted in 1942, after initially rejecting the notion that war was necessary, and both men would be captured, tortured, and murdered by the Nazis. Both were intellectuals and highly sensitive, peaceable human beings, even self-described pacifists. Why then did they go to the war? After studying their private documents and biography, Vance’s answer is that “war touched them personally.” “Canadian Poets on War” by Sandra Djwa marks a new step in the discovery of poetry about war in this country. The very idea that Canadian poets may have written about what they saw on the battlefield in the two world wars has received scant attention from literary historians. John McCrae’s famous “In Flanders Fields” is widely known and generally accepted as representative of what Canadians had to say in verse about the Great War. However, there is an impressive body of war poetry of varying quality and in a wide range of styles that is little known and deserves close

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study and acknowledgment.4 In her essay, Djwa opens up an important discussion of three major modernist poets – E.J. Pratt, F.R. Scott, and P.K. Page – and their responses to both wars. Moreover, she draws attention to specific works that are rarely read or discussed today: works such as Pratt’s verse play about the First World War, “Clay,” in which he poses questions about war from the home front. None of her three poets actually fought in a war, but in Pratt’s case he was friends with painters like Varley and may well have discussed For What? with him. Scott, the son of Canon Frederick George Scott, grew up influenced by the Great War in which his brother died and his father served as a chaplain. Page provides a woman’s perspective on the Second World War, and while she is not opposed to this war, she critiques war in general and examines the trauma of war for women. Part I closes with Lauren Lydic’s study of war and genocide in Rwanda, which examines both the prewar rhetoric of debasement and the post-war representation of events in fiction. In “Metaphor, Metalepsis, and the Colonial Library: Deconstructing Inyenzi and Ubuhake Metaphors in Gil Courtemanche’s A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali and Julien Pierce’s Speak Rwanda,” Lydic first explores the roots of ethnic hatred in the colonial experience and then demonstrates how such language contributes to hatred of the Tutsi by the Hutu. It is a chilling account of the power of a metaphor to establish social hierarchies of race and gender and to produce a discourse that turns human beings into insects: cockroaches to be exterminated to preserve the health of Hutu society. The parallel here with the Nazi dehumanization of Jews is striking, but Lydic bypasses that parallel to focus closely on two works of fiction created after the war. The conclusions she draws about the different ways in which Courtemanche and Pierce manage and reproduce (or resist) a language of othering are fascinating and disturbing. What she draws our attention to is the responsibility we all bear for the ways we speak, for the metaphors of everyday life that we use without thinking, and for the ease with which we can slip into a discourse of othering. Her concerns echo those of Filewod regarding “warplay” and point forward to issues raised by Imbert and van Wyck in Part III. Part II is the longest section of the volume and is devoted to scholarly studies of literature, painting, and photography. It is here that the range of artistic testimony and witnessing is explored through description and analysis of the art forms themselves. Mireille Calle-Gruber’s impassioned essay on the work of Claude Simon makes an eloquent opening to Part II, but it might also be taken as addressing the approaches of all those who contributed to the original symposium and now to this book. Early in “The Georgics of War and Peace: Following Claude Simon, Nobel Laureate,” she insists that “there is

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no moralizing dichotomy” between war and peace, either in her discussion or in Simon’s writing, because “these domains are entangled and interdependent.” Art, in this case literature, produces a parallel and incommensurate reality to the facts of war and peace, but it is reality all the same and its impact on the world in which we live can be profound. As a scholar she bears witness to the works of art she studies and their impact on her, whereas Simon bears witness to his war experiences and searches for the forms and the vocabulary that will capture something of those excoriating memories. Calle-Gruber’s emphasis on language, on testing the capacity of language – Simon’s and her own – to bear witness, produces a constant reminder that all of us who come after, especially scholars but also artists, respond to the complexities of war/peace, as best we can, in language. Martin Löschnigg also speaks directly in his own voice as he works to unravel – to make sense of – the tortured expressionist language and fragmented forms of German poetry from the Great War. This poetry offers a perspective rarely considered in English literary criticism and, for this reason alone, Löschnigg’s study makes a valuable contribution to this volume. His poets are August Stramm, Franz Richard Behrens, and Otto Nebel; each man struggled to tell what he experienced as the truth about the war both in his private letters and in his poetry. The letters Löschnigg quotes give us the poets’ personal voices while the poetry captures both the facts of representing their eye-witness accounts and the results of the struggle to represent terror and destruction. Like many German intellectuals, these men believed that a war might be a catalyst for badly needed social reforms, but they ended disillusioned and betrayed by the very rhetoric they embraced. What Calle-Gruber does for one major French writer and Löschnigg does for three German poets, I have tried to do with two contemporary Canadian works about the Second World War in the Pacific. In his novel, The Wreckage, Michael Crummey takes us from pre-war Newfoundland to a pow camp near Nagasaki in Japan and then home again, years after the war, when a severely traumatized man finally faces his past and the horrors of the camp. Marie Clements takes theatre-goers on a similar journey from northern Canada to Japan and back in her highly expressionist play Burning Vision. Both works insist on the process of bearing witness: Wish, Crummey’s soldier, must remember and tell his story about torture; the many characters in Clements’s play must perform their stories of contamination, death, and mourning before our eyes, thereby making the audience (or reader) witness the destruction and atrocities of the war. However, both works reach beyond the personal stories they recount to tell a larger Canadian story of racism and religious bigotry at home (The Wreckage) and racism and colonial exploitation of indigenous people and uranium in the Northwest

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Territories (Burning Vision). From these perspectives, both texts ask for the nation’s cultural memory to evolve in the hope of establishing a better, more peaceful, future. The last two essays in Part II turn our attention away from literature to painting and photography. The authors of these studies express their personal responses to the works they consider and invite readers to do the same. We are very fortunate to be able to include a large number of illustrations of the works discussed in these two pieces and thank the authors for selecting them. In “Above or Below Ground? Depicting Corpses in First and Second World War Official Canadian War Art,” Laura Brandon examines the depiction of the dead in this war art, but she also – and importantly – reminds us of the constraints placed upon painters. Despite what they actually saw, they were discouraged from painting dead Canadians not only by their own sensibilities but, more to the point, by military authorities, because grisly images of slaughtered and mutilated young men would not be well received at home. As Brandon explains, however, there were other obstacles to their bearing of witness in line, pencil, or pigment. The artists were limited by the inherited conventions of war art and by the fact that they had to rely, for the most part, on photographs to construct their images. Nevertheless, that familiar adage that a picture is worth a thousand words still carries force because to look at some of these paintings is to be drawn into the horror, despair, and sheer destruction they depict. Of course, the reality was not like that; there is no noise, no stench, and no shuddering of the earth in these images. But we are still asked to see a shocking part of what the artists saw and what the people in those pictures experienced. In “Emmy Andriesse, Dutch Wartime Photographer: The Hunger Winter of 1945,” Dutch scholar Conny Steenman Marcuse and Canadian scholar Christl Verduyn have collaborated to write a fascinating study of the war photography of Andriesse. Canada’s special relationship with the Netherlands was consolidated in 1945 when Canadian troops helped to liberate the country, but with the passage of time, people forget what life was really like under Nazi occupation during one of the worst winters in Dutch history. Non-Dutch readers may not know the work of this amazing photographer either. Andriesse’s photographs of the “Hunger Winter” bear eloquent witness to what she saw and speak for themselves much better than I can, so I will leave them to tell their story with the help of Verduyn and Steenman Marcuse. What I do wish to note, however, is the crucial importance of the archive that preserves Emmy Andriesse’s work. Without such resources, and open access to them, it is impossible to tell those stories history may have forgotten, overlooked, or repressed. In this way, Andriesse’s images reproduced from the archive remind me of the many times the contributors to this volume worked in archives with letters, documents,

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memoirs, and reports – as did Vance, Djwa, Lydic, Löschnigg, and Brandon. Without such archives, as Peter van Wyck demonstrates in “Northern War Stories,” the present and future are bereft, haunted by the ghostly traces of lost or suppressed facts and memories. The three essays grouped in Part III step back from specific artistic productions to consider some of the ethical dimensions of rhetoric, history, and archival research. For Patrick Imbert, the discourse of the media (print journalism, television, and the internet) is a crucial site for the knowledge needed to defend democratic values and support peaceful reconciliation of conflict. However, as he shows in “Underlining the Lies Surrounding ‘Holy War’ and ‘Infinite Justice,’” this discourse is permeated with dualist language and adversarial rhetoric, regardless of political or ideological agenda. In short, the media contributes to escalating violence and prejudice more often than not, and he provides numerous examples to illustrate this widespread abuse of a powerful means of communication. But Imbert also calls for “an ethics of recognition” that resists such “lies” and he calls for a “third option,” an/ other way of using language that will rise above blame, binaries, and oppositional posturing. If we can learn to recognize the Other, as Lydic also argues (or as Wish learns to do in The Wreckage), we must begin by rejecting metaphors and images of othering and hatred. In “Comparing South Africa’s Negotiated Settlement with Elusive Peacemaking in Israel/Palestine,” Heribert Adam insists that we must learn from the Holocaust and from ways of resolving conflict in other parts of the world if we truly seek peaceful answers to the impasse currently existing between Palestine and Israel. Like Imbert, Adam studies the rhetoric of propaganda and racism coming from both sides in order to demonstrate the degree to which such rhetoric blocks the road to peace. Among his suggestions for moving beyond this face-off are a return to the lessons of history and the example of South Africa, where it was possible to establish “a shared narrative” and “a common historical record” that facilitated peace and reconciliation. Such shared stories cannot be produced by governments; they must, says Adam, come from “people-to-people programs.” The last essay in Part III comes back to Canada and in it, Peter van Wyck begins by addressing us directly: “I want to tell you a story.” This story is his own: first of discovering the archives in Ottawa closed to him when he wanted to learn the history of the Eldorado Mine on Great Bear Lake, and then of going north to Great Bear Lake and the community of Deline, where he listened to the testimony of Dene Elders. On the one hand, he is denied access to records of the Canadian government’s silent take-over of the mine during the war and any evidence that they knew either about the high risk of contamination from handling the ore and/or how the uranium came to be used in the Manhattan Project. He must, therefore, endure what he calls

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“archival silence.” On the other hand, he is allowed to listen to the peoples’ stories about high cancer rates, environmental contamination, and the government’s refusal to take any form of responsibility for the way the Dene people were exploited to mine and transport the radioactive ore. Van Wyck charts the Dene’s attempt to find out about their past and to write their story back into a history from which they have been erased in a 1998 report called They Never Told Us These Things, and he describes their journey to Japan to make amends for the death and suffering inflicted on innocent civilians by bombs carrying Dene uranium. But perhaps the most astonishing element in van Wyck’s witnessing is his effort to understand how the Dene people manage their own sense of cultural responsibility for the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. How is it, he asks, that one arrives at a sense of responsibility for things over which one had no control or even knowledge? If the Canadian government fails to arrive at a comparable ethical position, then what can non-Dene Canadians learn from the Dene example? Marie Clements’s play Burning Vision, which I discuss, provides further insight into this Dene history, and through theatre Clements offers an artist’s answer to van Wyck’s question. Although the play is a complex, expressionistic tour de force to watch, its visceral impact on audiences is profound. Because it involves audience members directly in the story of suffering and death and addresses us passionately, it is difficult to leave a performance untouched, even changed by what we witness. Although van Wyck does not discuss literature or the arts, he does comment upon Peter Blow’s film (also examined in my essay) and Rudy Wiebe’s confessional memoir about his travels in the North, Playing Dead. But it is the two artists in Part IV who have the most to say on the subject of war, peace, and the arts. Anne Wheeler has made, to date, three important films about the Second World War in the Pacific, a subject that was part of her life from the very beginning. “The war in the Pacific changed my life completely,” she tells us, even “though I was not part of it.” Her three films, A War Story, Bye Bye Blues, and The War Between Us demonstrate how profoundly the Second World War affected Wheeler, not simply because her parents were sucked into its maelstrom but also because she had to decide how to tell their stories on film. Like the scholars, she had to search through dusty archives, write letters to find aging pows who knew her father, and investigate the historical background to the internment of Japanese Canadians and the plight of wives and mothers left at home while their husbands were trapped abroad. But all this research, this official history, pales in comparison with the autobiographical stance she takes in these films and the ethical responsibility she feels – and honours – in her art. The truth, she realizes, is

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impossible to present. Even the battles in war movies are designed, or in Filewod’s terms, reenacted. Nevertheless, her personal search for the war and its past becomes a larger, shared narrative – precisely the kind of narrative Adam calls for – and the key lesson of her films is that we must all acknowledge and share in such stories. Janet Danielson created a new string quartet that was premiered at the symposium, and her contribution to this volume concludes it. Like Wheeler and so many of the scholars, she speaks from her own experience, explaining how she found a way to convey the impact of the Second World War on an uncle she never knew. Danielson began with the words of a poem he wrote shortly before he was killed and the poem is reproduced here for the first time – another reminder, like Djwa’s, that citizen soldiers wrote poetry from the front. From there she worked to find a musical language that would capture the conflicting moods of the poem. Nothing can capture the impact of a live performance, of course, but Danielson places her work in a context that is both professional and deeply emotional and private. She explains her compositional process clearly for non-musicians, and in doing so she also reminds us that the arts have much to offer our deliberations on war, on why individuals and nations fight, and how we can overcome the rhetoric of hatred and violence, the language of othering, that divides us and makes lasting peace seem so hard to achieve. Throughout this introduction I have noted the personal perspective or first person voice that distinguishes many of the essays in this volume, and I want to end in that register by leaving you with two more examples of personal, people-to-people (as Adam puts it) address. In 1994, scientist and DirectorGeneral of unesco Frederico Mayor made a comment that bears repeating. The occasion for his speech was the launch of unesco’s “Culture of Peace Program,” and he told his listeners that “We must provide our children and peoples with a different vision of history. We should disarm history. There are too many battles, too much power, too many generals and soldiers [in our history books]. We sometimes forget all those people whose creative capacity became a turning-point for their countries: the writers, artists and philosophers.”5 In our collection we have tried to redress the balance, to undo just a fraction of forgetting, to remember what a small number of citizens and artists have said and are saying again in the twenty-first century. I realize, as I am sure all those who have contributed to this volume do as well, that practical economic, political, and scientific solutions to the many conflicts plaguing our times do not rest with the arts or the humanities. However, I believe that the responsibility to foster the will to change – to “disarm history” and imagine relationships differently – does rest with writers, artists,

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and humanists. No one in this volume has the answer to Varley’s compelling question; however, together these essays serve to open minds and imaginations to possible answers by bearing witness, by exposing some of the gaps in understanding, in archival silences, and in abuses of language, and by suggesting creative ways to move beyond the binaries of power and othering. As I pondered the essays in this volume, I recalled the remarkable achievement of Daniel Barenboim and the late Edward Said, who created the WestEastern Divan orchestra with young people from countries in the middleeast and brought them together in Ramallah for an extraordinary concert in 2005.6 This concert and this orchestra were not imagined by politicians or generals but by a great artist and a great humanist, a Jew and a Palestinian, two friends who believed in the power of the arts to imagine a different vision of history and who discovered, in the language of music, a shared story of peace and belonging.

P A RT I Exploring the Roots of War: Performance, History, Poetry, and Language

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1 Warplay: Spectacle, Performance, and (Dis)Simulation of Combat alan filewod

playing war As I write these words, I hear the sounds of combat, of yelling men, explosions, and machine gun fire. My fifteen-year-old son is playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 on his Xbox. In this game he takes the part of an American soldier equipped with realistic weapons in an online multiplayer scenario of urban combat. He’s having the time of his life. It is, he tells me, the best game ever. Play rehearses life, and like all rehearsals, never really ends; life must always need to be rehearsed. If this simple proposition is defensible, it suggests that playing war is a rehearsal for waging war and, as such, can be compared to other playful rehearsals in other areas of human life. But the pervasiveness of warplay raises ethical problems not encountered in other domains. Playing war is not like playing a Barbie tea party, because warplay activates fantasy desires that most people would claim to reject. In warplay, war is always a good thing. One more interjection: I remember playing war with kids on my block when I was my son’s age. We were decked up with our fathers’ old war gear and armed with wooden rifles and swords. As our two groups met, I recall raising my hand and saying, “Let us negotiate” in some vague imitation of President Kennedy. It was a great moment but it killed the game. There was nothing to negotiate, and really, we just wanted to play soldier. The pervasiveness of video wargames today shows that playing war is one of the most popular and profitable forms of entertainment in the modern world.

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As wargames become increasingly realistic in their simulations and graphic imagery, they produce increased social anxiety. In November 2009, two Swiss ngos (Pro Juventute and trial: Track Impunity Always) published a widely cited study that examined the game design and representation of war in selected videogames in light of international agreements on human rights and the conduct of war.1 The study found that many of the games implicated players in virtual war crimes, including torture and the killing of noncombatants. It recommended that game developers strive to adhere to international conventions because of the (unstated) assumption that game simulations model affective behaviour. The report concludes: “The message of the scenes should never be that everything is allowed, or that it is up to the player to decide what is right and what is wrong. In real life, this is not the way it works. In real life, there are rules and there are sanctions for violations of these rules. It is not up to the soldier or to the law enforcement agent to decide what is right and what is wrong. The events in Abu Ghraib have shown what such ‘private justice,’ even if carried out by well trained and high ranking officers, may lead to.”2 Online multiplayer videogames have also drawn criticism because the modeling behaviour can be reinforced by the immersive pressure of in-game communities. In 2008, in a case that drew considerable media attention, a fifteen-year-old boy in Ontario was found dead in the woods near his home after running away from his family following an argument about his obsession with Call of Duty, a multiplayer shooter game. Such stories reinforce the social suspicion that videogames have a unique capacity for provoking antisocial and violent behaviours. The popularity of combat-centered wargames continues to escalate. In 2009, the release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 sold more than six million copies in one month.3 Concerns that such games have affective consequences find some support in the fact that militaries use similar games as training instruments. One result of this is America’s Army, a series of free downloadable games developed by the United States Army at a cost of $32 million, and released in versions for pc, Xbox and recently, mobile phones. The official website for the game claims that it is now one of the ten largest online games, having attracted nine million players: The game has exceeded all expectations by placing soldiering front and center within popular culture and showcasing the roles training, teamwork and technology play in the Army. Over the past few years, in more than twenty updates and new game versions, we have opened the world of soldiering to players and provided them with a soup to nuts virtual experience within which to explore entry level and

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advanced training as well as Soldiering in small units. We have virtually taken our players through boot camp, Ranger and Airborne training, and even introduced them to the Army’s “Quiet Professionals,” the elite Special Forces.4 America’s Army focuses on individual skill and tactics, and to the extent that such games can be used to help train players to recognize and react in preset scenarios, they have individual impacts. They can be pedagogical, but they are not necessarily so: America’s Army might teach how to aim and fire an assault rifle, but Halo can’t really teach a player how to aim and fire a laser rifle, any more than World of Warcraft can teach how to cast firebolt spells. The question of social affect then is either particular to the nature of the game world, or to the player mechanics and experience. The Juventute/Trial study focused its attention on games that simulate warfare that in real life is regulated by international convention, which means, for the most part, warfare in the twentieth century and later. The study was unable to extrapolate its findings into fantasy worlds where no such regulations exist, including the massive multiplayer online roleplay game (mmorpg) World of Warcraft, with its player base of 11.5 million (Blizzard, “World of Warcraft”). WoW, like similar games (Warhammer Online, Age of Conan), allows players to level up in social networks that require organization, tactics, and skill to master increasingly complex dungeon raids and player-versus-player (pvp) battlegrounds. In Warhammer, arguably the most sophisticated battleground game, the game world is a constant pvp war, with battles, warbands, and sieges moving across fictional high-fantasy landscapes. In Eve Online, the most technically complicated of such games, players build and operate starships in a hostile galactic environment that is all pvp all the time. The concerns raised about the ethical and behavioural consequences of video wargames follow two main vectors. The first has to do with videogames and social behaviour, and includes many game genres that immerse players in behaviour that might not otherwise be socially acceptable. The second is particular to the wargame as a simulation of war and therefore converges with concerns about combat simulations in other media. In this essay, I am addressing this wider social phenomenon of war performance, a category that is most common today in video gaming but which embraces performative play and enactment across a range of cultural fields, and which conjoins these fields in the practice of the playing body. This transmedial linkage is one of the major organizing principles that define the field of warplay. It differentiates warplay from related field-identified forms of multiplayer gaming or living history. While all warplay is what I define as subjunctive

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authenticity roleplay, the reverse is not true, as evidenced by, for example, Jane Austen tea-parties. Roleplay that confirms its historicity (real or invented) in somatic experience can be found in any context where participants embody and animate cultural memory (or rehearse cultural futures). Warplay is a subset of the human practice of roleplay theatricality. My use of the term warplay to describe the range of simulations and reenactments of war as recreation and cultural practice is an inversion of the military term warfighting, as used by the Pentagon to describe military operations and doctrines that pertain directly to armed combat. Warplay and warfighting are practices linked in ways that go much deeper than matters of simulation and representational politics. I want to approach this subject with an overarching question: does warplay serve to normalize particular perceptions of warfare, and if so, what is the result of that normalization, and does this have a social consequence? The stakes are high for this question because of the possibility of real-world affect, and because, as many game theorists have argued, following Edward Castronova’s pioneering work on virtual world economies, in-game virtual communities are not simply representations or contained simulations, but permeable domains that have real-world impacts.5 We can speculate endlessly on the reasons why we play war, and various disciplines supply different answers. For some, the first level of response will point to tribute, memory, and commemoration – which may work in some reenactment cultures but doesn’t explain the appeal of World of Warcraft. Others might point to gendered socialization. Warplay practices tend to be gender inclusive but nevertheless they are dominated by male players. They evidence testosterone culture and a desire for homosocial masculinist group formation and attainment – the same desire that led Dr Johnson to his famous observation that every man thinks meanly of himself for not being a soldier. A fascination with war and the military procedures that prepare young men (for the most part) to fight has always been an integral part of popular entertainment. Military culture and theatre have developed in many cultures as closely related operations of power exercised through display and spectacle. They have traditionally been maculinist and homosocial, and even in the modern world, where both military and theatre cultures have over time (in some cultures) expanded to include women, they retain a defining masculinist ethos and patriarchal structuring of authority. From the perspective of performance studies, warplay speaks to the power of play and performance to produce somatic, phenomenological experiences. When we play war, we strive to feel as if we enter the reality we perform. Performance can give us the somatic experience of significance, of being there,

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of agency in history. But it can never reproduce the phenomenal experience of the real thing. In fact, the more accurately reenactment approaches the real thing, the more unreal it becomes. Warplay invariably focusses on the instances of intensified hyper-masculinism: the front-line combat troops who conventionally comprised a relatively small proportion of an army. In real armies, the rear echelon outnumbers the combat troops; but in reenactment culture, front-line elite units are disproportionately common. Few want to reenact the army Postal Corps.

desmesnes of warplay Whether adventuring together or fighting against each other in epic battles, players will form friendships, forge alliances, and compete with enemies for power and glory.6 Adult warplay includes computer and video gaming, fan-culture roleplay, and historical military reenactment (whether amateur, commemorative, or industrial). These practices are related in a cultural field marked by simulation of combat, masculinist achievement, and adherence to regimes of authenticity. We live in a dense cultural environment of warplay practices that are so common as to be almost invisible, and we are habituated to the replayed images of war entertainment. They saturate our movie, television, and computer screens to the point that many people understand war as the principle marker of historical periodization. For many, history is war. At the same time, war is ahistorical: warplay also embraces the diverse realms of unreal war, the wars of subjunctive fantasy – think of Star Trek and the Society for Creative Anachronism. Think of the numerous massive multiplayer online roleplay games based in combat worlds. Most of these are sited in fantasy worlds, but they sprawl across history and space. Then there are thousands of video games, many of them connected on the internet, and countless fan cultures that arrange themselves by degrees of rank, hierarchy and uniform regulation. (The Starfleet Marine Corps wants you! So does the Klingon Assault Group.) The boundaries between these domains are permeable: militaries use wargames, simulations, and rehearsals for training, and have in recent years developed software programs for soldier training that are indistinguishable from computer games. In fact, they become computer games – as did America’s Army. Perhaps all warplay can be considered to be propaganda in this way, or at least complicit in military power in the real world. Even fantasy

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and subjunctive worlds, such as World of Warcraft or Star Trek fandom, emerge from and mirror real-world cultural and ideological norms. Despite its low-tech fantasy setting, WoW requires player discipline, highly technical precision, and a careful balance of combat roles. It is a fantasy skin on a simulation of contemporary warfare, with technology morphing into magic. Star Trek fan culture posits a future military system that replicates the present United States military; the Starfleet Marine Corps directly models the United States Marine Corps in uniform, culture, and even in its downloadable training manuals. In this sense, Star Trek is American military force projection into the future. Warplay is, I have already suggested, one application of what I call subjunctive authenticity roleplay (sarp). As we approach the question of the social consequence of warplay, it is important to note that no matter how playful or serious, all warplay practices are governed by regimes of authenticity. For the Starfleet Marine and the Blood Elf warlock, issues of correctness in equipment, regalia, and deportment are regulated by a negotiation of authenticity as demanding as the most hardcore Civil War reenactment. Warplay practices can be understood as authenticity roleplay that physicalizes (that is, embodies) subjunctive what-if realities. In the sense that it becomes bodily real in the reciprocally constitutive moment of performance and spectatorship, warplay is theatre. Online computer gaming is the most common form of warplay, but it may seem the least theatricalized because it is the most disembodied, while live military reenactment may seem the most overtly theatrical because of physical immersion and spectatorial reception. However, they are joined on a spectrum of identity engagements that move from the body to the costume to the avatar. These identity practices continue into the domains of warfighting, where they are manifested in uniforms and in the disciplinarity that uniformity performs. One consequence of this is that warplay, especially reenactment, simulates disciplinarity and order. Online gaming and reenactment differ, however, because in virtual game worlds, player versus player (pvp) combat is felt as real. There is no consequence outside of the game world, but the experience of combat, including victory and defeat, is experienced as a real contest. Just as the economies of game worlds are real economies, so the battles are real battles. Victory can produce elation and prestige, and defeat can produce shame, and these results can be amplified in the intense social networks of the game world. Any multiplayer gamer knows that one inattentive player – a Leeroy Jenkins in Warcraft culture – can upset hours of tactical teamwork.7 Community plus tactics require discipline, and discipline requires time commitment. Mindful that an online raid or mission may take several hours of intense teamwork,

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we can perhaps begin to understand why a teenage boy might feel compelled to keep playing. The social dimension of warplay is a significant feature because while wargames can be solo, social experience – invariably gendered as homosocial – locates warplay in the spectrum of masculinist combat activity. Online gaming can be understood as a practice of the body, producing somatic responses (elation, fear, risk behaviour, fatigue) and reinforcing those responses in the social community of the game community. Reenactment is a social practice as well; in fact it may emerge when collectors animate their collections with others. Unlike wargames, reenactment combat is not felt as real. It is always marked by the physical absences it produces and by constraints on violence, such as firearms regulations. If online wargames are a form of combat without consequence, reenactment is display and applied spectacle. Considered as the performed production of historical authenticity (even when that authenticity is imagined or subjunctive), it is as diverse as human society. As a cultural practice, it is as widespread as dramatic theatre. Military reenactment can be found everywhere, as commemoration, as fantasy, and as politics. It crosses borders of discipline and legitimacy, from fetishists at one extreme, and professional military ceremonial units (like the Canadian Forces’ Ceremonial Guard and the United States Army’s Third Infantry Regiment, “The Old Guard”), on the other. One need only spend an hour surfing the web to discover links to hundreds of groups reenacting military formations from every culture and period.8 The most famous locus of reenactment culture is the American Civil War because of its pervasiveness in popular culture and its commemorative patriotism. Some 15,000 reenactors participate in the annual restaging of the Battle of Gettysburg, which has become a major tourist destination. The history of Civil War reenactment restages – and perhaps reconciles – regional and ideological conflicts in American society. Historical warplay is always about the present as much as the past, which is why media controversy provoked the cancellation of a planned reenactment of the Battle of the Plains of Abraham to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the founding of Quebec in the summer of 2009.9 Within reenactment culture there is an axis of authenticity, from casual hobbyists who display and perform at public events to the hardcore collectors known colloquially as “threadcounters” who participate in private, tactical battle events. Reenactment culture can function as a simulation to field test historical knowledge, especially of tactics and equipment. As such, it can include serious military historians. It also serves as a social forum for collectors of militaria, and this is particularly true of twentieth-century reenactment units that strive to kit themselves in authentic gear. (If you own a

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Soviet t-34 tank, well, you might want to dress up and drive it). This reinforces the idea that the experience of warplay operates as somatic proof of ideological interpretations of history. Marketed to hobbyists, film and television producers, collectors, gamers, fans, and historians, warplay is also cultural economy. Game studios, paintball operations, software engineers, artists, artisans, collectors, dealers, movie and tv suppliers, and trainers all point to an emergent cultural sector forming into a profession. A comparison might be made with the emergence of the theatre as a professionalized disciplinary practice in Europe. Six hundred years ago, itinerant and migrating players began a professional economy of theatre work by hiring out their performances and forming troupes; today a similar process can be seen in the emergent professionalism of reenactment culture. That push to professionalism can be seen in the internal tendency towards organization. Reenactment groups and online game guilds typically organize themselves as simulated military units with rank hierarchies. They enact not just the soldier but the unit itself, and often engage in deep research into the real history of their simulation.

army values Through America’s Army, players have learned about rules of engagement (ROE), lifesaving, laws of war and Army Values, the set of noble values that are the foundation of the world’s premier land force (America’s Army). If warplay is complicit in contemporary military systems, it produces experiential understandings of war and warfighting that have social consequences that surpass concerns about affective modeling. I am reminded of the deeper implications of this subject by the fates of two young men: the Ontario teen already cited, whose obsession with Call of Duty led to a terrible tragedy, and another Ontarian, Omar Khadr, who has to date spent ten years in a Guantanamo cell, accused of war crimes because as a fifteen-year-old child soldier he may have thrown a grenade that killed a US serviceman in Afghanistan. I say child soldier but his accusers do not: he is denied that status because he is accused of being an illegal combatant. He belonged to no army, served no government, and wore no uniform. He was a combatant but he was not, it is charged, a lawful soldier. Two teenage boys: one a gamer simulating a soldier, the other a fighter refused the status of soldier. Neither was a soldier in any legal sense, but for both of them the idea of the soldier changed the course of their lives. They

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are connected in the domain of war as social behaviour, but they disturb the continuum of martial masculinity that proceeds from safe performance and spectacle to licenced (that is, lawful and uniformed) combat. They disturb the boundary between warplay and warfighting to expose its tenuous provisionality. Their fates suggest that warplay does more than normalize war or habituate participants to accept war as normal. Warplay is an immersive theatrical practice that militarizes warfare as social organization and by doing so legitimizes an understanding of war as warfighting, as conventionalized, soldier-centered, and regulated force delivery. In this regard, the Juventate/ trial report makes an important point when it raises concerns about the normalizing potential of wargame criminality, but at the same time it appears to miss the deeper point that lawful wargames further distort reality by normalizing an idea of war in which only soldiers kill and die. Warplay rarely questions its ethics of representation; the issue of ethics is not an issue of affect. I am not arguing that warplay produces a desire for war and Juventate does not argue that games that enact brutal interrogations produce a desire to torture. But such play does embody and express desires that must be questioned. The most extreme and obvious examples are the ethically suspect groups around the world that reenact the Waffen SS. Even in reenactment culture there is some nervousness about the ethics of SS reenactment. As the website of the 9th Waffen SS Panzer Division reenactment society states, “the hobby requires that both sides of the conflict be represented. Simply put, you can’t play ‘Good Guys’ and ‘Bad Guys’ with only the ‘Good Guys’ being represented” (9th Reenactment). But the bad guy doesn’t have to be a criminal organization whose uniform and regalia are illegal in some countries. Clearly, there is a conscious decision to impersonate not just a German soldier, but a Nazi. Every SS reenactment unit posts a disclaimer that refuses admission to extremists, but at the same time they all invoke a romanticized image of the SS as an elite formation that models military valour, honour, and camaraderie.10 If SS reenactment is unethical, where do we draw the line? Any military formation that is reenacted must seem unethical to someone, until it passes the horizon of cultural memory. Can there be, in fact, ethical warplay? If warplay and warfighting are as closely interrelated as (for example) rehearsal and performance in theatre, then they share ethical commons. If so, is ethical warplay a social mechanism that legitimizes the noble values of ethical war, and delegitimizes insurgent and guerilla combat as unethical?

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combat privilege UNITED STATES OF AMERICA v. OMAR AHMED KHADR CHARGES: CONSPIRACY; MURDER BY AN UNPRIVILEGED BELLIGERENT; ATTEMPTED MURDER BY AN UNPRIVILEGED BELLIGERENT; AIDING THE ENEMY.11 The recurring critique of warplay is that because it does not result in death or injury, it can never fully represent war. This is why the historian and Second World War combat veteran Paul Fussell, whose work on the cultural memory of the First World War was so formative, dismisses reenactors as “weirdos” who engage in sick “fantasies of heroism.”12 If warplay cannot be the real thing, then it follows that it must be inherently false. This position is, however, based on the premise that warplay is a representational practice and that it seeks to achieve an ontologically impossible mimesis. I am arguing here that although warplay may represent war, it is not a practice defined by its representational capacity. War representation and the production of war spectatorship have always been a part of war itself and have long been used by armies as a form of force projection. Military use of spectacle is well-established and is most familiar in regimented parades for public display. Within military culture, spectacle and display function to maintain order and reinforce power. Spectacle can consolidate dominance, as in the case of surrender ceremonies following battles. One of the most famous may be the highly ceremonial surrender of Japan on the deck of the uss Missouri in 1945; the largest of all time may have been the surrender of the German High Seas Fleet in a sailpast between the assembled British and American fleets at Scapa Flow in 1918. Military culture (and its corollary, military science) in the modern era developed as the means of waging war in part because it could systematically deploy spectacle as force. If we posit that the best war is the one that achieves victory with the fewest casualties, then we can posit a war that is won without casualties. In that case war is the performance of war and the spectacle threat of force – the awe in the modern strategy of “shock and awe.”13 Can we therefore posit the opposite: performance as war? In that sense, warplay can be understood as war without consequence, war procedures that have no political or social outcome. And to the extent that warplay simulates the performative, reproducible aspects of military culture, it is a metaperformance: a performance of a type of performativity. The simulation of war is at the same time a dissimulation: the more real it is felt to be and experienced, the farther from reality it is. In its simulation of war, warplay dissimulates the extreme nature of combat by replacing the finality and hor-

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ror of combat with a fetishization of the procedural organizations that legitimize combat as warfighting. This leads to the suggestion that warplayers are – whether they know it or wish it – warriors who have not been trained and licenced to participate in impactful action. In this way, warplay works to rehearse a narrative of war as regulated and professionalized, as uniformed, and as the organized operation of legalized force. It identifies the soldier as the primary subject of war, and it confuses our understanding of war to the point that we accept the concept of an enemy combatant who is illegal because he is not a soldier. He is not a soldier because he does not belong to a unit or wear a uniform that can be replayed. In the logic of military culture, he is not a soldier because he has no honour, and he has no honour because he has no uniform. He is, in the words of the US Army’s charges against Omar Khadr, an “unprivileged belligerent” who therefore does not enjoy “combat immunity.”14 In the sense that warplay rehearses the procedures of warfare, it can be said to militarize war by reducing our understanding of war to the operations and structures of military forces, to requisition, parade, deployment, and manoeuvre, and to the structures that enable the privilege that Omar Khadr is denied. But warplay cannot testify to what it cannot enact. Every warplayer understands that play cannot cross the ontological boundary between performance and death, but the more problematic ethical challenge is that warplay manifests order but cannot play disorder. That we cannot reenact what war does is axiomatic; the deeper issue is that warplay is predicated on a too-common refusal to examine its complicity in systems that differentiate between the ostensibly noble values of lawful combat and the criminality of insurgent resistance. In the play of legitimation, warplayers and reenactors patrol the boundaries of military culture across time and space.15 But no-one reenacts the actual victims of modern war: raped women, tortured child soldiers, murdered children in the rubble of destroyed cities, and the unnamed dead in the mass graves of concentration camps. In warplay, the imagined enemy is always a lawful military target. But the horror of modern war is that she is not.

2 Understanding the Motivation to Enlist j o n a t h a n f. v a n c e

Why We Fight was the title given to a seven-part film series commissioned by the US government between 1942 and 1945 as a way to explain to Americans the issues of the Second World War. The decision to create this series arose from a belief that the majority of Americans were not fully aware of the philosophical issues involved in the war; they needed to be convinced of the dangers of isolationism and the necessity of joining the crusade against fascism. Directed by Frank Capra, who had already made a name for himself as a populist filmmaker with such successes as You Can’t Take It With You in 1938 and Mr Smith Goes to Washington in 1939, the films attempted to explain the reasons for the state’s decision to go to war in the hope that the same reasoning would push Americans to the recruiting offices. They made the implicit assumption that the individual could be convinced to enlist to defend values, that idealism alone was sufficient to get someone into uniform. But was it? Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s oft-quoted comment that “Every man, woman and child in the world”1 should see the Why We Fight series aside, was a film enough to convince an individual to enlist? The image of long lines of young men outside a recruiting office has become an icon of twentieth-century warfare, and behind every face is a story. Why did any one individual decide to enlist that day? What convinced him or her to leave a settled, civilian existence and join the military? This is one of the most perplexing issues for the historian to deal with, in this or any other context: what impels an individual to take a certain course of action? In studying the motivations behind enlistment for military service, scholars have advanced an enormous range of explanations. Those with an interest in gender issues can argue that recruiting campaigns consistently played on a man’s masculinity (“There’s a place for you at the wheel of a roaring tank; behind a spitting Ack Ack gun; astride an armoured motor-

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cycle … and you are not the man to hang back”) or his vanity (“You’ll feel like a million dollars the minute you step out in that fine new uniform now ready for you. You’ll be a man among men”2). There was no better way to promote enlistment than to suggest that women went weak over a man in uniform – the only conclusion to be drawn from the large number of songs with titles such as There’s Something ’Bout a Uniform That Makes the Ladies Fall and The World is Simply Mad on Uniform, and posters such as Howard Chandler Christy’s “I Want You for The Navy” (1917), in which the woman’s languid gaze implied that she wanted a man for more than just naval service. And even though there was a much smaller body of propaganda directed at potential women volunteers, much of it was based on a similar assumption – that appeals to feminine vanity could be very persuasive. A 1942 poster encouraging women to join the United States Coast Guard promised recruits that they could train at the Palm Beach Biltmore Hotel and wear a uniform designed by Mainbocher, the Paris/New York couturier that dressed such luminaries as Mary Pickford and the Duchess of Windsor, is only one of many such examples directed at young women of military age.3 Other scholars have been fascinated by the notion that some men greeted war as a welcome and even enjoyable diversion from the routine of civilian life. It is a reasonable assumption that a few looked forward to killing others, either because the enemy had been so demonized in propaganda or simply because they had latent violent urges. The archetype in this regard is probably Captain Buzz Rickson, the homicidal and/or suicidal anti-hero of John Hersey’s novel The War Lover, who delights in emptying tons of high explosives on German cities. But more common must have been the emotion expressed by the English poet Julian Grenfell, who wrote in October 1914 that he adored war, in part because “it is like a big picnic without the objectlessness of a picnic.”4 Nor was it only men who found it possible to adore war. The fact that fighting was inconsistent with contemporary gender roles made it very attractive to some women, for it opened the door to experiences that had long been denied to them. Flora Sandes, a British-born nurse who joined the St John Ambulance in 1914, eventually realized her dream of fighting in the infantry as a sergeant with the Serbian Army. Margaret Macdonald, who headed Canada’s military nursing service during the First World War, nurtured what she called “a yen for wars,” an impulse that drove her to get as close as possible to the fighting in the Spanish-American War, the Boer War, and the First World War.5 Later in life, she expressed profound regret that she had been considered too young to get involved in the Boxer Rebellion and too old for the Second World War. And there is a decidedly Buzz Rickson/

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Julian Grenfell tone in the reflections of Maria Bochkareva, who in 1917 organized the Women’s Battalion of Death, the first women’s combat unit in the army of Czarist Russia. In her memoirs, she recalled her emotions upon hearing the Czar’s decree that she be allowed to enlist as a soldier: “I was so happy, so joyous, so excited. It was the most blissful moment of my life.”6 Enthusiasm for war, whatever its roots, could be infectious, and more than a few young men and women found themselves carried away by the excitement of a crowd. Enlisting was not something they had intended to do, at least not at that particular time. Indeed, there is a clear sense of surprise, though not quite regret, in one soldier’s letter to his girlfriend: “I hope you are not mad at me for joining this crowd I had no idea of joining when I left you on the Tuesday night or at least not so soon, but when I got in town I went around to see the bulletins the crowd were [sic] so excited & the notice was in the window saying the 88th wanted recruits so I went down & enlisted.”7 Peer-group pressure of another kind continues to be an attractive explanation to scholars, particularly since the military has long recognized that the persuasion of friends can be a more powerful motivator than anything a stranger might say. Indeed, when the British government authorized the creation of the New (or Kitchener) Army in 1914, it built into the system what became known as Pals’ Battalions, units with specific local or occupational connections. It was believed that such units would be attractive to volunteers, who could enlist and serve with their friends and neighbours. This was a remarkably successful strategy across the social spectrum, from the Public Schools Battalion (16th Battalion, Middlesex Regiment) and the Stockbrokers Battalion (10th Battalion, Royal Fusiliers) to the Accrington Pals (11th Battalion, East Lancashire Regiment) and the Grimsby Chums (10th Battalion, Lincolnshire Regiment). Sadly, it was also a strategy that had dire consequences for local communities when some of these units were all but wiped out in the Battle of the Somme in 1916. When the Accrington Pals lost nearly 600 of its 700 men in battle on 1 July 1916, an angry mob descended on the mayor’s home in Accrington to demand an explanation. It must also be admitted that the decision to go to war might in fact be a decision to go away from something else – an unhappy marriage, overbearing parents, debt, criminal proceedings. By the same token, it is essential to put the decision to enlist into the context of an individual’s prewar routine. Even the bucolic life of the farmer in 1914 was anything but safe, with generations of agricultural workers falling prey to farmer’s lung, a disease caused by inhaling spores from mouldy hay, or silo-filler’s disease, caused by the inhalation of toxic gases from fresh silage. The mechanization of the nineteenth century may have made farms more efficient, but the new steam-powered

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contraptions, with their rotating blades and spinning belts, also created many new ways for the farm labourer to lose limbs. For industrial workers, the situation was even more perilous. Simply put, the most horrific battlefield – the water-filled trenches of the Western Front, the frozen steppes of Russia, the jungles of south-east Asia – looks a little different when we imagine the peace-time horrors of the coal mine, the tannery, the chemical plant, or the iron foundry. In the twenty-first century, with legislation to guarantee workplace safety and labour unions to protect the rights and bodies of workers, it is easy to forget that a century ago, the life of the average worker could be nasty, brutish, and short. Accidents of all kinds claimed an enormous number of workers’ lives, and it would have been unusual for the ordinary labourer to go through a week without seeing a fellow worker horribly maimed on the job. Machinery and power sources were frequently operated with no safety guards, and there was little protection against workplace environmental hazards that could cause chronic and debilitating diseases such as black lung, welder’s flash, or miner’s nystagmus. Nor was the situation necessarily improving with the passage of time and the accumulation of experience; between 1890 and 1904, it actually grew more dangerous to be a miner in the United States, in terms of the relative number of workplace fatalities per year.8 Like most young lads in Barnsley, Yorkshire, Ernest Bell left school at age thirteen to work in the coal mines, an industry that had been hit by bitter strikes in 1912 over low wages and dangerous working conditions. At the time, the only certainty in Bell’s life was that, if he was lucky, he would spend the next forty or fifty years working in the dark and stifling atmosphere of the coal face, with the ever-present dangers of cave-in or explosion. Is it any wonder that he jumped at the chance to join the Barnsley Pals (13th Battalion York and Lancaster Regiment), which at least offered the chance for something different?9 Other volunteers were clearly impelled by a sense of idealism and duty, either to their own principles or to their nation. A letter from a young man in 1914 who volunteered for active service after being in the militia before the war was probably typical: “My dear mother … I want you to be brave, for when I go to the front as a member of the contingent, I am not doing it for the want of a fight or the love of adventure; it is to fight for our country. It is every able-bodied man’s duty, Mother, and if I am unfortunate and don’t return to you – well it was for a good cause. Anyway I didn’t go into the Regiment and swear to defend Britain in the hour of need, to back down like a coward when I was needed. You know in your own heart, Mother, you would not want me to do that.”10 Claude Châtillon, his mind on the historic wrongs done to French Canadians outside of Quebec, enlisted in the infantry because he saw the situation in Europe in the late 1930s as antithetical to his

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own ideals: “something is happening over there that has profoundly touched me, my convictions and my principles. It’s a reality I can no longer avoid … it’s a war of ideas … of freedom, of rights, without discrimination as to origin, age, or colour. This relates to what is going on in my own country, in my province; and in Europe it has gone out of control with cruel savagery.”11 And then there were people who enlisted for no more complicated reason than that it seemed like the right thing to do at the time. Indeed, there are countless examples of enlistment being a snap decision in which neither motivation nor consequences were weighed. One wonders how Hannah Rooke in Saskatchewan reacted when she received a letter from her son Robert in 1900: Dear Mother, I have a little rather interesting news for you. Charlie [Rooke] and I came into town on Wednesday from Selkirk having finished our job out there. On Thursday night we were along at Jim’s and while talking, Jim asked me why I didn’t join Strathcona’s Horse and go to South Africa. Charlie spoke up and said “What do you say if we both go?” “Alright,” I said, “I’m with you.” So next morning we got a letter of introduction from a friend of Jim’s to the captain, went up to the barracks, were examined, measured, sworn in and had 2 hours drill before night, and we leave for South Africa tomorrow afternoon.12 Another such individual was the fictional woodsman Billy Throop, whose decision to enlist in 1914 was almost reflexive: “There was nothing deep or intricate in Billy’s reasoning. Sentiment governed his actions as often as logic, and ‘how?’ or ‘why?’ rarely detained him. The main idea was all he cared about. Details he ignored or trod under foot.”13 Amidst all these varied motives, the two extremes must be economic reasons and patriotism. Whatever else military service entails, it involves a steady wage, which is especially important for someone who has lived through economic depression or faced long-term under-employment in an itinerant, poorly paid labour force. One Canadian veteran interviewed by oral historian Barry Broadfoot was certainly not alone in his reasoning: “I was twenty, I didn’t have a bean, no hopes, no nothing. As they say now, there was no light at the end of the tunnel. Anything really was better than what I had been doing, so I joined up. Went down to Vancouver in a freight car in October and joined up. As simple as that. No patriotism. No saving my country from the Nazi hordes.”14 But the soldier’s wage was not all. Through the twentieth century, governments became more generous in

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caring for those in uniform and their families. There were separation and dependants’ allowances, disability payments in the case of injuries or wounds, pensions for widows and orphans, free medical care – a kind of social safety net for soldiers long before it was available to the general public. There were also philanthropic organizations; they might have little interest in helping the wife and children of a coalminer fallen on hard times, but were pleased to provide financial and other support when that miner became a soldier. For decades, many scholars would have agreed with Broadfoot’s anonymous veteran in dismissing patriotism as a motive, for there has long been suspicion of patriotism as a motivational force. John Bodnar notes the argument that patriotism is a form of social control that has no natural resonance with people; a normal person would not willingly and even happily volunteer to throw his or her life away for an abstraction called the nation unless they had been subjected to years of brainwashing.15 So, our young volunteer writing to his mother did not naturally believe in the value of defending Britain in her hour of need; that belief had been indoctrinated in him from such an early age that it had become a reflex. But whatever its roots, patriotism was a powerful force with tremendous pull; even if it has no natural resonance, it can still be a focus for passionate and deeply-held beliefs. And so Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, in his study of French trench culture in the First World War, concluded that “national feeling … formed the solid foundation of their mental world, and herein lies the explanation of their resistance over more than four years.”16 The average poilu, he would argue, enlisted because he loved his country and was able to endure with the worst of conditions because, for all its faults, France continued to be the focus of his love. It is interesting to examine in greater detail situations where these two ends of the spectrum seem to clash. A century ago, when Audoin-Rouzeau’s explanation would have been accepted as an article of faith, the default explanation for enlistment was patriotism: an individual who enlisted was, by definition, a patriot, while one who did not was unpatriotic. This could also be extended to a community as a whole (a town with a low enlistment rate could be criticized for failing to develop in its young men a sufficient sense of patriotism) or to an ethnic group (Icelandic Canadians were praised after the First World War for their high rate of enlistment, which was taken as proof that they had become truly Canadianized and embraced a feeling of national belonging). But what about men who enlisted, and then disappeared? Were they, in fact, selfish and unpatriotic scoundrels? The contemporary discourse certainly characterized them as such, but here we must pay attention to other motives. In 1916 and 1917, a number of military units recruited aggressively in the lumbering regions of northern Ontario and Manitoba, drawing recruits

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from a labour force that was known for its mobility and independence. Timber workers, many of them recent immigrants to North America, came forward in great numbers, but they also disappeared in great numbers. Although contemporary observers called into question their patriotism and integrity, such judgements missed the point of their enlistment. Forestry workers were accustomed to switching jobs frequently in search of better pay or working conditions, and it is not illogical to suggest that they might have seen the military as just another employer. They might spend a month working for a crew out of Fort Frances and then learn that the Canadian Expeditionary Force was offering a good wage, with room and board as well. But a month later perhaps a mill in International Falls offered even better wages, and so they decamped for Minnesota. For them, enlistment was not about patriotism or even military service; it was simply about employment, and to see it in any other terms is to misconstrue their motives. But we must be careful about carrying the economic motive too far. In 1939, in both Canada and Britain, there was a huge number of enlistments, which might lead one to assume that part of the reason for this rush was the unemployment of the Depression. The men who signed up in such numbers at the beginning of the war were not fired with the flames of idealism or desperate to destroy Nazism; like Barry Broadfoot’s unnamed veteran, they simply wanted a job. Logically, this makes perfect sense. A decade of unemployment hit young adult males the hardest, but then a war came along offering a uniform and a steady wage to any adult male who could pass the physical. Unemployment magically dropped, so it followed that people enlisted because they were unemployed. But research in the service records of these early recruits17 reveals that the vast majority of them were gainfully employed (or at least they claimed to recruiters that they were gainfully employed – that caveat must be kept in mind). It seems that they did not join up because they were looking for work, but rather they left their work to join up. By the same token, we must avoid making the easy assumption that people tended to enlist because they were under-employed. In Britain in 1914, the lowly agricultural labourer was near the bottom of the wage scale, with estimated weekly earnings of 16s 10d; but agricultural workers enlisted at a much lower rate than men from other trades with significantly higher wages. In general, low-wage groups had low rates of enlistment while highwage groups had high rates. Even after factoring in the various separation allowances, for most volunteers in Britain in the First World War enlistment involved taking a reduction in pay, sometimes by a significant amount. The most authoritative study of this subject concludes that, as a whole, economic need exercised little influence over the decision to enlist.18

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And what of individuals for whom enlistment seems to have been at odds with their earlier viewpoints? Most universities in Britain and North America had high rates of enlistment in the Second World War, but they were also hotbeds of pacifism and non-interventionism during the interwar era. In September 1939, an informal pool conducted at the University of California revealed that the majority of students would not volunteer for military service even if the US joined the war. A month later, the student union’s Peace Committee circulated a petition that included the statement, “We wish to inform our government that we will volunteer for prison rather than volunteer for service if the United States enters the war.”19 But by the 1944–45 academic year, Berkeley’s male enrolment had plummeted from a prewar figure of 11,180 to under 4,300. At the university’s Hastings College of Law, there were only thirty-four male students, down from 254 just a few years earlier.20 Such statistics suggest that the majority of male students who signed peace pledges and no-war declarations in 1937 and 1938 joined up in 1939 and 1940, and that the undergraduate pacifist of 1938 became the infantry officer of 1940. But why did this happen? The conversion is relatively easy to explain in a country facing invasion. We know, for example, that French Mennonites, despite the anti-war and pacifist tradition of that community, had come to accept and even embrace military service by the time that France was invaded at the beginning of the First World War; few of them, if any, declined to volunteer in either world war.21 But such reasoning could only carry so much weight in a country that was geographically isolated from the threat of invasion, such as the United States, Canada, Australia, or New Zealand. In those nations, the argument was often made that the country itself was indeed under threat, either actually or by inference. The Win the War League in Australia, for example, produced a poster that likened the First World War in Europe to a bushfire. “Would You Stand By while a Bushfire Raged?” it asked. “Get Busy, and Drive the Germans back.”22 The inference was clear. The war was, in fact, threatening Australia directly; like a bushfire, even if it wasn’t burning your land at the moment, if you failed to help fight it you would inevitably be burned out in the end. This argument became institutionalized in Australia with the adoption of the foreign policy of Forward Defence, but elsewhere it seems to have had less staying power.23 Since the decision to enlist is, ultimately, an intensely personal one, it seems sensible to consider it from the standpoint of the individual: in this case two individuals who were as far from natural soldiers as it would be possible to conceive. In the first place, they were both physically unfit for military service. But more than that, in the late 1930s they seemed to be intellectually unfit; they were scholars for whom the rise of Nazism was disturbing, but

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was nevertheless only an academic question. One of them even described himself as a pacifist. And yet those unlikely soldiers eventually put themselves in uniform.24 John Kenneth Macalister was born in Guelph, Ontario, the only son of the (lapsed Presbyterian) editor of the Guelph Mercury and his (staunchly Catholic) wife. He went to Guelph Collegiate Vocational Institute, the same school that his father had attended, but by all accounts he was a frustrating student – obviously very bright, but also reluctant to apply himself. His laziness might have been his downfall were it not for his sparkling personality, which sufficiently charmed his teachers that they gave him adequate grades to secure admission to University College in Toronto, to study law. There, Macalister really found his niche; he swept every prize that was available to him, and his professors could scarcely find superlatives sufficient for his achievement. In the opinion of one professor, a senior scholar who had seen decades’ worth of undergraduates pass through his classrooms and was not easily impressed, His academic career has been one of the most remarkable in the history of our honour schools … This is an academic record which is unequalled. It is the outcome not only of diligence in application and in study, but of insight, judgement, and critical faculties remarkable in a man of his years. His success is largely due to his capacity to think, to arrive at his conclusions for himself, to see a problem in its varieties of points of view, to suspend decision, to weigh evidence … he has the finest mind which I have met with for many years … As a leader, he commands the greatest respect. His influence has been very fine … I do not exaggerate when I say that I believe he will become, if all goes well, an outstanding Canadian.25 It came as no surprise to anyone when Macalister won the Rhodes Scholarship for Ontario, which took him to Oxford to continue his study of law. But Macalister was also fascinated by international relations, and from the time he was a teenager, he haunted the office of the Guelph Mercury, reading the wire stories and occasionally writing his own opinion pieces. In 1932, when he was eighteen and in his senior year in high school, he wrote a prizewinning essay that set out his philosophy at the time. “The disordered condition of the world has had a marked effect on our students,” he wrote. “They are keenly alive to the necessity of decisive action of some nature or other designed to end the important problems at present defying solution.” But just what constituted “decisive action” was left open. “The next generation will demand true application of the principles of democracy, and will turn out of office without hesitation those unable to come up to the new stan-

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dard … The peace the younger generation seeks is not restricted to surcease from war; they search also for a peace of mind and a calmness of mind, coming only from true conviction. The flame of its ideals is a lofty one … Out of the debris of world disaster may come a finer, more virile humanity.”26 Macalister’s application for the Rhodes Scholarship included two essays that give more clues to his philosophy. In his personal statement, he wrote that the thought “of an alien system being imposed upon this country is a horrifying possibility.” But he did not believe that joining a lobby group served any purpose. “The individual can best combat influences directed to such an end not by joining the League Against War and Fascism, or some of the anti-war youth movements, whose aims attract my sympathy but whose methods do not appeal to my common sense, but by attempting to strengthen democracy itself in theory and especially in practice.” His Rhodes essay on Canada’s external relations made a similar point. He saw no value in debating Canada’s course if Britain went to war, whether the nation should follow automatically or hold a referendum: “Here it must be said that the question will be argued in abstraction only by a fool or a doctrinaire theorist … As to the issues discussed above, chiefly of war and peace, few constructive suggestions were given. They will be resolved in crisis.”27 For Ken Macalister, the rise of Nazism was a theoretical problem, not a practical one that affected him personally. Intervention might be warranted, but only on an intellectual level. He shared this view with the man who later became his closest friend, Frank Pickersgill, a Manitoban raised in the rural community of Ashern but educated largely in Winnipeg. He was a student at the University of Manitoba during one of its golden ages, with a group of classmates who can only be considered over-achievers: Marshall McLuhan; the novelist W.O. Mitchell; the historian W.L. Morton; politicians Stanley Knowles and Mitchell Sharp; physicist Harry Duckworth; university president David Carleton Williams; physicist Louis Slotin, who was to die after a nuclear accident at Los Alamos; actor Tommy Tweed; and legal scholar Maxwell Cohen. After graduating from Manitoba, Pickersgill went on to the University of Toronto to complete his Master’s degree in classics; then he travelled to France with the aim of continuing his studies at l’Université de Paris. He was very interested in the relationship between faith and reason, and planned to study the life and thought of Gregory of Rimini, an Augustinian hermit who became Master of Theology in Paris in 1345. But once he was ensconced in Paris, Frank lost interest in medieval religious thought and became fascinated by contemporary politics. In the process, he transformed himself into a typical member of the Left Bank scene. He and his friends haunted one of the meeting places of the Paris intelligentsia, the Café de Flore; a waiter adopted them and made sure

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that they were never without a round of coffee as they noisily debated the most pressing issues of the day while puffing furiously on Gauloises bleues to which Frank had become addicted (“the habit costs 3c a day here & is not worth breaking for that,” he wrote to his older brother Jack28). Pickersgill travelled extensively in Europe, and came to regret the enthusiasm he had shown for the Nazis when he visited Germany in 1934, as a naive teenager. Now, after travelling throughout Europe, but particularly in the east (he was in Poland when the Nazis invaded in September 1939, but was able to escape to Paris via Romania), he came to deplore the Nazi regime and everything about it. Still, no matter how much he hated Nazism, he didn’t feel it was any of his business to do anything about it. In January 1940, at the height of the Phoney War, he wrote to Jack that he had no intention of enlisting in anything: “I’m not anxious to do anything in this bloody war unless I have to, so shall wait for conscription in Canada.”29 In that generation, it would be difficult to find two young men less likely to enlist. To them, the potentialities of Nazi rule were horrifying, but in their minds the question was entirely abstract. Someone should do something about what was going on in Europe, yes, but were Macalister and Pickersgill willing to put on a uniform and shoulder arms? Not at all – there is nothing in their prewar writings to suggest that enlistment would have been anything but a fantasy to them. Yet in 1942, they were both accepted into Special Operations Executive, the group that trained secret agents to work in occupied Europe, and these two gentle, unwarlike men learned all the tricks of the agent’s trade: how to kill, with a gun, a knife, or one’s bare hands, how to blow things up, how to burn things down, how to lie, how to steal, how to cheat – everything they would need to survive in enemy-occupied territory. In June 1943 they were parachuted into France, but just four days later, before they even had a chance to begin their mission, they were both arrested by the Nazi police south-west of Paris. In September 1944, after enduring months of abuse, Ken Macalister and Frank Pickersgill were executed in Buchenwald concentration camp. What was behind this dramatic change? What made these two men, whose sympathies approached pacifism, take part in the war in the most direct way possible? Both Macalister and Pickersgill, with their educational accomplishments and family connections, could have had their pick of government jobs where their skills could have been put to use in complete safety. Instead, they were determined to enlist in the military and enter enemy-held territory to help bring down the Nazis from within. Why? The answer is that the war touched them personally; the abstractions that they had discussed endlessly over glasses of beer or cups of coffee were replaced by powerful tangible motivation. In 1938, during the summer vaca-

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tion, Macalister left Oxford to visit France and brush up on his French; there, he met the daughter of a professor and fell in love. He went back to France in the 1939 summer vacation. The couple married, and soon his wife Jeannine was pregnant (sadly, their daughter was stillborn). Macalister fled France before the German invasion but vowed to return, because the war was no longer about ideas like democracy or fascism; it was no longer theoretical. His writings make it clear that those abstractions were still in his mind, but also that he had a new motivation for joining the fight against Nazism. He admitted to his academic mentor in Oxford that he was tortured by the situation in France “with my wife expecting a baby in the beginning of September, in German occupied territory, and with all means of communication cut off.”30 This new personal motivation could not be satisfied by other opportunities that were certainly available to him. Beginning in February 1941, Ken Macalister was employed by Special Operations Executive as a conducting officer, shepherding agents through the training process. By all accounts, he was very good at it and could certainly have continued in that role for the rest of the war. But it was not enough, and he badgered his superiors to be moved into the training stream himself. Despite their misgivings about his suitability, they relented to his demands that he be allowed to do something personally to liberate his wife and in-laws from Nazi rule. Frank Pickersgill experienced a similar transformation. As a budding journalist in prewar Paris, he was able to watch the drift to war from a front-row seat. But after the fall of France in the summer of 1940, his fascination with ideologies took a back seat to his personal feelings. While in France he became a committed Francophile; he adopted it as his home, and would almost certainly have stayed there had he survived the war.31 He was tortured by the thought that his best friends were living under Nazi rule, and he wanted to be involved as intimately as possible in ending the occupation. The events of 1940 had convinced him, he wrote, “in a fashion absolutely personal and sincere (not theoretical) that this country = everything decent, human that is going.” To leave when France’s fate was hanging in the balance was unthinkable: “Je suis si plein de honte et de dégoût qu’il faut que je fasse quelque chose – sans ça, je n’en reviendrais jamais.”32 “I’m not going to make the world safe for democracy,” Pickersgill wrote to his mother; instead he wanted to make France safe for the French people he loved: “when I think of these people I know & these towns I know it almost makes me scream. I’ve got to make every conceivable effort to stay in France until this war is over. I think now if I were in Canada I’d go stark staring nuts from wondering what was going on & what was happening to certain people … The only solid & sure thing I feel is that I’d be prepared to do anything to stay in France so as long as this thing lasts.”33

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Is it possible to draw any generalizations from the story of Ken Macalister and Frank Pickersgill? It must be admitted that the two men were very unusual. They were interested in ideas, and much of what they wrote about world affairs before the war survives. This makes it possible to chart the shifts in their thinking and relate them to the changing international situation. At the same time, they were unusually frank in their correspondence, so we can understand how much weight personal relationships carried in their decision-making. In short, we know why they fought, because they tell us. With the vast majority of volunteers, historians can only try to deduce their motivations. There is no question that there were countless other young people like Macalister and Pickersgill who had deep personal motives for enlisting. But drawing conclusions about their motivations is perilous. During the First World War, men who volunteered for service in the Canadian Expeditionary Force were asked to respond to a number of questions on the attestation form. One of them was “Do you understand the nature and terms of your engagement?” If one were to look at a thousand such forms, the answer would almost always be yes – to such a degree that one might assume this to be a kind of formula question to which only an affirmative answer was permitted. But every once in a while, the research turns up a surprise. In February 1916, James McLean, a nineteen-year-old steel worker in Trenton, Nova Scotia, presented himself to the recruiting office in New Glasgow to enlist in the 193rd Battalion of the Canadian Expeditionary Force. Most of the form is unremarkable, at least until question number 11, “Do you understand the nature and terms of your engagement?” To this, McLean responded “Not exactly.”34 Amongst the bureaucratic sameness of attestation forms, this is a rare and refreshing bit of honesty. One suspects that many recruits were not entirely certain what they were signing up for, but James McLean was almost alone in being willing to admit his doubts. If the question had been “Do you understand why you are enlisting?” one wonders how many people would have responded, “Not exactly.” When looking at a typical recruiting-office photograph, it would be nice if one could read the thoughts behind the faces: this fellow enlisted because his brother had enlisted; this man needed work; he was looking for fun; the chap on the left disagreed with the enemy’s foreign policy. But in the vast majority of cases, there is simply no evidence to arrive at any conclusions. And what is more, we must admit that some of these men were not entirely sure in their own minds why they joined up. If they did not fully understand the motivation to enlist, how can we?

