Mediating Peace : Reconciliation through Visual Art, Music and Film [1 ed.] 9781443887755, 9781443883719

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Mediating Peace

Mediating Peace: Reconciliation through Visual Art, Music and Film Edited by

Sebastian Kim, Pauline Kollontai and Sue Yore

Mediating Peace: Reconciliation through Visual Art, Music and Film Edited by Sebastian Kim, Pauline Kollontai and Sue Yore This book first published 2015 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2015 by Sebastian Kim, Pauline Kollontai, Sue Yore and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-8371-9 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-8371-9

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements .................................................................................. viii Contributors ................................................................................................ ix Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Sebastian Kim, Pauline Kollontai and Sue Yore Part I: Visual Art 1. Weeping Pictures: Linking Violence and Empathy in Visual Arts........ 16 Lucien van Liere 2. Returning to the Spiritual in Art: From Kandinsky to Rothko and Beyond ................................................................................................ 29 David Jasper 3. Freddie Gilroy and the Belsen Stragglers: Engaging Scarborough with the Holocaust ..................................................................................... 37 Victoria Nesfield 4. Art in a Philosophical and Theological Discussion on Theodicy and Moral Evil ........................................................................................... 57 Pauline Kollontai 5. ‘Seeing Paradise in the Dust of the Streets’: A Reflection on Student Art Projects ................................................................................................ 74 Sue Yore 6. Guilt and Reconciliation – An Aesthetic Perspective: A Comparative Study of Artistic Contributions from Germany and South Korea ............. 99 Volker Küster 7. Peace-building through Minjung Art in Korea .................................... 125 Sebastian Kim

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8. Images and Peace ................................................................................ 150 Jyoti Sahi 9. Art as a Force for Peace ....................................................................... 163 Huibing He 10. The Processes of Community Painting: A Theological Enquiry ....... 172 Jenifer M. Baker Part II: Music 11. Modelling Harmony: Music in Peace-Building................................. 194 Jeremy Begbie 12. Art, Peacebuilding, and Reconciliation: Will Formation and Consequence ..................................................................................... 210 Michael Minch 13. The Role of Music and Dance in Peace Making and Reconciliation: The Case of Rwanda after the 1994 Genocide ........................................ 230 James Amanze 14. In Search of an Aesthetic of Peace: Empathy, Lament and Forgiveness in Conflict Transformation ...................................................................... 245 Chijioke John Ojukwu 15. Culturally Sensitive Music Activities in Conflict Areas: Increasing Mutual Learning, Respect, and Self-esteem through Music Workshops .... 265 Fabienne van Eck Part III: Film, Literature and Performing Arts 16. Mediating Peace and Reconciliation through Film ............................ 282 Peter Malone 17. Portraying Forgiveness through Documentary Film.......................... 301 Duncan Fisher and Jolyon Mitchell 18. Valleys of Hope and Despair: Peace Building through Independent Environmental Documentaries ................................................................ 316 Josepha Ivanka Wessels

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19. Unhooking the Hookworm: The Rockefeller Foundation and Mediated Health................................................................................ 335 Marina Dahlquist 20. Church Conflict and the Art of Healing............................................. 351 Theodora Hawksley 21. Wordless Peace: The Rhetoric and Potential of Physical Theatre for Communicating Peace ....................................................................... 366 Geoffrey Stevenson 22. ‘Our Peace is to do God’s Will’: Peacebuilding through Hagiography in the Work of George Mackay Brown ................................................... 385 Linden Bicket 23. A Liturgical Theology of Walking: Mediating the Estranged after War .................................................................................................. 402 Simon Feta Index ........................................................................................................ 418

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We are privileged to acknowledge particular contributions made to the volume. We wish to thank Revd Dr Chul-shin Lee and Revd Dr Andrew Chung Yoube Ha of Youngnak Presbyterian Church, Seoul for their generous support for the conference held at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. At the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, we would like to express our appreciation to Dr Lihi Yariv-Laor and Dr Kang-Keun Lee of the Department of Asian Studies, to Prof. Menahem Blondheim, Ms Naama Shpeter and Ms Cheryl Cashriel of The Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace, and to Ms Danielle Keduri-Edri of the Maiersdorf Faculty Club, for their help and participation in organisation. At York St John University, we would like to express our sincere thanks to Mrs. Suzanne Parkes and Ms Sian Henderson for organising the conference and Dr Victoria Nesfield for assisting with proof-reading the manuscripts. We also would like to mention our thanks to Prof. Julian Stern, Prof. David Maughan Brown and Revd Richard Andrew for their support and encouragement. We would like to thank Mr Samuel Baker, Miss Amanda Millar, and the team at Cambridge Scholars Publishing for their efficient work.

CONTRIBUTORS

Professor James N. Amanze is Lecturer at the University of Botswana. Revd Jennifer M Baker is a PhD student York St John University, UK. Professor Jeremy Begbie is Thomas A. Lanford Research Professor of Theology, Duke Divinity School, Duke University, USA. Dr Linden Bicket is Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Institute for the Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh, UK. Dr Marina Dahlquist is in the Department of Media Studies, Stockholm University, Sweden. Simon Feta is a student at Uganda Martyrs University, Uganda. Dr Duncan Fisher lectures on religion and science in popular culture in the United Kingdom and the USA. Dr Theodora Hawksley is a scholar with interests in the area of peacebuilding and Catholic Social Teaching. Revd Dr Huibing He is an artist and Pastor at Smithtown United Methodist Church, New York, USA. Professor David Jasper is Professor of Literature and Theology, University of Glasgow, UK. Professor Sebastian Kim is Chair in Theology and Public Life, Faculty of Education and Theology, York St John University, UK. Professor Pauline Kollontai is Professor of Higher Education in Theology and Religious Studies, Faculty of Education and Theology, York St John University, UK.

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Contributors

Professor Dr Volker Küster is Professor at Johannes Gutenberg Universitaet Mainz, Germany. Dr Peter Malone was the President of SIGNIS World Catholic Association for Communication. Revd Dr Michael Minch is Director of Peace and Justice Studies, Utah Valley University, USA. Professor Jolyon Mitchell is Professor of Communications, Arts and Religion and Director of the Centre for Theology and Public Issues (CTPI) at the University of Edinburgh, UK. Dr Victoria Nesfield is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Leeds, UK. Chijioke John Ojukwu is a PhD student at Leeds Metropolitan University, UK. Dr Jyoti Sahi is a founding member of the Asian Christian Art Association, and is the founder of the Indian School of Art for Peace, or Art Ashram, in Silvepura Village, North Bangalore, India. Dr Geoffrey Stevenson is Lecturer in Homiletics, Communication and Media Literacy, School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh, UK. Dr Josepha Ivanka Wessels is at the Peace & Conflict Studies, Department of Political Science, Lund University, Sweden. Fabienne van Eck is the Regional Representative for the Middle East, Musicians without Borders. Professor Lucien van Liere is Assistant Professor of Religion and Conflict, Dept. of Religious Studies and Theology, Faculty of Humanities, Utrecht University, The Netherlands. Dr Sue Yore is Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Education and Theology, York St John University, UK.

INTRODUCTION SEBASTIAN KIM, PAULINE KOLLONTAI AND SUE YORE

The use of art, music and film is a growing area of interest to academics, practitioners and professionals working in the area of conflict resolution and peace-building. There is a recognition that using these media can provide a creative and spiritual space for the individual to express what they have experienced or witnessed which otherwise they cannot articulate through the spoken word. Continuing to keep memories of hatred, anger, fear and suspicion ‘unspoken’ is not only unhealthy for the individuals concerned but militates against any attempt at a dialogue of reconciliation with the perpetrators and bystanders. Art, music and film can help victims regain their own sense of worth, dignity, identity and purpose as well as repairing the breakdown of social trust within and between people. Theoretically it seems plausible that using various forms of artistic expression can assist in the transformation of attitudes and actions to promote and build more just and peaceful societies, but empirically it appears more difficult to assess this. The numerous projects throughout the world where art, music and film are used as components of peace-building demonstrate that there is a growing need to develop interdisciplinary research in this area. The aim of this volume is to examine the role and contributions of art, music and film in peace-building and reconciliation. The distinctive approach of the volume is that it discusses various forms of these in peacebuilding in a wide range of conflict situations, particularly in religiously plural contexts; hence it provides readers with a comprehensive perspective. In addition, the contributors of this volume were selected from among prominent scholars and artists who examine theoretical, professional and practical perspectives and debates. There are three main areas of the arts addressed in these investigations: (1) visual art: utilising visual arts in peace-building, expressing conflict situations, and demonstrating community life in conflicts; (2) music: facilitating of music or musical activities in order to bring about peace and reconciliation; and (3) film and performing arts: making films and performances to convey

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the realities of conflicts and find new approaches to peace and reconciliation. The contributors to the volume have addressed the following research questions, which form the theoretical basis of this project: ‘In what way has the particular form of art enhanced peacebuilding in a conflict situation?’; ‘How do artistic forms become a public demonstration and expression of a particular socio-political context?’; and ‘In what way have the arts played the role of catalyst for peace-building; if not, why not?’In this introduction to the role of different forms of art in peace-building, we will discuss three threads that are common across the stands of visual art, music, film and performing arts: the role of art in transformation at an individual level; the role of art in peace-building between communities; and the role of art for bridging justice and peace in conflict and post-conflict situations. The first strand acknowledges that, although for peace to be sustainable, both structural and relational transformations are required as well as a long-term commitment to a process that improves the material and financial infrastructure of war-torn societies (Lederach 1997: 83), there is also the personal dimension of peace-building which centres on changes to attitudes and behaviours on the individual level. Hendrick van der Merwe and Tracy Vienings argue this point by drawing attention to the psychological and emotional layers of conflict which must be dealt with on the national, community and individual levels. Ignoring or providing an inadequate response at the individual level can mean that some victims of past violence may become the perpetrators of future tensions, unrest or violence (van der Merwe & Vienings 2001: 343-45). It is in the transformation at the individual level that the arts are seen as a beneficial tool in peace-building. The arts provide opportunities for individuals to help re-create and re-build the physical, psychological and spiritual dimensions of their own life and the lives of others. Art projects and art therapies are provided for both adults and children but there appear to be a predominant number of projects world-wide that work with children and young people. Although evidence that art can contribute to peace-building by working at the individual level is not easily available, there is a growing body of writings looking at how arts are being used in conflict resolution and peace-building. The most comprehensive examination of the arts-based approach is given in the work of Michelle LeBaron and Danyta Welch (2005). Many projects throughout the world where art is being used in the context of conflict-resolution and peace-building show that people who have been on either side of conflict, seem to relate to each other in a positive and honest way, at least for the period of time in which they are

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involved in doing or sharing art. Involvement in art activities during a conflict can help people ‘to maintain their humanity in working and sharing their ideas with others across community and ethnic lines’ (Senehi 2002: 78). In post-conflict peace-building, art can in the aftermath of destruction provide a safe space where people can come together to explore their experiences and emotions, can be used as a tool in conflict resolving, help those badly traumatised to have a mechanism through which to express and confront their experiences and fears; and help build empathy and understanding amongst outsiders’ (Zelizer 2003: 68).

According to Marian Libemann, art used in group work particularly can help develop many of the skills needed for healing and understanding between individuals and communities, but the key issue is that ‘Involvement in the arts engages the whole person speaking from the heart and uses their creativity and emotions’ (Liebmann 1996: 2). The importance of being able to “speak” honestly from the heart is perhaps the key to being able to return to some form of normality after experiencing traumatic events of the kind experienced in war. It can be a sign that the individual has begun to heal and that the dynamic and creative aspect of the human sense of being as represented and expressed through spirituality has been restored. The second strand of the role of art in peace-building in communities and wider societies, it could be argued, is that art is an important catalyst for peace-building through social transformation and providing ‘prophetic’ insights to a community. According to Herbert Marcuse (1978), art provides a space where people can imagine something different to their daily circumstances. Marcuse believes that art can create a new consciousness on the part of the viewer, which addresses the reality and complexity of a given situation and where the established reality and the potential future engage in a dialogical clash that has the potential to transform the established reality. The monopoly of established reality can be challenged by art as ‘it presents the possibility of a fulfilment, which only a transformed society could offer. Art can embody a tension which keeps hope alive – a memory of the happiness that once was, and that seeks its return’ (Marcuse 1978: 68). The act of doing art and/or observing art may transform human attitudes, ideas and actions. For Marcuse it is not just about the intellectual role of art in raising awareness and understanding of injustice that is key, but that art can move the human spirit towards effecting social change. So art that only portrays a situation which recreates ‘the miserable reality’ of those events is not sufficient to

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provoke change in a person’s thought and action (Marcuse 1978: 70). Of course, Marcuse is not speaking specifically about sacred or religious art but his important observation is that art can assist people to imagine a different way of living with or without a spiritual dimension coming into play. The work of Marcuse suggests that our views, opinions and ignorance can be challenged through art, which in turn can give new understanding or new meaning to the reality we observe and/or experience. Marcuse’s idea that art can assist in creating a new consciousness or enhance our awareness of ourselves and others is, according to Karen Stone, because art is prophetic; it stands ‘against rootlessness, selfabsorption, stagnation and ease, oppression and institutionalized cruelty and despair’ (Stone 2003: 118). Engaging with these feelings the viewer can be challenged to review their understanding of a situation or issue, it can sensitize us, produce an emotional response, and it can mobilise us to some form of action which reaches out to others. Art can have a prophetic dimension as it warns and challenges the viewer. The power of art as language is taken up by Stone as she speaks of art as 'a visual word' because it provides 'an antidote to numbness and broken images by embodying and re-enacting the mystery' (Stone 2003: 114). The prophetic dimension lays the possibility for art to sensitise and challenge the viewer through engaging with a personal narrative or memory. However, this does not always happen as another writer on the impact and power of images, Susan Sontag, points out. Sontag makes an extremely important point about images of suffering portrayed through various forms of art which she says does not always effect some level of change in the viewer because 'we can turn away' for a variety of reasons (Sontag 2003: 101). Sontag suggests that art does have the potential to transform attitudes by provoking questions that perhaps some people would not ask if the image of human suffering was not there to be seen (Sontag 2003: 104). Liebmann takes up this aspect of art more generally when she argues that works of art 'seem to add a dimension that was not easily available through words, and for some people, provided real insights and ways forward in conflicts' (Liebmann 1996: 1). The third strand focuses on the role of art in seeking justice in the process of peace-making. The connection between justice and peace is of much concern for scholars of peace studies and yet they are quite divided on this issue. In the case of protracted war, Todd D. Whitmore, in his discussion of the priority of justice or peace, questions what he sees as the priority of justice over peace in Catholic social teaching and argues that negative peace could be a precondition for justice. He points out that starting with justice is a problem since the various parties are all

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accountable and it is almost impossible to achieve positive peace until hostility is brought to a halt (Whitmore 2010: 160-61). He concludes that, on balance, the practical priority must be negative peace, as was expressed in the Refugee Law Project as ‘Peace First, Justice Later’.1 On the other hand, Pauline H. Baker argues the importance of seeking justice in the peace-building process. She identifies the tension between peace-building, which involves conflict resolution, and justice seeking, through establishing democracy and human rights. She regards those working for peace-building as ‘conflict managers’ and those seeking justice as ‘democratizers’. However, she argues that ‘peace is no longer acceptable on any terms; it is intimately linked with the notion of justice. Conflict resolution is not measured simply by the absence of bloodshed; it is assessed by the moral quality of the outcome’ (Baker 1996: 563-71). She further emphasises the importance of public accountability and basic human and political rights and criticises the ‘conflict managers’ as seeking short-term solutions and insists that a solid democratic foundation provides a better chance of sustainable security and peace (Baker 1996: 566). Some scholars have tried to search for ways to overcome this dilemma of a dichotomy between justice and peace. Daniel Philpott for example, argues for reconciliation as restorative justice, a concept which can be utilised in a situation of political conflict. He argues that the best example for restorative justice is South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and he draws his insights from ethical teachings from the three Abrahamic religions. He supports the suggestions that reconciliation complements justice, calling the result ‘justice of positive peace’ and justice that entails a comprehensive restoration of relationship (Philpott 2012: 50-53). His argument is valuable as he brings wisdom from religious traditions and applies it to political peace-making, by focusing on justice as dealing with justice in two dimensions of ‘right conduct’ and ‘right response to wrong conduct’, and on ‘comprehensive right relationship’ (Philpott 2012: 53). The above discussions are focused on approaches which balance justice and peace. One can say that, in a conflict situation, justice without peace leads to a fragmented and fragile situation which will continue to perpetuate injustice, and that peace without justice is often used by those in power to continue to exercise their oppression over victims of the conflict. Justice and peace have to kiss each other (Psalm 85:10) and those who are working on peace-building and conflict resolution agree on the 1

Refugee Law Project, ‘Peace First, Justice Later: Traditional Justice in Northern Uganda’. http://www.refugeelawproject.org/working_papers/RLP.WP17.pdf [accessed 1 June 2013].

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integral nature of these two aspects of peace-building. However, a number of contributors of this volume emphasise the importance of justice-seeking for the sake of sustainable peace-building and that art makes significant contributions which have been effective both in individual and community levels by providing aspirations and visual and tangible realities of conflict and injustice and also by envisaging future hope and sustainable peace. In the section on visual art, Lucien van Liere, who like other contributors to this book is interested in the role of empathy, tackles a troubling dilemma. He recognises that visual images from conflict areas may usefully contribute towards the peace-building process due to the shock factor, but they can equally serve as the catalyst for even more violence. Painters like Calot, Goya and Chapman, and photographers like Friedrich are given as examples of people who have tried to evoke compassion by visual portrayals of violence. Alternately, he points to the example of Iman Samudra, whose response to images of headless children in Afghanistan in 2001 was influential in his involvement in the 2002 Bali bombing. Van Liere, utilizes theories on art, image, representation and responsibility and concludes that the complex links between visual shock, compassion and action are difficult to fully understand. Images showing violence should not be automatically assumed to lead to peace because varied religious, cultural or political frameworks are used to interpret them. David Jasper’s chapter makes a thoughtful connection between Kandinsky’s theory of non-objective art and the non-material spaces of the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas. Jasper suggests an abstract approach to art and the spiritual detracts from the divisions and violence that haunt and disfigure the history of religions. It also provides a meditation within and across spiritual traditions by offering common ground in the spaces of the visual and non-material places for dialogue. The paper concludes in the contemporary art of China in the work of Jasper’s friend, Ding Fang, who is a prominent Beijing artist who takes his inspiration from the ancient classic the Chang Tzu and traditional landscape painting to express the sufferings of the present age. These artists, Jasper argues, challenge our reliance on theories to explain reality by offering ways out of settled positions that lead to prejudice. Jasper ends by reflecting that Rothko’s Chapel today has become a place of reconciliation and a spiritual haven that promotes peace and human rights. The chapter by Victoria Nesfield argues that the sculpture Freddie Gilroy and Belsen Stragglers (2011) by Ray Lonsdale, represents a type of Holocaust memorial uncharacteristic of statues and memorials typically found at museums and sites of murder. The statue, which is situated on a seafront bench in Scarborough, commemorates the British miner from Lonsdale’s native County Durham

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who was involved in the liberation of Bergen Belsen, leading the remaining survivors, the ‘Belsen stragglers’, out of the camp. Nesfield carefully argues that this artefact provides an alternative way of utilising art to engage a community with a conflict situation. A general overview of some of the key motifs in Holocaust commemoration in art and sculpture is drawn on to suggest that, although the Holocaust is physically absent, the fact that it is referred to in the title and its non-confrontational style, means that it can be an effective tool in reconciling a public audience with the memory and legacy of a conflict. Pauline Kollontai draws on an arts-based approach to peace building to consider how the use of paintings and drawings done by the victims or witnesses of conflict such as war, genocide and ethnic cleansing, might contribute to the learning experience of students undertaking a module on the Philosophy of Religion which addressed the issues of God, evil and suffering. Herbert Marcuse, Karen Stone and Susan Sontag, are used to discuss the findings of this research to support the idea that pre-existing perceptions can be challenged. The data collected from three groups of students suggests that art may indeed provide a space in which the reconfiguration of personal views about human suffering caused by moral evil is enabled through student’s in emotional responses. Sue Yore, reflects on student art projects and how they might contribute to a broader process of peace and transformation. Related themes are reflected on as they are expressed in visual art produced by students depicting tragic events like the Holocaust, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and 9/11. There are three main themes that emerge in relation to the topic of peace and reconciliation: the first points towards a utopian vision of universal love and harmony; the second envisages peace and reconciliation, or hope, evolving through and within the context of war and genocide; the third suggests that any resolution for preventing these in the future and building a peaceful and life affirming society must come through the toil of human hands. The ideas of students as artists, popular writers like Levertov, and Annie Dillard are discussed in conjunction with Karen Stone’s perception of prophetic art, Grace Jantzen’s notion of natality and the Jewish concept of tikkun olam to examine the role of visual art for imagining peace and reconciliation. The dialectical relationship between theology and aesthetics is a central theme within Voker Küster’s discussion where he explores secular art as an interstitial space for theological reflection. The generative themes of human life like birth, illness, suffering and death, hatred, violence and horror but also happiness, friendship and love are dealt with by artists and theologians alike. This assertion is modelled by placing German artists

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Gerhard Richter and South Korean artist Hong Song-Dam who both deal with questions of guilt, reconciliation, and grace in societal transformation processes of their countries into dialogue with writers Uwe Timm and Hwang Sok-Yong as recent chroniclers of history. Sebastian Kim provides an inspiring account of how art played a key role in the lives of ordinary people during the period of struggle and protest against the military backed government in Korea from 1961- 1988 in his discussion on minjung art. He outlines three key areas of concerns among minjung artists during this period: political oppression and human rights; abuse by the military-backed governments; and the peaceful unification of the two Koreas. To facilitate the discussion Kim identifies three key historic events which became a focus for the concerns of the minjung artists: the Chun Tae-il incident (1970); the Gwangju uprising (1980); and the National Council of Churches of Korea (NCCK) Declaration (1988) to discuss minjung artist responses. What is important to note here is how minjung theologians and artists did theology together in the service of a common goal of peace and justice. As a Christian artist Jyoti Sahi draws on Biblical, Puranic and Advisi myths and cultures to explore the relationship between ethics and aesthetics through the medium of the visual arts. He is particularly inspired by metaphors of light as illustrated on the front cover of this book in his painting Vision of Abraham. Sahi is comfortable to draw on both Christian and Hindu perspectives of ‘the Primal Vision’ of the Divine presence to invoke a spirit of dialogue. Art, for him is ultimately a way of bridging the gap between subjective experience and that of the ‘Other,’ between theory and experience, and between different religious perspectives so he positions artists as co-creators on the path towards peace and reconciliation. The chapter by Huibing He provides a moving personal account of her own experiences of conflict and the role that art has played in helping her to reflect on the context of her Christian faith and ministry. Her recollections of her childhood in China under Chairman Mao and later interest and developing involvement in art as a way to survive spiritually, provides the reader with an account of a personal experience to understand the more theoretically informed discussions in this book. As an artist, and pastor, she affirms the value of art to express feelings and thoughts about violence and conflict but also its power to strengthen faith and hope for peace. She also sees everything in the world as reflective of God’s creative and redemptive grace which she depicts sometimes explicitly in pictures of Biblical stories but largely in what she sees in nature and the ordinary people she encounters in her ministry and daily life. Jenny Baker reflects on the use of art in communities but unlike the previous chapter, her .

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context is not marked by conflict and oppression. Instead, Baker is concerned here with the processes of producing art in a community and how communal perspectives can be facilitated and reflected on. Describing herself as an artistic-mediator, she analyses three communal painting projects carried out in an area of rural England, with its numerous village sub-groups. She found that the diverse subjects incorporated in the paintings were not only local but pointed to wider concerns about good and evil, war and peace, reconciliation, and international harmony. Particular attention is paid to theological insights arising from the painting processes, both as expressed by the contributors themselves and her subsequent theological interpretation of their comments. To provide a broader understanding she reflects on descriptions of community paintings elsewhere in the world, especially from conflict areas to offer suggestions about fitting methodologies to situations in order to maximise the reconciliatory benefits of community painting. In the music section of this volume the contributors come from a diversity of subject disciplines and backgrounds (academic, professional and field based-practitioners). Their writings provide theoretical and case study approaches to exploring how music is being used in peace-building across the world. Contributors here, as in other sections in the book, use a variety of theoretical frameworks (theological, sociological and political) to discuss music as a peace-building tool. The chapter by Jeremy Begbie refers to music as having a mixed potential in the sense that it can help overcome aggression, hatred and division by fostering new understanding between people but also recognising that music can also be used to foster and perpetuate these negative attitudes and behaviour. Begbie discusses the mixed potential of music with particular reference to Christian conceptions of reconciliation. Michael Minch’s chapter initially examines art by examining its relationship to human rights, democratisation and justice movements and its power in Christian and spiritual formation. He argues the practice of music is deeply democratic and actually models democracy. Minch speaks about music containing two energies which can contribute to conflict transformation, peace-building and reconciliation. James Amanze’s discussion focuses on Rwanda after the 1995 Genocide. He investigates the role that music and dance play in establishing, promoting and nurturing harmonious relations and argues that these artistic expressions are unique forms of communication which transcend cultural boundaries which can help people to reach out to each other. Overall Amanze presents the case that music and dance can promote emotional and spiritual healing which are essential to the process of reconciliation.

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Chijioke John Ojukwu discusses the issue of empathy and lament through an examination of the music and poetry of Black Americans. His discourse presents the power of song and poetry in the cultivation of empathetic dialogue and listening which he argues creates a deeper and much more meaningful engagement with the ‘other’. The key issue in all of this is that lament can unmask violence, nurture empathy and also promote forgiveness, all of which are essential elements in conflict transformation. The chapter by Fabienne van Eck is set against the backdrop of musicians across the globe who work in potential or post conflict contexts alongside local people to teach music. Through reflection and analysis of her own work with women and children in the Middle East and Central East Africa she considers two key issues. First, the appropriateness of musical activities in a society whose musical culture may be radically different from that of the workshop leader and second, the types of activities that can help children in conflict areas to express themselves and to listen to the others in order to increase their self-esteem and empathy for each other while respecting their own (music) culture. The examples which van Eck discusses gives insights into how music can promote and help participants develop their teamwork, listening skills, and social skills. In the section on film and performing art, Peter Malone discusses the significance of cinema, especially during the twentieth century, and argues for more education, both for adults and children, in learning how to watch a film, reflect on it and share reflections. He advocates a greater involvement in cinema and its power to affect imagination, heart and mind. He suggests that a way of developing this is through reflection on storytelling through film as he has demonstrated in his case studies in this chapter. Duncan Fisher and Jolyon Mitchell analyse two documentary films, Rwanda: Living Forgiveness (2005) and Uganda: Ready to Forgive (2008), both of which focus on the practice of forgiveness. They examine the distinctive characteristics of these two films in their use of Rwandan and northern Ugandan traditions, or folk-mechanisms, for healing the wounds in society after the much conflict and suffering. Josepha Ivanka Wessels argues that social documentaries are aimed to enlighten and inform on the nexus between environment, democracy and peace and he examines the relationship between armed conflicts, the environmental roots to these conflicts and theories of ecological peace-building, through the use of film in the context of Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Marina Dahlquist discusses the international campaign strategies aimed to eliminate inequalities in sanitary and social conditions worldwide by examining the work of the International Health Bard and

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Rockefeller-film Unhooking the Hookworm (1920), which was the key educational tool in British Guiana, Jamaica and Puerto Rico. On the topic of performing arts, Theodora Hawksley explores the two recent works of Fearghus Ó’Conchúir who is one of Ireland’s leading independent choreographers and dancers: Mo Mhórchoir Féin (2010) and Tabernacle (2011), in which he explores the relationship between the Church and the Irish people. She argues that Ó’Conchúir’s work reveals ‘body’ as a helpful metaphor for peace-building in the church in Ireland since we can express the task in theological terms as learning to live as a wounded risen body. Geoffrey Stevenson examines some of the ways in which physical theatre or ‘mime’ may be a form of affective, non-verbal rhetoric useful in peace-building. He argues that physical theatre, when interrogated through rhetorical analyses, remains a significant means of embodying narratives, symbols and values that can be formative for a ‘virtuous’ community and inspirational for the empathetic individual. Linden Bicket discusses the life and work of George Mackay Brown, a well known Scottish poet. She examines ways in which acts of nonviolence and sacrifice for the sake of peace are dramatized by Brown, who demonstrates his moral and sacramental imagination through his shaping of the life of St Magnus into fiction and suggests a number of ways in which Brown’s novel can be opened up, used, adapted and put in place for practical arts-based peace-building strategies. Simon Feta explores the liturgical theology of walking as a means for mediating between people in post-conflict Uganda. He argues, using the image of walking in the Bible, for the centrality of the body in worship. In emergence from war, a fusion of embodied demands echoing reconciliation frames sporadic opportunities for reviewing enacted liturgies to foster peace initiatives between individuals, communities and state. The chapters in this volume were originally presented at the fourth International Conference on Peace and Reconciliation at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2012. During the opening session, David Maughan Brown welcomed the participants by using the greetings of Zulu speaking South Africans. ‘Sawu bona’ literally means, ‘I see you’ and the response is ‘sikhona’, which means ‘I am here’. He explained the importance of these greetings: until you ‘see’ me, I do not exist, and when you ‘see’ me, you bring me into existence. This was reiterated by Richard Andrew at the last session of the conference, who suggested that these greetings express ‘something fundamental about the significance of recognition in human encounter: I recognise you; I comprehend you; I make space for you; I embrace you; I see you’. He further expanded:

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Introduction How do we develop a wisdom of seeing when our viewpoints both overlap and diverge? One theme that has emerged [from the contributions of this volume] is the ability of the arts and religious and political traditions both to create conditions for human flourishing and to destroy them. As we were reminded in a number of ways, the arts and other forms of expression do not exist in the abstract but in embodied practices. So what practices might serve human flourishing, however we might interpret it? ... I would suggest that practices which serve human flourishing will be of at least three kinds: celebratory (doxological), revelatory, and redemptive. They are celebratory because they create a capacity to see the diversity of human life and expression as a gift, as something to be celebrated; revelatory because they have a capacity to expose the truth about ourselves, to ‘unhide’ the truth, to ‘see the suffering of my people’, (a theme picked up in Jyoti Sahi’s use of the image of the eye in his paintings in the cover page); and redemptive because they have a capacity to re-humanise, to help us share together in the task of becoming what we might be.

In spite of limitations and shortcomings, various forms of art have contributed to bringing peace and justice. They help us to ‘see the suffering of my people’, to work for sustainable peace-building. Religious individuals and communities are part and parcel of this endeavour.

References Baker, P.H. (1996) ‘Conflict Resolution versus Democratic Governance: Divergent Paths to Peace?’ in Chester A. Crocker & Fen Osler Hampson (eds), Managing Global Chaos: Sources of and Responses to International Conflict, Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press, 563-71. Le Baron, M. and Welch, D. (2005) Arts, Creativity and Intercultural Conflict Resolution: Literature and Resource Review, Vancouver: Conflict Resolution, Arts, and Intercultural Experience Publishing. Lederach, J.P. (1997) Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies, Washington D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Publications. Liebmann, M. (ed) (1996) Arts Approaches to Conflict, London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Marcuse, H. (1978) The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics, London: MacMillan Education. Philpott, D. (2012) Just and Unjust Peace: An Ethic of Political Reconciliation, New York: OUP.

Sebastian Kim, Pauline Kollontai and Sue Yore

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Refugee Law Project, ‘Peace First, Justice Later: Traditional Justice in Northern Uganda’. http://www.refugeelawproject.org/working_papers/RLP.WP17.pdf (accessed 1 June 2013). Senehi, J. (2002) ‘Constructive Storytelling in Inter-Communal Conflicts: Building Community, Building Peace’ in Byrne, S. and Irvin, C. (eds), Reconcilable Differences, Turning Points in Ethno-Political Conflict West Hartford, C.T: Kumarian Press. Sontag, S. (2003) Regarding the Pain of Others, London: Penguin Books. Stone, K. (2003) Image and Spirit: Finding Meaning in Visual Art, London: Longman & Todd. Van der Merwe, H. and Vienings, T. (2001). ‘Coping with Trauma’ in Reychler, L. and Paffenholz, T. (eds) Peace-building: A Field Guide, Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Reinner Publishers Inc. Whitmore, T.D. (2010) ‘Peacebuilding and Its Challenging Partners: Justice, Human Rights, Development, and Solidarity’ in R.J. Schreiter, R. S. Appleby and G.F. Powers (eds), Peacebuilding: Catholic Theology, Ethics, and Praxis, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 155-89. Zelizer, C. (2003) ‘The Role of Artistic Processes in Peace-Building in Bosnia-Herzegovina’, Peace and Conflict Studies, 10/2: 62-75.

PART I: VISUAL ART

1 WEEPING PICTURES: LINKING VIOLENCE AND EMPATHY IN VISUAL ARTS LUCIEN VAN LIERE

Samudra’s conjunctive One day, Imam Samudra was looking at pictures of headless infants from Afghanistan on the internet. It was 2001. The US was bombing the Taliban. Reports about civilian casualties (‘body counts’) were published on the internet by different NGOs and anti-war groups. On some of these websites pictures of dead or severely injured people were uploaded. Imam Samudra came across these war-pictures and was shocked by what he saw there and made a decision: he would avenge the children. In his notebook he showed a deep awareness of the grisly reality of the pictures and wrote: Those images are photos of what really happened, that are scanned, put into a computer, and then uploaded onto the internet. They are immovable, without sound, numb. But the souls cried out in agony and their suffering filled my heart, taking on the suffering of their parents… (Editors Tempo, 2003; my italics).

In another diary-phrase Samudra wrote: ‘Your weeping, oh headless infants, slammed against the walls of Palestine, Your cries, oh Afghani infants, all called to me; all you, who, now armless, executed by the vile bombs of hell’ (Tempo 2003: 15-16). Imam Samudra became one of the architects of the Bali-bomb that killed 202 people in October 2002. What do pictures of violence do? How to understand the interaction between a picture of headless children and Imam Samudra as an observing, understanding, acting agent? Samudra’s diary-notes, partly published by the Indonesian magazine Tempo, show at least three levels of interaction between the agent and the picture. First, Samudra ‘saw’ pictures that were ‘immovable’, ‘soundless’ and ‘numb’. Secondly, these

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pictures, or better: the ‘souls’ of what was soundless, suddenly start to ‘cry out in agony’. Thirdly, Samudra acknowledges the reality of what he sees, taking up the grief of the parents. By acknowledging this, imagining the grief of broken ties, he draws the picture out of its two-dimensional physical frame and extends the cry he heard and felt in such a way that it also includes Palestinian infants. Their cries become personal; they all cried ‘to me’, Samudra claims. In the end, the personal appeal is framed within theological language: the bombs are from hell. Samudra decides that the ‘cry out of agony’ that he hears from these soundless pictures are a strong appeal for revenge. Are they? The pictures Samudra saw were not ‘crying’, neither were they ‘calling’. He didn’t know about the grief of their parents. Nevertheless, he ‘heard’ something that became a moral imperative and a strong motivation behind the terror-attack on Bali. Samudra’s story raises the question of the impact of pictures of violence that are shown on the internet, in newspapers, magazines, used by fund-raising campaigns of NGOs etc. For Samudra however, the shocking pictures of violence did not encourage peace but instigated more violence. What do pictures of violence do? How does visual arts or, more specifically, paintings, drawings, photographs lead us to ‘empathy’ (both violent and irenic) and how can we understand the link between the agent and the picture? In this article I am exploring a possible answer to this question by focusing on the interaction between pictures and the observing agents. Samudra uses the word ‘but’ as if he is aware of a gap between what he saw and heard and what was pictured. This ‘but’ is exactly the moment the observing agent and the picture seems to fuse into one, or, when the pictures become alive in the biography of the agent. When Samudra became responsible for the bombing of two pubs on Bali one year later, he almost literally re-created what he observed, becoming an ‘actor’ in the atrocity he initially observed. I will use W. J. Thomas Mitchell’s theory on picture and image and Judith Butler’s theory on human grief and social relationality to examine this capricious ‘but’ that forms the link between agency and picture. I will understand this ‘link’ as a physical link, connecting the violated bodies in a picture with the physical constitution of the observing agent. But before I will explore Mitchell’s and Butler’s theories, I will underline the importance of my question by exploring the problematic way visual arts is used in modern European history to make an argument for peace through pictures of violence.