3 Canadian Poets on War s a n d r a d j wa

The lives of E.J. Pratt (1882–1964), F.R. Scott (1899–1985), and P.K. Page (1916–2010) spanned two world wars: born seventeen years apart, each represents nearly a generation. To judge by J.W. Garvin’s Canadian Poets of the Great War, the Canadian cultural attitude at the start of the First World War was similar to that described in Mark Girouard’s study of English culture, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman.1 In Garvin’s anthology, the Great War is presented as a crusade and poems depict the young soldiers as knights, Galahads, or Lancelots. Why, we might ask, other than an emerging modernism, do Pratt and Scott and Page reject this prevailing view of war to write poems that are ironic, satiric, or psychological in nature? Pratt, born in 1882, the major poet between the wars, was lionized during his lifetime for documenting the Canadian experience in heroic poems such as “Towards the Last Spike” (1989, 2:201), “Dunkirk” (1989, 2:46), and “They Are Returning” (1989, 2:140). His biographer, David Pitt, raises the issue of why Pratt did not enlist in 1914, suggesting he was a pacifist.2 A more recent treatment of Newfoundlanders and war, David Macfarlane’s The Danger Tree, questions Pratt’s authenticity by suggesting his war poetry bore no relation to his experience: “while reading Masefield and Kipling and Robert Bridges … [Pratt] composed elegies to the fallen dead of a war he neither fought in nor saw.”3 This remark brings us to a larger question: what do we know, or what can we infer, about Pratt and war? We have no evidence whether Pratt tried to enlist. But we do know that he had experienced rheumatic fever as a child, and that he subsequently suffered from a heart murmur.4 Furthermore, he had undergone two severe physical breakdowns: one in 1906 and another in 1908, the last diagnosed as “anemia.”5 I would

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suspect systemic anemia, which is a debilitating disease. Given the state of his health, it is doubtful that a draft board would have passed him. Finally, by the time Pratt was writing his major poems he had become acutely sensitized to death, partly from a childhood spent along the Newfoundland coast, where shipwreck and death were commonplace, and partly because his own experience during wartime had led him to become skeptical of idealized views of war. In 1916, when Pratt was visiting his family in Newfoundland, news came of the annihilation of the First Battalion of the Newfoundland Regiment, “The Fighting Newfoundlanders,” at Beaumont-Hamel. A whole generation of his younger contemporaries had been slaughtered near the start of the Battle of the Somme; his younger brother, Arthur, was missing. Shocked into poetry, Pratt later wrote “Before a Bulletin Board (After Beaumont-Hamel)” (1989, 1:109–10). He had already written a poem in the conventional chivalric mode, “The Sacrifice of Youth” in 1915 (Pratt 1989, 1:10), but in June 1916, after the battle of the Somme, he wrote the sober “Dead on the Field of Honour” (Pratt 1989, 1:10–11). Then, in March 1917, he wrote the ironic “The Seed Must Die” (Pratt 1989, 1:11–2). In October 1918, Pratt published in the Victoria College journal, Acta Victoriana, a valiant letter sent home from a young Newfoundlander, Hedley Goodyear, killed at the front,6 and with it a war poem, “October” (Pratt 1989, 1:43). In December 1918, Goodyear was gazetted for bravery and Pratt began to write the ironically titled “Clay” (Pratt 1989, 2:305–56), a verse play which draws both on his Newfoundland childhood and on the war in progress. The poem begins on “A Coast” (Pratt 1989, 1:101–2), clearly set in Newfoundland, but then moves on to “Scenes from Afar (A Battlefield)” (Pratt 1989, 1:104–6). Included is the following stanza from “Before an Altar (After Gueudecourt)” (Pratt 1989, 1:110), a battle where many Newfoundlanders, including Hedley Goodyear’s brother, Ray, were killed: Blurred is the rubric now, And shadowy the token, When blood is on the brow, And the frail body broken. (Pratt 1989, 1:110) In this stanza, which alludes to Holy Communion at Shrovetide, usually carrying the promise of Easter resurrection, the “frail body broken” is not Christ’s but that of a representative young Newfoundlander. His death in battle undercuts the Christian service and renders meaningless the communion tokens of wine and wafer.

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Unlike many of his contemporaries, Pratt is realistic in his description of the battlefield. Not only was he influenced by the new realism in subject and diction of poets like John Masefield and Carl Sandburg7 but also from sources closer at hand, including returned soldiers and his brother Arthur. This is Pratt’s description of the burial of dead soldiers on the battle-field in “Clay”: … pallid faces, blue strained lips, And eyes that stared, amazed, through open lids That had no time to shut – that looked and asked But one eternal question. Then the moon Grew dimmer as the mist increased, and showed – In hazy outlines hurrying forms that moved In twos and threes, from place to place, and laid Upon the stretchers, one by one, the dead, Torn, jagged, mud-smeared and crumpled, carrying them To rows of damp deep trenches newly-dug, Where they were placed in groups of eight or ten, In order, side by side, and face to face – And the moon shone full again – the harvest-moon. (1989, 2:333) This passage is in strong contrast to the quintessential Canadian war poem, John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields” (1915), with its chivalric cry: “To you from failing hands we throw / The torch; be yours to hold it high” (1919, 3). Pratt’s originality is apparent; he evokes the horror and pity of war at much the same time as did the British war poets. What first grips his imagination is why such slaughter should occur, coupled with a Hardyesque awareness of the terrible ironies involved: not only does man slaughter brother man but the harvest moon appears before springtime.8 I think it probable that Pratt absorbed the specifics of battle from the war paintings, sketches, and photographs of his good friend Frederick Varley. For Varley, the primary question is “For What?” For Pratt, an ordained Methodist minister, “the one eternal question” is “Why?” If there is a good God, why does he allow evil? This question is introduced in a subsequent section of the verse drama, “Clay”: What Shepherd, this, that so attends his flocks, As leads them out into the wilderness, … Named you him Father? God? No. Rather a Potter with some clay. (Pratt 1989, 2:324–5)

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In 1919, Varley had gone to Europe as a war artist, where he photographed and sketched the battlefields; returning to Canada in August 1919, he exhibited at the Arts and Letters Club, where Pratt was a member. Pratt was working on “Clay” (with its war section) in 1919–20 when Varley was working on his Great War paintings from sketches and photographs: both men focused on the dead Canadian soldiers with sensitivity and horror. Viola Pratt recalls that her husband regularly visited the studios of close artist friends like Varley and Lawren Harris to talk about art (1976). At Varley’s studio, Pratt would have likely seen Varley’s The Dead (echoed in the diction of Pratt’s poem), For What? (see the first colour plate), The Sunken Road, Dead Soldier, and Shelled Graveyard – many focusing on the contorted bodies of the dead soldiers. The connections between Pratt and Varley remained close: after Varley was demobilized and ran into financial difficulties in 1922–23, Pratt took a number of his paintings and attempted to sell them to raise money for the artist. In 1923, when Pratt published sections of “Clay” in Newfoundland Verse, Varley provided cover design, endpapers, frontispiece and other “decorations” for the book – all executed with details that indicate he knew Pratt’s poems well. Varley’s paintings may have struck a vibrating chord in Pratt’s sensibility, and the heaped bodies in his paintings may have evoked Pratt’s adolescent memories of the bodies of dead sealers heaped on a ship’s deck in 1898 at the time of the ss Greenland sealing disaster.9 In fact, it is the omnipresence of death that generates many of Pratt’s best war poems, several of which are collected in Still Life and Other Verse (1943). For example, in “Come Away, Death,” a poem written at the start of the Second World War, a series of allusions with secondary references argues that despite man’s attempts at disguise, it is a personified Death that remains the generating, or constant, principle in human life: Willy-nilly, he comes or goes, with the clown’s logic, Comic in epitaph, tragic in epithalamium, And unseduced by any mused rhyme. However blow the winds over the pollen, Whatever the course of the garden variables, He remains constant, Ever flowering from the poppy seeds. (Pratt 1989, 2:111) Pratt’s metaphors show that the priests cannot pronounce the last rites over the bodies of the young soldiers before priests and soldiers are pulverized by the tanks and their bodies ground into the mud: “The paternosters of his priests, / Committing clay to clay, / Have rattled in their throats / Under the

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gride of his traction tread” (1989, 2:112). These later Second World War poems turn an apprehensive eye towards the new technology of submarines and airplanes that make killing so efficient. With simple but emotional metaphors in “The Submarine,” Pratt says that in times of war, man and the machines that he controls become like beasts; thus, the allied troopships are “fat” mammals and the subs that hunt them are “Tiger Sharks” (1989, 2:30–5). The implication is that man, the supposed paragon of evolutionary progress, can very easily revert to a primitive state. Pratt had earlier parodied the First World War in an allegory, “The Great Feud,” in which the struggle for “the boundary strip” is between an ape and a dinosaur (1989, 1:168–203), and his continuing criticism of war is clear in a number of his later war poems, such as “Autopsy on a Sadist” (1943, 3), “Missing: Believed Dead: Returned” (1943, 14), and “The Radio in the Ivory Tower” (1943, 17–21), from Still Life and Other Verse. F.R. Scott, who grew up on Victorian chivalric poetry, could recite by heart Tennyson’s “Sir Galahad” and, later, Rupert Brooke’s “The Soldier:” If I should die, think only this of me: That there’s some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England. There shall be In that rich earth a richer dust concealed. (Brooke 1915, 111) As soon as he turned eighteen, Scott tried fruitlessly to enlist in the First World War. He was turned down on five occasions because he had lost an eye while experimenting with gunpowder in emulation of his brothers at the front. Later, at Oxford in 1920, he hung a portrait of Sir Galahad in his digs and worried in his diary whether he, like Brooke, would achieve “greatness” (Scott 1921). Concurrently, his Christian idealism was channeled into Fabian socialism. These attitudes were characteristic of the period and were intensified in Scott’s case when he helped type his father’s eulogistic war memoir, The Great War as I Saw It (1922). Archdeacon F.G. Scott, a poet and priest, had been the beloved padre of the Canadian First Division: one of his best-known war poems was “Knighthood.”10 However, in 1922, Scott accompanied his father to the battlefields of France and the grave of his brother Harry. There the young Scott lost much of his enthusiasm for war, writing in his diary that he would spend the rest of his life “fighting those things that make war possible” (Scott 1922). By the mid-twenties, he recalled: “there was a great revulsion against the way the war was conducted, its useless slaughter” (13 September 1976). It was at this point that Scott met J.S. Woodsworth and found a new creed in the latter’s Christian socialism. Scott also abandoned

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the Victorian poets for the moderns, especially T.S. Eliot and The Waste Land. He recalled feeling that civilization was crumbling in the sense of spiritual collapse and that it was now necessary to go to the modern poets to remake his world (Scott 20 July 1978). By the early 1930s, Scott had read Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (Im Westen nichts Neues; 1929), Henri Barbusse’s Under Fire: The Story of a Squad (Le Feu; 1917), and Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That (1929). Henceforth he would believe that he had always been opposed to war. Scott wanted to criticize Canada’s social order, especially the causes of war and of the depression, but as a young professor in the Faculty of Law at McGill he was politically powerless (6 June 1977). As a result, satiric verse and polemical articles became his weapons of choice.11 In 1933, he wrote an article on contemporary poetry declaring that “the orthodox was wrong” and gave as his chief example the fact that in politics the old imperialism had led 60,000 young Canadians to their deaths on the battlefields of France, deaths sanctioned by Christian teaching (Scott 1931, 297). His 1930s social criticism was now reflected in squibs like “Teleological” (Scott 1981, 250), which satirized his father’s religious world view, and “Lest We Forget,” which satirized Imperial and Canadian war policy: The British troops at the Dardenelles Were blown to bits by British shells Sold to the Turks by Vickers. And many a brave Canadian youth Will shed his blood on foreign shores, And die for Democracy, Freedom, Truth, With his body full of Canadian ores, Canadian nickel, lead, and scrap, Sold to the German, sold to the Jap, With Capital watching the tickers. (Scott 1981, 95) By 1939 Scott, like Woodsworth, was a staunch pacifist. In his legal essays, he urged that Canada should have the constitutional right to decide whether it would go to war when England did (Scott 1977, 109–11). He was also convinced that this was another European war and he wanted Canada to stay out; he thought conscription would be inevitable and that it would rupture relations between French and English. The Ottawa monument to the war dead had been dedicated just three months prior to the outbreak of the Second World War, and Scott now looked at it with new eyes. He saw the Canadian troops as “plough horses” and the monument as “typifying Canada in World War One. I only saw the symbolism of the totally subor-

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dinate slogging role of the Canadians dragging huge guns” (Scott 30 Nov. – 1 Dec. 1977). Scott had accepted an invitation to teach at Harvard in 1940–41 and he was there during the Battle of Britain, when England was bombed every night. The thought that England might fall – the green and lovely England of his Oxford days – generated great anxiety because Scott felt, belatedly, that he had been wrong. This was not just a European war but one which put Western civilization in jeopardy. Scott’s sense of inner conflict generated a poem of the same name: When I see the falling bombs Then I see defended homes. Men above and men below Die to save the good they know. (1981, 97) In early November 1941, Scott’s equilibrium was somewhat restored when he read an article by John Strachey in The New Statesman and Nation about the search for survivors in the bombed London rubble. On one woman’s wrist was a metal disc identifying her as Mrs Miller.12 In a poem called “Recovery,” Scott transformed this event into a symbol of the intellectual’s search for meaning during the Second World War: Now thought seeks shelter, lest the heart melt In the iron rain, the brain bends Under the bombs of news. Fearfully the mind’s hands dig In the débris of thought, for the lovely body of faith. Is she alive after this shock, does she yet breathe? O say that she lives, she is ours, imperishable, Say that the crypt stood. (1981, 105) The body of Strachey’s Mrs Miller becomes “the lovely body of faith” (Scott 1981, 105), and the poem recapitulates the political events of the 1930s – the betrayal of democracy in Spain, Czechoslovakia, and at Munich. Now that the world was in ruins, on what could he build? The association of Mrs Miller with “faith” (Scott 1981, 105), the explicit reference to hope, and the poem’s implicit reference to love all suggest the trilogy of faith, hope, and charity found in 1 Corinthians 13. Increasingly, Scott attempted to explicate the circumstances under which a Christian and a democrat might support war. The democratic attitude towards conflict, he wrote, “is found in the Christian doctrine of loving your

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enemies and doing good to those who hate you”13 (Djwa 1987, 197). Subsequently, he wrote a poem called “Armageddon” that embodied a new psychological insight: “This foe we fight is half of our own self. / He aims our gunsight as we shoot him down” (Scott 1981, 103). In the opening metaphors of this poem, Scott reports the political and military events of 1940: Suddenly the last boundary broke And every land was used by somebody else. The closed world swarmed with a throng of roads Where caterpillars span a thread of our blood And sewed our flags into the history-quilt. (Scott 1981, 102) But, as the poem “Flux” indicates, Scott was beginning to find a new direction. He rejected one solution to the cataclysm of the Second World War, that of becoming “refugees of the mind,” by suggesting: “On the piled ox-cart of tradition; make for the rear. / This self-imprisonment obstructs the roads / And only the mobile heart allows escape” (Scott 1981, 99). Scott’s values are those of human feeling and brotherhood, and his program for political action in “Flux” rests with conscience expressed as insight: And if the ultimate I, the inner mind, The only shelter proof against attack, Sustain these days, carry this banner out To the clumsy dawn: a green seed Lies on the ground, under a leafless tree. (Scott 1981, 99) His hopes for war recovery and eventual peace are epitomized by “a mobile heart” and an Audenesque “green seed” (Scott 1981, 99). The war poems that Scott absorbed in the 1920s and wrote in the 1940s remained integral to his sensibility. In the 1970s, when troubled about Quebec politics and its relation to the larger problems of a united Canada, Scott was known to declaim: If I should die, think only this of me: That there’s some corner of a foreign field That is for ever Canada.14 The youngest of my three poets, P.K Page, born in 1916, also lived a life bracketed by war. Her father, brother, and future husband, Arthur Irwin, had all seen active service. Her father, Lionel F. Page, enlisted with the First Canadian Expeditionary Force during the First World War and, while at the front,

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sent home some verses for his infant daughter which his wife, Rose, illustrated and then bound together as P.K. Page’s first poetry book. Lionel Page returned to Canada as a war hero, and in 1921 he joined the permanent army; he died in harness in 1944 as Commander-in-Chief of Atlantic Command. When the Second World War began, P.K. Page was living in Rothesay, New Brunswick. The outbreak of war caught her by surprise as she was sailing with a group of friends on the Kennebecasis River. A radio program was interrupted to announce that war had started. Everyone was suddenly sobered, recognizing that the world that they knew had changed (Page 2001). Some of the group began to do what they could for the war effort; others immediately enlisted. A retrospective alter-ego for some aspects of Page’s pre-war self is found in the poem “Cullen,” where she takes on the persona of a young man searching for meaning; finally, in disgust, he enlists, as did many young Canadians of the 1930s: Cullen evacuated overnight, he knew no other region to explore; discovered it was nineteen thirty-nine and volunteered at once and went to war wondering what on earth he was fighting for. He knew there was a reason but couldn’t find it and marched to battle half an inch behind it. (Page 1997, 1:127–9) Page contributed to the war effort by writing plays and acting in a theatre group which toured New Brunswick to make money for an English Spitfire fund. In March 1940, she wrote to Erica Deichmann, the St John potter, confiding that she hoped to go overseas to help the war effort: “Peg [Pickersgill] and I start our motor mechanics course on Friday. If only that will put me in a position to get over to England I shall be a happy girl. I am terribly eager to get over” (Page 1940). But in June 1940, her father was transferred to England to be in charge of the Canadian Base Units. He worried about his wife during his absence and asked his daughter to stay at home (Lionel Page 1940). Page spent the next year working in the book section of a St John department store and writing a novel (2 Nov. 1997). However, the following year, when her father returned to Canada, he read her manuscript, later published as The Sun and the Moon, recognized her talent and helped her leave the Maritimes for Montreal where she could practice her craft. In Montreal, Page was invited to join the Preview group of poets that included, among others, Patrick Anderson, F.R. Scott, and Neufville Shaw. Anderson was a communist, Scott a socialist, and all the other members, soon to include Page, were highly politicized. Moreover, this poetry “little

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mag” was saturated with war (Page 1996). Page reported on the situation of women in offices during wartime, and argued that the Canadian poet should stop writing about trilliums and springtime “and hitch-hike to the towns … [where] he may find his age and consequently his belief (1942, 8). Page’s own war poems reflect personal experience. Her younger brother, Michael, was serving in the navy, facing enemy subs in the St Lawrence, and her father would soon be army commander in Halifax, the hub of Canada’s war effort. In a poem called “Generation” she speaks of the younger generation, like herself, who were born between two world wars: Schooled in the rubber bath, promoted to scooter early, to evade and dart; learning our numbers adequately … and treading the treacherous tightrope of unbelieved religion, we reached the dreadful opacity of adolescence. (Page 1997, 1:125) This generation took no definite shape until the mid-1930s of which she wrote, “Tragically, Spain was our spade” (Page 1997, 1:125). It was the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War that forced some of this generation to reject the past and, especially, Chamberlain’s attempts at compromise. Accepting their situation for what it was, they found love and conviction: Now we touch continents with our little fingers, swim distant seas and walk on foreign streets wearing crash helmets of permanent beliefs. (Page 1997, 1:125–6) By the summer of 1942, Page had taken a job with Allied War Supplies as a filing clerk, where she was in charge of blueprints and specifications for small arms manufacturers. The “boss” was unpleasant to his staff (including Page) and when the typists felt especially harassed they would shelter in the vault where Page was filing papers. Her poem, “The Stenographers,” emerges from this experience. The poem has a detached, Eliot-like narrator who observes rather than participates, thus transcending the personal situation of

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women left behind while men go to war. This is not a war poem in the traditional sense, but Page’s diction is militaristic: After the brief bivouac of Sunday, their eyes, in the forced march of Monday to Saturday, hoist the white flag, flutter in the snow-storm of paper, haul it down and crack in the mid-sun of temper. (Page 1997, 1:102–3) Stanza one sets the situation, the brief rest or “bivouac” of the weekend, followed by the forced march of the work-week. The whites of the eyes of the young women are seen as analogous to troops on a forced march – tired and weary, they are ready to raise the white flag but retreat when faced with force. Thoughts of happier days and reprieve with the ambiguous “boyfriends of blood” are brief interludes. The poem builds to a powerful weeping scene in stanza seven where “Their beds are their oceans – salt water of weeping,” and climaxes with the endless marathon which is their lives, suggesting that they too are engaged in a kind of war, perilously close to madness: In their eyes I have seen the pin men of madness in marathon trim race around the track of the stadium pupil. (Page 1997, 1:102–3) In this context, the concluding allusion to Marathon resonates as the scene of a great historic battle between the Greeks and the Persians. Page has written a number of fine poems about wartime including “Typist” (1997, 1:103), “Waking” (1997 1:134), “Some, They are Fearless” (“Fear, the habitué,” 1997 1:138), “Summer Resort” (1997 1:108), “Ship Building Office” (“Fixing eight sets of everything angrily upon paper,” 1997 1:104), “Italian Prisoners of War” (1997 1:139), and “Unable to Hate or Love” (1997 1:141). Representative is an early Page poem, first called “Paradox,” sometimes named “Poem in Wartime.” It is a sober, gentle poem, which reminds us of the necessity, in times of war, to take a quiet breath before facing the tragic realities: Let us by paradox choose a Catholic close for innocence … Let us stand together then till the cool evening …

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let us stand here close, for death is common as grass beyond an ocean, and, with all Europe pricking in our eyes, suddenly remember Guernica and be gone. (Page 1997, 1:135) What then can be concluded from this discussion of three Canadian war poets? E.J. Pratt, F.R. Scott, and P.K. Page all bear eloquent witness to wars that they “had never fought in nor saw”15 yet which impacted directly upon their personal lives and on Canada as a nation. Pratt, especially, has been undervalued as a war poet: his irony, realism, and depiction of the savagery of the First and Second World Wars, recognized in his lifetime, have been overlooked in the recent past. Scott’s war poetry, somewhat derivative of that of W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender, is less impressive than his political and social activism; nonetheless it bears witness to the impact of two world wars on a Canadian intellectual attempting to understand both the reasons for war and the psychology of combatants. The latter emerges as an externalization of an inner psychological struggle: “The foe we fight is half our own self” (1981, 103). And for both Scott and Page, socialist values offer hope for the future. Page – representative of her “Generation” (Page 1997, 1:125), wedged as it was between two world wars – writes a more personal and gender-inflected poetry. In Page’s poems, war also defines the situation of women: their frenetic lives on the home front are depicted as a parallel war.

4 Metaphor, Metalepsis, and the Colonial Library: Deconstructing Inyenzi and Ubuhake Metaphors in Gil Courtemanche’s A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali and Julien Pierce’s Speak, Rwanda l au r e n ly d i c

Since the 1994 itsembabatutsi (genocide against the Tutsi1), in which over 800,000 Rwandans were murdered,2 cultural discourses around the world and in all media have frequently reiterated the Kinyarwanda metaphor inyenzi (cockroaches). Although this trope can be traced to 1960s Rwanda – when the pro-Tutsi fpr (Front patriotique rwandais-Rwandan Patriotic Front) employed it as a political self-designation3 – global cultural discourses on the Rwandan Genocide focus almost exclusively on “inyenzi” as wielded by the rtlm (Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines) and Kangura (Wake Up) to incite violence. Often incorporating international human rights concerns, these cultural discourses reiterate the cockroach metaphor to show genocidal intent – not unlike its use in legal testimony at gacaca courts and the ictr (International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda).4 When framed as a culturally-specific metaphor, inyenzi sometimes characterizes the itsembabatutsi as historically exceptional.5 In order to challenge this de-historicizing turn, I will link inyenzi’s development to the ways in which Rwandan political rhetoric has metaphoricized pre-colonial institutions and gendered practices. Because all genocides depend on dehumanizing rhetoric, or what Josias Semujanga terms “discourses of otherness,”6 exploring the often elliptical relationships among inyenzi and

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pre-colonial institutions serves not only to historicize the Rwandan Genocide, but also to illuminate what is at stake when global cultural discourses reproduce genocidal tropes. Although spatial constraints here allow only for a truncated account of key metaphors in Rwandan political rhetoric, this abbreviated history should suffice to contextualize Gil Courtemanche’s and Julien Pierce’s fictional uses of the cockroach metaphor.7 Once situated historically, comparative analysis of each author’s use of inyenzi raises important questions about how and why the international appropriation of genocidal metaphors produces gendered artifacts of ethnic violence. At its worst, the cockroach metaphor codifies the erroneous but widespread perception of the Rwandan Genocide as a unique outpouring of unimaginable hatred and/or tribal animosity. For example, Terry George’s well-known 2004 film, Hotel Rwanda, begins with a fictionalized rtlm broadcast: “The Tutsi were collaborators for the Belgian colonists, they stole our Hutu land, they whipped us. Now they have come back, these Tutsi rebels. They are cockroaches. They are murderers. Rwanda is our Hutu land. We are the majority. They are a minority of traitors and invaders. We will squash the infestation” (my emphasis). This iteration of the cockroach metaphor, voiced over a black screen, simultaneously demonstrates and decontextualizes genocidal intent. Linking the black screen to the subsequent shot of a busy Kigali marketplace, the inyenzi metaphor becomes unmoored from the decades of real (and, as we shall see, gendered) experiences that shaped the Rwandan Genocide. Yet, even when global cultural production dehistoricizes the cockroach metaphor, its adaptation metaleptically invokes Rwandan historiography. Metalepsis (transumptio) – defined classically by Quintilian as “a transition from one trope to another”8 – variously highlights or veils inyenzi’s references to other politically significant metaphors in Rwandan historiography. According to Gérard Genette, metalepsis transgresses boundaries among narrative levels, potentially blurring history and fiction while producing displacements that assert authorship.9 The metaleptic function of inyenzi therefore allows for multiple historical rewritings. In global cultural discourses on the Rwandan Genocide – as in Rwandan labor practice, gender performance, and (post)colonial politics – the cockroach metaphor uses metalepsis to revisit (and re-author) the colonial library: the mythico-history10 associated with European colonialism in East Africa. Through metalepsis, genocidal discourse foregrounds gendered historical experiences even as it emphasizes racialized identifications. Metalepsis stipulates the relationship between genocidal discourse and the (pre)colonial social institutions that both Belgian historiographers and mid-

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century Rwandan politicians fetishized. Most notably, metalepsis falsely separates from or links the cockroach metaphor to ubuhake – a private contract between a male patron (shebuja), who provides one or more cows (ingabane) to a male client (mugaragu), who in turn renders his services by caring for the cows and cultivating the land. Ubuhake metaphors, which have come to epitomize unequal power relationships among Tutsi men (as patrons) and Hutu men (as clients), articulate a gendered discourse of otherness in the political rhetoric of postcolonial Rwanda. Changing perceptions of ubuhake have shaped postcolonial knowledge production of Hutu and Tutsi categories. After ubuhake was outlawed in 1954, it continued to metaphoricize Hutu-Tutsi power relations in political discourse – especially after the 1957 Manifeste des Bahutu (The Hutu Manifesto) explicitly linked Hutu oppression to ubuhake.11 It follows that ubuhake has been understood variously as recommandation, or council, during the colonial period; servage pastoral, or pastoral servitude, during Kayibanda’s First Republic (1961–73); and clientélisme, or clientship, during Habyarimana’s Second Republic (1973–94). Each of these three historical interpretations renders ubuhake as a metaphor for inequality between the (male) Hutu client (umugaragu) and the (male) Tutsi patron (shebuja).12 The concurrent development of ubuhake and inyenzi metaphors in (post)colonial Rwandan political discourse established a metaleptic relationship between these tropes, creating a discursive space for accessing and authoring the colonial library. Colonialists, individuals seeking to gain from colonial cooperation, and (post)colonial Rwandan politicians constructed ubuhake as an inherently Tutsi institution, locating evidence of racialized political power in the Tutsi role of patron (on which the Hutu client depends). Colonial historiographers13 and diverse Rwandan historical actors have used ubuhake metaphors to redefine Hutu and Tutsi categories. In the early twentieth century, colonial historiography foregrounded ubuhake, likening it to European feudalism. This emphasis, according to Catharine and David Newbury, often imagined ubuhake as a “social glue” that “gave the appearance of political homogeneity to Rwandan culture” and its social categories.14 Various historical actors, by re-imagining socio-political identifications in Rigeri IV Rwabugiri’s pre-colonial kingdom15 (c. 1860–95), have redefined Hutu and Tutsi categories, as well as ubuhake, to extend diverse powerseeking agendas. Early colonial historiography – and, after 1959, the discourse of parmehutu (Parti du mouvement pour l’émancipation Hutu or Party of the Movement for Hutu Emancipation)16 – conflated Rwabugiri’s system of triple chieftaincy17 with a dualistic understanding of Hutu and Tutsi (effectively

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eliminating Twa from political discourse): land chiefs were Hutu; livestock chiefs were Tutsi; and army chiefs were Tutsi or Hutu. Colonial administrators, functionaries, and historians located “evidence” of Tutsi superiority in this system, and extended their binary interpretations of “triple chieftaincy” to ubuhake, wherein they equated patronship with Tutsi power.18 Although ubuhake had been prohibited in 195419 and was obsolete by the time that parmehutu invoked it metaphorically in the 1957 Manifeste des Bahutu, it became an anachronistic metaphor for social injustice. Ubuhake metaphoricizes a hierarchical power relationship in which each Tutsi is likened to a shebuja and each Hutu is likened to the umuragugu. The Manifeste’s authors directly attribute inequity to ubuhake, which – from their perspective – enables the Tutsi (whom they quantify as fourteen percent of the population) to rule the Hutu (the majority): “La situation actuelle provient en grande partie de l’état créé par l’ancienne structure politico-sociale du Ruanda, en particulier le buhake, et de l’application à fond et généralisée de l’administration indirecte” (1); “The current situation arose to a great extent from the state created by Rwanda’s ancient socio-political structure – in particular ubuhake and its thorough and generalized application by the indirect administration.20 The Manifeste suggests that ubuhake was always already problematic, but became more so as the colonial administration began regulating it and instituted uburetwa (forced labor, or akazi). Ubuhake became increasingly oppressive as the colonial administration eliminated other indigenous Rwandan social institutions without replacing them with anything. Praising the establishment of “syndicalisme” (tradeunionism), the Manifeste glorifies an emerging, strong middle class – by which it means Hutu with a modest cash income independent of subsistence agriculture. In short, the Manifeste blames social inequity on voluntary Tutsi complicity in Belgian-regulated ubuhake before the 1950s. The Manifeste purports to seek the emancipation of all Rwanda, but arguably only advocates male Hutu power. Ubuhake metaphors – engaging a mythico-history rooted in nineteenth-century Rwanda – remained staunchly masculine; moreover, they became increasingly entrenched in political discourse, further diminishing the perceived legacy of Belgian colonial and Tutsi political power.21 Rwandan history textbooks uniformly cite 1 November 1959 as the beginning of the “Hutu Revolution,” when members of unar and parmehutu began killing, pillaging, and hunting powerful Tutsi chiefs.22 This increasingly hostile climate and political massacres forced numerous Tutsi into exile in Uganda and Tanzania. As the inyenzi movement began growing abroad, Radio Rwanda began broadcasting parmehutu rhetoric – and its ubuhake metaphors – to Burundi

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and to Hutu communities living in Kivu.23 This Hutu discourse valorized the 1959 Revolution – or, as Semujanga calls it, “la jacquerie populaire de 1959” (the 1959 peasant revolt) – and denounced ubuhake as just “une histoire officielle, épique, et légendaire” (an official, epic, and legendary history); at the same time, the government of the day prohibited popular songs mentioning ubuhake.24 The National Assembly also drafted a bill to enforce the use of the hoe over the traditional inkwano used in the marriage contract.25 By consciously developing agrarian symbols over pastoral ones, the government nonetheless emphasized the importance of ubuhake metaphors. Militant discourse suggested all Tutsi had been complicit in the colonial administration, because they exploited and impoverished Hutu through ubuhake. As ubuhake accumulated metaphoric functions in political discourse, it constantly incorporated – whether implicitly or explicitly – quotidian use of bovine characteristics, activities, and products (milk, butter) as established metaphors in Kinyarwanda. In short, the ubuhake metaphor emphasized an order of symbolic significations and socio-economic relations, representing a political domain influenced but not determined by Belgian colonialism. Militant parmehutu discourse did not appropriate the inyenzi metaphor until the fpr became an imminent threat to the Second Republic (after the 1987 coup in Burundi).26 When the fpr invaded Rwanda from Uganda on 30 September 1990, the October War further radicalized Hutu extremism, as political discourse associated all fpr actions with all Tutsi. Suddenly, all Tutsi were inyenzi. Now disconnected from its origins in Tutsi military activity, the metaphor became central to the pro-Hutu discourse of otherness that once relied explicitly on ubuhake metaphors. As survivor Esther Mujawayo recalls,27 the inyenzi metaphor was proliferating by autumn 1990. Even as mrnd discourse no longer recognized Tutsi humanity, its rhetoric gendered inyenzi with human sexual characteristics, labor practices, and marriage rights. Thus, the media’s use of inyenzi aroused not only “ethnic hatred,” but also, frequently, misogyny.28 In 1990, Hasan Ngeze, the founder of the Hutu paper Kangura (Wake Up), published “The Ten Commandments,” which essentialized and scapegoated women. For example, intermarriage is prohibited for far members, and strongly discouraged for everyone else, and Hutu-Hutu marriages are presented as the ideal. Ngeze implied that intermarriage must be forbidden because Tutsi women are domestic spies: foreign “cockroaches” who have infiltrated the country. Contrary to the preexisting Hamitic-inflected discourse on Tutsi beauty, Ngeze claims that Hutu women make better wives. In short, this propaganda frames gendered practices, such as labor and marriage, as central to Hutu power.

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Kangura and rtlm rhetoric contributed significantly to widespread practices of gendered violence during the Rwandan Genocide. In what popularly became known as the “Media Case,”29 discourse was identified as an instrument of genocidal violence, and drew the attention of the international community about the consequences of the inyenzi metaphor. Factual findings in the case included, for example, that a question on the cover of Kangura No. 26 – “What weapons shall we use to conquer the Inyenzi once and for all?” – was answered by the juxtaposed image of a machete.30 Certainly, the “Media Case” established the inyenzi metaphor in the contemporary political imaginary, informing multiple representations of the Rwandan Genocide. Although the “Media Case” recognized that the inyenzi metaphor targeted women in particular ways, characterizing Tutsi women as “seductive enemy agents,” its findings by and large subordinated gender to “ethnicity.”31 Nevertheless, because of the metaleptic relationship between ubuhake and inyenzi, genocidal discourse foregrounded gender even as it emphasized race, by sexualizing Tutsi women as inaccessible but beautiful traitors and spies. Various human rights reports reinforced this rhetoric, as Ngwarsungu Chiwengo notes, by describing Tutsi women as targets because of their ethnicity.32 Diverse ictr transcripts, human rights publications, and survivors’ testimonio show that gendered violence was pervasive during the 1994 genocide.33 Testimony in the “Media Case” also records that a few women, including Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, then Minister for Women’s Affairs, encouraged Hutu men to rape Tutsi women. But news media, legal discourse, and human rights publications often reproduce genocidal discourse by representing rapes as perpetrated against what often was described as an “ethnic” group. Chiwengo articulates precisely the resulting problems of such representations by distinguishing between the incidental rape of non-Tutsis and the deliberate dehumanization and rape of Tutsis. Chiwengo suggests that the discourse of Tutsi women’s “inaccessibility” aroused Hutu men’s desire by prohibiting access to women whom genocidal discourse categorized as already inaccessible. Through inyenzi’s metalepsis, Tutsi women’s “inaccessibility” came to symbolize Hutu oppression as encoded in ubuhake metaphors. The construction of female Tutsi “inaccessibility” suggests the investment of the male patron’s power in female Tutsi bodies, which are objectified as artifacts of the uneven Hutu-Tutsi relations that ubuhake now symbolizes. When emphasizing the Tutsiness of female survivors, ngo documents (like Nowrojee’s Shattered Lives) further objectify women’s bodies as artifacts of “ethnic violence” and targets of the cockroach metaphor.

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A S U N DAY B Y T H E P O O L I N K I G A L I

Gil Courtemanche characterizes his Un dimanche à la piscine à Kigali (A Sunday by the Pool in Kigali) as an eyewitness report, although he was not in Rwanda during the genocide.34 The protagonist, Québécois journalist Bernard Valcourt, is the author’s fictional counterpart and the novel’s primary witness, who observes the genocide from the Hôtel des Mille-Collines. Courtemanche projects an emotional truth onto Valcourt’s invented testimony, dismissing potentially contradictory testimony as irrelevant to his creative project.35 Furthermore, this literary sleight of hand frees Courtemanche to imagine “l’Afrique et les Africains qu’il prétend connaître” (Africa and the Africans he pretends to know).36 Courtemanche dedicates the fictional narrative to his (invented) “Rwandan friends,” and, in particular, Gentille, Valcourt’s lover (and eventual wife): “J’ai voulu parler en votre nom” (2002, 7); “I have tried to speak for you” (2004, i). Indeed, Valcourt speaks for (and not with) Gentille, depicting their love as a harmonizing (post)colonial encounter.37 Within the story of their love affair, Valcourt reframes Gentille’s life narrative – to which he assigns two beginnings, her birth and her family’s kwihutur – as representative of Rwandan history. Situating Gentille’s inheritance in colonial Ruanda-Urundi, Valcourt characterizes her fate and, by extension, Rwanda’s, as preordained by the colonial library’s fetishization of ubuhake. Problematically, only Valcourt’s love makes Rwandan historiography comprehensible. The narrator mythologizes the Rwandan subject as a mystic, who was incomprehensible to early Belgian colonialists and contemporary aid workers alike. However, Gentille’s grandfather, Kawa, reacts to the very European historical texts that first constructed knowledge of Banyarwanda as “mysterious” people in the “heart of Africa.” He reads Le Ruanda-Urundi, étrange royaume féodal au cœur d’Afrique (Ruanda-Urundi, A Foreign Feudal Kingdom in the Heart of Africa) by Jules Sassereth, “un médecin belge spécialiste des cultures indigènes” (Courtemanche 2002, 32); “a Belgian doctor who was a specialist in indigenous cultures” (Courtemanche 2004, 23). Valcourt assigns responsibility for inequity not to Kawa, but to Sassereth’s text, stressing that European historiography produced massive transformations of Rwandan society and de-emphasized Rwandan agency. In Valcourt’s attempts to answer questions of identity through metalepsis, colonial historiography and its ubuhake metaphors become the primary catalyst to the Rwandan genocide. Kawa encounters the Hamitic myth directly through Sassereth’s text instead of indirectly through the policies of his hill’s burgomaster (as would have been more likely for a wealthy Hutu farmer in the period). Valcourt paraphrases Sassereth’s physiognomy of Hutu and

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Tutsi categories, investing ubuhake with connotative value according to racializing stereotypes of the Hutu farmer and the Tutsi cattle-grazer. While Sassereth’s characterization no doubt contributed to the historical use of ubuhake metaphors in mid-century Rwandan politics, Un dimanche posits a causal relationship between Sassereth’s mythology and Kawa’s choices. Valcourt asserts that Kawa, who encouraged his children to be “chameleons,” “a fondé le Rwanda d’aujourd’hui” (Courtemanche 2002, 217); “invented the Rwanda of today” (Courtemanche 2004, 198). In response to Sassareth’s definition of Hutu and Tutsi as essential categories designating indigeneity and foreignness, agriculture and cattle-keeping, Kawa consults his cousin, an umupfumu (diviner), who foretells that future generations must constantly “changer de peau comme les serpents … sinon ils souffriront d’être ce qu’ils sont” (Courtemanche 2002, 37); “change their skins like snakes … otherwise they will suffer from being what they are” (Courtemanche 2004, 27). Since patrilineal descent determines a child’s social category, marriage intervenes directly in negotiations between “what one is not” and “what one is.” Valcourt concludes that Kawa’s “filles n’auraient qu’à épouser des Tutsis pour que leurs enfants fassent partie de la race choisie par les dieux et adulée par les Blancs” (Courtemanche 2002, 38); “Kawa’s daughters would only need to marry Tutsis for their children to be part of the race chosen by the gods and admired by Whites” (Courtemanche 2004, 27). Valcourt imagines that he receives this undesired inheritance when he marries Gentille. This bequest positions Valcourt, like Sassereth before him, as a writer of Rwandan historiography. He becomes “responsible” for knowing and telling Kawa’s story. This discourse of responsibility, while cloaked in human rights rhetoric, reproduces Belgian self-justifications for colonial occupation in Rwanda. As the novel’s historiography grows from Valcourt’s relationship to Gentille, what distinguishes the Rwandan genocide in Valcourt’s telling is sexual violence. Valcourt assigns himself the task of telling women’s stories, dissecting the processes by which survivors of sexual violence produce testimony. His interest, as a writer, is in the women’s language: a “presque clinique” mixture of “des mots concrets” and “détails qui donnaient le frisson” (Courtemanche 2002, 254); an “almost clinical” mixture of “concrete words” and “bloodcurdling detail” (Courtemanche 2004, 231). Valcourt – along with the fictionalized counterpart of Rakiya Omaar, the director of African Rights – becomes a collector of Hutu and Tutsi women’s testimonies. Ultimately, Valcourt’s own metaphors organize his understanding of how Gentille experiences the itsembabatutsi. Before April, Gentille asks Valcourt to arm her with the language of European courtly love: “Je veux que tu m’enseignes l’amour des Blancs” (Courtemanche 2002, 83); “I want you to teach me the White people’s love” (Courtemanche 2004, 72). Valcourt insists that

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his love is his own, but answers Gentille with verses by Paul Éluard. These poems, rather than opening a space in the lovers’ dialogue for Gentille’s thoughts, belie Valcourt’s sexual fetishization of Gentille’s body.38 For Valcourt, Gentille embodies what Éluard’s poetry terms “le dur désir de durer” (the enduring desire to endure), assimilating these “European” words into her own language. In a composition book,39 Gentille uses Éluard’s verse to narrate her own captivity: “Je suis fille d’un lac / Qui ne s’est pas terni / … Je ris des viols absurdes / Je suis toujours en fleur” (Courtemanche 2002, 266) “I am the daughter of a lake / Which has not dimmed / … At absurd rapes I laugh / I am still in flower” (Courtemanche 2004, 242). Here, Éluard’s lines refer to the gendered violence of the genocide, but – problematically – the “absurd rapes” at which Gentille “laughs” are real. As Courtemanche writes trauma through surrealist language, he locates the Rwandan Genocide and its metaphors outside any comprehensible history other than Valcourt’s relationship to Gentille. Courtemanche’s final (and problematic) Éluardian moral lesson, exploring the ways in which good and evil overlap, manifests itself through Valcourt’s leaving Gentille (as she requests). He does not, however, leave Rwanda, where he takes the inheritance of Kawa’s hill seriously, attending the gacaca to hear women’s testimony. Rather than mitigating the power of genocidal metaphors through romance, Valcourt introduces new bestializing and sexualizing metaphors that interact with inyenzi and ubuhake metaphors to produce new narratives of dehumanization.

julien pierce’s

S P E A K , RWA N DA

Ten fictional Rwandan characters narrate the thirty-seven chapters of Julien Pierce’s Speak, Rwanda.40 As Pierce’s title suggests, the novel implores the Rwanda of international news media to speak its stories through fictional characters. Recognizing the impossibility of this project, of animating a newspaper into a novel, Pierce does not conceal his dependence on journalistic reports as Courtemanche does. This formal difference sheds light on each writer’s choice of metaphors; where Courtemanche’s figurative language presents Valcourt and the author as testimonial voices, Pierce’s refraction of inyenzi’s metaleptic reference to ubuhake illuminates his own dependence on second-hand information. Although Pierce’s characters share a common engagement with figurative language, each one has a different relationship, determined by self-identification as Hutu or Tutsi, to the inyenzi and ubuhake metaphors. Whereas

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Courtemanche’s Rwandan characters are archetypal because they don’t speak for themselves, Pierce’s are archetypal because they do; they give voice to characters from the colonial library and international news media. Speak, Rwanda attempts to balance the perspectives of five Tutsi and five Hutu character-narrators.41 Although Pierce provides different viewpoints on the same events, the same metaphors, and the same mythico-history, his use of the character-narrators presupposes the existence of “Tutsiness” and “Hutuness” as ethnic (rather than political or socio-economic) categories. To tell the story of itsembabatutsi, the novel begins and ends with chapters focalized by Tutsi characters. Immaculée opens the narrative, saying: “I envy Hutu women one thing. They can eat meat” (Pierce 1999, 3). Pacifique’s reunion with his father, dressed in the costume of a traditional intore dancer, closes it. The introduction and conclusion both employ ubuhake metaphors from what purports to be a “Tutsi perspective” – suggesting that this institution, rather than its metaphoricization in Rwandan political discourse, catalyzed the genocide. Immaculée muses that in her “grandmother’s day a Tutsi woman like [herself] would never find anything to envy in a Hutu” (Pierce 4). She accesses Rwandan history through memories of her grandmother, while her husband conjures Rwabugiri’s court. He romanticizes “the old days” (Pierce 29), longing to possess the power of a shebuja: If a Hutu client missed one payment … my father would end their contract and the Hutu would have no milk to drink or fertilizer for his fields, and no other Tutsi cattleman would enter into a contract with him and his Hutu neighbors would turn away from him for fear my father would see to it their contracts ended too. (Pierce 29) Immaculée’s husband embraces ubuhake for the same reasons the Manifeste condemns it. By contrast, Silas engages ubuhake metaphors only metaleptically through the inyenzi metaphor. Silas rants about keeping “the inyenzi, those greedy cockroaches, in their place” (Pierce 15). He believes that “cockroaches … crawl around and poison the land” (Pierce 37). Drawing upon the agrarian metaphors of the First and Second Republics, Silas fervently maintains that all Tutsi “must be rooted out of the land like poisonous weeds from a garden” (Pierce 36). In the rhetoric of uburetwa/akazi, Silas emphasizes the relationship between inyenzi and his own capacity to do agricultural work. He feverishly anticipates that “some of the land will become empty” after Tutsi have been murdered. Silas brags that he is prepared to plant the land “with people of [his] own choosing who [he] know[s] are loyal majority

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people” (Pierce 36). This assertion has as much to do with seizing land as it does with ubuhake metaphors. The land of Rwanda, according to Silas, will go to the farming people: the stereotypically Hutu agriculturalists. As steadfastly as Silas embraces the Hutu mythico-history of ubuhake, Emmanuel Rubagunga evinces the Tutsi one. Emphasizing the historical connections among Tutsi pastoralism, monarchy, and ubuhake (as charted by colonial European historiography), he boasts that he is proud to be from the Abasinga clan (like Rwabugiri). He notes: “Abasingas believe in honoring contracts, especially the most sacred of contracts: buhake” (Pierce 100). Rubagunga conceptualizes his obligations as Captain Mazimpaka’s bodyguard as a kind of ubuhake. When he is upset, he thinks “of cattle, because thoughts of them are soothing. Few things are more beautiful than a herd of Inyambo going out to pasture” (Pierce 100). In contrast, Prosper, a Hutu farmer, maintains that “remembering 1959 is more pleasant” than recent events (Pierce 191). Both men are attached equally to the labor roles assigned to their social categories by originary myths and ethnicizing discourse. Because Pierce’s characters self-define according to ubuhake, it is always present – metaleptically – in the inyenzi metaphor, as we shall see. Augustin, a young far member and Agathe’s brother, uses the inyenzi metaphor to convince himself that the genocide is pleasant. He embraces his identity as a soldier by delineating far’s use of symbolism and metaphor: “I’ve already killed my share of Tutsi cockroaches and Hutu traitors” (Pierce 90). Occasionally, moments of pain slip through his militant posturing: “I don’t like doing the babies, but it has to be done, because they’re cockroaches and if we don’t get rid of them now they’ll infest the land. The burgomaster says so. rtlmc says so” (Pierce 54). He communicates his absolute deference by forcibly uttering “inyenzi” in situations where he has already revealed (to himself) an awareness of the metaphor’s effects on its human referents. Describing the “[h]undreds, thousands, many thousands” of corpses in the Kagera River “that goes all the way north to Lake Victoria,” Augustin observes: “This is the way Tutsi really are – white, mealy things a lot like insects dead on the surface of a river” (Pierce 98). His transition from metaphor (“cockroaches”) to simile (“like insects”) is poignant, emphasizing his own recognition that people are not insects, as he condones and commits violence. After the genocide, when a journalist asks an interahamwe member if he feels remorse, Silas, the interviewee, contemplates the literal meaning of the word “cockroach,” distancing the metaphor from its real referent: “Why should I feel bad? Do you feel bad when you squash a mosquito, a fly, a cockroach?” (Pierce 272). Similarly, when Silas is being tried in Arusha for what he understands as “genocide, murder, crimes against humanity, and that

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sort of thing” (Pierce 274), he explicitly calls into question the idea of a metaphor’s reference: prosecutor: Did you tell your people to kill cockroaches? silas: Of course. Don’t you kill cockroaches when they infest your house? prosecutor: But you meant Tutsi. silas: I meant cockroaches. You decide for yourself what a cockroach is. (Pierce 276) Silas exploits the connection between denotative and connotative definitions by insisting that the prosecutor assess the metaphor’s metaphoricity and meaning. Because metaphor always requires interpretation and the attribution of meaning, it is itself metamorphic and transformative on the level of event not only for Silas, but also for the Prosecutor. Righteous Agnès, who hides Innocent in her house, considers what inyenzi means: “Through many generations they have learned to think of Tutsi as they think of animals. … They are killing animals when they kill Tutsi” (Pierce 63). When Silas comes to Agnès’ house, looking for “cockroaches hidden by the ibyitso” (Pierce 68), she has intercourse with him – even though he “terrifies and disgusts” her – to protect Innocent. Agnès contends that, more than killing “cockroaches,” Silas is interested in exerting his power sexually. She perceives Silas as desiring recognition for his position in the cdr, which determines his relationship to the inyenzi metaphor. As the metaphor’s referent and Silas’ target, Innocent is raped after being forced to leave Agnès’ house. Pretending to be Hutu when he reaches a roadblock, he enters into a contract as the umugaragu of a Hutu militant. Innocent only learns what this “buhake” signifies after the militant takes him “into the woods and use[s him]” (Pierce 111). Innocent’s rapist enacts the ubuhake metaphor as employed by the Hutu Manifesto; he is the oppressive shebuja, while Innocent is the abused umugaragu. Rather than protection for ingabane, Innocent receives “food and tent and safety” (Pierce 111). In the place of cattle, the “shebuja” claims Innocent’s body in a “contractual” re-interpretation of ubuhake. The persistence of ubuhake metaphors, within and beyond Rwanda, points to ongoing struggles for authorship of African histories. By veiling the metaleptic relationship between ubuhake and inyenzi metaphors, both Pierce and Courtemanche privilege colonial historiography. They inculcate the cockroach metaphor within an Africanist discourse inflected with international human rights norms.

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Distancing inyenzi from the historical context of Rwandan politics reproduces uneven power relations, using Africa not only as a location, but also as a trope that conveys a colonial history and marks a “difference” from the “West.”42 The larger issue here is that when cultural discourses appropriate the inyenzi metaphor in order to condemn genocidal discourse, they can construct a generalizing African alterity that emphasizes identity over politics. The inyenzi metaphor, as a site of metalepsis, makes the discursive features of the Rwandan Genocide, produces semantic and historical displacements, and effects psychic and material violence. This is why unveiling the metaleptic processes of the inyenzi metaphor can reveal the metaphor’s complex relationship to the colonial library, to mid-century Rwandan politics, and also to North American (or European) perceptions of identity. Even when cultural discourses characterize the Rwandan Genocide as historically exceptional, women’s experiences reveal gender to be a site of active negotiation among inyenzi and ubuhake metaphors, opening through metalepsis a space for intervention.

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PART II Bearing Witness to War and Peace: The Vocabularies of Literature, Art, and Photography

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5 The Georgics of War and Peace: Following Claude Simon, Nobel laureate mireille calle-gruber

to try, finally, to control the world by this collection of signs, this alphabet of ‘cherished things’ … Claude Simon1

What place and what roles for literature, what place and roles for art in the cultures of war and peace? I entitle this intervention “The Georgics of War and Peace” because I want to inscribe myself from the very start in the direction pointed out by the wording of the Symposium The Cultures of War and Peace, and take all the consequences. Namely, considering war as one cultural form of that which action is, and not some uncontrolled or uncivilized act; considering also that there are – we know it, idioms show it to us – the art of war, the martial arts, rites and codes of honour, of duty, the strategies, the laws, the conventions, and international charters. Considering also that there is no moralizing dichotomy (evil and good, the bad one and the good one) between war and peace any more than between literature or art and war, and that all these domains are infinitely entangled and interdependent; actually they are the outward sign of highly civilized populations. With the word “Georgics,” which I borrow from Claude Simon’s 1981 novel The Georgics (after the publication of which he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1985), a novel that uses the title of Virgil’s poem Georgica, which celebrates farming, I intend to emphasize a constitutive filiation in occidental thought.2 But I also lay down explicitly the relationship of literary writing with a form and, as regards Claude Simon’s work, with the

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interaction between literary genres which are not classified anymore according to an established hierarchy that gives value to poetry and underestimates the novel, but on the contrary should be considered, in terms of literature and art, as a fertile mixture: a composition. There is another consequence to consider. The reference, not to nature but to art: Claude Simon’s novel alludes to the classical reminiscence of Latin literature but also, from the very start, to an antique sketch, the description of which recalls a work from David d’Angers that underlines the fact that literature is not mimesis, that it does not reproduce the world, does not duplicate it, is not used as a mirror. And vice-versa: that nature is not a mirror-image of human psychology. Or to say it differently, that engaged literature, naturalism, socialist realism, are cultural aesthetic conventions, similar to conceptual art, or science-fiction narrative, or detective story, or autobiographical narrative, to name only a few examples. It would be equally simplistic to attempt a reduction of the world’s narratives to representational dimensions of the human or, conversely, to dissociate them from any sensuality or emotion. Consequently, this short reflection on literature and arts is in line with the ideas of the painter Paul Cézanne and of the critic Élie Faure, who have striven to analyze the modalities, whether confrontational or idyllic, of the relationships between humans at the heart of the world. cézanne: “It is vital to slip sensations in-between the ideas so that they think.”3 élie faure: “As well as love, massacre is an excuse to glorify the form whose calm splendour is visible only to those who have fathomed the indifference of nature in front of massacre and love.”4 A question of form, then: give the “calm splendour” of the form to sensations, give order, poise, and beauty to that which is experienced with a feeling of chaos and inextricability – that would be a way of opening up thinking. Obviously, one remembers here the lesson taught by Baudelaire regarding literature: “there, there is nothing but order and beauty, luxury, calm and sensual pleasure.”5 Writing, in which language and prosody are put to work, strives to mutate abjection and pain in the architectural harmony of the text. It enables the necessary overhang: the appropriate withdrawal so that a balance in the configuration of the components of the language of arts and humanities produces and gives a place6 to a capacity to weigh [peser], and consequently to the faculty of thinking [pensement7] – and of wound-dressing [pansement] (soothing) – and of judging with equanimity.

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It amounts to saying that the feelings of indignation and horror that war generates, or the emotions of euphoria and love aroused by peace (unless it is the other way round, sometimes), are worked through at the very place where the matters of writing and of arts are put to work, and that this working-through engenders something else, of another nature and carrying an unexpected force of displacement. Roland Barthes says it very well: “One cannot work a scream without acknowledging that the message actually concerns much more the work than the scream.”8 One understands how much it matters not to forget that neither the idiom nor the narrative are mimetic, that they have their raw materials, their own resources, their economy, their intrinsic laws, which constitute the space of poetics (text, texture, weaving) where it arrives – where it might arrive: an event, a scriptural, pictorial, and sculptural event, organizer of other objects and other processes of apprehension. Here, the grammars, letters, and colours interact, they trade together, in their reality of things and in a tangible way, without the intervention of an exterior subjectivity. What is at stake here is a subject, subjects put to work and working, being in labour (as we say for parturition). Rilke makes it explicit about Cézanne: “There is comprehension only inside the work.”9 This stand, which gambles on a literature of war and peace written by the rule book, is the opposite extreme of the ideology of engaged literature advocated by Sartre or Camus, ideology which gives the right of way to the message (“something to say”), to psychology and to anthropomorphization – yet those categories remain outside language. Thus, responding to Sartre’s famous affirmation according to which there is no book that “measures up in front of a child dying of starvation,” Claude Simon declares that he refuses to weigh “cadavers and literature on the same scales” (“Pour qui donc écrit Sartre?” 151). Literature, in its literariness and its literality, is a wholly other and unsubstitutable reality: A world which would be, even momentarily, deprived of art (that is to say deprived of this dimension which cannot be reduced to materiality, deprived of these openings on the spaces of the imaginary, the marvellous or the dream, which are always free and inalienable), such a world would simply be as nightmarish as a huge functional and well-organized concentration camp, where the food would be abundant, the work not very painful, the blankets warm, the houses’ roofs watertight, and where humans would not rot anymore than beasts. (Simon “Pour qui donc écrit Sartre?” 152)

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What is said here is fundamental: literature has the power to make us greater than we are; it has the power to say everything, and above all, to say that which we do not know or do not know that we know/how to know – on condition that we give to literature a privileged position. Its power is inalienable, however good its cause or the feelings sustaining it may be. Claude Simon says even more: going against the freedom of means (I do not say freedom of speech), that is to say the potential of art, by limiting the inventiveness of forms, is not only a crime against the Arts and Humanities but also a crime against humanity. In this respect, his analysis of Picasso’s painting, Guernica, is striking. First, he shows how the horror generated by the bombarded city is transmuted into the harmonic effects of the painting: “While his motive force was abomination, as soon as he had seized the brushes, as soon as he had faced himself with his language, language itself took hold of his thought to such an extent that at the end it has been only harmony, architecture, classical reminiscence.” Simon then points out that Picasso has not painted the realism of the bloody bodies “from life” but that he paints rather “statues that some vandals have destroyed” (“Pour qui donc écrit Sartre?” 149): that is to say a crime against civilization, a violation of the humanity of the human. Is the fact that in Guernica there are none of these dark stridencies, none of these quasi-unbearable dissonances which Picasso handles so well and that his “subject” here would have seemed to command not unsettling? On the contrary, the colour shows an extreme sobriety, since it is a camaïeu in white, grey, and black, it is less a symbol of mourning than an element destined to position the painting on this level of unreality which the monochrome recalls. Not a single drop of blood flows. There is not even the palpitation of the wounded flesh, violated and dying, as in the Massacres of Scio: these flames, this quartered warrior, these broken weapons, have the cold paleness of marble. No farmers murdered on a market day, but statues that some vandals have destroyed. (“Pour qui donc écrit Sartre?” 149) The corollary of this side-taking is that the painter paints against the conventional images of representation; that the writer works against the habits of language, the motionless expressions, the ready-to-think in his own idiom. It is a matter of articulation and of arthritis, which gains ground and blocks the mobility of significations. Claude Simon waited twenty years before writing La Route des Flandres, a novel published in 1960, which is first in a series of narratives that he wrote following his experience during the Second World War, the defeat of 1940,

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and his captivity. Mobilized on 27 August 1939, the anniversary of his father’s death on 27 August 1914 during the first weeks of the First World War, sent to the front as a sergeant of cavalry with the 31st Dragoon, in Flanders, to the exact same scene where his father had been sent, Claude Simon is one of the few survivors of his regiment, which was decimated in May 1940 by Rommel’s column of tanks. He is then taken prisoner in Germany, Stalag IV B in Mühlberg an der Elbe to the south of Brandenburg, from which he manages to escape. If it took him twenty years to write about this event, it is because he was searching precisely for a narrative form in the unheardof resources of language, so that the idiom would not suffocate under the ready-made discourses and commemorations, which speak before and in place of the real narrative. Of its veridiction. Actually, this veridiction exists thanks to his remarkable narrative devices: writing does not seek to witness from life as if the cavalryman were there, but through the obsessive and fantasmatic filter of memory, that is to say at the present tense of writing and not as a reconstitution of the past. One observes, among other things, that the construction of the novel forms a triple loop and makes the cavalryman come back three times to the same spot: that is, the description of a horse cadaver – bringing the narration to the abolished moment of the carcass, the moment of decomposition and of the textual composition. One notices also the unusual flow, non-logical, non-synthetic, and nonteleological, of a narration which proceeds from both ends: that is to say, which tells the story from the beginning and also from the end, thus going back up its current like a tidal bore, back up the novelistic flow, such that the point of the fluctuating reminiscence that holds itself the right way up (in the chronological direction) and at the same time backwards (in the retrospective direction) opens up on the prodigious scene of the imaginary. The writer works mostly on the meticulous montage of the various narrative elements. For this novel, Claude Simon builds for the first time a Plan de montage which settles the periodicity of the serial components of the story. It is neither a scaffolding, nor a preliminary outline, nor a program. This Plan de montage is actually the result of a first draft; like the cavalryman, who at the staging area draws up the map of the lands where he travelled, the writer enters the text, thanks to a system of colours which identify the narrative steps he has covered (the motifs and the induced lines of force), in the same way as the image in the carpet. This spectral reading gives him the means to build a novel according to the textual economy at work. That which writing puts to the test is the constitutive organic conflict of the text: the paradigmatic axis and the syntagmatic axis; bindings and unbindings; ruptures and rapprochements; discord and concord of words,

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syntax, sentence – in other words a principle of war-and-peace in the assemblage of the book, and the work of a miraculous balance – a balance which is always unstable, and which gives rise to the physique of a form, singular, of the book, each time begun anew. Because literature offers the chance of this confrontational scene, it enables the relationships between the textual facture, the symbolic and the philosophical thinking to be rearticulated endlessly. Claude Simon points out the stakes of this scene by means of a striking short cut: “absorbing the reason of the world into the ways of writing” (“Pour qui donc écrit Sartre?” 147). Claude Simon’s The Georgics (1989) displays the most accomplished form of this double figure war-and-peace. The text elaborates, over four hundred pages, a disruptive disposition that imparts to the chronology many reversible laws, unthinkable comings and goings, ranging from the French Revolution to the Napoleonic campaigns, from one revolution to another until nowadays, through the Great War, the Spanish Civil War, Simon arrives at the Second World War. His text weaves, inextricably, the alternate and alternative narratives of agricultural works [travaux de la terre] and of the works of war [travaux de la guerre] and of peace. Once again, here, the narratives are not told directly but by means of the archive, that is to say through the lostand-found letters of the narrator’s ancestor, Jean-Pierre Lacombe SaintMichel, who was Constitutional in 1789, who voted for the king Louis XVI’s death, and then was made a General of Empire by Napoleon for the Italian campaign. The novel is made of fragments, taken up and organized, of letters of command addressed to his garrisoned armies, and also of briefs addressed to his quartermaster Batti, responsible for his property’s lands, a castle farm located in the centre of France. Here is an excerpt from one of the many passages in the novel in which military letters and georgic letters weave a single text comprising four pages: Briançon, 2 Floreal Year 8. Citizen Minister: I got here on 1 Floreal and I have undertaken without delay the checking of the siege provisions. I will send you shortly an account of the state of the fortress both as regards its fortifications and its armament, but the situation concerning victuals is so critical in my view that it constitutes a danger for the Republic, so I cannot delay acquainting you with the details: the enemy seized Mont Cenis … before the battle starts up afresh, the tanks lined up along the side of the road, their crews sitting in the open turrets or leaning against the tracks, sometimes chewing something or with a bottle in their hand, their empty staring eyes expressionless in their terrible pale faces, watching the cavalry

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go past, staring at each other silently, distantly, each man alone with his own fear, without sympathy, simply dumb, the whole like the wings in a theatre, an opera house, where the crowd of players silently take their places before the rise of the curtain and the glare of the footlights. Turin, 28 Brumaire; Dear Batti, I got your letter of 14 Vendémiaire and that of the 22nd on the same day … Falguières should be sown with wheat and alfalfa above it; there should be some alfalfa in the cleft of the field up to the Gendarme road. How can you expect me to deal with everything when I’m not there and when I’m preoccupied with military matters? … Ask Monsieur Delteil to supply you with all the corks and bottles you need and to bottle last year’s white wine. Reread my letter of 3 Vendémiaire and reply to it point to point, I don’t like you to pretend to be deaf. You must keep on the go, making sure that no damage is done … I only ask you to use your legs and your eyes and to keep me posted. I have more than enough work here for one man and I should at least be able to rely on you because if … (Simon The Georgics, 160–2) The text is suspended here, but resumes a little bit further on, as if an underground current surfaced again in an impetuous flow. Written in parallel and at the same place, in Italy during the drill, the interlacing of these letters constitutes the concomitant and contradictory framework of the novel. The missives transform the idiom in both a connective and disjunctive tissue of sorts, which draws the narrative energy from the laws of reversal and the motifs’ echo. And nothing is as disconcerting as the force of this great warrior, who is simultaneously attentive to the growths of the nurturing earth, as the keen predictions of this army strategist, and shows anxious consideration for the seasonal imperatives relating to farming and breeding. And nothing is as disconcerting as the similarity in tone of the military command used by the general to address the garrisoned troop as well as his quartermaster, Batti, who is almost a soldier and who was at his complete disposal, and entirely devoted to the fructification of his property. And all this goes through [passe], all this cannot take place/do without [se passer],10 all this can only go through in writing: indeed the injunction, the imperative, the performative, the relationship do not exist without the taking into account of words, sentences, sequences – enjambements that move the lines. Literature, thus, succeeds in absorbing “the reason of the world into the ways of writing” (Simon “Pour qui donc écrit Sartre?” 147). Between war and peace, between the labour [labeur] of military campaigns and the agricultural works [labours] in the French countryside, what is told

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here is the trivial and grandiose human epic. For this beat of narration, this breach, this opening, the story of textual revolutions correlated with historical revolutions, until the Spanish Civil War and the two worldwide conflicts of the twentieth century, is called to mind at several points, and can surface in a vertiginous movement of repetition-difference. The novel borrows the tonality of a meditation on the simultaneous vanity and necessity of human activity. Between the journeys of war and peace, the only place for the human is the scream, with which he is born, lives, and dies. This last sentence thrown out on the blank page is such a scream: “but once again do you think I have so many years to throw out of the window?” (Simon The Georgics, 322). Actually, the novel’s tour-de-force is to convoke History while putting at work, by means of writing, the process of its bringing into play, its reinterpretation, its revaluation. In order to do this, the writer transposes into novelistic prose the principle of boustrophedon, which refers to the backand-forth movement (like the plough), characteristic of the verse in antique poetry. In this way, he constructs the motifs of war and peace in a system of symmetrical returns and turning-around [retours-retournements]. Both motifs are inextricably linked as front and reverse. These Georgics tell us that the cultures of war and peace need to be cultivated – that is to say, to be taken away from what would be only factual technique or pure and simple execution, in order to bring them to the level of transmission, of reflection, of retreat, of meditation. Of rewriting. •••

To conclude, I would like to evoke the work and life of Gastone Novelli, an Italian painter who survived the Mauthausen concentration camp and is a central figure in Claude Simon’s novel The Jardin des Plantes: his work and life constitute indeed a parable of sorts for the question of “cultures of war and peace.”11 The painter’s work is described first, as a simultaneous chromatic and graphic search. Paste, colour, non-colour, and thickness, give primacy to elemental materials such as plaster, soil, and sand. In this material, geometrical tint areas, fragments of bodies and organs (breast, thigh, phallus, chest) repeated as obsessive signs can be seen, but also pieces of sentences, rows of the capital letter A: … sometimes using the handle of his brush, or a pencil, or a wider scraper, he would inscribe those superimposed lines of uneven letters, wavering like a scream, repeating themselves, never the same:

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AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA. (Simon The Jardin des Plantes, 187) All this is almost like the emergence of an alphabet, stammering and magical at once. Then, later in the novel comes the account of Novelli’s adventure. In the Amazonian rainforest, where he retreated to evade “civilization”: “once he was free he could no longer bear contact with nor the sight of not only a German but any being, woman or man, considered civilized,” The Jardin des Plantes, 180), the so-called civilization, which was able to engender the horror of concentration camp, Novelli, alone, abandoned by his guide, is confronted by a group of Indians displaying a bellicose attitude. One morning his tent is encircled with arrows stuck into the earth. The first lesson of this account is pragmatic; it is exactly the one that Novelli learned in Mauthausen: “If you seem too strong, they kill you because they’re afraid of you … if you seem too weak, they also kill you, this time just for the sake of amusement” (Simon “Gastone Novelli and the Problem of Language”). Novelli then tries to find a balance: each day, as a sign of friendship, he puts down little pieces of fish on the arrows and endeavours not to exhibit any sign of fear. He does this for more than a month. The lesson teaches that nothing is ever guaranteed, not even the worst; in other words, there is no definitive outcome in one’s relationship with others. In the end, Novelli will get to know the Indians and will be recognized by them; he will end up learning their language, which is a long modulation of the same vowel. It does not matter if this story is real or not. Actually, it is real in the way it is built and by the signification it receives. The second lesson of this narrative, which is a symbolic one, concerns the stages of civilization. Here, Claude Simon likens a degree zero of civilization at its end with the horror of Nazi camps, to the degree zero of civilization at its beginning with the Amazonian Indians and the precarious life in the forest. The lesson is, then: end and beginning at once. A third lesson follows immediately with regard to art and philosophy: we are forced to start from scratch (à zero), always. Start again from zero (de zero). Be on the side of departure because our solutions are always obsolete. Strive to rebuild a culture of war and peace, draw the first traits, the first words, with a keen consciousness and the urgency in the domain of Arts and Humanities, and the imperfection of language at once. “To try, while being perfectly aware of the futility of the attempt” and “To draw the unnameable and at the same time to know that doing so is an

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illusion, that it can never be immobilized, enclosed, fixed” (Simon “Gastone Novelli and the Problem of Language”). So there is an urgency of art and language, which are not primitive but originary, that is to say primary. The childhood of art.12 It is urgent to explore the childhood of art because it is able to get back to the childhood of humanity; it’s always a re-nascent promise. And, in order to do this, it is urgent to accept a form of humility, which enables us to acknowledge that there is not a perfect adequacy between the impeccable constructions of our grammars and the protean, elusive world. It is urgent, then, to accept the perpetual and vain struggle, and to try “to control the world by this collection of signs, this alphabet of ‘cherished things’” (Simon “Gastone Novelli and the Problem of Language”) that we pin momentarily to the canvas or the page. All in all, it is important to hold together the forces in conflict: more exactly, and with lucidity, to hold the tension which is the only possibility to operate, the only possibility, then, for something to happen, to arrive. That is precisely the definition of work (l’œuvre), which does not go without the task of reading: for reading is the faculty to resume patiently, to rework. The faculty not to settle the argument, but to weigh (peser) and think (penser) endlessly the mobility of exerted forces. It is the principle of becoming-forms of literature and arts. Perpetuum mobile: war-and-peace indissociably.13

6 “Expressionist – Artillerist”: “Poet” and “Soldier” as Conflicting Role Models in German Avant-Garde Poetry from the First World War martin löschnigg

In August 1914, enthusiasm for a war that would be over by Christmas was widespread. In Germany, Thomas Mann, otherwise renowned as the nation’s great literary ironist, hailed the patriotic fervour shown by the writers with unequivocal appreciation: “Wie die Herzen der Dichter sogleich in Flammen standen, als jetzt Krieg wurde!” (How the hearts of the poets have been inflamed immediately now that war has broken out!).1 Gerhart Hauptmann, Germany’s Nobel Prize winner of 1912, who had distanced himself from the Wilhelmine state through his critical pre-war plays, now supported the nation’s war efforts with patriotic poems.2 The war, it was widely held among the country’s literati, would testify to the superiority of German culture. However, enthusiasm for the war existed not only among established writers and intellectuals, but also on the side of those poets who stood apart from the political and literary mainstream. Their motives for welcoming the war were frequently of an artistic and aesthetic nature beside or perhaps instead of a patriotic one. It is with these motives, and with the ambivalent attitude of some German avant-garde poets towards the war, that this essay is concerned. If one looks at the poetry written in the years before the war in Britain (and, for that matter, also in Canada) on the one hand, and in Germany and Austria-Hungary on the other, one will notice that in the first case there was as yet no prominent modernist or even experimental tradition, while in Germany the years 1910–14 saw a blossoming of expressionist and other avant-garde poetry. As Modris Eksteins has noted, “Great Britain was the major conservative power” in the pre-war world, also with regard to its

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literary landscape, while “Germany was the principal activist, and hence modernist, nation.”3 The best of English and German poetry from the First World War thus grew out of different cultural contexts, with British poets such as Blunden, Sassoon, and, to some extent, also Wilfred Owen continuing in the style of Georgian poetry, while the German poetry which is still worth reading today is almost exclusively avant-garde in nature.4 In particular, this applies to the poets who were grouped around Der Sturm, one of the central periodicals of German Expressionism, which was edited by Herwarth and Nell Walden from 1910 to 1932. The other major expressionist periodical, Franz Pfemfert’s Die Aktion, was less radically aesthetic in its orientation, showing a stronger political commitment instead. During the war, it ran a section entitled “Verse vom Schlacht-Feld” (Verses from the Field of Slaughter), which featured drastically realistic war poems by Wilhelm Klemm, Kurd Adler, Oskar Kanehl, Alfred Lichtenstein, and others. Among the poets clustered around Der Sturm were August Stramm, Franz Richard Behrens, and Otto Nebel. Influenced by their reception of Italian Futurism, the Sturm poets sometimes reveal an initial enthusiasm for the dynamics of war, which they felt to be congenial to their own desire for aesthetic innovation, and a fascination with its new technologies. This enthusiasm stands in contrast to the internationalist and pacifist tendencies which from the beginning characterized the attitudes of others, such as Franz Werfel, for example, or the poets grouped around Die Aktion. In this connection, one should also keep in mind that some members of the younger generation of German writers had anticipated the war in their poems, making war stand as an emblem of a radical break with tradition, as a metaphor for renewal. The desire for a vitalizing social and cultural revolution is rendered through images of warfare for instance in Ernst Stadler’s “Der Aufbruch” (1913), which concludes with the following lines: Vielleicht würden uns am Abend Siegesmärsche umstreichen, Vielleicht lägen wir irgendwo ausgestreckt unter Leichen. Aber vor dem Erraffen und vor dem Versinken Würden unsre Augen sich an Welt und Sonne satt und glühend trinken. Perhaps in the evening, victory marches would play around my head. Perhaps we all would lie somewhere, stretched out among the dead. But before the reaching out and before the sinking, Our eyes would see their fill of world and sun, and take it in, glowing and drinking. (trans. Jeremy Adler)5 Born in Alsace-Lorraine, Stadler, who died on 30 October 1914 in the First

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Battle of Ypres, had grown up in a Franco-German, bi-cultural environment. As a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, and through his academic work on Shakespeare, he had also delved into English culture. The warlike images in “Der Aufbruch” are therefore programmatic in the sense of a general longing for change rather than concrete in any military sense, and the poem certainly lacks any chauvinistic overtones. In the same way, Ernst Wilhelm Lotz’s “Aufbruch der Jugend” (The Setting Out of Youth) imagines the cultural revolution desired by the avant-garde in terms of “troops anxious for the sounds of alarm” (Truppenkolonnen, unruhig nach Ruf der Alarme), and of the violent destruction of what has outlived itself.6 Emphasising the notion of catharsis, Georg Heym’s poem “Der Krieg,” written in September 1911 in answer to the Second Moroccan Crisis earlier that year, presents a vision of the sinking of the bourgeois world in chaos and death, and the fury of a gigantic personification of war. On 6 July 1910, Heym had noted in a diary his desire for relief from the oppressive feeling of boredom which troubled him: “sei es auch nur, daß man einen Krieg begänne, er kann ungerecht sein. Dieser Frieden ist so faul ölig und schmierig wie Leimpolitur auf alten Möbeln” (be it by starting a war, it may even be unjustified. This peace is as rotten, oily and oozing as the veneer on old furniture).7 One is reminded here of the “swimmers into cleanness leaping” in Rupert Brooke’s sonnet “Peace,” a poem that welcomes the war of 1914 as a spiritual cleansing and a relief from the paralysis and ennui that for many characterized the pre-war era: “Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour / And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping.”8 Many of the German expressionists were city-based and conceived of the war not only as a fulfilment of their poetic anticipations of a violent revolution of some kind, but also as an intensification of the speed and noise of life in the metropolis. When the war did arrive, they were therefore better prepared, in a sense, to render it in their art than those Georgian poets whose focus had frequently been on the detailed rendering of rural England and the natural world. Considering, in addition, their futuristically inspired fascination with modern machinery, this may account for a greater readiness on the part of the expressionists to capture the sensory experience of mechanized warfare. A similar case to that of these avant-garde poets is that of the socalled “worker poets” (Heinrich Lersch, Karl Bröger, Max Barthel, Gerrit Engelke), who saw their frontline experience as a continuation of their work in industry, and suppressed the social criticism which they had articulated in their pre-war poetry in favour of an affirmative attitude towards the nation and its war efforts. Like the formal experiment of the avant-garde, this is a strand of poetic representation which is almost completely missing in English language poetry from the war.

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In any case, the formal experimentation which characterizes many avantgarde poems may be seen as a manifestation of the authors’ consciousness that the particular quality of the war and of the sense perceptions it caused needed an adequate form. This is illustrated most memorably by the war poems of August Stramm, which originate, quite remarkably, from an early phase of the war (Stramm was killed in action on the Eastern Front on 1 September 1915). Incidentally, this chronological fact also applies to the satirical anti-war poems of Alfred Lichtenstein (killed in action on 25 September 1914 near Reims), the few war poems of Georg Trakl, including “Grodek,” perhaps the most powerful war poem to come out of this period (Trakl died in Cracow on 4 November 1914), and to most of the frontline poems published in Pfemfert’s Die Aktion. There is thus a conspicuous chronological difference between the pre-eminent examples of German poetry from the First World War and their English counterparts, since there the major poets such as Owen, Sassoon, and Graves only appear upon the scene around 1916. Their poetry, like that of the Aktion-poets, attempts to render an authentic image of the frontline in order to contradict and put to right the glorifying picture of the war which propaganda conveyed to civilians; as Osbert Sitwell insisted: “we are poets, / and shall tell the truth.”9 In English First World War poetry, the formal innovation and experimentation which reveal an aesthetic consciousness comparable to that of the German avant-garde, can be detected in only a few cases, for instance in the moderately modernist poems of Herbert Read and Richard Aldington, and perhaps in Wilfred Owen’s unconventional use of half-rhyme. The demand to tell the truth about the war made it painfully clear to many of the war poets that the roles of poet and soldier were, in fact, conflicting ones. In the case of the avant-garde poets, this conflict was aggravated by both their understanding of themselves as aesthetic revolutionaries and by a subconscious fascination with the war’s dynamics. In the following discussion, I shall analyse the manifestations of this conflict by referring to works of the Sturm poets August Stramm, Franz Richard Behrens, and Otto Nebel. As opposed to the bulk of realistic frontline poems which seem to rely on the assumption of a straightforwardly mimetic function of poetry, the war poems of August Stramm attempt to render the experience of modern war through poetic experiment. Fragmented syntax and the blurring of lexical boundaries, as well as the staccato rhythm created by asyndetically arranged scraps of words, mirror the chaotic nature of the frontline experience, as is evident in the poem “Signal”: Die Trommel stapft Das Horn wächst auf

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Und Sterben stemmt Das Haupt durch flattre Sterben Sträubt Gehen Gehen Sträuben Geht Und geht und geht Und geht und geht Und geht und geht und geht und geht Geht Stapft Geht. The drumbeat plods The horn climbs up And Dying stems The head through flutter dyings Struggles Going going Struggling Goes And goes and goes And goes and goes And goes and goes and goes and goes Goes Plods Goes. (trans. Jeremy Adler; The Lost Voices of World War I, 140) Stramm’s poetry illustrates the Wortkunst (verbal art) theories developed notably by Lothar Schreyer, one of the chief theoreticians of the Sturm circle, and by Herwarth Walden himself. Among the principles of Wortkunst, which was meant to get to the essence of words, were both the extreme concentration and the decentering which are evident in Stramm’s poem, the latter in the repeated alternation of going forward and resisting. The effect which is created by Stramm’s method of composition is an immensely dynamic one, yet as the line “Sterben stemmt” (Dying stems) seems to imply, the dynamic principle underlying what is happening is, in fact, death. As a captain of the reserve, Stramm was called up immediately on the outbreak of war, serving on the Western Front and, from the end of April 1915

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until his death in action, in Galicia. At the front, the chasm between his radical conception of himself as an artist and his careers as a civil servant (Stramm, who had a doctoral degree, was an inspector of postal services) and as an officer of the reserve, now amounted to an ambivalence which Stramm increasingly experienced as painful.10 Repeatedly decorated for bravery as an officer, Stramm the poet condemned the war. His self-image as expressed in his letters frequently corresponds to the stereotype of the Prussian officer: severity towards himself and others, bravery, and a strict sense of duty and patriotism. As Stramm wrote to his mentor, Herwarth Walden, on 23 February 1915: “Deutschland braucht tapfere starke Kämpfer. Es hilft nichts. Wir müssen durch und durch halten mögen wir den Krieg noch so sehr verurteilen” (Germany needs brave soldiers. Nothing else will do. We have to go through with it, however much we condemn the war).11 Out of a sense of duty and responsibility for his men, Stramm refused attempts by Walden to have him exempted from military service: “ein deutscher Dichter darf auch nicht fahnenflüchtig werden” (a German poet must not be a deserter).12 In the letters to his wife, Stramm emphasizes the burden, but also the deeply felt sense of contentment which he derives from his role as the leader of his men: … ich muß hart sein! muß hart sein! sonst klappen sie mir alle zusammen! So beißen sie auf die Zähne und halten durch. Sie wissen dann, es hilft nichts. Aber bestrafen tu ich doch keinen! Das kann ich nicht! … I must be severe! must be severe! Otherwise they‘ll all break down! As it is, they clench their teeth and hold out. They know there‘s no help. Yet I won‘t punish anyone! I can’t do that!13 … meine Jungens sind Helden! … Es ist eine große Freude hier Soldat und Führer zu sein. … my boys are heroes! … It is a great joy to be a soldier and leader of men.14 … mein Bursche erzählt mir, daß die Jungens auch im Gefecht stellenweise nach ihrem Hauptmann gerufen hatten und die Verwundeten haben Grüße an mich hinterlassen. Ach Lieb! Es ist alles so furchtbar und doch so groß. … my batman tells me that sometimes the boys called out for their captain even during battle, and the wounded left me regards. Oh my love! Everything is so terrible but also so great.15

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The letters to Herwarth and Nell Walden, by contrast, reveal Stramm’s fears and doubts: Es ist so viel Tod in mir Tod und Tod. In mir weints und außen bin ich hart und roh … Das Wort schon stockt mir vor Grauen … Ich dichte nicht mehr, alles ist Gedicht umher. Elendes feiges heimtückisches Grausen und die Luft kichert höhnisch dazu und gurgelt donnernd von den Bergen her … There is so much death in me death and death. Inside me, there is crying, and outside I am hard and rough … Words fail me because of terror … I no longer compose poems, everything around me is poetry. Miserable cowardly sinister horror and the air giggles tauntingly and gargles thunderingly down the mountains …16 “Everything around me is poetry”: as it is, the traumatic experience of modern war underlies the aesthetic principle in Stramm’s war poems. This is illustrated, for instance, by the poem “Sturmangriff” (Charge): Aus allen Winkeln gellen Fürchte Wollen Kreisch Peitscht Das Leben Vor Sich Her Den keuchen Tod Die Himmel fetzen. Blinde schlächtert wildum das Entsetzen. From every corner yelling terror wanting Shriek Whips Life On Before It Gasping death The heavens tatter Blindly slaughters wild-about the horror. (trans. Jeremy Adler; The Lost Voices of World War I, 140)

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Stramm’s poem renders the chaotic experience of battle by extreme linguistic compression, revitalizing poetic language through the fracturing of syntax and through lexical devices such as portmanteau words (“wildum”) and the grammatical re-functioning of words (abstractions such as “Fürchte” formed from verbs). However, these techniques also tend to suppress the “I” of the speaker, possibly in a conscious attempt to avoid reflection on the dilemma faced by the conflicting demands on the poet and soldier. Indeed, there is only one among Stramm’s war poems, “Angststurm” (“Storm of Fear”), in which an “I” appears – in all the others, the subject has retreated behind a quasi objective rendering of the fighting: “ein Grauen ist um mich wallt wogt umher, erwürgt verstrickt, es ist nicht mehr rauszufinden. Entsetzlich. Ich habe kein Wort. Ich kenne kein Wort” (a horror surrounds me wallowing surging, strangling and enmeshing me, there’s no way out. Terrible. I have no word. I know no word).17 As compared to the intensification of experience expressed in the words “everything around me is poetry,“ this passage is expressive of Stramm’s utter disillusionment as a poet in the war. Another poet who was associated with the Sturm-circle was Franz Richard Behrens (1895–1977). In his poem “Expressionist – Artillerist” (“Expressionist – Gunner”), Behrens, who had volunteered in 1914, investigates the affinity of avant-garde poetry with the experience of modern war. The title of the poem juxtaposes two concepts whose relation is left pending to be analysed in the text. Can “expressionist“ and “gunner“ be combined or even identified, and if so, on what grounds, or will they prove to be incongruent? Like the bi-partite title, the fifty-two lines of the poem comprise two strands which appear to be entirely disconnected at first, namely a series of fragmentary associations alternating with a regular counting from twenty-one up to forty-three: Bäh Drüben fliegt ein Eisenvogel ab, kerzengrader Als alle Vögel der Erde Ein-und-zwanzig Die Linie kennt die Natur nicht Zwei-und-zwanzig Der Organismus ist sie Drei-und-zwanzig Den Blick nicht verlieren. Bah Over there an iron bird flies off, more straightlined Than any bird on earth

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Twenty-one This line is not known to nature Twenty-two Organism she is Twenty-three Must not lose sight.18 An explanation of how the two disparate strands of the poem’s text may be combined is provided by the situational context: glimpsing the flash of an enemy battery, the gunner tries to gauge its distance by counting the seconds until detonation. Pronounced at normal speed, the German tetrasyllabic numbers beginning with “einundzwanzig” (twenty-one) are roughly equal in duration to one second. If, in addition, he retains the whereabouts of the enemy gun’s position in his sight (“Den Blick nicht verlieren”), he may then direct his own gun to strike the counter-blow in an artillery duel. The contrast which is introduced at the beginning of the poem is that between nature and technology, a theme which is frequent in war poetry, and the implication that war is unnatural is enhanced by the nonsensical comparative “kerzengrader.” However, to the speaker this may be fascinating in itself, and the fascination of military technology is captured in the poem through an intensified manner of expression which strives towards an analogy between expressiveness and explosiveness: Verdammt echtes Lebensgefühl bornt verflucht Heißen Ausdruck. Damned real awareness of life spurts damned hot expression. (Anz and Vogl Die Dichter und der Krieg, 63) In another key passage, Behrens seems to contrast his own expressionist understanding of poetry, which appears to be compatible with the dynamics of mechanized warfare, with seemingly inadequate views as represented by other literary movements: Im Leichenblut schöne Farbe sehen. Alte Jacke Knochensplitter sein, Impressionisten und Naturalisten. To see beautiful colour in the blood of dead bodies. Be old coat, splinters of bone, impressionists and naturalists. (Anz and Vogl Die Dichter und der Krieg, 64)

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As the poem implies, impressionists and naturalists focused on drastically portrayed details (and possibly on their aesthetic dimension), lacking what Kasimir Edschmid referred to as the “grand and comprehensive view which lies at the core of expressionism“ (“[das] Große … und Totale … das [der] Idee [des Expressionismus] zugrundeliegt”).19 “Dynamics” is a key concept of expressionist art, a concept that was sometimes explicitly contrasted with the obsolete aesthetics of impressionism and naturalism: “Statik und Dynamik: dieser Gegensatz ist im Expressionismus bewußt geworden. Und dieses Bewußtsein wird viel Abgestorbenes überwinden” (The static versus the dynamic – this contrast has been made conscious in expressionism. And this consciousness will lead to the overcoming of much that is really dead).20 At the end of Behrens’s poem, however, the grand gesture and expressionist pathos of the speaker are reduced to more pragmatic concerns as the shell is approaching: Drei Ich glaube aufzugehen -und Ich drücke mich hoch heilig -vierzig Aus Fetzen Fratzen Platzen. Three I am feeling boundless -and Expressing myself in a grand holy -forty Manner. Tearing Distortion Bursting. (Anz and Vogl Die Dichter und der Krieg, 64) Dividing the prepositional phrase, Behrens puns on the German collocations “ich drücke mich aus” (I express myself) and “ich drücke mich” (I budge), a pun which cannot be rendered in English, but effectively conveys, in the original German, the fact that in the face of death the speaker’s elation, which may have resulted from the dynamics of the events, is reduced to nought: it is better to budge, and quickly. The now isolated preposition “aus” (finished) implies that this may indeed be the end. The energies released by the war are not elevating, but destructive. In this respect, the poem reflects a general development in expressionist war poetry as described by Richard Sheppard:

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“Once the war had begun to contract the realization grew that those irrational powers in which the earlier poets had exulted were, when their true nature was revealed on the battlefield, totally destructive. The primal energies of ecstasy were seen to be those of death: they smashed, but did not reshape.”21 In a flippant manner, Behrens’s poem makes a poetological statement about the fact that Germany’s literary avant-garde welcomed the war not only as a catalyst of social change, but even more importantly because they associated it with an expectation of a revolution in art, in particular of a modernization and dynamization of poetic expression. However, “Expressionist – Artillerist” is also a very personal expression of the disillusionment of the poet, whose expectation of a boost to his creativity through his participation in the fighting has been disappointed by the oppressive nature of the war.22 Experimental German poetry from the First World War includes a highly idiosyncratic work which was written by another poet close to Der Sturm, Otto Nebel (1892–1973). This is Zuginsfeld, a satirical long poem whose title refers to a platoon’s moving to the front, but also alludes to Grimmelshausen’s anti-heroic soldier-figure Springinsfeld, whose story is set in the Thirty Years War.23 Nebel’s poem, which consists of more than 6,000 lines, is divided into twenty-eight sections, covering the time from the pre-war days to the end of the war. The first half deals with the ranks of the German military from the private soldier to the supreme war-lord, Kaiser Wilhelm himself, who appears in an imaginary dialogue with the poet; the second half renders the experience of war. Zuginsfeld is a bitter condemnation of the war and of the kind of society the poet held responsible for it. The first two versions of Zuginsfeld were composed in the British prisoner-of-war camp at Colsterdale, Yorkshire, in 1918–19. Nebel, who had served throughout the war on both the Eastern and Western Fronts, had been captured by the Canadians in a skirmish at Guillaucourt near Péronne on 8 August 1918. After his return to Germany at the end of 1919, the third version of Zuginsfeld was handed to Herwarth Walden and published in serialized form in Der Sturm.24 Nebel focuses on the relation between language and the attitudes that led to the war. His purpose in Zuginsfeld is to reveal the corruption of Wilhelmine society and the virulence of its militarism by allowing a language that has degenerated into cliché-ridden rhetoric to speak for itself. In this respect, the poem may be compared to Die letzten Tage der Menschheit (The Last Days of Mankind), a magisterial play written by the Austro-Hungarian satirist Karl Kraus in 1919. Of course, Nebel shows the same concern with language as Stramm; unlike Stramm, however, Nebel does not attempt to reflect the chaotic experience of the war by breaking up conventional word and sentence patterns. Rather than recreating his own war experience in a special poetic language, Nebel employs

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exactly the kind of language in which the war was conducted; i.e. he unmasks, as Kraus does in The Last Days of Mankind, the war-mongering phraseology which dominated society and the media.25 In a light-hearted manner, the poem includes satirical references to a variety of sources ranging from the national anthem to popular songs and the Bible; above all, however, Nebel lampoons the treasured cultural icons of a bourgeois society, the classic plays of Goethe and Schiller, debunking loudmouthed patriotism and pseudo-heroic attitudes through their parodic quotation and variation. Crucial to Nebel’s purposes, however, are those passages in which he reflects on the relations between (literary) language and war, in particular on the function of poetic language and of pro-war writers in stirring up people’s emotions: Reim ist Zufall Es gibt keinen Zufall Reim ist Absicht Wie reimt sich das Machen Sie sich keinen Vers daraus … Lüger [sic] reimen Krieg … Taucht tief in’s [sic] Blut die Federn. Rhyme is coincidental Nothing is merely coincidental Rhyme is intentional How does this rhyme Don’t make rhyme without reason … Liars make war rhyme … Deeply dip your pens in blood. (xvii, 3–13; 84) Zuginsfeld is informed by the author’s concern about the state of the language as a mirror of the state of society. Seen in this light, the trivializing character of Nebel’s numerous puns and of his distortions of idioms and proverbs function as an effective undermining of the inflated rhetoric of the war-mongers, especially among the literati, and also of the language of the military. Thus, the “nation of poets and thinkers” (“Volk der Dichter und Denker” in the well-known phrase),26 has in fact become a nation of

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“poetasters and monuments” (for the dead heroes of the past or perhaps already for those fallen in the recent war?): Sie vergreifen sich an Sprache und Ordnung … Alles in bester Unordnung Das ist gut Deutsch Das ist es Dadaisten Das da soll gutes Schriftdeutsch sein Soldatendeutsch ist kurz und klein Schriftdeutsch sei kurz und gut … Der gute Teutsche lernt alles Gutes Deutsch lernt er nie Volk der Dichterlinge und Denkmäler. They corrupt language and order … Don’t worry, everything’s in perfect disorder This is good German This is it Dadaists Is this supposed to be good German Soldiers’ slang does not beat about the bush Good German should be concise and that’s it … The good Teuton will learn anything He will never learn good German Nation of poetasters and monuments. (xvii, 80–101; 86) The language of war hysteria, Nebel seems to be implying, can be compared to the stammering of Dadaist poets. It is expressive of the loss of spirit (Geist) and of the intellectual deprivation that led to the outbreak of the war: Diese Hitze! Diese Hetze! … Hirne brennen Hirnverbrannte

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Hirnpest erbricht sich Beweis erbracht Geist bricht zusammen Krieg bricht aus. O what heat! O what hate! … Brains are inflamed Hot-headed fools Cerebral pestilence spills out Evidence produced Spirit breaks down War breaks out. (xiv, 1–9; 57) Zuginsfeld mainly proceeds on the principle of thematic and phonetic association, as language becomes an autonomous force, continuously producing, in a seemingly mechanical manner, new words and phrases. This is partly in line with the demands which concepts of Wortkunst made on the poetry of the Sturm circle. Moreover, Nebel, who had trained as an actor, emphasized the sound quality of language in the numerous reading performances he gave of his poem in the years after the war. The poems by Stramm, Behrens, and Nebel discussed here stand out among the literature of the First World War because of their concern with poetic language and with the aesthetics of rendering the war. As I have tried to show, this concern is manifested in these works in different ways – in linguistic concentration and fragmentation in the case of Stramm, in a probing of the affinity of modern poetry and modern war in the case of Behrens’s “Expressionist – Artillerist,” and, in the case of Otto Nebel’s Zuginsfeld, in a vitriolic satire on the ideological corruption of language in wartime Germany. In each case, however, the attempt at finding an adequate form for the rendering of the war experience and at defining the relationship between the dynamics of war and those of expressionist aesthetics, brings into focus the potential conflict between the roles of poet and soldier. As we may gather from the lack of orientation expressed in Stramm’s letters, and from the sense of disillusionment and of resignation that emerges from the texts by Behrens and Nebel, these poets seem to have been poignantly aware of that conflict.

7 Above or Below Ground? Depicting Corpses in First and Second World War Official Canadian War Art laura brandon More than 60,000 Canadians died during the First World War (1914–18), ten per cent of those who enlisted. More than 150,000 were injured. Over one million Canadians served between 1939 and 1945; 45,000 of them died, and 55,000 suffered injuries in a conflict marked by unprecedented violence on both sides. While a significant number of Canadian artworks from these wars depict the destruction meted out on the built, manufactured, and natural environments, the subject of physical violence is rare. Nonetheless, whether the soldiers, airmen, or sailors were from the allied or combatant sides of the conflicts, a survey of the nearly 1,000 First World War official artworks, combined with their nearly 6,000 Second World War equivalents, reveals that there was remarkable consistency in the depiction of dead bodies.1 Usually positioned lying on the ground, few show any evidence of violent injury. Emblematic material in the background – burning buildings, torched vehicles, and razed fields – indicates brutality and provides a narrative context for each victim’s supine presence. An elegiac grace that belies the reality of probable suffering suffuses even the few works that show Holocaust victims. Here, however, emblematic background material is rare because artists at the time had then so little knowledge of, or accessibility to, camp conditions. To these haunting figures of the dead, we bring a post-liberation awareness of their tragic ends. This chapter constitutes a case study centred on official Canadian artists’ depictions of corpses during the First and Second World Wars. By analysing artworks featuring dead people in war art now in the custody of the Canadian War Museum (cwm), it is possible to evaluate the challenges facing the authorities and their artists when it came to depicting corpses at these two different times. While I touch on contextual issues and refer to some nonofficial artworks, my focus here will be on a formal analysis of the official

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art in order to demonstrate that until the end of the Second World War when photographs of atrocity, specifically from the Holocaust, were widely published, artists were limited by physical, intellectual, and photographic access to dead bodies, which made the task of depicting them for the purposes of documentary record a substantial challenge. Corpses were also not a subject the authorities wished to document as, except in circumstances where they enhanced Canadian achievements, they could hardly be viewed as being helpful to the ongoing war effort. Instead, the marked presence of corpses in the form of their burial places and allegorical references in the form of crucifixion scenes became a common but not dominant indicator of their existence. The majority of the cwm’s art is twentieth-century and derives from the two official programs of the First and Second World Wars, the Canadian War Memorials and the Canadian War Records. Wealthy Canadian newspaper owner Lord Beaverbrook initiated the former in November 1916. Its organization hired more than 116 artists of various nationalities in Canada and Great Britain to document over 900 scenes of Canada at war. Some artists were sent to the front lines in France and Belgium to sketch Canadians in battle. Back in their studios in London, England, they completed larger paintings in oils. Other artists painted scenes of the home front in Canada. These works were transferred to government custody in 1921. Inspired by the success of the First World War art program, Vincent Massey, Canada’s high commissioner in Great Britain, encouraged the formation of Canada’s Second World War art scheme. With the support of the National Gallery of Canada (ngc), Canada’s art community, and the Canadian Army, the Canadian War Records became an official government program in January 1943. The authorities hired thirty-two official war artists to paint the activities of the armed forces at home and overseas. They served in specific army units, air force squadrons, or ships, were issued instructions regarding the choice of subject matter, and were given the necessary materials. Additional commissions went to a number of female artists who ensured that the role of women in wartime was adequately depicted. Over 5,000 works of art were completed before the program ended in 1946 with the transfer of the works to the ngc. In 1971, the gallery transferred almost all these works to the cwm. They are now extensively catalogued in a database using descriptive terms that help identify subjects referencing death.2 The limitation is that if none of the identifying terms are used in a catalogue entry, a particular artwork that might be relevant will not show up in a database search. That being said, the search terms I used for this study – including “body,” “burial,” “Calvary,” “cemetery,” “coffin,” “corpse,” “cross,” “crucifixion,” “dead,” “death,” and

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“grave” – did produce many of the same works, making me feel confident that a majority of the depictions of wartime corpses or their graves had been identified in the 13,000-work art collection. The total number of relevant images I found associated with the two official programs, and excluding any other related images acquired through different routes, about the same number again, was sixty-three. Given that the 1971 transfer of official art consisted of nearly 7,000 artworks, this small number reflects what French critic Philippe Dagen, in his book’s title and in the book’s overall content, calls “the silence of painters.”3 For the purposes of this study of official Canadian war art between 1914 and 1945 the cwm collection is virtually complete, as the authorities required artists to hand in all their finished work. While sketches and studies relating to major pieces have subsequently entered the museum alongside three relevant paintings not transferred with the original wartime collections in 1971, they do not add very much to the overall picture of corporeal absence. Similarly, those works collected from other nations’ artists or from soldiers themselves (particularly their sketchbooks) do not add substantially to the conclusions reached in this survey. Of course the total number of such works is unknown, given that only those that have been deposited are in the collection and some work may remain in private hands or may not have survived. It is important to note also that, while I acknowledge that death could be portrayed abstractly using other iconographic means including dead trees, ruins, and sunsets, I have not included this dimension in this study because with the exception of crosses and crucifixes, which I do include, they are extremely difficult to interpret. A dead tree can be a dead tree as often as it is a symbolic dead body, for example. Given that there are very few depictions of dead bodies in the collection as a whole and that those from the First and Second World War collections are not numerous, it is perhaps not surprising to discover that the cwm holds only one work depicting a corpse before the 1914–18 conflict. Probably not Canadian, in the form of a small and very amateur sketch from a soldier’s sketchbook, it depicts a dead soldier lying on some sort of bench inside a breached position during a Crimean War (1853–56) battle.4 Two soldier sketches from the South African War (1899–1902) show simple graves and suggest that artists preferred their corpses underground by the twentieth century; this is not borne out by the First World War collection’s official content however, which includes thirteen paintings that include corpses in their compositions, three crucifixion scenes, one coffin image, and only three paintings containing crosses.5 One might have anticipated more crosses as the Canadian Expeditionary Force’s (cef) official photographic record is replete with images of them rather than corpses.6

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It is history and tradition that provide the basis for images of crosses and crucifixes as symbols of the dead. Between 1347 and 1351, one out of three people in Europe died of the bubonic plague. This was also the period in which some of the greatest Gothic cathedrals were built. Their sculptural decoration frequently dealt with death, the Last Judgments on their west fronts depicting some of humankind’s most hideous ends, inspired no doubt by the pervasive mortality surrounding the stonemasons that carved them. By contrast, the image of the crucifixion provided comfort by symbolizing death not as an ending but as a beginning. In paintings such as Jan van Eyck’s diptych, The Last Judgement and The Crucifixion (c. 1430) stand side by side to explain virtuous and non-virtuous death.7 Western culture was predominantly visually rather than textually literate until the eighteenth, if not the nineteenth centuries, so such images of good and bad deaths became culturally dominant. It is depictions of this kind that provide much of the iconography of death in Canadian war art in the first half of the twentieth century. In their own time, the most powerful images of the First World War’s dead refer to the crucifixion of Christ. The revived religious sensibility in this conflict was important for both the church and the government of Canada. It initially provided a useful and acceptable means to rationalize a war that had undermined many of the fundamental tenets of Christianity and, furthermore, called into question the moral authority of the state. The Reverend G.C. Pidgeon of Toronto’s Bloor Street Presbyterian congregation informed his flock that “the death of a soldier on the battlefield and the grief that this caused those at home were comparable to the agony of Christ’s crucifixion and the sorrow it brought to his mother. As Christ’s crucifixion was part of a larger purpose and ultimately a demonstration of God’s love, so too were the sacrifices of wartime.”8 Pidgeon took a similar message to the battle front. Throughout the war, the cross was an important symbol for conveying the idea that the slaughter was not senseless but redemptive. The most magnificent of Canada’s wartime crucifixion scenes is Charles Sims’s Sacrifice (c. 1918; see fig. 7.1).9 This vast painting is split in half by a crucifix on which, seen from behind, hangs the dead body of Christ overlooking the corpses, the dying, and the wounded, half buried in the mud and swamp that constituted the western front. Below the cross, mourners in the form of mothers, children, and the elderly all grieve and continue their work. Above the arms of the cross are strung Canada’s then provincial coats of arms. Alfred Bastien’s Agny: Ruins of Shrine in the Wood (c. 1918) is more emblematic.10 Using atmospheric lighting – perhaps sunset – he depicts a damaged Calvary or roadside crucifixion, its carved Christ-figure drooping from one arm of the cross above what looks like a shell hole and beside which stands a dead tree. The most notorious crucifixion scene is Derwent

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7.1 Charles Sims, Sacrifice, c. 1918, oil on canvas, 416 ⫻ 409 cm. Beaverbrook Collection of War Art, cwm 19710261-0662. © Canadian War Museum

Wood’s Canada’s Golgotha (1918), which in the form of a small bronze relief sculpture depicts the crucifixion of a Canadian soldier rather than Christ.11 When the Canadian War Memorials 1919 exhibition of official Canadian war art toured to New York, this sculpture was pulled from the display when the German authorities protested that the event shown had never occurred.12 The theme of mourning at the foot of the cross is implicit in James Byam Shaw’s The Flag (1918).13 Here a young, dead Canadian soldier clutches his country’s flag as he lies between the vast paws of a sculpted metal lion (clearly

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drawn from those surrounding Nelson’s Column at Trafalgar Square, London) and is mourned by his family. The iconography, however, is different in that the dead Canadian is more reminiscent of Christ in the arms of the Virgin Mary at the foot of the cross, the familiar pièta figure. The work was immensely popular at the first exhibition of the Canadian War Memorials paintings in 1919. The Canadian art critic Hector Charlesworth described it in Saturday Night: “Most effective of all, [is] Byam Shaw’s classical and symbolical piece, ‘The Flag.’ Classical it is in the fullest sense, whether in the simple beauty of line or arrangement, or the manner in which the poignant facts of death, grief and sacrifice are harmonized into an expression of the mystery of Fate. Its very reticence and quietude heightens its emotional spirit.”14 To create his composition Shaw used models. His own son was the model for the dead Canadian and other family members modelled the mourners, sometimes more than once.15 Alfred Bastien’s Canadian Officer Killed (1918) was likely also not witnessed; the neat, fully-dressed soldier’s theatrical crucifixion pose suggests that a model was used.16 This posits propaganda as a motive, something made explicit in future Group of Seven member J.E.H. MacDonald’s poster design depicting a triumphant Kaiser marching over a dead Canadian.17 His design was created before the official war art program came into existence, and provides a taste of the crusading mentality that influenced the first years of the war and emerged in its visual imagery, particularly newspaper and magazine depictions of atrocity.18 Some artists used sketches from life in their compositions featuring corpses. In The Conquerors (1920), Eric Kennington introduces death as an emblematic buried skeleton below marching dead or near-dead soldiers based on studies of soldiers he had completed earlier.19 Maurice Cullen likely extrapolated from life for his 1918 portrayal of a dead horse and rider in a trench.20 The corpses in another of his paintings, The Cambrai Road (1918), were added from imagination or memory, as the original sketch features a tank.21 The Canadian War Memorials art collection developed in tandem with a host of other projects run by the Canadian War Records Office in London, England. These included film, diaries, newspapers, magazines, and photographs. In fact, exhibitions of official photographs funded the production of art. The restrictions placed on photography (prints showing dead bodies were almost always marked Not for sale or publication unless they were German dead bodies), combined with a lack of access to where the killing was taking place for both artists and photographers, resulted, for the artists, in a seeming paucity of corpses to sketch or to copy from photographs.22 Nonetheless, photography became an important tool for at least one artist. The corpses in future Group of Seven member Frederick Varley’s First World

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War compositions are drawn from official photographs, although the landscape elements are from direct observation. His watercolour sketch ShellTorn Trees (1918) forms the background to the painting German Prisoners (c. 1919). 23 The dead body in the painting is based on an official cef photograph.24 This photograph was also used for the corpses in his painting The Sunken Road (1919).25 Even though Varley’s dead have clearly not died gently, their incorporation into the landscape is suggestive of the same sort of respect afforded by burial. Some of this reverence for the dead is due to those responsible for burying and memorializing them, who with their stirring engraved words, architectdesigned cemeteries, and graceful grave-markers, helped initiate symbolic rituals of death that continue to this day. The dead were not commemorated as individuals or even as a group prior to the First World War. “In January 1915 – one can date this remarkable change with a precision not usual in cultural history – a new era of remembrance began: the era of the common soldier’s name or its self-conscious and sacralized oblivion,” writes Thomas W. Laqueur in his essay “Memory and Naming in the Great War.” “By 1938,” he continues, When the Imperial War Graves Commission had completed its World War One work, it had overseen the construction of 1850 cemeteries … By 1930, 557,520 soldiers of the Empire … had been buried in identified, that is, named graves. Another 180,861 unidentified bodies were put each in a separate grave … The names of these men, and of a further 336,912 whose bodies had simply disappeared, blown into the air or ground into the mud, are inscribed in stone on a monument near the place where they were thought to have died. These are the imposing, major monuments of the western front.26 Because the cemeteries and memorials were built after the war, they were not in the remit of wartime artists. Therefore, those images that exist in the First World War collection – a mere four anonymous undated watercolours – probably postdate the conflict, and judging by their appearance, by many years.27 The two exceptions are Herbert Hughes-Stanton’s The Cemetery, Pas-de-Calais (1919), which shows a cemetery filled with the crosses that preceded the more familiar Portland stone grave-markers we see today and which feature in the aforementioned cemetery scenes, and Varley’s celebrated Some Day the People Will Return (1918).28 With its stormy sky and upended graves it speaks to civilian loss of life, dispossession, and dislocation. C.R.W. Nevinson’s 1918 print approaches propaganda with its image of a coffin looted, the title states, by Germans.29 One painting featuring dead

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Germans exists in the official collection – an acquired rather than a commissioned work. Alfred Nantel’s watercolour was painted after his capture at the Second Battle of Ypres (1915) when he was a prisoner of war, so his depiction of dead and injured Germans being tended by British and Canadian forces may have been an act of personal and necessary propaganda.30 Dead Canadian military personnel and civilian casualties rarely appear in official art of the Second World War. The enemy is more frequently the subject, as are also, in the paintings of Aba Bayefsky and Alex Colville for example, the victims of the Nazi Holocaust. One consequence of authoritarian discretion and instruction, these absences also relate to the limitations of experience. Like their First World War predecessors, official artists had been trained in a traditional way that remained largely unchanged from the late eighteenth century. They relied on plaster sculptures and the occasional paid model for their figurative subjects. For the most part young, few had been exposed to violent death; even those like Robert Hyndman, who had seen it as a Spitfire pilot, after becoming war artists never depicted it.31 One soldier believed that it must have been the artist Charles Comfort who carefully covered the face of a dead Canadian with a white handkerchief near where he, Comfort, was sketching. Another body, that of a German, was also lying nearby and may have been the subject of the artist’s brush.32 There were content restrictions too. Historical officers attached to the same units as the artists assessed their finished watercolour compositions for accuracy and any breach of censorship requirements before forwarding the pieces to London. Once the war in Europe was over, the authorities sent the artists back to Canada, providing them with studio space so that they could complete a predetermined number of canvasses based on these approved watercolours. Two official Second World War paintings support the premise that both artistic tradition and the artists’ own innocence affected the depiction of wartime death. George Pepper’s Dead German Paratroopers (1945) depicts a dark pile of brown and blue clothed bodies that stretch from the top of the picture down to its bottom.33 With the figures cut off at the sides, the impression is left of a field of corpses, even though only ten individuals can be discerned. Their helmets give them away as German. They are the enemy. Bayefsky’s Belsen Concentration Camp, The Pit No. 2 (1945) shows an approximately equal number of bodies, skeletal and naked, men and women, their bones gleaming whitely in the surrounding gloom (see fig. 7.2).34 Nothing identifies them as individuals, prisoners, or soldiers. But we know from the title that they are Holocaust victims and civilian dead. While the two subjects are radically different, the painterly language available to depict the figures as dead is common to both. Neither painting shows evidence of overt violence. The artists have positioned none of the bodies to maximize horror

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and disgust; rather they present them with relative dignity. To these images we bring our own repulsion, horror, and sorrow. We have to imprint these images with our personal feelings and attitudes and these vary from generation to generation, making such works of art – like war memorials, as the title of Pierre Nora’s great work asserts – places of memory.35 In contrast, violence is notably present in the work of one official war artist attached to the Royal Canadian Air Force but it is not the violence of death so much as the restoration of life to injured men. At a hospital in East Grinstead, England, Charles Goldhamer depicted victims of the air war in unflinching detail.36 He did not sketch them in the immediate aftermath of their injuries, however, nor when they were dead, but when they were recovering. We can blanch at the sight of men whose faces flaming petroleum has half destroyed, but it is the superlative care they received at the hands of expert plastic surgeons we are meant to appreciate. Good healing rather

7.2 Aba Bayefsky, Belsen Concentration Camp Pit, 1945, oil on canvas, 91.6 x 121.8 cm. Beaverbrook Collection of War Art, cwm 19710261-1394. © Canadian War Museum

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than life-threatening wounds provides a similar narrative in other artists’ work, a notion brought to an extreme in the work of Jack Nichols, who evokes the necessity of violence to achieve better ends when, much like his First World war predecessors, he transforms his injured subjects into equivalents of both the wounded and the dead Christ.37 In his case, a major influence was his familiarity with the art of the past, which as generations of art history students have discovered, was often religious in subject matter. Calvaries or crucifixions appear in the Second World War official art only twice and in both appear close to tanks, perhaps as ironic commentaries on the killing capacity of these machines.38 This paucity of crucifixions could be considered surprising, given that scenes of Christian death had been apparently popular during the First World War. Times had changed, however, and the short-lived revival of Christian practice had been replaced by a more ritualized and less explicitly Christian form of mourning. As for crosses, the ngc transferred nine official paintings containing this motif to the cwm in 1971. Alex Colville places a newly dug grave and its cross alongside a tank in another ironic commentary on the destructiveness of machinery in his Grave of a Canadian Trooper (1945).39 Several artworks, such as Campbell Tinning’s The Gothic Line at Tomba di Pesaro (1944), by including figures, invite the viewer to bear witness and mourn the buried dead alongside the military personnel in the picture.40 Comfort makes the Christian relationship with death explicit, however, in Officers’ Lines, when he combines his depiction of a line of military tents in rainy England with a church tower and a white cross.41 Anthony Law was struck by how the masts of decommissioned vessels resembled crosses, and gave the Easter colours of purple and yellow and a setting sun to his work Graveyard, Sorel, P.Q. (1945).42 Only one watercolour records German grave-markers (see fig. 7.3): Pepper’s Hitler’s Youth, German Cemetery at Louvigny, Calvados, Normandy (1944).43 The majority of the fourteen depictions of German dead are of individuals, perhaps the most shocking being Comfort’s Dead German on the Hitler Line (1944), whose flesh has receded significantly leaving his exposed face somewhat skull-like (see fig. 7.4).44 On the back of this watercolour, Comfort noted, “I am not given to painting lugubrious subjects of this kind, but at least one horror picture is not inept in this situation” (1944). Other artists treat their depictions of corpses as a form of figure study, an element to be added into a more complicated final composition. Pepper’s watercolour of a dead German sniper spread-eagled on his back reappears partially reversed in his painting The Falaise Break-Through (1946).45 Pinned under a tank, his broken presence conceptually strengthens the notion of a German defeat. This same figure is also included in his painting Dead German Paratroopers (1945).46 It is a surprise to find a very similar figure in Will Ogilvie’s undated

7.3 George Pepper, Hitler’s Youth, German Cemetery at Louvigny, Calvados, Normandy, 1944, watercolour on paper, 35.6 x 50.7 cm. Beaverbrook Collection of War Art, cwm 19710261-5287. © Canadian War Museum

7.4 Charles Comfort, Dead German on the Hitler Line, 1944, watercolour, chalk, carbon pencil, and ink on paper, 38.8 x 56.8 cm. Beaverbrook Collection of War Art, cwm 19710261-2179. © Canadian War Museum

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Escape Route, suggesting a possible post-war sharing of sketches between artists as finished canvases were completed in London or Ottawa studios.47 This figure is not present in the sketch that preceded the finished work.48 Colville’s treatment of German corpses ranges from a bucolic scene of a dead paratrooper in a field to the curious foreshortening of the covered figures that characterises his Bodies on a Road (1945) and makes the dead Germans look like bundles of rags (see fig. 7.5).49 Only Colville addressed non-Holocaustrelated civilian death in a monochromatic watercolour entitled A Dead Civilian in a Prison Yard (1945), where the corpse is barely visible in the debris.50 The 1945 liberation of German concentration camps brought three war artists – Donald Anderson, Bayefsky, and Colville – face to face with levels of atrocity they had never seen before. There are eight works in the collection that deal with the dead of Bergen-Belsen, the only camp any Canadian artists accessed. Colville’s work is probably the best known of the three. He entered the camp shortly after its liberation and saw the mass pits of the dead, which he depicted in a startlingly gentle 1945 watercolour where his selected pit is barely distinguishable from the overall scene.51 Perhaps his most famous painting of the war, the surprisingly lyrical Bodies in a Grave, Belsen (1946) is associated with a number of related elegiac sketches in the cwm collection that he completed in order to get the composition as he wished it rather than for reasons of documentary accuracy.52 It can be argued that for this reason, Colville’s Belsen work is not representative of camp conditions. For the public, photographs of bone-thin camp inmates, mass graves, and horrifying moving footage of bodies being bulldozed into pits were the dominant images. This was the case for Bayefsky too, who had just turned twenty-two when he visited Belsen for the first time on 10 May 1945. For the young Jewish man, the experience was of critical importance to his later career and to his attitude to life. In a 1989 interview he said: “It was the determining factor in everything I have done since.”53 Three works depict a mass grave. The drawing completed on 10 May shows a jumble of bone-white emaciated bodies, like broken skeletons, piled one upon the other. The dark side of the pit rises up behind them providing a stark tonal contrast, while above the sky is leaden.54 The artist re-visited Belsen a week later and sketched another pit scene.55 This work shows signs of tension in that the lines of the composition are scratched in an urgent manner and are possessed of an anxious, nervous quality. The bodies are more contorted and the mood is one of agony. There is no sky, just the bleak, black walls of the pit with which the white forms of the corpses seem to intermingle. The final work (fig. 7.2), an oil painting on canvas, is more like the first drawing.56 The contorted, nervous lines are gone. Perhaps the intent is to show that the victims’ agony is over and they have found some kind of peace.