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Efforts to make arguments for peace through visual arts In modern European history (I will confine myself to this part of the world), different efforts have been made to demand attention for the disasters of violent conflicts. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, mainly due to the European wars that had a strong religious colour, violence became more down-to-earth for the first time in European history. Unlike arts showing the sacred history of suffering saints and a suffering Christ or unlike arts that somehow seem to rejoice in the punishment of heretics, a growing sensibility appeared about the gruesome effects of war, whether justified or not. One of the first painters who showed the abominable effects of warfare through arts was Jaques Calot (1592-1635). In his Les Grande Misere de la Guerre, a series of eighteen prints made in 1633, he did not glorify The Thirty Years European war, but showed how this war had produced anger, grief, death and revenge. Later painters, like Francisco de Goya (1746-1828) at the start of the nineteenth century, followed Calot’s example. But unlike Calot, whose scenes show violence from a distance, Goya portrayed close-up broken bodies and scenes of extreme suffering. This was until then predominantly known only from Medieval portrayals of the suffering Christ, suffering saints or from paintings about punishments in hell or public executions of heretics, in which the ‘why’ of suffering was not asked. Goya’s paintings and etchings showed the cruelties of the Dos de Mayo Uprising, the Peninsular War in 1808, the famine in Madrid and the disappointing restoration of the Bourbon monarchy. Los desastres de la Guerra, the series title was a literal translation of Calot’s printed series, was painted between 1810 and 1814 and not published until 1863, due to its anticlerical and politically critical content. The etchings propose an intense relationship between the observing agent on the one, and the inner construction in the etching between perpetrator and victim on the other ‘side’. The fractured bodies in i Grande nazaĖa! i Con muertos! for instance, link directly with the body of the agent and create a feeling of disgust and nausea. The series made by Calot and Goya during different times made the same argument: violence creates violence and is, in the end, extenuated by the lawful authorities. There is no justice for the victims. This way, feelings of disgust, repulsion and injustice remain and are not reconciled. Later portrayals of war were and still are often modeled after Calot’s and Goya’s ‘disaster of war’ series, like for instance Otto Dix’ drawings of the First World War, Salvador Dali’s premonition of the Spanish Civil War or Jake and Dino Chapman’s paintings of the First Gulf War. What

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these paintings continually show is the violent dissection of human bodies. You see human limbs, scattered across the two-dimensional surface of the painting. It is like the painter cuts into the flesh of the observing agent. You feel the misery the painters show, especially because their paintings show artificial, sometimes sadistic reshufflings of human limbs. What is interesting about these paintings is that the artists make their argument by showing violated bodies. The argument about violence and warfare is made by nameless bodies that somehow link with ‘my’ body as observer. It is like the distance between ‘my’ body and ‘their’ bodies is brushed away and I am pulled into the painting through somatic responses like disgust and nausea. I think this somatic moment is precisely what Samudra explains with the conjunction ‘but’, that marks the transition between seeing a picture and feeling a picture; between seeing scattered bodies and hearing them cry. The appearance of photography, mid-nineteenth century, seemed to be an interesting opportunity to ‘show’ the ‘real’ disasters of war. The ‘magic’ of photography, to show something shocking ‘real’, did not immediately have the same result as had paintings and etchings of artists making an impartial argument against the violence of warfare. The first war-photography appeared during the American Civil War in the 1860s. Matthew Brady photographed a whipped black man, his half-naked body showing clearly the signs of horrific torture. The photo was disseminated across the Union-states of the American North, showing the evil that Union-troops were battling. This picture was not meant to erase compassion alone; it was also an argument justifying the Union-actions against the South. The naked body is not only to show what the practice of whipping does; it is also part of the argument, as if its nakedness shows its vulnerability and links with the body of the viewer. The photo did not change public opinion, but rather confirmed a conviction that was already there. After the American Civil War, Brady tried to sell his photographs, but it seems people were not interested in war-pictures and could not see the value of it. In the same way, pictures were made during the Boer Wars in South Africa (1880-1881; 1899-1902). These pictures were predominantly made to ‘inform’ the homeland England about the proceedings of the troops at the battlefield. During the First World War something changed. Close-ups of wounded and dead soldiers were taken for the first time in history. After this war, in 1924, German photographer Ernst Friedrich published an uncanny book entitled Krieg dem Kriege! (War Against War!). In this book, Friedrich published twenty four close-up photos of badly wounded combatants along many grisly pictures of badly wounded or dead soldiers

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from both sides (Friedrich 2004). Friedrich wanted to send a clear message to the post-World War I world: this is what war does; this is the result of violence. He presumed that these pictures of war and violence would work as a shock-therapy for Europe. Doing so, he presumed that picturing violence and suffering erases compassion or at least a fear for violence. Friedrich, still strongly based within a tradition of European pacifism, presumed that the anger raised by seeing these pictures has the power to transform violence, through abhorrence of violence, into non-violence. In other words: he presumed that abhorrence of violence would not transform into anger and feelings of revenge towards the perpetrators. Responses to his book were very hostile and his center for peace that he established was burned down. However, war-photographer Hermann Rex felt encouraged by Ernst’s attempt and published in 1926 about 600 photographs in three volumes entitled Der Weltkrieg in Seiner Rauhen Wirklichkeit (The Brutal Reality of the World War). Again, broken, violated, torn apart bodies were used as argument. Friedrich and Rex clearly wanted to show the harsh reality of war, to make the dead bodies weep and scream, like a Medieval Christ, who looks down from the cross at ‘me’ and makes ‘me’ responsible for his suffering. After World War II, pictures and movies of concentration camps, made by the Allied forces were published. In German cinemas, people were confronted with the Shoah and some were hoping it would shock and make people think about their responsibilities, expecting these movies would create an opportunity to link with recent history. This however did not happen. The shock was there, but the link with any form of responsibility was lacking. Responses were rather defensive, excluding what happened from the direct context of the observing agent. It took a while before the Auschwitz-pictures made by Wilhelm Brasse were published showing extreme suffering of vulnerable, often naked bodies. Brasse had been a Polish photographer and prisoner in Auschwitz, assigned with the task to take pictures of prisoners. During his life after the war, Brasse always kept close a specific picture he made of naked boys who were close to death due to starvation. They are smiling. This contradiction produces an extreme shock, knowing these children were about to die. These boys with their smiles accuse the observing agents. For a photograph to accuse, it must shock, Susan Sontag writes (Sontag 2003: 72). Brasse photographed about 35,000 people before they were killed. These pictures became a haunting image for all other faces he saw through the lens after the war: ‘When I tried to photograph young girls, for example, dressed normally,’ he told Agence France-Presse, ‘all I’d see would be these Jewish children’ (Hevesi 2012). After Brasse’s death in

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October 2012, a picture was disseminated across the internet showing Brasse at old age with the picture of the naked boys in his hands; as a continuing accusation against modern European history. The theme of nakedness is not something accidentally appearing in pictures of war and violence. Nakedness is notable throughout the history of painting and picturing suffering and has a history that at least goes back to (half-) naked suffering saints and the suffering of Christ in the early Middle Ages. Nakedness stresses the picture as an icon and underlines the argument made by enhancing human vulnerability in a context of violence. Many shocking photographs that have made it to western media show naked or half-naked bodies. Nick Ut’s famous photograph of the nine-year old girl for example showing third-degree burns due to a Napalm-attack in the Vietnam War in 1972, almost literally inscribes the war onto her naked body. The same theme comes back in the famous picture of the Omarskaconcentration camp in Bosnia in 1994 that was reproduced by the press over and over again. And we see the same coming back, from a different angle, in the Abu-Ghraib pictures of 2006, although these pictures could not be understood as an argument against violence and could be better positioned into the tradition of picturing the suffering of heretics in scenes of the punishment and the execution or ‘evildoers’ in hell.

Framing pictures These pictures changed public opinion. However, this ‘changing’ may be critically addressed. The Vietnamese picture in 1972 was published by American media amidst an already changing public opinion. The massacre of Mai Lai and similar stories had corrected the idea that American soldiers were liberating the oppressed Vietnamese from a serious communist threat. The Omarska-picture disseminated across the world because it reminded especially the Western world about the World War II concentration camps, while the responsible Serbs were already portrayed in media around the world as the ‘bad guys’ of the Balkan War, and the Abu-Ghraib pictures became an argument against the US-invasion of Iraq especially for those who were already critical about this war. In other words: these pictures did not change public opinion, but confirmed an already existing framing of the conflict portrayed. The vulnerable, mostly naked bodies of the people depicted confirmed already existing mind-sets. To some they cried out, to others however, they remained without sound. Some could imagine the grief of ‘their’ loved ones, while others could not link with what they observed. As Judith Butler suggests, ‘whether and how we respond to the suffering of others, how we formulate moral criticisms,

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how we articulate political analyses, depends upon a certain field of perceptible reality having already been established’ (Butler 2009: 64). How can this ‘suffering of others’ critically be addressed in such a way that this suffering becomes suffering as such, as the effect of violence as such, without demanding retaliation but with as a question towards justice and reconciliation? In other words: how can empathy develop in such a way that the trap of the cycle of vengeance is avoided? The initial question, can visual arts, or more specifically, paintings, drawings, photographs of violence lead to empathy and how can we understand the link between the observing agent and the picture, can now be explored more deeply. Until now I have argued that the frame in which a picture ‘speaks’, to use Mitchell’s terminology (Mitchell 2005), determines, or at least affects an empathetic or apathetic response. The weeping pictures Samudra ‘saw’ wept about Palestine and cried out for revenge. Samudra’s frame, the war on terror and the response of the transnational mujahedeen, engaged a link between Samudra as agent and the pictures of headless infants. Surely the lives of these infants became visible in their precariousness? But Samudra decided to make a copy of their suffering on the life of youths celebrating their holidays on Bali in Indonesia. Mitchell’s theory on picture and image can help. The ‘frame’, as discussed above, is the context in and by which the subject perceives a picture. Butler, but more clearly Mitchell, turns this the other way around and asks how ‘the other’, say, the picture, becomes alive. This is an interesting, original argument that can help us to understand the tie between picture and agent.

Acting pictures In his article ‘What Do Pictures Really Want?’ W.J.T. Mitchell shifts the analyses of pictures from power (what power do pictures have?) to desire (what desires do pictures have?). He argues that a subaltern model of the picture, as he proposes, ‘opens up the actual dialectics of power and desire in our relations with pictures’ (Mitchell 1996: 74). Indeed, the question ‘what do pictures do and what power do they have’ can be studied by looking at interpretation, effect and social power frames. Jack Shaheen for example has convincingly criticized the graphic stereotypes and visual racism of Hollywood portrayals of Arabs (Shaheen 2009). Peter Morey and Amina Yaqin, to mention another example, have demonstrated how English media use classic stereotyped of Muslims to portray English Muslims in current media. These ‘pictures’ do have a social power (Morey and Yaqin 2011). But the question what do pictures want is embedded into

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a much more complex matrix of power and desire. Surely, Samudra heard with his eyes and although revenge was not communicated by the pictures he saw, he heard them crying for revenge. In order to understand this complex matrix, we need to dig deeper into the question what a picture wants, i.e., the complex interaction between what is shown and what is seen and the specific role played by power (whose power?) and desire (whose desire?). In an interview in Image and Narrative, Mitchell describes a picture as ‘at least potentially a kind of vortex, or ‘black hole’ that can ‘suck in’ the consciousness of a beholder, and at the same time (and for the same reason) ‘spew out’ an infinite series of reflections’ (Grønstad and Vågnes 2006: 1). This pull and push dynamic of a picture is especially at work in pictures of violence. In his 2005 book What Do Pictures Want? Mitchell argues that pictures are ‘complex assemblages of virtual, material, and symbolic elements’ (Mitchell 2005: xiii). These assemblages are powerful subjects of culture and cultural imagination. They are paradoxical creatures, ‘both concrete and abstract, both a specific individual thing and a symbolic form that embraces a totality’ (Mitchell 2005: xvii). In order to understand the link between me as subject of meaning and interpretation and the picture as subject, Mitchell distinguishes between picture and image. If a picture is a complex assemblage, an image is ‘any likeness, figure, motif, or form that appears in some medium or other’ (Mitchell 2005: xiii-xiv). An image can appear in a picture but is never identical with it. A picture vanishes; an image however, lives on, haunting, frightening or inspiring us. According to Mitchell, the image can be part of the Freudian ‘uncanny’. A picture is only the surface of an image. This becomes especially clear when Mitchell speaks about ‘destroying an image’. He argues that while pictures can be destroyed, the image survives … destruction, and often becomes even more powerful in its tendency to return in other media, including memory, narrative, and fantasy … . The act of destroying or disfiguring an image (…) has the paradoxical effect of enhancing the life of that image. An image is never quite so lively as in the moment when someone tries to kill it (Grønstad and Vågnes 2006: 3).

Often, pictures are destroyed because of the image they bear. The image of the Twin Towers for example clearly survived its destruction, haunting an extremely violent conflict for more than a decade in which the collapse of the Towers was repeated multiple times in the bombings of buildings in Afghanistan and Iraq. The pictures of the headless children Samudra saw were the surface of an intersection of many images including the Twin

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Towers. Many violent conflicts, wars and genocides are filled with earlier memories of destruction, failed negotiations, traumatic feelings and injustices, grievances and broken ties. This way, Mitchell’s theory of picture and image ranges wide beyond the borders of arts and cultural theory. Images, surrounding pictures, can be trans-generational clusters of memory, social-psychological frames, shaped and reshaped or distorted and deformed, ‘materialized’ and ‘materializing’ at a surface in pictures. The meaning of a picture however is very wide. Pictures are not only photographs and pieces of visual arts; you are my picture and I am yours, but what I see in you and what you see in me is an assemblage coproduced by psychological, cultural and historical images that are not always clear to us, but nevertheless make me feel about seeing you and you seeing me. Mitchell’s argument about the destruction of images adds an extra dimension to what is called ‘cultural’ violence. As Johan Galtung’s influential definition goes: by ‘cultural violence’ we mean those aspects of culture ... that can be used to justify or legitimize direct or cultural violence. Cultural violence makes direct and structural violence look, even feel, right – or at least not wrong (Galtung 1990: 291-92).

Taking cultural violence together with Mitchell’s theory of picture and image, ‘culture’ becomes a problematic term as only subject of what one might ‘feel’ about violence, if ‘culture’ is taken as the provisional result of an affective cluster of religion, history etc. What one makes feel ‘right, or at least not wrong’ about violence is (also) the haunting image one wants to destroy in justifying violence, an image that might well be part of ‘culture’ but somehow precedes and maybe even creates it. Mitchell describes the collective side of the image in such a way that it can almost replace the term ‘culture’. He speaks about ‘objectivist projections of a kind of collective imperial subject, fantasies about other people, specifically other people’s beliefs about certain kinds of objects’ (Mitchell 2005: 163). In this context, the question about empathy becomes even more urgent. Of course, Ernst Friedrich’s pictures of broken bodies and heavily injured faces did not make people feel ‘bad’ about what they saw. In the collective image in post-War Germany there was only very limited space for the suffering of ‘others’ and the soldiers of World War I were seen as Helden (heroes). Raising empathy for all victims contradicted the collective image of national sacrifice (Weisbrod, 2001). Mitchell does not explicitly speak about empathy. With Mitchell’s theory, it nevertheless seems very easy to

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become skeptical about empathy. Empathy might very well be a social affect of disappeared but very lively images. And indeed very often it is striking to see how empathy for some does not mean empathy for others. As Slavoj Žižek observes, when he speaks about media-portrayals of violence: ‘The death of a West Bank Palestinian child, not to mention an Israeli or an American, is mediatically worth thousands of times more than the death of a nameless Congolese’ (Žižek 2009: 2-3). Media expect a partial empathy; the conflict in Israel and Palestine still haunts European and American consciousness, while the conflict in the Congo, the bloodiest conflict of the twenty-first century, is excluded as part of Western history. While Mitchell’s theory on image and picture shows the impossibility of impartial empathy, I will nevertheless have a closer look at empathy, using insights from Judith Butler. The leading question will be what empathy exactly is. Butler’s sharp question about ‘when’ life is grievable, as she has explored this question in Precarious Life (2003) and Frames of War (2009) helps to understand the enormous tension between a picture and the image as a mental, cultural, social, political, historical frame of the picture. Butler dives deep into this question when she links empathy with the ‘nature’ of grief and relationality. Although I am aware of the fact that asking the question of relationality and empathy within the context of the argument explored in this article has to deal with multiple layers of analyses, including, to name just one, the analyses of the human brain (Preston and De Waal 2002), I will confine my analyses to Butler’s thoughts on grief and – what she calls - ‘grievability’ and link these with Mitchell’s theory of image and picture.

Shocking pictures and broken ties There is something between the shock of seeing violence and the way we care for what we see. There is, Butler writes, ‘a regulative power that creates the differential at the level of affective and moral responsiveness’ (Butler 2009: 50). Mitchell’s image surely is such a regulative power. While Mitchell’s focus is on what precedes to the relationship between observer and picture, say, to the desire of a picture, Butler jumps more deeply into the relationship between picture and agent. Responsibility, she argues, requires responsiveness and ‘is not merely a subjective state’. On the contrary, human beings are social beings. When we see horror, we respond with all kind of elaborate social interpretations. ‘Our affect is never merely our own’, but communicated ‘from elsewhere’. Butler adds an interesting and original insight to the question of empathy when she approaches the question of violence and empathy through the subject of

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the – what she calls – ‘grievability’ of life. By asking the question ‘when is life grievable?’ she turns to the very basics of dehumanization and compassion. Answering this ‘when’, deconstructs the images that lie beneath the surface. Grief somehow shows the tie by which people are connected and acknowledged. The ability to grieve means that people care about the loss of the other, that the invisible tie that constitute relations between humans is broken. In Precarious Life, Butler writes: On one level, I think I have lost ‘you’ only to discover that ‘I’ have gone missing as well. At another level, perhaps what I have lost ‘in’ you, that for which I have no ready vocabulary, is a relationality that is composed neither exclusively of myself nor you, but is to be conceived as the tie by which those terms are differentiated and related (Butler 2004: 22).

Grief displays the intense tie we share with the other. Butler states that grief is as such a challenge to the notion that we are autonomous and in control (Butler 2004: 23). We are, she writes, ‘undone by each other’. The notion of ‘me’ and ‘I’ as something that is ‘in control’ over its being there, its sexuality, religion or culture is highly problematic precisely because these aspects are not autonomous activities limited to something like a subjectivity but thoroughly constituted by and through the agent’s relationality with others. Grief displays that being ‘ourselves’ is always problematic. The grief Samudra felt was, according to his report, not only his own grief, but also the grief of the parents of the children he saw. Although he did not know the parents, he could imagine the atrocity as a part of his own life. This way, the desire of pictures, of which Mitchell speaks, is not located in the picture itself, or in the observing agent, but exists in the tie that is constructed at the surface and reveals the deep images by which photos live and people are haunted. According to Butler, this tie is not merely a mental issue, but predominantly a physical one: ‘the body (...) is where we encounter a range of perspectives’ (Butler 2009: 53). The body reveals the ‘physics’ of political, economic, sexual, social networks in which I live, in which I am treated in a certain way and respond in a certain way. Responding to a picture is prepared by the networks I live in. If I am shocked, my shock is embedded not only in myself but also in my social network that may have prepared my ‘being shocked’ as a ‘normal’ or even socially ‘demanded’ response. If this is the case, I strengthen my tie by responding in the expected way. Another aspect of this shock that is somehow related to this normality is that the shocked agent can imagine that what she sees could somehow be part of her own context, and thus of her social responsibility (Sontag).

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Although ‘being shocked’ may be part of a normalizing social strategy that resituates a subject in her or his social network (Butler), or as part of an imagination that fuses both contexts (Sontag), ‘being shocked’ also contains an interesting physical element. Being shocked about violence can be understood as an original somatic response. Certainly, this response is quickly normalized by the images we hold and share within our networks and that make up our social imaginaries of ‘the normal’ or ‘the proper way to respond’; it can also be ‘normalized’ by my imagination that ‘something like this’ would never threaten my social context. Nevertheless, the shock itself seems to be an original moment, a, as Theodor W. Adorno understood it, non-discursive ‘addendum’ to observing violence, or a somatic ‘impulse’ that precedes my constitution as thinking subject (Adorno 1966: 228). From this perspective, nakedness has indeed an important function. It confronts, shames, and links directly with the observer’s body by which he feels the shock. Scattered limbs, burned skin and bodies in humiliating positions, link directly with my body by which I respond. It is an original somatic response that nevertheless is quickly normalized and, as a question to my responsibility, neutralized. However, the shock may also be linked with my responsibilities in my context. I may accept what I see as part of my reality and thus as part of my responsibility. The fact that this realization not only leads to irenic moral actions, but depends on underlying social, historic, traumatic images is clearly shown by Samudra’s story.

Conclusion Can drawings and photographs of violence create empathy? Constituted by and as my relations (Butler), in other words, by and as my image (Mitchell), the original shock will be framed, ‘normalized’ and made harmless before it can turn into painful reflection. This was however certainly not the case with Imam Samudra. Shocked by seeing headless infants, the shock he felt did not only become a shock about violence and suffering he saw, but was immediately inscribed into the religious ‘image’ of the perpetrators as ‘infidels’. As a result, he violated his image of the perpetrator by creating a copy of the atrocity in Legian Street on Bali in 2002. If images are so strong that responses to violence can create another violence that is justified by the former violence (what is called the ‘cycle of vengeance’), ‘showing’ violence is never automatically an argument for peace. Although there is an impulsive, somatic response to violence that seems to be non-discursive, the shock is immediately inscribed into images of justice, social fears and historically generated perpetrator-victim

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Weeping Pictures: Linking Violence and Empathy in Visual Arts

dualities. This seems to be a ‘normal’ human response that functions as the re-creation of normality after being disturbed by pictures of warfare and violence. The question remains challenging if the impulsive shock that is the agent’s first somatic response to pictures of violence can ‘endure’ in such a way that this shock also includes my responsibilities as a moral agent and thus turn into a new image against violence as such. Samudra’s story certainly shows the difficulty of such a turn.

References Adorno, T.W. (1966) Negative Dialektik, Gesammelte Schriften 6, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag. Butler, J. (2009) Frames of War, When Is Life Grievable?, London, New York: Verso. —. (2004) Precarious Life, The Powers of Mourning and Violence, London, New York: Verso. Friedrich, E. (2004) Krieg dem Kriege, reprinted edn., München: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt. Galtung, J. (2009) ‘Cultural Violence’, Journal of Peace Research, 27: 291-305. Grønstad, A. and Vågnes, Ø. ‘What do pictures want? Interview with W.J.T. Mitchell’, Image and Narrative. http://www.visual-studies. com/interviews/mitchell.html (accessed 20 December 2012). Hevesi, D. (2012) ‘Wilhelm Brasse dies at 94; Documented Nazi’s Photographs’, The New York Times, 24 October 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/25/world/europe/wilhelm-brasse-diesat-94-documented-auschwitz.html?_r=0, (accessed 5 January 2013). Mitchell, W.J.T. (1996) ‘What Do Pictures ‘Really’ Want?, October, Vol. 77: 71-82. Mitchell, W.J.T. (2005) What do pictures want? The lives and loves of images, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Morey, P. and Yaqin, A. (2011) Framing Muslims, Stereotyping and Representation after 9/11, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Preston, S. D. and de Waal, F. B.M. (2002) ‘Empathy: Its ultimate and proximate bases’, in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 25: 1-72. Shaheen, J. (2009) Reel Bad Arabs, How Hollywood Vilifies a People, Dublin: Olive Branch Publishers. Sontag, S. (2003) Regarding the Pain of Others, London, New York: Penguin Books. Tempo editors (2003) ‘The Fires of Revenge’, in Tempo, 6 October 2003, 14-20. Žižek, S. (2009) Violence, Six Sideway Reflections, London: Profile Books.

2 RETURNING TO THE SPIRITUAL IN ART: FROM KANDINSKY TO ROTHKO AND BEYOND DAVID JASPER

This brief essay on the spiritual and twentieth century art begins with two moments in history. The first is the last moment of peace, perhaps for many even of innocence, before the outbreak of the first terrible war of universal mass destruction in modern times. Wassily Kandinsky’s essay, translated as Concerning the Spiritual in Art was published in late 1911 and in English in 1914. The second may be dated more precisely on 27 February, 1971, when the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas, built around Mark Rothko’s extraordinary paintings, was opened to the public. The two artists, Kandinsky and Rothko had certain cultural commonalities. The first was born in Moscow, the second in Russian-occupied Dvinsk. Although his family was Jewish, Rothko, like Kandinsky was deeply influenced by the culture of Russian Orthodoxy. As artists both made the transition from figurative to nonfigurative painting as a departure from the objective world in a journey inwards to a dark and mysterious place that in their art has left its mark upon the world today, now perhaps more than ever. Kandinsky’s familiar words on the nature of this darkness bear repetition: When religion, science and morality are shaken, the last two by the strong hand of Nietzsche, and when the outer supports threaten to fall, man turns his gaze from externals in on to himself. Literature, music and art are the first and most sensitive spheres in which this spiritual revolution makes itself felt. They reflect the dark picture of the present time and show the importance of what at first was only a little point of light noticed by few and for the great majority non-existent. Perhaps they even grow dark in their turn, but on the other hand they turn away from the soulless life of the present towards those substances and ideas which give free scope to the non-material strivings of the soul (Kandinsky 1977: 14).

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Kandinksy felt deeply what he called the ‘insecurity of ignorance and fear’ which pervaded his world. In Rothko, this sense of foreboding was more profoundly personal and culminated in his suicide almost exactly one year before the opening of his chapel. It was expressed in his art as a tragicreligious drama (Taylor 1992: 95) which pursues concealment as the necessary prelude to the most profound revelation. But what for him was in the end negation gave birth to something like a miracle in the soulless life of the present. In the Houston Chapel, which was originally conceived to serve as a chapel for a Roman Catholic university and modelled on Russian Orthodox churches, hang Rothko’s penultimate work, fourteen great canvasses like dark Stations of the Cross marking the route to Calvary. Almost black yet luminous they reflect Rothko’s tragic desire for the sacred and are not so much seen as experienced in what has become a spiritual sanctuary open to all believers and non-believers alike, a place to be religious yet set apart from any religion. It is now a sanctuary for music and for the pursuit of scholarly colloquia on matters of spiritual and social concern. Since 1981, the Rothko Chapel Awards for Commitment to Truth and Freedom have been presented to human rights activists (Hopps 1997: 314-15). In his concern for the spiritual in art Kandinsky, like the canvasses of the Rothko Chapel, moves away from the divisions and violence that haunt and disfigure the history of religions, moving into a more remote place that is, perhaps, better known to the artist than to the theologian. In 1979 the young American artist Bill Viola, a person of no fixed abode religiously speaking, though deeply influenced by the Bible, by Buddhist scripture, by the hymns of the Rig-Veda and by the Tao Te Ching, travelled to Chott el-Djerid in the Tunisian Sahara Desert, and wrote this: I want to go to a place that seems like it’s at the end of the world. A vantage point from which one can stand and peer out into the void – the world beyond – what would be above the surface to the fish. Where all becomes strange and unfamiliar. There is nothing to lean on. No references. It is said the mind plays “tricks.” Standing there, a place where, after a long arduous journey, you realize you can go no further. Each time you advance towards it, it recedes further. You have reached the edge. All you can do is stand there and peer out into the void, watching. Standing there, you strain to look further, to see beyond, strain to make out familiar shapes and forms. You finally realize that the void is yourself. It is like some huge mirror for your mind. Clear and uncluttered, it is the opposite of our urban distractive spaces. Out here, the unbound mind can run free. Imagination reigns. Space becomes a projection screen. Inside becomes outside. You can see what you are. … It is harsh place. It is

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difficult to reach. It feels like it’s at the end of the world. It is the edge (Viola 1995: 54).

To stand at such a place is a very precise experience, but utterly unbounded by any demands of doctrine or even belief. It may be found within all great religions, but it is not to be claimed exclusively by any. It is found in the poetry of mystics – in Ibn ‘ArabƯ in his contemplation of the holy mysteries, in St. John of the Cross in his dark night, even in the wu wei of Taoist philosophy, which is the opposite of all useless effort. We find it in the Book of Job, and in the poetry and art of William Blake. It is necessary in every age if we are to survive, for thereby alone can we see what we are. Recently I have found it again in the writings and inscriptions of the poet Paul Celan and the artist Anselm Kiefer (See Jasper 2012: 111-22). In their different ways both of these men are victims of the crime of violence and both are engaged in the work of mourning. Without such work of mourning we cannot survive (Derrida 2003), and in the art of Celan and Kiefer this becomes a deep mourning of the soul. Born in Romania in 1920, Celan laments for a lost generation and a lost community of European Jewry, and mourns for the German language: his is the mourning of one who barely survives, articulating and writing at an extreme in poetry of a steely fragility – another edge at the end of the world. Kiefer was born on 8th March, 1945 in Donaueschingen, Germany, and was brought up as a Roman Catholic. His is the mourning of a German who is without personal memory of the community which has been defeated and is overshadowed by Nazism and the Holocaust, but yet still has a profound awareness of its trauma and loss. For both men dialogue with the previous generation has been blocked – either erased or forbidden (Lauterwein 2007: 20-1). And yet they do find utterance in their poetry and art – and in the dialogue between them. For both there is the sense of an ending, but there is also a necessary sense of beginning over again. Kiefer has explained the repetition of the image of the artist’s palette in his paintings, relating to his vocation as a creative artist: ‘The palette [he insists] represents the idea of the artist connecting heaven and earth’ (Kiefer 2006: 171). The artist, he seems to claim, is the connecting rod, the one who makes possible again the way to the divinity. And yet the very point of connection is also the vanishing point in art, the moment at which thinking founders and yet it is the mystical foundation of the possibility of any justice in this world (Derrida 1992: 3– 67). In his great painting of 1990, Zim Zum, Kiefer offers a visual meditation on the term Tzimtzum in the Lurianic Kabbalah teachings in which God begins the process of creation by the contraction of his infinite light, allowing for a conceptual space within which the finite

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world can exist. The empty space formed by this contraction that allows for creation is known as the Tzimtzum. It is at once the moment of divine disappearance and also the point of creation. In Kiefer’s canvas, that point, at almost the dead centre of the picture, seems to be rather a point of desertion. A scorched and wasted world flows into that space of departure, disintegrating into a place of nothingness in which the viewer stands before the vanishing God, maybe even the God who has died. Perhaps at this point we find also the secret of the suicides of Rothko and of Celan. And yet it is at the unutterable and awful point that we find the beginning of all things and the possibility of peace and justice. In the twelfth century in Europe it was said of God: ‘Deus est spaera cuius centrum ubique’ (‘God is the sphere of which the centre is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere.’) But if God reveals himself or herself at every point in the universe, so too, wherever we are, we are conscious of a presence which is at the same time a vanishing and an absence, and we can no longer finally make any distinction between the divine transcendence and the disappearance of God. Thus, as artists and as poets we sing the praises of the one who is Nothing, as in Paul Celan’s Psalm: Praise be your name, no one. For your sake we shall flower. Towards You A nothing we were, are, shall remain, flowering: the nothing-, the no-one’s rose (Celan 1990: 175).

Our reality is an experience of the absence of God – and yet we shall remain, remain flowering. Art finally knows no boundaries of culture or religion. And so as, in very brief space, we have already traversed the art of Russia, America, Germany and Eastern Europe, finally I move to embrace the art and spirituality of China where I have spent much time in recent years. Close to the spirit of Anselm Kiefer is the art of my friend Ding Fang, a Beijing artist scored by the years of the Cultural Revolution and the mourning that they require, and whose work draws together the ancient and deeply interior Chinese art of landscape, the sufferings of the present age, and the sense of the eternal in remote mountains of Western China. Ding Fang, who speaks little English and I even less Mandarin, found a common

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language in the ancient Taoist classic the Chuang Tzu, infinitely puzzling to the Western mind, but with endless resonances within our traditions of spirituality, especially the mystical. The connection came fully alive when I stumbled upon a late work of the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, The Way of Chuang Tzu (1965). It was helpful to me because it does not claim to be a scholarly exercise by an ‘expert’. Rather, it was an attempt to explore the nature of harmonies in language and the images of story – a weak form of philosophy and thought (to borrow a phrase of Gianni Vattimo) that opens doors upon the human soul. Merton begins by making a statement which bears the mark of one who was himself also a visual artist and photographer, and a better one than he usually given credit for. He suggests that ‘Chuang Tzu is not concerned with words and formulas about reality, but with the direct existentialist grasp of reality itself. Such a grasp is necessarily obscure and does not lend itself to abstract analysis’ (Merton 1995: 11). We need to see, to touch and feel, and to find in words not theories but the living narratives and dramas which we encounter in parables, fables, riddles – the stuff of the Chuang Tzu as of the Bible. Here thought is not secured in its settled positions and prejudices, but is provoked, enlightened and delighted in worlds within art that challenge reason and common sense with their profound sense of reality. It was in these worlds that Ding Fang and I began to find friendship and degrees of trust and understanding. And it led me to reflect upon another friendship that takes us back to the beginning of this short essay. The art historian Joseph Masheck has, for a long time been interested in the close friendship between Thomas Merton and the abstract painter Ad Reinhardt, two men whom he described as ‘two sorts of monk’ (Masheck 1984: 91-6). On the whole people have not found it easy to connect these two for their respective readers and viewers tend to live in quite different worlds. But there are links. As Masheck says, ‘while practically everyone knows something about Merton, and admirers of Reinhardt tend to be curious about him because they are on the lookout for spirituality in the artist’s late paintings, many readers of Merton are too exclusively literary to know what to make of Reinhardt’s non-objective art’ (Masheck 2011: 65). Both Merton and Reinhardt had radical political sympathies, their origins in the deep roots that nurtured the spirit of Kandinsky in his time, but it was not there that their deep friendship found its true beginnings. Here is Merton trying to establish what faith is in his first spiritual ‘hit’ (though his Seven Storey Mountain had been published a year earlier in 1948), the little book entitled Seeds of Contemplation:

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Returning to the Spiritual in Art: From Kandinsky to Rothko and Beyond First of all, it is not an emotion, not a feeling. It is not a blind subconscious urge… It is simply not an elemental need… It is not a feeling… It is not a conviction… It is not something entirely interior and subjective… It is not something that bubbles up out of the recesses of your soul… It is not something so purely yours that its content is incommunicable. It is not some personal myth… But it is also not an opinion. It is not a conviction… It is not the fruit of scientific evidence… [T]he assent of faith is not based on the intrinsic evidence of a visible object (Merton 1949: 77-8).