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7.5 Alex Colville, Bodies on a Road, 1945, watercolour on paper, 26.1 x 35.6 cm. Beaverbrook Collection of War Art, cwm 19710261-2035. © Canadian War Museum

On the back of this painting is a quotation from Goethe: “Man needs but little earth for pleasure and even less for his final repose.” Is this solicitous treatment of the dead and injured even in the most violent of circumstances a constant in official war art today? In two paintings by one of Canada’s most recently commissioned war artists, Gertrude Kearns, we can learn something of the impact an official role has on the work produced. Responding to the same event – the violent results of an attack on a vehicle convoy in Afghanistan in 2006 – both in an authorized capacity and as a civilian, Kearns produced two entirely different paintings. In the official painting, Master Corporal Paul Franklin is seen doing his medical work, as well as being depicted in an injured but respectable state.57 In the unofficial work, the focus is entirely on his injury and that of two others.58 Kearns recently wrote of this painting: “I slashed this time, expressing for the first time since my return from Afghanistan, the sadness and volatility of emotion I had contained for so long as far as this war work was concerned.”59 Seen together, the two compositions suggest that working in an official capacity is constraining.

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First and Second World War official artists faced innumerable challenges in depicting dead bodies. The overall purpose of their art, lack of exposure to violent death, their traditional training in figurative work, and limited access to corpses all combined with an evolving respect for the individual dead that placed an emphasis on burial, and discouraged any potentially exploitative battlefield depiction. In consequence, a number of artists relied on alternatives to the literal depiction of corpses. Christian iconography, in particular, played a useful role as artists reworked images of Christ’s crucifixion to transform the meaning of violent death into necessary sacrifice. Nonetheless, even if personal, authoritarian, and circumstantial contexts played significant roles in determining how much and what human damage was to be included in the official visual record of the two world wars, in today’s environment the war artists’ often tame or cartoonish portrayals of corpses come as a surprise. Their reliance on Christian symbolism combined with allusions to violence in their choice of ancillary subjects (such as tanks), even their use of specific paint applications to evoke brutality, but, in particular, their own and their employers’ seeming reluctance to address the subject has resulted in a depiction of war that, in reducing all but a few handfuls of the more than 105,000 deaths to symbolic allusions, denies its human cost. We have to look to Spain’s Francisco Goya and Germany’s Otto Dix to truly see what this cost is.

8 Bearing Witness and Cultural Memory: The Wreckage, Burning Vision, and War in the Pacific sherrill grace I Over the past thirty years, and with increasing frequency, Canadian writers, filmmakers, and playwrights have assumed the task of recreating the experiences of Canadians in the Second World War. Canadians are by no means unique in this work of cultural memory and the recreation of the past; artists, historians, and philosophers from many of the countries involved in that global war have revisited it, tried to make sense of the sheer senselessness of many events, and yet stubbornly insisted that later generations must remember and must try to understand. For me, however, since my subject is literature and the arts, it is always Adorno’s famous dictum about the impossibility of writing poetry after Auschwitz that rings in my ears.1 However, that was not Adorno’s final word on the subject of the Second World War and the arts, and writers (including scholars) as diverse as Primo Levi, Shoshana Felman, Modris Eksteins, Dominick LaCapra, Iris Chang, Mark Levy, and Marie Clements have all claimed that they must bear witness to the past and that those of us who read or watch their work must engage in this process of witnessing with them. Filmmakers have also been keen to remember, interrogate, and re-imagine the war in films as different as Le chagrin et la pitié (1969), Shoah (1985), The Valour and the Horror (1992), The Thin Red Line (1998), Zwartboek (2006), Katyn´ (2007), and Max Manus (2009).2 This increasing attention can perhaps be attributed to our safe distance from the Second World War and, thus, our increasing ability to face it, to speak openly about it, or perhaps to a sense of urgency felt as more and more veterans and survivors age and die, or perhaps to the fact that the twenty-first century (indeed, the last decade of the twentieth century) has

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been so plagued by new wars, fresh atrocities, and escalating tensions. In any case, world peace seems more and more remote and unattainable, so we turn to the past for lessons, warnings, and help. We ask the past to speak, as if by listening to the voices of the dead in art, literature, and memory we could stem the tide of violence. In this brief discussion of an immense subject, I can only consider a few texts, and as a Canadianist I have chosen to examine works by Canadian artists. Furthermore, I have decided to look at works that explore the nature and impact of war in the Pacific and the role of Canada and of Canadians in that part of the war. I have made this last decision because some extremely fine work has been created on the topic even though Canadian attention has, more often than not, been focused on the war in Europe. We know about experiences of Canadians in France, the Netherlands, Greece, and Italy through our official war artists, through documentary films like The Valour and the Horror or Return to Ortona, and through novels like Colin McDougall’s Execution, Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, and Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces. With the exception of Joy Kogawa’s Obasan, we know much less about events in the Pacific theatre of war (as the expression goes), but recent work by Michael Crummey, Marie Clements, Marjorie Chan, Dennis Bock, Karen Levine, Donna Milner, and the films of Anne Wheeler provide us with stories that bear witness to many aspects of this history, which is also Canada’s history. I have now referred twice to bearing witness, and I have used the term in a context that implies an ethical response or obligation to a history to which we should pay attention. Before I turn to my primary texts, therefore, I want to comment further on why I choose this term with its ethical overtones. As Dominick LaCapra notes in History and Memory after Auschwitz, witnessing that is based on memory – and explicitly on first-hand memories of trauma – has become a privileged mode of access to the past for historians,3 as well as for other writers, such as novelists, playwrights, and biographers, and for filmmakers. But he also warns against our contemporary obsession with this mode of memory witnessing, describing it as “the chocolate-covered Madeleine of the psyche on which one overdoses.”4 LaCapra is just one among many scholars in Europe and North America who have theorized and debated memory, trauma, and witnessing over the past twenty years.5 If I turn to him in particular here, it is because of his warnings and because of the clear distinctions he makes between primary and secondary witnessing. In Writing History, Writing Trauma, he insists (wisely, I think) that “historical trauma is specific, and not everyone is subject to it or entitled to the subject position associated with it.”6 In other words, someone listening to or read-

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ing the words of a trauma victim must not then claim to be a “surrogate” victim.7 This person who listens or reads, or who writes about another’s suffering – the historian, the psychologist, the biographer, playwright, or novelist – functions as a secondary witness, and as such he or she takes up the position of “empathy and empathic unsettlement,” which is entirely different from claiming identity with the primary witness.8 But LaCapra pushes his description of the secondary witness one step further: not only must such witnessing display “empathic unsettlement,” instead of identity with the traumatic experience, but the process of secondary witnessing also involves complex ethical responsibilities to both the primary witness (and the primary traumatic event), to the facts and historical specificity of that event, and to the next, or third, degree of witnessing – that of contemporary readers or theatre and film audiences.9 Narratives created by the secondary witness and offered to us (those of us who read history and novels or watch films and plays) must work to avoid simplistic, harmonizing, uplifting conclusions, what LaCapra calls “redemptive narrative [that] denies the trauma that brought [the story, the witnessing] into existence.”10 Although LaCapra is somewhat suspicious of artistic narratives (as distinct from historiography) because he too often finds them offering redemptive, healing narrative closure, he does allow that much contemporary literature dealing with war or the Holocaust can provide a “relatively safe haven in which to explore post-traumatic effects”11 And this is precisely the point at which a literary scholar’s expertise is helpful. While I would argue that history is as vulnerable to redemptive narrative closure as any other mode of story-telling (and LaCapra would no doubt agree), literature and art have the capacity to disturb such narratives, to challenge and displace them, indeed, to completely undermine and expose them as false, self- or State-serving myths. Among recent successful works by historians who renarrativize the two world wars, I can think of no better examples than Jonathan Vance’s Death So Noble: Memory, Meaning, and the First World War and Randall Hansen’s Fire and Fury: The Allied Bombing of Germany, 1942–45.12 Vance analyses the Canadian mythology of the First World War as our glorious coming of age story, identifies where and why redemptive narratives arose to dominate our historical memory of that war, and then carefully opens up the story to make room for hitherto forgotten, repressed (and less ennobling) narratives and events. Hansen is, if anything, more aggressive than Vance and less forgiving in his exposure and damning of Britain’s Bomber Command area attacks on Germany under the leadership of Sir Arthur Harris, and he dramatizes this exposure through the familiar narrative strategy of focalization by writing as if from the perspective of, for example, a German child

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witness in a Hamburg bomb shelter as the raf (and the rcaf) drop tonnes of bombs and incendiaries on the city. But the history books are not my subject here. I am interested in what a small subset of Canadian novelists and playwrights have been telling us about Canada’s connections with the Second World War in the Pacific. Until Obasan was published in 1981, Canadians by and large ignored the Pacific war and knew very little about it except that the Americans dropped two atomic bombs on Japan in August 1945. Younger generations born after the war could not see the war art by painters like E.J. Hughes or Maurice Gagnon, and knew little about what happened in Hong Kong, the Japanese prisonerof-war camps, Canadian internment camps in the British Columbia interior, or even the history of the Alaska Highway.13 Since 1981, however, a number of excellent and important novels, plays, and films have appeared, each throwing new and troubling light on Canada’s role during and after the war. Following close on the publication of Obasan were Anne Wheeler’s feature and documentary films Bye Bye Blues (1989), A War Story (1993), and The War Between Us (1995). The impact of Obasan and its contribution to the Japanese-Canadian Redress movement has been well documented and Bye Bye Blues, the story of a young wife and mother waiting in Canada for news of her doctor husband, who is a pow in a Japanese camp, was widely screened and highly praised upon its release.14 However, the cacophony that greeted the 1992 television broadcast of The Valour and the Horror focused wide public attention on Canada’s role in the Second World War as no other single work had done to that point in time. To be sure, it was the segment about Bomber Command, and our part in bombing German civilians, that produced the loudest protests from veterans, and others, but Brian McKenna also devoted one part of the series, called Savage Christmas, to Hong Kong, thereby reminding older viewers and informing younger generations about what happened to Canadian troops and nurses in December 1941 and after, when the survivors were taken prisoner.15 Obasan, Bye Bye Blues, and then Savage Christmas put the war in the Pacific back on the map, or radar screen, of Canadian cultural memory. Stories written since 1992 have visited and re-visited events, exploring, analyzing, remembering, and bearing secondary witness to aspects of our involvement in that war. In doing so, they employ a range of narrative strategies and tropes to produce “empathic unsettlement” and to resist redemptive closure. Chief amongst these is, necessarily, the position of the writers themselves as secondary witnesses who did not take part in the war. Moreover, they engage carefully and respectfully with the historical record, while also performing an ethically motivated and informed re-telling of stories we might

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prefer to forget. And they construct several categories of witnessing, including at times historical primary witnessing, which I see as their chief way of involving us, positioning us, so we can gain greater insight – albeit never full knowledge, never neat answers – into the meaning the past might hold for the present and the future. Like LaCapra, Vance, or Hansen, like Adorno himself, these story-tellers bear witness and invite us to do the same, but always within the carefully managed boundaries of history and art. In selecting the works to discuss, I have decided not to return to Obasan because it has already received a great deal of attention and interpretation. Anne Wheeler comments on her films in a separate chapter of this book and while I believe her three war films warrant much more attention, I will only comment upon them in passing and leave closer analysis to another occasion; likewise, Savage Christmas and The Valour and the Horror must wait.16 With limited space, then, I have decided to focus on one play and one novel: Marie Clements’s Burning Vision (2003) and Michael Crummey’s The Wreckage (2006), but this means leaving Dennis Bock’s The Ash Garden (2001), Robert Lepage’s epic drama Seven Streams of the River Ota (1996), Karen Levine’s Hana’s Suitcase (2002), Marjorie Chan’s A Nanking Winter (2008), and Donna Milner’s The Promise of Rain (2010) also waiting in the wings.17 Reluctant as I am to relegate these important and profoundly moving texts to an endnote, my play and novel do establish the ethical and artistic parameters and most of the narrative strategies that characterize Canadian contemporary, secondary-witnessing responses to the Second World War. Burning Vision tells the story of uranium mining at Great Bear Lake and its journey from the Northwest Territories to the Manhattan Project to Nagasaki; it is also the story of official Canadian secrecy and complicity in the war and the refusal to acknowledge the impact of uranium mining on the Sahtu Dene of Great Bear Lake, an issue discussed eloquently by Peter van Wyck in this book and in The Highway of the Atom. The Wreckage is the story of several lives swept up in the maelstrom of the war, especially as that war developed in Japan, and Crummey takes his main male characters from Newfoundland and British Columbia to a Japanese pow camp, where one is a prisoner and the other is a soldier with Japan’s Imperial Army serving as an interpreter in the camp: both are from here, both are Canadian (at least, the Newfoundlander is in the fictional present of 1994). Both works insist that we bear witness and both urge us to adopt the position of “empathic unsettlement,” but make that position acutely uncomfortable. Neither offers redemption, makes things all right in the end, or holds out a promise of “never again.”

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II Burning Vision dramatizes the consequences of the Second World War and the bombing of Japan for the civilians in Canada and Japan who were caught up in that conflagration. Despite its complex structure, stark symbolism, and expressionist techniques, the plot of the play stays close to historical facts, dates, and actual events, beginning with the discovery of uranium in the Canadian North. Gilbert and Charles LaBine are credited with discovering pitchblende ore, which produced high grade uranium, on the shores of Great Bear Lake in the nwt in 1930. A mine quickly developed at Port Radium from where the ore was transported south. Most of the men mining and handling the sacks of ore were local Sahtu Dene, who moved their families to the site and lived in tents at Port Radium. The fine powder from the ore blew everywhere: into sandboxes, across the vegetation eaten by the migrating caribou herds, and into the food being prepared by Dene women. The sacks carried by the Dene stevedores leaked; tonnes of tailings accumulated on land and in the water. In short, radium contamination permeated everything in the environment. Moreover, it is believed that ore from that mine made its way into the American Manhattan Project.18 After the Second World War, with the Soviet Union arming and the Cold War heating up – and long after it was clear what damage the atomic bombs had done in Japan – mining at Port Radium continued pretty much as it had during the war. In 1952, the Crawley film company produced an “industrial documentary” called The Highway of the Atom, and the narrator of this film assured viewers that uranium from Port Radium “ended WWII.”19 It was not until the 1990s that the story of unusually high cancer rates and deaths among the Sahtu Dene in Deline began to emerge. As Peter Blow argues in his 1999 documentary film Village of Widows,20 too many Dene have died of cancer for there to be no connection with the mine, and the Deline Uranium Committee began seeking help from the federal government, as well as a kind of atonement or common ground with the Japanese survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by visiting Hiroshima and participating in commemorative ceremonies. Although Clements incorporates much of this information in her play, she transforms the story into a parable of life and death for our times. Underlying her complex, expressionist drama are many facts about the Second World War in the Pacific, including the discovery of uranium, the mining operations that continued after the war, and the deaths from cancer of the miners, beginning in 1960. The cast is large, and some of the characters are named for historical figures of the period: Tokyo Rose (a Japanese-American “radio siren” whose real name was Iva Toguri), Lorne Greene, a well-known

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Canadian cbc radio announcer and actor nicknamed “the Voice of Doom” because the war news was so bleak, and the LaBine brothers. Two other characters, who have symbolic roles, are simply called “Fat Man,” “an American bomb test dummy manning his house in the late 1940s and 50s” (13), and “Little Boy,” an “eight to ten years old” native boy who personifies “the … uranium found at the centre of the earth.”21 The through-line of the plot is sustained in two key ways: through the on-stage presence of a Dene Widow, who mourns the death of her husband from cancer as she tends the fire from which she evokes the visions that supply the scenes of the play; and by the voice, off-stage, of the Dene See-er, a medicine man who speaks from the past of 1880 to the present of post-war devastation and threat, and warns all who will listen that the black rock – the uranium-bearing pitchblende – should not be touched. The play is set in a timeless realm of vision that merges past and present, here at Great Bear Lake with there in the United States or in Japan. As the map, which introduces the published text, suggests, the site of Burning Vision is a palimpsest of events in time and space that identifies important human connections. And the scenes are brief visions called up by the Widow as she stares into her fire to dream into reality the movements of memory, trauma, love, hatred, despair, and hope that define our humanity despite the pervasive rhetoric of racism and war-mongering, the atrocities too often committed in the name of peace, and the ignorance and greed of individuals and colonial powers. Although Burning Vision is a serious, issues-based play that does point fingers – as Rose says directly at the audience: “you’re all so sorry [but] you can’t really be sorry for something you don’t want to remember can you” (100) – the intensity of live production, the encompassing sound and lighting effects of the drama, the melding of voices in three languages (Slavey, English, and Japanese), and the composite characters from past and present, finally produce what I experienced in performance as an exhilarating testimony to human creativity and endurance.22 Because the play opens with the atomic bomb exploding on Nagasaki, we are situated as witnesses to a shared history of destruction and to the struggle to understand, survive, and maintain human values. Equally important, Burning Vision ends on a note of hope: the voice-over of the Slavey radio announcer is followed by the Japanese announcer, and then by an announcer whose English reveals what we have heard: “Hello Granddad, brother, sister, son, husband, father, cousin, nephew, friend, my teacher, my love … We love you and miss you” (122). And in the final words of the play, the Japanese survivor, Koji, answers this northern radio call: “They hear us, and they are talking back in hope over time” (122).

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This promise of hope notwithstanding, Burning Vision is anything but a redemptive narrative. In the closing sequence of the play, set in some undetermined present, a bomb falls again, and the stage instructions inform us that “a huge white light” envelops the characters, leaving “their world” (and ours in the audience) in total “blackness” (119). When the stage lights come up again, we see that a “black dust has settled over everything” and the actor playing Fat Man has been replaced by “a sack dummy” looking the “worse for wear” (119). This explicit reminder of the past is followed by an hallucinatory montage of characters moving across a charred landscape, passing and merging with one another – Japanese Grandmother to Radium Painter to Dene Widow, who Koji, the Japanese boy killed by the original blast over Nagasaki, addresses as his grandmother. The Dene Widow recognizes him as her “small man that survived. Tough like hope” (121), and she is finally able to release the haunting spirit of her dead ore-carrier husband. The hope Clements leaves us with, then, is shot through with warnings – that war is not over and done with, that grief and suffering continue, that healing is never complete, and that human beings who survive disaster and are alive today can, must, remember and learn from past experience. In the final analysis, the responsibility to learn and act is ours. We are the ones who must uncover and acknowledge the facts about war, accept our share of responsibility for the fate of civilians on both sides, and bear witness to their stories. Clements leaves that ethical burden for us to carry, after the play is over, after the house lights come up, as we reflect upon the meaning, for today, of her burning vision. What Clements does not consider, what she leaves out of her reckoning, is nonetheless immense. For example, there is no room on her large canvas for the fate of Japanese-Canadians in Canada or for Canadian soldiers in Hong Kong and in pow camps, never mind the Chinese and other civilians massacred by the Japanese Imperial Army.23 Kogawa told us something of the first story in Obasan, and other writers are beginning to open up other perspectives. The most important of these new writers who address Canada’s experience in the Pacific is Michael Crummey. Towards the end of his monumental novel The Wreckage, a grown daughter asks her seventy-year-old mother why she “would … choose that kind of trouble now?”24 The mother is not sure herself, but she has, nevertheless, chosen to accept, indeed to embrace, “that kind of trouble.” That “trouble” is a seventy-two-year-old man called Aloysious, or “Wish” for short, who is a Second World War veteran and a survivor of a Japanese pow camp near Nagasaki. The seventy-yearold mother and widow is Mercedes, who has returned to Newfoundland, where she was born, to scatter her husband’s ashes on the occasion of the

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fiftieth anniversary of D-Day, 6 June 1944; her husband was an American soldier stationed in St John’s during the war, but the man who drew her from her outport home to the city in 1940, the man she fell so deeply in love with when she was sixteen, is Wish. The Wreckage comprises a complex set of interwoven life-stories, each of which has been shaped by the war in the Pacific, just as each was influenced, if not actually determined, by racism and bigotry at home. The third central character, with his own life-story, is a Japanese-Canadian who has joined the Imperial Army to fight for the glory of Japan and for an Asia liberated from white, Western influence. His name is Noburo Nishino and his story is loosely based on that of a real person, Kanao Inouye (1916–47), who was tried and executed for treason after the war.25 To bring these complex narrative threads together across fifty-four years, not counting the equally complex, detailed backstories for each character’s family, and two utterly separate worlds and cultures, Crummey creates a narrative divided into two sections: part one, beginning in 1940, sets the stage for the love, misunderstandings, and wartime separations that follow, and part two, set in 1994, explores the catastrophic consequences of the war in the Pacific for the lives of these otherwise ordinary Canadians. Uniting these two date-specific present times, is a host of repeated tropes, haunting phrases, and memories (often re-remembered and slightly distorted or reconstructed memories) to carry the weight of ethical purpose and narrative meaning in the text. But the point I want to keep in mind through my brief discussion of this important novel is that it does not provide an easy resolution of the “trouble” Mercedes accepts by returning to Wish.26 We cannot put this work down with any reassuring sense of redemption for the characters, for Canada, or for ourselves. To allay any misconception that The Wreckage will tell a story of starcrossed teenaged lovers from Newfoundland, Crummey opens the novel in medias res with Japanese soldiers in the jungle of Guadalcanal, just hours before their encounter with American troops.27 But it will require several paragraphs before readers understand precisely where they are or on which side of the battle line: He was never dry. Every day they abandoned field guns mired in mud. The tires and axles of ammunition carts disappeared in sludge and the shells for the guns still with them were carried by hand. Half a dozen men at the front of the column slashed a trail with machetes … Soldiers lost their footing on exposed roots … There was only river water to drink, and everyone in the company was miserable with dengue and with dysentery. (1)

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The “He” that opens the book is Private Noburo Nishino and, despite his Japanese name, he understands English perfectly. When he hears a parrot crying, “Yes sir!” (2), he realizes the Americans are close and warns his fellow soldiers. After their failed encounter with the enemy and three days of desperate retreat, a badly wounded Nishino is questioned by his commanding officer, Lieutenant Kurakake, about where he learned to speak English: “In Kitsilano,” Nishino replies. “In Canada” (8). From that startling announcement, the story shifts abruptly to part one and the title “1940” and then to the sub-title “Wish.” We are now in a makeshift cinema in the Cove on Little Fogo Island, Newfoundland; Wish is preparing to screen The 39 Steps, and the beautiful local girl he had hoped to see is watching him. If what these two feel cannot yet be called love, then it is certainly such a powerful sexual attraction that they will risk ostracization and violence to be together. Wish, who comes from a town on the southern shore of the Avalon Peninsula, is Roman Catholic; Mercedes, or Sadie, is Protestant. In 1940s Newfoundland everyone knows your religion based on where you were born, and no one will countenance a marriage between these two. While mention of the war now underway in Europe is made in passing by local men, it is not until Wish is driven from the community that he flees to St John’s and enlists. By the time Mercedes escapes to join him, turning her back on her family and her community’s bigotry, he has already left for Halifax, and her long years of waiting for him begin. From this point on, the narrative perspective shifts back and forth between Wish, who is captured in Singapore and interned in pow camps there and later near Nagasaki, and Mercedes who waits in St John’s hoping for some word from him; she writes to him regularly, sending a photograph, with her promise that she will be there when he comes home. As so often happens in war stories, a photograph and a letter become potent talismans, symbols of hope, of a return to normalcy and home, and Wish cherishes her image and the few words that reach him through his years of starvation, forced labour, illness, and abuse as a prisoner of war. He survives this ordeal, but with no word from him, Mercedes comes to believe he is dead (in fact, she receives a letter saying he is), and she marries the American soldier who has loved her loyally for years. The question that haunts the narrative almost to its end is why: why did Wish not write or call as soon as he was liberated? Why, when he reached Halifax in late 1945, did he not continue on to St John’s? The answer is inextricably bound up with his prisoner-of-war experience and his participation in the murder of Nishino. Indeed, Nishino, whose own story is inserted piece by piece between those of Wish and Mercedes, is the key figure in The Wreckage, the ghost who will haunt Wish, the third element so

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remote, so incalculable, so deadly, that will keep them apart. Until, that is, Wish is able to tell all his story, to testify as it were and bear witness, something he cannot manage until, at seventy-two in 1994, Mercedes asks him to tell her “What happened to you over there, Wish?” and she wants to know “everything” (302). Before he releases his appalling story, Wish tells her that in Spanish her name “means compassion or mercy or some goddamn thing” (327), and in a way compassion or mercy is what she will give him by listening attentively “as if he was providing an affidavit, listing dates and events, victims and perpetrators and bystanders, answering questions to clarify, interpreting phrases, naming names” (327). His bearing of witness is, in turn, acknowledged and legitimated by her listening, by her willingness to be his secondary witness and, in this capacity, she serves as the reader’s textual surrogate. What she cannot grant him is forgiveness or absolution. What he withholds from her is “the one detail” no one else knows (331). After Wish and his fellow prisoners were liberated, he and two close friends found Nishino hiding in the crypt of the French Temple not far from the camp, where Wish had previously delivered the ashes of dead pows. They beat the interpreter to death with wooden clubs, removed objects from his pockets (including a First World War medal), and then they urinated on the corpse – at least two of them did. Wish was incapable of the act, not because he refused to carry out this final outrage on principle, but because he had developed a sudden erection, something he had not had in several years. His incapacity, at once crude and incongruous – Crummey’s description is “pedestrian and bizarre … freakish, inexplicable” (332) – should not, however, be dismissed as trivial. The resonance of this moment for the reader and the significance of Wish’s erection for an interpretation of narrative meaning and ethical perspective in the novel is profound. This horrifying scene of pissing on the corpse echoes an earlier scene in Nishino’s story and an early scene in Wish and Mercedes’ relationship. While growing up in Vancouver, Nishino and his Japanese-Canadian friends experienced considerable racism, and on one occasion they struck back in the only way they could. The public swimming pool in English Bay was banned to boys like him; “No Japs” were allowed (189), but Nishino ingratiated himself with the white manager, who eventually allowed the boys into the pool early in the mornings provided they left well before it opened to the general public. Finally, on one morning, before they left, “all four boys pissed into the clear water of the pool” (191). To grasp the significance of Wish’s erection before Nishino’s corpse, we must also recall one of his and Mercedes’ clandestine meetings back in the Cove when she asked to see him naked. He stripped in front of her and although

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she had never seen a naked man before, let alone one sexually aroused, she understood and reached for him, but he moved away saying they would wait until they were married (177–8). From this point in 1940 with Mercedes until the murder of Nishino five years later, Wish has linked his body, especially his sexual identity, with her and, in my reading of these parallel scenes, his overwhelming shame, even self-loathing, is so profound that he feels unable to return to her.28 His contamination from the war is not only physical, the result of being forced to clean up the aftermath of the bombing of Nagaski; it is psychological and spiritual. Nishino, like Wish a victim of bigotry at home, has become his nemesis. To be sure, he has been told that his exposure to radiation at Nagaski will likely kill him, as it does his friend Harris, and he is haunted by his memories of the camp and of the devastation of Nagaski littered with charred bodies and dying women and children and later, while living temporarily in Chicago, by the sight of a young African-American’s battered face on the front page of the Chicago Defender, an image that evokes Nishino’s dead face.29 But at the root of his refusal to return to Mercedes or to embrace any future happiness is this deeply personal crisis over the murder of Nishino. This memory of wartime betrayal and atrocity has polluted and supplanted a memory of love and domestic fulfillment. This haunting by the past is among the most complex, intimate, and powerful ones I know of in recent remembered stories of war. The scars Wish carries are not on his body but of it and, thus, inescapable. No healing, no plastic surgery of the soul, will ever remove or alter this past.

I II Burning Vision and The Wreckage have much in common besides their representation of the war in the Pacific. Both texts foreground the complex connections between here in Canada and there in Japan, between home front and battle front, between the violence and hatred of the war and the bigotry and persecution of peace-time Canadian (and Newfoundland) society. By insisting on these connections and using them strategically to advance and unify plot, this play and novel invite us to participate in remembering the war and discovering aspects of its factual history and traumatic aftermath which we may not have known about or might prefer to ignore. These connections, together with the processes of remembrance and discovery, contribute to Canada’s more general cultural memory of the war. But they do more than this because each narrative brings its characters, and us with them, home in the end. Each resists the temptation to leave war over there; each reminds

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us that our home and native land contributed to the war, not only by supplying uranium for bombs and soldiers for fighting, but also by sharing in the racism, bigotry, and violence that fuel all wars. Clements makes this point emphatically when she dramatizes the fatal effects of radium contamination and when her character, Round Rose, accuses us of being sorry for things we refuse to remember: “Selective memory isn’t it? Let’s be honest, hell, you can’t even apologise for the shit you did yesterday never mind 50 years ago” (100). Crummey makes a similar point more obliquely when he has Wish keep the First World War medal found on Nishino’s body. Ironically, tragically, this medal was won by Nishino’s father who fought for Canada in the Great War, as the inscription on the medal states. Whether intentional on Crummey’s part or not, this medal recalls for me a scene in Anne Wheeler’s film The War Between Us in which the Japanese-Canadian father, a decorated veteran, about to be repatriated to Japan, burns his uniform and throws his medal into the flames. Both works provide deeply moving examples of fictional, re-created primary witnessing (Clements through her Dene Widow; Crummey through Wish), and both serve as exemplary instances of secondary witnessing on the part of their creators who resist redemptive conclusions and insist that we – readers, audiences, contemporary Canadians generally – also perform the role of secondary witnessing and carry the ethical burden of remembering and understanding into the present. For the genre of drama, this passing of the burden is managed by a character (played in performance by a live actor) addressing the audience directly, as Round Rose does. In a novel, at least in The Wreckage, a character within the story – Mercedes – shows us what we must do: listen with “empathic unsettlement,” with compassion, and share the weight of memory. This sharing is made somewhat easier, or more accessible, because the people in both works are recognizable, average human beings who desire nothing more than to enjoy love, family, and peace. No one in either text is simply evil; Fat Man becomes almost sympathetic as the play develops and his terror over Cold War hostility is palpable, while Nishino’s family past in Vancouver explains, if it does not excuse, his behaviour. By the same token, there are no heroes or heroics in either work; the sheer helplessness of all the characters, their grief, trauma, and loss, makes them resonant figures of the human condition. And it is at this level of ordinary humanity that these works deliver their chief message, their excoriating damnation of war, because this is where we all live our daily lives. Quite simply, we can relate to them and their suffering. Insofar as this play and novel hold out hope for a better, more peaceful future, they do so by bringing their fictional characters together across barriers of race, language, and religion, and by refusing the temptations of anger,

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recrimination, and retaliation. Burning Vision closes with a symbolic recognition of the Japanese survivor by the Dene Widow; The Wreckage ends with Mercedes and Wish united to face a belated and problematic future … together. In neither case is the past denied. To the contrary. The past of the Second World War is remembered, its ghosts acknowledged, and its history brought forward into our present of telling, performing, and reading. Like A Nanking Winter, in which a Chinese-Canadian playwright writes the horror of that massacre into contemporary Canadian life, or Hana’s Suitcase, in which the Holocaust makes its way to Japan and finally to Canada in the form of a Jewish child’s suitcase or, most recently, The Promise of Rain, in which another Canadian survivor of a Japanese pow camp must remember and bear witness to this past (including the brutality of a particular JapaneseCanadian interpreter) to save his sanity and his family, Burning Vision and The Wreckage ask us to bear witness. They implore us to face that terrible vision, to see the wreckage left behind by war for what it is, and to work through mourning to an informed cultural memory of war that embraces peace.

9 Emmy Andriesse, Dutch Wartime Photographer: The Hunger Winter of 1945 christl verduyn and conny steenman marcusse Dutch photographer Emmy Andriesse’s (1914–1953) wartime photograph, Boy with a Pan (“Jongen met het pannetje” in Dutch, see fig. 9.1 on page 128), has become an iconic image of life under Nazi occupation during the “Hunger Winter” of 1944–45. A small, thin boy standing alone and forlorn in an Amsterdam street clasps an empty tin, in case food might be found at one of the soup kitchens. Boy with a Pan is one of hundreds of photographs Andriesse took as a member of the clandestine group that came to be known as “The Underground Photographers” (De Ondergedoken Camera). The Underground Photographers were by all accounts unique to the Netherlands.1 With their cameras hidden in briefcases, clothes, newspapers, or shopping baskets, they documented the difficult day-to-day life of Dutch citizens during the German occupation. Like fellow Underground Photographers2 Carel Blazer, Cas Oorthuys, Krijn Taconis, Ad Windig, and Eva Besnyö,3 Emmy Andriesse courageously chronicled the struggles of ordinary men, women, and children during the war. For a Dutch woman of Jewish origin, this was dangerous work. Andriesse’s social and political commitment to documenting life, however, outweighed personal peril. After the war Andriesse went on to become known for fashion, portrait, and landscape photography, which comprised her livelihood as the Netherlands set about rebuilding. She completed a superb series of artist portraits for the Stedelijk Museum (Municipal Museum) in Amsterdam and a photographic tribute to Vincent van Gogh published in 1990.4 Though she is still relatively unknown in North America, an exhibition of Emmy Andriesse’s work mounted by the Fotomuseum Den Haag (The Hague Museum of Photography) and the University of Leiden in 2003, and

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an exhibition at the Barbican Centre in London, uk in January 2007,5 have brought renewed attention to her photography. In her review of the Barbican exhibition, The Guardian columnist Alice Rawsthorn described Andriesse’s work as bearing “the hallmarks of 1940s avant garde documentary photography. Beautifully composed with striking use of light and shade, it aestheticises the subjects without flinching from their pain.” Unlike other documentary photographers known for sensitive portrayals of oppression, Rawsthorn declared, “Andriesse was more than an observer. As a Jew, she was a participant in – and victim of – the brutality and persecution of occupied Amsterdam during the second world war.” With Emmy Andriesse’s photographs the viewer, too, becomes more than an observer. As Louise van Santen asserted, “it is impossible to remain a mere onlooker in the presence of Emmy Andriesse’s photographs. You are immediately involved in her anecdote, in the story she tells.”6 According to van Santen, Andriesse was one of the first photographers in the Netherlands to use the anecdote as a style: “hundreds of photographs – hundreds of anecdotes, a conglomeration of subjects … war, starvation, travel, poverty, fashion, Van Gogh.”7 In this essay, we focus on the anecdotes and stories that Andriesse’s war photographs tell. Part I comprises a brief biographical portrait of Andriesse; as a Jewish woman in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, the personal and the political were deeply interconnected and her life was implicated in her work as an underground photographer. Equally important were the pre-war cultural and aesthetic contexts in which her photography developed, as well as the social, historical, and political backdrop of the period. In Part II, the fourteen photographs we selected from the Emmy Andriesse archive at the University of Leiden8 the Netherlands, help to tell the story of the Hunger Winter in Amsterdam. It is a multifaceted story made up of numerous narratives of the women, children, and men who endured the Hunger Winter, of the endless search for food and fuel, of shoes and bicycles, collaborators and resistors, and of the photographers who dared to document life in occupied Amsterdam. As the photographs demonstrate, Andriesse combined documentary intention with aesthetic concerns. When her photographs were first exhibited in 1945,9 their documentary value was clear and compelling. More than half a century later her work has retained its documentary value, in particular for the descendants – among them the authors of this essay – of men and women who experienced the war and preferred to leave that experience in the past. However, the lasting documentary import of Andriesse’s photographs is not at the expense of their aesthetic features, which form part of the following discussion.

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I 1914–1940: pre-war years Emmy Eugenie Andriesse was born in The Hague on 14 January 1914, the only child of liberal Jewish parents with extensive family roots in Germany. Her father travelled frequently for his work as a newspaper agent and her mother ran a lingerie business. This laid the foundation for an independentspirited young girl. Recalling Andriesse’s childhood, photographer Lotte Grunebaum observed: “Because Emmy had been left so much to her own devices, she had a much broader outlook on life than I had with my orthodox upbringing.”10 Grunebaum and Andriesse met through shared interests, first in the Zionist movement and then in the Communistische Partij Holland (Dutch Communist Party). “We were going to a workers’ meeting of the Dutch Communist Party,” Grunebaum recollected, “and I was wondering what to wear. Emmy said: ‘Just wear what you’d normally wear.’ She wasn’t at all artificial.”11 Forthright and feisty is how friends described young Andriesse. “Emmy Andriesse was a very straightforward person, who made contacts very easily,” Eva Besnyö recalled, “one of the assets of being a photographer.”12 Eva Loeb described her as smart, alert, and interested in everything, especially people.13 These traits served Andriesse well following her mother’s death in 1929. Although Andriesse was only fifteen at the time and still in high school, she made a valiant effort to carry on her mother’s business. This did not work out on a full-time basis, but selling lingerie to individual customers helped Andriesse support herself after finishing high school. Keen to continue her studies, she wanted to enroll at the prestigious Reimannschule in Berlin, which had more to offer in the fields of photography and film than colleges in the Netherlands at the time. Finances posed a problem,14 but more important was the changing political climate in Germany with the rise of Hitler and anti-Semitism. Andriesse settled for the Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten in Den Haag (Royal Academy of Art in The Hague), in particular a new program in advertisement design. This program proved to be very influential in her artistic development. It introduced her to new ideas about art as well as to a community of avantgarde thinkers.15 Andriesse’s teachers at the Royal Academy, including Gerrit Kiljan, Paul Schuitema, and Piet Zwart, were avid disciples of the New Photography; from them she learned both new ideas and the technical skills necessary to create strong images. New Photography was contemporaneous with the influential Bauhaus movement to which Andriesse was introduced thanks to guest-lecturers such as Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Emanating from Germany and the field of architecture after the First World War, the Bauhaus movement

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promoted purity of form, with an emphasis on straight lines and geometric composition. As a student, Andriesse already paid great attention to form and composition and exhibited considerable skill in experimenting with lines and exposure. She produced the winning poster design for the Photograph Exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1937. Its diagonal lines, geometric shapes, and tonal contrasts would become recurring features of her photographic work. The Bauhaus ideas appealed to Emmy Andriesse as did the unconventional life-style and principles of a group of students known as the Voorburg community, named for a residential area on the outskirts of The Hague, who lent their support to Jewish anti-fascist organizations and the Dutch Communist Party. Devotees of Russian film, they participated in political protest against rising National Socialism in Germany, and sympathized with the ideas of the Spanish Civil War (1936–39). In 1937, Andriesse joined the Bond van Kunstenaars ter Verdediging der Kultuur (bkvk; the Federation of Artists for Cultural Rights), an anti-fascist organization of artists. Here she met, among others, future Underground Photographers Cas Oorthuys, Carel Blazer, and Eva Besnyö. The four were also members of Arfots, short form for Arbeidersfotografen (worker-photographers), an association founded in 1931 to supply newspapers and magazines with photographs documenting conditions of poverty under capitalism. Arfots members believed firmly that photographs had more social impact than articles.16 With Eva Besnyö, Andriesse mounted Foto ’37 at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.17 The exhibit included her photo-reportage on the working class neighbourhood, The Jordaan, located in the centre of the city. Andriesse was at home in the politically active milieu of Amsterdam and she relocated to the city after graduating from The Hague’s Royal Academy of Art in 1937. In Amsterdam she undertook diverse series of photographs and reportages,18 placing them as best she could with newspapers and magazines to support herself. Her subjects ranged from street scenes to landscapes, from children to animals, and included fashion photographs. Not one to lose sight of her political concerns, Andriesse travelled to Paris in 1939 for an international peace conference. Her travels were about to come to an end, however. Europe went to war in 1939 and on 10 May 1940, Germany invaded the Netherlands.

1940–1945: political and personal As a Jew, Emmy Andriesse’s life and work under the German occupation of the Netherlands became increasingly difficult. By 1941 Jews were being

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persecuted. There was collective Dutch resistance to this persecution on several notable occasions, such as the February 1941 public strike. When German police raided a Jewish-owned ice cream parlour on 19 February 1941, the proprietor defended himself with ammonia spray. The occupiers responded by arresting 425 Jews at random. The citizenry protested with a public strike in Amsterdam on 25–26 February 1941. Although it was quashed, the 1941 strike was a significant act of public resistance, commemorated by the monument, The Dockworker, in central Amsterdam. On a smaller scale, albeit with far-reaching consequences in the field of education, was the courageous speech on 26 November 1940 by a professor at the University of Leiden, R.P. Cleveringa, dean of the faculty of law. On 21 November 1940, the German occupiers decreed the dismissal of all Jewish civil servants, including university employees. Five days later Cleveringa declared his sympathy with one of his dismissed Jewish colleagues, Professor E.M. Meijers, and stepped down from his position. Others followed suit. Despite such acts of courage and resistance, however, many Jews perished under the Nazi regime in the Netherlands.19 While many Dutch worked against the occupiers and took Jews into hiding, there were also those who worked with the Nazis, and betrayal among citizens was a contributing factor in the high death rate of Dutch Jews.20 Following the Journalist Decree of May 1941, which restricted the activities of photojournalists and professional photographers, Andriesse could no longer publish photographs under her own name.21 She married Dick Elffers, a graphic designer whom she knew from her studies at The Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, and the couple became involved in the Dutch resistance movement, initially in the work of the pbc – Persoons Bewijzen Centrale (Centre for Identity Papers). Under the auspices of the pbc, professional and amateur photographers used their skills to produce false identity papers. Andriesse herself would need these papers when, in 1943, she was forced to wear the infamous yellow star marking Jewish identity. Marriage to a nonJew did not protect her from this indignity. For approximately a year, Andriesse lived in hiding. During this time her first son, Cas, was born. In 1944, with forged identity papers in hand and a camera hidden in her belongings, Andriesse ventured into the streets of Amsterdam. The bitter Hunger Winter of 1944–45 was about to unfold.

the hunger winter 1944–1945 In the fall of 1944, the southern part of the Netherlands was liberated. The Allied Forces were unable to penetrate north, however, nor could they

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advance east into the industrial heartland of Germany after the devastating battle of Arnhem, 17–26 September 1944. Operation Market Garden, devised by the commander of the British forces in Europe, Bernard Montgomery, had appeared successful at the outset, but problems in logistics on the Allied side gave the Germans time to regroup and obtain reinforcements. They destroyed key bridges across the Rhine and Allied troops in the south could not cross the river. The north remained occupied and cut off from all communication with the south, just as one of the coldest winters in years began. Coal and food were soon in short supply, especially in the populous city of Amsterdam. The search for food and fuel became a matter of life and death. Men and boys aged fourteen to sixty who ventured out risked being arrested by the occupiers and sent to work in German factories or labour camps, thus the task of finding food and fuel fell primarily to women and children. For this reason, Andriesse was temporarily at an advantage over her male colleagues in the underground movement. Her presence in the street, camera hidden in a shopping basket, was less conspicuous. As the winter wore on, women and children sometimes travelled long distances into the surrounding farmland, pushing prams, carts, or old bicycles, and carrying silverware, books, or any goods that might be exchanged for food and fuel.22 Emmy Andriesse was among the photographers who dared to document this terrible winter.

the underground photographers Under the leadership of Fritz Kahlenberg, who had fled Germany with his Jewish parents in 1933, the photographers of the Nederland Archief turned their talents toward producing a record of Amsterdam during the Hunger Winter. Kahlenberg’s aim in directing this collective of some forty photographers was two-fold. On the one hand, he wanted to provide the Dutch government, exiled in England, with information about the grievous situation of its civilian population. He also supplied photographs and maps of German military operations to aid the Allies in their plans for liberation.23 On the other hand, Kahlenberg wanted to document for posterity the history of German occupation. In the final year of occupation, the Nazis forbade photography in general and the underground work of the Nederland Archief members became extremely risky. Photographs had to be taken surreptitiously or from within the camera’s hiding place, requiring nerves and skills alike.24 Kahlenberg played a central role in organizing the photographers, securing necessary materials, and spiriting film to the liberated south or out of the country. With Tony van Renterghem, Kahlenberg developed the plan for a group exhibition of the clandestine photographers’ work after the war,

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and three weeks after the city’s liberation on 5 May 1945 the exhibition took place in M.C. Meyboom’s studio in Amsterdam.25 The exhibition’s title, De Ondergedoken Camera, gave its name to the participants who from then on were known as the Underground Photographers. Among the photographs exhibited were those by Emmy Andriesse, including the celebrated Boy with a Pan.

1945–1953: re-constructive/productive years By September 1945, the Netherlands was busy reconstructing for the future. The Amsterdam publishing house Contact, which specialized in books of photography, perceived a need to preserve some images of the past destruction, and invited Emmy Andriesse to do a photo-reportage of the bombed city of Arnhem. Located on the frontline of the opposing forces, Arnhem had been severely damaged. The publication never materialized because the prevailing mood of the country at the time was to move forward rather than look backward, to forget rather than remember the war. The post-war years found Emmy Andriesse traveling again, between Paris and Amsterdam, photographing fashion shows, urban scenes, and artists. She was an early example of the modern working mother, embarking on assignments throughout Europe and abroad, her abilities to juggle work and family greatly admired by her photographer-friend Eva Besnyö.26 Sadly, tragedy struck the AndriesseElffers household on the heels of war’s end, when their son, Cas, died in a drowning accident in the summer of 1945. A year later, a second son, Joost, was born. Today a designer and publisher in New York, Elffers is the custodian of Andriesse’s work. In 2003, in collaboration with the Museum of Photography in The Hague, he established the Emmy Andriesse Prize, recognizing a Dutch photographer with an award of three months of paid travel. The first recipient of the prize was Andriesse’s friend and fellow photographer Eva Besnyö. Emmy Andriesse lived life to the fullest, even in the most adverse circumstances, as if she were aware that like her mother she would die young. On 21 February 1953, Andriesse died of cancer at her home in Amsterdam. She was thirty-nine years old.27

II Almost every exhibition devoted to the Hunger Winter features Emmy Andriesse’s photograph Boy with a Pan (see fig. 9.1). It has been reprinted

9.1 Emmy Andriesse, Boy with a Pan, 1945. Courtesy of the collection of Leiden University Library, a3768.

in books, magazines, and newspapers around the world, and appears regularly in the Dutch media on lustrum anniversary commemorations of the end of the Second World War.28 In the catalogue for the exhibition Foto ’48 at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, Piet Zwart declared: “If the only image we had of the period 44–45 were that heart-rending little lad holding a pan in

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front of his tummy that Emmy Andriesse recorded, it would depict a period of social suffering in a way that was legible for everyone of every era.”29 Sem Presser, a Jewish photographer stationed in Arnhem who became the first official photographer working for the Allied Forces, reported seeing Boy with a Pan on a notice board at one of the Canadian troop headquarters.30 War correspondents like Presser knew what to do with such a powerful and moving photograph, the image of a starving population. Together with other photographs by the Underground Photographers, Boy with a Pan found its way out of the country. The Emmy Andriesse archive contains several prints of the photograph, some in better condition than others, some displaying more of the street in the background than others. In all of them, however, the compelling focus is this little boy; his thin wrists and legs attest to his state of starvation; indeed, his head appears too large for his small body. He holds the pot as if it is a shield to protect himself, his hands gripping so tightly that they are almost claw-like. He stands alone in the street, staring into the distance, light illuminating a furrowed brow. His position slightly left of centre in the photograph emphasizes the emptiness of the road ahead. A dent in the pan seems to reflect the boy’s life even as it catches a glint of light. Who was the boy with a pan? In May 1960, the fifteenth anniversary of the liberation, an anonymous article in the Dutch magazine Margriet claimed that the boy was Willem (Pim) van Schie, whose family lived in The Jordaan neighbourhood of Amsterdam during the Hunger Winter (see “Weet u het nog?”). The then eighteen-year-old Pim could not recollect being sent out to hunt for food, however, and his parents, like so many of their generation, preferred not to talk about that period of their lives. Thus the boy in Andriesse’s photograph remains anonymous, one among the many children of Amsterdam who went hungry during the war, as do so many children everywhere in the world in times of war. The photograph’s potential for meaning beyond its spatial and temporal specificities is a major contributing factor to its enduring impact. An example par excellence of the combined documentary intention and aesthetic concern of Emmy Andriesse’s photography, it was one of Andriesse’s posed photographs. Fellow Underground Photographer Ad Windig explained that “she did [it] simply from her own porch. I was there too and she made the boy stand for her in various ways. And in the picture she eventually chose, he holds the pan in front of his stomach.”31 The photograph captured with artistry the senseless consequences of war for ordinary citizens, especially for children. This is not a photograph of the brutality of the battlefield, nor of the cruelty of the camps, but of the vulnerability of a small boy who could be one’s own son, brother, or neighbour. The personal element of Andriesse’s

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photographs distinguished her work as well as the principles and techniques of the New Photography.32 She had “a sort of socialist inner sense of justice,” Ad Windig recalled, “not only because she worked for Wij [we], the socialist weekly, but her whole attitude was like that.”33 Keenly conscious of the social and moral function of photographs, the New Photographers took their cameras into the street so that what was seen through the lens should be materialized on the print. Already as a student, Andriesse had preferred taking her camera out of the studio and she insisted on working with the light that was available naturally. In Boy with a Pan bands of light and shadow capture the incomprehension on the small face of the boy. Boy with a Pan is not the only photograph Andriesse took of Amsterdam’s children of war, nor the only one illustrating New Photography principles and techniques. In fig. 9.2 (Another Boy with a Pan), the vulnerability of children in times of war seems at first somewhat tempered by the ruffian appearance and stocky legs of the subject. This boy is older and his curly hair longer and more unkempt than that of the younger Boy with a Pan. The viewer’s eye is drawn to a white cloth wrapped around a pan from which the boy raises a spoon to his lips. He has found something to eat and has crouched in the corner of one of Amsterdam’s many stoops, his pan firmly gripped between his knees. Andriesse has captured a brief moment of respite from the privations of war, and the photograph makes highly effective use of sunlight and shadow; the cloth is startlingly white against the dark tones of the pan, the boy’s coat sleeves, and the door in the building behind him. The diagonal perspective conveys the sense of instability of the subject’s situation (will the boy have something to eat tomorrow?), while the zig-zag chalk mark on the brick below the window sill suggests the ups-and-downs of every day civilian life in times of war. Like its celebrated twin, this second photograph tells the story of the soup kitchens that children were sent to during the war. Kryn Taconis, another of the Underground Photographers, remembered the children of Amsterdam looking “like little old men – tough, defiant and hungry.”34 With little or no food at home, they depended on the “central kitchens” that were set up in the larger cities of the Netherlands to supply the poor with subsidized food. By 1943, however, the total capacity of the kitchens was two million portions a day for a population of nine million. Accordingly, during the winter of 1944–45, a distribution system was established in Amsterdam. Food supplies were transported by horse-drawn wagons and hand carts to different centres, and women and children had to walk from centre to centre to exchange coupons for specified food items. Line-ups were long and waits were stressful. With little hot water or soap to clean pots and pans in the kitchens, hygiene became a problem. People fell ill; dysentery was widespread.

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9.2 Emmy Andriesse, Another Boy with a Pan, 1945. Courtesy of the collection of Leiden University Library, a3672b.

When food in the soup kitchens ran out, children roamed the streets for what they might find. “Sometimes the German soldiers would let them clean out their mess tins,” Taconis recalled.35 The search for food became desperate as rations diminished. The Germans embargoed food supplies in retaliation for the national rail strike ordered by the Resistance and the Dutch government-in-exile on 17 September 1944. The attempt to thwart German transport and help Allied forces break through to the north did not succeed and the population of the northern Netherlands, particularly in the city of Amsterdam, was reduced to starvation levels. By the end of the occupation, the official ration supplied only 665 calories a day and could go as low as 400,

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compared to an average 3,000 calories daily before the war.36 If Andriesse’s second “boy with a pan” appears less vulnerable than his famous counterpart, he is still a child alone in the streets, ill-dressed in an oversized jacket, and mismatched, rumpled stockings. The food over which he hovers defensively cannot have been much. Between 26 November 1944 and 17 February 1945, weekly rations of bread were reduced from 1,000 grams to 800 grams, and meat from 125 grams to 31 grams.37 Some people even turned to eating tulip bulbs in their desperation. As if the lack of food were not enough, the winter of 1944–45 was unusually cold and wet. In the photographs by the Underground Photographers, the wooden shoes that traditionally protected Dutch feet against such conditions are almost nowhere to be seen. Of course, shoe styles had long been modernized but many Dutch households still had wooden shoes on hand. Were they burned for a bit of heat? Feet and shoes are a recurring theme in all the Underground Photographers’ work. Poignant images of sore and swollen feet, misshapen and mismatched shoes, create a powerful sense of the suffering of young and old alike. In fig. 9.3 (Boy and Girl with Bicycle), Andriesse has introduced an unsettling note of humour in the juxtaposition of the little boy’s ragged shoes and the elegant but ludicrously impractical women’s high-heeled shoes dangling from the girl’s feet. Once again diagonal perspective is present in the line that cuts across the photograph from the shadow of the photographer’s head in the lower right corner to the shadow that frames the boy seated in the upper left corner. The boy’s legs jut out from the shadows into the sunlight, creating a parallel with the legs of the girl seated on the bicycle. In an innovative move, Andriesse cropped the photograph at the girl’s waist. “The way [Andriesse] cut[s] people, with no heads or half-heads,” Eva Besnyö recounted, “was very exceptional at that time. Nowadays you’d call that modernistic and she did it already.”38 If the girl’s face is absent from the photograph, the boy’s face is all the more remarkable for its disconsolate expression. The bicycle on which the girl sits is another key ingredient in the photograph. By 1944–45, most Dutch bicycles had been confiscated by the Germans or had fallen into disrepair. The large basket on the front of the bicycle in Andriesse’s photograph suggests that it was still in use for deliveries. The next photograph from the Emmy Andriesse archive illustrates the extent to which bicycles were re-built or modified in ingenious ways so that they could still be serviceable. Riding bicycles without rubber tires resulted in badly bent or broken rims and wheels. Without other means of transportation, solutions had to be found. Fig. 9.4 (Rebuilt Bicycle, Jewish Quarter) shows one such solution. The lost front wheel has been replaced with a smaller wheel, perhaps that of a cart. This photograph creates a graceful interplay between the

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9.3 Emmy Andriesse, Boy and Girl with Bicycle, 1945. Courtesy of the collection of Leiden University Library, a3768.

round and semi-circular shapes of the bicycle wheels and piping along the wall, and the triangular and rectangular shapes of the bicycle frame and building in the background. Taken in the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam, Andriesse’s photograph records the dilapidated state to which the neighbourhood was reduced. The homes of the deported were easy prey for plunderers among the occupiers and the citizenry alike. Valuables were stolen and, as wood became scarce, houses were stripped of doors, floor boards, and window frames. Trees too were cut down to sad stumps along the canals, and whole sections of the city seemed eerily empty, all the more so because many of its citizens were in hiding.