Such insistent use of the language of the via negativa would hardly have been common currency amongst the American artistic avant-garde of the post Second World War years, but clearly Merton hit a chord, and from the evidence of their extensive correspondence we know that it struck home and resonated in Reinhardt. In 1956 he responded to Merton’s request and painted one of his Black Paintings for him, prompting Masheck to consider in an article its theological precedent in the plans of Byzantine churches. ‘Considering that condition [he went on]… I pointed to a chapter of Thomas Aquinas’ Summa contra gentiles (written 1259-64) as titled ‘ ”that in God There Is No Composition,” and quoted a 1953 letter from Robert Rauschenberg to Betty Parsons, Reinhardt’s dealer, describing his own all-white paintings as “large white (one white as one God) canvases” ’ (Masheck 2011: 83). This was also the kind of music and harmony in art and religion that Kandinsky was hearing in the dark years after the publication of Concerning the Spiritual in Art when his own painting was moving towards abstraction, art departing from the objective world and seeking a new and more interior subject matter. We are now moving back also to the world of the Rothko Chapel – a dark world, on an edge and yet inflected by the interiors of Byzantine churches, the liturgy of the Russian Orthodox church and the spiritual, mystical literature of the great world religions. Over all the art which we have touched upon lies the spectre of war and awful human violence, and for some, like Celan and Rothko, the burden was finally too great to bear. It is not impossible also that Merton’s early death was deliberate – we do not know. In a lecture of 1958, Rothko remarked: I want to mention a marvellous book, Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling/Sickness Unto Death, which deals with the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham. Abraham’s act was absolutely unique. There are other examples of sacrifice… But what Abraham was prepared to do was beyond understanding. There was no universal that condoned such an act. This is like the role of the artist (Quoted in Chave 1989: 197).

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There is enough in such a statement for another essay, but I offer just one comment. In the end, perhaps, the artist is the one who sacrifices himself (one thinks of Van Gogh who wrote to his brother just before his own suicide that he was risking his life for his art), just as Rothko was finally lost in the darknesses of his own canvasses in the Chapel that is named after him. And yet, across all religious boundaries, this sanctuary has become a place of reconciliation and a spiritual haven which promotes peace and human rights. I would like to sit there with my Chinese artist friend Ding Fang – and perhaps say a prayer for peace in my own way. In that place I think that he would understand, and perhaps join me in his own way.

References Celan, P. (1990) Selected Poems; trans. Michael Hamburger, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Chave, A.C. (1989) Mark Rothko: Subjects in Abstraction, New Haven: Yale University Press. Derrida, J. (1992) ‘Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’’, in D. Cornell, M. Rosenfeld, D. Gray Carlson (eds), Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, New York: Routledge. —. (2003) The Work of Mourning; eds. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Hopps, W. (1997) ‘The Rothko Chapel’, in The Menil Collection: A Selection from the Paleolithic to the Modern Era, New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc. Jasper, D. (2012) The Sacred Community: Art, Sacrament and the People of God, Waco: Baylor University Press. Kandinsky, W. (1977) Concerning the Spiritual in Art; trans. M. T. H. Sadler, New York: Dover Publications. Kiefer, A. (2006) Heaven and Earth. Organized by Michael Auping, Fort Worth: Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Lauterwein, A. (2007) Anselm Keifer/Paul Celan: Myth, Mourning and Memory. London: Thames and Hudson. Masheck, J. (1984) ‘Two Sorts of Monk: Reinhardt and Merton’, in Historical Present: Essays of the 1970s, Ann Arbor: U.M.I. Research Press, 91-6. —. (2011) Texts on (Texts on) Art, Berkeley CA.: The Brooklyn Rail and Black Square Editions. Merton, T. (1949) Seeds of Contemplation, Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions.

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—. (1995) The Way of Chuang Tzu, Tunbridge Wells: Burns & Oates. Taylor, M.C. (1992) Disfiguring: Art, Architecture, Religion, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Viola, B. (1995) Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House: Writings, 1973–1994, London: Thames and Hudson.

3 FREDDIE GILROY AND THE BELSEN STRAGGLERS: ENGAGING SCARBOROUGH WITH THE HOLOCAUST VICTORIA NESFIELD

The Scarborough of this chapter’s title is the small Yorkshire town on the east coast of England. It is not an obvious site for a Holocaust memorial, nor any piece of art which makes direct reference to the concentration camps of the Nazi regime. Since November 2011, however, the imposing presence of a large figure sitting on an oversized wooden bench, looking out to sea, has formed a bridge between the bloodied history of Nazi rule, sited across the North Sea which this figure looks out over, and the small sea-side town he now resides in. Freddie Gilroy was a soldier of the Durham Light Infantry, a civilian soldier recruited from the mines of his Durham home to join the allied war against Nazi Germany in the 1940s. Arriving at Bergen Belsen in April 1945 Gilroy and his colleagues led the surviving prisoners, the ‘Belsen stragglers’, to their freedom. He is commemorated in a memorial by Country Durham sculptor Ray Lonsdale in the piece which now sits in Scarborough, a monument to an ordinary man who once was a part of one of the most extraordinary moments in world history. In this chapter I will identify some motifs of Holocaust commemoration in art and sculpture and consider how the Freddie Gilroy and the Belsen Stragglers sculpture may be read within this framework. The central argument here is that although the Holocaust is physically absent from this sculpture, meaning there is nothing actually represented in the sculpture which makes any explicit reference to the Holocaust, the inclusion of Belsen in the title makes this piece of art a Holocaust memorial of sorts. I will argue however, that the lack of any overt Holocaust imagery makes this memorial a non-confrontational appeal to Holocaust and World War

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Freddie Gilroy and the Belsen Stragglers

Two memory. Finally the chapter will interrogate the impact of a piece of Holocaust art within a community removed from the conflict the art commemorates. The premise of this paper is that a work of commemorative or memorial art can be an effective tool in reconciling a public audience with the memory and legacy of a conflict, and encourage a continued, remembrance of a conflict.

Creating Freddie The sculpture (Figure 1) is constructed from weathering steel, in double scale, typical of Ray Lonsdale’s outdoor creations. Lonsdale met Gilroy in the sculptor’s Durham workshop and the pair formed a friendship, whereby Lonsdale came to know of Gilroy’s life during World War Two, and his role in the liberation of Bergen Belsen. The sculpture, created after Gilroy’s death, is a war memorial, but a memorial which takes inspiration and form from a particular veteran, who is remembered as the sculptor knew him, an ordinary man. Created as a commercial piece, but with the intention of using the opportunity to create a personal war memorial, Lonsdale has deliberately avoided the typical obelisk style, rejecting the sense of austerity and silence raised by such a design. In a phone conversation with the artist, Lonsdale observed a sentiment that Austrian writer Robert Musil had declared in 1936, that there is ‘nothing as invisible as a monument’ (Musil 1936, 1987, cited in Young 1993: 13). Where is the sense, Lonsdale asked, of commemoration in a sculpture design that is so well-recognized that it is easy to pass by without even noticing? The imposing figure of Freddie Gilroy who, even seated, towers over visitors (the sculpture is over three and a half metres long) is certainly not the typical monument to war memory. Freddie Gilroy and the Belsen Stragglers arrived in Scarborough in November 2011 as part of an art promotion initiative in the north-east of England called Artsbank, which publicizes local artists and their work, and sells commercial pieces on behalf of the artists. Artsbank approached Lonsdale inviting him to display pieces of his work on short term loans to towns in the area. Freddie Gilroy was initially loaned to the city of Newcastle for one month, before coming to Scarborough initially for one month also. In November 2011, immediately after the sculpture arrived in the town a local resident, Jakki Willby, began a campaign to raise enough money to buy the sculpture, working with Scarborough Borough Council and Gilroy’s nephew. In December of the same year a Scarborough pensioner, Maureen Robinson, donated around £50,000 to buy the sculpture for the town, with the agreement from the council for Freddie

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Gilroy to remain seated on Scarborough’s Marine Drive, his double-scale park bench sat amongst the rest of the wooden benches lining the drive, looking out over the sea. The response from Scarborough has been popular. A small landmark in a small town, ideally positioned to greet tourists who come to Scarborough to the sea, and a welcomed gift to the town. Scarborough prides itself on its celebration and support of the military; the annual Scarborough Armed Forces day is one of the largest in the country, and the now national Heroes Welcome initiative is organized and administrated by a local businessman. Matthias Hass wrote of memorials relating to Nazism that they reflect the discourse on National Socialism which relates to the country the memorial stands in: ‘Memory does not exist beyond the societal context in which remembrance takes place’ (Hass 2007: 163). As the Holocaust typically exists in British public consciousness in the societal context of World War Two, a connection explicit in Freddie Gilroy’s part in history, the dual function of a war and Holocaust memorial in the form of Gilroy supports Hass’s reading, and Scarborough acts as an appropriate location for a memorial to a war veteran and concentration camp liberator.

Reading Freddie Gilroy as a Holocaust memorial How the sculpture functions firstly as a memorial, and secondly as a piece of Holocaust art, requires some exploration. It was Lonsdale’s intention to create a war memorial which commemorated a soldier personally close to his heart, and in doing so he relates the sculpture to a very specific piece of British military history – the British role in the defeat of Nazism and the liberation of Bergen Belsen. However it was also the intention to memorialize Freddie Gilroy as the sculptor knew him and wanted to remember him by; not as a soldier bearing arms, but as an ordinary man. To borrow a phrase from James E. Young, an authority on Holocaust monuments and memorials, Freddie Gilroy arguably becomes a ‘countermonument’ (Young 1993); it is deliberately not the austere and imposing traditional monument. A criticism Young has made on discussions of Holocaust memorials is that there is a tendency to ignore, ‘the essentially public dimension of their performance, remaining either formally aesthetic or almost piously historical.’ (Young 1993: 11) Although in this chapter I do not intend to disregard the aesthetic or historical facet of this sculpture, I will endeavour to focus primarily on the public dimension of a Holocaust memorial. Around the UK the presence of a sombre stone cross in a church yard, or obelisk in a town square is a familiar sight. Every November on the 11th

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Freddie Gilroy and the Belsen Stragglers

day we come to a standstill to remember the war dead; on Remembrance Sunday politicians, royalty and soldiers lay wreaths and stand before Edwin Lutyens’ Cenotaph monument in Whitehall in respectful silence. This influential design, grand, yet understated, and echoed in war memorials across the UK and the Commonwealth is evocative of how we understand the commemoration of the war dead: reverential, respectful, out of reach. If this is typically how we remember the war and its heroes and victims through sculpture, then Freddie Gilroy occupies an unusual place between memorialization and art. The act of memorializing, and the physical presence of memorials to encourage this act, has been the subject of much philosophical discussion. From Nietzsche’s famous remark, ‘away with the monuments’ (Nietzsche 1909: 18), examining the peculiar nature of man’s obsession with the past, to Baudrillard’s post-Holocaust assertion that by memorializing we restage the past to remember it, because ‘forgetting extermination is part of extermination’ (Baudrillard 1981; 1994: 49). Young calls the monument the ‘intersection between public art and political memory’ (Young 2000: 93), and although at first glance Freddie Gilroy and the Belsen Stragglers appears only to be public art, it is the political memory it commemorates which is the focus here. The title of the sculpture is only very subtly displayed on the piece, on a small plaque almost concealed underneath Freddie’s arm, with a poem written by Lonsdale. Recently an information board has been placed next to the sculpture, with some explanatory information, but this is a relatively new feature which was added in 2012. The title of the piece is given on Lonsdale’s website, where it is still featured, and became well-known due to the local press interest in the purchase of the sculpture (Lonsdale 2009). This is significant because the word Belsen is so clearly attached the art, but aside from the small plaque displaying the title, is nowhere explicitly represented, nor is there any obvious sense of this piece of art being a memorial, to the Holocaust, to World War Two, or to a soldier, but for its name. What the visitor sees is an old man sat on a bench. His current position actually looks as if he has been designed to sit at Scarborough, wrapped up in his coat and hat, looking out to sea. The title is quite deliberate. Lonsdale had heard the term ‘Belsen Stragglers’, as an old expression to describe those remaining survivors of Bergen Belsen who were discovered by the British soldiers, and eventually liberated from the camp by them.1 Despite the conspicuous physical

1

The terminology appears to have been quite localized or fallen out of use, as evidence of its usage and origins have proved elusive. What has happened however, is that the terminology has reappeared online in relation to the memorial,

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absence of the Belsen Stragglers in the sculpture, Lonsdale was deliberate in his inclusion of the expression in the title. He argued, and I fully agree, that it added a further dimension to the sculpture, and a further level of response to it. It does not need to be read as a Holocaust memorial or as making any reference to the Holocaust, any more than it must be read as a war memorial; it could be viewed as a tribute from a sculptor to his friend, but it can be read and engaged with as a monument to a concentration camp liberator, and a veteran. If one is to engage with the sculpture from the perspective of Holocaust art and memorialization, it should be asked, how does Freddie Gilroy compare to other Holocaust memorials and monuments, as a means to engage a community with such a powerful, complex, and emotive part of history? Firstly, the location of the sculpture and its origins must be taken into consideration. Lonsdale shares a local connection with the old soldier he commemorates in his sculpture, which now sits in the shadow of Scarborough castle, a symbol of British defence. Scarborough suffered some air-raid damage during the war, costing 137 lives and was initially a destination for evacuees (Lambert). There the topographical and geographical connections end. Some of the most powerful sculptures are situated at sites of history, sites of cruelty, what are now sites of memory, and some of the most notorious imagery of the Holocaust is the part of the architecture of the camps. Consider the Arbeit Macht Frei gates, the Birkenau watch-tower, these are the physical workings of the camp system, never intended to become monuments to the horrors of the Nazi regime, yet they have become the most recognizable images associated with the Holocaust. As the sites of destruction and cruelty have become visitor destinations, the monuments erected in commemoration often reflect the nature of the place. Consider, for example, the huge stone Monument to the Victims of Fascism at the remains of the Páaszów concentration camp on the outskirts of Krakow in southern Poland (Figure 2). Little remains of the original concentration camp site now, the land grown over into grassy hills. But for the enormous monument and the signs indicating the history of the place, the passing visitor would not know about the camp. The sculpture, designed by Ryszard Szczypczyski and Witold C‫ܗ‬ckiewicz, which has towered over Krakow since 1964 is a monument to the agony and despair of the Páaszów inmates, most of whom were deported to nearby Auschwitz-Birkenau, beginning in May 1944 continuing until as late as

so Lonsdale has played a part in resurrecting a piece of Holocaust memory that had been forgotten.

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January 1945. Young writes of the shape Holocaust memory takes in Europe (and Israel) as being ‘determined by political, aesthetic and religious coordinates’ (Young 1993: 2). This is certainly the case in this monument. Created in Communist Poland, and typical of Holocaust memorials created under this regime, there is no mention of Jewish victims; the focus is on the destructive impact of Fascism in occupied Poland, the wartime enemy of Communism. For the Polish citizens who remember the Holocaust and those who have lived through its aftermath, having exchanged one occupying ideology for another, the impact of the war years on Polish identity is made clear in the memorial. The subjugation and oppression of the prisoners is carved into the stature and expressions of the figures. The sculpture, situated by the side of a busy road, dominates the landscape, and at seven metres tall, is an overwhelming size, evoking the dominating power of Nazism in Poland, the oppression of the prisoners and the sheer misery of life at this site less than seventy years ago. One cannot miss the sculpture, but, at the same time, it is difficult to engage with it too. The size of the sculpture, the sombre nature of it, and the blood-soaked land it stands upon all present barriers to a physical engagement with the work, which are absent from the geographically distant memorial in Scarborough. A further Polish example, more abstract, but in the same way as Freddie Gilroy, more physically practical to engage with, is the monument to the deportees at the Krakow Ghetto main square, designed by Piotr Lewicki and Kazimierz àatak. The arrangement of thirty three steel and iron chairs in the ghetto square offers no explicit reference to the ghetto, or the ordeals of everyday life there, much like Lonsdale’s sculpture. The use of seating however, invites a much more physical engagement with the memorial, again, like Lonsdale’s work. Thirty seven further chairs merge the memorial with the modern landscape, bleeding into the seating at the bus and tram station next to the square. One could recognize the implication that everyday life in the square can so rapidly be transformed into an ordeal of simply trying to survive. Visitors and local residents could also be moved to appreciate the bitter realization that while sitting on the seats waiting for a bus or tram, they will return home at the end of the day, which was a privilege denied to many who were deported from the ghetto square, who are now so visibly absent from the area, their absence made explicit by the vacant seats. The significance of this example is that seats have become a function of the modern square which forces some kind of engagement with the history of the place. Viewing Freddie Gilroy at a time when there is no-one sat next to him, sat on his knee, or posing with him can often be difficult, presenting a challenge to

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engaging with him on a personal and practical level, but positively, demonstrating the interest and responsiveness of the public towards the sculpture, and inviting a sense of group, or community engagement. Offering visitors a physical space to sit with a sculpture, to study it closely, or to read the inscription (the poem on Freddie’s sculpture is below his arm, on the back of the bench, much like commemorative plaques on the other wooden benches which line Scarborough’s sea front), gives an opportunity for engagement not usually encouraged with war memorials. A final European memorial I will compare Freddie Gilroy to, is a German memorialization project, the stolpersteine, or stumbling blocks, which can be found in a number of towns and cities across Germany and other European countries. Created by Gunter Demnig, these small plaques are personal Holocaust memorials dedicated to specific people, and placed outside their former homes with an inscription bearing their name, their year of birth, their deportation year and destination. For example, on a street on the approach into Cologne’s city centre can be found a plaque indicating ‘Hier wohste Grete Jonas’, and another, ‘Hier wohste Kurt Jonas’; both inscriptions end with ‘Deportiert 1941 àódĨ’. ‘Here lived Grete and Kurt Jonas, deported 1941 to àódĨ.’ Here, the trail of Grete and Kurt Jonas ends; their destination beyond àódĨ unknown. On the street in Cologne where the Jonases are remembered, is also a stolperstein for Elisabeth Mayer, indicating she was deported to Theresienstadt in 1942, then on again to Auschwitz. Commemorating murdered Jews at their homes, the places they identified themselves with, rather than at the site of their deaths, offers a more humane form of memorialization, framing their memory at the place they chose to live their lives not the place they were selected to have their lives ended. In this respect Lonsdale shares a similar ethos with Demnig in representing Gilroy as the man he became and lived his life as after the war, and not as the liberating soldier at Bergen Belsen he was recruited to be. The humanity in Demnig’s memorial design is positive, and I believe the continued success of the stolpersteine project is that it is an aesthetically sympathetic way of memorializing the past without attempting to obstruct the present.2 Young’s work identifies an issue Germany has faced in creating Holocaust memorials, which are arresting and different, yet which are not so intrusive as to turn public support away from them, thus causing more 2

Demnig’s project has expanded across Germany and Austria so successfully that he is now approached by members of the public who have been moved to research their properties and discovered a Holocaust narrative therein. Such is the demand for Demnig’s work that students often assist him in his project.

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conflict than the memorial aspires to reconcile memory of. One example of problematic memorials in Young’s work is artist Horst Hoheisel’s 1995 proposal to destroy Berlin’s historic Brandenburg Gate, leaving a void in its place symbolic of the void left by the disappearance of Berlin’s Jews (Young 2000: 91-2). As undeniably striking as such a memorial would be, it would also be to destroy a part of Berlin’s history which extends much further than the Holocaust, and the proposal was never going to be approved. A second example is Sol Lewitt’s Black Form Dedicated to the Missing Jews, a large back rectangle which was installed in front of the Münster Palace in 1987, obscuring the vista of the eighteenth century palace, now a part of the University of Münster. The monument was destroyed by University staff in 1988 who objected to its physical obstructiveness positioned on the driveway of the University, and its jarring ugliness against the backdrop of the palace. The monument was rebuilt in Hamburg in 1988 (Young 1993: 17-19). Freddie Gilroy and the Belsen Stragglers is certainly striking in its size, but is not intended to obstruct passers-by, or to blight the landscape with a deliberately ugly design. Reading Freddie Gilroy as a Holocaust memorial, it is perhaps fairer to consider a comparison with another example of a removed place, although the following example can only be considered geographically removed, one cannot deny the emotional, familial and psychological connection to the Holocaust and to the death camps and ghettos of Eastern Europe. Yad Vashem in the Mount Herzl region of Jerusalem is Israel’s national Holocaust memorial; a combination of museum and memorial space, where exhibitions, commemorative plaques, gardens and trees honouring the victims and the righteous vie for attention with a multitude of sculptures, both beautiful and traumatic. Amidst the exhibitions, sculptures and memorials evoking the trauma of the Holocaust, Bernie Fink’s Memorial to the Jewish Soldiers monument at Yad Vashem is an example of how art and sculpture can evoke a strong sense of community identity as well as functioning as a commemoration of the past. A larger scale sculpture than Freddie Gilroy, the sculpture is made up of six large granite blocks arranged to make six fragmented points of the Star of David. The star shaped space in the middle of the monument is pierced by a tall sharp steel shard which cuts through the space like a sword (see Figure 3). Like Freddie Gilroy, the Memorial to the Jewish Soldiers is multi-faceted in its potential for interpretation. The significance of the number six is obvious when commemorating six million murdered Jews, and the six points of the granite blocks make up the six pointed Star of David. The steel shard tearing through the star can be read as representative of the tearing apart of

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the Jewish community in Europe, but when standing back to view the monument from a short distance the monument makes the Star of David complete again. Viewed with the Israeli landscape in the background and the sword-like shard in the centre of the Star of David, the symbol of Jewish identity, the monument can be viewed from this perspective as a symbol of might and strength, and of a shared identity reconciled after such trauma and horror (Brutin 2012). The view of the sculpture close up fragmented, and at a distance - unified, is jarring yet effective, a symbol of Jewish survival, determination and tenacity, situated against the backdrop of the modern Jewish state, the Zionist dream, which began as a response to the persecution of Jews in Europe, long before the Nazi regime.

Bergen Belsen and the British connection To return to Freddie Gilroy, I would like to offer a brief consideration of why this memorial, and the reference to Bergen Belsen, is relevant to a community such as Scarborough, ostensibly far removed from the Holocaust. Like Auschwitz-Birkenau and the Polish extermination camps were to the Russian forces, it was Bergen Belsen, near Hanover in Germany that, of all the camps, was the most significant to the British armed forces and to British civilians at the time of liberation, for it was the British troops who arrived at the gates of Belsen to discover around 40,000 survivors, barely living, amidst the thousands more dead who lay unburied across the site (Schulze 2007: 173). Amidst the joy and relief of an Allied victory against Nazi Germany, and at a physical distance from the wretchedness and the disease ravaging Bergen Belsen, even civilians at home cannot have failed to be horrified by Richard Dimbleby’s solemn BBC radio report of Belsen’s liberation (Dimbleby and BBC 1945; 2012). For those present in the camp like Gilroy, the shock and horror must have been overwhelming. It must be noted that Gilroy was an ordinary man before the war too, he was part of the civilian population recruited to support the army, a member of what General Montgomery called the ‘citizens’ army’ (Saddler 2010: inside cover). Military historian John Saddler, who traced the Durham Light Infantry’s wartime journey across Europe, wrote of the Belsen liberators: Not one of the 112 Regiment who came upon Belsen would emerge unchanged. These were men who had experienced the full horrors of war since landing in France the previous summer. Belsen, however, manifested an unspeakable darkness and level of cruelty undreamt of (Saddler 2010: 224).

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Of course, there is nothing of the unspeakable darkness and cruelty of Belsen in Lonsdale’s sculpture, but a man who had witnessed it. Young asks, ‘how is a post-Holocaust generation of artists supposed to “remember” events they never experienced directly? … This postwar generation, after all, cannot remember the Holocaust as it occurred’ (Young 2000: 1). The post war generation, Young argues, know the Holocaust through the various representations and memories of those who experienced it. I am arguing here that Lonsdale’s work functions as a Holocaust memorial of sorts by offering something humane: an ordinary man who has witnessed the misery, the horror of the Holocaust, some would argue the ineffable, and who can still return as an ordinary, if not totally unchanged, man after liberation, the subtlety of his rendering belying his extraordinary role in twentieth century history. Mark Godfrey notes that the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has received criticism over the years since its opening for framing the Holocaust narrative through the US-centric story of the American liberation of the camps (Godfrey 2007: 200). Although his memorial also offers a British perspective of the Belsen story, Lonsdale’s narrative is far from triumphalist. Lonsdale’s inscription on the sculpture offers a further dimension to the piece of art, and a further way to read the sculpture. Lonsdale’s poem reads: They said for king and country, we should do as we were bid. They said old soldiers never die but plenty young ones did.

Reading the poem with the knowledge of who Freddie Gilroy was, and his military past, this inscription could be read as an anti-war poem, or as a commentary on war. In part a moving tribute to the old soldier who will always exist in memory and in art, yet in part, a comment on the staggering death toll of World War Two. It evokes the bitterly sardonic lines of poet Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum est, which offers a far more graphic representation of life in the trenches of Europe’s World War One battle fields, and closes with the lines: My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est Pro patria mori.

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Like Owen’s closing lines of his poem, Lonsdale’s four short lines give the sculpture an edge, as subtle as the physical placement of the poem, which serves as a reminder that as much as this is a piece of public art to be enjoyed and engaged with, and as much as it is a tribute to a friend, that this is ultimately about war and about a conflict which not only saw huge civilian and military losses across the continent, but culminated in the discovery of a programme of genocide almost incomprehensible. In an interesting evolution of the poetry perhaps being the most revealing element of the sculpture’s success, it has itself has inspired poetry competitions about Freddie Gilroy within the local area – art is inspiring art, and with each new composition, a further engagement, or interpretation of the original memorial is explored.

Holocaust Memorial Day 2012 This chapter has until now considered how the memorial performs to engage and reconcile an audience with an historical conflict or event. I have argued that although Freddie Gilroy and the Belsen Stragglers is, in its design a war memorial, it refuses to glorify war, instead focusing on a human face of conflict and the life-long impact a conflict can have on a participant. The final part of this chapter will identify an occasion when the memorial became the canvas for a new conflict, which in turn mediated a sense of community action around Freddie Gilroy and his home in Scarborough. On the morning of 27 January 2012, Holocaust Memorial Day (the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, and the date decided to be International Holocaust Memorial Day in 2000) the sculpture was discovered defaced in yellow paint. Despite a police investigation, a public appeal for information and the offer of a reward, the vandal or vandals have not been found, and until they are, the meaning of the vandalism will be limited to speculation at best. There was, unsurprisingly, speculation that the vandalism was a political statement, a response to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Police publicly considered the possibility of British National Party members being responsible for the attack, and the suggestion that the vandalism was deliberately timed to be discovered on Holocaust Memorial Day, some kind of anti-Semitic or anti-Holocaust memorialization attack, was immediately mooted, and has never been ruled out. I believe that the use of yellow paint and the very specific date of the attack cannot be coincidental, and indicates recognition of the sculpture as related to the Holocaust. Whether this is a specifically anti-Semitic attack however, would be difficult to say with confidence. Scarborough does not have a

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Jewish community of any substantial size; the latest publically available census to indicate a Jewish population in Scarborough dates from 2001, and the number of Jews was seventy eight, 0.07% of Scarborough’s population (STREAM 2001). The nearest synagogues are some forty to fifty miles away. It would be problematic to discuss this attack as being directed at a Jewish community in a town where there is no identifiable Jewish community, yet to disregard the significance of an attack using yellow paint and timed to be discovered on Holocaust Memorial Day seems naïve at best and a diminishment of the offence at worst. Certainly this would not be the first Holocaust memorial to suffer from anti-Semitic vandalism. The disappearing anti-Fascist monument in Hamburg, a large black obelisk designed to gradually sink into the ground and disappear, which it finally did in 1993, was intended for people to inscribe their names on, a way of committing oneself to remember those killed through Fascism, and for that commitment to remain forever in the subterranean monument. Young wrote that ‘inevitably, swastikas began to appear on the monument’ (Young 1993: 35). The designers, Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz were philosophical in their response. According to Young, when Gerz and Gerz were warned by the Hamburg authorities that their monument would be a target for Nazi symbolism, they replied ‘why not give that phenomenon free rein and allow the monument to document the social temperament in that way?’ (Young 1993: 35). Ulf Zander also writes of a negative response to a memorial which resembles Freddie Gilroy more than others, in the form of Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg who was responsible for the evacuation and protection of tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews. Wallenberg was commemorated in a lifelike sculpture erected in Budapest, but removed again by the Communist government due to Soviet investigations of Wallenberg during his wartime residence in Hungary. Temporarily displayed in Debrecen, there was resistance from within Budapest to repatriate the sculpture to the capital from right-wing officials who did not wish to see another commemorative sculpture of Wallenberg in the city (Zander 2007: 131-32).3 The sculpture of Wallenberg was not a deliberate eyesore, and was not rejected because of the aesthetics of its design. The memorial was, it seems, rejected by a politically-motivated group whose city, and country, was mired in postHolocaust memory and did not wish for one more reminder of the absence of Jews in Hungary, or indeed certain branches of Hungarian complicity in the deportation and murder of so many of its citizens. A sense of Holocaust ‘saturation’ and a reluctance to be confronted with a history not 3

The sculpture of Wallenberg was eventually returned to Budapest in 1999.

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deemed to be one’s own, or one’s responsibility remains an issue for Holocaust memorialization, in the UK as well as the rest of Europe and beyond, and such a sentiment cannot be disregarded when questioning the intent behind the attack on Freddie Gilroy. Through the vandalism of the Freddie Gilroy sculpture there did emerge a sense of community identity and a unifying force which developed as a response to the defacement of a local icon and gift to the town. Funds were raised locally to restore the sculpture, and despite a Freedom of Information request made to the council enquiring as to the amount of council money spent on the initial installation and later clean-up of the memorial, which it was revealed, was more than covered through the fundraising, the public response to the restoration of Freddie, and the imperative to discover the vandals and remove their damage, was positive (Bartholomew 2012). The very fact that suggestions were made via the local newspaper’s online forum, that the vandalism may be political, and that there were isolated cases of concern that the council may be diverting otherwise needed public funds towards pieces of vandalized art, does indicate at a micro level, that there is a tension, usually muted, towards a memorial to an event which, however traumatic and important, has no direct connection with the town. These concerns may be largely subsumed by the overwhelming popularity surrounding the sculpture, but it does suggest that the recognition of the Holocaust connection and the use of art as a tool of memorialization remain to some extent, controversial issues.

Conclusion I will end the chapter by considering, finally, if Freddie Gilroy and the Belsen Stragglers is an appropriate model for engaging a distant, or removed community with the Holocaust. I have aimed to challenge Adorno’s oft-quoted declaration against creatively representing the Holocaust in the examples cited (Adorno 1967; 1983: 34), and would argue that while not as singularly Holocaust-themed as the other memorials discussed here, Lonsdale’s memorial stands alongside them, a successful model of memorialization for its environment. In mainland UK there is no natural historical landscape for a Holocaust memorial, much like the in USA.4 Even Israel, although it has an obvious community related to the Holocaust, does not have a geographical reference point. 4

British and refugee Jews were deported to concentration and extermination camps from the Channel Islands, which would be the only geographic point actually connected to the Holocaust in the UK.

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This is a challenge when engaging with the sculpture as a Holocaust memorial: how does the sculptor relate the work to the Holocaust without alienating its audience? The primary route into engaging with Freddie is a physical one. The sculpture is interactive and inviting, and arguably if Lonsdale had included some explicit or direct representation of Belsen, he may have alienated people. In this respect, some consideration to the fact that residents and visitors to Scarborough are not at a site of cruelty must be recognized. A visitor may go to the sites of the Auschwitz-Birkenau or Páaszów camps, expecting to get some sense, however inadequate, of what happened at that place, or to remember those killed there. The imposing stone memorials evoke the atmosphere and the solemnity of the place. In a location removed from the history of the Holocaust, how can art engage a community with a history it is not so closely connected with, without alienating people? I would argue that the non-confrontational, non-explicit style of memorialization utilized by Ray Lonsdale works very well here. This challenge of using a removed space to commemorate a traumatic event in mind, there is in a sense, an ethical freedom to be more creative, and less confrontational when removed from the sites of the Holocaust. We do not like to see memorials at places like Auschwitz engaged with inappropriately, for example, witnessing visitors posing behind barbed wire fences, or children playing with the stones carefully placed by visitors in respectful memory. The subject of war or the Holocaust is not as explicit in Freddie Gilroy as it is at the Cenotaph or at Auschwitz for example, and the physical memorial is not so austere. What Lonsdale’s sculpture does offer is an invitation to engage with it on a physical level. Decorum and respect typically dictate a somewhat distant and nonphysical engagement with the traditional war memorial.5 In a style much more open to physical interaction, albeit still respectfully, the use of the wooden bench, with space next to Freddie, invites participation with the sculpture, becoming a part of the memorialization process through this interaction. The barriers to a physical engagement with an emotional memorial are to an extent removed with Freddie, visitors are free to, and even encouraged to respond to the physical tactility of the sculpture and 5

In the December 2010 student protest in London against rising tuition fees which rapidly spiralled out of control, a resounding image in the media was of a Cambridge University student swinging from the Union flag on the Cenotaph. The student was jailed after committing a number of offences on that day, however it was his display of disrespect towards the memorial to those whose lives were lost to protect the freedom of the next generations which provoked the most revulsion and anger from the media, the general public, and the sentencing judge who condemned his ‘outrageous and deeply offensive behaviour’ (BBC News 2011).

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the space around him, to explore his features and interpret his presence however they feel. Freddie Gilroy is not a didactic model of memorialization, and ultimately I argue that this is its most positive feature. The Holocaust is present within the sculpture, for those who want to interpret it in this way, but it is not forced; it is left to the individual interpretation of whoever responds to it. Finally, I will give the last word to Young who writes: Memorials provide the sites where groups of people gather to create a common past for themselves, places where they tell the constitutive narratives, their “shared” stories of the past. They become communities precisely by having shared, if only vicariously, the experiences of their neighbors [sic]. At some point, it may even be the activity of remembering together that becomes the shared memory. Once ritualized, remembering together becomes an event in itself that is to be shared and remembered (Young 1993: 6-7).

The town’s general collective response to the arrival of the memorial, and arguably more-so in response to the vandalism of it, echoes Young’s view on the act of creating a community around a shared memory. Although Freddie Gilroy and the Belsen Stragglers was not made for Scarborough, its now permanent presence in the town, and the purchase of it as a gift for the town creates a sense of community around it. While the vicarious engagement with the Holocaust narrative is not as explicit here as in the memorials Young writes of, I believe that the sense of community connection to the memorial, opens the pathway to engaging with Freddie Gilroy’s story and his role in liberating Bergen Belsen, as a local community, in a very positive way.

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Illustrations

Figure 1 Freddie Gilroy and the Belsen Stragglers, Ray Lonsdale Location: North Bay, Scarborough, UK Photo credit: Mark Mullen Photography reproduced with permission.

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Figure 2 Monument to the Victims of Fascism, Ryszard Szczypczyski and Witold C‫ܗ‬ckiewicz Location: Páaszów labour camp memorial site, Krakow, Poland.

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Figure 3 Memorial to the Jewish Soldiers, Bernie Fink Location: Yad Vashem World Center for Holocaust Research, Documentation, Education and Commemoration, Jerusalem, Israel.

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References Adorno, T. (1967; 1983) Prisms, trans. S. and S. Weber, Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Bartholomew, T. (29 July 2012) ‘Statue Clean Up Cost Revealed’, Scarborough News. http://www.thescarboroughnews.co.uk/news/statue-clean-up-costrevealed-1-4785406 (accessed 26 November 2013). Baudrillard, J. (1981; 1994) Simulacra and Simulation III: Holocaust, trans. S.F. Glaser, Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Press. BBC News (5 October 2011) ‘Charlie Gilmour “did not realise he was on Cenotaph”', http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-15189414 (accessed 14 December 2012). Brutin, B. (2012) ‘Monuments in Israel Commemorating the Holocaust’, The Jewish Virtual Library, Online. http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/israelmons.html (accessed 19 December 2012). Davies, M.L. and Szejnmann, C.C.W. (eds) (2007) How the Holocaust Looks Now: International Perspectives, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Dimbleby, R. and BBC (1945; 2012) ‘Richard Dimbleby Describes Belsen’, http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/holocaust/5115.shtml (accessed 13 December 2012). Godfrey, M. (2007) Abstraction and the Holocaust, New Haven: Yale University Press. Hass, M. (2007) ‘The Establishment of National Memorials to the Nazi Past: Yad Vashem, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Topography of Terror Foundation’, in M.L. Davies and C.C.W. Szejnmann (eds) How the Holocaust Looks Now: International Perspectives, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 163-72. Lambert, T. (n.d.) ‘Scarborough in the 20th Century’, A Short History of Scarborough, Online. http://www.localhistories.org/scarborough.html (accessed 13 December 2012) Lonsdale, R. (2009) ‘Freddie Gilroy and the Belsen Stragglers’, Two Red Rubber Things, http://www.tworedrubberthings.co.uk/index.php/outside-sculptures (accessed 18 December 2012). Musil, R. (1987) ‘Monuments’, Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, trans. P. Wortsman, Hygiene CO: Eridanos Press. Cited in J.E. Young (1993) The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Their Meaning, London and New Haven: Yale University Press.

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Nietzsche, F. (1909) The Use and Abuse of History, Part II, in The Thoughts of Our Season Part II, trans. A. Collins. Originally published Edinburgh and London: T. N. Foulis; Ebook publication: Project Gutenberg (2011) http://www.gutenberg.org/files/38226/38226-h/38226-h.htm. (accessed 25 November 2013). Owen, W. (1918) ‘Dulce et Decorum est’, The War Poetry Website, http://www.warpoetry.co.uk/owen1.html (accessed 27 November 2013). Saddler, J. (2010) Dunkirk to Belsen: the Soldier’s Own Dramatic Stories, London: JR Books. Schulze, R. (2007) ‘Filling the Void: Representing the History of Bergen Belsen for a New Generation’, in M.L. Davies and C.C.W. Szejnmann (eds) How the Holocaust Looks Now: International Perspectives, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 173-84. STREAM Statistics, Research and Mapping for North Yorkshire and York (2001) Religion (census table KS007): People stating Religion as Jewish (% of whole population) http://www.streamlis.org.uk/ (accessed 13 December 2012). Young, J.E. (1993) The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Their Meaning, London and New Haven: Yale University Press. —. (2000) At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture, London and New Haven: Yale University Press. Zander, U. (2007) ‘Heroic Images: Raoul Wallenberg as a HistoryCultural Symbol’, in M.L. Davies and C.C.W. Szejnmann (eds) How the Holocaust Looks Now: International Perspectives, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 126-35.

4 ART IN A PHILOSOPHICAL AND THEOLOGICAL DISCUSSION ON THEODICY AND MORAL EVIL PAULINE C. H. KOLLONTAI

During the last decade there have been reports by government bodies and other organisations across the world that identify the arts as making a positive contribution to various aspects of society. For example, in South Africa the Deputy Minister of Arts and Culture wrote, ‘the arts contribute to national unity, a spirit of solidarity, promote social cohesion and nurture a caring society’ (Mashatile 2009: 5). In the UK the arts has been said, ‘to transform lives and communities’ (Arts Council England, 2003: 8), and The Arts Council of Korea states in its 2007 Report that ‘art can change the world’ (Arts Council of Korea 2007: 1). The potential transforming power of art has also been recognised in recent years by those involved in conflict resolution and peace-building. Many projects across the world include some form of art activity to help victims of conflict, both individually and collectively, in shaping a political process which enables a more profound understanding of each other with the aim of reconciliation and building a future where the break-down of societies into violence is less likely to occur. Theoretically it seems possible that art can assist in the transformation of attitudes between conflicting parties, enabling individuals to engage with, and express, both negative and positive memories and emotions. But empirically it appears more difficult to assess the effectiveness of art being used for this purpose (Beller 2009). There is evidence from art projects involved in peace-building which show that the participants seem to relate to each other in a positive and honest way during these activities (Le Baron & Welch 2005). Certainly a body of opinion exists that art has a role in helping to heal divisions and assist in restoring social trust between people who have experienced violent conflict (Kalmanowitz & Lloyd 2005: 24-25; Sway et. al., 2005: 154 – 170; Wise 2005: 142-153). This led me to consider how the use of paintings/drawings, done by

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the victims or witnesses of conflict such as war, genocide and ethnic cleansing, could contribute to the learning experience of students undertaking an elective module on the Philosophy of Religion which included looking at the issues of God, evil and suffering (theodicy) and moral evil. The findings presented here are from work I undertook with undergraduate students studying on this module over a period of three years. The overall aim is to explore the use of art alongside the more traditional text based approach to enable students to have a more informed understanding of the issues being studied with regard to their own social responsibility towards others. This paper is not intended to provide empirical evidence of a life change in the actions of students when confronted with issues of evil and suffering. Rather it was to explore if the use of visual images could contribute to raising more than an intellectual awareness and understanding of moral evil and subsequent suffering and if any of the students felt more challenged to consider how they themselves might assist in trying to do something about the causes of moral evil within their own societies and help its victims.

Philosophers and theologians on the arts To provide a context and rationale for using images within a course on philosophy on religion students were introduced to some of the key philosophical and theological perspectives on the arts, beginning with perspectives from classical Greece through to the 20th century, to show the diversity of views and also the controversy over the value and role of art in social and religious settings. The starting point in the investigation was Plato who argued that the arts, in particular poetry and theatre, were of little value to people and had the power to corrupt making people behave immorally, unethically and threaten governments (Plato, The Republic, Book X). Using the key aspects of Plato’s metaphysical, epistemological and psychological arguments students considered first Plato’s view of art as imitation (Plato, The Republic, Books II, III & X, & Ion). This refers to a representation of Forms or Ideas which are ‘an ensemble of abstract properties or qualities that exist independently of our world and constitute a sphere of being distinguished and separated from the human one’ (Abbagnano and Fornero 1986: vol. 1,123-4). The arts are doubly flawed because they are an interpretation of an interpretation of the true essence of things. Using Plato’s epistemological argument, students considered the view that understanding, enlightenment or moral teachings cannot be gained through the arts. Finally, consideration was given to Plato’s view that exposure to the arts feeds the irrational part of the human soul thereby

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often rendering the rational part ineffective in the formation of human ideas. A more positive view of the arts in relation to their cognitive value and emotional impact was looked at in the work of Aristotle, mainly about music and tragic theatrical performance (Aristotle, The Poetics). Through Aristotle’s viewpoint students considered the value of the arts in terms of their function in moral education and self-development as well as their cathartic function, which for Aristotle was especially evident in the tragic theatrical performance. Other philosophical viewpoints were considered through the work of Kant (Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime); Hegel (Phenomenology of Spirit); Nietzsche (The Birth of Tragedy); and Maritain (Art and Faith: Letters between Jacques Maritain and Jean Cocteau). The controversy over the arts that is evident within philosophy was also shown to exist in theology. Starting with the early church onwards students considered the various degrees of antagonism, sometimes expressed with great ferocity regarding arts, particularly in the context of the church and worship, or more generally in society. Looking at the views of those in the early Church the views of Tertullian (On Idolatry) and Clement of Alexandria (Stromata) showed evidence of the negative attitude with their accusations of art promoting a range of things: idolatry, indecent and immoral behaviour, stunting of spiritual growth, and distracting individuals from seeking God. The clash of opinions in the Church during the 8th and 9th century over the use of icons further demonstrated the uneasiness and disagreement over the presence and function of art within the Church. The role of art in medieval times was seen to express religious experience and also used as a way to teach the faith. Icons, statues, stained glass windows, painting and frescoes were common place in Catholic churches prior to the Reformation. The growth of blood imagery in art particularly in Northern Europe was seen by students as a means of the Church glorifying suffering. Devotional art became dominated with pictures of Christ’s flagellation, his crucifixion, his broken and bloody body being removed from the cross. Students debated the view that showing the wounded bloody images of Christ appears to have been one way in which piety was taught to Christians (Bynum 2007: 1-15). From the Reformation period, students saw that the tensions and uneasiness about art in worship and belief were given new expression through Protestant Iconoclasm articulated for example by Calvin (Institutes of the Christian Religion). Finally, contemporary theological debate on the role of the arts both within the church and wider society was explored.

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Students discussed the view of Karl Barth who was against the use of the visual arts in church life because the Word of God he believed must take prominence, yet it his great love of the music of Mozart seems to suggest some art can have a spiritual function, ‘The golden sounds of the melodies of Mozart’s music has always spoken to me, not as gospel, but as parables of the Kingdom revealed in the gospel of God’s grace’ (Barth, 1969: 45). Consideration was given to Tillich’s view that the visual arts could have theological significance and that they had a vital role in providing a bridge between the religious and secular (Tillich, 1964: 81) and also the view of von Balthasar (1982) that the visual arts have an important role in theological work. Finally students engaged with de Gruchy’s (2001) perspective on how he saw the relationship between theology and the visual arts showing the value of these in the life of the Church as an aid to worship and in the struggle against moral evil. Having provided an overview of the debates and opinions that have existed across the centuries in these two academic disciplines time was then given to looking at key Judeo-Christian teachings on evil and suffering. It was following this that a small number of paintings/drawings were used to explore how art can assist in learning about theodicy and the challenges that this presents to believers and non-believers.

Methodology The initial findings presented here are the result of sessions facilitated by the author in the context of an elective module on the Philosophy of Religion with three different year groups of undergraduate students. This was a qualitative study which is phenomenological in character and uses an epistemological approach. The findings of this study are based on the empirical data gathered. Therefore it is knowledge gained through the student’s experience of their learning in a formal higher education setting that has been analysed to consider two viewpoints: (a) visual literacy can enhance learning in areas of higher education where text and theoretical based approaches dominate; (b) art (painting and drawing in this study) can specifically engage the student in a more holistic way in considering in the issue of moral evil. In total this study involved 114 final year undergraduate students on a Theology and Religious Studies undergraduate programme over three academic years. The age range was from 21-58, the majority of students were female, and only three students were from minority ethnic groups. The religious background of most participants was Christianity and a small number of students identified themselves as either being atheist or as not

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belonging to a particular religion. Students were informed prior to the start of the module that the sessions on the issues of God, evil and suffering would include the use of paintings/drawings of actual events to consider the philosophical/theological perspectives considered. The use of art in these sessions was part of a research project that I was undertaking to explore the use of visual literacy as part of teaching about moral evil and its consequences. Students were given the opportunity not to participate in the seminar sessions where the art was presented. Instead small tutorial groups were available where students would choose a selection of media reports or the key aspects from auto-biographical accounts of people who had experienced contexts of human destructiveness (e.g. survivors of the holocaust, apartheid in South Africa, Rwandan war, ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina). The lecture sessions on evil and suffering consisted of input on some of the key classical and contemporary Judeo-Christian teachings on theodicy to provide a theological and philosophical context. After the theoretical input a total of six pieces of art were presented to students. These were shown without prior discussion of what they contained or the context which they aimed to portray. The first picture is of a soldier sat in a very exhausted, distraught manner with his head in his hands, his fingers pressing tightly into his face. The second shows a group of eight Jewish refugees, men, women and children. Of the five adults shown, three of them are holding a child in an act of protection. The other two appear to be praying to God. The cold, dark eyes of the two figures in the foreground, a man and a young boy, look outward in a plea for help. The third picture is of a street being bombed by a military plane. Destruction of the buildings and bodies of people lying in the street are shown whilst in the forefront of the painting there are two women, one is holding a baby and close by her side a child, running away from the plane, terror engraved on their faces. The fourth is set in the context of the Rwandan Genocide. It has two men dominating the picture, one holds a child’s head in his hands, and the other embraces a large gun. At the top of the picture there is a Christian cross and beneath is the Virgin Mary. Around the edges of the picture are the faces of men, women and children with expressions of fear, despair and hopelessness. The fifth picture shows a Muslim woman, looking upwards, her hands covering her mouth as she kneels by the side of a grave stone. In the final picture a small boy is shown sat against a wall, portrayed with a small package, dressed in clothes slightly too big for his size, with a lost and lonely expression. The students were asked to look at each painting and consider three things: (i) what they thought the painting was aiming to portray; (ii) what their response was to each picture; and (iii) their evaluation of using a

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combination of the written/spoken word with artistic representations of unspeakable acts and experiences to inform and challenge us. As mentioned above students had already been made aware that art done by witnesses and survivors of conflict would be used in these sessions but I was aware of the challenging, provocative and sensitive nature of discussing the issue of God and suffering. Before showing the paintings I made it clear that the images may be disturbing because they portrayed human experiences of suffering and that should anyone find it distressing they could leave the room. First students were asked to work individually and reflect on the three questions mentioned. The questions were given to each of them on an anonymous work sheet and they were asked to write down their responses. Students then worked in small groups to discuss their responses in relation to the theological/philosophical perspectives already considered and each group then reported back to the larger group the main points of their discussions. Notes were taken by myself of the report back from groups and then immediately after the sessions these were written up.

Case study and findings The data gathered and presented here is considered particularly in relation to the work of Marcuse, Sontag and Stone. The analysis of the data looked for evidence that both supported and challenged the views of these three writers with regard to: (i) art and conscientization; (ii) art connecting with the spiritual; (iii) art and embracing the pain of others.

Art and conscientization Marcuse explores the role of art through a Marxist perspective. He presents the dilemma that whilst art can embody and express the potential for liberation it could express and be used to maintain ideologies of domination (Marcuse, 1968). But he argues that whilst art can affirm the society in which it is created and the reality therein, it can also be alienating from the established reality because, Art dissociates itself from this reality and confronts it with another one: the beautiful and the sublime, the pleasure and the truth that Art presents are not merely those obtaining in the actual society. No matter how much Art may be determined, shaped, directed by prevailing values, standards of taste and behaviour, limits of experience, it is always more and other than beautification and sublimation, recreation and validation of that which is (Marcuse 2007: 143).

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Recognising however that art can be a reflection of bourgeois society with its powers and values of domination he speaks of the need for ‘living art’ where’, Art comes to join the struggle against the powers that be, mental and physical, the struggle against domination and repression in other words, Art, by virtue of its own internal dynamic, is to become a political force’ (Marcuse 2007: 144). Here then is the dialectic aesthetic which Marcuse argues is contained with art. This dialectic in art emancipates, ‘sensibility, imagination, and reason in the spheres of subjectivity and objectivity’ (Marcuse 1979: 9). This confrontational quality arises because ‘art is largely autonomous vis a vis the given social relations. In its autonomy art both protests these relations, and at the same time transcends them. Thereby art subverts the dominant consciousness’ (Marcuse 1979: ix). How does it do this? Becker points out that for Marcuse the answer lay in the ability of the human imagination, its regenerative ability ‘to remain uncolonized by the prevailing ideology, continue to generate new ideas, and reconfigure the familiar’ and as a result push forward to the realization of ‘the idealized state of Utopia’ (Becker 1994: 114). Art can be both a product of the human imagination’s regenerative ability and provoke this ability in those who are yet to have their imagination awakened. Marcuse’s view of art as a source of social change is possible because resistance is contained within the creative process of art, ‘It seems that art as art expresses a truth, an experience, a necessity which, although not in the domain of radical praxis, are nevertheless essential components of revolution’ (Marcuse 1978: 1). Art can also occupy a physical and physic space, ‘a place in the mind where one allows for a recombination of experiences, a suspension of the rules that govern daily life, a denial of gravity’ (Marcuse 1979: 4). The space created through art provides an opportunity to think differently and independently from the established social order. Marcuse believes that there is an emancipatory function of art because of the radical transformative nature of art which if translated into political activity can contribute to social and political change. The data from the students suggest that art can provide a space in which the reconfiguration of personal views about human suffering caused by moral evil can take place. Seventy nine of the students expressed views, either verbally or on their written work sheets, indicating that the pictures of these people had made them think more deeply about why such things as represented in the art shown happen and questioned why such events happen. Forty two students verbally expressed dismay and sadness that such hatred exists and this number increased to eighty nine coupled with data from the written work sheets. One of the obvious points emerging in the group discussions was about God’s existence in relation to evil and

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suffering. Fifty three students indicated they became more challenged about their responsibility towards people who suffer in the ways captured in the pictures and amongst this same number twenty eight students expressed difficulty in believing in an omnipotent, loving, merciful God. Issues of where was God in the Holocaust and why did so many Jews perish was a point of concern as was the issue expressed verbally by six students about how can people who claim to follow God’s teaching ‘kill all those people in the Twin Towers in 2001’. Other comments on the God factor led to discussion about human free will and therefore having the ability to choose between good and evil. The view of sixty nine students on this point was that the issue was not only about why God allowed suffering but why do people allow suffering caused by human action or inaction. Students expressed a range of reactions from that which saw evil and suffering as a fact of life to that of expressing a sense of hopelessness because ‘ordinary people like us don’t have the power to stop these things happening.’ The data also showed that sixty nine students expressed feeling angry and frustrated about the often lack of effective actions by governments. Sixty four students felt that engaging with the images had begun to make them think more about their own sense of responsibility in creating a world where people lived without the fear of being dehumanised, brutalised and killed. This was expressed by one of the students in discussions, ‘It makes me realise how much I don’t know about what is happening to some people, and seeing these pictures makes me ask what I’m doing about trying to stop them happening.’ Reponses of fifty three students indicated that they had thought more about what part they could play in helping to avoid suffering as portrayed in the paintings and drawing. The data collected would appear to concur with the view that, ‘The monopoly of established reality can be challenged by art as it presents the possibility of a fulfilment, which only a transformed society could offer. Art can embody a tension which keeps hope alive’ (Marcuse 1979: 68). Some of the verbal responses from students showed not just a theoretical understanding and evaluation of the suffering portrayed by the images but it demonstrated that as Marcuse argues, ‘art can move the human spirit towards effecting social change’ (Marcuse, 1979: 17).

Art connecting with the spiritual The artistic image and the spirit (human and/or divine) have been paid much attention throughout the history of philosophical and theological thought. While Marcuse speaks of the human spirit in a philosophical

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context of the dialectics of human history which creates change, other philosophers place the human spirit in a theological context and align its existence in relation to the Divine. Yates argues in his work on spirituality and art, ‘The arts are for all of us are sources for shaping our spirituality from our earliest growing up until we die’ (Yates 1998: 20). Art informs our spirituality because it helps facilitate the asking of questions ‘about the meaning and purpose of life. It can pronounce the Divine No against human idolatries and injustices; it can offer the Divine Yes of new possibility’ (Yates 1998: 23). The idea that art can connect with the human spirit from a theological stance is central to the perspective of Stone who provides a view of art as visible Logos and argues argue “that there is nothing inherent in a work of art to forbid its interpretation on a spiritual level” (Stone 2003: xiv). Art is spiritual because it can be an embodiment of the transcendent and it can help illuminate those moments when an intangible encounter with the Divine happens (Stone 2003, 11). Philosophically Stone is positioning herself alongside aspects of Kant and Hegel’s philosophical view of art. Both philosophers see that the role of art is to teach about the Divine and bring the widest range of spiritual truths into human consciousness. But unlike Kant and Hegel who work within an elitist paradigm, claiming that only some things are works of art and only highly gifted people can recognise and attest the absolute, eternal meaning of art; Stone promotes a paradigm of inclusivity. She does this by arguing that we all have the ability to find meaning in art and that the viewer’s role in “the apprehension of meaning” is equal to that of the artist (Stone 2003: xiv). If art can communicate on a spiritual level then this appears to provide an opportunity for people to engage in a process of learning and engagement which transcends the boundaries of reason and rationality that sometimes deters finding a common place where people from diverse backgrounds can come together in meaningful and constructive dialogue. According to Stone the phrase ‘I see’ signifies knowing, understanding and/or believing. (Stone 2003: 2). For Stone a visual image can be worth much more than ‘a thousand words’ because it can convey meaning across languages and cultures, also ‘the visual weight of images can affect and convince in a way that words cannot’, and that ‘Frequently images survive in our memory long after words are forgotten’ (Stone 2003:2 - 9). This argument reflects the Sensory Stimulation Theory which is based on the basic principle that when the human senses, especially the visual sense, is stimulated, then effective learning occurs. Laird (1985) quotes research studies which show that 75% of knowledge held by adults is gained through the visual senses particularly through engaging with image,

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colour, and artistic form. Stone sees art as central to the human learning and in expanding human insight because art is prophetic and it can communicate spiritual truths. Stone takes up the idea of art being prophetic as she speaks of art as a ‘kind of embodiment, a visual word’ (Stone, 2003: 8) which provides, ‘an antidote to numbness and broken images by embodying and re-enacting the mystery’ (Stone 2003, : 114). The prophetic nature of art stands ‘against rootlessness, self-absorption, stagnation and ease, oppression and institutionalized cruelty and despair’ (Stone 2003: 118). Here lays the possibility for art to sensitise and challenge the viewer through engaging with a personal narrative or memory. Art can also be spiritual because it can be an embodiment of the transcendent and it can make concrete those moments when an intangible encounter with being happens as it illuminates ‘the essence of experience beneath and beyond the surface appearance of things’ (Stone 2003 11). Referring to the teaching of St John of the Cross, Stone argues that, ‘God created the arts in order that life might be held together by them, so that we should not separate ourselves from spiritual things.’ Stone presents the argument that art can help form the spiritual within each person and is a means by which to help keep the balance ‘between the material and transcendent that characterises human life’ (Stone 2003: 19). Art can also be a pastoral Word which can enrich people’s spiritual journey. Applying this to a community of faith means that, ‘In people’s ministry together art has the potential to help them feel their feelings, face death concretely, experience hope, seek meaning, share joy’ (Stone, 2003: 140). Together the prophetic and pastoral function of art is a formation tool in the spiritual experience of both the individual and community. Here lays the possibility for art to sensitise, mobilise and challenge the viewer through engaging with a personal narrative or memory. The idea that art can connect with the human spirit from a theological stance is central to the perspective of Stone who provides a view of art as visible Logos and argues, ‘that there is nothing inherent in a work of art to forbid its interpretation on a spiritual level’ (Stone 2003: xiv). If art can communicate on a spiritual level then this appears to provide an opportunity for people to engage in a process of learning and engagement which transcends the boundaries of reason and rationality that sometimes deters finding a common place where people from diverse backgrounds can come together in meaningful and constructive dialogue. For Stone a visual image, ‘can be worth much more than a thousand words because it can convey meaning across languages and cultures’ (Stone 2003, 2). However, some caution is needed in assuming that a visual image can

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always articulate the same message across languages and cultures because although there will be a specific meaning and reason on the artist’s part, this is then interpreted by the viewer. Studies show that responses to the arts are highly subjective and there are a large range of variables, (cognitive, emotional, personality, biographical context, memories etc.) which shapes each response (Kreitler & Kreitler 1972). This was demonstrated in the students’ response to two of the paintings shown, of which one will be considered in this discussion. The drawing of the soldier sat slumped over with his head in his hands was seen by the majority of the students as the portrayal of the soldier being physically tired, perhaps hungry and just wanting to sleep. Their response, was a matter-of-fact one summarised as the work of a soldier being very physically demanding and that this was being shown by the artist. A minority of students interpreted the drawing as showing that this was not only about physical tiredness but illustrated a state of emotional distress because of what the soldier would have seen in terms of human suffering and destructiveness. Although there were two dominant interpretations of this picture the discussion that followed reflected on the trauma that soldiers experienced when in combat, about why individuals work for the military and also expressions of sadness particularly for those soldiers who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan. The data shows that forty one students engaged on a much more human level with what the picture portrayed. Perhaps part of the answer to why this was the experience of some students can be found in Stone’s belief that art is spiritual because it can be a prophetic Word which raises ‘its image-voice’ against those things which are destructive of life and helps the viewer to construct an alternative to a ruling order that dehumanises. Art’s prophetic voice provides, ‘an antidote to numbness and broken images by embodying and re-enacting the mystery’ (Stone 2003: 114). The prophetic nature of art stands ‘against rootlessness, self-absorption, stagnation and ease, oppression and institutionalized cruelty and despair’ (Stone 2003: 118). Here lays the possibility for art to sensitise, mobilise and challenge the viewer through engaging with a personal narrative or memory. The data shows that sixty six students felt the pictures helped them to connect and begin to empathise in a much deeper and emotional way with people who suffer in the ways depicted in the images shown. The word spiritual was not used by any of the students. One student spoke about how the painting which showed adults trying to protect children, connected with her feelings about how she as a mother would want to protect her young daughter. Responses from seventy two students indicated that looking at the representation of human suffering in the

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paintings, knowing that these were experiences that either the painters had witnessed or experienced, made much more of an emotional impact on them than reading about it in text books. Comments included being reminded of, ‘what it is to be human and the importance of all people having the right to quality of life’; that ‘seeing suffering and the prospect of the death of another person can cause the viewer to confront their own fears about these issues and make them more attentive to the situation of others’; and ‘seeing visually the effects of moral evil helps strip away some of that superficial, materialist approach we have to life’. Certainly the data shows that, ‘Engaging with these feelings the viewer can be challenged to review their understanding of a situation or issue, it can sensitizes us, produce an emotional response and it can mobilise us to some form of action which reaches out to others’ (Stone 2003: 122). And so as Stone argues and which is evidenced in a significant number of the students’ responses is the point that art has the capacity to connect with the soul, thereby ‘it proffers an antidote to the dead tree and the dry stone, an alternative to those prevailing beliefs and values of a culture that threaten spirit—that trivialize experience, anesthetize feeling. And estrange people from others and from their own selves’ (Stone, 2003: 114).

Art and embracing the pain of others Susan Sontag is well known for her work particularly on photographic images which are political in content and message. In her essay on the pictures recording the torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison she argues that ‘complex crimes of leadership, policies and authority are revealed by the pictures’ (Sontag 2004: 2). Sontag has also considered the work of artists such as Callot, Franck and Goya in their portrayal of human suffering in war. Their work showing the killing of civilians by soldiers ‘represents atrocious suffering as something to be deplored, and if possible, stopped’, which is a type of shock therapy that is meant to ‘awaken and wound the viewer’ (Sontag 2003: 42 & 44). Sontag also refers to the long tradition of an iconography of suffering in painting and sculpture which have a particular theological meaning such as the passion and death of Christ or the executions of Christian Saints and Martyrs. The purpose of these is to morally instruct and exemplify, ‘feel admonished or inspire by model faith and fortitude’ and perhaps pushing the viewer to ‘commiserate with the sufferer’s pain’ (Sontag 2003: 40). For Sontag the function of the image is two-fold: (i) what they reveal and mean; and (ii) what they can do in politicising and transforming the viewer from a

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passive status to that which actively reaches out and embraces the pain of others. An important function of images is to make us remember, the activity produced out of memory which without the remembering remains at a passive level. Sontag describes remembering as ‘an ethical act’ she writes, ‘The images say: This is what human beings are capable of doing – may volunteer to do, enthusiastically, self-righteously. Don’t forget’ (Sontag 2003: 115). However, Sontag is also realistic that images of other people's suffering does not always produce this or any response on the part of the viewer. Unlike Marcuse’s materialist argument that art can help create social change and Stone’s view that art can change us on a spiritual level to respond differently to the suffering of others, Sontag points out two important things: showing human suffering through the visual image does not automatically give the answer about how to stop the suffering; and it may not transform the viewer’s attitude either because moral or psychological maturity has not been reached. The data collected shows that twenty four students raised another very essential issue about the potential of the images shown in session to promote a hatred of those who caused suffering. In this sense, they had identified the danger of art being used for propaganda purposes and promoting more violence. Sontag warns about this in speaking particularly of photographs taken during war, ‘Photographs of an atrocity may give rise to opposing responses. A call for peace. A cry for revenge’ (Sontag 2003: 12). Thirty one students took the view that violence begets violence and that this was not the best way to resolve disputes and conflict. The majority of students were less convinced of this view and a number of these students used the example that if someone was killed in your family then you would want to take revenge on the perpetrator. Amongst the students who participated in this research fifteen said that at some point in viewing the paintings/drawings they ‘looked away’. Why? Their answers centred on not wanting to look at the suffering or fear portrayed in the paintings. One student said, she didn’t like to see people treated in such cruel ways and the expressions on some of the faces were terrifying. Another said that looking at the pictures made her feel overwhelmed, that she felt it was not possible for ordinary people to do anything about it. This latter feeling was expressed by a student who said he felt sorry for people shown in the pictures, ‘but there’s nothing I can do about things like this happening, so I’m not interested in looking at these paintings’. The picture that caused all of the fifteen students to look away was the depiction of a scene from the Rwandan Genocide. The key issue was about looking at the two decapitated bodies over which there stood a

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man poised with a machete. The reality is then that for various reasons we sometimes turn away from images which trouble us. According to Sontag this latter example of the ‘turning away’ response would have been seen as coming from someone who ‘has not reached moral or psychological adulthood’ (Sontag 2003: 114). The reality is then that for various reasons sometimes we turn away from images which trouble us. But despite this Sontag's makes a crucial point that the image at least invites us: to pay attention, to reflect, to learn, to examine the rationalizations for mass suffering offered by established powers. Who caused what the picture shows? Who is responsible? Is it excusable? Was it inevitable? Is there some state of affairs which we have accepted up to now that ought to be challenged? (Sontag 2003: 104).

Sontag is suggesting that the image does have the potential to transform attitudes by provoking questions that perhaps some people would not ask about why these things happen. An important function of images is to make us remember which is described by Sontag as ‘an ethical act’ she writes, ‘The images say: This is what human beings are capable of doing – may volunteer to do, enthusiastically, self-righteously. Don’t forget’ (Sontag 2003: 115). But despite this, Sontag makes a crucial point that the image at least invites us, ‘to pay attention, to reflect, to learn, to examine the rationalizations for mass suffering offered by established powers. Who caused what the picture shows? Who is responsible? Is it excusable? Was it inevitable? Is there some state of; affairs which we have accepted up to now that ought to be challenged? (Sontag 2003: 104). Sontag is suggesting that the image does have the potential to transform attitudes and this view can provoke us to consider the traditional questions in religion and philosophy in a new way. The voice of the image can be equal to the power of the voice of the spoken and written word.

Conclusion The work of Marcuse, Stone and Sontag claims that our views, opinions and ignorance can be challenged through art because it has the capacity to impact us in a way that gives new understanding or new meaning to the reality we observe and/or experience. The central point is that art can be an important tool to assist learning and in expanding emotional insight because art can raise human consciousness to a different level and perspective, it is prophetic and it can communicate spiritual truths. Turning to the responses of the students presented above it is possible to

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say that the data shows that for most of them the art they viewed did have some impact on their views and opinions about moral evil and suffering through the engagement of their emotions, both positive and negative. One of the key challenges for educators in presenting the topic of evil and suffering through the visual image, in whatever academic discipline, is how to communicate unspeakable events in the history of humankind in such a way that does not overwhelm and traumatise to the extent that it produces a sense of powerlessness or indifference that disengages rather than engages the student. Trained as academics to present an objective view of issues, we sometimes fall into the trap of considering facts, detail, data and theories as the most appropriate or only way to communicate the unspeakable in life. The importance of visually seeing the human reality of events such as war, conflict and genocide is that they illustrate as well as corroborate atrocities that otherwise can sometimes be incomprehensible and underestimated in terms of the human cost. Otherwise an intellectual remoteness can occur which may translate into and/or reinforce ignorance, indifference and apathy.

References Abbagnano, N. and Fornero, G. (1986) Filosofi e Filosofie nella Storia, Vol 1. Turin: Paravia. Aristotle, (1996) Poetics, London: Penguin Classics. Arts Council England, (2003) Ambitions for the Arts 2003-2006, London: Arts Council England. Arts Council of Korea, (2007) Annual Report, www.arko.or.kr (accessed 27/6/2010). Barth, K. (1969) How I Changed my Mind, Edinburgh: St Andrews Press. Beller, S.D. (2009) Sowing Art, Reaping Peace: Toward a Framework for Evaluating Arts Based Peace Building, Unpublished MA Thesis, American University. Bynum, C.W. (2007) Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in LateMedieval Northern Germany and Beyond, Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania. Calvin, J. (1960) Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. by Ford Lewis Battles, The Library of Christian Classics, Philadelphia: The Westminster Press. Clement of Alexandria (2004) The Stromata, Montana: Kessinger Publishing. De Gruchy, J. W. (2001) Christianity, Art and Transformation: Theological Aesthetics in the Struggle for Justice, Cambridge: Cambridge

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University Press. Hegel, G. W. F. (1979) Phenomenology of Spirit, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kalamanowitz, D. & Lloyd, B, (2005) ‘Art Therapy and Political Violence’ in Kalamanowitz, D. & Lloyd, B. (eds) Art Therapy and Political Violence: With Art without Illusion, London & New York: Routledge, 14-34. Kant, I. (1960) Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, New Jersey: University of California Press. Kreitler, H. & Kreitler, S. (1983) Mental Models: Towards a Cognitive Science of Language, Inference and Consciousness, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Laird, D. (1985) Approaches to Training and Development, Massachusetts: Addison-Welsey. Le Baron, M. and Welch, D. (2005) Arts, Creativity and Intercultural Conflict Resolution: Literature and Resource Review, Vancouver: Conflict Resolution, Arts, and Intercultural Experience Publishing. Marcuse, H. (1968) Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, Boston: Beacon Press. —. (1979) The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics, London: MacMillan Education. —. (2007) Art and Liberation, London: Routledge. Maritain, J. (2007) Art and Faith: Letters between Jacques Maritain and Jean Cocteau, New York: Philosophical Library. Mashatile, P. (2009) Annual Report, Government Department of Arts and Culture, South Africa, https://www.dac.gov.za/sites/default/files/Part1.pdf (accessed 12/06/2010). Nietzsche F. W. (2010) The Birth of Tragedy, Montana: Kessinger Publishing. Plato. (2000) The Republic, Books I – X, trans. by Tom Griffith, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. —. (2010) Ion, trans. Benjamin Jowett, Boston: Actonian Press. Sontag, S. (2004) ‘What Have We Done?’ Guardian, 24 May 2004, sec. G2, 2-3. —. (2003) Regarding the Pain of Others, London, Penguin Books. Stone, K. (2003) Image and Spirit: Finding Meaning in Visual Art, London: Longman & Todd. Sway, R.A., R. Nashashibi, R. Salah and R. Shweiki. (2005) ‘Expressive Arts Therapy – Healing the Traumatized: The Palestinian Experience’, in Kalamanowitz, D. & Lloyd, B. (eds) Art Therapy and Political

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Violence: With Art without Illusion, London &New York: Routledge, 28-39. Tertullian. (2010) On Idolatry, Montana: Kessinger Publishing. Tillich, P. (1964) Theology of Culture, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Von Balthasar, H. U. (1982) The Glory of the Lord: A Theology of Aesthetics, Seeing the Form, Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark. Wise, S. (2005) ‘A Time for Healing: Art Therapy for Children, post September 11, New York’, in Kalamanowitz, D. & Lloyd, B. (eds) Art Therapy and Political Violence: With Art without Illusion, London & New York: Routledge, 142-153. Yates, W. (1998) ‘The Intersection of Art and Religion, in ARTS,’ The Arts in Religious and Theological Studies, 10:1, 19-27.