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9.4 Emmy Andriesse, Rebuilt Bicycle, Jewish Quarter, 1945. Courtesy of the collection of Leiden University Library, a3733a.

As the photographs discussed so far show, children suffered greatly during the Hunger Winter of 1944–45, but so did adults, particularly the elderly. In all, some 20,000 Dutch civilians died between October 1944 and May 1945. Looking at the woman in the next three photographs, it is not difficult to understand why (see figs. 9.5, 9.6, 9.7). The woman in fig. 9.5 (Old Woman) is terribly emaciated and clearly suffering from malnutrition. Her ankles and feet are swollen and her hands are gnarled to the bone. Rectangular shapes in the background, from the windows in the building to the stones in the pavement, emphasize the woman’s thin body. Another of Andriesse’s solitary figures, she stands alone and erect in her long dark coat, her purse looped on her arm as if to retain some of the respectability of earlier times. Shadows indicate that the day is bright and perhaps she has come out to warm up in the sun. She squints more than she looks at Andriesse’s camera, her face still dignified despite disfiguring lumps. In addition to a fulllength photograph, Andriesse took close-ups of the woman’s hands and feet

9.5 Emmy Andriesse, Old Woman, 1945. Courtesy of the collection of Leiden University Library, a3635.

9.6 Emmy Andriesse, Old Woman’s Feet, 1945. Courtesy of the collection of Leiden University Library, a3635b.

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(fig. 9.6, Old Woman’s Feet), which reveal the decrepit state of her footwear. That her shoes are mismatched is all the more poignant. Swollen ankles appear to explain the tattered knit slipper on her left foot, too engorged to fit into a leather shoe. Her right foot can still be squeezed into a shoe that is now badly worn and as ragged as her stockings. The sunlight illuminates the hole in her right stocking as well as the truly threadbare state of the woman’s coat. From a distance it had seemed in better condition, but as the next photograph shows, the coat is stiff with dirt (fig. 9.7, Old Woman’s Hands). Here, the close-up of the woman’s hands focuses attention on her meagre meal – a crust of bread spread with what is likely lard. Andriesse’s photograph is sharp and clear and the dirt under the woman’s fingernails is readily visible.

9.7 Emmy Andriesse, Old Woman’s Hands, 1945. Courtesy of the collection of Leiden University Library, a3637.

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Elderly men, considered useless for labour in German camps and factories, were also seen in the streets of Amsterdam throughout the winter of 1944–45. The man in figure 9.8 (Slumped Man) has slumped on the stoop of a publishing house. Identified by the plaque on the wall as A.A. Balkema, it was situated on the prestigious Herengracht in central Amsterdam. His shoes are hole-ridden; he has no socks, and his trousers are ragged. His face is hidden by his cap and his hands are joined as if in prayer. He may be asleep – or he may be dead. It was not uncommon for people to collapse in the streets of Amsterdam that winter, from exhaustion, starvation, illness, or death. Corpses were removed by cart and when there were too many to bury, they were laid out in the large Zuiderkerk church near Central Station.

9.8 Emmy Andriesse, Slumped Man, 1945. Courtesy of the collection of Leiden University Library, a3624.

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9.9 Emmy Andriesse, Sieving for Coal, 1945. Courtesy of the collection of Leiden University Library, a3531.

Amsterdamers had become used to such harsh realities as they scoured the city for food and fuel. Precious pieces of coal might be salvaged from former shunting yards, factory grounds, or canals, and these and other sites were repeatedly searched and even sieved. Andriesse photographed this timeconsuming and often disappointing work. For example, an elderly woman manoeuvres a large, awkward sieve in a field that, from the chimneys in the distance, appears to be in an industrial part of the city (fig. 9.9, Sieving for Coal). She works intently, apparently unaware that her left earring is dangling. She has tried to protect her long coat with a makeshift canvas apron. Her face is thin and wrinkled but it is perhaps possible to imagine a hint of happiness at the recovery of a few nuggets of coal from the sieve.

9.10 Emmy Andriesse, Landwacht/German Collaborator, 1945. Courtesy of the collection of Leiden University Library, a2228.

The struggle to secure fuel and food was subject to sabotage by those who collaborated with the German occupiers, who were known as the Landwacht (guardian of the country). This German-initiated organization was founded in the Netherlands in November 1943 to provide security for Germanoccupied buildings, as well as to check identity papers and make arrests. Members of this paramilitary group were primarily Dutch citizens belonging to the Nationaal Socialistische Beweging (National Socialist Movement). “NSBers” or Landwacht members were armed with rifles and dressed in black uniforms with black belts and boots and long coats. They were despised for confiscating items of food that half-starved children and women trekked great distances into the countryside to find; indeed, an article in the illegal newspaper Het Parool (The Word) on 27 March 1945 declared that the Landwacht members should be shot at the end of the war. In Andriesse’s photograph of one Dutch collaborator (fig. 9.10, Landwacht/German Collaborator), his bicycle is so burdened with confiscated boxes and packages that

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9.11 Emmy Andriesse, Star of David, 1945. Courtesy of the collection of Leiden University Library, a3774.

it is impossible for him to ride it. Across his back, a gun is slung in a dark diagonal that draws the viewer’s eye. Its barrel seems to point at the houses as he passes by. The overall mood of the photograph, with its black and grey tones, is threatening and watchful. Among Emmy Andriesse’s most powerful photographs are two that she took of symbols of the oppression humans inflicted on one another during the war. Under Nazi rule, Dutch citizens of Jewish descent were required to sew a yellow cloth star of David onto their clothes. Indeed, prior to securing false identity papers, Emmy Andriesse herself wore the symbol of her Jewish identity. The stark composition of fig. 9.11 (Star of David) ensures that all focus is trained on the star and the word “Jood” (Jew) at its centre. The texture of the jacket contrasts with the rough stitching of the star, suggesting something amiss in the scene. Surely it is the requirement to wear the yellow star. In the next photograph (fig. 9.12, Returning Prisoner), Andriesse has again produced a deliberately uncluttered composition in which all attention focuses on its subject. The white cross on the back of a returning political prisoner constitutes an arresting photographic image. It is not clear whether the prisoner is a man or a woman, but longish hair tucked up inside

9.12 Emmy Andriesse, Returning Prisoner, 1945. Courtesy of the collection of Leiden University Library, a2459.

a cap suggests the latter. Dutch citizens were sent to German prisons for a variety of reasons. If the prisoner is indeed a woman, she may have been arrested for participating in the resistance movement. The punishment for hiding Jews was more typically immediate death. Prisoners being returned at the end of the war would have been among those who survived the camps to which they had been sent.39 The Germans organized an elaborate network of camps with different names and locations; fig. 9.13 (Return from Camps) includes the names of three of these camps: Vught, Buchenwald, and Amersfoort.40 The viewer’s eye is immediately drawn to these words inscribed in white against a black background, as well as to the words “Kreymborg is Waarborg,” which appear

9.13 Emmy Andriesse, Return from Camps, 1945. Courtesy of the collection of Leiden University Library, a2176.

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in black against the white façade of the building in the background.41 Kreymborg was a clothing store founded by a German family of the same name. “Kreymborg is Waarborg” was an advertising slogan promoting the quality of the store’s clothing – surely an ironic backdrop for Andriesse’s photograph of the men in prison garb on the wagon. On closer inspection, the viewer notes that some of the men are better dressed than others. Indeed, this is a very disparate group of repatriates among whom one might imagine many different stories would be told. The return of prisoners was one of several stages marking the official end of war and therefore of the occupation in May 1945. Travel became possible again to the extent that railways, roads, and bridges were reconstructed. In the summer of 1945, Andriesse travelled to the city of Arnhem on assignment for the publishing house Contact, which had commissioned her to photograph the badly bombed city. Arnhem’s railway station, bridges, and churches lay in ruins.42 Andriesse photographed the cathedral-like Eusebius church from various angles, its shelled tower and broken windows captured in abstract compositions to almost surreal effect. In figure 9.14 (Arnhem), two young boys walk toward a pile of rubble by the church,43 one with his face turned up to its heights, as though to the future; the shadows behind the children suggest the dark days are over for the Dutch. Despite the ruins of war around them, the boys in the photograph – and the generation they represent – seem to face brighter times.

the observer observed As Alice Rawsthorn stated in her review of Emmy Andriesse’s photographs in the recent Barbican exhibition, Andriesse was more than an observer. Indeed, Emmy Andriesse’s Jewish identity implicated her in a profoundly personal way as she documented the lives of men, women, and children during the Hunger Winter of 1944–45 in Amsterdam. Notably rare in her photographs are her fellow Jewish Amsterdamers – for all too obvious reasons. She herself is absent from her photographs. Her work, however, allows us to observe her unique technique and to appreciate the stories they tell of a dark chapter in Dutch history. These fourteen photographs demonstrate that Emmy Andriesse’s photographs have, as Hanny van den Horst says, “stood the test of time.”44 Their documentary value remains integral. Today Boy with a Pan retains its power as a document of the dire consequences of war for children and the incomprehensible cruelty of human conflict.

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9.14 Emmy Andriesse, Arnhem, 1945. Courtesy of the collection of Leiden University Library, a4088a.

acknowledgments The authors wish to thank Flip Bool, Ingeborg Leijerzapf, and Joost Elffers for valuable points of detail, as well as the following individuals for their kind cooperation: Adriaan Elligens, Rob Hornstra, Joke Pronk, Tony van Renterghem, Wim van Sinderen, Anneke van Veen, and Hans van Zonnevijlle. This essay draws, with the permission of Palgrave Macmillan, on parts of the following essay: Christl Verduyn and Conny Steenman-Marcusse, “More than an Observer: Emmy Andriesse, Dutch Wartime Photographer,” in Photographs, Histories, and Meanings, Marlene Kadar, Jeanne Perreault, and Linda Warley, eds. 139–66 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

PART III Taking Some Lessons from History: Rhetoric, Ethics, and the Search for Peace

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10 Underlining the Lies Surrounding the “Holy War” and “Infinite Justice”1 pat r i c k i m b e rt

We believe that God used our holy war in Afghanistan to destroy the Russian army and Soviet Union. We did it from the summit of the mountain where you sit. And now, we ask God to use us another time to do the same thing to America, to transform it in the shadow of herself.2 Robert Fisk The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind.3 Thomas Paine World’s attitude toward U.S. life is a murky emotional mixture of envy, hatred and fear.4 Globe and Mail, 17 September 2001 Let us clearly state why these anti-American “do-gooder” criticisms are so stupid … Terrorism is the murder of innocents, a mass murder. Justifiying such an atrocity with U.S. government policies is equivalent to denying the very base of morality, namely that individuals are responsible for their actions.5 Salman Rushdie

1. the space exterior to discourse The only undeniable information one can have access to is that they were living people, and now they are dead. Apart from this information, there is an accumulation of discursive constructions in which the deaths of people are

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used in media images and political discourses in order to endorse a given logic or strategy in the battle for recognition and power. However, the statement of passage from life to death is more than a referential base. It is a way of reinstating an ethic of recognizing the Other. It traces a path towards selfreflection that demands new and different solutions. The view of dying people calls upon what is common to every human because each person can imagine what he or she could suffer in that situation, which can lead to an ethic of recognition of the Other, according to the meaning attributed to this expression by Paul Ricoeur.6 This circulation of images implies the understanding, as Lévinas suggests, that the Other is in the Self and that discourses that aim for total coherence with the group are those that confound identity and its multiple potentialities by imposing, through the process of attribution that aims to collectivize, one sole identity that conforms to the dominant discourse of the moment.7 However, live diffusion of death images is often short-circuited, as cnn journalist, Christiane Amanpour, states with bitter disappointment in a web site which has been cited, often very discreetly, in many daily newspapers. In “Why do I do it?” she notes that numerous journalists risk their lives in order to report on the suffering of victims across the planet. After all is said and done, “they have gone through hell to report their pieces only to find the stories frequently killed back in New York – because of some fascinating new twist on Fergie getting fatter or who knows what.”8 In the context of this egocentric, superficial consumerism, the misfortune of others, as it turns out, lacks importance. It is in light of this that the misfortune of the Afghan people under the dictatorship of the Taliban, and the misfortune of Afghan women who are forbidden from going to school, dying from lack of medical treatment, brutalized, raped, assassinated, have long been ignored by American television. That being said, a fundamental film, directed in secret by Saira Shah, “Beneath the Veil,” appeared on cnn on Saturday 22 September 2001 at 11pm. It documents the horrors committed by the Taliban, some of whom are proud to show the repressive nature of their régime. However, this film, shown very shortly after the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, seems to recognize these victims a little too late. Presenting this film at that moment can evidently appear to be strategic. Yet, this is a crucial element in the battles that take place today in the world. And this battle is not only technological and economic, but above all eminently cultural. In fact, culture, as defined by many theorists and anthropologists such as Benedict Anderson, Eric Hobsbawn, and Ulf Hannerz, is based upon conflict. If this cultural battle is a Holy War against dark Western forces, as the Taliban claim, it would be important to reinforce the knowledge of people, as is emphasized in “Make Sense not War,”9 especially that

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of the millions of people who have gone either to college or university, rather than throwing out slogans that discourage rational and critical thought: “Millions of lives were suddenly taken by enemy forces,”10 said President Bush. The people of Western democracies must be able to defend their democracy, which can be done as much, if not more, by knowledge11 and meaningful discourse than by the use of rhetoric leading to a consensus that justifies immediate recourse to weaponry. This recourse, if it must exist in light of thousands of civilians being assassinated, must then be effective in all regards: military, technological, energetic, and cultural. And this efficiency cannot be based on clichés like “enemy forces,” but rather on sophisticated information coupled with long-term measures such as the reorganization of energy consumption so as to depend significantly less on the Muslim world.

2. recognizing death With regard to the recognition of others, especially when they are dead, a constant battle takes place. This is what the following text illustrates by underlining the fact that the poor die in utter silence: El 11 de septiembre del 2001 también 35.615 ninos murieron de hambre … lugar paises pobres de la planeta; ediciones especiales de las teles: cero; articulos de prensa: cero … forums sociales organizados: cero … hipo´tesis sobre la identidad de los criminales: ninguna … probables ordenantes del crimen: paises ricos.12 On September 2001 also 35,615 children died of hunger … places: poor countries of the world; special programs on tv: zero … articles in the newspapers … organized social forces: zero; hypothesis about the identity of criminals: none … probable organizers of this crime … rich countries. Y los asesinos de los doscientos mil guatemaltecos, en su mayoría indigenas, que han sido exterminados sin que jama´s la tele ni los diarios del mundo les prestaran la menor atencio´n … no fueron sacrificados por ningu´n fana´tico musulma´n, sino por los militares terroristas que recibieron ‘apoyo, financiaciòn e inspiracio´n’ de los sucesivos gobiernos de Estados Unidos.13 And the assassination of two thousand Guatemalans, in majority natives, were exterminated without ever attracting attention from

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international television or newspapers … They were not sacrificed by a fanatical Muslim, but rather by military terrorists who received support, money and inspiration from one United States’ government after another. The recognition of death is then one of the biggest privileges on the planet. And this privilege is unequally shared. Dictatorships misinform by denying death and disappearance, and democracies do not discuss them in mainstream media. But these facts, cited in the paragraphs above, lead to rapidly drawn conclusions: that rich countries cause the starvation deaths of children across the globe. Yet, nothing can be less certain. Moreover, Eduardo Galeano, an Argentinean left-wing thinker, develops an interesting discourse that questions the kind of dualisms that dominate certain public speeches made by President Bush. However, this dualist discourse is obviously omnipresent in Taliban discourse, as well as in that of a large majority of leftwing thinkers opposed to the United States. For example, the following comments circulated on 20 September 2001 in La Gauche, a Socialist newspaper in Brussels. La souffrance de la population américaine ne diffère en rien de celle qu’Israël impose aux Palestiniens, avec le soutien des États-Unis. C’est la même souffrance que connaissent les civils irakiens dont les enfants meurent faute de médicaments du fait de l’embargo imposé par les États-Unis depuis dix ans. C’est la même souffrance qu’ont éprouvées les populations de Belgrade et d’autres villes yougoslaves bombardées “chirurgicalement” par les Etats-Unis … La tâche immédiate de tout progressiste est de combattre la fausse image de la lutte entre deux camps: le camp du Bien et celui du terrorisme international. Notre camp est celui des millions de gens exploités et opprimés par l’impérialisme … luttant contre les restrictions aux droits démocratiques et aux acquis sociaux. Et surtout, en luttant pour une solution juste de la question palestinienne.14 The suffering of the American population does not differ in the slightest from that imposed upon the Palestinians by Israel, with the support of the United States. It is the same suffering that the Iraqi civilians face whose children are dying because of the lack of medical treatment resulting from the embargo imposed by the United States ten years ago. It is the same suffering felt by the people of Belgrade and other Yugoslavian cities that were surgically bombed by the United States … The immediate concern of all people in favour of

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social progress is to combat the false image of battle between two camps: the Good and International terrorism. Our camp is that of millions of exploited and oppressed people at the hands of Imperialism … battling against the restrictions on democratic rights and social gains. And above all, battling for a just solution to the Palestinian question. This text constitutes another example that is symptomatic of deaths being recognized by some, but not others, according to strategies that legitimize a particular discourse. In fact, it is evident here that important contextual elements are lacking. If Iraqi civilians die, it is also perhaps the fault of the dictatorial régime that does not hesitate to gas the Kurdish people. The suffering of the people of Belgrade corresponded with that of the Muslims in Bosnia, who were the subject of genocide at the hands of army troops of both Serbian and Croatian groups. It is curious, then, that in the text of La Gauche, one finds such sympathy for the Palestinians and not an inkling of thought for the Muslims in Bosnia who were thrown into mass graves. The goal is indeed to illustrate the total evil that the imperialist United States represents. While claiming that there is no good camp and terrorist camp, the authors of this text reconstruct the same dualist modernity that is characteristic of canonic writings of legitimization. And the United States, for La Gauche, clearly incarnates evil enemy forces. Rhetoric that claims to demystify can rapidly opt for mystification. Misinformation is omnipresent and feeds upon this dualism that is readily criticized by Gregory Bateson, though he also strategically uses it as a tool when he needs to communicate news about the Second World War to the general population.15

3. new fro ntiers As for immediate history, that is to say, the information diffused by the media (including the Internet), who controls it? Does it become canonized? In other words, does it become a series of clichés that attempt to consensually weld together individualities behind a line of defense? It often depends on the meeting of new conquerors who tell the immediate history, and on those who ask for legends. The new conquerors, as Amanpour proposes, are those who define journalism as a function of the interests of shareholders and proprietors “who display real passion only for their stock.”16 The history of the United States, which still refers to canonic discourses of national legitimization, is then displaced by financial interests open to the desires and fantasies of Americans “who care about nothing except contemplating their own navels” and who have succumbed to a culture of “self-obsession.”17 For

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Amanpour, the ones who are now using disinformation on a massive scale are those involved in the world of finance and its corollary, narcissism. In other words, an important dimension of the consciousness of otherness, and the recognition of the suffering of others as a weight to be shared by humanity, is lacking. There is a lack of memory more than a lack of history. Memory is in fact the impact that is personally and emotionally integrated by individuals who no longer experience dualist oppositions like rational/emotional, but who attempt to position themselves within contexts that avoid the monopolization of reason in the multiplicity of openings onto violence and global exclusions that are at the base of intercultural relationships. This framework, revealed by Amanpour, where finance and technology combine, lacks a postcolonial dimension that would care for those excluded by history, and by contemporary media. There is a lack of recognition, that is to say, a new frontier in the American sense of the term, which is not that of technology but of content. This new frontier represents where North America in particular must recognize otherness. In this case, recognition means the allocation of a legitimate place, as well as seizing the underlying logic in the enemy’s aggression. Deep gaps regarding cultural recognition are visible in comments such as the “fbi cherche désespérement des interprètes” (The fbi is desperately looking for interpreters).18 Indeed, the fbi is looking for people who speak Arabic, Persian, and Pashto so as to participate in the case pertaining to attacks in Afghanistan, which seems to reveal a definite gap in necessary knowledge for understanding otherness in the context of conflicting relationships. In effect, the fbi did not have enough specialists able to deal with communication in these languages.

4. hatred One of the problems linked to discourse that uses phrases like “enemy forces” resides in the favouring of dualism particular to public language. This dualism is, of course, omnipresent in Taliban discourse and is based on the expression of profound hatred vis-à-vis the Western world, the United States in particular, as Pierre Foglia in La Presse, G. Leroux in Le Devoir, and Robert Fisk in Le Devoir, underline in response to Taliban claims. For example, the Taliban have stated that “the usa and all imperialists in the world, Jews and Christians and their supporters are intending to destroy the Islamic order which has been established at the cost of your blood under this pretext,” according to Akhond, deputy chairman of the Taliban Council of ministers, and also that “Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar, who has been shelter-

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ing bin Laden in the face of U.S. extradition demands after earlier attacks on U.S. targets around the world, urged the American people to question the motives of their government. ‘You should know whatever incidents and sorrow you suffer … are a result of the erroneous policies of your government,’ he said in a statement faxed from his headquarters in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar.”19 These discourses – deeply rooted in Islamic fundamentalism – provoke hatred and lead to the calling for Holy War against the West and especially against Christianity, Judaism, and, of course, laïcité. Indeed, this hatred is constantly expressed through a willingness to demonize adversaries, which removes any possibility of dialogue and transforms a forum into an arena where all that is left is violent battles for power. Thus, at the Durban conference against racism, Mr John Manley, Minister of Canadian Foreign Affairs, though willing to discuss the Palestinian situation, left the meeting because it had been organized with a “vif sentiment anti-israélien et a débouché sur des positions extrêmistes.”20 This is corroborated by numerous sources, especially by Mr Jedwab, a professor at McGill University in Montréal: “J’ai rarement vu une expression d’antisémitisme aussi palpable. Ça déborde de beaucoup la seule critique d’Israël. Et l’agressivité est telle contre ceux qui ne sont pas d’accord avec ça que c’est vraiment stigmatisant” (I have rarely seen such a palpable expression of anti-Semitism. It goes over and above the sole critique of Israel. And the aggression is such, that those who do not agree with this sentiment, feel stigmatized).21 Anne Bayefsky, a law professor at Columbia University claims: “This conference is supposed to be about combating racism. Instead it has been seized by those who foment it.”22 To this, one can add the characterization of Israel as “an apartheid, racist and fascist state” which did not keep the secretary general of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, from claiming that there is no excuse for the maltreatment suffered by the Palestinians.23

5. peace and war Certain governments, like those in Iran, Syria, or Afghanistan, reactivate, in their national territories, old fears in those who do not have access to modernity, and even less access to postmodernity/postcoloniality. They are often aided by charismatic or populist leaders who attempt to maintain a manageable level of tension in the local elite while attacking the process of globalization. By clinging to the paradigm interior/exterior, they use old stereotypes that construct an image of the Other that works for them, that of a demonized Western world engaged in a war against them and against

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Islam.24 This world does not correspond to the new liberal postmodern/ postcolonial context that has, in part, at least in the Western and Westernized world, transformed warlike conflicts into economic competition, a competition that is based upon the dominance of secular economic discourses that dominate religious discourses through discursive irony, as one can see in numerous advertisements. For example, one can mention the advertisement where a laptop computer with the HearMe technology asks a monk, piercing the silence of the monastery: “Pssst, hey buddy. Can you hear me?”25 as if the HearMe technology was in contact with the divine word. It is within this new economic, mainly non-religious context, that hatred is polarized. These national governments are agents of misinformation and keep their populations hostage by removing their access to the new epistemology and to new specialized languages that would have a liberating effect that opens onto opportunities for economic and symbolic development, as Néstor García Canclini underlines in La globalización imaginada.26 They deny them the possibility of becoming bi-discursive: that is to say, of being able to function partly in their culture and partly in a new globalized culture. They cut themselves, as well as the rest of the population, off from the possibility of exchanging goods, ideas, and information internationally, by valorizing isolationism and an aggressive nationalism. They profit from resentment and, in order to feed it, they need to create a context that proves, in the eyes of the younger generation in particular, that the Western world wants them to be destroyed. For this reason, declaring a war of vengeance against the Taliban, without convincing other countries – especially Muslim countries – of the necessity for combating this type of fanaticism and terrorism, reinforces their dualist methods that profit from exclusion where the Other (the West, in this case) will be demonized. A strong dualism is perceived in the speeches made by George Bush. It also appears sometimes in specialized languages because there is often an inability to think creatively, outside stereotypical paradigms as, for example, the dualist division between peace and war. This is shown by Lowenthal, who writes: “Closely related to mirror-imaging or perhaps a peculiar American aspect of it, is the tendency to evaluate likely decisions by the probability of demonstrable military success, and the inability to appreciate that political aims can be achieved through unsuccessful military efforts (Tet, Middle East War). To a large degree this reflects the traditional American bifurcation of peace and war into antithetical states rather than elements among the same continuum.”27 This remark, originating from an American strategist, contradicts Eduardo Galeano’s assertion that “Todos los enamorados de la muerte coinciden también en su obsesión por reducir a términos militares las

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contradicciones sociales, culturales y nacionales” (All those who are in love with death also agree in their obsession to reduce social, cultural and national contradictions to military terms).28 For Lowenthal, the goal is to improve the defence system of the United States, whereas Galeano’s objective is to repeat that the United States is the henchman of dictatorships that they are not sophisticated. Within this framework, it is interesting to recall that the American President spoke immediately of war: “C’est un acte de guerre” (This is an act of war).29 The problem, then, is to understand how war is conceived. Is it linked to conflict between two countries, as the Larousse explains: “Guerre: une épreuve de force entre peuples, entre pays” (a showdown between two peoples, two countries),30 or between social groups as the Robert suggests: “Guerre: lutte armée entre groupes sociaux” (an armed battle between social groups),31 or rather simply, as in The Living Webster in 1975: “a state of hostility or military conflict.” If we retain the first definition, there was no act of war by Iraq, but in claiming that there was an act of war, Bush created a desire to respond in a military fashion. The second case would signify a battle between imperialists and non-imperialists, for example, which satisfies the reading proposed by the Belgian newspaper La Gauche. The third definition describes a state of hostility that leaves the door open to various interpretations and seems to adapt to contemporary situations where conflicts are permanent and demand multi-directional solutions. Moreover, these solutions can come from either the interior or the exterior. Webster’s text allows for the integration of a particular conception of the notion of national security with demands for a revision of international, as well as military and police, regulations, laws and social procedures.

6. interior/exterior In several Latin American countries, the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York City and the attack on the Pentagon are presented, first and foremost, as the result of a conflict coming from the interior and as caused by the citizens of the United States. Journalists base this interpretation on the Oklahoma City attacks and on the virulence of groups from the far right in order to disseminate a leftist opinion that spreads – globally and immediately – discourses with misleading contexts: Se ha insistido en que los avionazos son una declaración de guerra, pero no se senala que tal vez se trate de una guerra civil y que, en

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todo caso, es, por ahora, un conflicto con un enemigo desconocido … Sería apresurado e improcedente senalar culpables, pero la matriz cultural del horror vivido ayer en el país vecino no parece árabe, ni islámica, ni asiática, sino, tal vez, profundamente estadounidense.32 The aerial attacks insist on being categorized as a declaration of war, but it has not been mentioned that perhaps this is a civil war and that, in any case, it is a conflict with an unknown enemy. It would be premature to indicate guilty parties, but the cultural matrix of the horror experienced yesterday in a neighboring country does not appear to be Arab, Islamic or Asian, but perhaps profoundly American. The event would be endogenous according to this journalist, who uses hypotheses derived from stereotypical anti-American logic that does not understand the complexity of the United States or the threats that come from fundamentalist groups originating in other parts of the globe. From this text, which circulated rapidly by Internet in Latin America, one can see that it is less important to have access to facts than to continue to circulate opinions from the perspective of an Other who perpetuates its violent image of the United States. The point is to reaffirm that the victim of terrorism is not a victim and that the United States is just as dangerous as before 9/11. In view of this, one has to realize that it is necessary to integrate the idea that the paradigm interior/exterior is not the only operational method and that displacement as well as the “chameleon” method are also viable: “Psychological-political penetration and subversion of foreign states and of international organizations and movements, remains a distinguishing feature of the contemporary strategic environment. Though taking place in peacetime (or what currently passes under that term) such activity is nonetheless intimately linked with violence.”33 It must also be recognized that subversion and misinformation are most likely shared and that they are normal methods in a cultural, political, and media-based universe.34

7. peace and non-violence It is also symptomatic to grasp that arguments and points of view (except in the text appearing in La Jornada, where the perspective is changed in order to re-direct aggression towards interior factions) all rely on a pronounced interior/exterior dualism. This is the case for petitions that, implicitly or explicitly, do not distinguish between the Afghanis and the Taliban. This is

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clearly manifested in Eduardo Galeano’s text: “los afganos musulmanes eran los Buenos. Ahora son malos, malisimos … ” (The Muslim Afghans were the good ones. Now, they are bad, extremely bad).35 Now, this reasoning implicitly retains a modernist vocabulary, according to which the Nation-State and national borders constitute a homogenous space. However Afghanistan is composed of diverse ethnicities, of which several are in conflict with the Taliban. Moreover, the vast majority of the population that chose not to live under a communist regime is oppressed by the Taliban regime. Millions of refugees living in Pakistan, or looking for refuge in diverse regions across the planet, are there to remind us of this fact. One must see, then, that the dualist interior/exterior paradigm is not at play in the text by Galeano and that the Afghani population suffers from oppression from the interior. One must distinguish between Taliban and Afghani, just as it was necessary to distinguish between the Argentinean population and those supporting the Videla dictatorship. Misleading information often originates from generalizations that create an equation based on a mechanical and dualist application of paradigms such as interior/exterior, self/other, good/evil. This misinformation is apparent even in the choice of terms used to denote acts of terrorism. It is indeed far from innocent to describe the events that occurred in New York and Washington as a tragedy: “Dear Mr President … We urge you and your fellow citizens to remember that vengeance offers no relief, that retaliation can never guarantee healing … Our goal should be to build bridges of love, respect and understanding among all people. This is the only way to ensure that the tragedy of September 11th and similar tragedies around the world do not happen again.”36 Speaking about “tragedy” encourages one not to actively search for particular agents of violence, since everyone knows that a tragedy is caused by destiny, if not by the gods or a curse. In this case, we are fully submerged in a mythical universe that allows us to call upon Christian idealism that forgoes context, especially considering the fact that such a “tragedy,” in the hands of a particularly effective organization, runs the risk of happening again. It is this type of rhetoric and prejudice that seeks to counter new information regarding imminent attacks: Washington suspects that a group led by fugitive Saudi-born millionaire bin Laden has been contemplating attacks using biological and chemical weapons, such as sarin nerve gas, for years, according to the sources quoted by Jiji. The United States has information that the group has already acquired small airplanes to spray bacteria causing smallpox or anthrax from the air, Jiji quoted the sources as saying.37

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The 9/11 attack incites a war of slogans and also a virulent war of words that tends to go beyond facts. In the postmodern/postcolonial world, there are discursive acts in competition with a sole undeniable fact: the passage from life to death. The truth has particular interests and is indeterminable in a discursive and economic battle where not a single intangible point may be situated outside this passage from life to death, even if George Bush and the Taliban constantly refer to an external power: the work of God that they interpret according to their cultural systems and their interests. The number of petitions all demanding nonviolent solutions to this attack is phenomenal, and illustrates well the discursive battles that take place every day: “We call for peace and justice, not revenge.”38 The attraction of these petitions calling for non-violent sanctions is that, thanks to the Internet, they often come from people we know, who are sympathetic and well-intentioned. But what is the origin of these petitions? No one knows. In any case, we may think they also serve terrorist interests, which can profit from social division regarding the most effective response: “We must bring them to court and have a trial – That’s democracy – American style! – Let’s not go to war and be like them! – that’s what we usually condemn!”39 It is, however, necessary to grasp an important difference between these two petitions. In the first text, it is almost laughable to speak of peace and non-violence when one is aware of the situation for women in Afghanistan and when one understands that it is the Taliban who imposed strict sanctions on the Afghani people, who are living in caves, in destroyed buildings, and on the edge of famine. What sanctions can we impose and upon whom in such a context? Moreover, imposing sanctions, as argued by the newspaper La Gauche, will mean that certain people will be able to claim that the people, especially children, are dying of hunger because of the United States and not because of the Taliban. In the second text, a more effective suggestion can be found, based on a certain legalism. But is it not the object of the circulation of petitions on the Internet that almost all demand peace and non-violence? Such repetition seems to point to supernatural interests at play here that aim to promote a form of popular passivity. In fact, it must be understood that globalization is far from being reduced to the influence of the United States on the rest of the world. These attacks prove that violence is globalized, and that North America is no longer untouchable: “This was a different kind of globalization … Globalization will not work if it simply means westernization … the degree of absolute poverty that exists in the world … the westernization of the world fails to recognize the cultures and needs of other societies.”40

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8. passivity The passivity asked for by these petitions was, however, not matched by the passengers of the airplane that crashed near Pittsburgh. And it is this reaction that seems to have stopped the plane from crashing into a targeted building, which would have produced even more victims. This is what Alex Gladstone underlines in an article that establishes parallels between this event and the male passivity during the attack on the Polytechnic School in Montreal, where a deranged man killed fourteen women in 1989: “But these young men were a product of their time and of this society. We have all been taught to leave matters to the experts … Here in North America … we have lost the capacity to think about taking responsibility in tough situations, and standing up to defend ourselves.”41 Gladstone suggests that our way of thinking needs to change, in the media and at school. He suggests that courses be taught to young people so that they understand how to react to the eruption of violence in their daily lives – a violence that is not born of video games or film scenarios, despite comments that compare the explosion of the planes into the World Trade Center towers to a film. They would also need to be conscious of cultural differences and be able to argue in favour of democracy. The impossibility of detaching death from sensationalized media attention allows us to identify three periods over the last fifty years. First, there is modernity that insists on the fact that there is one truth, a historical canon, and facts. At this point, a dualist consensus is established that denies difference. In this framework, misinformation is seen as an exceptional activity that demands a recovery that allows truth to be found and to be told. Second, in a postmodern/postcolonial framework, up until the attacks of 9/11, misinformation is felt to be normal, especially after the techniques masking the cadavers and transforming war into a video game during the Gulf War. This misleading normalcy is one that penetrates all layers of Western society; it transforms everything into an object of discourse until there seem to be no more facts. Third, since 9/11, we are convinced of the omnipresence of misinformation and we attempt to strategically position ourselves to obtain the advantage, but we have found, in public language, the consciousness of a fact outside discourse.

9. economy and multiple scenarios that avoid dualism In our liberal economic world, it is important to understand that terrorism lives off the money it receives. This is rarely insisted upon by politicians and

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those who want to engage the US military. This is even less acknowledged by petitions. In Afghanistan, money is in part obtained by revenue from poppy cultivation. Terrorist groups are financed by drug users. Moreover, they are financed by profits made by short-selling. Thus, the group of investors linked to Osama bin Laden, knowing in advance that American Airlines and insurance companies would have financial difficulties because of this terrorist act, sold down their shares in these companies ahead of time.42 This allowed them to make significant profits. Obviously, attacking investment groups’ capital is difficult, as is noted in La Presse,43 regarding forensic accounting, and where it is also mentioned that the al-Qaeda movement founded by bin Laden possesses numerous transportation and construction enterprises.44 In any case, it is worrying to notice the financial imbrications that have personal ramifications. Let us not forget that one of Osama’s brothers, Salem bin Laden, who died in 1983 in a plane crash, is known to have founded Arbusto Energy oil company with George W. Bush, in Texas, in 1978. Again, it is necessary to comprehend that the interior/exterior paradigms do not have particular importance when one attempts to produce adequate interpretation. The world’s rich and famous know each other and temporarily collaborate in the running of enterprises, even though their goals often differ radically. Financial measures like freezing the assets of groups linked to terrorism in the United States and throughout the world45 backed by an effective collaboration from numerous countries, including Arab and/or Muslim dominant countries, will certainly facilitate the reduction in terrorism. In addition, as Albert Legault notes, les règles d’engagement pourront être fermement définies, ce qui constituera autant de contraintes ou d’arguments raisonnés capables de limiter l’étendue ou l’ampleur de la colère américaine … Cette participation est peut-être, en bout de ligne, ce qui permettra de distinguer la guerre sainte que l’Amérique nous annonce, du simple ‘nettoyage’ antiterroriste qui s’impose au nom de la raison et de la simple sécurité du citoyen, quelle que soit d’ailleurs l’ampleur qu’il prendra.47 The rules of engagement will be able to be strongly defined, which will constitute as many constraints or reasonable arguments as are able to limit the extent or the magnitude of American anger … This participation is maybe, at the end of it all, the point that will help us

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to distinguish the Holy War that America announces from a simple anti-terrorist cleaning that has been imposed in the name of reason and simple homeland security, whatever the impact may be. It is true that the American crusade employs rhetoric that often verges on superstition. This reminds us of Mr Falwell, who claims that what happened may be a just punishment from God because the United States has recognized gays and lesbians.47 It is essential to avoid this dualism of resentment to which fundamentalists turn, just as it is essential to recognize that demanding nonviolent sanctions does not work with well-organized people who do not wish to negotiate in good faith. The new dynamic paradigms of specialized languages that are a part of changes favoured by postmodernism48 lead to the recognition that good faith – contrary to what Habermas claims in Theory and Practice – is often not an operational priority on which the ability to communicate can be based.49 At this point then, one must avoid falling into the trap of retaliation, or what journalists biblically call “an eye for an eye.”50 One must get involved in the production of a third option, which is neither retaliation nor passivity, and enable people to fight in multiple economic and cultural environments that are exempt from violence. This ability to avoid dualism could lead more and more people to: 1. Be able to work and to create without referring to a stable principle while being able to evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of using stable entities or using the belief in stable entities. For example, the belief in origin, in the absolute of different paradigms like peace or war; 2. Be interested in the probabilities of interconnections and by the inevitable interrelation of actions that should be considered as reaction to reaction of reactions; 3. Be able to build multiple scenarios vis-à-vis an ensemble of clues where a certain number seem more significant than others; 4. Be able to search less for coherence that sometimes leads to placing variables on the back burner or to not consider missing elements; 5. And to be able to evaluate similarities in a situation full of juxtapositions that do not rely on relationships of cause and effect. This approach would contribute to reinforcing the culture of democracies and to putting a new ethic of complexity in place that leads to the recognition of the Other in oneself and of oneself in the Other. In this dynamic, a legitimate place for the Other would be created, which would allow one to

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clearly recognize that in himself which is unacceptable and must be controlled or rejected so that all can flourish to their fullest potential. As Salman Rushdie points out, we as well as “all the Muslims in the whole world … question themselves to know why the faith that they venerate produces so many virulent changes.”51 This new culture of flux linked to the recognition of the space exterior to discourse leads to the understanding that if it is impossible to tell the Truth, it is possible to point out lies. And the biggest lie is to kill people in the name of Truth in order to be certain of going to heaven.

10. pointing out lies In the situation where there is neither absolute truth nor relative truth guaranteed by history and by particular hermeneutic procedures, there remains something fundamental that differentiates democratic operations from dictatorships or fundamentalisms that rely on the arbitrary nature of discourses generated at the will of small groups in power. It is a fact that, if, from now on, it is impossible to tell the truth, it is still possible to point out lies. A dictatorship or a fundamentalist regime obliges people to believe, or at least behave as if they believe, that there is an absolute truth, while denying the occurrence of institutional murder or genocide. The new culture of postmodern democracy underlines that there is no truth, only strategic discourse, but that it is possible to point out lies and that the biggest lie is to claim that one has access to truth and that one can seize it and communicate it. Democracy, in fact, does not rely on the binary paradigm truth/lie, but rather on the idea that this paradigm is the ultimate lie at the root of genocide. Pointing out lies, in the framework of an epistemology based on contingence, understood as the impossibility of knowing each other completely by way of a given transparency of language, is one of the driving elements of a postmodern democracy. This democracy puts in place an individual who is responsible, critical, and free, who knows the different points of view that invent the world, and knows how to act effectively against that which is unacceptable.

11 Comparing South Africa’s Negotiated Settlement with Elusive Peacemaking in Israel/Palestine h e r i b e rt a da m i. the israeli/palestinian conundrum On the Israeli/Palestinian issue one can adopt essentially three approaches. The Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel maintains that “As a Jew I see my role as a … defender of Israel. I defend even her mistakes.”1 The British philosopher Ted Honderich argues the same blind loyalty for the Palestinian cause, advocating “liberation-terrorism to get freedom and power for a people when it is clear that nothing else will get it for them.”2 Neither of the two will ever mention the atrocities committed by his adopted side. Wiesel explicitly says: “Either speak up in praise, or keep silent.”3 A preferred third approach avoids the pitfalls of such blind patriotism that elevates fallible policies into the realm of the sacred. Learning from the holocaust implies concern for human rights everywhere. Why should breaking ranks on Israel amount to a betrayal of identity, or worse, be dismissed as anti-Semitism? On the contrary, criticizing a fallible government reaffirms a cherished Jewish tradition of rational argumentation that risks being lost by an unquestioning loyalty. The several hundred Israeli conscientious objectors who refuse military service in the occupied territories (but would defend Israel proper) bravely uphold this tradition of autonomous reasoning. Yet they are ostracized as betraying fellow Jews. Persons who rightly celebrate the Jewish overrepresentation in the anti-apartheid struggle avoid even querying the accusation of Israeli apartheid. In the North American media, Mahmood Mamdani observes, “there is not even a trace of a public debate when it comes to Israel.”4 Israeli newspapers are far more outspoken than American or Canadian dailies dare to be. A slight majority of the Israeli Jewish electorate supports the establishment of a viable Palestinian state. However, an even bigger majority also endorses

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the continued expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, according to the monthly Steinmetz Center Peace Index. Historically this illegal colonization has been carried out with the connivance of most Israeli politicians from most parties. Yet each policy precludes the other. No Palestinian leadership could survive without a return to the 1967 borders, save some minor equitable land swaps for 22 percent of original Palestine. Probably no Israeli leadership would survive if it were to agree to any substantial settlement evacuation on the West Bank. However, maintaining the more than 150 illegal settlements on Palestinian land, some connected by separate roads, and insisting on an undivided Jerusalem under exclusive Israeli sovereignty, will make a mockery of a contiguous Palestinian state. While everybody hails a two-state-solution, hardly anybody faces the contradiction in the mutually exclusive goals. In reality, endless talks about peacemaking, roadmaps, Annapolis process, Geneva accords, and “final status negotiations” serve as smokescreens for establishing irreversible “facts on the ground.” It was always assumed that integration in a divided society (South Africa) is more difficult to engineer than partition. History has proven this assumption wrong in the Middle East (me). However, unlike the open-ended South African transition process, ironically there is already widespread consensus on what a final compromise must look like in the Middle East. The Camp David/Taba negotiations, the Geneva Accord, or the Nusseibeh-Ayalon document spell out the basic agreements on the three most contentious issues: 1. Equitable land swaps for some continuing Jewish settlements behind the Green Line; 2. Recognition by Israel of the right of refugee return in principle, but limited to a symbolic number in practice, with relocation assistance and compensation for others; 3. Jerusalem as a joint capital with each state exercising sovereignty over its holy sites. Yet a substantial and well-organized minority in Israel does not even want a Palestinian state. In the shadow of the Gaza withdrawal, the West Bank settlements are consolidated and at most a truncated, discontiguous Palestinian entity is envisaged. In the words of the senior advisor to Ariel Sharon, Dov Weisglass: “The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process. And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.”5 Various political actors also use the South African analogy self-servingly in their exhortations and rationalizations. The former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert says: “I shudder to think that liberal Jewish organizations that shouldered the burden of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa will lead the struggle against us.”6 Similarly, former Prime Minister Barak warns of broad international support if the Palestinians turn away from the two state option and demand a single state in the spirit of the twenty-first century, as

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long as there is no acceptable Israeli plan on the table. South African civic democracy haunts the Zionist left and right. In Barak’s reasoning: “‘One man one vote?’ Remind you of something? Yes, South Africa. And that’s no accident. It’s precisely their intention. And that’s their long-term plan. So, we have to say honestly today: the strategic blindness of the Israeli Right and the Sharon government’s effort to grab more than it can hold, indeed endanger the future of the Zionist enterprise.”7 Previous Prime Minister Ehud Olmert asserts that Israel as a Jewish state is “finished” if it does not return to the 1967 border and evacuate its settlements which he, together with Sharon, promoted at all costs initially. Many left-liberal activists advocate similar anti-apartheid strategies (divestment, boycott) against “Apartheid Israel” and assume that strong pressure would produce similar outcomes. Such idealistic optimism may foster illusions. The underlying assumption that the South African (sa) model of conflict resolution readily lends itself to export ignores the unique historical circumstances of two disparate situations. It may actually retard imaginative new solutions by clinging to visions or processes of negotiation that may not work in another context. Above all, in South Africa an entire regime had to be changed while in Israel the occupation and the status of the territories is the main contentious issue. Therefore, a more nuanced understanding of differences and similarities may enhance new approaches. Furthermore, just as apartheid equals fascism rhetoric distorted political strategies in favour of illusionary military solutions, so the Israel equals apartheid rhetoric serves more propagandistic than analytical functions.

ii. differences and similarities between south africa and israel/palestine Despite apartheid-like features of Israeli domination, the focus on differences yields more insights for appropriate strategies of equality and peacemaking. Six crucial realms stand out for comparison in both contexts: economic interdependence, religious divisions, third party intervention, leadership, political culture, and violence. 1. Economic interdependence and the emergence of a politicized union movement since the mid 1970s socialized South Africa in the politics of negotiation and trade-offs. The Israeli economy depends minimally on Palestinian labour and two economies exist more or less side-by-side. Israel uses closure as collective punishment. Palestinians are deprived of industrial action (strikes, consumer boycotts) that was heavily used by black South Africans to combat apartheid.

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2. Religion in South Africa served as a common bond to assail and delegitimize apartheid, while Judaism and Islam compete for sovereignty in Jerusalem. A minority of religiously motivated settlers and ultra-orthodox believers hold the secular majority to ransom. When settlers redeem Palestinian land as fulfillment of biblical prophecy and Islamist holy warriors inveigh against infidels, they apply a logic of divinely ordained destiny, crusades against evil, and a belief in collective redemption that is foreign to secular truth-seeking. The settler zealots, a mere three percent of the Israeli population, have declared an informal war on the Palestinians.8 What is worse, they continue with the connivance of all Israeli parties, despite the illegality that even the United States administration criticized. 3. Both the African National Congress (anc) and the National Party (np) eschewed third party intervention in their negotiations. An Israeli-Palestinian settlement depends heavily on American policy that strongly supports Israel. Sanctions (divestment and trade boycotts) are generally overrated in triggering sa change. Only loan refusals and, to a lesser extent, moral ostracism exerted significant impact on the apartheid government. Such action against Israel by the West is inconceivable at present. Unlike Afrikaners, Israelis enjoy a supportive diaspora. White South Africa finally negotiated when the rising costs of apartheid outweighed the benefits. In Israel, the costs of occupation are largely compensated for from outside. That is one reason why a militarized Israel can live in a permanent state of warfare. 4. The sa negotiations were facilitated by a cohesive and credible leadership with a widely endorsed open mandate available to both sides. Leaders could sell a controversial compromise to a skeptical constituency. Both the Israeli and Palestinian leadership is fragmented, with militant outbidding, a frequent tool of populist mobilization. The apartheid Westminster electoral system rewarded majority parties, in contrast to the minority influence in the proportional representation in Israel. 5. A much more personal interaction in a vertical status hierarchy shaped sa race relations, compared with the more horizontal social distance between Jews and Palestinians. Paternalism characterized Afrikaner attitudes. Moral erosion of the apartheid stance among the ruling elite in sa contrasts with moral myopia in Israel, a few hundred military objectors, courageous dissidents and noble peace activists notwithstanding. Both sides in the IsraeliPalestinian conflict brandish victimhood as a weapon and both claim a monopoly on truth. White South Africans were plagued by doubt. In contrast, both parties in the me suffer from certainty and self-righteousness. 6. During the anti-apartheid armed struggle, suicide was never used as a weapon and martyrdom never celebrated; those who fought indiscriminately lost the moral high ground and acted in a counterproductive way. In Israel

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and Palestine, the mutual attacks on civilians harden and unify public opinion on each side. Israel as the far superior power is gradually destroying the social fabric of Palestinian society. In summary, on most counts, the differences between apartheid South Africa and Israel outweigh the similarities that could facilitate transferable conditions for a negotiated compromise. Above all, opponents in South Africa finally realized that neither side could comprehensively defeat the other, short of the destruction of the country. This perception of stalemate, as a precondition for negotiating in good faith, is missing in the Middle East. South Africa, arguably, constitutes merely a multi-ethnic society with many cross-cutting bonds between the legislated artificial racial groups. In I/P, on the other hand, a truly divided society exists. The two Semitic peoples may look alike and even enjoy the same food. They are, however, divided by religion, language and above all, by history, and the mythologies that the burden of history imprints on the self-concept and collective identity of the two groups. Jews and Palestinians constitute groups which are competing for meaning, security, and scarce resources in a small space.

iii. south african lessons for peacemaking What lessons can be drawn from the sa negotiated settlement for the seemingly intractable conflict in the Middle East? During the late 1980’s, a solution in South Africa looked as elusive as in i/p today. First, assuming Israel is really interested in a negotiated two-state solution, Israel should have an interest in a cohesive Palestinian partner. Currently, Israel mainly aims at using the Palestinian Authority as a security subcontractor against Hamas, which ironically Israel initially supported against the more popular and secular plo. Yet the more Palestinian leaders are perceived as collaborating partners with an occupying force, the more their legitimacy fades. Abbas resembles Buthelezi. Both are men of integrity, albeit with a diminishing following, because they are tainted and could not deliver. Furthermore, encouraging strife and internal conflict among an opponent backfires. This happened in sa when shadowy third-force-elements instigated large-scale intra-black violence during the first years of the South African transition in order to destabilize and discredit the new order. A brutalized youth and a continuous high crime rate resulted from this disruptive strategy. In a similar vein, some pundits gleefully editorialize: “If Palestinian factions are fighting amongst themselves, they will have less time to conduct terrorist attacks.”9 South Africa’s Bantustan policy represented a “divide and rule” policy towards the black South African majority. With a similar fragmentation

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of the Palestinian Authority (pa), the emerging autonomous fiefdoms in Gaza and the West Bank enclaves counteract nation-building. However, just as the imposed Bantustan divisions proved unworkable, so the personal rivalries, cronyism, and illegitimacy of Palestinian warlords undermine potential settlements. Second, negotiators have to be freely chosen by each side. One side cannot dictate to the other who should be their leader. Had the then President F.W. de Klerk insisted that he would only talk to the nationalist wing of the anc and exclude communists (as some had advocated), negotiations would not have started. Likewise, if the Palestinian negotiators are considered unrepresentative stooges, their agreements will not be acceptable to a radicalized constituency. Free elections can best produce this legitimacy of controversial negotiators. In free elections, Hamas gained majority support in Gaza. Even if Hamas does not formally recognize Israel, mutually beneficial agreements about a ceasefire and prisoner exchange can be and are being forged between the two antagonists, if necessary through third parties (for example, Egypt). In short, efforts must be made to draw the most extreme factions on both sides into the negotiation process. Both in i/p and South Africa, some groups boycotted negotiations and branded participants as sellouts. This proved less of a problem in South Africa, since the anc represented the overwhelming majority of the disenfranchised. Smaller radical factions could be ignored or sidelined without jeopardizing the main compromise. This is not the case in fragmented Palestinian and Israeli politics, where extremist sections command considerable support, if only for the social services they provide or the religious doctrines they espouse. The delegitimation of contested compromises is preempted and the perception of a fair deal increased, if the likely challengers are included or at least if voluntary self-exclusion is clearly demonstrated. On the part of Israel, the dominant power, that means shedding rhetoric of “not giving the enemy the impression that their violence has succeeded.” As the veteran sa analyst Allister Sparks has wisely commented: “Those who vow never to talk to ‘terrorists’ are doomed to fight them forever.”10 Third, Israel insists that before negotiations can occur, violence must stop and trust must be established. This condition, however, hands veto power to any individual with a gun or explosives. Nobody is able to enforce such a demand. Trust is the outcome, not a precondition of negotiations. Enemies, not friends, need to negotiate. Negotiations do not depend on a ceasefire, but have to be unconditional. The anc continued with the “armed struggle” long after negotiations had started and so did the white government’s violent enforcement of its laws. In fact, the escalation of mutual violence during the

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transition period (1990–94, Bhoipatong, Bishu, Hani assassination) spurned the efforts of both sides to succeed with the negotiations. Fourth, if controversial compromises are to be accepted by an indoctrinated constituency on both sides, a prudent leadership must educate its following in political literacy. Yet, giving up dreams and master-narratives is painful for activists. The anc had to shed the socialist dream of capturing the commanding heights of the economy and whites had to give up state power in return for peace. The various informal Israeli-Palestinian peace agreements, the Geneva Accord in particular, outline in detail possible compromises on the three most contentious issues (Jerusalem, refugees, borders) in a two state solution. When it comes to these issues, the danger of populist outbidding looms for pragmatic compromisers. This necessitates organization and strengthening of civil society institutions on both sides. The Canadian columnist Shira Herzog has rightly identified that for sa leaders “involving their own people was essential for negotiations to succeed.”11 This transparency of leadership-deal-making, complementing the top-down process with bottom-up information, is missing on both sides of the Middle Eastern conflict. Fifth, the Israeli-Palestinian peace camp can learn a lot from Mandela’s conciliatory gestures and the African ubuntu philosophy. It starts with the language of persuasion and condemnation. The apartheid and racism invective, though true in many respects, nevertheless blocks access to the Israeli public mind. The intended shaming and delegitimation fails. It therefore disregards Edward Said’s recommendation “to capture the imagination not just of our people, but of our oppressors.”12 Mandela’s and anc’s insistence on the “common humanity” of blacks and whites achieved this unifying vision. The majority of Jewish quests for peace and security have not only not been captured, but attitudes towards compromise have also been progressively hardened by an inept Fatah leadership and some minority Islamist rhetoric and suicidal martyrdom. Yet even with an unlikely outside intervention by the United States or Arab states to impose a settlement, the support of the Jewish public is a precondition for any lasting peace agreement. Sixth, it is rightly argued that there cannot be peace without justice, but the reverse is not necessarily true. One can strive for justice without peace. Principles of justice and inherent rights of peoples should be upheld regardless of conflict. Initially Yasir Arafat was considered the main cause for stalled peace negotiations. After Arafat’s death, Palestinian recognition was made dependent on democracy and internal reform. However, the universal right of national self-determination cannot hinge on the system of government. In as much as one party cannot dictate to its adversary who its representatives

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should be, so peace cannot be made contingent on how democratically Palestinians behave. If that were the case, Israel should never have signed peace agreements with autocratic states, such as Egypt and Jordan, and the sa National Party should never have negotiated with a Stalinist Communist Party. As Hanan Ashrawi has argued: “You don’t use democracy for justifying the existence of states. You would then have to remove many states.”13

iv. parallel israeli and palestinian truth commissions Preparing an indoctrinated public for a painful transition through a South African-type Truth Commission remains perhaps the most important lesson. While the sa Truth and Reconciliation Commission (trc) showed many flaws in its design and in the execution of its task, at least it held out a less divided truth about the past. Victims were affirmed and some perpetrators exposed, although beneficiaries were left unchallenged. Denial of past crimes became impossible, although interpretations of causes, guilt, and blame continue to differ. Peace between Israelis and Palestinians requires a different trc: an introspective investigation into each group’s own abuses rather than a lament about victimhood within each group. Andrew Rigby has stressed that it “is vital that people learn to acknowledge the validity of other people’s truths.”14 A parallel Israeli-Palestinian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (iptrc) could attempt this shared narrative by undermining the sectarian stranglehold on history. The effort would have to originate from a civil society initiative, since neither official authority is likely to support a critical scrutiny of its record. In order to get an Israeli-Palestinian Truth Commission off the ground at all, the initial goal would have to be modest, not aiming at ascertaining guilt, punishment, redress, forgiveness, or healing, but merely establishing a common historical record. The opposing meta-narratives currently poison relations and negotiations. What Mahmood Mamdani has argued for post-genocide Rwanda applies equally to i/p: “It is not possible to think of reconciliation between Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda without prior conciliation with history.”15 While all other trcs have focused on post-conflict reconstruction after the violence has ceased or a regime has changed, the unique role of an Israeli-Palestinian one would lay the essential groundwork for bringing this end about in the future. It could bridge a wide gulf of perceptions through a public project of political education for a mutually acceptable compromise.