5 ‘SEEING PARADISE IN THE DUST OF THE STREETS’: A REFLECTION ON STUDENT ART PROJECTS SUE YORE

The intention of this paper is to reflect on themes of peace and reconciliation as they have been expressed in visual art produced by final year students as part of a level three undergraduate module entitled Religion and the Visual Arts. The students are studying on one of four programme strands: Christian Theology, Religious Studies, Theology and Religious Studies or Religion, Philosophy and Ethics at York St John University. While we do have some mature students on our programmes, the students in this sample are all in their early twenties and studied here between 2008 and 2015. They are expected to produce a visual artefact with religious or theological significance as part of their summative assessment. In order to facilitate this, two and a half days of practical workshops are run by a professional artist to help students develop basic artistic techniques. The majority of students utilise semi-abstract and/or expressionist approaches to express their ideas; they have a free remit to produce something that expresses a theological or religious theme reflecting their own interests, beliefs or values, although it should also draw on past learning in the subject area. They then assemble an exhibition which counts as 20% towards their overall mark for the module which is displayed publically and assessed by two tutors. Over the years, it has become apparent that there are three main strands that emerge in relation to the topic of peace and reconciliation: the first points towards a utopian vision of universal love and harmony (see Figure 1); the second envisages peace and reconciliation, or hope, evolving through and within the context of war and genocide; the third

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suggests that any resolution for preventing these in the future and building a ‘peaceable kingdom’1 must come through the toil of human hands. The first view could be viewed as problematic because it ignores the reality of human suffering. Moreover, socio-political utopian ideologies like Fascism and Communism, as well as religious revivalist movements within Christianity and Islam have been the root cause of the some of the worst cases of violence and conflict across the globe in the last two thousand years.2 Paradoxically then, visions of utopian societies, whilst having good ends to aspire to, do it seems, invoke violent conflict between human societies who hold different worldviews. Notwithstanding, we need visions of a life affirming future to aspire to which will be explored through Grace Jantzen’s notion of ‘natality’ who I invoke to justify my artistic exegesis. It also aligns to what Karen Stone (2003) describes as a prophetic approach in the arts which reflects the human capacity for harm back on itself whilst at the same time offering a way through or beyond it. Having experience of both education and the creative arts, Peter Abbs affirms the prophetic impulse as driven by a ‘burning dissatisfaction with the society that surrounds one,’ whilst elaborating on ‘alternative mythologies of consciousness’ (Abbs 2003: 79). The third idea illustrates the idea of human responsibility to work towards resolution and restoration, which is linked here to the Jewish concept of tikkun olam. The writings of poet Denise Levertov (1923-1997) and novelist and essayist Annie Dillard (1945 - ) will be discussed alongside images by students that portray hope in relation to tragic events like the Holocaust, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and 9/11. In brief, the aim is to construct a dialogue between students as artists, artists, including poetic writers, philosophers and theologians to reflect on the possibility of new beginnings.

The role of art in creating meaning Before I move on to discuss the themes of art projects in more detail it is worth pausing to reflect on how art provides meaning, particularly in an educational context. Aside from obvious physical functions of making our 1

‘The Peaceable Kingdom is eschatological future time implicitly referred to in the Bible: Isaiah 2: 2-4; 11: 6-9; Hosea 2:18-19) and in the New Testament (Matthew 5: 43-48) in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. It is also the title of a series of paintings by Edward Hicks which will be discussed later. 2 The most recent attempt is the so called restoration of the Islamic Caliphate declared on 29th June 2014 by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and subsequent efforts to annihilate all non-Muslims to restore an Islamic State as a means to achieve salvation in the afterlife.

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surroundings aesthetically pleasing, art has many personal and social functions which relate to the expression or communication of meaning. As such, art can inspire and provide hope but it can also be used by those in power to support unjust regimes in the form of political propaganda; the destruction of images is a precursor to establishing authority and power of an occupied territory. Yet it can also help us imagine a different future for ourselves and our communities; images of hope set out a path for peace and reconciliation. In this sense art can be a tool for social and political change. Art is so powerful because it engages our emotions and invokes an interpretation. Additionally, as Stone reminds us, ‘much art goes beyond or beneath the surface of things; it interprets reality’ (Stone 2003: 35). Through the internal and external expression of our views on a piece of art, new ideas are able take shape and offer a fuller apprehension of the human situation. Students are required to write an accompanying critical commentary where they outline their aims and objectives as well as reflecting on the artistic journey and religious or theological implications of their art piece. Some comments from these will be included in the overview of each piece. The opportunity to create a visual image allows space for, and values, the role of the emotions and spirituality; the arts rely on imaginative engagement to convey their meaning. The role of spirituality in education is a burgeoning field of discourse although the role of art in its expansion is somewhat underdeveloped.3 Bruce Speck asserts that: Current academic attempts to reestablish the viability of religion and spirituality are essentially a counter movement to the Enlightenment program that has become the reigning paradigm in much of the academy (Speck 2007: 4).

In postmodernity where grand narratives of any order become suspect, the role of subjective viewpoints and varying spiritualties, have begun to gain more credence ‘as a corrective to positivist epistemology’ (Speck 2007: 11). Any definition of spiritualty is fraught with difficulty due to the complex and varied nature of personal and institutional expressions of it. For the purposes of this discussion I follow Abbs’ view that spirituality should be understood as ‘a definitive element of human nature and potentiality, an abiding expression of our predicament and our creative response to it’ (Abbs 2003: 30). While spirituality is inevitably caught up with a quest for self-awareness and non-material issues it is not exclusive 3

Bruce W Speck does not include any reference to artistic development in his literature review for ‘Spirituality in Higher Education.’

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to religious adherents of major world faiths. Neither is it devoid of ethical and moral considerations. The value of incorporating art into any education programme is that it ‘enlists three major aspects of the whole person – mind, body and spirit – in the learning process and environment’ (Campbell 2006: 29). This challenges the underpinning ideologies of a Western Education that are the legacy of Enlightenment ideals that promote rationalism and scientific enquiry. Abbs further elaborates that spirituality facilitates an opening up ‘new dimensions of reflection, prophecy and possibility’ (Abbs 2003: 35). So here we have an educator suggesting that art in education opens the possibility of prophecy. Put more simply, Campbell interprets this as encompassing ‘the realities one faces as well as the dreams one imagines and creates part of the human experiences each person expresses in visual arts (Campbell 2006: 35). The importance of integrating emotions in education is explored by Esther McIntosh who draws on the thought of John Macmurray who recognised the danger of overlying on science and insist[ed] that we need to engage with the arts to achieve a maturity of feeling and the appreciation of the nature of objects and persons … because we are more focused on material gain than on human flourishing. (McIntosh 2015: 8-9).

The role of developing creativity and artistic sensibility is therefore intrinsic to human flourishing. If we are to educate the emotions they must include feelings of anger and dissatisfaction, protest and rage. These negative feelings must also feed into art’s utilities and need to be included in educational objectives if human flourishing is to be holistic and inclusive of restoration and justice.

A poet’s view The title of this paper is taken from the final line of a poem by Denise Levertov, whom I have defined elsewhere as a contemporary mystic,4 called ‘City Psalm’ where the author imagines goodness and hope rising out of the suffering and destruction she saw in Vietnam during the war there in the 1960s. I made an obvious connection between this poem and a piece (see Figure 2) produced by one of my students who had the same 4

Yore, S. (2009) The Mystic Way in Postmodernity: transcending theological boundaries in the writings of Iris Murdoch, Denise Levertov, and Annie Dillard, Oxford; New York: Peter Lang.

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vision of hope amid violent scenes in city streets where there is violent conflict: The killings continue, each second pain and misfortune extend themselves in the genetic chain, injustice is done knowingly, and the air bears the dust of decayed hopes, yet breathing those fumes, walking the thronged pavements among crippled lives, jackhammers raging, a parking lot painfully agleam in the May sun, I have seen not behind but within, within the dull grief, blown grit, hideous concrete façades, another grief, a gleam as of dew, an abode of mercy, have heard not behind but within noise a humming that drifted into a quiet smile. Nothing was changed, all was revealed otherwise; not that horror was not, not that the killings did not continue; not that I thought there was to be no more despair, but that as if transparent all disclosed an otherness that was blesséd, that was bliss, I saw Paradise in the dust of the street (Levertov, 1983: 222).

Denise Levertov was an accomplished poet who had the prophetic ability for ‘double vision;’ to see the reality of despair and destruction whilst at the same time being able to see a glimmer of hope beyond it. She was herself actively involved in the protests against the Vietnam War and her invocations for peace throughout her poetry remain (mostly) optimistic about the possibilities of new beginnings. She was passionate about the power of poetry to instigate social change, believing that the inner change of individuals was required in order for external manifestations to emerge.5 I wish to contend the opportunity to experiment with artistic expression in Higher Education has the same function. Levertov goes further to articulate how art can be powerfully prophetic: We need life, and abundantly - we need poems of spirit, to inform us of the essential, to help us live the great social changes that are necessary … All authentic art shows up the vagueness and slackness of ninety per cent of our lives - so that art is in its nature revolutionary, a factor instigating

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Denise Levertov founded the Writers and Artists Protests against the War in Vietnam and took part in many anti-war demonstrations in the USA.

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radical change, even while (giving “the shock of recognition,” and naming and praising what is) … (Levertov 1992: 127).

One of the key visions Levertov presents in her work is that of a future peaceable world. The final lines of Levertov’s poem ‘Life at War’ look toward living in peace. The title itself juxtaposes life and death, and here is more evidence of the double vision of the poet that enables the reader to see the harsh reality of war as well as to realise the potential of human beings to flourish. On one hand she despairs of ‘the gray filth’ and ‘burned human flesh’ in Vietnam, on the other, she finds a remnant of hope in the fact that we ‘go on knowing of joy, of love’ (Levertov 1987a: 127). Levertov treads an uneasy path here between despair and hope that in the darkest moments in human history we can still, just about, imagine ‘the deep intelligence living at peace would have.’ Some years later, in response to the debate on a panel at Stanford wherein the lack of poems of peace was lamented, she felt moved to write a poem that tries to imagine what peace would be like. The result was the poem entitled ‘Making Peace.’ A voice from the dark called out, ‘the poets must give us imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar imagination of disaster. Peace, not only the absence of war.’ But peace, like a poem, is not there ahead of itself, can’t be imagined before it is made, can’t be known except in the words of its making, … (Levertov 1987b: 40)

Elsewhere Levertov acknowledges that peace is something more than ‘an interim between wars’ and adds that it is something ‘so unknown that it casts no images on the mind’s screen’ (Levertov 1992: 155). This peace in Levertov’s mind is neither utopian nor a complacent belief that God will make all things new. Peace has to be both an internal conversion and made. The poet needs to keep a balance between depicting ‘the grime and gore, the torture, the banality of the computerized apocalypse’ with ‘the vision of the potential for good even in our species which has so messed up the rest of creation’ (Levertov 1992: 144). This life affirming outlook is mirrored in the art works of my students and will be explored in relation to Grace Jantzen’s concept of natality.

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Prophetic art In an essay, Levertov invokes the term ‘prophecy’ to revive the biblical concepts of ‘Threat, Promise Reproach, Admonition,’ which she sums up in the word ‘witness,’ as a much needed role in the contemporary world (Levertov 1992: 147).6 This implies that a prophet has the duty to speak the truth about reality, to warn to people of possible negative outcomes of actions, to resist power structures, to lament, as well as offer visions of a better life – ‘ a new heaven and a new earth’ as she puts it (Levertov 1992: 148). While I am not making any claims about the artistic excellence of my students work, I am situating them in a trajectory of witness or prophecy – a category that Karen Stone (2003) labels as ‘Art as Prophetic Word,’ which proffers an antidote to the dead tree and the dry stone forming, and calling us to form, an alternative to those prevailing beliefs and values of culture that threaten spirit – that trivialize experience, anesthetize feeling, and estrange people from others and their own selves (Stone 2003: 114-115).

Artistic voices can be profoundly prophetic - voices that wake us up and prompt us to take a different moral path; they allow us to get back in touch with reality and ‘goad people out of apathy and numbness’ (Stone 2003:120). Matthew Eggemeier coincides with Levertov’s prophetic voice in her poems about the Vietnam War by defining the prophetic tradition as ‘rooted in the encounter with burning flesh and tortured bodies of victims of oppression’ (Eggemeier 2014: 10). Similarly, Abraham Joshua Heschel (2001), mirroring Levertov’s remnant of hope, reminds us that while the prophets feel enraged by the injustices and suffering they see around them: there are also interludes when one perceives that eternity of love hovering over moments of anguish; at the bottom there is light, fascination, but above the whole soar thunder and lightning (Heschel 2001: 7).

Heschel helpfully links prophecy with artistic and creative endeavour by clearly stating that the prophet is a poet and highlighting that both poet and prophet share ‘a heightened and unified awareness of certain aspects of life’ (Heschel 2001: 468-469). While the poet makes images with the arrangement and patterns of words and stanzas, artists work in tangible or visual mediums, the process behind the production and the impact on the viewer or reader is arguably the same. 6 Levertov states that she draws on a Catholic Biblical scholar here but does not give any more information.

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Artists with prophetic visions The work of both art and prophecy is a human task; both can project into the future – not to tell us what will definitely happen, but to offer possible visions of the future and how human action can intervene to make either a heaven or hell on earth. According to Stone ‘nothing impedes positive social change more surely than a people’s inability to imagine (Stone 2003: 125). I turn now to some brief examples of artists we explored on the module who have tried to help us see the darker side of reality as well as alternative futures.

Seeing what’s in our own backyard: Stanley Spencer British artist Stanley Spencer (1891 – 1959) as a Christian expressed his religious faith through earthly and personal things aspiring to affirm everything, not just the obviously beautiful. The painting The Crucifixion (1958) which was to be his final painting before his death, was commissioned for Aldenham school and depicts in stark terms the human capacity for cruelty. Not surprisingly it caused a lot of outcry as it jarred many people’s religious and cultural sensibilities. The scene is set in the Cookham High Street, a town in Berkshire. Mary is particularly poignant depicted lying prostrate in grief on top of a pile of rubble ‘as though left there by the sea’ (Harries 2004: 120). Instead of Roman soldiers, there are workers from the local brewery, which was a key industry in the area at the time, and a local schoolboy tying Christ to the cross. Spencer has particularly portrayed the pleasure in the eyes of the persecutors. This image is intentionally unsettling to the viewer as it confronts us with cruelty that is re-contextualised as local, in our own streets, rather than distant. Richard Harries concludes that it is ‘rightly disturbing’ because it presents a more realistic view of human capacities to harm than the traditional Crucifixions which focus on beauty (Harries 2004: 120). It confronts us with the prophetic notion that individuals in our communities have the potential to cause suffering and pain, our neighbours, ourselves we could be hammering in the nails. Hope here is a veiled concept; it sits outside the composition and rests with the viewer who will, it is hoped, respond to its message by looking into their own conscience.

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Representing the unpresentable: Paul Nash We find the symbol of the sun in a similar manner portrayed in figures 1, 2, 3, and 5 in Paul Nash’s work We are Making a New World (1918)7 except in his case the depiction was derisive in that ‘the title mocks the ambitions of the war, as the sun rises on a scene of total devastation.’ (www.iwm.org.uk) Paul Nash who depicted the horrors of the Frist World War, could not see a glimmer of hope in the same way that Levertov did. As someone employed as an official War Artist he wrote about his experiences of the war: I have seen the most frightful nightmare of a country, more conceived by Dante or Poe than nature, unspeakable, utterly indescribable. In the fifteen drawings that I have made I may give you some vague idea of its horror, but only being in it and of it can ever make you sensible of it dreadful nature and of what our men in France have to face … no pen or drawing can convey this country – the normal setting of the battles taking place day and night, month after month. Evil and the incarnate fiend alone can be master of this war and no glimmer of God’s hand is seen anywhere. Sunset and sunrise are blasphemous, they are mockeries to man (Nash cit. Duffy 2011: 89).

This is the voice of lament and witness. The sun will rise each day but only to continually reveal the destruction in this apocalyptic scene. We are Making a New World depicts a barren, wasteland - a landscape with only the burnt remains of tree stumps and no life present. It also contains a dissenting anti-war message which would have been revolutionary and dangerous at the time. It also recalls the biblical prophets who drew on images of a wasteland to wake people up from their apathy.8 Does the sun stand as a symbol of divine judgement on the atrocities that humans have inflicted on each other and the earth?

The Peaceable Kingdom: Edward Hicks One of the most well-known representations of future peace and reconciliation comes in the form of Edward Hicks The Peaceable Kingdom painted around 1833. Coming from the Protestant Quaker tradition Hicks struggled with his vocation to paint due to the disapproval of non-utilitarian art. He resolved this by painting around 100 variations of a representation of Isaiah 11:6-9 which prophesises that the ‘wolf will live 7 8

Owned by the Imperial War Museum See Jeremiah 4: 23-26 for example.

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with the lamb, and the leopard will lie down with the kid.’ While this is indeed a utopian vision of the future Kingdom of God, with the animals being metaphors for humans, it is contextualised in what was, at the time, a contemporary human community. In the background Hicks depicted William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania and his famous treaty with Native Americans. As we might expect, given the long tradition of Quaker pacifism, this image depicts peace and reconciliation as the primary goal of human endeavour. It may also have been expressing the artist’s hope for reconciliation with the Society of Friends with whom the Quakers had had a split based on theological difference. While Spencer’s image contextualises cruelty, Hicks contextualises peaceful co-existence. This too is prophetic as it imagines a future where differences have been reconciled. What the image does not depict of course is the genocide of the indigenous people of America and violation of their natural resources that forced them into signing the Treaty.

‘Repairing the world’ after the Shoah9: Samuel Bak In his painting, Creation of Wartime III (1999-2008) Samuel Bak, a survivor of the Holocaust, bears witness to the suffering and destruction following the Holocaust where all the familiar narratives and sense of cohesion are in shreds; he engages in ‘the arduous task of reconstructing a new story that seeks to repair and reorder both self and community’ (Fewell 2012: 35). Bak invokes Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam (1508 1512) to provide a provoking image of a new beginning. Here, Adam, in the guise of an exhausted refugee, is depicted discarded on a pile of rubble alongside several religious objects in the corner of a destroyed building. God is notably absent apart from his hand and forearm which remain as a remnant nailed to the surviving section of wall that has a hole in the shape of Michelangelo’s Creator God. Fewell reflects that, ‘The commanding presence of God literally evaporates in the Shoah’s smoke’ (Fewell 2012: 35). The shattered remains of the Judeo-Christian religion (cross, scrolls, tablets, prayer shawls) and military warfare (rifles, artillery shells, smoke) are juxtaposed in a disordered array of objects and signifiers. The whole scene is one of ruin which deconstructs the order of Michelangelo’s representation of the creation in Genesis. Adam is faced with a different world where meaning and God are in need of reinvention. Bak situates the Shoah as the prologue of new life ‘in the beginning was the Shoah’ 9 Shoah, a Hebrew word meaning ‘calamity’ is the preferred term for the Holocaust from a Jewish perspective.

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(Fewell 2012: 35). So while there is little hope to be discerned in this image there is still a sense of new beginnings.10

Tikkun Olam It is, in Bak’s representation, up to humans to repair the world which is normally spoken of in terms of tikkun olam in Jewish circles.11 The term originated in the Zohar, the most important book in Kabbalist mystical tradition, but has come to refer to social justice and the human responsibility to fix a broken world as co-creators with God. The term was summarised by writer Annie Dillard in her book For the Time Being (2000) within which she attempts to discover glimmers of the sacred in a deeply troubled and mysterious world. She includes an account by Rabbi Isaac Luria that tells of how God withdrew from the world to leave room for creation with the intention that divine light was to filter through ten holy vessels to humans. However, something went cataclysmically wrong: The holy light burst the vessels. The vessels splintered and scattered. Sparks of holiness fell to the depths, and the opaque shards of the broken vessels (quelippot) imprisoned them. This is our bleak world. We see only the demonic shells of things. It is literally sensible to deny that God exists. In fact God is hidden, exiled, in the sparks of divine light the shells entrap. So evil can exist, continue to live: The spark of goodness within things, the Gnostic-like spark that even the most evil tendency encloses, lends evil its being (Dillard 2000: 50-51)

Although to the sceptical reader this is purely an aetiological myth that accounts for moral evil and natural disasters, it also fits in with the idea of keeping hope alive through metaphorical imagery. In Dillard’s view, each small act contributes towards this reparation. Dillard asserts that it is the human task to release the divine sparks …and return them to God. This is the human task: to direct and channel the sparks’ return. This task is tikkun, restoration. Yours is a holy work on earth right now, they say whatever that work is, if you tie your love and desire to God. You do not deny or flee the world, but redeem it, all of it just as it is (Dillard 2000: 141). 10

See also Samual Bak, Genesis (1988) which depicts remnants of human society. The objects suspended in the sky leave the viewer wondering whether this is the beginning of annihilation or new creation. 11 This is most apparent in the bimonthly magazine Tikkun which is a leading Jewish leftist magazine in the U.S that serves as the mouthpiece of Jewish social activism and spiritual renewal.

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The potential for humans to restore the world through recovering more life affirming symbols and metaphors will be explored next.

Grace Jantzen’s imaginary of natality Having recently sat though yet another rerun of the popular film 30012 with its glorified violence and continual bloodshed, I am reminded of Grace Jantzen who tried to highlight the damaging effects of a Western symbolic of death and violence which she critiques as: the deadly material and discursive practices of a thought-world in which violence is taken for granted and expresses itself through every sort of battle, literal and metaphorical, as the taken-for-granted response to a situation … It is urgent that there should be those who step back and ponder the mind-set and heart-hurt that is acted out in such violence, greed and destructiveness, the cultural symbolic of the West that if it continues to be acted out will certainly destroy the planet through pollution if not through warfare (Jantzen 2000: xx)13.

Of course it is not just in popular culture that this is acted out but in many of our time honoured traditions including politics and religion, and as discussed earlier, appears implicitly in education. I suggest that artists and writers with prophetic vision are people who ‘step back’ and suggest possible ways out of the violent course of history. As an antidote to these concerns, Jantzen developed an imaginary of ‘natality’ which is, I suggest, embedded in the glimmers of hope for a peaceable kingdom which I see in the art products of my students. Jantzen draws on the work of Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt whose concerns arose specifically out of her experiences of totalitarian regimes such as National Socialism, which emerged from standard Western thought that she understood to be deeply problematic. She argued that natality, or the fact that we are all born as natals, represents a fundamental dimension of the human condition and experience that should be central category of thought. As a metaphor, natality is essentially about the possibility of new beginnings and, therefore correlates agreeably with the possibility of creating paths 12

Zack Snyder’s (2006) film 300 fictionalises the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BCE based on a graphic novel by Frank Miller. Some critics have pointed out racist and homophobic elements while others have seen it as an analogy of the tensions between US and Iran at the time. 13 A significant aspect of Jantzen’s oeuvre is to critique the patriarchal relationship to the female body across history which she understands to be behind some of the prevailing Western preoccupation with necrophilia.

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towards peace and reconciliation through human artistic effort. In The Life of the Mind she writes: The very capacity for beginning is rooted in natality, and by no means in creativity not in a gift but in the fact that human beings, new men, again and again appear in the world by virtue of birth (Arendt 1978: 217)

Arendt’s vision is based on her perceived need for a new world order based on mutual understanding and partnership brought about by what Jantzen terms ‘a transformation of the necrophilic imaginary’ (Jantzen 1998: 147). Jantzen develops this further arguing that: …taking natality seriously can have direct and immediate consequences for a shift in the imaginary. It affirms the concreteness and embodied nature of human lives and experience, the material and discursive conditions within which subjects are formed and out of which religious symbols must emerge (Jantzen 1998: 146).

More succinctly, Jantzen argues that natality, as a symbol, focuses on ‘life before death’ as opposed to life after death. Therefore, both Arendt and Jantzen consider natality as an ongoing process that has been repressed in favour of ‘the view from nowhere,’ which has dominated philosophical and theological formulations of human nature and our place in the world which have resulted in violent ways. In particular, she grapples with traditional Christianity’s penchant for necrophilia, its focus on death, and a disembodied God, suggesting that ‘natality’ as a metaphor offers more promise for ‘human flourishing.’ Indeed if we look at current events unfolding in Syria and the Levant under the Islamic State we can see how the promise of Paradise outside of our early existence leads to violent conflict and oppression of those whose religious outlook does not conform to the dominant view. To recognise someone as a natal is to recognise ‘a person “in full flourish” … a movement or person that is vibrant and creative, blossoming and coming to fruition’ (Jantzen 1998: 160). Philosopher, Jerry Gill reminds us that ‘words have consequences’ and that ‘the language we acquire and adopt, with various “root metaphors” and conceptual orientations inherent within it, directs and colours the way we construe and interact with the world around us’ (Gill 123-124 ). In her later work, Jantzen, argues that the central feature of the western symbolic is ‘a preoccupation with death, and with it a longing for other worlds’ and calls for a need to find beauty amid violence, not outside of it (Jantzen 2004:45). The prophetic artistic impulse that is intrinsic to Levertov’s oeuvre, only partially realised in other artists who cannot always achieve the

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double vision required, relates clearly to the notion of natality. The idea of restoring the world, or tikkun olam, can also be linked pragmatically to prophetic art. Although each effort might seem inconsequential, this is not the case as each of us has our part to play – however small.

Case Studies: student art projects The four images to be discussed here in more detail have been created in response to war, conflict or genocide in recent history. The students have spontaneously without any prompting from me as the module tutor, produced images that document signs of a developing symbolic based on natality. The common symbol connecting them is the role of the sun or sunlight as a symbol of hope and concern for violent acts perpetrated by political regimes. The multivocalic nature of the sun symbol is too complex to be discussed here; the sun has historically been central to most major societies with a spiritual system. In ancient civilisations it was often worshipped as a male deity, while in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, the sun represents enlightenment or the illuminating truth in the human soul. In reality our very existence depends on the sun; without the warmth from the sun no life would flourish. My students have commonly used it as a symbol of hope, which I am interpreting as a hope for life and flourishing that peace and reconciliation would enable.

Student C: 9/11 (2010) (Figure 3) This student chose to paint a semi-abstract image depicting the destruction of the Twin Towers on 11th September 2001. The student would have been about eleven or twelve years old when the images of the planes flying into the Twin Towers saturated our TV screens. For her, this was obviously a memorable event in her life. What impact did this event, as portrayed in constant media coverage at the time and on subsequent anniversaries, have on young minds? It seems inevitable that young people need to imagine, an alternative, life affirming imaginary future as Jantzen does, in order to progress and develop. Abbs is clear that the prophetic role of art in education ‘presupposes a power to apprehend possibilities’ (Abbs 2003: 68). 9/11 is a bold piece, rich with symbolism and a suggestion of what Jantzen (1998) terms ‘horizons of becoming.’ In discussion, the student stated that she was ‘trying to convey the feelings of people involved in 9/11.’ The student’s concern here affirms Jantzen’s vision of ‘amour mundi, love of the world and the realization of the ultimate preciousness of all natals’ (Graham 2009: 9). When I asked

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whether the sun symbolised hope she agreed that it did but was at pains to point out that there was also a significant amount of dark remaining in the top left corner. So there is a good dose of realism going on in this image. Also of interest is the animal like gaping mouth on the right tower which signifies the brutal nature of these acts which she perceived to be lacking in any moral conscience or sense of wrong. I have included two pieces of Holocaust art (see Figures 4 and 5). These have been designed by two individual students separated by four years who are not known to each other. Both students have read and listened to survivor accounts and visited Auschwitz. Both examples of Holocaust art here want to highlight hope amid suffering. While this may miss some of the darker implications of the Holocaust, it is important to recognise, as Levertov did, the value of believing that hope survives.

Student D: Reaching for the Star of David (2015) (Figure 4) This piece unabashedly draws on the Jewish symbol of the Star of David as a symbol of hope. In reality of course the yellow stars, with various translations for a Jew, were a legal requirement to be worn across large parts of Eastern Europe from 1939. The hands and arms represent those interned in the concentration camps clad in the easily recognisable blue and white striped pyjamas. For this student, the Star of David has a double meaning: one related to religious identity, the other representing their suffering due to the fact that it singled them out for extermination. She does acknowledge the deep questioning about the role of God and whether he had broken his promises that must have gone on within the camps. She states that her image specifically represents the words of Jewish theologian Dan Cohn-Sherbok who said ‘As they awaited their final sentence, they drew strength from one another to witness to the God of Israel’ (Cohn-Sherbok 2002: 183). Interestingly this student drew on the work of Samuel Bak, who I suspect might dismiss this view as sentimental. The primary focus for this student was the power of belief and faith in times of suffering. Perhaps in a broader, retrospective understanding this ignores the underpinning causes of such an atrocity against humanity. Certainly the Holocaust can be cited as one of the major dreadful outcomes of what Jantzen described as ‘discourses of male necrophilia that beset the Western moral imaginary [that] are dependent on their repressed others’ (Graham 2009:17). On the other hand, perhaps Jantzen does not fully acknowledge the role that religious faith plays in human flourishing. In the case of monotheistic

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Western traditions, Judaism in particular, it is not so ready to embed a new symbolic order, as there is comfort in the ancient traditions.

Student E: Forsaken? (2012) (Figure 5) The title to this piece is taken from Psalm 22: 1-2 which is also uttered from the dying Christ on the Cross: ‘My God, my God why have you forsaken me?’ (Matt 27:46). This also inescapably reflects on questions about God’s absence/presence in the Holocaust and is prophetic in that it depicts both ‘hope and desolation’ (Abbs 2003: 68). Developed with a sense of the genre of Holocaust art, this is a semi-abstract piece featuring a fence as a symbol of oppression at the forefront. It is decked out with black and white images that prophetically witness the murder and death that took place as part of Hitler’s Final Solution. The student was aware that she did not have any personal and familiar connections to the Holocaust and therefore had no right according to Stephen Feinstein, director of the Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota to convey the memory of it. Nevertheless she stated that she ‘still felt emotionally connected’ because as she put it ‘as a human being, suffering is universal, and the Holocaust affects every human.’ She deliberately chose colours such as red and black to evoke emotions of sadness and suffering. The light represents the presence of God as ‘a light that was bright throughout the Holocaust and kept shining, offering hope for Jews who were being persecuted for their faith.’ The bright shining light draws the viewer in so that there is hope envisioned beyond the human suffering – linking again to Jantzen’s (1998) horizon of becoming. The student justifies its use based on an inscription discovered on a wall in Cologne where Jews hid from the Nazis: I believe in the sun even when it is not shining. I believe in love even when feeling it not. I believe in God even when he is silent. (Landau 1992: 161)

Jantzen wanted to include the embodied experience of humans and recognise our connections to human beings and history, within her philosophical category of natality (Jantzen 1998: 141). The memory of the experiences of suffering and violent death in the Holocaust is part of this history - they are the starting place for working towards peace and reconciliation.

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Student F: Wall of Tears (2010) (Figure 6) This image shows a stylised version of the Israel/Palestine Wall which has been blown apart to reveal mystical possibility through use of a trail of translucent paint which trails off into a glowing yellow hued light. To either side, black silhouettes depict people torn apart by the continuing conflict in this area. The student’s inspiration comes from British graffiti artist Banksy, whose work appears on the actual wall, yet it also moves beyond mere imitation to draw on and incorporate a range of religious insights. The student documents that she was profoundly affected by a visit arranged through the University Chaplaincy to the region. Whilst there, she listened to harrowing personal narratives from both Israelis and Palestinians that impressed on her the human tragedy of something that is normally conveyed to us largely through news reels so that we become desensitised to the reality of the suffering. She tries to articulate a possible solution. As part of her studies she was also researching and writing about Sufism, the mystical aspect of Islam and had an understanding of Christian, Jewish, and Buddhist traditions from past studies during which she became drawn to the notion of a mystical core at the heart of all religions. The title ‘Wall of Tears’ invokes the biblical tradition of prophetic lament. As such the image expresses genuine sorrow provoked by the student’s experience and understanding of what people are enduring in Israel and Palestine. This student nobly tries to suggest the potential to move beyond the differences around which conflicts arise towards a point of similarity and shared hope symbolised by a tree gradually growing through the wall and breaking it apart with glimmers of sunlight just visible through the branches. Once again, we see a horizon of becoming or an attempt to visualize what Abbs describes as prophetic ‘utopian icon of wholeness’ (Abbs 2003: 81)14 by drawing on expressive popular culture in the form of a popular street artist. Prophets, old and new, are by nature counter-cultural.

Student G: It’s in Our Hands (2012) (Figure 7) This image was chosen for the cover of a book that was one of a three part volume which was a collection of papers from a previous conference on 14

See Dorothee Soelle (2000) The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance, Minneapolis, Minnesota: Fortress Press, as a sustained discussion on the role that mystical traditions across religions could play in transforming the destructive elements of our contemporary culture.

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Peace and Reconciliation held in Youngnak Presbyterian Church in Seoul, Korea in 2010 (Kim and Ha 2012). The image draws inspiration from ancient and contemporary Australian Aboriginal art forms. Human hand prints on rocks are one of the oldest forms of art and are common in parts of southern and eastern Australian: ‘Aboriginal people put a mixture of ochre, water and animal fat … into their mouth and blew it across their hand which rested on a rock surface’ (www.creativespiritus.info). These are found widely across the world where ancient cultures lived and first appeared around 30,000 years ago (National Geographic News 2009). The familiar dot paintings are a more recent development attributed to a white teacher, Geoffrey Bardon, who worked with a small Central Dessert Community as a means to revive Aboriginal Culture and identity in the early 1970s to produce the now famous mural project, Honey Ant Dreaming (McCulloch 201: 18-19). The colours of these art works draw on the colours of nature: yellow for the sun, brown for the earth, red for the desert sand and white for the clouds and sky. It’s in Our Hands deliberately changes these traditional colours to blue and green to suggest a concern that we need to mend the environment and our relationship with it. Jantzen’s imaginary of natality similarly recognises that through the process of being born we are fundamentally connected to others and the wider environment through our ‘our rootedness in the physical and the material’ (Jantzen 1998: 145). Inevitably she argued in Becoming Divine that pantheism should be the primary approach for speaking about the divine, which is linked here with the Aboriginal view of humankind’s intrinsic connection to nature. There is also an explicit message embedded in the title concerning human responsibility to repair our world which I link with the Jewish notion of tikkun olam, except here religious differences are no longer relevant in the face of a possible dystopic future.

Conclusion Paradise in Levertov’s poem refers to the Kingdom of God on earth as a vision of hope. By defining images of hope as prophetic dissent and promise I have suggested that art has the potential to shift our thinking from a culture of violence to one that looks towards peace and reconciliation. Three different concepts have been employed: prophetic vision, an imaginary of natality and tikkun olam. These varying, but linked concepts sit in opposition to our current culture of death and violence; they posit humans as co-creators who not only have a responsibility to create a more peaceable and life enhancing future, but as the means to do so

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through creative engagement with the arts. A range of student artworks have been used to elaborate on these themes and assess how their hopes and concerns about the past and present are being expressed through art. I maintain, that the opportunity to express some of the emotive elements that surface around continuing instances of violence and conflict in the context of teaching and learning in Higher Education offers a holistic educational experience. I hope you agree that there are signs from students as artists that there is an emerging sense of the possibility of new beginnings. Artistic manifestations that draw on the human imagination and empathetic engagement with our troubled world in order to point out possible alternatives, can, hopefully have real impact on us as individuals as well as within the wider community.