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Only when the cognitive maps of both publics resemble each other, by similar acknowledgements of past traumatic events, will the peace accords of elites resonate among their constituencies. The Cape Town academic Andre du Toit introduced an illuminating distinction between two kinds of truth: “hidden truth” and “disputed truth.”16 The first kind concerns disappearances, secret police hit squads, informers, and other disguised abuses of state-power. Exposing those secrets was the main target of the sa trc and also the Latin American and East European predecessors of the sa institution. The sa trc hardly dealt with the second kind of “disputed truth:”17 why apartheid was established, who benefited, and who is to blame for perpetuating the system of human rights abuses. Unlike in the sa case, in i/p there seems to be no need for investigating a “hidden truth.”18 Both sides commit their atrocities in the open and proudly display their success. The Palestinian suicide bombers prepare a video in advance of their terrorist acts. The perpetrators smile before their death and are celebrated for their sacrifice. Likewise, the Israeli state-terrorism of extra-judicial assassinations and collective punishment is described in detail and praised in the country’s newspapers as deterrent and justified revenge. However, both camps lack a moral assessment of the “disputed truth”19 that one side’s supposed generous offer is considered an insult by the other, that factual historical events are interpreted contradictorily or even denied altogether. Yet there should also be no illusions about the widespread hostility towards such introspective soul-searching, which undermines comforting notions of moral victory in each community. Israeli and Palestinian academics have not exactly clamoured for such in-group conscientization. The Tel Aviv historian Mottie Tamarkin expresses this reluctance forcefully: “Any attempt to reeducate the Israeli and Palestinian societies to change their disposition towards one another as a means to facilitate the peace process is a non-starter. The most ridiculous idea is that of an Israeli-Palestinian Truth and Reconciliation Commission.”20 Without offering more than the hope that “the passage of time” will result in “the return of both nations to sobriety and normalcy within their respective states,” Tamarkin advocates passive bystanding: “Any attempt to heal the wounds through ethnomoral dialogue and collective reeducation while the conflict rages is bound to be counterproductive.”21 Such advice not to interfere with ongoing confrontations flies in the face of a vast literature on the need to prepare a public for recognizing unpleasant realities. In his magisterial tome about two decades of failed diplomatic efforts at peacemaking in the Middle East, the chief American envoy Dennis Ross singles out as the crucial lesson learned, that “peacemaking can never

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succeed in an environment dominated by mythologies and untruths.”22 He self-critically deplores that past efforts were mainly construed as top-down processes. Ross recommends “people-to-people programs that break down barriers”23 and faults both the Palestinian and Israeli leadership for never leveling with its own public about necessary compromise. An iptrc, mainly based on civil society initiatives, would be a credible instrument to create this political literacy. Risk-adverse, embattled leaders propagate only their biased versions of truth, if they address the sensitive issues at all. A redefinition of Israel from an “ethnocracy”24 with an official Jewish dominance to a pluralist, multicultural democracy requires a reciprocal Arab revision of an anti-Zionist identity that frequently flows into anti-Semitic stereotyping of the worst kind. Israel’s moral legitimacy has yet to be accepted by its neighbours. As long as anti-Semitic stereotypes (such as the Czarist forgeries of the “Protocol of the Elders of Zion”) or even Holocaust denial are peddled among Islamists, the South African solution of an inclusive, tolerant common state remains a utopian vision indeed. Yet why should the Shoa and historical suffering of the Jewish people not be part of the Palestinian curriculum? Why should the nakba, the historical facts of the dispossession of the Palestinians since 1948, not be part of the Jewish curriculum? Why does nobody in Israel/Palestine, apart from a few marginalized historians and peace activists, such as Gush Shalom, demand a Truth and Reconciliation Commission?

v. conclusion Compared with the moral, legal, and political complexity of the Middle East conflict, apartheid amorality proved an easy target for analysis and condemnation. Mandela’s vision succeeded because it evoked a universal morality. Common ideological and economic bonds existed between the antagonists inside South Africa. An outdated racial hierarchy eventually clashed with economic imperatives when the costs exceeded the benefits of racial minority rule in a global pariah state. In the Israeli-Palestinian case, outside support sustains intransigence. Only when the colonial policies of occupation embarrass and threaten their stronger patrons abroad or can no longer be so easily contained inside – as apartheid racial capitalism did in the Cold War competition – can outside pressure on Israel be expected. This turning of the tables will have an impact on the Israeli public as much as on the outside perception as this is affected by visionary local leaders and events. Despite gains in global empathy, Palestinians are still at the mercy of a superior adversary in every respect, which

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even a Mandela would not have been able to overcome. In this impasse, hope is offered by Israeli progressive moral dissent on the Left as well as opportunistic calculations on the Right that the occupation also harms the occupier. Israel has the capacity, but has yet to prove its willingness, to reach a meaningful compromise. The Palestinian mainstream has the willingness, but lacks the capacity to initiate a fair settlement. Alone among all Western countries, only in Israel did a majority of 43 percent support McCain, as compared with 23 percent of Israelis who endorsed Obama. While more than 70 percent of American Jewish voters opted for Obama, Israelis put their faith in the Republican warmonger, according to the October 2008 representative survey of the Steinmetz “War and Peace Index.” These figures should not be surprising, considering that in the same survey respondents were asked to locate themselves on the right-left spectrum, whatever these terms mean in a security conscious state. 43 percent self-identified as right-wing, 30 percent as center and 15 percent as left-wing. Obama, should he really try to be an honest broker, has his work cut out for him. He would also be well advised not to postpone engaging with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict towards the end of his term, as Clinton and Bush did, but to tackle the seemingly intractable issue right away while presidential power is strongest. However, Obama quickly capitulated when rightwing Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu called his efforts to stop settlement expansion bluff, and the pressure of the strong pro-Israel faction exerted its influence in Washington. Robert Fisk, the veteran Middle East correspondent may be overly harsh in his criticism, but hardly off the mark in his pessimism about the chances of a viable Palestinian state in the foreseeable future: “Palestine” is no more. Call it a “peace process” or a “road map”; blame it on Barack Obama’s weakness, his pathetic, childish admission – like an optimistic doctor returning a sick child to its parents without hope of recovery – that a Middle East peace was “more difficult” to reach than he imagined. But the dream of a “two-state” Israeli-Palestinian solution, a security-drenched but noble settlement to decades of warfare between Israelis and Palestinians is as good as dead. Both the United States and Europe now stand idly by while the Israeli government effectively destroys any hope of a Palestinian state; even as you read these words, Israel’s bulldozers and demolition orders are destroying the last chance of peace.25

12 Northern War Stories: The Dene, the Archive, and Canada’s Atomic Modernity p e t e r c . va n w yc k

site Great Bear Lake in Canada’s Northwest Territories is a vast inland sea; nearly 31,000 square kilometers carved into barely fathomable depths sometime in the late Pleistocene. On the far eastern shore, where no one lives today, just below where the tree-line cuts across the immense glacial body of the lake, at the far end of what is now called McTavish Arm, buttressed in ancient granites by the very western edge of the Precambrian Shield, lies Port Radium. This land, home to the Sahtú Dene for millennia, is also a site of considerable significance to Canada’s atomic history. A point of origin, one might say, where a frontier economy with its currency of fur shifted awkwardly to the very contemporary projects of an atomic modernity. From here on Great Bear Lake, uranium ore was transported south by river and rail, leaking as it went, for processing at Port Hope, and then into the productive centers of the Second World War – The Manhattan Project, as it is conventionally known – subsequently extending itself over the clear morning skies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and back again into the Dene community at Déline in the form of cancers, stories, addictions, and depression. This is a very long and complex route, in part material, topographic, narrative, archival and memorial. It has come to be called the Highway of the Atom.1 For many in this North, the Highway of the Atom pertains to a history that is very much alive in the present. If one is prepared to follow this route, it tells a story, or stories – fragile, marginal, unasked, and unheard – about history and memory, landscape and trauma, and ethics. But also, and significantly, it tells us about Canada’s silence on topics pertaining to its wartime activities. It tells us of a piece of marginal history at the dawn of the Second World War, when a wilderness outpost became a nexus of connections link-

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ing the pre-modern routes, practices, and peoples of the fur trade and the atomic modernity in which, quite suddenly, Canada found itself. It tells us also about a profoundly occluded vision available to those of us at a distance from all of this. And indeed this impaired vision supports and ratifies the very idea that we are at a distance, to begin with. For the southern researcher it poses important challenges – philosophical, archival, methodological – for thinking through some of the warring atlas of calamity that was the twentieth century.

archive I want to tell you a story that begins (or ends) at a place not far from where I now sit. Library and Archives Canada is home to some thirty-four meters of objects – more often called records – belonging to Eldorado Nuclear Limited (enl).2 The corporate predecessor of enl, Eldorado Gold Mines, was the central corporate protagonist in this piece of marginal history. From the terra nullius of the mid-Depression Canadian North, Eldorado was to invent a decidedly modern North, not once, but twice, from a site on Great Bear Lake, at a place known to some as Port Radium. From this place, Eldorado pioneered two uniquely modern Canadian staples. This particular North began in 1930 with one of the richest radium and silver mines in the world – a mineral museum, it was called, featuring an abécédaire of minerals and metals, most valuable of which was the radiumbearing pitchblende. At the time (and still, as far as I know) radium was the most valuable commodity on earth. It was held to be a substance of miraculous power: it was action at a distance, a tonic for health, and scourge of the cancerous cell. Reminiscent of the recent and ongoing public furor concerning Atomic Energy of Canada’s isotope production (nuclear McGuffins, for sure), radium – due to its apparent inexhaustibility – was once poised to fulfill a promise of medical democracy: radium for all. In the second instance, this time at the dawn of the Second World War – with an Eldorado about to be transformed and fortified as a corporation of the Crown – it was seen as a critical and strategic Allied source of uranium and technologies of refinement. This ore made its transformed debut at Alamogordo in July of 1945; its entrance was reprised shortly thereafter, over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The aptly named Eldorado archive held in Library and Archives Canada is a kind of black box, a grail, on the Highway of the Atom. It pertains to the development of the radium mine from 1930; its radium refinement activities and markets from 1932; the closure of the mine in 1940; its re-opening in 1942 as a rich source of uranium; its strategic reinvention as a Crown

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Corporation in 1944; the dealings between Eldorado and the Canadian, American, and British governments concerning the procurement, refinement, and sale of uranium; and the general corporate minutiae concerning transportation, health and safety, human resources, and so on. It contains papers – the reports, minutes, and drafts; the marginalia and maps; and photographs, sketches, tables and figures – that collectively might, one could imagine, divulge something about the details of Canada’s involvement in a war effort to invent something that promised to eradicate war itself. Yet, the material contained in the archive has remained largely inaccessible to researchers – the majority of its contents deemed to be secret – since the time of its deposit. The contemporary published record on all of this is scant. The circle of citation orbits around two corporate biographies – one on Eldorado, and another on Atomic Energy of Canada Limited – and both of these volumes were researched and written by the historian Robert Bothwell under contract to the corporations involved.3 Nonetheless, this work (and to a lesser extent the aecl history), have functioned and continue to function as authoritative, historical datum for virtually all research, journalism, activism, dispute, and land-claim-related work that touches on this history; that is, the work of a single author under a contractual arrangement with a corporate body has come to constitute the field of historical facts for all questions pertaining to Eldorado.4 The archive itself remains a largely unexplored repository – a fantastic abridgment of testimonies and stories – of considerable interest to those who may wish to understand this time through the optic of what was kept and concealed, of the remains. Yet we do not know what it might divulge. It remains a silent presence. Like so many projects that have taken and continue to take place in the North of Canada, this archival silence refers to the stories of those people who actually live there, who laboured on the Highway of the Atom in a project of a war they had no knowledge of, who watched as their lands were contorted into a site of “national self-realization.”5 Yet their story, their stories, remain closed for us in different ways as well. Of course they are inaccessible, if we mean by that geographically remote; a pious and ironic alibi. But more than this, they are closed because those of us from elsewhere have not had ears with which to hear them. It seems clear as well that voices from the North seldom gather sufficient force to rise above the colonial din of southern, settler life. The secrecy around the central archival record, a residual and lingering piece of the wartime exception itself, adds only another measure of pathos to it all.

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the dene The question of the archive is not … a question of the past.6 Jacques Derrida

About the time I was beginning to think about all of this, I saw a documentary film by the Canadian filmmaker, Peter Blow. His film, The Village of Widows, which aired on the Canadian cable channel Vision TV, was exactly the history I was thinking about; only it was told from the point of view of the Sahtú Dene of Great Bear Lake.7 Made from contemporary video shot on location by Blow and his crew, extensive archival footage, photographs, newsreels – he did a lot of research – Village of Widows is a harrowing tale which, at the time, almost no one south of Yellowknife knew. So he told it. Village of Widows relates the experience of the Dene, who have resided in the region for three or four thousand years – or forever, if you ask them – and their involvement over a (comparatively brief) period of thirty years with the development of these exceedingly modern staples on their land. They were deeply involved, as Blow’s film demonstrates, in the handling and transport of radioactive pitchblende ores from the mine-site on Great Bear Lake. With testimony from Elders and other community members, Blow’s film reveals an unknown narrative concealed within a story itself largely unknown. The Dene had also been involved at and around the mine site in various support roles – from providing moose, caribou, and fish for the mine’s kitchen, firewood and building timbers, beading, crafts, and clothing, to other miscellaneous jobs. Several Dene men were employed as riverboat pilots on the Great Bear River. The Canadian government has concluded there had not been any Dene miners.8 I’m not so sure. The answer to this probably remains to be unearthed in the archives. For the Dene, as it appears to me at a distance, the film was instrumental in a process of completely resignifing the preceding half-century.9 It is not that the pieces started to fall into place; it was just pieces. Falling. An imperceptible tide of suspicion washed over the past. In a stroke, lives lived in and around the mine, on the river and the portage, on the lake, were transformed into something quite different. The health and abundance of fish and game, the unimaginably vast lake, the land, upon which everything depends, all this was thrown into question. Domestic life, the very intimacy of the home, the oikos, was also and retroactively contaminated. Families began to recall that they had been living with radioactive ore dust, ore bags repurposed for

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domestic and sanitary uses, contaminated building materials scavenged and used elsewhere, and that standards of hygiene appropriate to hazardous radioactive materials and gasses (radon) were not enforced, much less taught or recommended. Details gathered new and grave significance. Dust and dirt became tailings. Hands not washed became precautions not taken. Caribou and fish became freighted with risk. Even, and perhaps particularly, the deaths of those who had already passed were no longer secure. Symbolic death denied to the dead. In this way, the past, their past, was itself rendered toxic via a retroactive catastrophe of knowledge; a traumatic reversal toward events not experienced as traumatic in the first place. In any case, as a result of this labor, the Dene contend that they have suffered the loss of many of their kin, men mostly, and children. Cancer.10 As it turned out, and quite unbeknownst to them, not only had the radium and uranium mined from their land contaminated an unknown extent of their waters and lands, animals, and peoples, but the uranium had come to be used in the development of the bomb and in the massacre of Japanese civilians – as we and the Dene were told – to save lives, and end a war in which the Dene had had no hand. This was a revelation. Nearly a generation had passed. The miners: gone. Boats and barges beached and sold. It was about the middle of the 1980s that the Dene became officially – that is, publicly – aware of the nature of their historical activities; until then, it hadn’t really been a question. That is, their collective history project did not register the fact of the Highway, its purpose, and the threat posed by its material, memorial, and symbolic legacy. Contamination. The absolute invisibility of radiation. From Port Radium to Déline, down the river to Tulita, then up the Mackenzie and into Southern Canada, and well beyond. The rocks from their land, the cancers in their community: these things had not relayed into correct concepts. Not until then. By the mid-1990s, the Dene had become well informed about the connections between the mine, the war, their labour, and the health of their community. The reaction was complex. Certainly it politicized the community around questions of health and radiological contamination. A report was authored that collected their memories and assembled what little documentation was then available.11 Notwithstanding their general invisibility to Bothwell, his book provided the historical foundation of the report. Their task was to write the history of their exclusion, using the very documents that excluded them. Nonetheless, what they were able to show was that they were in fact there; that they had worked for Eldorado in a number of capacities; that the government was fully aware of the danger posed in the mining, han-

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dling, and processing of pitchblende ores; and that they had never been told any of this. As it appears to me, in the wake of these realizations the Dene came to interpret their role in a most complex manner; as both accomplices and victims. As both agents of war, and subject to it; in both cases unwittingly. One can see something of this in stories that have circulated in recent years. I relate here a story told by the late George Blondin that refers to an ancient Dene prohibition about the very site of Port Radium.12 In the old days, the Sahtú Dene used to travel across the lake towards the Barrenlands every summer, to hunt caribou. Some of these Dene hunters were paddling near shore on the east side of Sahtú (where Port Radium is today) and they came to a place where rocky cliffs rise high over the water. Like all Dene, they believed it was bad medicine to pass in front of this rock: it was said that loud noises came from within it. These particular hunters pulled their canoes out of the water, but decided not to portage … Instead they camped near the cliff. During the night everybody was awakened by the singing of the medicine man … In the morning, when the medicine man stopped singing the people at last spoke to him … “Why did you sing all night ?” … “I foresaw many things and I was disturbed,” replied the medicine man … The medicine man told them of his strange vision. “I saw people going into a big hole in the ground – strange people, not Dene. Their skin was white … [and] they were going into a hole with all kinds of metal tools and machines … On the surface where they lived, there were strange houses with smoke coming out of them … I saw … big boats with smoke coming out of them, going back and forth on the river. And I saw a flying bird – a big one. They were loading it with things … I watched them and finally saw what they were making with whatever they were digging out of the hole – it was something long, like a stick. I wanted to know what it was for – I saw what harm it would do when the big bird dropped this thing on people – they all died from this long stick, which burned everyone. The people they dropped this long thing on looked like us, like Dene … But it isn’t for now; it’s a long time in the future. It will come after we are all dead.”13 I will note just two things here. First, this was the story that was foregrounded by the Dene when they came to realize what they had been involved with in their relations with Eldorado, and which they published in

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1998 in the community-based report, They Never Told Us These Things.14 It is at once a kind of oracular speech, attributed to the greatly respected community prophet Ehtseo Ayah (1858–1940), “Grandfather,” as he was called.15 We knew it all along. But also striking about this story is its instability; a prohibition – stay away from this place – a transgression – why did they camp there to begin with? – and a prophetic moment follows. The function of this story is so central that this tension is fascinating. As the story that comes into circulation at the very moment when the past, their past, is undergoing massive revision in the light of their actual involvement, it seems to say both that they already knew (via Ayah’s vision and story of the future), and that they should have known better. In counterpoint to the if only we had listened to what we already knew tone of this story, another began circulating – a kind of creation story – in which the genesis of the mine itself was predicated on a theft of a pitchblende-bearing rock. In this story it is Gilbert LaBine – the main protagonist in white mining mythology – who steals a rock by trickery from a Dene man by the name of Beyonnie. The stolen rock reveals the secret of the radium and uranium folded into the Precambrian hills, for which the Dene, of course, were never properly compensated.

punctum They had discovered many things, and foremost they had discovered that they had been, by virtue of their actions, collaborators. The Dene disaster required that something be done. It was procedural. It required that a responsibility be acknowledged, and acted on; an apology was to be made. In other words, for the Dene, the entire apparatus of implication, all the exceptions called into presence by the war, the mining company, the crown corporation, the processing facilities in Port Hope, the secret laboratory at University of Montréal, the inter-jurisdictional industrial-military complex (the British, the Canadians, and the Americans), the principal nations involved in the uranium economy (the Belgians and the Germans), the entire route through which those materials passed, infinitely beyond the sphere of their knowledge, influence, and concern, was by-passed. In August 1998, to coincide with the fifty-third anniversary commemorative events of 6 August, a delegation of ten Dene went to Japan, to Hiroshima.16 They went to the end of the circuit to convey their apologies for having been involved, and to acknowledge their responsibility. What had not been registered as traumatic in the first instance – or at least no more or less

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traumatic than any other of their historical and ongoing contacts with Europeans and southerners – was in a way even less so in the second.17 This was the punctum that drove me to this work. It leads me to ask how it is that one comes to assume responsibility for that over which one has no control. How? How in the midst of recognizing their own disaster, did they attend to the Japanese survivors? What economy could account for this? Was it, perhaps, a gift? Or was it a piece of ethical behavior called into presence by their disaster itself? Struggle though I have, I cannot answer this question. It occurs to me though that Rudy Wiebe offers us a clue. He writes: “history sometimes offers us a moment, a crack as it were, where a certain light can illuminate our ignorance.”18 The crack of interest to him – in the supplementary coda to the reissued Playing Dead – takes us to Fort Providence, a Hudson’s Bay Company post, in December of 1821, where Franklin, Richardson, a sailor, and a Métis translator have been brought, barely alive, having been rescued by a group of Dene (Yellowknife Indians). Franklin has explained to the Dene that the supplies from which he was to pay them for their generosity in (again) having saved them by sharing their meager provisions with the English exploration party had not, and would not, arrive that season. No supplies meant no payment could be made. As Richardson records in his diary, upon hearing this sad news the Dene leader Akaitcho noted their disappointment. Richardson records Akaitcho’s words: “The world goes badly,” he said, “all are poor. You are poor, the traders appear to be poor, and I and my party are poor likewise, and since the goods have not come in, we cannot have them. But I do not regret having supplied you with provisions, for a Red Knife can never permit a White man to suffer from want on his lands without flying to his aid … At all events,” he added in a tone of good humour, “it is the first time that the White people have been indebted to the Red Knife Indians.”19 Wiebe is fascinated by this moment, this crack, as am I. As Wiebe sees it, Akaitcho is telling his English friends: “This is our land. You came here without us inviting you, but we fed and clothed you so that you could live here. After you left us, and we heard you were dying, we went to your aid immediately. We saved your lives because it is the nature of Dene people to help every human being.”20 Perhaps, then, just perhaps, this is nothing new. I have come to think that the Dene’s response to their slow-motion, retroactive disaster was irreducibly

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ethical – they had nothing to give. Yes, the world goes badly. Their actions did indeed graft something onto the real; it was profoundly ethical in this sense at least.21 Yet an analytic optic on this is somehow not quite right. Ethics is more than damage control. More than reactive. Notwithstanding the conceptual seductions of trauma theory, one must be careful; the real remains a theoretical problem, not an alibi for, or gesture toward, silence. One may wonder if there are perhaps the seeds of a categorical imperative here, recast as something strange: behave toward the other as though you were responsible for their misfortune? Is that it? What then would constitute a Dene model of the accident? Is it that over which one has no control, and in spite of that (or, as I come to suspect, because of that) is it that for which one comes to assume responsibility? The archive ratified a memory of a trauma never experienced as such, and the Dene saw in their own suffering an ethical inducement toward a responsibility for the other. The mind reels; or mine does. And the mine did.

erasure, redux Some things we know. After their travels to Japan, the Dene attempted to establish a claim with the Government of Canada in the late 1990s. They wanted to know what the Government knew, and when, and why it failed to warn them. They wanted to know what legacy remained from this time. They wanted to know what happened, and why they were never told. After an appropriate period of stalling, the Government agreed that some of the Dene’s questions deserved to be answered, and so struck a five-year inter-jurisdictional investigative mechanism, the Canada-Déline Uranium Table (cdut) that concluded its work in 2005.22 The terms of reference of this body concerned the remediation of the mine site and other contaminated areas, health and environmental studies and monitoring, and the question of compensation. All of this amounted to a very large piece of work in the community in the attempt to quantify and legitimate their resignified history. That is, people came to understand that what they had actually been doing was quite different indeed from what they had thought they were doing; this itself is cause for anxiety. This recent formal process culminated, as many such northern events tend to do, in the production of a report: the Canada-Déline Uranium Table Final Report.23 As a document of the State it is a tragic piece of work, and a chronicle of disappointments suffered by a community. The report’s main finding is that there was insufficient evidence to link the Dene’s work for the mining company, Eldorado, to the cancers experienced in the community. Sorry.

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The cdut concluded that, in fact, all of the fear and anxiety that has gripped the community since their toxic history was revealed to them was groundless. No contamination of the lake would harm them, although considerable contamination was located; indeed some 740,000 tonnes of mine tailings were deposited directly into the lake.24 No site contamination would affect the wildlife they depend on although considerable site contamination was located: some 170,000 tons of tailings remain on the surface of the site at Port Radium, some buried, some exposed.25 Although the document identified specific areas that exceed allowable radiological activity and several areas with other forms of metal contamination, no danger at the site would remain; that is, once appropriate remediation had taken place. Indeed, it turns out that their involvement living and working near the mine and along the transportation corridor could not be said to have exposed them to harmful levels of radiation (by today’s standards). As per the mandate of the cdut, a fact-finder was engaged26 to gather and assemble “all known information about this mine and its operations.”27 It is crucial to realize that the central archive at Library and Archives Canada remained secret and inaccessible to the fact-finder researchers. “[A] request for information to Canada Eldor Inc., which now holds the records related to the operation of the Port Radium uranium mine, was declined with no reasons provided.”28 Nonetheless, it was determined that one or two additional deaths might have taken place over and above the “normal” expected cancer deaths for a similar statistical population. “It is not possible to know for certain if the illness or death of any individual ore carrier was directly caused by radiation …”29 An attempt was made to join this study to other research on cohorts of miners from Port Radium, and from other mines of that era. Even though the National Research Council published research to the contrary in 1935, the report claims that the understanding of radiation and health at the time of the mine was not advanced with respect to understanding longterm, sub-acute effects.30 So much for that. So while the community has been injured because of radiation, concludes the report, it has not been injured by it. “One of the key findings by the physicians who conducted the assessments was a profound and pervasive fear of radiation and a tendency to blame any and all health problems on the mine and the legacy of the mining activities.”31 And whether or not this is true, it has become so. It is a tragic state of affairs in which the community’s anxiety is at once acknowledged and invalidated. At least insofar as its ground lies not in the past, but in the present. A profound and pervasive fear of radiation. Should there be any other kind? That the cancer is a nonstarter should not be surprising. Epidemiological arguments are a tough game that select for aggregates, robust numbers, and

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rhetorically skilled practitioners. For example, between 1991 and 2001 there were forty-three deaths in Déline. On the face of it, this seems like a lot. And the cancer-related deaths during this period were five percent greater than in the total population of the Northwest Territories. This also seems like a lot. However, this difference amounts to only two additional deaths over a ten-year period. Aggregates in the North are just not that big. The numbers, as numbers, are too small to do the necessary work within an epidemiological frame; you just can’t get there from here. In Henningson’s recent documentary Somba Ke: The Money Place, Rosalie Bertell makes the argument that assessing the historical effects of uranium on the population of Déline cannot reasonably be done by using death records alone.32 To do so is to elide the burden of radio-toxicity that is already present as a function of their historical exposure. Bertell maintains that the only way to do this kind of investigation (she apparently offered this to the community) is to do blood and urine analyses, which would at least allow for correlation with exposure. For the Final Report, the only statistically relevant expression of the Dene’s grievance with the Canadian government is a body count. Yet the testimony of their dead has proven insufficient. Once again, the living are passed over in silence. In any case, the upshot is that the community becomes sick in another sense. One must begin to look to other causes – to dis-junctures with traditional practices, to the histories of colonialism, to alcoholism, to nutrition, to traumatic stress, depression, and so on. But the specific practices around mining and transporting radium and uranium have now been effectively exonerated. And the community is made responsible for their own misery. To read this document, the Final Report, is to remark how little the authors were able to discover about the mine and its operation. Even after engaging a fact-finding consultant, so very little is known to them.33 The report, the Final Report, is cloaked in a language of adequacy. It acknowledges that there is much more to be known, that many questions were left unanswered, but through the bureaucratic logic of the situation, and the instrumental demands of the mechanism, the poverty of facts became the facts nonetheless. So in lieu of establishing the state of the archive (as per the terms of reference), “information about working conditions, and employment histories was largely gathered from oral histories,” from community members. That this is the very testimony that was suspect to begin with – at least in so far as it was the specific recollections of ore-carriers that the fact-finding sought to clarify from the outset – is simply ironic.34

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h istory I might ask: what, then, is the lesson of history here? Clearly, this is not just about a war, about a country, ours, a home and native land responding to decidedly real threats to freedom. The lesson here is both more and less than this, for it is not history that is doing the teaching; not directly, at least. Here history and memory and trauma and land and ethics are terms in a strange algebra of invention; one that poses such questions as what it might mean to assume responsibility for events over which one had no control, or knowledge. Yes, this problem is ours. And as other contributors to this volume would concur, it is a problem for memory. It is twofold, at least. First, how does one come to constitute in memory something that was not fully experienced to begin with, in the face of an archive that conceals itself and a history which consumes itself, its witnesses, and its evidence? Second, and perhaps even more pressing, is how to bring into memory, and thus bear witness to, events which we do not wish to remember, nor to be remembered for.35 The strange objects of our time cry out for modes of conceptualization that might lead us to such questions; these questions yet to come. They might.

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PART IV For What? Artists’ Reflections on Film, Poetry, and Music

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13 Perspectives on War anne wheeler

I grew up in a household where you did not talk of war. My father did not attend reunions or glory in the telling of stories about his time spent in her Majesty’s service. From the time I knew my alphabet I knew he had an obe, which was a medal given to him by the King of England because he was a hero. What he had done to deserve this honor I didn’t know. Every Christmas, dozens of cards would arrive from the United Kingdom full of words of gratitude and deep affection – unlike any words uttered by our quiet undemonstrative family. One night Mom and Dad went to a film, which was a rare occasion. They returned home earlier than expected and my father was furious. The film, The Bridge on the River Kwai, had greatly upset him. “It was a sham, a fairy tale – whoever made it certainly never went to war,” my father declared. “He should be ashamed of himself, exploiting the truth – fabricating entertainment from the suffering of others.” British filmmaker David Lean had directed the movie and my father was right. Mr Lean had never been to war. His life experiences were limited by his pursuit of making movies, starting as an editing assistant and working up from there. He focused on adaptations of books and plays, collaborating with the likes of Noel Coward and Alec Guinness. It was not important to him if a story was true and even possible. He looked for interesting plots with well-defined characters that lived fascinating lives. Stories were judged by their potential to grab an audience and hold its attention. This film, Bridge on the River Kwai, garnered seven academy awards in 1957 and was considered to be a huge success, but to my father – who had lived almost four years in a series of Japanese pow camps – it was an insult. More films have been made about war than anything else – except perhaps love. War sells. War is exciting. It brings out the best and worst in men and

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women in ways by which we all measure ourselves. As a viable cinematic property it’s an easy “pitch” with clearly defined antagonists facing obstacles that are life-threatening and dramatic. The biggest challenge to getting war movies made is that they are usually expensive, which means the returns must be very high in order to realize a profit. To attract a wide audience, historical details and facts are sacrificed. Plots are squeezed into three acts. Complications are simplified so a broader public can digest them without much effort, and endings are neatly twisted so the majority of people leave the theatre feeling satisfied. Filmmakers pride themselves in being modern-day artists and storytellers, but filmmaking is also an enormous business that incorporates many agendas. Producers can fire directors. Directors, for the most part, set the casting, the pacing, the music, the color palate, and overall tone of a piece, but usually the producer gets the last cut. A director has to sell his vision to those who finance the work. Once it is “green lit,” the director is free to communicate to his department heads what he/she sees and hears and wants. They talk about the point of view, the use of movement, color, and sound. Is it a drama? Where is the humor? What is the style? These creative collaborations set the look of the movie, with the director bringing the team together so that they work intensely and coherently to bring about the vision. For instance, most war films have images that are deliberately jarring, designed to shock and disturb. Often they are monochromic, often blue, telegraphing a sense of cold and isolation as well as a sense of time past. Though the subject may be horrific, it’s beautiful to watch. Designed from the director’s imagination, it is meant to seduce the audience with a continuous flow of wonderful big explosions and intense heroics. Set to thrilling music, every detail is contrived to keep the audience engaged. Whose perspective is it really? The same battle from the same script can be designed a thousand different ways, depending on what combination of individuals make up the crew. Every person has a creative role to play whether he/she is the director, a hair stylist, the gaffer, or a musician performing the score. Most crews number more than two hundred people, so the possibilities, when you consider the nuances of personal taste, are infinite. A director can veto everything and anything but a director also wants those working for him or her to do their best work, and that usually means a willingness to delegate through the department heads. Personally, I like to celebrate the risks taken by the gifted people on my crew and in my cast. Audiences get a more realistic perspective on war when watching the news, hoping that moments of reality will be exposed and shared. But there too a creative mind is guiding what is seen or not seen. A journalist or a producer makes choices due to limitations of time or access. Whether a film is fiction

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or reportedly non-fiction, it is impossible to present an audience with the complete truth. As we rely more on media for a sense of what is happening in the world, the role of the director becomes more complex and is pulled between truth and fantasy. Politics and finance always have an impact on what is sponsored. The necessity to deliver a production that is technically modern and smooth is often used as a form of censorship by those who are selling the programming to the paying advertiser. If it can’t sell, it won’t be made or seen. I was almost thirty, and had already made a number of documentary films, when I became aware of the diary my father had written during his internment. He had been captured in Singapore and held in Changi for eight months before being shipped to Formosa (now Taiwan) in what is now known as a “Hell Ship.” Because he was a doctor, the Japanese allowed him to keep a medical diary. Knowing that this diary could be confiscated at any time, my father was very careful about what he wrote. It was his most valued possession and the focus of his own survival. It read like a code – with just the facts revealing what he could of the truth. It was taken away from him many times and he knew if he was to cause insult or write something suspiciously critical, it would be burned like the rest of the books in the camp. My perspective on what happened to him when I read this diary was limited – this was a highly censored account of day-to-day occurrences he detailed without being critical in any way. He could describe his clothes, the fact that his six foot five friend died at sixty-seven pounds, that there had been 200 inches of rain that month. These were facts written concisely. After a year he ran out of ink so he made some by crushing insects. Paper was scarce so he resorted to writing on anything he could find. This diary was the inspiration for A War Story, the documentary I did in 1979 with the National Film Board, narrated by Donald Sutherland. My father died when I was a teenager. Getting to know who he was as an adult became my quest. With his diary as my guide and those Christmas cards as my clues, I began by contacting some of the men who had known him as a prisoner. He had been thirty-two when he was captured; I was thirty-two when I set out to make the movie. I wanted to relate to who he was, to meld my perspective with his. Like David Lean, I had never experienced war and had only imagined it. But my perspective was that of a daughter in search of a father, and I wanted to know the truth. At least that’s what I told myself. It wasn’t easy to research the War in the Pacific in 1978. Research was confined to the library. Correspondence took time, with one connection leading to another, often taking months. I wrote to museums and universities all over the world. Images were particularly difficult to find: nobody was proud

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of what had happened in the East during the Second World War. Much about the European theatre had been written and preserved, collections were in good order, but the realities of the Pacific battlefront had barely been examined. Men had returned from the camps with no fanfare, no acknowledgement. Some were asked in Britain to pay for the uniforms they “lost.” I found rare reels of Nitrate film disintegrating in cans; disorganized and unprotected. It seems that nobody had taken the time to thoroughly examine this precious material. In a forgotten old warehouse hours north of London, I was the first to open a stack of cans that were rusty and bent, stored under a leaky roof. The film turned out to be original footage of the camps in Japan being liberated. Only a small percent could be saved, the rest having turned to highly flammable dust, ready to explode. I pulled short strips of the 35mm negative out carefully and took it to a laboratory to be duplicated. Several men who had served with my dad responded to my letters and they invited me to a reunion in London, where I met people who felt that they owed their lives to my father, their doctor. They told me how outspoken he was, how brave and brilliant, inventing ways of keeping them alive when survival seemed impossible. They credited his early days of growing up on the prairies with his ability to improvise and never give up. He told them stories about himself that I had never heard. Eight months after being captured in Singapore, my father was shipped to Formosa with 1,500 other soldiers. They ended up in a hard labor mining camp on the north east coast of the island, digging for copper. The work was arduous and the weather extreme. The mine was deep and dangerous, with tunnels reaching far beneath the ocean. The men told me how unbearably hot it was with sulfuric acid constantly dripping down on them. The timbers were unstable, so the shafts collapsed several times and men were frequently killed or injured. My father had no medicine, no tools, and was forced to perform delicate operations with razor blades and amputations with home-made saws. The only pictures of this pow camp were taken by the Japanese for propaganda the one and only time the Red Cross arrived. Everyone was given a set and I had found my father’s with his diary. Now I wanted to see the place for myself. Three of the men I met at the Far East Prisoners of War reunion wanted to come with me, so I decided that this pilgrimage could be the central core of the movie. My father was a hero and a stranger to these men. He had never shared his inner feelings with them, because he realized that he was their hope. He projected what he felt they needed to see – a strong intelligent man who was always calm and knowledgeable and never discouraged. But amongst his medical notes, written carefully and obscurely, was an on-going letter to my

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13.1 Film still from A War Story. Written, produced, and directed by Anne Wheeler. National Film Board of Canada, 1981.

mother expressing his hopes and fears. It was an intimate love letter meant only for her, should it survive his death. I felt protective of this precious document and reluctant to share it in its entirety with an audience. So when it came to making this film about war, I censored my perspective because of the loyalty I felt towards my parents. My audience would get the truth but not the whole truth. It took three years to make A War Story. Canada did not have a diplomatic relationship with Taiwan, so visas were obtained through the United States. Two of my pows were from Britain and a third was from Hong Kong, which made it all more complicated. I was required to have a Taiwanese “guide” who controlled every decision I made, which was very frustrating. But the real challenge came when we finally got to the camp site and I realized I had brought these three men back to a place they had tried desperately to forget. I had brought them back to hell – and they, understandably, were distraught. They had come out of respect for my father, but

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13.2 Film still from A War Story. Written, produced, and directed by Anne Wheeler. National Film Board of Canada, 1981.

now they were in shock, unable to express what they felt in seeing this place again. I found I couldn’t turn the cameras on them. Even though I had raised private money, expecting this footage to live at the centre of the film, I could not bring myself to exploit their good will towards my father and me. I was the Major’s daughter – and they owed him so much. He was dead and they were not. I could not cash in on this devotion. It felt morally wrong. There were four people on my crew; a cinematographer, a soundman, a researcher/assistant, and a production manager, Dean Stoker, who kept track of the budget and the logistics. He was as skinny as a rake and so I asked him to strip off his clothes and put on a loin cloth. My father’s comrades made sure he looked pathetic and filthy, smearing him with muck, and for two days in the pouring rain we filmed some simple re-enactments of Dean working in the mine. My three companions were happy to share their memories through him, and this new direction took the film into another realm. It became a “docu-drama,” which at the time was a very controversial approach. I created footage to match the limited archival footage I had found rotting in the British warehouse. It was hard to tell the difference between what was

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13.3 Film still from Bye Bye Blues. Photograph: Doug Curran. Written and directed by Anne Wheeler, 1989.

authentic and what was not. What we shot in Taiwan was treated to appear grainy, black and white, and in the process of decomposing like the footage I had rescued. I had crossed over to dramatic filmmaking. My attempt to present the historical truth, when there was so little evidence, forced me to try something unexpected. The old soldiers had tried to be open with me in the interviews, but I knew that there was much they would never tell me and that was theirs to keep. I would have to guess, to make deductions. They were relieved when the film turned out to look so close to what they remembered. A few years later I decided to make another film about war. It would be “inspired” by my mother’s story, as she lived out the war years wondering if my father was alive. In order to support herself and her children, she made a living by playing piano and singing in a band. The film is called Bye Bye Blues. When I told Mom that I was about to make her wartime experiences into a film, she had a very clear perspective on what I was about to do. In her opinion it was a very boring story. She encouraged me to “spice it up a bit. In fact, spice it up a lot, if you want anyone to watch it!”

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And so I did. I began by researching other people’s stories much like I would a documentary. Then I wove various characters together by connecting their experiences with those of my mother. I didn’t talk to her or to anyone who knew her about this. What I did do was take her into a recording studio and capture the spirit of her music. This became the inspiration for the sound track later released on cd. The basic family story went like this: my parents were childhood sweethearts. When my father graduated from medical school he was broke and applied to the Indian Medical Service. In 1936, they left the Canadian west to live in India, where they had three sons. Until 1941 they lived in a mansion with fifteen servants but then, when the war broke out, their fantasy life came to a halt. Dad was sent to Malaysia and Mom and the boys were sent home to Edgerton, Alberta. My father was “lost” for more than two years, when finally a small postcard arrived. There was no financial support for Mom so she turned to her talent for music to make a living. I didn’t want my mother to feel responsible for how I told her story. I assumed she had private thoughts she never shared, but I didn’t want to interrogate her. So we made a deal; she wouldn’t see or read anything until the movie was completed. She would view it for the first time in front of a big audience and honor its debut. I decided that my perspective would be that of a woman: not a daughter, but a typical mother trying to imagine another mother’s reality. My own two boys were now eight. In the writing of the film, I put myself in her position, with her talent and her good looks, and imagined what it might have been like to be separated for almost five years from her one and only love. It was a time of change for her, from India back to her home town, from being an officer’s wife to being a single mother without an income. Emotionally, I had to find the path between the beginning and the end. My mother was a “mighty fine piano player” and a born entertainer. When she played, the whole room would start to move, people clapping their hands, singing, and dancing. Her music was designed to lift the spirits. For as long as she played, the party would be a happy one, with one song morphing into another, hour after hour. I saw it happen a hundred times. She was as good as anyone on television and yet, when I was growing up, she played the role of a typical mother of the fifties – laundry on Mondays, ironing on Tuesdays, shopping on Wednesdays, and so on. Only at parties did this other side of her reveal itself and people couldn’t wait for her to sit down and play. Bye Bye Blues had a Gala at the Toronto Film Festival in 1989 and then, like most Canadian films, a modest opening across the country. The first

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13.4 Film still from Bye Bye Blues. Photograph: Doug Curran. Written and directed by Anne Wheeler, 1989.

screening of the release was in Edmonton, my home town, and Mom was sitting right next to me. As agreed, she hadn’t seen or read a thing about the production. As the film played, I realized just how far from the actual story I had ventured. The lead character was called Daisy and she was given a serious suitor, a level of success, and a promising future that did not reflect exactly what I knew of my mother’s more complicated truth. In the film,

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when the war ends, Daisy is faced with a decision – to pursue an exciting career or to let the band go on without her. My mother watched it right to the end. When Daisy decided to give up her passion for playing to be reunited with her husband, there was silence from the little woman beside me. Suddenly the whole theatre came to its feet, giving the film a standing ovation. But Mom just sat there quiet, not responding. I got up to receive the response, but I knew too that people wanted to see her, the person to whom the film was dedicated. I urged her to get up, and for a moment she seemed confused. Graciously she rose and waved, smiling, and I worried, “What is she thinking? Have I made a terrible mistake, taken too much liberty?” When the roar died down she looked at me directly and leaned over to whisper in my ear – “How did you know all that?” What a relief, what a surprise! Facts and figures reflect part of the truth, but I had struggled to find an emotional truth through fiction that I would have missed had I made a documentary. It would have been heavy with information, but this drama had revealed an undercurrent she would never have shared. She was pleased and relieved that I could say to her: “I just made it up Mom, I just used my imagination.” In the early nineties, after moving from Alberta to the West Coast of Canada, I became curious to know more about what had happened to Japanese-Canadians, most of whom had settled in British Columbia, during the Second World War. One such family had returned to Salt Spring Island in the early fifties and I came to know them and their story. For me it was part of coming full circle. I was curious to see the Pacific War from yet another perspective. Richard Murakami was a couple of years older than me, and he grew up in an internment camp. At first I tried to get the rights to Obasan, the wonderful book by Joy Kogawa. Then, to my delight, a young writer, Sharon Gibbons, sent me a script about her mother who lived in the Slocan Valley when the Japanese community was moved there in 1942. Her mother hired a young educated woman named Aya to be a babysitter and the two women became lifelong friends. It was a wonderful story. But the writer had gone through numerous versions and the truth had lost its way. The story was not reflecting what the writer had set out to say. We worked together to bring it back closer to what really happened and in this instance we brought the real people into the process. Every film seems to find its own path. The War Between Us was made in New Denver, where the original story happened, with the participation of the people from the town, many of whom had been there since the war. The characters reflected individuals who people recognized as themselves. Both Sharon’s mother and her former babysitter told us all that they could remember feeling and doing during the three years they shared their lives. The Japanese Canadian community in

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13.5 Photograph taken during the filming of The War Between Us, New Denver, bc, 1995. Photograph: Greg Corp.

New Denver adopted the film to be their own and generously shared their artifacts, including the clothing worn by some of the original internees. There was one woman in New Denver, an artist, who had been a young girl living on the west coast when the war broke out. Her name was Tsuneko Kokubo, and though she was not in New Denver during the war, she became the liaison between the makers of the film and the community. Her father had a boat-building business in Steveston in the 1930s, and just prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor she was sent to Japan to meet her grandparents. She was a child then and was unable to return to Canada. Her parents had no way of communicating with her or her grandparents. Her family was sent north to New Denver. All through the war they could only worry about whether their daughter was safe in Japan, which was eventually under heavy attack. They refused to move east of the Rockies and were deemed unloyal to the Canadian cause. In retaliation, the Government of Canada sent this family to Japan at the end of the war. Unlike the other 4,000 Japanese Canadians being expelled, they were anxious to go. They wanted to find their daughter and their aging parents. For more than three years they could only hope to find them all alive.

13.6 Robert Ito as Mr Kawashima in The War Between Us. Directed by Anne Wheeler and written by Sharon Gibbon, 1995. Photograph: Greg Corp.

13.7 Ian Tracey as Jig Parnum in The War Between Us. Photograph: Greg Corp.

13.8 Scene of detainees in transit in The War Between Us. Photograph: Greg Corp.

It was in mid-November 1945 that they made their way to Victoria to catch a boat that would take them to war-torn Japan. It was around the 14th when their vessel docked and unloaded before a thousand Japanese Canadians were boarded with what they could carry, leaving the country where many of them were born. Koko’s parents were on a quest and I can imagine their anxiety. They had made a good life here once but knew that it was unlikely they would be back for a second chance. It was in November that my father docked in Victoria, having stayed in the East longer than most to recuperate and attend to his patients. He had not seen his children for more than four years and for most of that time his wife, my mother, had not known if he was alive or dead. He had been out of touch with the modern world, out of touch with the advancements made in medicine during the war. Yes, there is a very good chance that he was disembarking from the same boat that Koko’s parents were waiting to board. How many ships were going back and forth between Japan and Victoria in midNovember of 1945? And on that same day, 14 November, a young piano player, mother of three, got a telegram from her husband that he had landed and was alive and well. She realized suddenly that a chapter in her life was over and she wondered if she would know her husband in his present state or if he would know her after so many years of independence. A family was heading off to a country that didn’t want them, in the hopes of finding their

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child. And a man was coming home after being away for ten years, to find a new beginning in what he called “God’s country.” One event in history is like a multi-faceted gem that reflects numerous possibilities. In researching and pondering these different perspectives, I have stumbled on other lives that hold new insights into war and the people who suffer the consequences. People have seen my work and have sent me their stories, all of them worthy of recognition. And now with the internet, I am able to look up what was obscure and hidden, and find information instantly that would have taken months or years to obtain in the seventies. A person I interviewed but didn’t use in A War Story was a Japanese guard who I later learned had been one of the torturers in the camp. I was told he tortured my father. This became the beginning of a screenplay I am writing that focuses on my father and this man – and my finding him in Japan years later. My research for this screenplay led me to a filmmaker who made a documentary about the hundreds of Japanese men who were not tried at the War Trials in Japan because the Americans shut the trial down – unlike the Nuremberg trial in Germany. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of war criminals went free, and this filmmaker found fourteen who wished to tell their story. Now this filmmaker and I have written yet another screenplay together about a family with a child who has disabilities and up to the war had been hidden from the world. I have stories about the Chinese in Hong Kong and Singapore, the Sikhs who remained loyal to the British when they were captured by the Japanese, who expected them to join forces. These are stories that could be lost and I feel a responsibility for them, as one of a few who have tried to understand these events from a human point of view. The war in the Pacific changed my life completely though I was not a part of it. I feel connected to it because it had such an impact on my parents and their perspective on life. I remember one night when I was editing A War Story and was alone in the old building that housed the National Film Board of Canada in Edmonton at the time. I was trying to write the narration for the opening that focuses on the Fall of Singapore. Thinking I was alone, I was shaken to hear what sounded like someone weeping in the dark hallway behind me. Then I heard a shuffle, and a man in his sixties wearing a turban revealed himself in the doorway. I recognized him as the security guard who normally sat at the front door and nodded when I came in to work at night. In a broken voice he told me, “I lost two Uncles and a cousin in Singapore.” I was surprised and curious. “They were soldiers?” I asked. “Yes, Officers,” he said proudly. “My father was with the Ninth Indian Division,” I stammered. “Were they with the Ninth?” He shook his head, “No.” For a few moments he didn’t speak. I showed him what I had cut together and he pulled up a chair to watch. We

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were connected by this time, this place, this event. “You know,” he began, “I was trained as a diver. And at the end of the war, dozens of us swam like porpoises, back and forth, combing the Singapore Harbor for mines.” “It’s a huge harbour,” I murmured. “Did you find any?” “Oh yes,” he answered, “but we didn’t find my family. We have never known what happened to them.” I think now, with the world being what it is, that there is a chance that someone could find out, before it’s too late. Or we could just imagine.

14 On Active Service, and Let Us Wake From This Dream: A Poem and a String Quartet j a n e t h e n s h aw d a n i e l s o n

The horrors of war and the longing for peace cannot be fully expressed in words: music has the capacity both to evoke deep emotion in individuals and to meld these individual responses into a communal expression, providing a channel for the sharing of intentions, a “human technology for crossing the solipsistic gulf.”1 It was fitting, therefore, for music to be part of a symposium on The Cultures of War and Peace, voicing the call for a culture of peace. In early November 2007, I was commissioned to write a new string quartet for the 2008 Royal Society of Canada Academy I Symposium. I started thinking about how music could be a reflection of the symposium theme, evoking not just the events or actions of war and peace, but the cultures from which they emerge. I decided to examine the culture I knew best, that of Canada; though like many Canadians of my generation I have no direct experience of war, I happened to have at hand an artifact by a family member who had served in the Second World War. This became the basis for my string quartet. I was able to attend the symposium, and I listened to the distinguished speakers with great interest, hoping to hear something that connected with my music so that the première performance of my string quartet at the close of the symposium would foster contemplation of the significant themes addressed during the day. As symposium keynote speaker Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire has so convincingly demonstrated,2 the horrors of war have not diminished in the modern era; in fact, civilian involvement – an index of savagery by any standard – has increased sharply. Though there was no specific mention of music in his presentation, he did make a passing reference to the international community fiddling while Rome burned. This was not the musical allusion I had

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hoped to hear, but I admit that music can be a pernicious diversion, and stringed instruments in particular have their dark side. The predecessor of the musical bow was the hunting bow, for millennia the best means of inflicting violence from a safe vantage point. The instrument itself is basically a resonant rack upon which four strings (originally made of gut) are stretched under high tension. The fingerboard is a slippery slope with no frets to secure intonation and guarantee concord. Bowed stringed instruments have the capacity to scrape, moan, scream, and wail, easily emitting sounds of terror. The power of music is intensified in association with armed conflict: think of the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the musical icon of Second World War Britain. Even the human ear is a site of violence and concord. Within the cochlea, hair cells line up in tidy military-style chevrons that reinforce the harmonics of tonic stimuli. Overly loud sounds, however, can cut a swathe through these hair cells like a fierce tornado, thereby inflicting permanent damage. Yet of all instrumental ensembles, the string quartet may well be the hallmark of a culture of peace. In its precise and exacting requirements for attunement, sensitivity to others, teamwork, economy, concord, and beauty, a quartet of bowed stringed instruments offers no cheap and easy beauty. The instruments themselves pre-date the era of mechanization, so their construction involves anachronistic arts such as skilled hand-carving. To play them well requires thousands of hours of meticulous drill. In a period of mass production and easy replication, stringed instruments are a treasured anomaly, nearly as individual, vulnerable, and difficult to replicate as human life itself. The quartet commissioned for the Cultures of War and Peace Symposium is a musical rendering of the family artifact that I mentioned earlier: a poem by my uncle Harry Saunders, written a few months before his death from a shrapnel wound in Holland near the end of the Second World War. Entitled simply On Active Service, the poem has been a private family keepsake until now. I initially under-rated my uncle’s work, assuming that rhyme and metre in the mid-twentieth century were incompatible with depth and artistry. As a young composer who relished Webern and Feldman (composers not known for catchy rhythms), I doubted that a poem that scanned like ’Twas the Night Before Christmas could be anything but trite. But I have come to appreciate the poem’s terse and carefully crafted articulation of the terror and ambiguity of life at the front. Our ancestors had left Scotland in the eighteenth century and settled in New Brunswick. My grandparents (my uncle’s parents) moved to Calgary and there established a home full of music and marked by uncommon tenderness, and my uncle’s impressive Latin notebooks indicate that he had good

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academic schooling. He returned to New Brunswick for university, and in 1942 completed a degree in Forestry in April, married in May, and in August left to serve in the Royal Canadian Artillery, 3rd Light Anti-Aircraft Regiment. On 16 February 1945, the eighth day of the Battle for the Rhineland, he became one of 5,500 Canadian casualties of this month-long offensive; he was twenty-seven when he was killed. This is his poem. on active service I think peaceful thoughts and I dream peaceful dreams The loud distant rumble and gun roar just seems To remind me of thunder, a storm that is near The flashes are lightning, I’ve nothing to fear. The battles are over, the peace flag’s unfurled “God’s in His heaven, all’s right with the world.” But down the road winding along at a creep The wounded are coming packed tight in a jeep I hear now the groans and the life-ebbing gasp, My day-dreams are shattered, the picture I grasp, The jerries are shelling – terrific the roar The bastards are ranging, they’ve found us once more. I think wicked thoughts and I dream wicked dreams As over my slit trench a “minnie” bomb screams That close tearing fragment of 88 shell Has my number on it – it has, sure as Hell, But no, it was Joe’s turn – just happens that way. He could have gone out if he’d wanted today. Reports will go back when this battle is done They’ll tell the good news, “We lost only one” But “the one” was a guy with a wife and a kid Who died – not because of what he, himself, did. The soldiers all wonder just what will be done For Joe’s wife and baby, when this war is won. Still over the dug-out death whispers, death screams, You’ve been lucky so far – not this time, it seems. You get cold and clammy – they can’t scare you more Your mind starts to work, but you don’t know the score.

5

10

15

20

25

On Active Service, and Let Us Wake from This Dream

Then deep gentle memories of love, peace and home Flash in and flash out as your thoughts start to roam. That’s all that saves you from going clear nuts. It’s worth more than training or whiskey or guts. But after it’s over and life lies ahead, You push on through rubble and dying and dead; And deep in your heart you start thinking once more That your number’s not coming up in this war. So it continues day after day, Same simple pattern, same deadly way. But soon ‘twill be over; please God, may it seem But a nightmare in passing. Let us wake from this dream.

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30

35

40

If Harry Saunders needed an example of anapestic tetrametre as he was penning his poem at the front, he would likely have called to mind not ’Twas the Night Before Christmas, but rather Byron’s The Destruction of Sennacherib, which his grandmother liked to recite: “The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,/And his cohorts were gleaming in silver and gold” (163–4). But there is nothing Byronic about my uncle’s poem and no gleaming cohorts: where Byron’s poem is full of colour and imagery, my uncle reserves his more vivid language for a chilling spectrum of brutal sounds: death whispers, death screams. His choice of colloquial, monosyllabic language suggests a conscious refusal to glorify violence. On Active Service opens with narration in my uncle’s voice in four six-line stanzas. He is having “peaceful thoughts” (l. 1): an enemy attack catches him in a daydream world in which the war has ended. His immediate response to the attack is denial – the artillery blasts are just a thunderstorm. But when the groaning of the wounded brings him to full consciousness, his self-deception turns into anger and “wicked thoughts” (l. 13). A shell narrowly misses him, only to hit “Joe,” a soldier who leaves a widow and baby behind. The narrative part of the poem closes, not with acceptance, but with dark speculation that the triumphant news of “only one” casualty (l. 20) may not translate into justice for Joe’s wife and baby once the war is over. The second part of the poem is in shorter four-line stanzas, underscoring a sense of urgency. In these stanzas my uncle outlines his internal turmoil in the aftermath of the incident. Interestingly, it is at just this point that he shifts the voice from “I” to the indefinite colloquial “you” – for example, “you get cold and clammy” (l. 27). This shift of pronoun serves to generalize his experience and to direct attention back to the situation of war. In the simplest

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possible language, he credits the “deep gentle memories of love, peace and home” (l. 29) with preserving his sanity: “That’s all that saves you from going clear nuts. / It’s worth more than training, or whisky, or guts.” Once again, what saves him is not his own agency – his ability to visualize positive outcomes, or his technique of detachment – it is the memories themselves that, like the artillery in the first stanza, “flash in and out” (l. 30). The poem closes with the hope that the horrendous realities of the front may be a “nightmare in passing” (l. 40). Even after his experience on the battlefield, the enduring realities for my uncle were the values of love, peace, and home. My uncle’s poem has little to say about the evils of the enemy, the virtues of a just war, or the heroism of anyone, including himself. For a war poem, there is not a lot of blame or praise. Though he acknowledges that “Joe” went out for duty on a day off, the shell that killed Joe could have killed him or someone else: “just happens that way” (l. 17). “Joe” becomes a metonym for humanity in its vulnerability, its individuality, and its irreplaceable value. A striking feature of the poem is its frank recognition of the human proclivity for denial, whether in the reports sent back from the front, or in his own thinking, so soon after barely escaping the shell that killed Joe, that his “number’s not coming up in this war” – wishful thinking, as it soon turned out. Was my uncle’s death justified because the goal of world peace is worth the price of human casualties, or because international law, through historical processes, now sanctions the use of force to quell threats to national sovereignty? In his Critique of Violence (1921), Walter Benjamin compares two ways in which violence or force can be justified in legal theory: in natural law, violence is justified by the outcome; whereas in positive law, violence is justified by legal process. Violence can be justified in natural law because it is a means to a just or natural end. Benjamin cites “popular Darwinistic philosophy” which justifies force as proper to the process of natural selection.3 In positive law, on the other hand, force or violence is seen as appropriate if the means are legally sanctioned, so the legality of the processes guarantees the justice of their ends. Benjamin searches for a standpoint independent of both positive legal philosophy and natural law from which a proper critique of violence can be made. He has unmasked an antithesis that cannot be resolved from within either framework. Despite his warning that there is “something rotten in the law,”4 echoes of these inadequate justifications reverberate through the genocides of the past century. In Rwanda, violence was justified by natural law for the Hutu insurgents who saw it as a means of ridding the nation of oppressive Tutsi “cockroaches” and by positive law for the international community who deemed Rwanda the site of intertribal conflict, not genocide, and therefore

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beyond the aegis of international jurisdiction. The problem with both these justifications, as Dallaire has shown, is that when our own interests are at stake, we are all too quick to define some humans as less human than others.5 Dallaire explains that “[i]n the last decades of the twentieth century, self-interest, sovereignty and taking care of number one became the primary criteria for any serious provision of support … If the country in question is of any possible strategic value to the world powers, then it seems that everything from covert operations to the outright use of overwhelming force is fair game. If it is not, indifference is the order of the day.”6 Once situated outside the domains of both natural and positive law, humans become expendable without penalty, a condition Giorgio Agamben has famously identified with the homo sacer of ancient Rome.7 The limitations of natural and positive law were discussed in the late Renaissance by distinguished French jurist-philosopher Jean Bodin and refined by astronomer Johannes Kepler in his Political Digression on the Three Means. Bodin and Kepler follow Aristotle in using types of proportion as models: arithmetic proportions for corrective justice (related to natural justice or equity); geometric proportions for distributive justice (related to positive law and similarity); and harmonic proportions for peace or concord in which “the whole body of the state, and its safety and mutual love and peace [are] related to the common harmony of all.”8 Musical parallels to natural and positive law are also found in the two major streams of twentieth-century music theory. For Heinrich Schenker, dissonance was justified by its eventual resolution into the fundamental tone of the “chord of nature,”9 a manifestation of a tonal Ursatz. All music could be judged on the basis of its fulfillment of this universal musical destiny.10 On the other hand, Arnold Schoenberg forsook the idea of a central fundamental tone11 for a method of composition in which dissonance was justified by its place in a series defined by the compositional process, not by its relation to an end.12 These theories are both valued for their explanatory power, and both offer a basis for legitimizing and excluding certain types of music. But (at least in my view) neither of them offers an adequate explanation of the human predilection for harmonized tunes, which were for Kepler (as for many others) the musical correlative of love, peace, and home. In composing Let Us Wake From This Dream, I aimed to reflect my uncle’s poem on several different levels. Like the poem, the composition has two main sections, the first more narrative and the second more introspective, and the large-scale time frame echoes the 3:2 ratio (24 lines and 16 lines respectively) of the main sections of the poem. The proportions of the total number of lines in the poem and those of each section – 40, 24, and 16 – factor down neatly to Kepler’s harmonic concord, 5:3:2. I used the 3:2 ratio again in the

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intentionally tuneful opening theme by basing it on the interval of the perfect fifth (that is, two tones in a 3:2 ratio). The swaying tune is clad in vaguely 1940s harmonies and follows the predictable metre of the poem.