References Abbs, P. (2003) Against the Flow: Education, the Arts and Postmodern Culture, London: RoutledgeFalmer. Arendt, H. (1978) The Life of the Mind, San Diego, New York and London: Harcourt. Campbell, L.H. (2006) ‘Spirituality and Holistic Art Education,’ Visual Arts Research 32 (1): 29-34. Cohn-Sherbok, D. (2002) Holocaust Theology: a Reader, Exeter: University of Exeter. Dillard, A. (2000) For the Time Being, New York: Vintage. Duffy, A.P. (2011) ‘We are making a new world’ (Paul Nash) Part 2, British Art Journal 12 (1): 11-18. Fewell, D.N. (2012) ‘From Bak to the Bible: Imagination, Interpretation, and Tikkun Olam,’ ARTS, 23 (2) 33-44. Eggemeier, M. (2014) A Sacramental-Prophetic Vision: Christian Spirituality in a Suffering World, Collegeville, Minnesota: Liturgical Press. Gill, J. H. (1989) Mediated Transcendence: A Postmodern Reflection, Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press. Graham, E.L. (2009) ‘Redeeming the Present,’ in Graham, E.L. (ed) Grace Jantzen: Redeeming the Present, Aldershot, Hampshire; Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate. Harries, R. (2004) The Passion in Art, Aldershot, Hampshire; Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate. Heschel, A.J. (2001) The Prophets, New York: Perennial. Jantzen, G.M. (1998) Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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—. (2000) Julian of Norwich, London: SPCK. —. (2004) Death and the Displacement of Beauty: Foundations of Violence, London and New York: Routledge. Jantzen, G.M. Carrette, J. and Joy, M. (eds), (2009) Violence to Eternity, London and New York: Routledge. Kim, S. and Ha, C.Y. (2012) Building Communities of Reconciliation Volume 1: Reflections on the Life and Teaching of Rev. Kyung-Chik Han, Seoul: Nanumsa. Landau, R.S. (1992) The Nazi Holocaust, London: I B Tauris. Levertov, D. (1983) Poems 1960 – 1967, New York: New Directions. —. (1987a) Poems 1968 – 1972, New York: New Directions. —. (1987b) Breathing the Water, New York: New Directions. —. (1992) New & Selected Essays, New York: New Directions. McCulloch, S. (2001) Contemporary Aboriginal Art: A Guide to the Rebirth of an Ancient Culture, Crows Nest NSW, Australia: Allen & Unwin. McIntosh, E. (2015) ‘Why We Need the Arts: John Macmurray on Education and the Emotions’ Educational Philosophy and Theory 47 (1): 47-60. Speck, B.W. (2007) ‘Spirituality in Higher Education: A Literature Review,’ Speck, B.W. & Hoppe, S.L. (eds) Searching for a Spirituality in Higher Education, New York; Washington, D.C./Baltimore; Bern Frankfurt am Main; Berlin; Brussels, Vienna; Oxford: Peter Lang, 334. Stone, K. (2003) Image and Spirit: Finding Meaning in Visual Art, Minneapolis: Augsburg. New Revised English Bible with the Apocrypha (1989) Oxford: Oxford University Press. ‘Hand Stencils through Time’, National Geographic News, 26/6/2009 http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/06/photogalleries/cave-arthandprints-missions-pictures/ (accessed 2 February 2012). http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/20070 (accessed January 6th, 2013). http://www.creativespirits.info/aboriginalculture/arts/aboriginal-rockart#axzz3hptUrDjc (accessed 4 August 2012).

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Figure 1 Student A:

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All Together (2008)

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Figure 2, Student B: Hope 2010

Figure 3, Student C: 9/11 (2010)

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Figure 4, Student D: Reaching for the Star of David (2015)

Figure 5, Student E: Forsaken? (2012)

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Figure 6, Student F: Wall of Tears (2010)

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Figure 7, Student G: It’s in our Hands’ (2012)

6 GUILT AND RECONCILIATION – AN AESTHETIC PERSPECTIVE: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF ARTISTIC CONTRIBUTIONS FROM GERMANY AND SOUTH KOREA VOLKER KÜSTER

In late modernity theology has to perform an aesthetic turn, if it wants to break out of its current isolation. This hypothesis implies that theologians cannot limit themselves to biblical texts and Christian tradition as a frame of reference but also have to search for traces of God’s presence in cultures and religions.1 Along with interdisciplinarity and multiple methodologies new literary genres like essay, critique or meditation have to be explored to complement the dogmatic tract. In what follows I will tackle the question of the relationship between ethics and aesthetics in context by a close reading and interpretation of the works of painters and writers from Germany and South Korea, who are dealing with questions of guilt and reconciliation in the societal transformation processes of their countries. Because of the comparability of their historic experiences the painters Hong Song-Dam and Gerhard Richter as well as the writers Uwe Timm and Hwang Sok-Yong are brought into dialogue. I will close with some considerations how to create interstitial spaces and memoryscapes.

1

This article is an excerpt from my earlier German book Küster, V. (2009) Gott/Terror. Ein Diptychon, Frankfurt a.M.: Lembeck (Dutch 2008).

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Ethics and aesthetics in context Aesthetics is understood here as a theory of the perception of sensual manifestations (Cf. Seel 2003). This implies for me the thesis, that we perceive for example the horror produced by the media in a structurally similar way to the beauty (Sontag 2003: 67f.). The classical definition of aesthetics as the theory of the perception of beauty has become shaky. This has been caused by the discovery of the artist as individual and the autonomy of the work of art as well as the indifference and lack of norms that is typical for late modernity as it appears exemplarily in the ambivalence of the mass media. In contemporary art moreover the assumption that art is an expression of beauty and therefore of the good is deconstructed. The dialectics between aesthetics and ethics (Cf. Zijlstra 1990) that has been originally regarded as constitutive has to be reconstructed case by case today (Cf. Devereux 1998). In visual arts and literature Christian themes have receded to the background with the rise of modernity. Contemporary artists rarely design sacred spaces. The relationship between the arts and the churches is a difficult one when regarded from both sides. At the same time the arts and the churches have in common that they can interpret human life and allow experiences of transcendence. Whether one succeeds in disclosing to human beings this transcendent dimension of their life, is a criterion for a good worship and similarly for good art. Even if secular art critics and artists probably would contest this vehemently. `The generative themes of human life like birth, illness, suffering and death, hatred, violence and horror but also happiness, friendship and love are dealt with by artists and theologians alike.2 In earlier times Western art made use of the abundance of biblical stories to illustrate them, later mythological, historical and literary topics have been added. The themes themselves can be found in modern art as well and are open to Christian interpretation according to recent developments in art theory. On the other hand the artists make further use of the repertoire of the Christian tradition, even if today they work more with elements rather than with full stories. These aesthetic considerations also have a theological dimension: in how far can secular art be interpreted theologically or to put it the other way round, to what extent can theological language illumine secular circumstances? Christian 2 This terminology I owe to the Brazilian educationalist Paulo Freire. The “generative themes” can be derived from their relevance for a community in a particular context or are fundamental for the identity of a faith community. Cf.Küster, V. (2001) The Many Faces of Jesus Christ. Intercultural Christology, Maryknoll: Orbis, 33-35.

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vocabulary like forgiveness, reconciliation or grace for instance has made its inroads into resolving secular transformation processes (Cf. de Gruchy 2002). During the interviews for the nomination of the members of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission the coloured writer Adam Small (1936),3 one of the candidates himself, postulated: ‘Only literature can perform the miracle of reconciliation’ (Krog 1999: 26). He thereby reconstitutes the dialectic between ethics and aesthetics. I tend to rid Small’s controversial statement of its exclusivism and at the same time extend it to the artistic production at large. The modified thesis then reads as follows: ‘Art can anticipate the miracle of reconciliation and serve as a catalyst in societal transformation processes’. In a similar direction points the living sculpture that the artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset directed for the exhibition ‘Made in Germany’ in the Sprengel Museum Hannover. Close to the entrance inside one of the exhibition halls a young actor dressed in every day clothes stands on a platform silently handing out little cards to the visitors on which one could read, have you come here for forgiveness? Whoever accepted the card was first of all confronted with him or herself. It evoked the question about possible personal guilt. At the same time this declares the exhibition space, and with it the arts, to be a chapel or even a cathedral of reconciliation (Made in Germany 2007: 98). The hypothesis formulated above shall be tested in the following by a comparative study of artistic contributions from Germany and South Korea. The artists introduced here deal in their works with horrible suffering, which they quite often also experienced first-hand. They seem to stand powerless opposite these experiences. From this position of vulnerability the will to reconciliation arises albeit in the beginning only auto-poetic with their own violated identity. The initiative to reconciliation lies often enough with the victims and not with the perpetrators. In spite of all cultural differences between Germany and Korea, the home countries of the artists discussed here are connected through their recent historical experiences. Both countries were divided after the end of World War II, yet while the Germans were perpetrators, the Koreans were victims. Their hopes for freedom and independence after being released from the yoke of Japanese colonialism were distorted by the upcoming East-West conflict. Korea was divided along the 38th Parallel in 1945. Then in 1950-53 a bloody civil war spread throughout the country. 3

Small, who was closely associated with the Black Consciousness Movement, is the most prolific representative of the coloureds of the South African Cape Province.

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Germany experienced a fascist government (1933-45) with the east of the divided country coming under communist rule (1945-89). In Korea Japanese colonialism (1910-45) was followed in the South by an autocratic phase (1945-60) and a number of military governments (1961-88), interrupted only by a short democratic interlude. In the North a communist regime immediately established itself. ‘The Iron Curtain’ here was woven much denser than in Germany. While the Germans were allowed to have certain contacts across the border even after the construction of the wall, Koreans were even forbidden to write letters. South Koreans were interested observers of German reunification and learned their lessons for the envisioned reunification of their own country. The historic meeting of the two Kims, South Korea’s president Kim Dae-Jung (1997-2002) and his North Korean counterpart Kim Jong-Il (since 1994) in 2000, resulted, at least temporarily, in a gradual opening up. These traumatic experiences of the Korean people still need to be dealt with.

Hong Song-Dam – aesthetic self-reconciliation Hong Song-Dam, born in 1955 on the island of Haui and raised in Kwangju, is a real son of the rebellious Cholla province. In his youth he used to work as a studio assistant until his talent was discovered which then enabled him to study fine arts at the Chosun University in Kwangju. His university years were overshadowed by his poverty that forced him to earn money to sustain his living, and by severe tuberculosis from which he suffered. In the sanatorium Hong came in contact with the workers who got sick through the poor working conditions and social activists who were seeking shelter there from police and secret services (Unerwünschte Bilder 1990: 35). The artist became conscientized and took part in the 1980 Kwangju uprising. The fact that he survived the bloody suppression of the revolt became a special obligation for his artwork: ‘To pay off for my survival I want to portray my time!’ (Maltuggi 1986:144).4 His political involvement made Hong a suspect for the regime. In July 1989 the artist was arrested because of an alleged violation of the national security law. He had sent slides of the mural painting ‘The History of the National Liberation Movement of Korea’ that he had painted together with about 200 other artists to the World Youth festival in Pyongyang, North Korea’s capital. The painting that had been destroyed by the South Korean police was reconstructed there in the original format by North Korean 4

Cf. Küster, V. (2010) A Protestant Theology of Passion. Korean Minjung Theology Revisited, Leiden: Brill.

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artists. Hong was tortured and put into solitary confinement. As a result Amnesty International adopted him as prisoner of conscience in October 1989.5 After his release from prison in 1992 he first lived as a freelance artist in Kwangju, but decided in 2000 to move to Illsan near the 38th Parallel; both to gain some distance from Kwangju and to work for Korean reunification. In spring 2005, after getting married he resettled in Ansan. The artist started to engage in cultural work with the many migrant workers who were living in the area. Woodcuts were Hong’s preferred medium for a long time. He found his subjects in the life of the common people. Apart from the depressing scenes of the Kwangju massacre that he dealt with in an artistic way, Hong mainly concentrated on events of everyday life, illustrations of traditional tales, but also religious topics. The artist frequently draws upon traditional Korean stylistics, profiting from having been trained in Buddhist painting (t’eanghwa and tanchong) and from restoring old Korean cultural assets together with his master. The Kwangju massacre which Hong has been traumatized by ended the political spring that blossomed only for a few months after the assassination of president Park Chung-Hee in 1979. Behind the scenes the military turned out to be the ruling power very soon. In its internal struggles General Chun Doo-Hwan asserted himself over his opponents already in December 1979. For the second time after the fall of the Syngman Rhee regime in 1960 caused by student protests, the hopes for democratization were crushed. The disappointed hopes of the people burst into demonstrations all over the country. In Kwangju the demonstrators were able to gain temporary control over the city during May 1980. The government sent troops to resolve the conflict. The Special Forces were said to be starved out and drugged. They acted with brute force against their fellow countrymen. The soldiers fired at random into the people. There were rapes and cruel mutilations in public. The officers in charge, Chun Doo-Hwan and Rho Tae-Woo later became Presidents.6 The American supreme command must have agreed to the deployment, or at least tolerated it, because temporarily troops had to be withdrawn from the 38th Parallel to the interior of the country.7 Kwangju remained a collective trauma for the Korean people for a long time. A volume with woodcuts of Hong Song-Dam, published in 1990 in Korea contains fifty prints originating from the past decade gathered under 5

The trial and its further details are documented in: Unerwünschte Bilder, 11-29. Chun (1980-88) and Rho (1988-93). 7 Only on December 1, 1994, after 44 years, at least the peace-time operational control over the Korean troops was returned from the US to Korea. In 2012 also the wartime command was supposed to be transferred to the Koreans. 6

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the title ‘Kwangju’.8 Blood and tears 7 depict the dead body of a woman lying in a puddle of blood (Figure 1). Her blouse is torn apart, her breast lies bare. She shared in the fate of many women who had been raped before being murdered during the Kwangju massacre by relentless soldiers, their own countrymen. The positioning of her body is reminiscent of Jesus Christ on the lap of his mother in classical depictions of the Pietà. Under a traditional grass mount somewhere in the hills around Kwangju the upper part of a dead body is visible on the print My name is (Figure 2). Nobody was there to even close his eyes, eyes that had seen so much injustice. Still he wants to be called by his name not to be forgotten. The image of the crucified Christ appears only as a torso in the lower third of the print Kwangju (Figure 3). In its center, however, there is a lorry with three bodies on the open platform. They almost appear like sacks - carelessly hurled down; human material in complete disregard of human dignity. On their hands and feet they bear the stigmata of Jesus Christ. The background of the picture is black, only interrupted by a couple of lines in the upper right corner, which apparently are supposed to outline mountains. Hong uses the crucifixion as a strong symbol of identification for those who were suffering themselves. The faith conviction that God is present amidst human suffering gives hope against all hope and empowers the downtrodden to become agents of change. In the 1990s Hong Song-Dam tried to cope with his prison experience in an artistic way, like he did with the Kwangju massacre in the 1980s.9 He switched however his technique from woodprint to oil painting.10 Born on an island surrounded by water, the artist strives to gain back the positive memories of experiencing life at the seaside in his youth after being exposed to water torture during his imprisonment. The guards forced litres of water down his throat or pressed his head under water for several minutes. In the series ‘The twenty days in water’ (8 pieces 1999) Hong describes the metamorphosis of the one tortured with water into a fish, which cannot live without water. The first image of the series (Figure 4) shows the victim sitting naked tied to a chair upside down drowning in water. Flowers are blossoming from the legs of the chair that stick out of the water, together with his feet 8

Cf. the catalogue (1990) Prints of Hong Seong-Dam, Seoul. Cf. (2003) ‘Resistance and Meditation’ Hong Sung-Dam in EAST Wind, New York: Queens Museum of Art. 10 The mural style of the protest years is resumed by Hong in a number of oversized oil paintings. After earlier tableaus denouncing the ecological crisis in more recent works he has created mytho-poetic worlds, mixing elements of Korean history and culture with fantasy. 9

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tied to the front ones. These flowers only grow in coastal areas. In the moment close to death, when the torture has reached a point where one’s resistance fades, Hong recalls these flowers of his youth. In the early morning hours when fog is covering the ground up to ones’ knees, the flowers seem to drift on the sea. Even these beautiful flowers have forsaken him in his own perception. A rice bowl floats on the water next to the chair. While for Kim Chi-Ha, his friend and companion, rice as the basic food in Asia is a symbol of life, Hong Song-Dam has a much more ambivalent notion of it. One can only be tortured if he or she eats sufficiently. Rice then becomes part of the torture process. Fishes are swimming around the body. On the right hand a single tree grows on the cliffs. In the upper left corner one can see an island from a far. Probably reminding of the artists own home island Haui. In the fourth picture (Figure 5) the former prisoner has grown fins and is swimming with a fish. Together their bodies form a circle, reminiscent of the yin-yang symbol of cosmic harmony. For the last three pictures Hong chose the shape of a mandala. On number six (Figure 6) man and fish circle around the chair, with some of the bonds hanging over the backrest. On the seventh picture (Figure 7) they are surrounded by depictions of memories from the artist’s life. Close to death one’s life passes by before the inner eye. The two are now swimming around a rice bowl. On the concluding picture (Figure 8) the man has transformed into a fish totally. The two fishes still circle around the rice bowl, the color of which has changed from the yellowish of the preceding picture to pure white, symbol of catharsis.11 Hong Song-Dam has recovered from his trauma through his artwork. One of the torturers who had been traced by an investigative TV programme was not showing any repentance and even said that they obviously did not torture him enough because he is still politically active. While the artist has gone through a process of aesthetic self-reconciliation, mutual reconciliation and forgiveness have not even begun in Korea (Cf. Chai 2005).

Gerhard Richter – aesthetizising memory Gerhard Richter was born in 1932 in Dresden. The Nazi dictatorship left its marks on the first thirteen years of his life. Half of this time Germany was at war. The division of the country meant for him the direct transition 11

In the series “Meals” of 68 square paintings in mixed media Hong has created variations on the rice bowl, given to him through a square hole on the bottom of his prison wall (cf. the painting Distributing meals, in: East Wind, 67).

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into a communist system. In 1962 just before the erection of the Berlin wall, Richter ceases his career as rising artist of socialist realism and goes West. After having already finished an artistic training in the East, Richter enrolls anew at the art academy in Düsseldorf. Under the influence of the West German art scene his style changes and he experiences his personal hour zero. The manual of his works kept by the artist himself does not list his early productions. Richter finds his own style in a kind of photographic painting. In times when painting was not done, he sticks to it, by recycling traditional genres such as still life, portrait and landscape. Even if Richter in the meantime experimented with abstract painting he always returned to the concrete. Whereas Hong Song-Dam is a decisive political artist, Gerhard Richter always emphasizes aesthetical questions. Nevertheless his oeuvre includes next to the occasional abstract paintings not only the above mentioned genres but also historical subjects. Early examples are the portraits of his Aunt Marianne, who was murdered in the Nazi Euthanasia programme or his Uncle Rudi in Nazi uniform. With the Nazi doctor Mr. Heyde he also catches one of the perpetrators in picture. The pictures are kept in various shades of grey, the contours blur. Uncle Rudi, his mother’s brother stands in the uniform of the Wehrmacht in front of a wall that reaches to his neck (Figure 9). A small tree or shrub rises above its edge. The background is marked by rented flats. The uncle has taken on a relaxed posture. He smiles into the camera. By portraying a member of his family in Nazi uniform – painted after a private photo – Richter reveals the entanglement of an average German family with the Nazi regime. The artist ‘addresses in a subtle manner questions of collective responsibility and individual guilt of the Germans’ (Elger 2002: 182). Aunt Marianne, also from his mother’s side, is portrayed with the artist himself as a baby, lying with his tummy on a cushion (Figure 10; 1965). Marianne stands as a young girl behind the furniture, on which the baby lies. Only her torso is visible. She is glancing to the right, while little Gerhard looks directly at the viewer’. The background is bathed in blurred grey tones. Everything is concentrated on the young woman and the child – the Madonna is drawn here into private life.12 Richter preserves his aunt from being forgotten and turns her image even into an icon of the victims of the Nazi regime. Mr Heyde depicts one 12 Richter later painted a cycle with images of his third wife Sabine Moritz and their newborn son that is also reminiscent of portrayals of the Madonna. Today these paintings can be seen in the Kunsthalle in Hamburg. Cf. Im Blickfeld: Gehard Richter in der Hamburger Kunsthalle, with a text by Uwe Schneede, Hamburg 2006.

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of the leaders of the Nazi euthanasia programme. After the war he lived under a false name in Flensburg where he worked as neurologist. Behind a police officer, who stands with his back to the camera, the vague facial expressions of a man with thick black spectacles and a hat are visible. The subtitle of the newspaper photo that served as a pattern discloses his identity as ‘Werner Heyde in Nevember 1959, when he turned himself in to the authorities’ (Elger 2002: 100). He committed suicide before he could be taken to court as a criminal of war. The rift in German society also runs through Richter’s own family (Cf. Schreiber 2007). While the aunt was murdered by the Nazis, his father and uncle had to serve in the army of Hitler’s regime. It is an irony of life that Heinrich Eufinger, the father of his first wife Ema, was one of the key figures in the euthanasia programme. After the war he soon became an authority in medical science. For a long time Richter did not really know about this. In any case he played down the political meaning of his pictures. In those days it would have been embarrassing to me to make these backgrounds public. Then the art would have been seen as reappraisal of contemporary history or social work. [...] Now, I don’t mind, if it is known.13

With his three paintings that address the Nazi dictatorship Richter already anticipated in 1965 the questions of the generation ’68, who addressed their parents why they did not resist the Nazi regime.

Uwe Timm – literary interventions The writer Uwe Timm is one of the most prolific representatives of the protest generation.14 Born 1940 in the middle of World War Two, he later would deal in his books with the legacy of the Nazi epoch as well as with the consequences of imperialism and colonialism (cf. Timm 1978). The learned furrier regarded it as his duty to first disencumber the fur shop of his father, before he could acquire the university entrance diploma by second-chance education and start to study philosophy. He thereby singlemindedly followed his goal to devote his life to writing. In his The Example of my Brother (Am Beispiel meines Bruders) published in 2003 Timm addresses questions of guilt and conscience with regard to the years 13

Quoted by Elger, Richter, 172. Cf. his early roman a clef Timm, U. (2007) Heißer Sommer, München6 [1974] and its ironic reverberation in Timm, U.(2006) Rot, München6 [2001]. 14

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of the Nazi dictatorship from the perspective of the involvement of his own family. The formulistic summing up of the parents for what happened was the blow of fate, a fate, one could not influence. To have lost the boy and the home, was one of the sentences, with that they eluded themselves to think more deeply about the reasons. They thought to have contributed with this suffering their share to common atonement. Everything was horrible because they have become victimized themselves, victims of an inexplicable collective fate. It was daemonic forces that operated either beyond history or were part of human nature. In any case they were catastrophic and inevitable. Decisions one only could comply with. One felt treated unjust by fate (Timm 20053: 87f.).

In long flashbacks Timm dissects the life of his parents, searching for their conscience. While his father, according to Timms observation, tries to avoid the question of guilt and relativizes it (Timm 20053: 130),15 his mother at least allows it to be asked (Timm 20053: 129). With the help of a fragmentary war diary the writer tries to get an impression of his 16 years older brother, who fell in Russia (1943). The book therefore in a sense becomes a requiem.16 The notes of the brother close with the words: ‘Herewith I end my diary, because I regard it as senseless, to take account of such cruel things as they sometimes happen.’ I have opened and read this passage time and again while I was writing – it was as if a ray of light was falling into darkness. How did this insight evolve? My brother mentions the death of two comrades and the loss of his home. Both events were dating back for quite some time. Could it be that in the meantime something has happened during his service, something horrible, that eludes this form of writing? His notes could not comprise the suffering, neither that of the others nor one’s own. It is the lack of any compassion – even in regard to oneself. The repetition made the futile even trivial. Does this insight, that one cannot take account of these cruel things, also comprise the foes and victims, the Russian soldiers and civilians? The Jews? The diary does not contain any anti-Semitic statements or stereotypes, like in the army post of other soldiers: Untermenschen, dirt, vermin, the bluntness of the Russians. Yet one can also not find a sentence that shows something like compassion, no insinuation of criticizing the 15

Hielscher, M. (2007) Uwe Timm, München, talks about “the Prussian German nationalistic and conservative middle-class values of the father” (cf. ibid., 29). 16 Hielscher, Timm 177 compares the composition of the book with a fugue. Four times the death of a family member is described, father, mother and the two older siblings, brother and sister.

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circumstances is to be detected, nothing that would explain a sudden conversion. The notes neither reveal someone who acts on conviction nor burgeoning resistance. They show – and that is what is terrifying – a partial blindness, only the normal is recorded. Even more surprising this sentence and the interstice between the last but one entry the journey continues and the insight, not to be able any more to write about such horrible things. There is the wish, my wish, that this interstice stands for a no, for the non servo, that marks the beginning of the revoke of obedience and asks for more courage, than is necessary to blast breaches for the attacking tanks. That would be the courage that leads into separation, and into the pride and pain of the lonesome (Timm 20053: 147f,).

Timm gives voice – in an often theologically drenched language – to what is hidden behind Richter’s paintings, the dismay about the banality of evil and the involvement of their own families. Both drag into the light in their own way that which still waits to be dealt with.17

Hwang Sok-Yong – fictionalizing memory Similar to Uwe Timm, Korean writer Hwang Sok-Yong is also a chronicler of the recent history of his divided country. His novels have an autobiographic touch as well. Born 1943 in Manschuria, his family fled to the South during the days of the division of the country. He is tackling these experiences in his early book The story of Mr Han (Hwang 2005). In his novel cycle Chang Kilsan (1974-1984), originally published in sequel in a daily newspaper (Hanguk Ilbo) Hwang reconstructs Korean history from the perspective of the Minjung, the poor, oppressed Korean people. The main character Chang Kilsan is a kind of Korean Robin Hood. The core of the composition is formed by two legends ‘The Falcon of Changsam Cap’ and ‘Chongbul Dong’, both of which have been also illustrated by Hong Song-Dam (Malttugi 1986: 17-22 and 75-83). In 1989 Hwang travels to the North of the divided country to establish contacts with the writer’s organization there. Upon his return from exile in Berlin and New York in 1993 he is sentenced to imprisonment because of an alleged violation of the national security law. After the election of Kim Dae-Jung as president (1998) Hwang is released from prison along with other political prisoners. The parallels to the biography of his fellow countryman Hong Song-Dam are obvious. Being accused of having illegal contacts with North Korea, both were persecuted only after the official end

17

“Only if something is articulated, resistance can emerge” (ibid., 129).

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of the military dictatorship on grounds of the security laws which were still valid. In his novel The Guest, (Hwang 2007) Hwang describes the massacres among North Korean civilians due to the conflicts between Christians and Communists in the commotion of the Korean War (1950-53). He also focuses on the fate of two brothers, both Christians, who have been haunted by the ghosts of the past all their lives. The novel is composed in the form of a shamanist ritual (Chinogwi-kut) comprising twelve parts, that is supposed to guide the souls of the deceased safely into the hereafter. The author himself writes: I hope that this kind of personal kut, can contribute to heal the scars of war 18 that are still visible on the Korean peninsula, the ghosts of cold war find rest and a new century of reconciliation and cooperation may begin.19

The younger one of the two brothers Ryu Yosop goes on a trip to his home country in his old days. Shortly before his departure his brother Yohan dies. As a ghost he accompanies him on his journey into the past. Gradually the events are reconstructed in all their brutality. In the course of the story not only the two brothers but also their relatives left behind in North Korea and the ghosts of the victims of the massacres that occurred in the wake of the division of the country raise their voices. When Yosop visits an uncle, from his mother’s side, Ahn Song-Man, called Some, it comes to a catharsis in a big witching hour. The other spirits also got up from their places along the wall without any sound and began to disappear in the darkness, pending like cloth widths in the wind. From afar a voice said: The killers and the killed, they all come together again in the other world. Then it was Yohan, who said to his brother: “Finally I am at home, and finally I can get rid of all the hate and anger, that has been in me for so long, and I don’t have to stray around in dark foreign territory. Take care, you two.”

18

Theologically a similar language game can be found in Bonhoeffer, D. (1992) Ethik, Munich, 125-36 esp. 133-136. For Bonhoeffer justification can only take place within the church, ‘for the nations there is only the scarification of guilt and the return to order, law and peace.’Cf. Frettlöh ,M.L. (2004)‘"Der Mensch heißt Mensch, weil er … vergibt”? Philosophisch-politische und anthropologische Vergebungsdiskurse im Licht der fünften Vaterunserbitte’, in J. Ebach et al(eds), Wie? Auch wir vergeben unseren Schuldigern?, Jabboq 5, Gütersloh, 179-215, 186. 19 Hwang, Nachwort [Postscript], in: Der Gast, 294-297, 297.

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All the ghosts had left. Silence prevailed. Gradually the darkness disappeared, outside the window the silhouettes of the mountains emerged in front of the brightening sky. Nobody was in the room besides Yosop and his uncle. Uncle Some said: “Those, who had to leave, have gone, now those who are still here have to start anew to live. We have to clean this maculated country from its dirt, don’t you think so?” Yosop folded his hands and started to recite by heart a passage from the bible [Ecclesiastes 3,8-11] (Hwang 2007: 285).

Creating interstitial spaces and memoryscapes After the overthrow of a dictatorship or the end of bloody civil wars there is a big risk that those forces get their way, who want to suppress and make forgotten the horror about the deeds as soon as possible and proceed to the order of the day. For the sake of the new beginning, the perpetrators get off lightly, while the victims are left alone with their trauma. Theologically Johann Baptist Metz points to a structural parallel in Christianity. He talks about a ‘soteriological circle’, ‘in which the biblical question of justice for the innocent suffering is changed too quick […] into the question of the redemption for the perpetrators’ (Metz 2006: 10 fn. 13). Therefore ‘the church is more at ease with the guilty perpetrators than with the innocent victims’ (Metz 2006: 57). Metz’s repeated polemic against an aesthetization of intellectual discourses including theology however, seems for me orientated towards the classical identification of aesthetics and beauty (Metz 2006: 18f., 105 and 138). I apply a much broader concept of aesthetics that comprises the perception of ugly and evil as well as the suffering of the victims. The strenuous reconstruction of the relationship between aesthetics and ethics is not about an aesthetization of suffering in the sense of its glorification but about its disclosure, its treatment and the preservation of memory. The latter is a central category in the works of all the artists introduced here and matches theologically with Metz’ programme of memoria passionis.20 Regarding our initial question, in how far it is feasible to interpret secular art in a theological way it can be referred to the strategy of late modern hermeneutics to locate the viewer in the picture. A Christian 20 At least five themes are addressed in this connection on a regular basis: The resistance against forgetting, the wish to understand what has happened, the expectation that the perpetrators show repentance, the question whether amnesty or grace should be granted and the necessity to compensate the victims. Cf. Küster, Gott/Terror, 86-93.

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viewer can thus interpret a secular painting from the perspective of his or her religious convictions. It may however not be monopolized for Christian ends. The respect for the autonomy of the work of art requires the necessary distance that must include the recognition of the rights of people with other religious affiliations to interpret the painting (or novel for that matter) in their own way. To give an example: the monochrome blue of a painting by Yves Klein will remind a Christian viewer of the colour of heaven, while a Zen-Buddhist might be reminded in front of the same picture of ‘absolute nothingness’.21 A good work of art will never be exhausted by one interpretation, but produces in interaction with its viewers a plentitude of meanings. At the same time it sets the limits of its interpretation, it does not allow just any. As we have observed on a closer look still many iconographical patterns stem from Christian tradition. Another bridge between art and religion are the generative themes of life for which to understand Christian faith – as well as other religions – has a reservoir of stories and generative themes to deal with. Not only in times of joy, but also in those of suffering and failure. In Christianity the presence of God in human suffering and the defeat of death through the resurrection of Jesus Christ have proven to be powerful stories in situations of oppression and suffering. In Korea it was Minjung theologians in the 1970s and 80s who encountered in the suffering minjung, the poor, workers and farmers the suffering Christ. This made them the avant-garde of social change. Germany does not have a comparable liberation theological movement. Yet the mainline churches have at least identified the overcoming of poverty and oppression in the Third World as a field of their diaconic work. Further there are overlaps between church initiatives like the Kirchentag and parts of the peace and ecology movement. There is however only a few theologians, mainly from the background of new political theology and feminist theology, like Johann Baptist Metz, Jürgen Moltmann or Dorothee Sölle who have addressed the challenges of their context theologically.

Conclusion Adam Small seems to direct a way for artists and theologians to enter in a dialogue that is fruitful for both sides. Because of that an interstitial space or Third Space is opened up, in which one can negotiate between art and theology (Cf. Küster 2004). Artists tackle the generative themes of life 21

In Christian-Buddhist dialogue one also talks about the ‘god filled gap’ in this respect.

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in an aesthetic way. With their works of art they create an interpretative space that allows multiple readings. Theological or even broader religious language can serve to illumine secular circumstances; at the same time it is within the secular language of art that theological content might emerge. Artists in a way then become theologians and theologians become artists.

References Bonhoeffer, D. (1992) Ethik, Munich: Chr.Kaiser. Chai, S.I. (2005) ‘Die Überwindung der Gewalt aus der Sicht der Opfer – Das Beispiel von Hong Sung Dam‘, in: B. Simon and H. Wrogemann (eds), Konviviale Theologie, Festgabe für Theo Sundermeier zum 70. Geburtstag, Frankfurt a.M., 287-98. Devereux, M. (1998) ‘Beauty and evil: The case of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will’, in Jerrold Levinson (ed) Aesthetics and Ethics. Essays at the Intersection, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 227-56. Elger, D. (2002) Gerhard Richter, Maler, Köln. Evangelische Erwachsenenbildung Niedersachsen (ed.) (1990) Unerwünschte Bilder. Hong, Sung-Dam.Holz und Linolschnitte aus Südkorea, Göttingen. Frettlöh, M.L. (2004) ‘“Der Mensch heißt Mensch, weil er … vergibt”? Philosophisch-politische und anthropologische Vergebungsdiskurse im Licht der fünften Vaterunserbitte’, in J. Ebach et. al. (eds) „Wie? Auch wir vergeben unseren Schuldigern?“, Jabboq 5, Gütersloh, 179-215. De Gruchy, J.W. (2002) Reconciliation: Restoring Justice, Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Hielscher, M. (2007) Uwe Timm, München. Hwang, S.Y. (2005) Die Geschichte des Herrn Han, München [Kor. 1972]. —. (2007) Der Gast, München. —. (2006) Im Blickfeld: Gehard Richter in der Hamburger Kunsthalle, with a text by Uwe Schneede, Hamburg. Krog, A. (1999) Country of my Skull, London: Vintage. Küster, V. (2001) The Many Faces of Jesus Christ. Intercultural Christology, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis. —. (2004) ‘Who, with whom, about what? Exploring the Landscape of Inter-religious Dialogue’, Exchange 33: 73-92. —. (2009) Gott/Terror. Ein Diptychon, Frankfurt a.M. (Dutch 2008). —. (2010) A Protestant Theology of Passion. Korean Minjung Theology Revisited, Leiden: Brill.

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Metz, J.B. (2006) Memoria passionis: Ein provozierendes Gedächtnis in pluralistischer Gesellschaft, Freiburg etc. —. (2007) Made in Germany.Kurzführer / Short Guide, Hannover. Lim, C.H. and Jung, A. (eds) (1986) Malttugi. Texte und Bilder aus der Minjung Kulturbewegung in Südkorea, Heidelberg. —. (1990) Prints of Hong Seong-Dam, Seoul. —. (2003) ‘Resistance and Meditation’. Hong Sung-Dam, in: EAST Wind, New York: Queens Museum of Art. Schreiber, J. (2007) Ein Maler aus Deutschland. Gerhard Richter. Das Drama einer Familie, Berlin. Seel, M. (2003) Ästhetik des Erscheinens, Frankfurt a.M. Sontag, S. (2003) Regarding the Pain of Others, London: Penguin. Timm, U. (2007) Heißer Sommer, München6 [1974]. —. (2006) Rot, München6 [2001]. —. (1978) Morenga, München. —. (2005) Am Beispiel meines Bruders, München3. Zijlstra, O. (1990) Ethiek en Esthetiek zijn Eén. Over Wittgensteins Tractatus 6.421, Kamper Cahiers 69, Kampen.