Let Us Wake From This Dream (piano reduction), mm. 2–4

In contrast to this nonchalant theme, pairs of falling semitones evoke sirens and groans, merging into chords that offer no prospect of resolution.

Let Us Wake, measures 19–22

In the more introspective second section, the musical points of orientation disappear, although there are flashes from an old gospel song my grandfather often sang: “Fight manfully onward, dark passions subdue, / Look ever to Jesus, He’ll carry you through.”13

Let Us Wake, measures 113–14 [lyrics added]

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I chose to quote this particular gospel song because it was in the family repertoire; it alludes to the metre of the quartet’s opening theme; and most importantly, it outlines the strategies my uncle employed to maintain his sanity: fighting manfully onward, subduing his wicked thoughts, and looking beyond the humanly-devised tactics of training, inebriation, and courage which he found to be insufficient. My uncle concluded that war was simple: a simple deadly pattern that he “pushed on through” (l. 33). For him, what was deep were both the gentle memories of what all humans cherish – love, peace, and home – and his own capacity for self-deception. In the extreme horror of daily random violence, it seems he needed both in order to maintain his sanity. This is quite an admission. The premiere of Let Us Wake From This Dream, beautifully performed by the Vida Quartet, closed the Cultures of War and Peace Symposium: a reminder of what it means to be human. I did not aim to provide a kind of musical aversion therapy with realistic scrapes and screams, nor, I hope, an escapist diversion from a world in flames, but rather a guided non-verbal reading of my uncle’s poem in honour of his memory and of his memories, and by extension in honour of all who put their lives at risk for the sake of humanity.

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Notes

preface 1 Claude Simon, “Pour qui donc écrit Sartre?” (1964), in Les Triptyques de Claude Simon ou l’art du montage, ed. Mireille Calle-Gruber (Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2008). introduction 1 There is a vast literature on war and peace by political scientists, military historians, social scientists, and journalists; see recent work by Arbour, Dyer, Fabijancic, Faludi, Fitz-Gibbon, Kaldo, Paris, Reardon, Shaw, and Winter, as well as earlier studies by Eksteins, Fussell, Mayor, and the ongoing work of the Pugwash conferences, unesco, and an important network like “City for the Cultures of Peace.” There is also an important literature on individual arts (eg. visual art, film, novels, poetry) and their representation of war. But relatively little has been done to bring a range of perspectives in the arts and humanities together to consider the contexts of war and peace. This collection brings a new kind of discussion to the table with essays on language, history, comparative literature, new technologies, painting, music, film, photography, performance, theatre, and the archive, and with perspectives on global, American, Canadian, African, and European topics. Four European volumes with similar aims to ours are Franz K. Stanzel and Martin Löschnigg, eds., Intimate Enemies: English and German Literary Reactions to the Great War, 1914–1918 (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 1993); Helmut Peitsch, Charles Burdett, and Claire Gorrara, eds. European Memories of the Second World War (Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 1998); Pierre Schoentjes, ed. La Grande Guerre: Un siècle de fictions Romanesques (Genève: Librairie Droz, 2008); and Elena Lamberti and Vita Fortunati, eds. Memories and Representations of War: The Case of World War I and World War II (Amsterdam, Rodopi, 2009). In addition, the pmla devoted its 124.5 (October 2009) issue to literary, philosophical, and cultural studies discussions of war.

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2 Andreas Huyssen was one of the first humanities scholars to examine the links between history, memory, and trauma in the context of forgetting in his 1995 book Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (London: Routledge). He coined the term “memory boom” to describe the response to a “waning of history … and cultural amnesia” in Europe from the early 1980s to the mid-1990s (see Huyssen 3–5, 9). Studies in English of witnessing, memory, and trauma are numerous; among the most influential are Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992); Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Kelly Oliver, Witnessing beyond Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001); Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the aids Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); and Jay Winter, Remembering War: The Great War between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006). In 2008, the Imperial War Museum in London mounted a powerful exhibition called “Unspeakable: The Artist as Witness to the Holocaust,” and in Landscapes of Memory I will have an extended discussion of witnessing in the context of post-1977 work by Canadians. 3 The two writers who spoke at the 2008 symposium are not represented here because to reprint excerpts from their works is a less than satisfactory way of conveying either the power of their work or the enormous impact they made on the audience. Joseph Boyden spoke about his research for the novel Three Day Road and Vern Thiessen described his goals and the premiere of his play Vimy. Their presence at the symposium was galvanizing for everyone, but especially for students from across Canada who had been invited to attend and observe the day’s events. The best way to appreciate what these two writers have achieved is to read or see their work. Others who spoke at the symposium but who are not represented in this volume are Senator Roméo Dallaire, who gave the opening address, and Mary Louise Pratt, whose essay, “Harm’s Way: Language and the Contemporary Arts of War,” can be found in pmla 124, no. 5 (October): 1515–31. 4 The first collection of Canadian war poetry was John William Garvin’s Canadian Poets of the Great War, published in 1918 by McClelland and Stewart; it has long been out of print and more recent general anthologies of Canadian poetry ignore such verse. Two contemporary collections that redress this absence are, Barry Callaghan and Bruce Meyer, eds., We Wasn’t Pals: Canadian Poetry and Prose of the First World War (Toronto: Exile Editions, 2001) and John Robert Colombo and Michael Richardson, eds., We Stand on Guard: Poems and Songs of Canadians in Battle (Toronto: Doubleday, 1985). These volumes make close study possible for contemporary scholars, but much remains to be done. 5 Frederico Mayor, The New Page (Aldershot, Hants: unesco Publishing and Dartmouth Publishing, 1995), 33. 6 Barenboim’s dream of peace can be found online, and the entire process of

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creating and rehearsing the orchestra, as well as the concert performance, is available on dvd. Edward Said (1935–2003) died before the goal of a concert was realized. Barenboim, an Israeli national, has accepted honorary Palestinian citizenship. chapter 1 1 See Frida Castillo, Playing by the Rules: Applying International Humanitarian Law to Video and Computer Games (Zurich: ProJuventute/Geneva: trial, Track Impunity Always, 2009). 2 Castillo, Playing by the Rules, 47. 3 Tom Magrino, “Nov. US PC Game Retail Sales Hit $51.7 million, Call of Duty top 2009 franchise,” Gamespot, 12 Dec. 2009, http://uk.gamespot. com/news/6242819. 4 “America’s Army: The Making of: Letter from Leadership,” America’s Army, http://www.americasarmy.com/aa/ about/makingof.php. 5 Edward Castronova, Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 6 “Introduction to World of Warcraft,” Blizzard Entertainment, http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/Beginners/index. 7 “Leeroy Jenkins” is a notorious YouTube video found under that tag. It purports to show the player point-of-view as a Warcraft raid leader briefs players on the tactics for a boss encounter. The video shows the point-of-view player’s attention wandering as he busies himself with trivial time-wasting. At the end he triggers the encounter, heedless of the instructions, leaps into the fray yelling his name, and “wipes” the raid. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= LkCNJRfSZBU) 8 As I type this, I open another window and google “Ottoman Reenactment.” It takes me to “Historical Reenactor’s Ottoman faq” (www.kaman.org.ottfaq). “Aztec Reenactment” takes me to www.reenactor.net, “the worldwide online home of reenacting,” with links to groups spanning global history and geography. When we expand the field to include classical, Viking, medieval, Renaissance, and Napoleonic era groups, and the twenty “kingdoms” through which the Society for Creative Anachronism is organized internationally, we are clearly dealing with a rhizome of thousands of groups. Or to put it bluntly, there may be more reenactment units than there are theatres. Reenactment may be the national theatre of our time. 9 American Civil War reenactments sidestep this controversy because no matter which side loses, Americans always win in a unifying nationalism that reconciles the war. In Canada, in the absence of a unifying national ideology, reenactments of the French-English wars of the 18th century continue to disturb the nation text. Hence most Canadian reenactors drawn to that period stage American Revolution or 1812 units. 10 In a typical example, an American group that simulates a Waffen SS division, the 11th SS Panzergrenadier Division Nordland, stipulates on its website: “Reenactors of the 11th SS Panzergrenadier division Nordland are non-political, and thus do not share in any of the beliefs or values of the nsdap. The

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display of the national emblem, SS runes, and any other potentially offensive insignia are used strictly for historical purposes. This unit as a whole and its members do not tolerate neo-nazis, skinheads, racists, radical extremists, and the like. The aforementioned are strictly barred from membership in this unit” (http://nordland.us). “United States of America v. Omar Ahmed Khadr,” Juvenile Law Center, http://www.jlc.org/files/briefs/ khadr/government%20charges.pdf. Paul Fussell, Uniforms: Why We Are What We Wear (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), 127. Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade, Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance (Washington: National Defense University, 1996). Juvenile Law Center, 4. The phenomenal popular success of Avatar underscores the resilience of combat fantasy even when framed by an anti-militarist morality play. Avatar hit a resonant chord of public feeling with its story of militarized colonial genocide against tribal, forest-dwelling indigenes. But the emotional mechanism of the film was produced by the heroic masculinism of the hero who recovers his manhood, his sexuality, and his physical wholeness when he becomes a Navi warrior. In another celebrated film of 2009, The Hurt Locker, director Kathryn Bigelow constructs a detailed portrait of a United States Army bomb disposal technician in Baghdad, whose addiction to high-risk combat is portrayed as a private trauma, with no exploration of social, political, or ethical context. Following the film’s Oscar for best picture, media discussion of the film focused almost entirely on the question of its reenactment authenticity.

chapter 2 1 Quoted in Kathleen M. German, “Frank Capra’s Why We Fight series and the American audience,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 54 (1990): 237. 2 Leader-Post [Regina], 15 May 1941, 4; 19 May 1941, 4. 3 Robert Lee, “Don’t Be a Spare, Be a Spar,” Miscellaneous Man: Rare Original Posters and Vintage Graphics, http://www.miscman.com/posters_graphics/ details. asp?ID= 2953&CatID=35&PID=2. 4 Nicholas Mosley, Julian Grenfell: His Life and the Times of His Death, 1888–1915 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976), 238. 5 Susan Mann, Margaret Macdonald: Imperial Daughter (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005), 29. 6 Maria Botchkareva, Yashka: My Life as Peasant, Exile and Soldier (London: Constable, 1919), 74. 7 John Davey to Kate, 16 August 1914, The Canadian Letters and Images Project, http://canadian letters.ca/letters.php?letterid=10939&warid=3& docid=1&collectionid=421. 8 Mark Aldrich, Safety First: Technology, Labor, and Business in the Building of Work Safety, 1870–1939 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 42. 9 Jon Cooksey, Pals: The 13th & 14th Battalions York & Lancaster Regiment, a

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History of the Two Battalions Raised by Barnsley in World War One (Barnsley: Wharncliffe, 1986), 27. H.M. Urquhart, The History of the 16th Battalion (the Canadian Scottish), Canadian Expeditionary Force, in the Great War, 1914–1919 (Toronto: MacMillan, 1932), 11. Terry Copp, No Price Too High: Canadians and the Second World War (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1996), 39. Robert Rooke to Hannah Rooke, 11 February 1900, The Canadian Letters and Images Project. Robert E. Pinkerton, “Off to the Wars,” Maclean’s, 24 November 1915, 24. Barry Broadfoot, Six War Years, 1939–1945: Memories of Canadians at Home and Abroad (Toronto: Doubleday, 1974), 14–15. John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 17. Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, 1914–1918: Understanding the Great War (London: Profile Books, 2002), 188. Terry Copp, The Brigade: The Fifth Canadian Infantry Brigade, 1939–1945 (Stoney Creek, on: Fortress Publications, 1992), 5; 17. P.E. Dewey, “Military Recruiting and the British Labour Force during the First World War,” Historical Journal 27.1 (1984): 218. Verne A. Stadtman, The University of California, 1868–1968 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970), 304. Ibid., 313. Peter Brock and Nigel Young, Pacifism in the Twentieth Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 60. Harry J. Weston, “Would You Stand By while a Bushfire Raged?” National Library of Australia, 1918, http://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/ 2014281. Sir Robert Menzies, Measure of the Years (London: Cassell, 1970), 77. See Jonathan Vance, Unlikely Soldiers: How Two Canadians Fought the Secret War Against Nazi Occupation (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2008). Reference from Prof. W.P.M. Kennedy, John Kenneth Macalister [jkm] Papers, Rhodes House, Oxford, 11 November 1936. J.K. Macalister, “A Transition Viewed,” Prize senior essay, Acta Nostra [Guelph Collegiate and Vocational Institute], 1932, 34. Personal statement for the Rhodes Committee; “Canada’s Part in International Affairs,” submitted to the Rhodes Committee, 1936, jkm Papers. fp to Jack Pickersgill, 16 July 1938, Frank Pickersgill [fp] Papers, retained by the Pickersgill family, Ottawa. George H. Ford, ed., The Making of a Secret Agent: Letters of 1934–1943 Written by Frank Pickersgill (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1978), 156. jkm to Carleton Allen, 13 October 1940, jkm Papers. Gordon King to Jack Pickersgill, 5 May 1945, fp Papers. fp to Jack Pickersgill, 9 September 1939; 31 October 1939; 4 September 1939. fp Papers. fp to Sara Pickersgill, 23 December 1939; fp to Jack Pickersgill, 27 May 1940. fp Papers.

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34 Service record of #901419 James Allen McLean, rg150, accession 199293/166, box 7043-35, Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa. I would like to thank my research assistant Liam van Beek for drawing my attention to McLean’s form. chapter 3 1 John William Garvin, Canadian Poets of the Great War (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1918) and Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981). 2 D.G. Pitt, The Truant Years (Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 1984), 136. 3 David Macfarlane, The Danger Tree: Memory, War, and the Search for a Family’s Past (Toronto: MacFarlane Walter and Ross, 1991), 42–3. 4 D.G. Pitt, telephone interview 14 Oct. 2008. [Dr Pitt was in St John’s, Newfoundland and the author was in West Vancouver, British Columbia.] 5 Ibid. 6 Macfarlane, The Danger Tree, 201. 7 Sandra Djwa, introduction to E.J. Pratt: Complete Poems. Vol. 1, ed. Sandra Djwa and R.G. Moyles (Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 1989), xxvi. 8 Sandra Djwa, The Politics of the Imagination: A Life of F.R. Scott (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1987), xxvi–xxvii. 9 Shannon Ryan, “Newfoundland Spring Sealing Disasters to 1914,” The Northern Mariner/Le Marin du nord 3.3 (1993): 36. 10 Djwa, The Politics of the Imagination, 37. 11 Ibid., 120. 12 John Strachey, “Digging for Mrs. Miller,” The New Statesman and Nation, 9 November 1940, 466. 13 Djwa, The Politics of the Imagination, 197. 14 Ibid., 429. 15 Macfarlane, The Danger Tree, 42–3. chapter 4 1 Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa are contested social categories in Rwanda, generally represented as approximately 85%, 14%, and 1% of the population, respectively. (The Twa rarely figure into considerations of post-colonial Central African politics – or into discourses of and on the Rwandan Genocide.) The Kinyarwanda terms for Hutu and Tutsi are umuhutu (plural, bahutu) and umututsi (plural, batutsi). For an excellent summary of essentialist, socialconstructivist, and radical constructivist interpretations of how “Hutu” and “Tutsi” came to have meaning, see Peter Uvin, “Reading the Rwandan Genocide,” International Studies Review 3, no.3 (2001), 76–8. 2 In emphasizing genocidal violence, “the Rwandan Genocide” and “itsembabatutsi” both subsume Rwandan Patriotic Front (fpr) murders in 1994 of tens of thousands of Hutu, as well as ongoing violence against refugees in Congo (see, for example, Uvin, 75). While recognizing that violence has also

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targeted Hutus, I use the terms “the Rwandan Genocide” and “itsembabatutsi” to refer specifically to genocidal violence against Tutsis. “Inyenzi” was an acronym of “ingangurarugo yemeye kuba ingenzi,” meaning a member of the ingangurarugo (an army division under Mwami Rwagubiri Rwabugili) who has committed himself to bravery. See Jean-Marie Vianney Higiro, “Rwanda Private Print Media on the Eve of the Genocide,” in Rwanda: Death, Despair and Defiance, Rakiya Omaar and Alex de Waal, eds. (London: African Rights, 1995), 84. To counter this rhetoric, President Kayibanda prohibited the state-run media from using the term inyenzi (Vianney Higiro 1995, 85). Notably, however, Alexis Kagame used the term to discuss the 1963 raids as follows: “le terme Inyenzi = Cancrelas [sic] nous est très familier” (the term Inyenzi … is very familiar to us); see Un Abrégé de l’histoire du Rwanda de 1853–1972 (Butare: Éditions universitaires du Rwanda, 1975), 353. The cockroach metaphor was particularly instrumental in the ictr’s 2003 ruling – against Ferdinand Nahimana (of rtlm), Jean Bosco Barayagwiza (of rtlm), and Hasan Ngeze (of Kangura) – in the widely publicized “Media Case” (99-52-T). Mahmood Mamdani locates this danger globally: “For Africans, [the 1994 genocide] turns into a Rwandan oddity; and for non-Africans, the aberration is Africa.” See When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 7–8. Josias Semujanga defines “discourses of otherness” as incorporating “des stéréotypes, des préjugés, des clichés, des mythes et des idéologies dans l’identification de soi et de l’autre en rapport avec le passé” (Récits fondateurs du drame rwandais: discours social, idéologies et stéréotypes, Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998, 41); “stereotypes, prejudices, clichés, commonplace statements, myths, and ideologies in the identification of the self and the other with regard to the past” (from the English translation, Origins of the Rwandan Genocide, New York: Humanity Books, 2003, 62). For a more detailed account of the cockroach metaphor, see Lauren Lydic, “Metaphor and Gender in Conflict: Discourse, the Bosnian War, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Chechen Wars” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2010). Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, III, trans. Donald A. Russell. Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1920), 323. See Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983). Liisa Malkki defines mythico-history as “an interlinked set of ordering stories which converged to make (or remake) a world” and emphasizes that mythicohistory is “[m]ythical not in its truth or falsity, but in its concern with order in a fundamental, cosmological sense.” See Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 55. On 24 March 1957, Godefroid Sentama, Louis Mbaraga, Maximilien Niyonzima, Grégoire Kayibanda, Calliopé Mulindahabi, Claver Ndahayo, and Joseph Sibomana transmitted Manifeste des Bahutu (The Hutu Manifesto).

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One of the signatories, Grégoire Kayibanda (1924–1976), was president of Rwanda from 1962 until 1973 (when Juvénal Habyarimana took over in a coup). As Jean-Damascène Gasanabo notes, the term recommandation – as used by the colonial historian de Lacger, for example – suggests that a weak solicitor (umuhakwa) asks a stronger individual to protect him. See “The Rwandan Akazi (Forced Labour) System, History, and Humiliation,” Social Alternatives 25, no. 1 (2006): 52. This interpretation falsely equates ubuhake with European feudalism, wherein the shebuja is the lord and the umugaragu is the vassal. Similarly, Alexis Kagame’s use of the term servage emphasizes the umugaragu’s dependence on and obligation to the shebuja. Gasanabo counters that the patron’s “direction of control is more marked than the [client’s] search for protection” (52). For example, the colonial historiography of Albert Pagès, Louis de Lacger, Léon Delmas, Jean Hiernaux, and Marcel d’Hertefelt used ubuhake to attribute racialized and ethnicized connotations to the categories of Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa. David Newbury and Catharine Newbury, “Bringing the Peasants Back In: Agrarian Themes in the Construction and Corrosion of Statist Historiography in Rwanda,” The American Historical Review 105.3 (2000): 836. Colonial histories were often dynastic in focus, and Rwabugiri’s late nineteenth-century kingdom, by virtue of bridging pre-colonial and colonial Rwanda, came to represent “pure” Rwandan history. Narcissistic colonial ideology positioned the initial moment of contact, when German Count von Götzen became the first European to reach Rwabugiri’s court in 1894. See Catherine Newbury, The Cohesion of Oppression: Clientship and Ethnicity in Rwanda, 1860–1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 53. According to Semujanga, when Kayibanda founded this populist, anti-Tutsi party on 9 October 1959, he “va inscrire l’idéologie du génocide … dans le champ politique du Rwanda contemporain” (Récits fondateurs du drame rwandais, 139); “register[ed] the ideology of genocide … in the political domain of contemporary Rwanda” (Origins of the Rwandan Genocide, 151). Rwabugiri used a system of chiefs to increase the power of his central court. As umwami, he appointed a provincial chief, umutware w’ubutaka or umutware w’intebe, to represent him in each polity. In turn, they appointed hill chiefs, abatware b’umusoozi, who collected land préstations (duties), or amakoro y’ubutake. See C. Newbury 1988, 42. (Note that hills, rather than villages, constituted the primary organizational unit of rural Rwanda. Each hill is divided into quarters.) Additionally, most hills had a land chief, or umunyabutaka; a livestock chief, or umunyamukenke; and an army chief, or umunyangabo. Colonial historiography and militant discourses have dedicated much attention to whether these roles were predominantly Hutu, Tutsi, or Twa. Since any understanding of identifications (whether imposed or chosen) and institutions (whether legislated or elective) engages with contemporary postgenocide politics, there is much debate about the meaning(s) of Hutu and

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Tutsi categories in the pre-colonial period. René Lemarchand highlights the anachronism of this focus, arguing that Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa all identified with the same symbolic universe in pre-colonial Rwanda, and in Burundi, “status, not ‘ethnic identity’ was the principal determinant of rank and privilege. Status derived from things like historical connection to the monarchy.” See Burundi: Ethnocide as Discourse and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 36; 10–11. Catharine Newbury likewise asserts that Tutsi, Hutu, and Twa were fluid political labels, “wherein one’s loyalty to the king functioned as a source of local status … The meaning and significance of these categories differed by region, as did Mwami Rwabugiri’s powers” (C. Newbury 1988, 9; 52). Current historiography suggests that clan and regional affiliations were more important to self-identifications and socio-political exchanges in late nineteenth-century Rwanda than the categories of Hutu, Tutsi, or Twa. On 1 April 1954, Mwami Rudahigwa prohibited ubuhake. By 1956, out of the 40 percent of the Rwandan population who owned cattle, 49.5 percent of the cows belonged to Tutsi, while 43.3 percent belonged to Hutu. Danielle de Lame, A Hill among a Thousand: Transformations and Ruptures in Rural Rwanda, trans. Helen Arnold. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 354. Militant Hutu discourse connected this inequality – which is staggering when one remembers that Hutu accounted for roughly 85 percent of the population – to ubuhake. The history of ubuhake metaphors is related closely to twentieth-century debates in Rwandan historiography. See, for example, Lauren Lydic, (2010); de Lame (2005); Jean-Damascène Gasanabo, Mémoires et histoire scolaire: le cas du Rwanda de 1962 à 1994. PhD diss., Université de Genève, 2004; Newbury and Newbury (2000); David Newbury, “Understanding Genocide,” African Studies Review 41, no. 1 (1998): 73–97; and Catharine Newbury (1988). The ways in which labour is gendered shaped agrarian and pastoral metaphors during the 1959 revolution. For example, by the end of the 1950s, women labourers were responsible for seventy percent of the coffee production (the primary colonial crop); Newbury and Newbury (2000), 862. Gasanabo 2004, 142. Semujanga, Récits fondateurs du drame rwandais, 155; 163. Ibid., 157–69. Semujanga claims that “le peuple a refusé parce que, dans l’ordre symbolique et économique, la figure de la vache est plus positive que celle de la houe” (ibid., 157); “people refused because, on the symbolic and economic levels, the figure of the cow was more positive than that of the hoe” (Origins of the Rwandan Genocide, 164). In response to the 1987 violence in Burundi, some 50,000 Hutu refugees fled to Rwanda in 1988. From 1959–94, Rwandan refugees repeatedly arrived from and left for Uganda, Congo, Tanzania, and Burundi; see Malkki 1995. In her testimony published in SurVivantes: Rwanda, dix ans après la génocide (Paris: Editions de l’Aube, 2005), Esther Mujawayo contemplates the metaphor’s meaning: “J’ai eu une fois des cancrelats à la maison, et tu as vraiment

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du mal à les éliminer. À un certain moment, j’ai eu le déclic, j’ai compris la comparaison” (I once had cockroaches in the house, and you really must eliminate them. At a certain moment, it clicked, I understood the comparison), 147–8. For examples of how incendiary Kinyarwanda media used the metaphor, see Jean-Pierre Chrétien’s Rwanda, les médias du génocide (Paris: Karthala, 1995). Also known as ictr-99-52, this case tried Ferdinand Nahimana (of rtlm), Jean Bosco Barayagwiza (of rtlm), and Hasan Ngeze (of Kangura). Catharine A. MacKinnon, “Prosecutor v. Nahimana, Barayagwiza, and Ngeze. Case No. ictr-99-52-T,” The American Journal of International Law 98.2 (2004): 329. Ibid. Nigwarsungu Chiwengo, “When Wounds and Corpses Fail to Speak: Narratives of Violence and Rape in Congo (drc),” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 28.1 (2008): 87. As well, see, for example, Binaifer Nowrojee’s Shattered Lives: Sexual Violence during the Rwanda Genocide and Its Aftermath (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1996) and Omaar’s and de Waal’s Rwanda: Death, Despair and Defiance. Extrapolating from National Population Office estimates that there are some 2,000 to 5,000 children of war-time rape, Nowrojee guesses that between 250,000 and 500,000 rapes occurred in 1994 (Shattered Lives, 24). The book was published first in French by Boréal Press of Montreal in 2002; an English translation by Patricia Claxton was published by Vintage Press of Toronto in 2004. All subsequent quotations refer to these editions. See Robin Philpot, Ce ne s’est pas passé comme à Kigali (Montréal: Les intouchables, 2003). Ibid., 125. Robert Favreau directed a 2006 film adaptation of Courtemanche’s novel, Un dimanche à Kigali (“A Sunday in Kigali”). Favreau states in an interview with cbc’s Katrina Onstad: “In Rwanda, women are very beautiful, very poor, and being seduced by or seducing a 40- or 50-year-old man who comes from Germany or France or Belgium or the U.S. and marrying him to make a better life – that’s the real deal; that happens. So you can understand that a lot of Rwandans are very aggressive and angry about losing their women, their future, to foreigners. It’s a real issue and people in Rwanda told me I had to include that aspect of the story: a 40-year-old white man seducing a young Rwandan woman.” See “Shooting Rwanda: An Interview with A Sunday in Kigali Director Robert Favreau,” available at http://www.cbc.ca/arts /film/ sunday_in_kigali.html. Philpot, Ce ne s’est pas passé comme à Kigali, 132. Courtemanche’s specifying that the document is a composition book, full of copied poems, all of which are italicized, seems to further infantilize Gentille as Valcourt’s “pupil.” Julien R. Pierce, Speak, Rwanda (New York: Picador, 1999). All subsequent references are to this edition.

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41 The character-narrators include five Hutus: Silas Bagambiki (cdr), Agnès Mujawanalija, Augustin Hakizimana (far), Pauline Mukandina, and Prosper Ndabatze, and five Tutsis: Immaculée Makeri, Innocent Karangwa, Stephen Mazimpaka (fpr), Emmanuel Rubagunga (fpr), and Pacifique Niawingia. 42 Christopher L. Miller, Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 10. chapter 5 1 “Gastone Novelli and the Problem of Language,” in Gastone Novelli, Paintings, Exhibition Catalogue, unpaginated (New York: The Allan Gallery, 1962). 2 All citations from this work in the text will refer to the English translation by John Fletcher and Beryl Fletcher (London/New York: John Calder Publications/Riverrun Press, 1989). 3 Paul Cézanne et al. Conversations with Cézanne, ed. P.M. Dorian (Paris: Macula, 1978). 4 Claude Simon, “Pour qui donc écrit Sartre?” (1964) in Les Triptyques de Claude Simon ou l’art du montage, ed. Mireille Calle-Gruber (Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2008), 103. All further citations from this essay in the text will refer to this edition. 5 Charles Baudelaire, Selected Poems, trans. Carol Clark (London: Penguin, 1995), 59. 6 The verb in French is “donner lieu” which means, as a figurative expression, “to produce,” “to engender,” but the literal meaning of this verb is: “to give a place.” Underlined by the author. Translator’s note. 7 “Pensement” is an archaic term which designates the action of thinking. We generally use nowadays the word “la pensée,” which actually designates not the action of thinking but its result. In French, the verbs “peser” (to weigh) and “penser” (to think) have the same etymological root. Translator’s note. 8 Quoted by Simon in “Pour qui donc écrit Sartre?” 149. 9 Rainer Maria Rilke, Lettres sur Cézanne, trans. and ed. Philippe Jaccottet (Paris: Seuil, 1991), 70. 10 In French, the idiomatic expression “se passer” is plurivocal: it means “to happen,” “to take place,” but also “to do without,” when one says “se passer de …” Here, in this context, the plurivocity already suggests that one cannot do without writing. Translator’s note. 11 Claude Simon, The Jardin des Plantes, trans. Jordan Slump (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001). All further citations from this book in the text will refer to this edition. 12 In French, the expression “l’enfance de l’art” is used to refer to something very easy to do, so it is usually translated as “child’s play.” Here, the author uses the expression in its literal meaning: that is, the childhood of art, the early stage of art. Translator’s note. 13 For her translation of this chapter from the French original, the editors wish to thank Sarah-Anaïs Crevier Goule.

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chapter 6 1 Thomas Mann, “Gedanken im Kriege,“ (1914) in Thomas Mann: Das essayistische Werk, ed. Hans Bürgin. Vol. 2: Politische Schriften und Reden 2 (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1968), 9. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine. 2 Hauptmann’s propagandist activities (and those of Richard Dehmel) are criticized in particular by Stefan Zweig, one of the few critical voices in the initial stages of the war. See Die Welt von Gestern: Erinnerungen eines Europäers (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1970), 265. See also Löschnigg, Der Erste Weltkrieg in deutscher und englischer Dichtung (Heidelberg: Winter, 1994), 283–323, on a comparison of the attitudes and responses to the war of Hauptmann and Thomas Hardy. As I have tried to show, private remarks were often different, in both cases, from public statements. 3 Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989), 117. 4 See Patrick Bridgwater’s superb The German Poets of the First World War (London and Sydney: Croom Helm, 1985). 5 This translation can be found in The Lost Voices of World War I: An International Anthology of Writers, Poets and Playwrights, ed. Tim Cross (London: Bloomsbury, 1988), 105; the title of Adler’s translation is “Setting Out.” Another English version, “Decampment,” translated by David McDuff, can be found in John Silkin’s anthology The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry, 2nd ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), 232. 6 From Die Dichter und der Krieg. Deutsche Lyrik 1914–1918, ed. Thomas Anz and Joseph Vogl (Munich: Hanser, 1981), 45. 7 Georg Heym, selected by Karl Ludwig Schneider and Gunter Martens. Sammlung Dialog Series. Texte 46 (Munich: Nymphenburger, 1971), 240. 8 The Poetical Works of Rupert Brooke, 2nd ed., ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London: Faber and Faber, 1970), 19. 9 “Rhapsode,“ Poetry of the Great War, ed. Dominic Hibberd and John Onions (London: Macmillan, 1986), 160. 10 In the afterword to his edition of Stramm’s poetical works, Jeremy Adler speaks of a “peculiar double life” (eigentümliches Doppelleben) which Stramm must have led during that time. See Die Dichtungen. Sämtliche Gedichte, Dramen, Prosa (Munich and Zurich: Piper, 1990), 370. 11 August Stramm, Das Werk, ed. René Radrizzani (Wiesbaden: Limes, 1963), 442; Cross, The Lost Voices of World War I, 124. 12 Stramm, Die Dichtungen, 376. 13 August Stramm, “August Stramm. Fünfundzwanzig Briefe an seine Frau,” ed. Lothar Jordan, August Stramm. Kritische Essays und unveröffentlichtes Quellenmaterial aus dem Nachlaß des Dichters, ed. J.D. Adler and J.J. White (Berlin: Schmidt, 1979), 142–3. 14 Ibid., 146. 15 Ibid., 152. 16 August Stramm, “Briefe an Herwarth und Nell Walden.” Literatur-Revolution

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1910–1925. Dokumente, Manifeste, Programme, Vol. 1, ed. Paul Pörtner. Zur Ästhetik und Poetik (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1960), 47. Ibid. 14 February 1915, 50. First published in Der Sturm 6 (1915/16), 130. Behrens did not include this poem in his collection Blutblüte (Bloodblossoming); accordingly, Gerhard Rühm’s edition of Behrens’s works reprints it under “Uncollected Poems.” See Blutblüte. Die gesammelten Gedichte. Werkausgabe. Frühe Texte der Moderne Series. Vol. 1, ed. Gerhard Rühm (Munich: Edition Text und Kritik, 1979), 43–4. It may also be found in Die Dichter und der Krieg. Deutsche Lyrik 1914–1918, ed. Thomas Anz and Joseph Vogl (Munich: Hanser, 1981), 63. All further quotations from Behrens refer to this edition. Kasimir Edschmid, “Expressionismus in der Dichtung. Rede gehalten am 13. Dezember 1917 vor dem Bund deutscher Gelehrter und Künstler und der Deutschen Gesellschaft 1914,” (1918) in Expressionismus. Manifeste und Dokumente zur deutschen Literatur 1910–1920, ed. Thomas Anz and Michael Stark (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1982), 45. Paul Hatvani, “Versuch über den Expressionismus” (1917), in Expressionismus, 40. Richard Sheppard, “German Expressionist Poetry,” Modernism 1890–1930, ed. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 386. The poem thus mirrors the change from “a state of being euphorically overwrought to lack of enthusiasm, complete exhaustion and disgust” (“euphorische Überreiztheit mit Lustlosigkeit, totaler Erschöpfung und Ekel”) which Gerhard Rühm detects in the field diaries dating from Behrens’s time on the Western Front (March to December 1915) and in Galicia (June to September 1916). See “Die kriegsgedichte von Franz Richard Behrens,” in Das Tempo dieser Zeit ist keine Kleinigkeit. Zur Literatur um 1918, ed. Jörg Drews (Munich: Edition Text und Kritik, 1981), 99. I have dealt with Zuginsfeld in a different context, and in comparison to David Jones’s In Parenthesis (1937), in my essay “Intertextuality, Textuality and the Experience of War” included in Intimate Enemies. English and German Literary Reactions to the Great War 1914–1918, 2nd ed., ed. Franz Karl Stanzel and Martin Löschnigg (Heidelberg: Winter, 1994), 99–119. Some of the comments on Zuginsfeld in the present essay are indebted to this piece. It was only later that Nebel’s Zuginsfeld became accessible to a wider reading public through Zuginsfeld. 1918/19, Luchterhand Typoskript Series, ed. Angela Köhler (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1974) and Das dichterische Werk. Vol. 1. Zuginsfeld, Unfeig, Das Rad der Titanen, Frühe Texte der Moderne Series, ed. René Radrizzani (Munich: Edition Text und Kritik, 1979). References in this essay are to the latter edition and indicate section, line, and page, e.g. iii, 24; 13. The text reproduced by Radrizzani is that of the seventh and last version of 1945. cf. Jörg Drews, “‘Denn wer den Bestien seiner Zeit genug hat angetan/der hat gelebt.’ Notizen zu den Ähnlichkeiten zwischen Karl Kraus’ Die letzten Tage

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der Menschheit und Otto Nebels Zuginsfeld,” in Das Tempo dieser Zeit ist keine Kleinigkeit, 130. 26 Originally “das enthusiastische Volk unsrer Denker, Dichter” (the enthusiastic nation of our thinkers, poets). See Johann Karl August Musäus, “Vorbericht an Herrn David Runkel” (1782), in Volksmärchen der Deutschen (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1988), 9–17. chapter 7 1 I have written extensively on these collections. My 2006 book Art or Memorial? The Forgotten History of Canada’s War Art, published by the University of Calgary Press, contains a detailed bibliography. 2 The number an 19710261 prefixes all the catalogued official paintings the National Gallery of Canada transferred to the Canadian War Museum (cwm). 3 Philippe Dagen, Le Silence des peintres: Les artistes face à la Grande Guerre (Paris: Fayard, 1996). 4 John Campbell, Untitled, c. 1854–6, pencil on paper, 10.7 x 16.5 cm, cwm, Beaverbrook Collection of War Art (bcwa), an 19950010-001. 5 I have chosen not to footnote every relevant work I identified in my survey on the basis that a binder has been compiled of all of them that can be referenced in the cwm’s war art curatorial files. 6 I recently examined aspects of this in a paper given at a symposium entitled Atrocity, Photography, and War at the Monash University Centre, Prato, Italy, 14–16 June 2010, which will be published in due course. See note 22 for details about the cef photographs. 7 Jan van Eyck and workshop assistant, The Crucifixion, The Last Judgment, c. 1430, oil on canvas, transferred from wood, each 56.5 x 19.7 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Fletcher Fund, 1933. 8 Quoted in David B. Marshall, Secularizing the Faith: Canadian Protestant Clergy and the Crisis of Belief, 1850–1940 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 163. 9 Charles Sims, Sacrifice, c. 1918, oil on canvas, 416 x 409 cm, cwm, bcwa, an 19710261-0662. 10 Alfred Bastien, Agny: Ruins of Shrine in the Wood, c. 1918, oil on canvas, 38.3 x 55.3 cm, cwm, bcwa, an 19710261-0079. 11 Derwent Wood, Canada’s Golgotha, 1918, bronze relief sculpture, 83 x 63.5 cm, cwm, bcwa, an 19710261-0797. 12 Maria Tippett, Art at the Service of War: Canada, Art, and the Great War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), 81–7. 13 John Byam Shaw, The Flag, 1918, oil on canvas, 198 x 365.5 cm, cwm, bcwa, 19710261-0656. This painting was also reproduced as a 30.2 x 58.1 cm print, an 20010022-004. 14 Hector Charlesworth, “Reflections,” Saturday Night, 13 September 1919, 2. 15 Former cwm curator of war art Hugh Halliday recounts this in an interview excerpted in the documentary Canvas of Conflict, directed by Katherine Jeans. vhs (Ottawa: Sound Venture Productions, 1996).

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16 Alfred Bastien, Canadian Officer Killed, 1918, oil on canvas, 60.9 x 86.3 cm, cwm, bcwa, an 19710261-0083. 17 J.E.H. MacDonald, Spirits of Christmas – No Man’s Land, 1916, oil on laminated board, 75.6 x 53 cm, cwm, bcwa, 19930115-001. 18 See, for example, Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, 1914–1918: Understanding the Great War (London: Profile Books, 2002), Chapter 2. 19 Eric Kennington, The Conquerors, 1920, oil on canvas, 297.8 x 242.8 cm, cwm, bcwa, an 19710261-0812. 20 Maurice Cullen, Dead Horse and Rider in a Trench, 1918, oil on canvas, 112 x 143 cm, cwm, bcwa, 19710261-0126. 21 Typical of the work Maurice Cullen did during his first of two visits to the western front is Wrecked Tank, Cambrai Road, graphite on paper, 12.4 x 19.2 cm, Art Gallery of Hamilton, 55.81.A. Dating from 2 Sept. 1918, it was one of the last studies he completed before returning to London. In this sketch, the tank is the predominant image, but in the large painting, The Cambrai Road (1918) that is based on this small drawing, there is no tank. Instead, the vast Douai plain – the control of which was the fundamental objective of the Canadian attack on Vimy Ridge in 1917 – is made the focus of the composition. Cullen underlines the Canadian achievement by concentrating on this geographic challenge (The Cambrai Road, 1918, oil on canvas, 183.4 x 228.7 cm, cwm, bcwa, an 19710261-002). 22 These words are marked prominently on the majority of the admittedly limited number of photographs of dead bodies in the 6,847-strong First World War official photography collection. See, for example cwm, an 19920085940. Library and Archives Canada holds the original glass negatives for the official photographs but the cwm has an album of unknown date that contains a majority in print form and an index. Like the print mentioned above, these prints are catalogued individually under an 19920085. The index lists thirty-five dead Germans and no Canadians, although a close analysis of the images shows that the latter are scattered in very small numbers throughout; for example, in the photograph numbered an 19920085-941, titled “Canadians occupying old German Third Line Trench.” There are, however, hundreds of images of cemeteries and graves. It is important to note that some of the images of dead Germans and Canadians were exhibited during the war, the Germans being specifically identified in the captions as having had to be killed to avoid more Canadian deaths. See, for example, No. 38 in the 1919 catalogue (in the cwm library) entitled “The End.” The words read, “In the foreground is a German machine gunner who kept his gun in action at Valenciennes and took a heavy toll of our troops till a Canadian crack shot put an end to his deadly work.” 23 Frederick Varley, Shell-Torn Trees, 1918, watercolour over graphite on wove paper, 25.4 x 35.3 cm, Vincent Massey Bequest, 1968, National Gallery of Canada (no. 15556); German Prisoners, c. 1919, oil on canvas, 127.4 x 183.7 cm, cwm, bcwa, an 19710261-087. 24 cwm, George Metcalfe Archival Collection, an 19920044-841. This is titled

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in the cwm’s album “The Battlefield after a Canadian Charge.” The bodies are not identified as Germans in the index, which could presuppose they are Canadian, which might account for the image being marked Not for Sale or Reproduction. Frederick Varley, The Sunken Road, 1919, oil on canvas, 132.7 x 162.7 cm, cwm, bcwa, an 19710261-0771. Thomas W. Laqueur. “Memory and Naming in the Great War,” in Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, ed. John R. Gillis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 153–4. Anonymous, Tyne Cot Cemetery (Passchendaele), undated, watercolour on paper, 25.2 x 30.5 cm, cwm, bcwa, an 19710261-1668; Berks Cemetery Extension; Pluegstee RB, Belgium, watercolour on paper, 20.5 x 28 cm, cwm, bcwa, an 19710261-1669; Tyne Cot Cemetery, Belgium, undated, watercolour on paper, 25.2 x 30.5 cm, cwm, bcwa, an 19710261-1670; Unidentified Cemetery 1914–18, undated, watercolour on paper, 20.7 x 26.5 cm, cwm, bcwa, an 19710261-1667. Frederick Varley, Some Day the People Will Return, 1918, oil on canvas, 183.5 x 229.3 cm, cwm, bcwa, an 19710261-0769, and Herbert HughesStanton, The Cemetery, Pas de Calais, 1919, oil on canvas, 152.5 x 213 cm, cwm, bcwa, an 19710261-0684. C.R.W. Nevinson, Coffin Looted by Germans, 1918, lithograph, 27.9 x 44.6 cm, cwm, bcwa, an 19710261-0525. Arthur Nantel, After an Advance, undated, watercolour on paper, 23.5 x 33.8 cm, cwm, bcwa, an 19710261-0508. One painting is an exception, although it is not at all violent in appearance. The story behind it, in which Hyndman flies through the human debris of his former squadron leader, is described by Hugh Halliday in “F/L Robert Stewart Hyndman: Spitfire Pilot and War Artist.” Canadian Aviation Historical Society Journal 22, no. 1. (Spring 1984): 21–9. Robert Hyndman, Above Falaise, undated, oil on canvas, 75.6 x 101.6 cm, cwm, bcwa, an 19710261-3229. Frank Delaney to author, cwm Artist File, Comfort, Charles, 23 Sept. 1993. George Pepper, Dead German Paratroopers, 1945, oil on canvas, 91.5 x 122 cm, cwm, bcwa, an 19710261-5258. Aba Bayefsky, Belsen Concentration Camp, The Pit No. 2, 1945, watercolour on paper, 39.2 x 54.7 cm. cwm, bcwa, an 19710261-1396. Nora’s seven volumes of collected writings by numerous authors, Les Lieux de Mémoire (Paris: Edition Gallimard, 1984–92), have been seminal to the study of the subject of memory. See for example, Charles Goldhamer, Burnt Airman with Wig, 1945, watercolour and charcoal on paper, 50.1 x 39.3 cm, cwm, bcwa, an 19710261-3067. See, for example, Jack Nichols, Head of a Wounded Sailor Crying, 1945, oil and graphite on paper, 23.9 x 21.1, cwm, bcwa, an 19710261-4294. Will Ogilvie, Calvary and Tanks, undated, watercolour on paper, 27.9 x 38 cm, cwm, bcwa, an 19710261-4444; Paul Goranson, Calvary – On the Road to Caen, 1944, watercolour on paper, 29.1 x 39.3 cm, cwm, bcwa, an 19710261-3692.

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39 Alex Colville, Grave of a Canadian Trooper, 1945, watercolour on paper, 37.8 x 52.9 cm, cwm, bcwa, an 19710261-2071. 40 Campbell Tinning, The Gothic Line at Tomba di Pesaro, 1946, oil on canvas, 102.2 x 122.2 cm, cwm, bcwa, an 19710261-5481. 41 Charles Comfort, Officers’ Lines, 1943, watercolour on paper, 37.1 x 54.2 cm, cwm, bcwa, an 19710261-2242. 42 Anthony Law, Graveyard, Sorel, P.Q., 1945, oil on canvas, 89.5 x 121.5 cm, cwm, bcwa, an 19710261-4075. 43 George Pepper, Hitler’s Youth, German Cemetery at Louvigny, Calvados, Normandy, 1944, watercolour on paper, 35.6 x 50.7 cm, cwm, bcwa, an 19710261-5287. 44 Charles Comfort, Dead German on the Hitler Line, 1944, 38.8 x 56.8 cm, watercolour, chalk, and carbon pencil on paper, 38.8 x 56.8 cm, cwm, bcwa, an 19710261-2179. 45 George Pepper, Dead German Sniper, undated, watercolour on paper, 25.2 x 35.5 cm, cwm, bcwa, an 19710261-5259; The Falaise Break-Through, 1946, oil on canvas, 102.2 x 127 cm, cwm, bcwa, an 19710261-6255. 46 George Pepper, Dead German Paratroopers, 1945, oil on canvas, 91.5 x 122 cm, cm cwm, bcwa, an 19710261-5258. 47 Will Ogilvie, Escape Route, undated, oil on canvas, 81.8 x 122.5 cm, cwm, bcwa, an 19710261-4528. 48 Will Ogilvie, Infantry Moving Up through Burning Equipment, undated, watercolour, ink, and graphite on paper, 25.4 x 35.9 cm, cwm, bcwa, an 19710261-4582. 49 Alex Colville, Tragic Landscape, 1945, oil on canvas, 61 x 91 cm, cwm, bcwa, an 19710261-2126; Bodies on a Road, 1945, watercolour on paper, 26.1 x 35.6 cm, cwm, bcwa, an 19710261-2035. 50 Alex Colville, A Dead Civilian in a Prison Yard, 1945, watercolour on paper, 36.7 x 50.7 cm, cwm, bcwa, an 19710261-2049. 51 Alex Colville, Belsen Concentration Camp, 1945, watercolour on paper, 39 x 57.9 cm, cwm, bcwa, an 19710261-2032. 52 Alex Colville, Bodies in a Grave, Belsen, 1946, oil on canvas, 76.3 x 101.6 cm, cwm, bcwa, an 19710261-2033. 53 Christopher Varley, Aba Bayefsky Revisited: A Retrospective Exhibition (Toronto: The Koffler Gallery, 1989), 13. 54 Aba Bayefsky, Belsen Concentration Camp – The Pit, 1945, watercolour on paper, 36.1 x 52.4 cm, cwm, bcwa, an 19710261-1395. 55 See fn 34. 56 Aba Bayefsky, Belsen Concentration Camp Pit, c. 1945, oil on canvas, 91.6 x 121.8 cm, Beaverbrook Collection of War Art, cwm 19710261-1394. 57 Gertrude Kearns, Injured Medic (Master Corporal Paul Franklin), 2006, acrylic on canvas, 122 x 91.5 cm, Department of National Defence, Task Force Afghanistan. 58 Gertrude Kearns, What They Gave, 2006, ink, acrylic, and crayon on 4-ply board, three panels, each 152 x 102 cm, artist’s collection. 59 Revised artist’s statement for What They Gave, cwm Artist File, Kearns, Gertrude, 8 June 2010.

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chapter 8 1 In “Cultural Criticism and Society” (1951), Theodor Adorno claimed that “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”; see The Adorno Reader, ed. Brian O’Connor, (Malden, ma: Blackwell, 2000), 210. But a decade later, in 1962, he allowed that “It is now virtually in art alone that suffering can still find its own voice” (“Commitment,” in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt, New York: Continuum International, 2005, 312). My list of writers and artists who have tackled this difficult subject could be very long indeed. With these few names I wish only to suggest the scope of the attention paid in France, Germany, Italy, the United States, and Canada, and the range of concerns and positions – from survivor memoirs (Primo Levy), to autobiography (Eksteins), to literary criticism (Felman) and historiography (LaCapra), to cultural non-fiction, fiction, and drama (Chang, Mark Levy, and Clements). My brief list also includes reflections on the war in Europe and the Holocaust and the war in the Pacific. 2 There have been many war movies made, especially in the United States, that celebrate the victories and heroics of war; Paul Gross’s recent Passchendaele about Canadians in the Great War resembles this genre. However, none of the films I have listed can be designated a war movie in this sense; each one, feature film and documentary alike, explores the context, background, consequences, and tragedies of the war. Each opens windows on memories most people prefer to repress or forget, each addresses contemporary audiences on the politics of cultural amnesia, and each engages viewers in the shared task of bearing witness to history. 3 Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998), 11. 4 Ibid., 14. 5 See the works cited in the bibliography by Caruth, Felman, Huyssen, Kirmayer, Laub, Nünning, Oliver, and Winter. I discuss this wide-ranging debate in detail in my forthcoming book, Landscapes of Memory, so I will not rehearse that material here. Suffice it to say that there are at least two different yet overlapping approaches to these interconnected topics as they pertain to the two world wars: the North American approach tends to be focussed on individual psychology and the Holocaust; the European approach tends to begin from a socio-cultural perspective on forgetting and remembering in the context of national histories. 6 Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 78. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., 28. 9 Ibid., 90–6. 10 Ibid., 179–80. 11 Ibid., 180. LaCapra’s candidates for redemptive narrative are Schindler’s List and The Reader (see Writing History, Writing Trauma, 202). However, a caveat may be in order on this point because the perceived need for such narratives may, in fact, be the responsibility of the genre or medium (maintaining

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ambiguities and contradictions is more challenging in a film) or be the result of a critic’s interpretation of a text. A complex novel about a difficult subject may well be open to many different readings, not all of which are of equal relevance or are equally redemptive. I am thinking of the debate over novels like Joy Kogawa’s Obasan or Timothy Findley’s Famous Last Words; see Marlene Goldman, Rewriting Apocalypse in Canadian Fiction (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005) and David Ingham, “Bashing the Fascists: The Moral Dimensions of Findley’s Fiction.” Studies in Canadian Literature 15, no. 2 (1990): 33–54. Jonathan F. Vance, Death So Noble: Memory, Meaning, and the First World War (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1997) and Randall Hansen, Fire and Fury: The Allied Bombing of Germany, 1942–45 (Toronto: Doubleday, 2008). E.J. Hughes painted some striking canvasses of the 13th Canadian Infantry Brigade attacking the island of Kiska in the Aleutians in August 1943 and Gagnon the now famous recruiting poster, “Remember Hong Kong!” See Dean F. Oliver and Laura Brandon, Canvas of War: Painting the Canadian Experience, 1914 to 1945, (Vancouver and Ottawa: Douglas and McIntyre and the Canadian War Museum, 2000), 101; 87. One of the best studies of Japanese-Canadians is The Enemy that Never Was: A History of the Japanese Canadians, (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1991), by Ken Adachi. Bye Bye Blues won several awards, and The War Between Us, partly inspired by Kogawa’s story, is an important and beautifully filmed and directed movie about the tense relationships that develop when a sophisticated, well-educated Japanese-Canadian family is removed from their Vancouver home to the small, white, English-speaking town of New Denver. They are shocked by the racism and ignorance of the town’s folk; the town’s folk treat the new arrivals as aliens, if not actual enemy aliens, despite the fact that the father fought for Canada in the First World War. This cultural divide will be crossed by one family, but the film offers nothing resembling redemption or healing; the closing shots are of the Japanese-Canadian family being driven away for repatriation to Japan, while the English-Canadian family watches helplessly and mourns. This film is almost impossible to see today and it should be made widely available. It is no exaggeration to describe the hostile reaction to The Valour and the Horror as scandalous. Such pressure was brought to bear on government and the cbc through Senate Committee hearings and other channels that the film was not shown again. Some veterans’ groups called for the film to be censored tout court, but fortunately it is still available through the nfb; for discussion of this episode in the film’s history, see Bercuson and Wise. Whatever its faults, it remains a courageous and moving portrayal of the Canadian armed forces in the Second World War, and I discuss the film in detail in Landscapes of Memory. I have commented briefly on Wheeler’s The War Between Us and The Valour and the Horror in notes 6 and 7. I consider these works more fully in Landscapes of Memory.

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17 Bock’s hero, the scientist Anton Böll, is haunted by his role in the Manhattan Project, and his story takes him across decades and continents in search of an elusive peace in Canada, and Lepage’s play also brings German, Japanese, American, and Canadian characters together in a requiem for the war. Levine’s children’s story, like Milner’s novel about a former pow in Vancouver, brings the war in the Pacific home to Canadian lives and cities, and Chan’s play recreates the story of Iris Chang who committed suicide shortly after she published The Rape of Nanking. 18 See Peter C. van Wyck, The Highway of the Atom (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010), 85–6. 19 Highway of the Atom was one of many “industrial documentaries” made by Crawley Films. Labelled “production #491,” it was shot in November 1951 and finished in July 1952; the sponsor was the Northern Transportation Company, which explains a good deal about the boosterish tone of the piece. My thanks to James Forrester and Paul Harris for the emails that provided this information on a now largely-forgotten film. I would also like to thank my colleague Peter van Wyck for bringing the film to my attention in the first place. This colour film invokes an illustrious history of white explorers opening up the North to trade routes, industrial development, and progress. Contemporary mining and engineering feats are likened to the heroic endeavours of Alexander Mackenzie, and southern technology and science are touted as “carrying life to the North.” The heroine of the film is the tug boat called the Radium Franklin, a new member of the Radium fleet, on her maiden voyage from the shipyards in Vancouver, up to Waterways, Alberta, to the Mackenzie River, and across on the Bear River to Fort Franklin (Deline) on Great Bear Lake. The North, while filmed as always beautiful, under sunny skies, is described by the narrator as “trackless” and empty; the Indians are stevedores who cannot read or write, and no mention is made of their families or communities; and we are told that the mine at Port Radium is “the very source of the power of the atom” that ended the Second World War and is now changing the world. I make these quotations of the film’s narrator from my viewing of an old copy of the film; more detailed information is not available. 20 Peter Blow, Village of Widows. dvd. (Peterborough, on: Lindum Films, 1999). 21 Marie Clements, Burning Vision (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2003), 13. All further quotations from the play refer to this printed edition. 22 The play premiered at Vancouver’s Firehall Theatre on 26 April 2002 with Margo Kane playing the roles of the Dene Widow and the Japanese Grandmother, Allan Morgan as Fat Man, Hiro Kanagawa as Koji, and Dene Elder George Blondin performing as the Dene See-er. The production was directed by Peter Hinton, with set design by Andreas Kahre and lighting (a crucial component in the action of this play) by John Webber. The opening explosion was an effective way of plunging an unsuspecting audience into the darkness, noise, and shuddering impact of a bombing experience, and when this is repeated towards the end of the play, the audience is forcibly reminded of the events leading up to the first dropping of the bomb. For me these two shocks served to emphasize my role as a witness above and beyond my already clear witnessing position as an audience member.

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23 Perhaps it is unfair to ask a playwright to do more than Clements achieves in her play, but I do find that the absence of any attention to the causes of the war or to Japanese atrocities creates a problem for the ethical dimensions of her otherwise very powerful drama. 24 Michael Crummey, The Wreckage (Toronto: Anchor, 2005), 351. All further quotations from the play refer to this edition. 25 Inouye, who was known as the “Kamloops Kid,” was a Canadian citizen born in Kamloops, British Columbia; he was studying in Japan when war broke out and was conscripted into the Imperial Army, where he served as an interpreter and guard in Hong Kong’s notorious Sham Shui Po pow camp. He became known for his unusual brutality, notably to Canadian prisoners of war, and several Canadian pows testified at his trial that he was responsible for the torture and death of at least eight Canadians. At his trial, Inouye claimed that he had been a victim of racist abuse in Canada. Crummey departs considerably from these facts in creating his character Nishino, but the basic outline is there: Nishino is subject to racism in Vancouver, enlists in the Japanese army, is brutal to the prisoners, and hates all Canadians with fierce intensity. His death, however, is not the result of a formal trial for war crimes, and Crummey’s invention of his murder by liberated pows is a crucial element in Wish’s story. 26 The Wreckage is a major work of art that is too complex for detailed consideration here. Herb Wyile comments on the racist treatment of Nishino in Vancouver in his discussion of the “ethical turn” in recent literature; see “Making a Mess of Things: Postcolonialism, Canadian Literature, and the Ethical Turn,” University of Toronto Quarterly 76, no. 3 (Summer): 826–7. 27 The Guadalcanal Campaign, code-named “Operation Watchtower,” took place between August 1942 and February 1943. It was won by the American Marines and the Allied forces, and ended by pushing the Japanese army into a long and costly retreat. Crummey has observed the historical facts as the basis for this opening section of his novel, but there is no indication I am aware of that a Japanese-Canadian serving with the Imperial Army was present. Crummey has invented his character Nishino; see note 25. 28 In a more thorough analysis of the images and echoes in the text, one might well develop a different interpretation of Wish’s behaviour. One might ask, for example, why he cannot see in his inability to urinate on the dead interpreter an unconscious rescue from further complicity in degrading another human being. In such a reading, Wish’s refusal to seduce the sixteen-year-old girl because he loves and respects her, despite his sexual drive, serves as the sign of his body’s remembrance of her presence, which saves him from an equally sinful act. In the final analysis, Crummey leaves this sexual echo, along with many other echoes and memories in the novel, unresolved and ambiguous. 29 What Wish sees in the newspaper is the report and photograph of fourteenyear-old Emmett Till (1941–1955) who was savagely beaten and murdered in Mississippi for whistling at a white woman. Photographs of the corpse confirm that his face was reduced to a pulp, much as we are told Nishino’s was.