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7 PEACE-BUILDING THROUGH MINJUNG ART IN KOREA SEBASTIAN KIM

After the Korean War in 1953, South Korea went through political turmoil with corruption and dictatorship. Eventually the military took over the government led by General Park Chung-hee (later President) and through a series of coups d’etats military-backed government continued until 1988. Two of the key agendas of the successive government were economic development and peace and stability in the Peninsula. In pursuing these goals, the governments often legitimised their oppression of the opposition party and disregarded the civil liberties of the people. During the period of military-backed government (1961-1988), South Korea faced various political and economic challenges: poverty and inequality in society; human rights abuses by military governments; and confrontation with the communist North. In this period, the South Korean churches were deeply divided theologically into conservative and liberal positions, which posed a struggle for Christians grappling with the political situation. While conservative Christians focused their attention on church growth and spiritual renewal, growing numbers of Christians, led by minjung 1 theologians, stood against the injustice brought by the capitalist market system and military-backed governments. While minjung theologians developed the theoretical framework for the democratisation movement, minjung artists made a significant impact on the movement by providing a platform for expressing people’s han and aspirations. The artists were working alongside minjung theologians but were particularly effective among students and ordinary people who were campaigning against the military-backed government because of human rights abuse. In a sense, they were ‘doing theology in the public sphere’ (Kim 2011: 3-26) or, as Volker Küster puts it, they ‘devote their creativity 1

Sino-Korean term for the masses or the people.

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as means of communication into the service of the common goal’ (1994: 115). They used woodcuts since they can be easily duplicated for flyers, leaflets, books and other printed media without a great cost, thereby ‘democratizing’ art. In addition to Chinese woodcut techniques, they adopted German expressionism and genre paintings of the Korean Yi dynasty (Küster 1994: 116). Lee Chul-soo, Oh Jun and Hong Song-dam were among the most prominent artists in that era and, in addition, students produced banners and murals as they participated in demonstrations against the government. In this period, minjung artists were concerned with three areas: poverty and injustice among factory workers and farmers; political oppression and human rights abuse by the military-backed governments; and the peaceful unification of the two Koreas. As I discuss these in turn, in each case I have identified a historic event which became a focus for the concerns of the minjung artists: the Chun Tae-il incident (1970); the Gwangju uprising (1980); and the National Council of Churches of Korea (NCCK) Declaration (1988).

Struggle for equality and justice for farmers and factory workers in the 1970s and the death of Jeon Tae-il In the 1970s South Korean workers were exploited by multinationals, by Korean conglomerates and by medium and small businesses under pressure to supply the others. Light industry predominated and much of the workforce was fresh from the countryside and living in dormitories, slum housing or shanty towns. In the workplace, training was poor, and health and safety were grossly overlooked. Social security was virtually non-existent and management was rough and sometimes brutal. Although collective bargaining was practised, unions were generally organised or manipulated by employers rather than representing the interests of employees (Ogle 1977). As well as personal grievances, as the working class grew and observed that the rewards for their labour seemed to be disproportionately benefitting the Korean business elite, and that powerful Japanese and American business interests were increasingly dictating domestic policy, so industrial unrest grew and in 1968 it resulted in the first large-scale strike (Cumings 2005: 372-74). Christians sought to address the needs of industrial workers in several different ways. Christian owners employed industrial chaplains, who had mainly evangelistic and pastoral roles; other Christians did social work such as running night schools and kindergartens; and some directly tried to improve conditions for the workers and challenged management (Koo 2007: 76; Ogle 1977: 67-68). Foremost among the latter category were

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UIM and JOC. UIM (Urban and Industrial Mission) was a project of the WCC which built on the Protestant Social Gospel tradition and the theology of Reinhold Niebuhr, and was also inspired by the Catholic worker-priest movement. It had been active in Korea since 1958. UIM workers were mainly young graduates who had disguised their identity and deliberately took factory work to discover what it was like and to make workers aware of their rights (Ogle 1977: 33-65). Although it tended to be the theologically radical who were most vocal in support of UIM, mainstream churches and leaders in the NCCK also backed them. In addition they received funds and personnel from foreign church agencies, such as the Australian Presbyterians who supported the work at Yeongdeungpo from 1964. JOC (Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne) or Young Christian Workers, was a Catholic Action movement founded in Belgium by Joseph Cardijn which received papal approbation in 1925 for its work for labour justice and encouraging Catholic trade unions. In 1967, JOC was involved in a successful action against the Ganghwa Island Simdo garment company. This resulted in a statement by the Bishops’ Conference in February 1968 which declared ‘the Church has a right and responsibility to teach Christian social justice’ and to uphold the dignity of workers (Kim 2009: 199-202). In 1970 the Bishops’ Conference formed a Korean Justice and Peace Committee and in November 1971 the bishops issued a pastoral letter saying economic and social development should go hand-in-hand (Hanson 1980: 102). JOC in Korea also had an agricultural wing that, in 1972, became the Korean Catholic Farmers’ Movement. Both UIM and JOC worked by forming small groups for leisure activities, problem-sharing, conscientization and bible study (Koo 2007: 75). They played an important role in politicising labour, linking the intellectual community with the workers and broadening the social background of participants in the labour movement (Sohn 1989: 180). Using media, street demonstrations and other protest methods, they drew attention to the cause. When industrial workers found their own struggle for labour justice suppressed, they tended gravitate toward the Christian progressives because of their organisational structures and international connections, and also because they were less susceptible than intellectuals to accusations that they were Communist. One single event – the self-immolation of Jeon Tae-il in November 1970 – ‘marked the beginning of South Korea’s working-class formation’, ‘awakened the intellectual community to the dark side of the exportoriented industrialisation’ and stirred Christian consciences into action (Koo 2007: 70-72). 22-year-old Jeon worked as a tailor in sweatshop conditions in the Peace Market in Cheonggyecheon in Seoul, which was

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full of garment factories employing mainly young women workers. He was also a Sunday school teacher at Changhyeun Methodist Church, which was started among people displaced by slum clearance. Jeon documented how young women, 15-18 years old, were spending 15-hour days in exceedingly cramped conditions with no sunlight for very low payment, even by the standards of the time. In 1969 he started a workers’ group and began to campaign for better pay and conditions for them. After letters to the relevant government ministry met no response, and peaceful protests were forcibly broken up, Jeon set himself on fire outside the market (see Rhie & Cho 1997: 306-309). This incident shocked the nation and triggered the minjung movement among students, church members, factory workers and ordinary people, which was largely Christian-led. In the context of the labour movement, minjung artists were active in representing critical voices from the ordinary people. The forums for this included university campuses and small group meetings for conscientization. They employed music, poem and drama as well as paintings and woodblock art. The best example is the ‘Gold-Crowned Jesus’ a musical drama written by Kim Chi-ha, a Catholic dissident, with music by Kim Min-ki, a student composer, and sung by Yang Hee-eun, a Protestant student, most of whose songs were banned by the authorities. It was first performed in 1973 at a Catholic centre in Wonju. The plot involves beggars, lepers and prostitutes on the street; a nun who wants to help them; a company owner who exploits those people; police, university students and a priest who ignore them; and the gold-crowned Jesus who was captured and held in a concrete prison. Jesus had given the gold crown to those on the street, but the priest, police and company owner took it and put it onto Jesus’ head and hid him within concrete. The cynical attitude displayed in the play towards those who with power and authority was widely shared by people at the time and in particular the music, ‘Oh Lord, be here now’ became an expression of seeking God’s justice and also of defiance toward the injustice done to the poor and marginalised. The play included the following poem: That frozen sky. That frozen field. Even the sun has lost its light. Oh, that dark street of despair. Where are they from? Thin-faced people. What are they looking for? Those eyes, those bone-dry hands.

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Oh, Lord now. Here, Oh Lord, now here. Oh, Lord now. Be with us here. Oh, street, lonely street Of those who are rejected. Oh, that dark and poor street. Where is it? Where is heaven? The green forest beyond death Oh, is heaven there? Oh, Lord now. Here, Oh Lord, now here. Oh, Lord now. Be with us here, here.… (Kim 1978: 85-131)

Oh Yoon was particularly interested on the poverty and exploitation of factory workers and produced a number of woodblocks. ‘Dawn for labour’ (1984; Figure 1) (Oh 2010: 129) is a portrayal of a labourer getting up in the early morning for work. It was used for Park No-hae’s poetry book when it was first published in 1984 (Park 2004: 93-95). The rugged back of the labourer expresses the hardship of work and the shape of the figure suggests the tiredness from the long hours of work for most factory workers during the early period of industrial development. When government and company owners insisted that for the sake of economic prosperity and security in a competitive capitalist market, workers need to make sacrifices, the minjung protagonists were arguing that justice for the workers needed to be achieved first and that prosperity and justice are not mutually exclusive. In the midst of the Yushin constitution controversy, there was a struggle for justice for factory workers and farmers in the context of exploitation by company owners. There were a number of art works done by minjung artists, such as ‘Rice in soup and hope’ (Oh Yoon) (Oh 2010: 142), ‘Night work’ and ‘Labourer’s family’ (Hong Sung-dam) and ‘Dream of a female factory worker’ (Lee Chul-soo) (Lee 2011: 59). They express the poverty and hardship of factory workers in inhumane conditions but also present some aspirations and hope in the midst of despair and injustice. In particular, ‘Rice is heaven’, a poem by Kim Chiha (written in 1975) and illustrated by Lee Chul-soo (1987: Figure 2) (Lee 2011: 70) drew much popular attention.

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Peace-building through Minjung Art in Korea Rice is heaven As you cannot possess heaven by yourself Rice is to be shared Rice is heaven As you see the stars in heaven together Rice is to be shared by everybody When rice goes into a mouth Heaven is worshipped in the mind Rice is heaven Ah, ah, rice is To be shared by everybody (Kim 1978: 30).

The idea of rice as heaven was a radical one for Christians, who tended to see heaven in spiritual not material terms, and yet it was inspiring. Kim challenged people that the nature of heaven is sharing because we do not monopolise it, and so it is imperative that we all share what we have. The art work vividly portrays the imaginary heaven in a typically Korean depiction of a pine tree in the middle surrounded by mountains, stars, moon and sun. They are all contained together in a rice bowl, signifying that both rice and heaven are integral to our spiritual aspirations as well as our understanding of everyday reality. For many, this challenged the dichotomy of sacred and secular, suggesting that rice and heaven should be understood as integral part of our life that material and spiritual cannot be separated. It is likely that this concept influenced the Christians who led the nation-wide ‘Rice of Love’ campaign which was started in 1989 and ‘The South-North Sharing Campaign’, founded in 1993, that gained widespread support from the Korean Protestant churches, from both conservative and progressive circles.2

Political oppression by military-backed governments and the Gwangju Democratisation Movement in May 1980 During the 1970s, the political atmosphere became increasingly tense as the government became more aggressive toward opposition politicians, students and religious leaders. Eventually President Park brought in the Yushin Constitution in 1972 justifying it on the basis of the threat from the 2

During the early stage of the campaign, Christians were encouraged to set a bowl of rice set aside whenever they cooked and then bring the rice to their church for collection.

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North. The new constitution gave Park unlimited tenure in office and powers to appoint the cabinet, prime minister and a third of the national assembly. He now ruled largely by emergency decree, each more restrictive than the last. This brought critical opposition from church groups who openly protested against the government on the basis of religious freedom and attendant human rights. In 1973, a group of Christians declared ‘The Korean Christian Manifesto’ which condemned the new Constitution. They believed they were commanded to obey God’s word in the historical context, that Koreans were looking to Christians for action, and that they had a responsibility to carry out God’s salvation through action. They saw this as a continuation of the liberation movement during Japanese rule. They criticized Park for ruling by ‘power and threat’ instead of ‘law and dialogue’. They accused the government of limiting freedom of expression and faith, distorting the facts and brainwashing the people. They persecuted their political opponents, criticised intellectuals, intimidated innocent people and exploited the poor and the workers in the name of economic development. The Manifesto warned that no one is above law and Christians are called to be involved in proclaiming truth and justice and fighting for the poor, marginalized and oppressed. They made three calls for action: for rejection of the Yushin constitution and unity for democratization, for renewal of the church for the poor and oppressed, and for garnering support from the world church (Rhie & Cho 1997: 271-76; See also Yoo 2000: 258-59). The declaration was the beginning of a human rights movement among some Protestant churches, which was led by minjung theologians, but it also signalled the polarization of political positions among Christians, which continues to the present day. The NCCK held a ‘consultation on human rights in Korea’ in November (1973) and soon the NCCK and YMCA buildings and leading liberal churches in Seoul – Tonghap, Methodist and Kijang – became recognised centres of anti-government activity (Park Chung-shin 2003: 194). There were a number of high profile human rights abuses by the government including the arrest of Catholic bishop Chi Hak-soon and other Christian ministers and the People’s Revolutionary Party’s case (1974-75) which eight men were sentenced and executed the same day through a sham trial. Students, the NCCK and the National Catholic Priests Association for Justice were at the forefront of protests against the government, which united other denominations as well in opposition to the government. In 1976 a joint Catholic-Protestant service was held on the highly significant date of 1 March in Myeongdong (Catholic) Cathedral, which

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was rapidly becoming the main centre of anti-government activity. It was attended by the Christian civil leaders who formed the core of the opposition: political leaders Kim Dae-jung and Yun Bo-seon, religious leaders including Ham Seok-heon, NCCK General Secretary Kim Kwanseok, and minjung theologians Ahn Byung-mu and Suh Nam-dong. Twelve of them prepared the Declaration for the Democratic Salvation of the Nation, which was read out during the service by Lee U-jung, head of Korean Church Women United. The 1976 Declaration used secular liberal democratic concepts of freedom and rights for broad appeal and posed a significant intellectual challenge to the rationale for the Yushin constitution by pointing to the importance of dealing with the underlying economic context and North-South tension in order to release funds and resources to achieve democracy and social justice. Park was re-elected in 1978, but he was assassinated in the following year by the head of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency and after the chaotic period Major General Cheon Doo-hwan seized military power on 17 May 1980 and imposed a martial law. It was in this context that the brutal suppression of the student demonstration took place in the south-western city of Gwangju which prompted the Gwangju Uprising. University students defied the curfew and continued to demonstrate. Chun responded by sending in troops to put down the rebellion. In the process of brutal treatment by the soldiers, civilians soon joined in and a major conflict arose between the people citizens and the central government. This resulted about the death of about 600 students and civilians, although the exact number is still in dispute. The Gwangju Uprising or Democratization Movement was also a turning point for the opposition Christians. In particular, some Catholic priests in Gwangju actively participated in the struggle and made it known to the nation despite a media blackout.3 Hong Sung-dam who was from Gwangju and was profoundly affected by the uprising, created a number of art works, expressing the situation, fifty of which were collected and later published as May Gwangju (Hong Sung-dam 1989). The work called ‘Mother’ (1982; Figure 3) is an expression of the hardship that young Koreans and their mothers faced during the time of turmoil. This Korean pietà is the ‘expression of the suffering … of all mothers in Korea’ as she holds her dead son. Her ragged face and hand shows the hard life and agony she went through in her life to raise her son and now she is holding his dead body she has lost 3

Kim Jun-tae, ‘Oh, Gwangju! The Cross of Our Nation!’, translated by ChaePyong Song and Melanie Steyn, https://jaypsong.wordpress.com/2012/05/06/ohgwangju-the-cross-of-our-nation-by-kim-jun-tae/ (accessed 5 March 2015).

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all hope and has only the deep anguish of han, which no one can console. Yet, like the pietà of Mary, the suffering of han may bring justice and then peace in the troubled land. Theologian Suh Nam-dong insisted that han is the key theme for theology in Korean context and that if ‘one does not hear the signs of the han of the minjung, one cannot hear the voices of Christ’. So the art work not only portrays the despair and agony of the mother against injustice done to her who lost her son, but also provides a glimpse of hope for the future when justice and peace will be restored (Suh 1983: 51-65). On the same issue of political struggle, the mural in Chonnam National University (1980; Figure 4) portrays the Gwangju Uprising (Democratization Movement) as a movement of the minjung. In the front of the mural, a student holds a banner of ‘liberation of the people’, and in the background there are students and armed civilians fighting against military forces. On the lower left part of the mural, there are women and children making soup to feed the resistance parties. In the upper part of the mural, there is a large figure of a student holding a rifle who, together with his colleagues in the background, encourages others to join the cause and to protest. The students and civilian army in Gwangju were portrayed by the government as trouble-makers intent on harming national security, peace and stability and they were therefore brutally suppressed by the military. Gwangju Movement represented not only the deep resentment of the people in that region, who have been marginalised for centuries of Korean history, but also those who had undergone the unjust treatment by the authorities and others who exercise power over the weak and the poor. The political tensions continued and were reignited in 1987 when Park Jong-cheol, a student who had died in custody, was later discovered to have been tortured. There were large demonstrations and a commemorative mass was held on 26 January at Myeongdong Cathedral at which Cardinal Kim Sou-hwan challenged the government with the words: ‘Are you not afraid of God? ... God is now asking where is Park Jong-cheol – your son, your student, your citizen – just as he asked Cain who killed Abel’ (Kim 2009: 368). The participation in the demonstrations expanded from a few university students, opposition politicians and some church leaders to the general public and even conservative Christians. In June a nationwide demonstration started when protestors gathered at the Anglican Cathedral in the centre of Seoul and then at Myeongdong Cathedral from the following day. They continued to gather support from civilians in most of major cities. Minjung demonstrators, artists and students refused to accept the argument of the government and large companies that security and prosperity would bring peace and eventually a just society, but argued that

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justice and peace have to go hand in hand and that there will not be peace without justice. They called for democracy and frequently demanded justice for the victims of Gwangju. Perceived US complicity with the suppression of Gwangju Democratization Movement produced antiAmerican slogans as well. Nationwide demonstrations by people from all walks of life eventually brought the government to its knees and an end to dictatorship. President Chun was forced to promise a democratic election in the following year. However, due to a split between the opposition parties, President Noh, a former military general got elected in 1988 and South Korea had to wait another five years to see a full civilian and democratic government. Numerous murals were painted during the time of the June demonstrations. The most well-known and also the most controversial mural was the one at Dong-A University in Busan entitled, ‘June Resistance Panorama’ or ‘Self-reliance, Democracy and Unification’ (1980; Figure 5). It shows Mount Baekdu, which is a symbol of Korean identity with a dragon rising up from it, which indicates the strength and dynamic power of the movement. It is surrounded by people of the North and South dancing with the joy of liberation and in the middle a man tearing the chains and the American flag binding him and running across the sea of trouble, supported by farmers and company workers on the right side of the mural. Another mural was the one in Kyunghee University entitled ‘Youngman’ which is dominated by a strong figure with his fist raised rising out of the crater lake in Mount Baekdu, and cheered on by farmers, company workers and fellow students (1988; Figure 6). It reflects the nature of the June Protest and the desire for democratisation and unification. The murals in this period were produced by students calling for democratisation, selfreliance and unification who were strongly supporting farmers and workers and also anti-American, reflecting the perception that the USA was supportive of the military-backed government due to their shared anticommunist policy. The main issue of concern in the early 1970s was the socio-economic problems of poor workers and farmers, but towards the end of the 70s and 80s, it became political and ideological tensions in relation to democracy. The former identified with and mobilized the ‘mass’ of workers and farmers over against the employers and land owners. But the later minjung theologians and artists had only minority support because they rather uncritically adopted Marxist ideology. Particularly after the Gwangju massacre, minjung theologians and artists shifted their attention to ideological issues, taking a socialist-communist line, favouring North Korea, and confronting what they perceived as the illegitimate government

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of the South, which was in association with the USA. This created a gap between the minjung who were not prepared to be on the side of the North and those intellectuals who tried to integrate minjung theology into their ideological combat (Kim 1998: 8-9).

Peace and reconciliation in the Korean peninsula – the NCCK declaration, February 1988 The activists for democracy in South Korea came to see the division of the peninsula as the flip side of the suppression of civil and human rights since both were maintained on grounds of national security. So it was natural that, having ousted the military regime, they should turn their attention to unification. Perhaps the most important step in this direction was in February 1988, when the NCCK issued the ‘Declaration of the Churches of Korea on National Unification and Peace’, which made a significant impact both within the church and on the whole nation (KNCC *Peace and Reconciliation, 185-95; See also Yi Mahn-Yol 2001: 389-414). The KNCC declaration was welcomed by many Christians but also generated a heated discussion among Christians. It brought to the fore within the churches the issue of peace and reconciliation and motivated even conservative Christians to participate in the debate. The declaration, while affirming the three principles expressed in the Joint North-South Declaration of 1972 – self-determination, peace, and grassroots unification of the Koreas – added the priority of humanitarian practice and the participation of the minjung, who are the victims of the divided Korea, in the unification discussions. The Declaration then proclaimed the year 1995 as a jubilee year for peace and unification when Koreans could celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation from Japan. In the following year, Protestant minister Moon Ik-hwan went on his own initiative to North Korea to meet Kim Il-sung and was arrested by South Korean government as he returned. From his position regarding reunification and democratisation, he argued that peace and justice are inseparable and that, while North Korea should work for the freedom and human rights of its people, the South also needed to work towards more equality and just distribution of wealth (Moon Ik-hwan 1984: 36-44). Although he did not criticise human rights issues in North Korea – a major weakness of most minjung perspectives on the peace and justice between the two Koreas, he expressed the same view as most people who wished to make reconciliation with the North: that one could not talk about unification and peace in the Korean peninsula without dealing with democratisation and justice at home. Later the same year, Im Su-gyeung a

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Catholic university student attended the World Festival of Youth and Students in Pyongyang and received an overwhelming welcome from the people in the North as ‘the flower of unification’.4 She too was arrested by South Korean authorities after she crossed over the border. Minjung artists were very much encouraged by the development of a reconciling spirit between the two Koreas and the peace movement among minjung activists, particularly through the NCCK declaration and the visits of Moon Ik-hwan and Im Soo-kyeung to the North. There were a significant number of art works created to reflect the desire for peace and reconciliation in the Korean peninsula including ‘Daybreak’ (1987) (Lee 2011: 72-73), ‘Wish for the reunification’ (1988) (Lee 2011: 77), ‘Day is breaking, beat the drum!’ (1988) (Lee 2011: 81), and ‘Hope for the unification’ (1985) (Oh 2010: 251). The most well-known work on the topic is ‘Dreaming of reunification’ by Lee Chul-soo (1983 & 1987) (Figure 7) (Lee 2011: 69). This was a mural at Dolsan Church done in 1983 and later reworked as a woodblock with colour added. The man and woman represent the shapes of North and South Korea respectively embracing each other against the background of the mountains of Korea. They firmly hold one another as if they do not wish to be parted again. They may be crying or they may be whispering as they talk about the past years of separation. This work reminds us of so many separated families across the border. Only a very few have had occasion to meet up for a few days by the arrangement between the two governments. The cloud-bridge in the foreground suggests the East Asian folk story of The Weaver Girl and the Cowherd (Gyeonu and Jiknyeo) who were separated and only meet once a year in heaven. The artwork reflects the sad reality of a divided nation and yet the hope for reunification. The approach of the South Korean government toward the North changed drastically in the late 1990s when President Kim Dae-jung announced the ‘Sunshine Policy’, which had three principles: no armed provocation will be tolerated; the South will not attempt to absorb the North in any way; and there would be reconciliation and cooperation wherever possible. This policy had two important dimensions: first, affirming a partnership of the nations, rather than merging the North into the South along the lines of German reunification, and second, insisting that initiatives on the issue be taken by North and South Korea themselves, rather than by outside interference. As a result of this initiative from the South and a change of relationship between the North Korean and US 4

There is a mural in her university, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, entitled, ‘the Flower of Unification’.

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governments, the first ever meeting of the heads of the two Koreas in Pyongyang in June 2000 was a landmark moment for divided Korea. The joint declaration at the end of the meeting was focused on the acceptance of others as partners in peaceful coexistence, dialogue rather than conquest, and attempting to find common solutions to unification step-by-step. This initiative was followed by economic cooperation between the two Koreas, both at governmental and civilian levels, as well as an increase of humanitarian support from the South to the North. The succeeding government in South Korea continued the policy of peaceful coexistence and the gradual reunification of the two Koreas but the talks between the two Koreas are like waves, sometimes raising high expectations but often disappointing people on both sides. Nevertheless, although the political relationship has often appeared tense and aggressive, the exchange of people and trade and the social and cultural cooperation have been steadily increasing, which is a very positive sign that there is growing reconciliation between the two Koreas.

The question of priority of justice and peace Although there were many causes of democratisation, the church’s contributions for justice were widely acknowledged by both church and secular historians (see Korea Democracy Foundation 2009). In particular, the participation of minjung artists and theologians in this cause was significant, but as I pointed out earlier, they were criticised by many conservative Christians who saw national security and stability as taking priority over justice and equality and perceived that justice will be achieved eventually as the South Korean economy and society continued to progress and stabilise. So the priority of justice and peace was a key issue for those minjung theologians and artists. Against the protests brought out by the opposition party, the militarybacked government tried to persuade the people to support its rule on the basis of peace, security and prosperity. This is understandable since the government was facing an enormous challenge of national reconstruction in the midst of the perceived threat from the North. It is also widely held, although also contested, that President Park made lasting contributions to the growth of the national economy during the period, which established ground for South Korea’s being raised within fifty years from the world’s poorest nation to the world’s thirteenth strongest economy. It has to be pointed out that the nation benefitted from relative security and stability, particularly during his earlier period in office. The government argued that in order to maintain security and see economic progress in peace and well-

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being, the citizens would have to sacrifice themselves. They asked people to sacrifice economic justice (fair distribution, workers’ rights, working conditions in factories, etc.) and political justice (aspects of freedom of speech, civil liberties, political opposition activities, etc.). Since overcoming poverty and maintaining security was a critical issue for South Koreans who still vividly remembered the Korean War (1950-53), which cost nearly 3 million lives, South Koreans were prepared to accept limits on civil liberty for the sake of maintaining security. However, successive governments gradually took advantage of this willingness to suppress opposition parties and groups and began to abuse their power. Through a series of emergency acts, any civilians could be arrested and charged without going through proper trial processes. There were numerous cases of human rights violations as many of them were accused of associating with the communist North. The majority of the church leadership, both Protestant and Catholic, tended to hold an anti-communist position due largely to communist persecution of Christians in the North Korea from which many church leaders in the South had fled. During large Christian gatherings during this period, the association of Christianity with anti-communism was very explicit and this close identification is still strong among many older Christians. This generation also saw that the adoption of a free market economy was a necessary measure, at least on a temporary basis, which they believed would eventually lead to benefits for the poor as the economy grew. Korean Protestant churches also operated according to a market economy – adopting competitive approaches to gather congregations which resulted in the rapid growth of mega-churches in large cities. It seems that, in the debate over the emphasis on peace, security and well-being on the one hand and justice and human rights on the other, people are too easily persuaded that peace, security and wellbeing take precedence as in the case of Korean situation. Understandably the connection between justice and peace is of much concern for scholars of peace studies. Johan Galtung, perhaps the most well-known figure in peace studies scholarship, presented models of conflict, violence and peace. He defined ‘negative’ peace as the cessation of direct violence and ‘positive’ peace as dealing with structural and cultural violence as well (Galtung 1996: 72). He saw that either approach could be implemented since both have strengths and weaknesses. Other scholars aim to balance justice and peace but very often a situation demands sacrificing one dimension to the other (see Ramsbotham, et al. 2011; Whitmore 2010: 155-89; Baker 1996: 563-71; Philpott 2012: 11967). In the complexity of human society, there is no absolute justice – the

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concept of justice is fluid and relative. Justice for one group or individual may be injustice for the other party. Justice can be misused for sectarianism, communalism, partisanship, and so on. ‘Justice for all’ is an ideal concept, which in reality is always challenged by individuals and groups who differ for whatever reason. At the same time, peace can be misused for maintaining security, the status quo and stability, which are priorities for those in power. Often temporary measures for keeping peace become the norm and there is little opportunity to pursue justice and therefore there is a great risk to lasting peace. The scholars of peacebuilding and conflict resolution tend to argue that justice can be sacrificed for the sake of immediate peace, thereby releasing people from suffering and establishing security. However, I would argue, on the basis of the South Korean experience, that seeking justice has to have priority for sustainable peace and that one has to be very cautious about too easily accepting a peace option at the expense of justice, which was the argument of the demonstrators. Ahn Byeung-mu, who was a prominent figure in minjung theology circles, in a talk on ‘Justice and Peace’, criticised people who accept peace can be achieved without discussing justice and insisted that it is impossible to achieve peace without justice. He argued this on the basis of his own experience in the Korean peninsula in which the government justified human rights abuse due to the need for economic development and national security. He insisted that the basis of peace will be achieved when true justice in Korea can be achieved, that is when the minjung are liberated from exploitation and democratisation and human rights are restored. And furthermore, he claimed that justice and peace should be understood from a minjung perspective which is learnt through understanding the historical Jesus who was on the side of the poor and oppressed. There is no justice without the liberation and autonomy of the minjung, and if one tries to make peace without this justice, it only works to maintain the status quo. Second, he insists that when we discuss justice we have to talk about sharing of material wealth on the basis of faith that everything is under God’s sovereignty and authority. The first step for achieving justice and peace is to let go of private concepts of what we have got. In other words, the concept of ‘public’ is vital in this regard. As the early Christians shared their food with one another, so we should share what we have with others. God’s kingdom is closely related to the concept of food sharing community (Ahn 1989: 34-59). The basis of peace in justice is also emphasised by Catholic Social Teaching. The Vatican II document Gaudium et Spes (1965) declares:

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In addition, the Compendium for Justice and Peace insists that justice is not just defined by the law but by the profound identity of the human being: in fact, the Church’s social doctrine places alongside the value of justice that of solidarity, in that it is the privileged way of peace. If peace is the fruit of justice – peace is the fruit of solidarity. The goal of peace – will certainly be achieved through the putting into effect of social and international justice… (Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace 2004: 104105).

These assertions of the prerequisite of justice for are founded on the Hebrew Bible where, according to Gerard von Rad, ‘there is absolutely no concept in the Old Testament with so central a significance for all the relationships of human life as that of justice. It is the standard not only for man’s relationship to God, but also for his relationship to his fellows… [the] highest value in life, that upon which all life rests when it is properly ordered’ (von Rad 1975: 370). Even more importantly, as Walther Zimmerli argues, justice in the Hebrew Bible is ‘never blind Justitia. It is always understood as an aspect of open-eyed compassion’ and ‘divine demand for compassion towards the weak and the poor’ (Zimmerli 1976: 96). The crucial test of peace then lies in how a society deals those who are vulnerable. ‘Justice and peace will kiss each other’ in the Psalm 85 is, I would regard, one of the most striking and pertinent passages in the Hebrew Bible when it comes to any form of peace-building.

Conclusion The Korean experience of the minjung struggle in the 1970s and 80s demonstrates the key importance of justice for the poor and oppressed. Although issues and concerns are different from context to context, I would argue that the fight for justice for the poor and oppressed is what has brought a sustainable peace in South Korea. For this, minjung artists made lasting contributions to the movement by providing creative imagination, challenging the authority, and sustaining the legitimacy for

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protest, and above all, persuading people that seeking justice should result in lasting peace. They not only touched people’s hearts by expressing the struggle and han of the people but also by demonstrating hope and aspirations for the future. In a time of despair and confusion, the minjung artists took the risk and led their own protest through various art forms. They may not be the ones who initiated protest by presenting reasonable arguments nor directly confronted the authority by being involved in street protest, but their work encouraged the ordinary people to reflect and remember the injustice and exploitation and persuaded them to sustain their protest in the face of the threats and oppressive measures of the military-backed government. The works of the minjung artists remind us about their struggle to pursue justice in their search for lasting peace and democracy in South Korea, and also about wisdom, discernment, determination and engagement when we face a challenging situation. Pope Paul VI declared that ‘If you want peace, work for justice!’ 5 Desmond Tutu, speaking on the situation of Arab-Israeli conflict, strongly asserted that ‘a true peace can ultimately be built only on justice’ since he believed that ‘injustice and oppression will never prevail. Those who are powerful have to remember the litmus test that God gives to the powerful: “how do you treat the poor, the hungry, and the voiceless?”’ (Tutu 2004: 9-12). Of course, justice and peace should be implemented simultaneously as the Scripture ‘justice and peace will kiss each other’ implies, but if, and often this is the case, one has to prioritize between the two, in the light of the Korean case above, I would argue that justice-seeking has to take precedence.

References Ahn, B.M. (1989) Christ in the Midst of Minjung Event, Seoul: Korea Theological Study Institute, 1989. Baker, P.H. (1996) ‘Conflict Resolution versus Democratic Governance: Divergent Paths to Peace?’ in Crocker, C.A. & Hampson, F.O. (eds) Managing Global Chaos: Sources of and Responses to International Conflict, Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press, 563-71. Cumings, B. (2005) Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History, 2nd ed., New York: W.W. Norton. 5

Pope Paul VI, ‘If you want peace, work for justice’ (1 January 1972), http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/paul_vi/messages/peace/documents/hf_pvi_mes_19711208_v-world-day-for-peace_en.html (accessed 1 June 2014).

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Eric, O.H. (1980) Catholic Politics in China and Korea, Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books. Galtung, J. (1996) Peace by Peaceful Means: Peace and Conflict, Development and Civilisation, Oslo: PRIO. Hong, S.D. (1989) May Gwangju, Gwangju: Institute of the Study of Jeonnam Social Issues. Kim, C.H. (1978) The Gold-Crowned Jesus & Other Writings, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Kim, J.T. (1980) ‘Oh, Gwangju! The Cross of Our Nation!’, translated by Chae-Pyong Song and Melanie Steyn, https://jaypsong.wordpress.com/2012/05/06/oh-gwangju-the-cross-ofour-nation-by-kim-jun-tae/ (accessed 5 March 2015). Kim, S. (2011) Theology in the Public Sphere, London: SCM Press. Kim, S.H. (2009) The Story of Cardinal Kim Sou-hwan (in Korean), Seoul: Pyeonghwa Broadcasting. Kim, S.J. (1998) ‘Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow of Minjung Theology’, Shinhack Sasang, Spring issue. KNCC ‘Declaration of the Churches of Korea on National Reunification and Peace’, in Kim, S., Kollontai, P. & Hoyland, G. (eds), Peace and Reconciliation: In Search of Shared Identity, Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 185-95. Koo, H.G. (2007) ‘Emerging Civil Society: the Role of the Labor Movement’, in Charles K. Armstrong (ed.), Korean Society: Civil Society, Democracy and the State, 2nd ed., London: Routledge, 73-94. Korea Democracy Foundation (2009) A History of Democracy Movement in Korea, vol 2 & 3, Seoul: Dolbegae. Küster, V. (1994) ‘Minjung theology and Minjung Art’, Mission Studies, XI/1, 108-129. Lee, C.S. (2011) A Mind Carved in Wood: Selected Woodblock Prints, 1981-2011, Seoul: Culture Books. Moon, I.H. (1984) How Can Unification Be Achieved?, Seoul: Hakminsa. Ogle, G.E. (1977) Liberty to the Captives: The Struggle Against Oppression in South Korea, Atlanta: John Knox Press. Oh, Y. (2010) Collected Works II: Dokkaebi Who Holds Sword, Seoul: Hyunshil Books. Park, C.S. (2003) Protestantism and Politics in Korea, Seattle: University of Washington Press. Park, N.H. (2004) Dawn of Labour, Seoul: Neurin Geoleum. Philpott, D. (2012) Just and Unjust Peace: An Ethic of Political Reconciliation, New York: OUP.