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chapter 9 1 “Few if any such groups existed in other occupied countries, even in France,” Louise Guay notes. “With the exception of the Dutch material [photographs], movie films constitute almost all the visual archives we have about the Resistance. Members of the Resistance outside the Netherlands seem generally to have neglected this aspect [photography] of information gathering.” See Brian Carey and Louise Guay, Kryn Taconis: Photojournalist (Ottawa: National Archives of Canada, 1989), 10. 2 Amsterdam photographer Jutka Rona knew many of the members of De Ondergedoken Camera. In e-mail correspondence (16 March 2005), in addition to Blazer, Oorthuys, Taconis, and Windig, she named Eva Besnyö, D. de Boer, Jr, Charles Breijer, Violette Cornelius, Andrea Domburg, Jack Dudok van Heel, Dr A.L. Faber, C. Holzapfel, Fritz Kahlenberg, H.R. Kettner, Bernard van der Linden (pseudonym for Boris Kowadlo), Frits Lemaire, M.C. Meyboom, Piet Noordzij, Karel Oilie, Hans Sibbelee, and Ben Steenkamp. 3 Besnyö and Andriesse are the two women photographers most often associated with the Underground Camera movement. Born in Hungary to a Jewish family, Besnyö (1910–2003) went to Berlin 1928 to pursue her interest in photography but because of the political climate soon moved to the Netherlands, where she met Andriesse. 4 Jos de Gruyter, ed., De Wereld van van Gogh: Fotografie Emmy Andriesse (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker Publishers, 1990). 5 “In the Face of History; European Photographers in the 20th Century,” Barbican Art Gallery, London, England, October 2006–January 2007. 6 Louise van Santen, Emmy Andriesse foto’s/photographs 1944/52 (Amsterdam: Rijkmuseum Vincent van Gogh, 1975), 1. 7 Ibid. 8 The Emmy Andriesse archive at the Prentenkabinet Universiteitsbibliotheek, University of Leiden, houses 1,500 print photographs and 14,000 negatives and contact sheets according to Flip Bool and Hripsimé Visser, Emmy Andriesse: Monographs on Dutch Photographers (Amsterdam: Focus Publishing, 1995), 47. Most of her photographs are untitled; therefore we have supplied descriptive titles as well as numbers to assist identification of our illustrations. 9 The exhibition, “De Ondergedoken Camera,” was held in M.C. Meyboom’s studio located at the Keizersgracht 568, Amsterdam, three weeks after the end of the war. 10 Bool and Visser, Emmy Andriesse, 19. 11 Ibid. 12 Carrie de Swaan, Foto: Emmy Andriesse: een documentaire over het werk en het leven van fotografe Emmy Andriesse (1914–1953), Documentary Film (Amsterdam: Stichting Documentaire Produkties, 1991). 13 Ibid. 14 Andriesse had little financial support from her father, Eva Loeb recalled in the documentary film by de Swaan; therefore, even while a student, she began trying to sell her photographs to newspapers.

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15 Designed and inaugurated in 1929 by the theoretician and lecturer Gerrit Kiljan, the Royal Academy of Art’s department in advertisement design, or the “A6” as it became known, proposed photography and film as progressive artistic media and art forms for the future (Bool and Visser Emmy Andriesse, 24). In the Netherlands, photography developed more slowly than in neighbouring Germany and France. Pictorialism dominated photography in the Netherlands between 1885 and the First World War, and Henri Berssenbrugge (1873–1959) was the most prominent Dutch photographer of the interbellum years. Berssenbrugge incorporated various forms from movements such as cubism, constructivism, and symbolism in his photographs in order to emulate painting. See Ingeborg Th. Leijerzapf and Harm Botman, Henri Berssenbrugge: Passion - Energy - Photography (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2001), 144. The new generation of photographers, however, did not consider the camera a mere replacement for the painter’s hand. The photograph was viewed as a work of art of a different order. ‘“New Photography’ marked its break from pictorialism with an emphasis on functionality, objectivity, sharpness of light and dark, minimal retouching, and social impact.” See Nico de Haas, “Nieuwe Fotografie,” De 8 en Opbouw, No. 3 (3 Feb 1936), 3. 16 Flip Bool and Jeroen de Vries, “De waarheid,” Volksdagblad voor Nederland, 3 May 1980, 22. 17 The aim of the 1937 exhibition, Eva Besnyö recalled in Carrie de Swaan’s documentary film, was to show how important photography had become in everyday life – from portraits to scientific photography to medical X-rays. 18 For these photographs, Andriesse used a Rolleiflex camera with twelve highquality exposures in place of a Leica. In 1924 Leica had introduced the first 35 mm camera with the capacity for thirty-six exposures, which Andriesse exploited to its fullest during her time at the Royal Academy. Indeed, she earned the nickname “Emmy Leica” while at the Academy. 19 Bob Moore, Victims and Survivors: The Nazi Persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands, 1940–1945 (London: Hodder Arnold, 1997), 12. For more on the fate of Jews in the Netherlands, see Moore’s Victims and Survivors. 20 This has been documented by the Nederlands Instituut voor Oorlogs Documentatie (Netherlands Institute of War Documentation) and in recent years brought to wider public attention via popular media such as film. In the recently released film Black Book by Paul Verhoeven, for example, a Dutch resistance worker is complicit in murdering Jews despite also providing food and medicine for fellow resistance workers and other people in hiding. 21 Bool and Visser, Emmy Andriesse, 35. 22 Anneke Reuvekamp, “Vier vrouwen halen herinneringen op aan haar hongertochten,” Opzij 8.5 (1980): 17. 23 Flip Bool and Veronica Hekking, “Illegaal fotograferen,” NRC Handelsblad (1 Nov 1996), 2. 24 Kryn Taconis fashioned a small hole in the leather briefcase in which he hid his camera. See Carey and Guay, Kryn Taconis, and Christl Verduyn, “A Piece

236

25

26 27

28

29 30 31 32

33 34 35 36 37

notes to pages 126–32

of the Picture: Kryn Taconis, Dutch-Canadian Photojournalist 1918–1979,” in Building Liberty: Canada and World Peace, 1945–2005, ed. Conny Steenman Marcusse and Aritha van Herk, 53–73 (Groningen, nl: Barkhuis, 2005). Tony van Renterghem, who had played a key role in the Dutch resistance movement from the outset of the war, was in hiding with Kahlenberg during the Hunger Winter, in an attic room at 36 Michelangelostraat, Amsterdam. In a telephone conversation on 6 June 2007, van Renterghem recalled meeting Emmy Andriesse at the exhibition; he also noted there was less interest in De Ondergedoken Camera work than the photographers had hoped. The post-war wish to forget had already begun to take hold. Kahlenberg moved to the United States in 1945 and van Renterghem in 1947. Ironically, Kahlenberg was not invited to the official opening of the exhibition by Prince Bernhard. Post-war sentiments were such that the German refugee was excluded despite his resistance work against the Nazis. Bool and Visser, Emmy Andriesse, 43. This was just two weeks after the historic flood of 1 February 1953 in the southwestern Netherlands in which more than 1,800 people lost their lives. The documentary film Photo: Emmy Andriesse includes a letter in which Andriesse expresses her extreme regret at not being able to document the tragedy. The photographer was confined to her bed in the final stages of her illness. In 2000, for example, De Volkskrant featured an extensive article with accompanying photographs of “Boy with a Pan,” once again raising the question of the child’s identity. See Marie Louise Schipper, “Daar staat Pim weer met z’n pannetje,” De Volkskrant, 4 May 2000. Bool and Visser, Emmy Andriesse, 4. Schipper, “Daar staat Pim weer met z’n pannetje,” 13. De Swaan, Foto. New Photography techniques aimed to confer a purity of form in the photograph. The diagonal line featured prominently, with extensive use made of horizontal, vertical, and parallel lines, geometric forms, tonal gradation, contrast of light and darkness, attention to texture, and surprising camera angles. These principles and techniques suited Emmy Andriesse well. At the same time “She always had technical problems,” Lydia Oorthuys recalled (de Swaan). What Emmy Andriesse lacked in the technical domain, however, she readily made up for in her exceptional sense of form, Eva Besnyö observed (de Swaan). Andriesse made effective use of light, diagonal perspective, vertical and horizontal lines, geometric forms, and texture. “Timeless, stylized, and serious,” was Ed van der Elsken’s succinct description of Emmy Andriesse’s photographic work (de Swaan). De Swaan, Foto. John Clare, “Liberation,” The Star Weekly [Toronto], 8 May 1965, 15. Kryn Taconis quoted by Clare in “Liberation, 9. Clare, “Liberation,” 19. L. de. Jong, Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de Tweede Wereldoorlog. Vol.10b, Part 1. (s-Gravenhage: Staatsuitgeverij, 1981), 181.

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38 De Swaan, Foto. 39 Saul Friedländer stresses the incomprehensibility of the Holocaust while telling his own history and drawing from numerous diaries and letters written by Jews. See Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945, Vol. 2. The Years of Extermination (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2007). 40 The most notorious were the extermination camps Auschwitz, Sobibór, and Treblinka. For political prisoners there were the nn camps, from the German words Nacht und Nebel (“night” and “fog”), a name that reflected the mysterious disappearance of many of these prisoners, whose bodies were never found. To these various camps the Nazis sent Jews, gypsies, gays and lesbians, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the disabled, drifters, and everyone who opposed their regime. Vught was the only permanent camp on Dutch soil during the war. It was located in the province of Brabant, in the south of the country. It began as a labour camp where political prisoners worked on Philips electrical products such as radios, and other items useful to the occupiers. After prisoners began to sabotage their work, rendering the products unreliable, Vught was turned into a concentration camp with a population of 19,000 Dutch men. For Jews, Vught served as a transit camp, as did Amersfoort, located in the centre of the country near the city of Utrecht. To the east, Camp Westerbork organized the mass exodus of the Jews to extermination and concentration camps in Germany. 41 It is also possible to discern the name of the street where the photograph was taken – Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal Centrum, which was a stone’s throw from Andriesse’s home at the time on the Oudezijds Achterburgwal, in central Amsterdam. 42 See A.B.C. Schulte, Emmy Andriesse: Arnhem september ’45 (Zwollw: Uitgeverij Waanders b.v., 2006), which features thirty-five printed photographs depicting the destroyed city and the efforts to rebuild it. 43 On the door to the right of the rubble, the keen eye will discern the letters WC (“water closet”), the European term for toilet. 44 De Swaan, Foto. chapter 10 1 The text of this essay has been translated by Rachel van Deventer, Department of French, University of Ottawa. Military operations against the Taliban controlling Afghanistan were named “Infinite Justice” by President Bush (La Presse, 20 September 2001). They were renamed “Enduring Freedom” a few days later in order to avoid any religious connotations that would lead some to believe that the two political systems functioned according to similar logic. 2 Robert Fisk, “Ma rencontre avec Oussama ben Laden,” Le Devoir, 20 September 2001. Translation P. Imbert. 3 Thomas Paine, The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine (New York: Citadel, 1945), 3. 4 Globe and Mail, 17 September 2001, A13. 5 Salman Rushdie, “Combattre les forces de l’invisible,” Le Devoir, 4 October 2001.

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6 Oneself as Another (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 7 Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969). 8 Christiane Amanpour, “Why Do I Do It?” Brill’s Content, 3 December 2000, www.brillscontent.com/2000dec/columns”atwork.shtml. 9 Globe and Mail, 17 September 2001, A4. 10 La Presse, 12 September 2001, A1. 11 See Patrick Imbert, Le Canada et la société des savoirs: Le Canada et les Amériques (Ottawa: University of Ottawa, 2007). Research Chair, “Social and Cultural Challenges in a Knowledge-Based Society.” 12 www.wesak.net. Translation P. Imbert. 13 Eduardo Galeano, “El teatro del bien y del mal,” Pagina 12, 23 September 2001. Translation P. Imbert. 14 I received this statement by email. Translation P. Imbert. 15 Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine, 1972), 204. 16 Amanpour, 4. 17 Ibid. 18 Richard Hétu, “Le fbi cherche désespérément des interprètes,” La Presse, 19 September 2001, A7. Translation P. Imbert. 19 Akhond, Reuters, 18 September 2001. 20 La Presse, 31 August 2001. 21 Le Devoir, 4 September 2001. Translation P. Imbert. 22 Middle East Times, 31 August, 2001. 23 Ibid. 24 This is proven by what Osama bin Laden says in his interview with Robert Fisk. He criticizes the fact that American troops are in Saudi Arabia, a sacred religious territory, and says they must leave. However, the troops are present because of the Iraqi aggression towards Kuwait. Moreover, if the American troops were to leave, it is possible to believe that the entire country would fall into the hands of fundamentalist Muslims and that numerous countries’ oil supply would be threatened. See “Ma rencontre avec Oussama ben Laden.” 25 For a series of examples, see Imbert, Trajectoires culturelles transaméricaines (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2004), 226. 26 N. García Canclini, La globalización imaginada (Buenos Aires: Paidos, 1999). 27 M. Lowenthal, “The Burdensome Concept of Failure,” Intelligence Policy and Process, ed. James M. Keagle, Alfred C. Maurer, and Marion D. Tunstall (Boulder: Westview Press, 1985), 49. 28 Galeano, “El teatro del bien y del mal,” 7. Translation P. Imbert. 29 La Presse, 13 September 2001. Translation P. Imbert. 30 Translation P. Imbert. 31 Translation P. Imbert. 32 Editorial, La Jornada, 12 September 2005. Translation P. Imbert. 33 Carnes Lord and Frank Barnell, Political Warfare and Psychological Operations (Washington: National Defense University Press, 1989), 49.

notes to pages 156–67

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34 Dennis F. Thompson, “Hypocrisy and Democracy,” in Liberalism without Illusions, ed. Bernard Yack (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 177. 35 La Presse canadienne internationale, 1 September 2001. Translation P. Imbert. 36 Petition sent by a friend via Internet, origin unknown, destination: the President of the United States. 37 Reuters, Yahoo!news, 23 September 2001. 38 www.thePetitionsite.com. 39 Editorial, Weekly Journal East, 10 September 2001. 40 David Crane, “US Tragedy Shows Peril of Bad Globalization,” Ottawa Business Journal, 17 September 2001, 9. 41 Globe and Mail, 17 September 2001, A20. Translated by P. Imbert. 42 Ibid. 43 La Presse, 18 Septembre 2001, A5. 44 This is not to be confused with the Bin Ladin International group involved in the construction of roads, buildings, airports, etc. (www.saudi-binladin-group. com), although that is indeed the same family. Osama bin Laden was the seventeenth of fifty-four children. 45 Manon Cornellier, Le Devoir, 25 September 2001, A8. 46 Le Devoir, 17 September 2001. Translation P. Imbert. 47 Editorial, Ottawa Citizen, 22 September 2001. 48 See Patrick Imbert, “Post-modernism, Monotheism, Polysemy, Economism,” in Borders and Margins: Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism, ed. Fernando de Toro and Alfonso de Toro (Frankfurt/Madrid: Vervuert/Iberoamericana, 1995), 79-90. 49 Jürgen Habermas, Theory and Practice (Boston: Beacon Press, 1974). 50 Albert Legault, Le Devoir, 17 September 2001. 51 Le Devoir, 4 October 2001. Translation P. Imbert. chapter 11 1 Quoted in Mark Chmiel, Elie Wiesel and the Politics of Moral Leadership (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), 97. 2 Ted Honderich, After the Terror (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002), 151. 3 Quoted in Chmiel, Elie Wiesel, 97. 4 Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim (New York: Pantheon, 2004), 241. 5 Arit Shavit, Interview of Dov Weisglass, Haaretz Magazine, 8 October 2004. 6 Quoted in James Bennett, “Sharon Dismisses Worries of Loss of Jewish Identity,” New York Times, 12 January 2004. 7 Ehud Barak, “I Did Not Give Away a Thing,” Journal of Palestine Studies 33.1 (2003): 84–7. 8 See Idith Zerdal and Akiva Elder, Lords of the Land (New York: Nation Books, 2007), for the most up-to-date critical history of the settlements, particularly the radical driving force, Gush Enumin. 9 Editorial, National Post, 22 July 2004.

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10 Allister Sparks, “Talking to Terrorists,“ Op-ed, Cape Times, 30 November 2004. 11 Shira Herzog, “Follow South Africa’s lead,” Globe and Mail, 24 June 2003. 12 Edward Said, From Oslo to Iraq (New York: Pantheon, 2004), 51. 13 Ruthie Blum, Interview with Hanan Ashrawi, Jerusalem Post, 18 December 2004. 14 Andrew Rigby, Justice and Reconciliation: After the Violence (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2001), 190. 15 Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 2001), 267. 16 Andre Du Toit, Personal communication, Cape Town, March 2008. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Mottie Tamarkin, “Conflict Resolution in Israel/Palestine,” Lecture, sfu International conference on negotiating compromises in divided societies, Vancouver, bc, 15–17 October 2004. 21 Ibid. 22 Dennis Ross, The Missing Peace (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), 773. 23 Ibid., 770. 24 Oren Yiftachtel, “Democracy or Ethnocracy,” Middle East Report 28.2 (1998): 8–13. 25 Robert Fisk, “Why Does the US Turn a Blind Eye to Israeli Bulldozers?” The Independent (London), 30 January, 2010. chapter 12 1 This text is selected and revised from a presentation given at the rsc: Academies of Arts, Humanities and Sciences of Canada symposium, Cultures of War and Peace, November 2008, and from my book, The Highway of the Atom (2010). My thanks to McGill-Queen’s for permission to do so. 2 Only a fraction of this material – some 5–10% according to the archivist currently in charge of this collection – has been previously cleared for viewing by researchers. 3 The Eldorado volume, written between 1981 and 1984, is not historically inclusive (covering the company history only until 1960), nor is it a particularly critical work, nor does it give much consideration to issues of health and safety or aboriginal involvement, nor did Bothwell consult (or address) the Eldorado archive comprehensively. And while he was very interested in Canada and Eldorado’s relationship to various war-related activities with the Allied Forces, in particular those supporting the control and procurement of uranium and the bomb’s development, the Indian labour force in the North was invisible to him. It is unclear why. Bothwell acknowledges that he had the support of Eldorado, wide access to its directors, employees, former employees and resources, and significantly, access to the company records

no tes to pages 176–7

4

5

6 7 8

9

241

before they were put on deposit with Library and Archives Canada in the fall of 1984. In addition to Bothwell’s work and the inaccessible company papers, other sources of archival documents exist, although Ottawa remains the resumed El Dorado, so to speak. Visually, the mine is exceedingly well documented. These are in addition to the hundreds of photographs taken by the scores of journalists and other visitors to the mine over the course of its history. A German immigrant and photographer by the name of Henry Busse established a photography club at Port Radium in the mid-1930s, and as a result there are thousands of photographs of life at and around the mine. Many of these photographs and a number of other documents, maps, and journals are in the holding of Northwest Territories archives at the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Center in Yellowknife. The offices of The Northern Miner in Toronto have a very good set of files with clippings covering the entire period from 1929 on. The museum in Norman Wells has an ongoing exhibit of documents and images from Port Radium. Two former employees have published books chronicling their time in the North: Fred “Tiny” Peet, Miners and Moonshiners: A Personal Account of Adventure and Survival in a Difficult Era (Victoria, bc: Sono Nis Press, 1983), and Robert G. Jenkins, The Port Radium Story (Summerland, bc: Valley Publications, 1999). There is also a very interesting and quite detailed unpublished manuscript by George Inglis entitled “History of Northern Transportation Company and Eldorado Nuclear Limited” that can be consulted in the Library and Archives Canada (Eldorado Nuclear Limited fonds, R1220-0-5-E, vol. 166). Eldorado began its own historical work in the late 1970s, when it hired Jane Mingay to conduct an oral history project with former Eldorado employees. Matthew Evenden, “The Northern Vision of Harold Innis,” Journal of Canadian Studies 34.3 (1999): 165. Although Evenden is writing in relation to Harold Innis, he captures well the national mood that pervaded Canada’s northern aspirations at the time. Jacques Derrida, “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression,” Diacritics 25.2 (1995): 36. Peter Blow, Village of Widows. dvd. (Peterborough, on: Lindum Films, 1999). “Canada-Déline Uranium Table,” in Canada-Déline Uranium Table Final Report: Concerning Health and Environmental Issues Related to the Port Radium Mine (Ottawa: Ministry of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, 2005). Blow’s film was also responsible for bringing a great deal of attention to the village of Déline, to Port Radium and other significant locations along the Northern transportation corridor, to Canada’s integral role in the development of the bomb, and to the allegations that the former ore-carriers and workers were dying of cancer as a result of their unprotected labors. In particular, Andrew Nikiforuk of the Calgary Herald wrote extensively about the “Village of the Widows” and the history it referenced. And other media outlets – e.g., cbc’s The National program, Maclean’s magazine, the Toronto

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11

12 13 14 15 16

17 18 19 20 21

notes to pages 177–82

Star – throughout Canada and elsewhere also covered the story in relation to their trip to Japan, and the community in relation to the Village of Widows documentary. Although the dangers of mining and handling radioactive materials were well known to both the American and Canadian governments, neither the miners nor the Dene were given much training or awareness about the dangers of the materials they were handling, the radon they were inhaling, nor the wastes that were strewn about at the mine and in the lake, at the airfield and the portages, and elsewhere on their land. There are many sources documenting the state of knowledge about the dangers of radioactive materials, particularly radium, that date from this period. In the United States, the industrial practices for the use of radium resulted in a considerable body count, and a sharp learning curve (in that order, sadly). In Canada, the Federal government produced several key documents pertaining both to the dangers and best practice for handling such materials. See W.R. McClelland, “Precautions for Workers in the Treating of Radium Ore,” in Investigations in Ore Dressing and Metallurgy, ed. R.J. Traill and W.R. McClelland, 147–8 (Ottawa: Department of Mines,1931); W.B. Timm, “Health Hazards in the Production and Handling of Radium,” in Investigations in Ore Dressing and Metallurgy, Report No. 550, ed. W.B. Timm, 181–92 (Ottawa: Department of Mines, 1933); and John D. Leitch, “Health Hazards in the Radium Industry,” Bulletin 16 (Ottawa: National Research Council of Canada, 1935). Déline Dene Band Uranium Committee, They Never Told Us These Things: A Record and Analysis of the Deadly and Continuing Impacts of Radium and Uranium Mining on the Sahtú Dene of Great Bear Lake (Northwest Territories, Canada. Déline: Dene First Nation of Déline (Sahtúgot’ine), 1998). George Blondin died on 12 October 2008. Both he and his father worked at Port Radium. George Blondin, When the World Was New: Stories of the Sahtú Dene (Yellowknife: Outcrop, 1990), 78-9. Déline Dene Band Uranium Committee, They Never Told Us These Things. George Blondin, Yamoria the Lawmaker: Stories of the Dene (Edmonton: NeWest Press, 1997), 109–13. As it was reported in Japan on the occasion of their visit, the “miners” have suffered “both as victims of radiation exposure, and as victimizers who helped make the atomic bomb” (Kyodo News International 1998). Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 41–3. Rudy Wiebe, Playing Dead: A Contemplation Concerning the Arctic (Edmonton: NeWest Press, 2003), 130. Ibid., 131. Ibid., 141. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992), 21.

notes to pages 182–209

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22 The participants in this mechanism were the Déline Dene Band, Indian and Northern Affairs Canada (representing Health Canada and Natural Resources Canada), and the Government of the Northwest Territories. 23 “Canada-Déline Uranium Table.” 24 Ibid., 4. 25 Ibid. 26 Intertec Management Limited, Port Radium Fact Finder Report (Ottawa: Natural Resources Canada and the Déline Dene Band, 2004). 27 “Canada-Déline Uranium Table,” iv. 28 Ibid., 24. See also the Port Radium Fact Finder Report. 29 “Canada-Déline Uranium Table,” vi. 30 See Leitch, Health Hazards in the Radium Industry, 11. 31 “Canada-Déline Uranium Table,” 31. 32 David Henningson, Somba Ke: The Money Place. dvd. (Canada: Urgent Service Films, 2007). 33 Intertec Management Limited was engaged as the fact-finding consultant. Following publication of the Final Report of the cdut, Walter Keyes, a pronuclear, anti-regulatory lobbyist and director of Intertec went on to write a scathing and distorted review of Village of Widows, making clear to me that the fact-finding work for the Dene had been catastrophically biased from the outset. See Walter Keyes, “A Review of the Video ‘Village of Widows’: A Lesson of How Much More Powerful Emotions Can Be than Facts,” CNS Bulletin 26, no. 4 (December 2005): 45–6, and my Highway of the Atom. 34 “Canada-Déline Uranium Table,” 27. 35 I will resist drawing conclusions here. My sense is that any critical engagement with stories – whether those leaked from metropolitan archives, or those told by peoples of North – must stop short of interpretive closure. The ellipsis becomes a political and critical act – both deference and deferral. chapter 14 1 Walter J. Freeman, Societies of Brains: A Study in the Neuroscience of Love and Hate (Hillsdale, nj: L. Erlbaum Associates, 1995), 131. 2 Roméo Dallaire with Brent Beardsley, Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda (Toronto: Random House Canada, 2003), 323; 462. 3 Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Selected Writings of Walter Benjamin, Vol. 5. Ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, ma: Belknap Press, 1996), 237. 4 Ibid, 242. 5 Shake Hands with the Devil, 522. 6 Ibid., 519–20. 7 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 72. 8 Johannes Kepler, The Harmony of the World, trans. E.J. Aiton, A.M. Duncan, and J.V. Field (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1997), 260. 9 Heinrich Schenker, Free Composition (Der freie Satz), trans. and ed. Ernst Oster (New York: Longman, 1979), 188–9.

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notes to pages 209–10

10 Nicholas Cook, The Schenker Project: Culture, Race, and Music Theory in Fin-de-siècle Vienna (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 208. 11 Joseph Auner, A Schoenberg Reader: Documents of a Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 136. 12 Arnold Schoenberg, Letters, ed. Erwin Stein (London: Faber and Faber, 1964), 248. 13 Horatio Palmer, “Yield Not to Temptation,” in Songs of Joy and Gladness. Ed. W. McDonald, Joshya Gill, Jr., R. Sweney, and W.J. Kirkpatrick (Boston: McDonald and Gill, 1885), 86.

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Contributors

heribert adam, frsc, is professor emeritus of sociology at Simon Fraser University and a Fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Studies (stias), Wallenberg Research Centre, Marais Street, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa. Born in Germany and educated at the Frankfurt School with Adorno and Habermas as mentors, his most recent books are Seeking Mandela: Peacemaking between Israelis and Palestinians (2006) and as editor, Hushed Voices: Unacknowledged Atrocities of the 20th Century (2011). He received the 1998 Adenauer Prize of the Humboldt Foundation, the 2006 Outstanding Achievement Award of the Canadian Sociology Association, the 2008 Sterling Prize and the 2010 Thakore Scholar Award for his work on socio-political developments in Southern Africa, post-conflict reconstruction, truth commissions, and reconciliation in divided societies. laura brandon, prior to her present appointment in 1992, worked as a freelance art curator, writer, and critic, and taught art history at the University of Prince Edward Island. She has lectured extensively in North America and overseas. As well as more than one hundred catalogues, articles, chapters, and reviews, she is the author of the award-winning biography Pegi by Herself: The Life of Pegi Nicol MacLeod, Canadian Artist (2005), Art or Memorial? The Forgotten History of Canada’s War Art (2006), and Art and War (2007). Recent exhibitions include War Brides: Portraits of an Era (2007), A Brush with War: Military Art from Korea to Afghanistan (2009), and the co-curating of the Canadian War Museum’s opening exhibition Art and War: The Second World War Art of Australia, Britain, and Canada (2005). In 2000 her exhibition, Canvas of War, received the Canadian Museum Association’s Award of Excellence. She holds a ba (Hons.) in history and art history from the University of Bristol, England, an ma in art history from Queen’s University, and a PhD in history from Carleton University. She is an adjunct professor in the School for Studies in Art and Culture at Carleton University. mireille calle-gruber is a professor and a writer. She teaches French literature, aesthetics, and gender studies at Université La Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3. She is the director of the Centre de Recherches en Etudes féminines et de genres/ Littératures francophones (crefeg/lf), and she co-directs the research programme

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“Poétique des genres et transculturalité.” She is responsible for the master’s degree in gender studies and francophone literatures. Her books include Histoire de la littérature française du XXe siècle (2001); Assia Djebar ou la résistance de l’écriture. Regards d’un écrivain d’Algérie (2002); Le grand temps. Essai sur l’oeuvre de Claude Simon (2004); Les Triptyques de Claude Simon ou l’art du montage (2008); and Jacques Derrida, la distance généreuse (2009). Her recent novels include Tombeau d’Akhnaton (2006) and Consolation (2010). She recently finished editing Michel Butor’s complete works. These Oeuvres Complètes include twelve volumes that are completed by an index, edited by Sarah-Anaïs Crevier Goulet. She is the director of a research team on Claude Simon’s manuscripts, and she has published the Nobel Prize writer’s biography (Claude Simon. Une vie à écrire, 2001). In 1997, Mireille Calle-Gruber was elected to the Academy of Arts and Humanities of the Royal Society of Canada. janet danielson is a composer and music theorist. Her commissioned works include an opera, The Marvelous History of Mariken of Nimmigen, commissioned by Music in the Morning; The Occupation, a song collaboration with poet Robert Bringhurst for baritone, marimba, and viol da gamba; and Suite Vancouver, a work for string orchestra and erhu. Her writings include articles published in Circuit, Musicworks, and the Proceedings of the Asia-Pacific Composers’ League, and a text, Basic Organization of Music. Danielson is an associate composer of the Canadian Music Centre, has served as associate artistic director of Vancouver New Music, chair of the Association of Canadian Women Composers, and member of the executive council of the Canadian League of Composers. She has taught courses relating to music and theology at Regent College, and is currently a lecturer on composition, analysis, and music theory at Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Arts. sandra djwa, professor emerita, Simon Fraser University, is a critic, cultural historian, and biographer. Sometime editor of “Poetry,” Letters in Canada, University of Toronto Quarterly, she has written extensively on Canadian poetry. Books include E.J. Pratt: The Evolutionary Vision (1974), the Complete Poems of E.J. Pratt (1989) co-edited with Gordon Moyles, and the Selected Poems of E.J. Pratt (1999), co-edited with Zailig Pollock and W.J. Keith. Her biographies include F.R. Scott: The Politics of the Imagination (1987), F.R. Scott: Une Vie (translation 2001), and Professing English: A Life of Roy Daniells (2002). F.R. Scott: Une Vie was short-listed for the Governor-General’s Award in Translation in 2001 and Professing English was awarded the Royal Society Lorne Pierce Medal in 2002. She has recently completed Journey with No Maps: A Life of P.K. Page. alan filewod is professor of theatre studies at the University of Guelph. His research fields include Canadian theatre history, radical political theatre, and masculinist performance in warplay and reenactment. His books include Committing Theatre: Theatre Radicalism and Political Intervention (2011), Performing Canada: The Nation Enacted in the Imagined Theatre (2002), Collective Encounters: Documentary Theatre in English Canada (1987), and, with David Watt, Workers’ Play-

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time: Theatre and the Labour Movement since 1970 (2001). In his current research on the history of radical political theatre in Canada, he examines reenactment warplay as “heritage guerilla agitprop.” He is a past president of the Association for Canadian Theatre Research and of the Association for Canadian and Quebec Literatures/Association des littératures canadienne et québécoise, and is a former editor of Canadian Theatre Review. sherrill grace is Distinguished University Scholar and University Killam Professor at the University of British Columbia. She has published widely on twentieth-century and Canadian literature and culture. Among her most recent books are Canada and the Idea of North (2001), Inventing Tom Thomson (2004), Making Theatre: A Life of Sharon Pollock (2008), and On the Art of Being Canadian (2009). She won the 2008 Canada Council Killam Prize in Humanities, and she is currently writing a book on the two world wars and a biography of novelist and playwright Timothy Findley. patrick i mbert studied semiotics and literature at the University of Ottawa, and obtained his PhD in 1974 for his research on “Sémiotique de la description chez Balzac.” He started his academic career in 1974 as an assistant professor at McMaster University. In 1975, he taught at the University of Ottawa where he became a full professor in 1984. He was professor of the year of the Faculty of Arts in 1998, and has a University Research Chair entitled: “Canada: Social and Cultural Challenges in a Knowledge-Based Society.” He was executive director of the International American Studies Association (2005–2009), and became the president of the Academy of Arts and Humanities of the Royal Society of Canada in 2009. He is co-founder and vice-president of the City for the Cultures of Peace. He is director of a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada funded project (2010–13) entitled “Établir des paradigmes opératoires pour comparer les variations discursives dans les Amériques menant des identités enacinées, de leur inclusion ou exclusion, aux identités transculturelles dans le contexte de la glocalisation.” He has published twenty-five books among which the most recent are: Trayectorias culturales Latinoamericanas (2009); Américanité, cultures francophones canadiennes et société des savoirs: Le Canada et les Amériques (2009); Theories of Exclusion and of Inclusion and the Knowledge-Based Society: Canada and the Americas (2008); Trajectoires culturelles transaméricaines (2004). tiffany johnstone is a PhD Candidate at the University of British Columbia, where she is currently writing her dissertation under the supervision of Sherrill Grace. In her dissertation, she applies a cognitive linguistic analysis to North American women’s frontier adventure literature at the turn of the twentieth century. She studies how the representation of the travelling female body in these texts appropriates American manifest destiny rhetoric to promote women’s rights on both sides of the Canadian-American border. Johnstone has published articles on early twentieth-century adventure literature set in Canada, and she recently gave talks on early women’s polar exploration at two international conferences in Scandinavia.

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martin löschnigg studied English and German literature and linguistics at the Universities of Graz (Austria) and Aberdeen (uk). He is currently associate professor of English, chair of the Section on the New Literatures in English, and deputy director of the Centre for Canadian Studies at Graz University. Martin Löschnigg was a visiting scholar at the Free University of Berlin and at Harvard University in 1995 and 1996, and a visiting associate professor of English at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis in autumn 2005. His main research interests are narrative theory, autobiography, the English novel, the literature of war, and Canadian literature. Martin Löschnigg has published on the literature of the First World War (Der Erste Weltkrieg in deutscher und englischer Dichtung, 1994 and Intimate Enemies – English and German Literary Reactions to the Great War 1914–1918, edited with Franz K. Stanzel, 1993), on fictional autobiographies (Die englische fiktionale Autobiographie: Erzähltheoretische Grundlagen und historische Prägnanzformen von den Anfängen bis zur Mitte des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, 2006), and on Canadian literature with Maria Löschnigg (Kurze Geschichte der kanadischen Literatur, 2001 and Migration and Fiction: Narratives of Migration in Contemporary Canadian Literature, 2009). lauren lydic completed her PhD in comparative literature at the University of Toronto in 2010. Her dissertation was entitled Metaphor and Gender in Conflict: Discourse, the Bosnian War, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Chechen Wars. Recent publications include an article in Comparative Literature: “‘Noseological’ Parody, Gender Discourse, and Yugoslav Feminisms: Following Gogol’s ‘Nose’ to Ugreši’s ‘Hot Dog on a Warm Bun.’” conny steenman marcusse teaches Canadian literature in English in the Netherlands. She holds an ma in American literature and a PhD in Canadian literature from the University of Leiden, nl. She is a former president of the Association for Canadian Studies in the Netherlands (acsn). Recent publications include The Rhetoric of Canadian Writing (2002); Building Liberty: Canada and World Peace, 1945–2005 (co-editor Aritha van Herk, 2005); Carol Shields: Evocation and Echo (co-editor Aritha van Herk, 2009); and Tulips and Maple Leaves in 2010: Perspectives on 65 years of Dutch-Canadian Relations (co-editor Christl Verduyn, 2010). jo nathan f. vance holds the J.B. Smallman Chair in the Department of History at Western University, where he teaches military history, Canadian history, and social memory. A native of Waterdown, Ontario, he holds degrees from McMaster University, Queen’s University, and York University. He is the author of many books and articles, including Death So Noble: Memory, Meaning, and the First World War (1997); High Flight: Aviation and the Canadian Imagination (2002); A Gallant Company: The True Story of “The Great Escape” (2003); Building Canada: People and Projects that Shaped the Nation (2006); and Unlikely Soldiers: How Two Canadians Fought the Secret War Against Nazi Occupation (2008). His most recent books are Maple Leaf Empire: Canada, Britain and Two World Wars (2011); A History of Canadian Culture (2009); and Bamboo Cage: The P.O.W. Diary of Flight Lieutenant Robert Wyse, 1942–1943 (2009).

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aritha van herk is the author of five novels: Judith, The Tent Peg, No Fixed Address (nominated for the Governor General’s Award for fiction), Places Far From Ellesmere (a geografictione) and Restlessness. Her wide-ranging critical work is collected in A Frozen Tongue and In Visible Ink; she has published hundreds of articles, reviews, and essays. Her irreverent but relevant history of Alberta, Mavericks: An Incorrigible History of Alberta, won the Grant MacEwan Author’s Award for Alberta Writing. That book frames the permanent exhibition on Alberta history, which opened at the Glenbow Museum and Archives in Calgary in 2007; Audacious and Adamant: The Story of Maverick Alberta, accompanies the exhibit. Mavericks was also chosen as the inaugural book in the Calgary Public Library’s one book/one calgary initiative in November of 2010. With George Webber she has published In This Place: Calgary 2004–2011 (photographs by George Webber, words by Aritha van Herk). She teaches creative writing and Canadian literature at the University of Calgary. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a member of the Alberta Order of Excellence. peter c. van wyck is professor of communication studies at Concordia University in Montreal, where he is also the director of the ma in media studies graduate program. He is an interdisciplinary scholar and writer with an abiding interest in the theoretical and practical relations between culture, nature, environment, landscape, and memory. His most recent book, The Highway of the Atom (McGillQueen’s University Press) – winner of the 2011 Gertrude J. Robinson book award from the Canadian Communication Association – is a theoretical and archival investigation concerning the material and cultural history of uranium production in Canada’s North. His other books include Signs of Danger: Waste, Trauma, and Nuclear Threat (University of Minnesota Press, 2005), and Primitives in the Wilderness: Deep Ecology and the Missing Human Subject (State University of New York Press, 1997). He is now working on a new study to do with nuclear media, apology, justice, and the future. christl verduyn is cross-appointed to the Department of English and the Canadian Studies Program at Mount Allison University, where she is Davidson Chair in Canadian Studies and Director of the Centre for Canadian Studies (2010–15). Her research interests include Canadian and Québécois literatures, women’s writing and criticism, multiculturalism and minority writing, life writing, and Canadian studies, and she has published extensively in these areas. Recent titles include Canadian Studies: Past, Present, Praxis (2012; with J. Koustas), Archival Narratives for Canada: Re-Telling Stories in a Changing Landscape (2011; with K. Garay), Marian and the Major: Engel’s Elizabeth and the Golden City (2010), and Asian Canadian Writing Beyond Autoethnography (2008; with E. Ty). Before joining the faculty at Mount Allison, Verduyn taught at Wilfrid Laurier University (2000–06), where she chaired the Canadian Studies Program, and at Trent University (1980–2000), where she was Chair of Women’s Studies (1987–90) and Chair of Canadian Studies (1993–99). Recipient of the Governor General’s International Award for Canadian Studies, she is a member of the Royal Society of Canada. With her co-author of the article in the present volume, she recently

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published Tulips and Maple Leaves: Perspectives on 65 Years of Dutch Canadian Relations (2010). anne wheeler was born in Edmonton, where she attended the University of Alberta, graduating in mathematics in 1967. Her filmmaking career started in the early seventies with a film cooperative dedicated to defining what it was to be western Canadian through storytelling and documentaries such as Great Grand Mother, which focused on settlement from a woman’s point of view. In 1978, she joined the National Film Board to help to establish a regional presence on the Prairies. Her film A War Story, based on her father’s experiences as a doctor in a Japanese pow camp, won several international awards. By the eighties, she had moved into writing and directing dramatic material that included several adaptations of Canadian short stories such as To Set Our House in Order, One’s a Heifer, and Teach Me to Dance. In the nineties she broke into episodic television doing pilots for DaVinci’s Inquest, Jake and the Kid, and multiple episodes of Cold Squad, North of Sixty, and This Is Wonderland. To date she has directed more than twenty-five feature length films including Loyalties, Bye Bye Blues, Angel Square, The Diviners, Cowboys Don’t Cry, The War Between Us, The Sleep Room, The Investigation, Suddenly Naked, Better than Chocolate, and Living Out Loud. A respected member of the industry, filmmaker, and teacher, she has been awarded six honorary doctorates and the Order of Canada.

Index

Abbas, Mahmoud, 167 Adam, Heribert, 11, 13 Adler, Jeremy (translator), 80. See also Stadler, Ernst, 82–3, 85. Adorno, Theodor W., 107, 111 African National Congress (anc), 166, 168–9 Agamben, Giorgio, 209 Akaitcho, 181 Akhond, Mohammad Hassan, 152–3 Amanpour, Christiane, 148, 151–2 America’s Army, 18–19, 21, 24 Anderson, Benedict, 148 Anderson, Donald, 104 Andriesse, Emmy, 10, 121–44; Another Boy with a Pan, 130–2; Arnhem, 143–4; Boy and Girl with Bicycle, 132–3; Boy with a Pan, 121, 127–30, 143; Landwacht/German Collaborator, 139–40; Old Woman, 134–5; Old Woman’s Feet, 135–6; Old Woman’s Hands, 136; Rebuilt Bicycle, Jewish Quarter, 132, 134; Return from Camps, 141–3; Returning Prisoner, 140–1; Sieving for Coal, 138; Slumped Man, 137; Star of David, 140 Annan, Kofi, 153 Arafat, Yasir, 169 Arfots (Arbeiders-fotografen; workerphotographers), 124 Aristotle, xv, 209

Ashrawi, Hanan, 170 Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (aecl), 175–6 Atwood, Margaret, 3–4; “The Loneliness of the Military Historian,” 3 Audoin-Rouzeau, Stéphane, 33 Ayah, Ehtseo (“Grandfather”), 180 Barak, Ehud, 164–5 Barenboim, Daniel, 14 Barthes, Roland, 71 Bastien, Alfred, 96, 98; Agny: Ruins of Shrine in the Wood, 96; Canadian Officer Killed, 98 Bateson, Gregory, 151 Baudelaire, Charles, 70 Bayefsky, Aba, 100–1, 104; Belsen Concentration Camp, The Pit No. 2, 100–1, 104 Bayefsky, Anne, 153 Beaverbrook, Lord (William Maxwell Aitken), 94 Behrens, Franz Richard, 9, 80, 82, 86–9; “Expressionist-Artillerist” (“Expressionist-Gunner”), 86–9, 92 Bell, Ernest, 31 Benjamin, Walter, 208; Critique of Violence, 208 Bertell, Rosalie, 184 Besnyö, Eva, 121, 123, 127, 132 bin Laden, Osama, 153, 157, 160 bin Laden, Salem, 160

268

Blazer, Carel, 121 Blondin, George, 179; When the World Was New: Stories of the Sahtú Dene, 179 Blow, Peter, 12, 112, 177; Village of Widows, 112, 177 Bochkareva, Maria, 30 Bock, Dennis, 108, 111; The Ash Garden, 111 Bodin, Jean, 209 Bodnar, John, 33 Bond van Kunstenaars ter Verdediging der Kultuur (bkvk; Federation of Artists for Cultural Rights), 123 Bothwell, Robert, 176, 178 Brandon, Laura, 10 Broadfoot, Barry, 32–4 Brooke, Rupert, 45, 81; “Peace,” 81; “The Soldier,” 45 Bush, George W., 149–50, 154–5, 158, 160, 173 Buthelizi, Mangosuthu, 167 Byron, Lord, 207; The Destruction of Sennacherib, 207 Call of Duty, 18, 24 Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, 17–18 Calle-Gruber, Mireille, 8–9 Canadian Expeditionary Force, 34, 40, 95 Canadian War Museum (cwm), 93–5, 102, 104 Capra, Frank, 28 Castronova, Edward, 20 Cézanne, Paul, 70–1 Chan, Marjorie, 108, 111; A Nanking Winter, 111, 120 Charlesworth, Hector, 98 Châtillon, Claude, 31–2 Chiwengo, Ngwarsungu, 58 Colville, Alex, 102, 104–5; Bodies in a Grave, Belsen, 104; Bodies on a Road, 104–5; A Dead Civilian in a Prison Yard, 104; Grave of a Canadian Trooper, 102 Comfort, Charles, 100, 102–3; Dead

index

German on the Hitler Line, 102–3; Officer’s Lines, 102 Crummey, Michael, 9, 108, 111, 114– 15, 117, 119; The Wreckage, 111, 114–18, 118–20 Cullen, Maurice, 98; The Cambrai Road, 98 Canada-Déline Uranium Table (cdut), 182–3; Canada-Déline Uranium Table Final Report, 182, 184 Canclini, Néstor García, 154; La globalización imaginada, 154 Cleveringa, R.P., 125 Clements, Marie, 9–10, 12, 107–8, 111, 112, 114, 119; Burning Vision, 10, 12, 111–14, 118–20 Courtemanche, Gil, 8, 54, 59–61, 64; Un dimanche á la piscine á Kigali (A Sunday by the Pool in Kigali), 59–61 Dagen, Philippe, 95 Dallaire, Roméo, 204, 209 d’Angers, David, 70 Danielson, Janet, 6, 13; Let Us Wake From This Dream, 209–11 DeCapra, Dominick, 107 Déline Dene Band Uranium Committee: They Never Told Us These Things, 12; 179–80 Der Sturm, 80, 83, 89 Derrida, Jacques, 177 Dickinson, Emily, xv Djwa, Sandra, 7–8, 13 du Toit, Andre, 171 Edschmid, Kasimir, 88 Eksteins, Modris, 79–80, 107 Eldorado Nuclear Limited (enl), 175–6, 178–9, 182 Elffers, Cas, 125, 127 Elffers, Dick, 125 Elffers, Joost, 127 Éluard, Paul, 61 Emmy Andriesse Prize, 127 Eve Online, 19 Falwell, Jerry, 161

index

far. See Forces Armées Rwandaises Faure, Élie, 70 Filewod, Alan, 7, 8, 13 Fisk, Robert, 147, 152, 173 Forces Armées Rwandaises (far; Rwandan Armed Forces), 57 fpr. See Front patriotique rwandais Franklin, Paul, 105 Franklin, Sir John, 181 Front patriotique rwandais (fpr; Rwandan Patriotic Front), 53, 57 Fussell, Paul, 26 Galeano, Eduardo, 150, 154–55, 157 Garvin, J.W., 41; Canadian Poets of the Great War, 41 Genette, Gérard, 54 Geneva Accord, 164, 169 George, Terry, 54; Hotel Rwanda, 54 Gibbons, Sharon, 198 Girouard, Mark, 41; The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman, 41 Gladstone, Alex, 159 Goethe, 90, 105 Goldhamer, Charles, 101 Goodyear, Hedley, 42 Graves, Robert, 46, 82; Goodbye to All That, 46 Greene, Lorne, 112–13 Grenfell, Julian, 29–30 Grunebaum, Lotte, 123 Guelph Mercury, 36. See also Macalister, John Kenneth Habermas, Jürgen, 161; Theory and Practice, 161 Halo, 19 Hamas, 167–8 Hansen, Randall, 109, 111; Fire and Fury: The Allied Bombing of Germany, 1942–45, 109 Harris, Lawren, 44 Hauptmann, Gerhart, 79 Henningson, David, 184; Somba Ke: The Money Place, 184 Hersey, John, 29; The War Lover, 29

269

Herzog, Shira, 169 Heym, Georg, 81; “Der Krieg,” 81 Highway of the Atom, The, (1952 documentary), 112 Honderich, Ted, 163 Hughes-Stanton, Herbert, 99; The Cemetery, Pas-de-Calais, 99 Huyssen, Andreas, 5 Hyndman, Robert, 100 Imbert, Patrick, 11 Inouye, Kanao, 115 International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ictr), 53, 58 Israeli-Palestinian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (iptrc), 170–2 Ito, Robert: The War Between Us, 200 Juventute/Trial report, 18–19, 25. See also Pro Juventute and trial Kahlenberg, Fritz, 126 Kangura (Wake Up), 53, 57–8 Kearns, Gertrude, 105 Keegan, John, xiii Kennedy, W.P.M., 36 Kennington, Eric, 98; The Conquerors, 98 Kepler, Johannes, 209; Political Digression on the Three Means, 209 Khadr, Omar Ahmed, 24, 26–7 Kogawa, Joy, 108, 114, 198; Obasan, 108, 110, 114, 198 Kokubo, Tsuneko (Koko), 199, 201 Kollwitz, Käthe, xvi, 4; The Grieving Parents, xvi Kraus, Karl, 89–90; Die letzten Tage der Menschheit (The Last Days of Mankind), 89–90 La Gauche, 150–1, 155, 158 La Jornada, 156 La Presse, 152, 160 LaBine, Charles, 112–13 LaBine, Gilbert, 112–13, 180 LaCapra, Dominick, 107–9, 111; History and Memory after Auschwitz,

270

108; Writing History, Writing Trauma, 108–9 Lacombe Saint-Michel, Jean-Pierre, 74–5 Laqueur, Thomas W., 99; “Memory and Naming in the Great War,” 99 Law, Anthony, 102; Graveyard, Sorel, P.Q., 102 Le Devoir, 152 Lean, David, 189, 191; The Bridge on the River Kwai, 189 Legault, Albert, 160–1 Lévinas, Emmanuel, 148 Levine, Karen, 108, 111; Hana’s Suitcase, 111, 120 Library and Archives Canada, 175, 183 Lichtenstein, Alfred, 80, 82 Loeb, Eva, 123 Löschnigg, Martin, 9 Lotz, Ernst Wilhelm, 81; “Aufbruch der Jugend” (“The Setting Out of Youth”), 81 Lowenthal, Mark M., 154–5 Lydic, Lauren, 8, 11 Macalister, John Kenneth, 7, 36–40 MacDonald, J.E.H., 98 Macdonald, Margaret, 29 Macfarlane, David, 41; The Danger Tree, 41 Mamdani, Mahmood, 163, 170 Mandela, Nelson, 169, 172–3 Manifeste des Bahutu (Manifeste; The Hutu Manifesto), 55–6, 62, 64 Manley, John, 153 Mann, Thomas, 79 Massey, Vincent, 94 Mayor, Frederico, 13. See also unesco McCrae, John, 7, 43; “In Flanders Fields,” 7, 43 McKenna, Brian, 110; Savage Christmas, 110; The Valour and the Horror, 108, 110 McLean, James, 40 McLuhan, Marshall, 37

index

Meijers, E.M., 125 Milner, Donna, 111; The Promise of Rain, 111, 120 Montgomery, Bernard, 126 mrnd. See National Republic Movement for Democracy and Development Mujawayo, Esther, 57 Murakami, Richard, 198 Nantel, Alfred, 100 National Gallery of Canada (ngc), 94, 102 National Party (np), 166 National Republic Movement for Democracy and Development (mrnd), 57 National Research Council, 183 Nebel, Otto, 9, 80, 82, 89–92; Zuginsfeld, 89–92 Netanyahu, Benjamin, 173 Nevinson, C.R.W., 99–100 Newbury, Catharine, 55 Newbury, David, 55 Ngeze, Hasan, 57 Nichols, Jack, 102 Nora, Pierre, 101 Novelli, Gastone, 76–8. See also Simon, Claude. The Jardin des Plantes Nowrojee, Binaifer, 58; Shattered Lives, 58 Obama, Barak, 173 Ogilvie, Will, 102; Escape Route, 102, 104 Olmert, Ehud, 164–5 Ondaatje, Michael, 4, 108; The English Patient, 108 Oorthuys, Cas, 121 Owen, Wilfred, 80, 82 Page, Lionel F., 48–9 Page, P.K., 8, 41, 48–52; “Cullen,” 49; “Generation,” 50, 52; “Paradox” (also known as “Poem in Wartime”),

index

51–2; The Sun and the Moon, 49; “The Stenographers,” 50–1; “Tragically, Spain was our spade,” 50 Paine, Thomas, 147 Palestinian Authority, 167–8 Palestinian Liberation Organization (plo), 167 Pals’ Battalions, 30 parmehutu (Parti du mouvement pour l’émancipation Hutu; Party of the Movement for Hutu Emancipation), 55, 57 Pepper, George, 100–3; Dead German Paratroopers, 100–2; The Falaise Break-Through, 102; Hitler’s Youth, German Cemetery at Louvigny, Calvados, Normandy, 102–3 Pfemfert, Franz, 80, 82; Die Aktion, 80, 82 Picasso, Pablo, 4, 72; Guernica, 72 Pickersgill, Frank, 7, 37–40 Pidgeon, G.C., 96 Pierce, Julien, 8, 54, 61–4; Speak, Rwanda, 61–4 Pitt, David, 41 Pratt, E.J., 8, 41–5, 52; “Before an Altar (After Gueudecourt),” 42; “Clay,” 8, 42–4; “Come Away, Death,” 44–5; “The Great Feud,” 45; “The Submarine,” 45; “Tiger Sharks,” 45 Presser, Sem, 129 Pro Juventute, 18 Quintilian, 54 Radio Rwanda, 56 Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (rtlm), 53–4, 58 Rawsthorn, Alice, 122, 143 Richardson, John, 181 Ricoeur, Paul, 148 Rigby, Andrew, 170 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 71 Rooke, Robert, 32 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 28

271

Ross, Dennis, 171–2 Rushdie, Salman, 147, 162 Said, Edward, 14, 169 Sandes, Flora, 29 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 71 Sassereth, Jules, 59; Le RuandaUrundi, étrange royaume féodal au cœur d’Afrique (Ruanda-Urundi, A Foreign Feudal Kingdom in the Heart of Africa), 59–60 Sassoon, Siegfried, 80, 82 Saunders, Harry, 205–7; On Active Service, 205–8 Schenker, Heinrich, 209 Schoenberg, Arnold, 209 Schreyer, Lothar, 83 Scott, F.G., 45; The Great War as I Saw It, 45; “Knighthood,” 45 Scott, F.R., 8, 41, 45–9, 52; “Armageddon,” 48; “Conflict,” 47; “Flux,” 48; “Lest We Forget,” 46; “Recovery,” 47; “Teleological,” 46 Semujanga, Josias, 57 Shah, Saira, 148; “Beneath the Veil,” 148 Shakespeare, William, xiv, 4; Julius Caesar, xiv–xv Sharon, Ariel, 164–5 Shaw, James Byam, 97; The Flag, 97–8 Sheppard, Richard, 88–9 Simon, Claude, xv, 8–9, 69–78; “Gastone Novelli and the Problem of Language,” 77–8; The Georgics, 69–70, 74–6; The Jardin des Plantes, 76–7; La Route Des Flandres, 72–4; “Pour qui donc écrit Sartre?” 71–2, 74–5 Sims, Charles, 96–7; Sacrifice, 96–7 Sitwell, Osbert, 82 South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (sa trc), 170–1 Sparks, Allister, 168 Special Operations Executive, 38–9 Stadler, Ernst, 80; “Der Aufbruch,” 80–1 Star Trek, 21–2

272

Steenman Marcuse, Conny, 10 Stoker, Dean, 194 Strachey, John, 47 Stramm, August, 9, 80, 82–6, 89, 92; “Angststurm” (“Storm of Fear”), 86; “Signal,” 82–3; “Sturmangriff” (“Charge”), 85–6 Taconis, Kryn, 130–1 Tamarkin, Mottie, 171 They Never Told Us These Things. See Déline Dene Band Uranium Committee Tinning, Campbell, 102; The Gothic Line at Tomba di Pesaro, 102 Toguri, Iva. See Tokyo Rose Tokyo Rose (Toguri, Iva), 112–13 Tolstoy, Leo, xv, 4; War and Peace, xv Tracey, Ian: The War Between Us, 200 Trakl, Georg, 82; “Grodek,” 82 trial: Track Impunity Always, 18 ’Twas the Night before Christmas, 205, 207 unar. See Union Nationale Rwandaise Underground Photographers, The (De Ondergedoken Camera), 121, 127, 129–30, 132 unesco (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), 5, 13 Union Nationale Rwandaise (unar; Rwanda National Union), 56 Vance, Jonathan F., 7, 109, 111; Death So Noble: Memory, Meaning, and the First World War, 109 van den Horst, Hanny, 143 van Eyck, Jan, 96; The Crucifixion, 96; The Last Judgement, 96 van Gogh, Vincent, 121–2

index

van Herk, Aritha, 6 van Renterghem, Tony, 126–7 van Santen, Louise, 122 van Schie, Willem (Pim), 129. See also Andriesse, Emmy. Boy with a Pan van Wyck, Peter, 11–12, 111; The Highway of the Atom, 111, 174. Varley, Frederick, 4, 6, 8, 14, 43–4, 98–9; German Prisoners, 99; ShellTorn Trees, 99; Some Day the People Will Return, 99; The Sunken Road, 99; For What?, 4, 8, 44 Verduyn, Christl, 10 Vida Quartet, 211 Virgil, 69; Georgica, 69 Waffen SS, 25 Walden, Herwarth, 80, 83–5, 89; Der Sturm, 80, 83, 89 Walden, Nell, 80, 85 Warhammer, 19 Weisglass, Dov, 164 West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, 14 Wheeler, Anne, 6, 12–13, 108, 110–11, 119; Bye Bye Blues, 12, 110, 195–8; The War Between Us, 12, 110, 119, 198–201; A War Story, 12, 110, 191–5, 202 Wheeler, Ben (father of Anne), 189, 191–4, 202 Why We Fight, 28 Wiebe, Rudy, 12, 181; Playing Dead, 12, 181 Wiesel, Elie, 163 Windig, Ad, 129–30 Wood, Derwent, 96–7; Canada’s Golgotha, 96–7 Woodsworth, J.S., 45–6 World of Warcraft, 19, 20–2 Zwart, Piet, 128–9