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Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace (2004) Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, London: Burns & Oates, 2004. Pope Paul VI, ‘If you want peace, work for justice’, http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/paul_vi/messages/peace/documents/ hf_p-vi_mes_19711208_v-world-day-for-peace_en.html (accessed 1 June 2014). Ramsbotham, O., Woodhouse, T. and Miall, H. (2011) Contemporary Conflict Resolution 3rd ed., Cambridge: Polity. Refugee Law Project, ‘Peace First, Justice Later: Traditional Justice in Northern Uganda’. http://www.refugeelawproject.org/working_papers/RLP.WP17.pdf (accessed 15 March 2014). Rhie, D.J. & Cho, Y.J. (eds) (1997) Creeds and Confessions of Korean Church (in Korean), Seoul: Han Deul. Sohn, H.K. (1989) Authoritarianism and Opposition in South Korea, London: Routledge. Suh, N.D. (1983) ‘Toward a Theology of Han’ in Kim Yong Bock (ed), Minjung Theology: People as the Subjects of History, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Tutu, D. (2004) ‘Foreword’ in Priory, M. Speaking the truth about Zionism and Israel, London: Melisende, 9-12. Vatican (1965) Gaudium et Spes. Von Rad, G. (1975) Old Testament Theology vol 1, London: SCM Press. Whitmore, T. (2010) ‘Peacebuilding and Its Challenging Partners: Justice, Human Rights, Development, and Solidarity’, in Schreiter, J., Appleby S. and Powers, G.F. (eds) Peacebuilding: Catholic Theology, Ethics, and Praxis, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 155-89. Yi, M.Y. (2001) Korean Christianity and the National Unification Movement, Seoul: Institute of the History of Christianity in Korea. Zimmerli, W. (1976) The Old Testament and the World, London, SPCK.

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Illustrations

Figure 1 (27.4 x 17.9cm)

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Figure 2 (33 x 36.5cm)

Figure 3 (23.1 x 22.9cm)

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Figure 4 (16 x10m)

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Figure 5 (1988: 3 x 30m) (picture showing part of the whole mural)

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Figure 6 (20 x 15m)

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Figure 7 (41 x 50cm)

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8 IMAGES AND PEACE JYOTI SAHI

Images have often been the cause of conflict. Images can be distorted, abusive and hurtful. Recently, for example, there has been much discussion over cartoons. In India, cartoons used in a school text book on political science, have given rise to violent feelings. The Indian parliament had to discuss the pros and cons of using cartoons for creating awareness, and making people think. Many cartoons are not intended to be funny they are a form of criticism. The line between cartoons and the visual arts generally has always been tenuous. Portraits have been called caricatures. The art critic John Berger has compared the paintings of the artist Francis Bacon to the art of Walt Disney. The portrait of Winston Churchill by Graham Sutherland was considered offensive by Lady Churchill, who, it is believed, had the painting destroyed. The paintings of Picasso have much which is distorted, and can therefore be compared to the art of the cartoonist. Is art meant to be just beautiful, and uncritical of the world in which we live? There are those who talk about the prophetic function of art. Art that is socially engaged and critical may be condemned as anarchist. Charlie Chaplain’s film The Great Dictator would certainly have offended Hitler. But then democracy is based on an ideology which champions freedom of expression. This applies to the visual image as much as to the spoken or written word. But can there be freedom without concern, and an ultimate commitment to the cause of Peace? Does freedom in art conflict with a deeper social responsibility? This is the basic ethical issue in relation to aesthetics. The Biblical command: “Thou shalt not make graven images” (Exodus 20: 4) has been used by many iconoclasts to condemn all forms of image making. Images have been associated with idolatry. It is interesting to note that, although the Abrahamic Faiths have condemned the use of images in

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the context of Holy Persons, or the Divine or Sacred Domain,1 there is a tradition that the Father of Abraham was an image maker. In fact the very passages in the Bible that are most explicit in their censure of images show that there is a deep understanding of how images are created. One could argue that it is the artist who knows the inadequacy of the image to really represent reality. The image derives from our way of seeing, and this is always partial, distorted. So ultimately we have to say that the Real is beyond our imagination. However, as St. John of Damascus argued in his On the Divine Images which was presented at the second council of Nicaea (787AD), when the iconoclastic controversy was in danger of splitting the Church apart, all language is based on metaphors, or images. He showed that the Bible is full of images. The fact that these images are in words, and not made visible, does not mean that they are any truer than visual images. In fact, the danger of the images that we use in words is that we might forget that these are also the products of human language, and are as limited as visual images. In fact a book itself can become an idol, if we take it too literally.

The relation of ethics to aesthetics In Indian art theory there are supposed to be different types of mood, or rasa which is a Sanskrit term meaning juice, or essence. Classical canons of aesthetics going back to Bharata, who is supposed to have lived around the second century of our present era, mentions nine forms of rasa (navarasa). These apply to all the arts, not only the visual art forms, but also the dramatic or performing arts, and also poetry and other forms of literature. Music is also governed by these aesthetic essences, or rasa. Eight of these moods are arranged in pairs of opposites, one considered to be attractive, and the other repulsive. For example, the erotic mood sringara rasa, can be contrasted with the mood of disgust bibhatsa rasa. There is courage, but also fear; joy but also sorrow, anger as well as compassion. The ninth mood has been described as a spiritual mood, and called shanta, or peace. This rasa has also been understood as being the essence of bhakti, or devotion. There have been some who feel that this ninth rasa is not really a mood at all - it is more a spiritual quality that lies beyond moods which are transitory, or conditioned by conflicting emotions. The ninth rasa is the stillness that lies beyond movement, or the silence that is the source from which all sound emanates. Others have 1

St John of Damascus. On The Divine Images; trans by David Anderson, (1980), St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press.

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suggested that this quality of stillness or peace is the balance that can only be found when the opposites which constitute our phenomenal world are resolved, or shall we say reconciled. When anger and compassion are discovered to be two sides of the same coin, then we can say that both these opposite moods are part of the same human currency. It is only when our conflicting emotions are integrated, and we learn to accept the ‘other’, that we can arrive at peace. The desert Father known as Evagrius of Pontus, who had a deep understanding of human nature, argued that the moods were actually what the Greeks called ‘passions’. These passions are not just human: they have a cosmic dimension. They can even be connected to energies, which have an angelic nature. The passions can be used for good or for bad purposes. The psalmist said: ‘be angry and sin not’! Peace cannot be realized without justice. We cannot talk about joy and beatitude, without also recognizing the reality of sorrow and conflict in the world in which we are living. In his Sermon on the Mountain, Jesus said: ‘Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted, Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied, Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy…” (Matt 5: 4 – 7) The Indian mystic and social teacher Kabir, who lived in the 15th century, said that only those who are wounded can understand the suffering of others. In the Wisdom literature of the Bible, we are told that fear is the beginning of Wisdom, and Kierkegaard analysed this fundamental sense of awe in his essay on ‘The concept of Dread’. God may be all loving and all compassionate, but the holiness of God includes the dreadful. This experience of the dark dimension of existence, which is mysterious and often threatening, deeply influenced the work of expressionist artists who evolved aesthetics of angst, or anguish. Ultimately all art aspires to the condition of Peace, but this peace cannot be arrived at without also recognizing the agonizing facts, and underlying causes of conflict.

Creation theology and a theology of liberation The artist is concerned with creativity, and in that sense has been seen as a ‘co-creator’ with that Divine power that brings all things to birth. This Creative Force which the artist draws on, does not belong to the individual human being, but is something that all humanity is given access to. In fact, we could derive a whole understanding of what it means to be human, by saying that every person is called to be an artist in some sense. The imagination, according to William Blake, is the Divine Spark which is

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present in everyone.2 Without this power to imagine, we would not be human. And yet the imagination can also lead us into a world of unreality. In Indian thought the power to imagine, is also the force underlying maya, or illusion. The word maya is related to magic, it is the dangerous aspect of enchantment. Again, in Indian metaphysics maya is the other side of lila, or playfulness. The Divine Source of all creation is playful, and it is this play that the creative child-like dimension in every person, is in tune with. Without play we could not have the gift of empathy, of imagining what it is like to be the ‘Other’. If the ‘Other’ which is essentially different from what we see is our own self-identity, then that the ‘Other’ is perceived as dangerous and even ‘the enemy’. To love the ‘Other’ means really to understand and empathize with the ‘Other’; to be able imaginatively to place oneself in the position of the ‘Other’. That means we need to cross over the boundaries of one’s own culture, and sense of security; to be exposed, and vulnerable. All true art is a way of bridging the gap between a self-experience, and an experience of the ‘Other’. That is why the meeting of cultures, and the bringing together of opposites, potentially gives rise to creative impulses. There has been a tendency to differentiate between a theology that affirms the creative forces of life, such as we find in primal cultures that have an intuition of an energy that transcends the human, being present in the whole of creation, and a theology which focuses on the liberation of down trodden human beings. Creation theology has a very wide scope, and looks at the Cosmic reality. The liberation theologies which come out of experiences at the local level, and are concerned with situations of conflict, are more concerned with the historical reality of communities. In Asia there has been a strong effort to find the link between Creation and Liberation Theologies. Primal communities like the Adivasis or indigenous communities, have a creation spirituality, whereas the marginalized and oppressed Dalits, who have been exploited by a caste system, long for liberation. One aspect of a common concern that links a cosmic, mythological worldview, with a more historical understanding of human conflicts, is to recognize that human well-being depends on the relation between culture and nature. Humanity can only develop in a holistic way, if cultures respect the natural environment. Ecological movements are an 2

The concept of the Divine Spark which is present in the human being, is extended to the whole of Creation in the Hassidic, and earlier Kabalistic ideas related to ‘At-onement’ where it is believed that the Creator is redeeming, or drawing back a Divine Essence which is embedded in every creature, and is in the constant process of returning to its source in the Divine. This concept can be found in the I-Thou philosophy of M. Buber.

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essential dimension of liberation. That would be an important insight of the Vedanta, and of the Buddhist approach to suffering or dukkha. The Bodhisattva is a human being who foregoes the possibility of an individual liberation, believing that true liberation only comes about when the whole of creation is liberated, right down to the ‘last blade of grass’. The liberation of human communities that have suffered from oppression and marginalization, is tied up with an attitude towards the natural environment on which we all depend. If we look deeply at any conflict, we discover a struggle to control natural resources. Water, for example is at the heart of many wars. We all need the fruits of the earth, but when these fruits are appropriated by a privileged few, those who are marginalized are denied the means to live. In many parts of the world we find that the greed for natural resources, which includes mining for precious minerals that lie buried in the earth, is the cause of huge injustices, resulting in whole communities being displaced, and denied their natural habitat. These are just some examples of the way in which cultures want to possess and exploit nature, which leads to the exploitation of human beings living close to the earth the Anawim who are denied access to the very sources of life that are found in nature. We have become very conscious of a terrible ecological crisis because we are so changing the natural rhythms on which we all depend, that even food cycles are being destroyed, and there is an imminent danger of the whole world becoming a famine zone. Not only water to drink, but bread to eat is being controlled by vested interests. All forms of art need to make our cultures conscious of what we are doing to creation around us through the very selfish drives that seem to dominate the world view of the privileged elite and politically powerful in society.

Art as social activism: art ‘represents’, but also makes ‘present’ A concern that faces every creative person is the relationship between action and contemplation, between wanting to change the world in which we live, and the need to also change ourselves. Art-forms come from a contemplative vision. They are essentially part of a way of seeing Reality, and are not to be limited by ideologies, and theories about what should or should not be done politically. There is a danger, which happened in what was called ‘social realism’ where images became a form of propaganda. True art is not so much about representing the world in which we live, as about making present a new vision of reality. Otherwise the imagination is instrumentalized to serve purely political ideologies. If art becomes merely

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the skill to make artefacts, or art objects, it ends up only serving those who can afford these ‘designer products’, and for whom ‘being artistic’ is a status symbol. Essentially true art belongs to the elemental, to the poor rather than the rich. William Morris said that he wanted art to be something everyone has access to, in the same way that education, or the basic needs of life, should be available for everyone.3 Art which is only for the few is ultimately a contradiction in terms. But how can we make art something that every human being can participate in, and be fulfilled by? Here I would suggest that it is important that we come down to the very basic link between art and life, between art and being human. And this means that we need to understand the connection between art and consciousness, or art and meditation. I feel that what we have lost is an art which is rooted in a contemplative spirit. We speak of the artist as an activist, but art cannot act on a community if it does not arise from a deeper spiritual vision. There is a link between art and spirituality. Spirituality without art, or the imagination, becomes a dangerous form of fundamentalism. But art without spirituality becomes just another consumer item, which serves the interests of those who want to possess all that is beautiful or meaningful in life. Art cannot be possessed, any more than we can possess the water that is for all, or the air that every living creature needs to breathe. Our concern for art as a way of discovering peace and reconciliation in the world in which we live, has to include this contemplative dimension. Our deepest loss in the world in which we live is not just a political or social loss. It is a spiritual loss. This does not mean that all art has to be ‘religious’ in the narrow sense. Personally, I do not think that art can be confined to religious boxes, like talking about Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, Christian or Islamic art. The spiritual in art has to be something universal, even though it may draw its ways of seeing from a faith commitment. A work of Islamic art, for example, can be appreciated by all. In fact art forms can help us cross over religious or dogmatic divides, to see that all faiths aspire to discover the beauty of the world in which we live. As noted earlier, this does not mean we refuse to look at those aspects of reality that are not beautiful; the Indian rasa theory accepts that every positive emotion has its counterpart in a negative impulse, so that alongside courage vira we will find fear bhaya. However, all art-forms point to that which we call the ‘ultimate beauty of Creation’ in that the virtual conflict of the light and dark aspects of the world as we see it in the play of the 3 William Morris (1873) News from Nowhere. “I do not want art for a few: any more than (I want) education for a few, or freedom for a few.”

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Divine, is actually resolved in the unity of the ultimate joy, or ananda of the creative experience. That is why drama, or all art experience, while representing what is dark and distorted in the world as we know it, ultimately gives aesthetic pleasure to those who see the work of art. In Indian aesthetics it is said that all art is a way to discovering the Divine present in the world, what is known as Atma Darshan, seeing the Atma or Divine Spirit in all beings. It is this seeing what is holy, and precious in every creature, that is the way that art-forms can liberate humanity from oppressive political structures.4 We need to affirm that different art forms can help us find ways of bringing about reconciliation and peace in our broken world. However, this requires an inner search that will make our outer vision clearer. We need to discover ourselves, and to ask the fundamental question: ‘What is art? ‘Art is not possessing, not controlling our environment, or the materials with which we work. Art is discovering the deep rhythms of being. The artist is only an instrument in a force that brings all things into being. Only by realizing this can the artist participate in a longing which we all have—the hope that there will be peace here on earth.

Unity and diversity A basic aspect of Creation Theology is the celebration of diversity. If we look around us at the many forms of nature, we are amazed by the diversity that characterizes nature. This is also reflected in the diversity of cultures. Each culture has arisen out of a very unique relationship between the human community and its natural environment. What has been called the “Primal Vision”5 discovers the Divine present in the world as being manifested in a unique way as the ‘Spirit of the Place’. This sense of every holy place revealing the Divine Presence in and through the diversity of nature, may give rise to a form of polytheism6. Over the last forty years I have been especially interested in the rich diversity of India’s folk 4 Cf. M. Hiriyanna (1954) ‘Art Experience’ his first essay on Indian aesthetics, where he lays the foundations for an understanding of the Jivanmukta, or liberated human being, for whom the experience of Ananda, or joy, is an essential part of a process of spiritual transformation. Hiriyana argues that the concept of the ‘good’ in art is no different from ‘good ‘in the ethical sense. Cf. See also his earlier “The Quest for Perfection” 1952. 5 Cf. J.V. Taylor (1963) The Primal Vision, SCM Press. 6 A distinction is made between Pantheism and Panentheism. The former postulates that the Divine is in nature, and that there are many gods, whereas the latter sees the Divine present in Creation, but not to be identified with nature.

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traditions. I have noted how each indigenous community discovers a particular form of expressing the experience of the Divine in the ordinary and everyday life of the people. In rural India we find each village having its own “village deity”, who has very special attributes that affirm the unique history of a particular local culture and community. But unfortunately this diversity itself can lead to tensions when one cultural group makes claims that their god is the only god, the most powerful god; the greatest and best god. When social and national identity becomes the domain for exclusive claims, then faith divides communities, rather than bringing about a shared understanding through spiritual dialogue.7

The Burning Bush tradition When I decided to start what I called an Art Ashram, I was inspired by the Ashram ideal of a Sat Sangh, or gathering of people who are searching for the Truth or Sat. Art, I feel is about dialogue - a common pilgrimage to find the Truth. Without this kind of dialogue, we cannot find spiritual peace. It seemed to me that this search for Truth which is not exclusive, but brings people together, should search for what is universal or archetypal. This has brought me to explore what in early Christian art was called ‘typology’, which recognizes that certain images become ‘types’, that can be found in different religious traditions all over the world.8 One such ‘type’ is the image of The Burning Bush. The Biblical image of The Burning Bush has inspired many of my paintings. The event describing the vision of the Burning Bush in Exodus 3 narrates one of the most profound mystical experiences that transformed the life not only of Moses, but also the whole Hebrew community whom he was inspired to lead away from slavery to liberation. There is a rich Midrashic tradition of Jewish mysticism which tries to understand the inner meaning of this experience of the Divine Spirit or Shekinah, present in a thorn bush where Moses was grazing his father-in-law’s sheep near the Holy Mountain of Horeb (also known as Mount Sinai). The following

7

Paul Knitter (1985) in his book No other Name? A Critical Survey of Christian Attitudes toward World Religions suggests that such exclusivist claims arise from a kind of love language. An individual may claim that their loved one is the best, and most perfect, but this should not mean we cannot dialogue with those who hold different beliefs. 8 Cf. Mircea Eliade (1974) Patterns of Comparative Religion. Also Carl Jung used the concept of the Archetype, to show how certain images seem to be universal, and belong to a collective unconscious,

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are a few passages I have chosen from some Midrashic reflections on the significance of the Burning Bush: Why did the Holy One Blessed Be He remove Himself from the heavenly heights to speak to Moses from a lowly bush? It is because whenever Israel is in dire straits, it is as though God Himself is in dire straits, as it is written: “In all their affliction He was afflicted ...” God could well have spoken to Moses from the Heavenly heights, from mountain pinnacles or from the tops of mighty cedars. Yet he chose to lower Himself to speak from the bush … (Mekilta de Rabbi Shimeon bar Yonai, 2). How great is peace! For the Holy One Blessed Be He did not first appear to Moses through an awesome spectacle, but through a symbolization of Peace. For it says, “And the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire (III, 2)” God showed him the flame burning in the vegetation without destroying it, and without the vegetation extinguishing the flame” (Mishnat Rabbi Eliezer IV, 17).

There are so many such precious reflections in this tradition of the Midrash on the significance of the Burning Bush.9 I have found a similar image of the presence of the Divine in a tree in a number of tribal Adivasi myths. For example, in the Karam Kahani of the Kharias,10 we find the Karam Raja, who is a tree in the forest, revealing himself to the sick and weary Dharam, who searches for this healing tree after a long journey through the wilderness.11 Dharam finally finds the tree burning with a mysterious fire, and observes the tree weeping, and crying out to Dharm “Why did you forsake me?” Only after Dharam begs for forgiveness from the tree for having forgotten to worship it, is he healed. A number of Adivasi Christians have taken this myth and introduced the Karam Festival into their local Church. During the ancient ritual of the Karam harvest 9

Cf. Etan Levine (1982) The Burning Bush: Jewish Symbolism and Mysticism, Sepher-Hermon Press. 10 The Kharia tribe are found mainly in Orissa, and Chotanagpur in Eastern India. The Karam Kahani, or story of the Karam Tree is one of the main myths of this tribe, and relates to the way in which the Karam tradition of worship was lost by the tribe. During the Karam festival, the elder of the tribe, asks the youngest member present whether he knows about the Karam tree. He then proceeds to narrate the legend of the tree. 11 The Karam Tree is found in the forest. It is essentially a tree of the wilderness, and should not be cultivated. It is useless, in the sense that it has no fruits which are edible. Like the thorn bush, it cannot be utilized by any human industry. However, it is worshipped during the Karam Festival, which is a harvest festival. As a symbolic tree of the Wilderness, it is believed to have a healing power.

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festival three branches of the Karam tree are carried ceremonially into the central courtyard of the tribal village, as a sign of healing for the whole community. The modern Indian mystic Ramana Maharshi, who lived in a cave on the ancient mountain of Arunachalam, near the great temple of Tiruvanamalai in South India, also referred to the Burning Bush tradition, saying “Why did that Spirit, or Shakti, say “I am who am”, or “I am who will be”? Surely this was because God is the Atman, the Spirit who is present in every heart.” Finally this mystery of the Burning Bush brings us back to the unique Presence of the Divine in every heart. Every person is like this humble ordinary bush that God chose to inhabit. In fact one Midrashic tradition sees the burning thorn bush as being Moses himself. God burns within the heart of Moses not “out there” on Mount Horeb. Another Midrash suggests that the thorn bush is the whole of Israel which, though it is filled with the fire of the Divine Judgement, is yet not consumed or destroyed by that fire. The medieval South Indian mystic Basvanna says: The rich Will make temples for Shiva. What shall I, A poor man Do? My legs are pillars, The body the shrine, The head a cupola Of gold. Listen, O lord of the meeting rivers Things standing shall fall But the moving ever shall stay.12

Here finally what is being celebrated is the Presence of God in every person, however humble. There is in the Bhakti traditions of India an essential criticism of a Temple cult, which alienates what is human. The true temple of God, the holy place where the Divine is really present, is in the heart of every person.

12

Cf. Speaking of Shiva trans. A.K.Ramanujan, (1973) Penguin Books.

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The divine unity and transcendence Alongside this primal realization of the Sacred within all creatures, there is also a recognition of the Transcendence of God. The Divine is in the Many, but God is also the One. Once again I would like to refer to a Midrashic account of how Abraham came to this understanding of the Unity of God, beyond the diversity of Creation. What Abraham seems to have ‘discovered’ which enabled him to found a whole religious worldview, which we find in the Abrahamic faiths, was a belief in the One God, who is a transcendent God, though still immanent in the whole of creation, through which we come to an intuition of the One that lies beyond Creation. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord” (Deut 6. 4.) by whose recital one proclaims God’s oneness, and by which very act one takes upon oneself the yoke of the Kingdom of heaven. (Midrash ha-Gadol on Deut. 6. 4)

The distinctive form of Jewish interpretation of the Bible which is known as Midrash, has a tendency to use parables, or legends. The Bible itself does not tell us how it was that Abraham came to this intuition that there is One God, who is sovereign over the whole of Creation. However, the Rabbinic teachers, using the imagination as an interpreter provide us with two stories. Personally I find such stories helpful in imagining how fundamental concepts of the Biblical tradition can be visualized. A parable told by Rabbi Isaac in the second half of the third century C.E: This may be compared to a man who was travelling from place to place when he saw a building lighted. “Is it possible that the building lacks a person to look after it?” he wondered. The owner of the castle looked out and said to him, “I am the owner of the building.” Similarly, because Abraham our father said, “Is it conceivable that the world is without a guide?” the Holy One, blessed be He, looked out and said to him, “I am the Guide, the Sovereign of the Universe.”13

This is a legend concerning how Abraham realized the Unity of God. There is another legend which we are told already existed in the second 13

This tradition may relate to the “Many Mansions” of the Divine House (cf John 14. 2) which is also a cosmological image. St Paul claimed that he had reached the third heaven (2 Cor. 12.2). The Prophet Mohammed in his mystical journey by night (mi’raj) travelled through these mansions or heavens. Theresa of Avila’s mystical doctrine based on the image of the ‘interior castle’ also probably uses this archetype.

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century BCE, though we do not find it in the Bible. One might wonder whether a legend like this would have been known to Jesus. It is referred to in the Koran (Sura 3: 74-79). When the sun sank, and the stars came forth, he (Abraham) said, “These are the gods”. But the dawn came, and the stars could be seen no longer, and then he said, “I will not pay worship to these, for they are no gods.” Thereupon the sun came forth, and he spoke, “This is my god, him will I extol”. But again the sun set, and he said, “He is no god,” and beholding the moon, he called her his god to whom he would pay Divine homage. Then the moon was obscured, and he cried out: “This, too, is no god!” There is One who sets them all in motion.14

The image of light as the symbol of unity in creation For the visual arts, light has a special meaning. It is through light that we are able to see the world around us. This image of light is certainly universal, and we can find in it the key to a unity that transcends the diversity of forms that characterize nature. As an artist I work through metaphors or stories, whether they are Biblical, Puranic, or Adivasi. One could show how these stories can be reflected in other stories from other spiritual traditions. For example in the famous Upanishadic verse which we find In the Katha Upanishad, as well as the Mundaka and Svetasvatara Upanishad:15 The sun shines not there, nor the moon and stars. These lightning’s shine not, much less this (earthly) fire! After Him, as He shines, doth everything shine This whole world is illuminated with His light.

I would like to conclude this reflection on the image as Peace by referring to the wonderful Sura of Light in the Koran: God is the light of the heavens and the earth. The likeness of His Light is a niche wherein is a lamp. The lamp is in a glass. The glass is like a brilliant star lit from a blessed tree, an olive neither of the East nor the West, 14

Cf. David Flusser (1997) ‘Abraham and the Upanishads’ in Between Jerusalem and Benares: Comparative studies in Judaism and Hinduism Hananya Goodman (ed) Sri Satguru Publications, Delhi. 15 Svetasvatara Upanishad, Sixth Adhyaya, 14. The theme of a land where neither sun nor moon shine, being illumined only by the Divine Presence is also a favourite image of Kabir’s nirguna or apophatic mysticism.

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In this image of Light we can find another important archetype which is in every spiritual tradition. The Divine reality is Fire, but also Light. It is in and through this Light that we are able to see the world that God has created. But the Light is also an inner form of illumination, which enables us to see. This light has come into the world to enlighten everyone, and seeds of this light can be found in all the great spiritual traditions of the world.

9 ART AS A FORCE FOR PEACE HUIBING HE

Human conflict has existed as long as there have been human beings. From Adam and Eve and the serpent, Cain and Abel, Sarah and Hagar, Jacob and Esau ... to the attack on the Twin Towers in New York City and beyond to the present day, with seeming scant prospect of abatement, the mark of conflict and its consequences have posed countless unanswered questions about pain, grief, hatred, revenge, hostility, killing and war. We have always yearned for this turmoil to end, seeking peace and healing through many ways and great efforts. But only when human beings are able to learn and listen, to understand and empathize with the pain and hurt of others, and to know what causes these things, will we be able to achieve healing and reconciliation. Philosophers, theologians, and social scientists, as well as practical politicians, have provided much insight and many explanations and devised policies, teachings, and political systems to enlighten the human mind and conscience. But even though the intent may have been to develop more reasonable social systems and thereby avoid conflict and build peace, sometimes this very process has led to violent conflict. Artists too have been a part of this effort, also for better and worse. Their creative works have at times served a unique function of enlightenment, but of course have also had the potential to inflame. In this essay I choose to focus on my own medium of visual art and on ways it can promote peace. Because this kind of art is a powerful medium of communication with the mind and heart via the human senses, it can offer a constructive educational function for helping to cultivate a healthy spirit. From over the centuries, we have inherited precious and timeless masterpieces from which people have derived nurturing and consolation. Vincent van Gogh’s The Good Samaritan comes to mind (inspired by a painting of Eugène Delacroix, which may itself have been inspired by a painting of an earlier artist). Images in artistic depictions can invite people to understand and

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respond to messages of love, hope and harmony and in this manner build peace in our life and society. Through pictorial symbols, art is able to speak in hidden words that may be absent from the vocabulary of verbal language. Artists reveal things that may lie just beneath our everyday perception and yet have the power to transform us. A visual image can awaken an ignorant or distorted mind and inspire a heart to yearn for restoration and healing. In today’s culture we see, more and more, ugly and distorted images and figures featured in the visual arts. They lead one to question whether art’s function is to nurture and enlighten the good nature in the innermost mind of a human being, or is instead to provoke the opposite of that. Some of these images are created for so-called self expression; others are for winning commercial recognition. The latter in particular are considered stimulating amusements and entertainments, for example, violent video games to which many young people have become addicted. If this is the case and the motivation of the artist, I think it reflects a conflict that is basic to our very nature, when the negative side overwhelms the positive side, leading to a disharmonious and destructive outcome. Artists find meaning for their creativity when they have freedom combined with a mission that guides their choices. An artist is a person first. When an artist is honestly in touch with both her personal experiences and her moral values, artistic language can deliver a message expressing knowledge and an ideal. Since the European Enlightenment of the Eighteenth century, new ways of thinking and imagining have opened up diverse possibilities of artistic expression. On the other hand, they have also opened up possibilities for oppressive thoughts and feelings. Thus, art can encourage kindness, consideration, forgiveness, reconciliation and positive actions that are constructive and healing, or it can stir up negative emotions and unhealthy desires such as greed, aggression and hatred. Art is therefore neutral as a medium of expression and communication, since it can be used either to nurture good attitudes or to spoil the sense of goodness in our world. I believe the power of art is its ability to transcend opinion, ideology, social norm and system, seeming reality and sometimes even actual reality, and thereby to help people discover hope and beauty even in places of darkness. Art can then be a light shone into these areas. When people are denied exposure to this kind of art, either through impoverished education or even direct suppression of the artist, they are deprived of a basic human right to see and experience goodness and beauty. The whole society suffers.

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Growing up with conflict and art I grew up in a time of conflict in mainland China. As mighty forces contended, people were starving by the millions due to the ideologically driven agrarian policies of Chairman Mao. My own earliest memories are of hunger, continual hunger. I also remember as a little girl walking hand in hand with my brother through our town and coming upon human corpses in the street. These were people who had starved, or been beaten to death, or had killed themselves by jumping out of a window. Then a few years after the Great Famine (a.k.a. the Great Leap Forward) came another human-induced cataclysm, the Great Cultural Revolution. This time I witnessed beatings and torture with my own eyes. Meanwhile my father, who had opposed Mao’s policies, was sent away to a labor camp for ‘reeducation,’ and the rest of our family was left to fend for itself. My mother carried the heaviest burden, having to hold down several jobs. This left us children with many responsibilities too, but also a great deal of freedom. However, that freedom was always hedged in by denial of opportunities in school and persecution by schoolmates, since we carried the taint of our denounced parentage. Thus was my reality. But art came to me as a gift from heaven - as a way of dreaming and escaping from this reality. Where truth was limited or prohibited in expressive language, imagination was liberated. My cousin visited my family when I was seven, and she saw me fervently drawing with a pencil on paper and felt that I might have some innate talent in art. Knowing that in those days nobody in my family would even notice or be interested in, not to mention appreciate that discovery, she, who was a school teacher, lent me a book of instruction about drawing and art. From this I learned about perspective and proportion and the way of seeing things. That book enlightened me and motivated me to figure out the truth of this world. Seeing in nature and in human figures that beauty and ugliness were woven together in a spectrum of black and white and colour, I was always wondering: where was I and why? In school I was not allowed to join any art or music group activity because I was the child of a Capitalist and Rightist. Carrying that stigma made me deeply aware of the limited space I had in my daily life. The deprivation became the stimulation and motivation for me to draw and read. The whole world was unfolding to a young and curious mind. It is a beautiful world in which the sun rises every morning, the river runs far, and nobody forbade me to swim in the river or climb in the mountains. Beauty and ugliness were mixed in a livable world. A young heart is like a tender plant, so it easily bends around obstacles and through nooks and

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crannies to reach out into the air in order to survive. I should be very thankful for being a child of a family that was discriminated against and not favored by the social norm in that Communist society. Once again art came to me as a gift from heaven – this time in the form of the music I heard in the church newly reopened at the end of the Cultural Revolution. The attraction drew me into the building, and eventually into the choir - and, after more years, I found myself teaching art in a seminary in Nanjing. Yet even then the way was not smooth. One opportunity after another arose for me to pursue my artwork further, only for it to be dashed by circumstances. I was even offered a scholarship to study abroad, but conflict intervened again: Permission was denied me to leave the country after I had brought water to some students who were protesting locally in sympathy with the Tiananmen Square democracy movement of 1989. Finally, however, I made it to America, where I took my vows to be a minister and became the pastor in a church. But the human conflict exists in every group and community where there are people. It is certainly a normal phenomenon in a family or in an organization, as well as between political parties, nations, and religions; but it even exists within a religious community. I served in a parish ministry where I dealt with conflict every day, both among the congregation and between them and myself. I discovered that conflict can have either a positive or a destructive outcome. In dealing with conflict in the faith community I deepened my understanding of conflict as a reflection of the full character of human nature. My artistic insights helped me in this ministry. For I knew from my own creative experience that artists have a choice: either to dig into the ugly images and exaggerate the dark side of reality that provokes the suppressed and destructive forces in human nature, or to depict the beauty and goodness in this world in order to guide people to nurture the goodness within themselves. Being a new immigrant in the USA, and female with a tinted skin and short stature to boot, I knew deep down in my heart that I possessed no automatic privileges in my new home or profession. However, perhaps because of that very birth mark I had more privilege to embrace hardship, prejudice and alienation as fertilizing agents for my understanding and insight. The very shortcomings of our corrupted human nature are the ground of hope and faith in the possibility of God’s transforming grace in sanctification.

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Abraham then and now On the bright, clear morning of September 11, 2001, I was riding in a car from visiting a cousin in New Jersey back to my home on Long Island. As we were passing by the view of Manhattan I noticed a long trail of smoke in the air. Since I always carry a camera in case I see something I might later want to paint, I took a few photographs, having no idea what I was seeing. Of course subsequently I realized that I had witnessed the destruction of the Twin Towers. By the time I returned to my parish, our world had drastically changed. Thereafter I was confronted daily with questions from the members of my congregation, who were experiencing anger, pain, sorrow, perplexity and grief. Then one day it occurred to me to introduce a piece of art into the discussion of our Bible study group. I showed them a picture of a sculpture by George Segal, who had died the previous year, called Abraham’s Farewell to Ishmael (Figure 1). This proved to be a powerful and timely image for not only discussion but also meditation and prayer. Gazing on the image we were led to a deep introspective reflection. In the center of the piece, Abraham is embracing Ishmael with both deep affection and deep sorrow because of his dilemma. The child is innocent, and he is too young and inexperienced to know anything about the destiny he is stepping into. Sarah, Abraham’s wife, the one who insisted on the arrangement that caused this tragedy to happen, is hiding in the background. As the mother of a young child herself, perhaps deep down in her heart she is feeling great guilt and waiting anxiously for this sad moment to pass. Hagar, the maidservant of Sarah, mistress of Abraham, and mother of Ishmael, stands in shock, facing an imminent unknown and unwelcome journey and with no way out or choice. The body gestures and facial expressions of each person and the composition of the group are simple and profound. There is no judgment or complaining on the surface, but each figure is indeed frozen like a statue as he or she undergoes silent and unspeakable pain. In his depiction of this typical human tragedy, the sculptor reminds us of the perpetual human story. As human beings we confront the consequences of our choices and decisions every single day, and in our dilemmas and suffering we seek for relief and acceptance – for liberation from guilt and shame and for forgiveness by the redeeming Grace. This sculpture can speak to all of the descendents of Abraham and Sarah and Hagar, who share the same story today – not only the patriarch’s and matriarchs’ story but also our own contemporary story – no matter whether we be Jew, Christian, or Muslim (or for that matter, perhaps,

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Hindu, Buddhist, or atheist) – and who can thereby find shared meaning and experience from which to forge a common human identity. Our Bible study group was itself informed by different opinions. Some members criticized Sarah and Abraham, while others defended our JudeoChristian faith. Different members tried to defend Sarah or Hagar according to their own perspective and experience. Eventually every one of the figures in this piece of art touches our heart, since we can identify with all of them at the level of humanity and sympathetic and empathetic response. And in this way we recognize our commonality as human beings. Just like the people in Biblical times and in Biblical stories, we too are capable of giving offense or of being ourselves defenseless. So we know that pain and hurt - and so too, with bleeding wounds and scars, we yearn for healing and recovery. Of course this particular piece of sculpture now resonated with specific cultural meanings pertaining to the trauma of 9/11. As we come to recall many incidents in human history through the symbolism of Biblical stories, we are able to examine and critique our faith and ourselves. A piece of sculpture provoked in our study group thoughts of justice and mercy. We savored the beautiful images in that work of art even as we felt the ache in our hearts. We realized that many tragedies are of human origin. This awakened us to responsibilities for making sometimes historical decisions.

Conclusion I will close with a short reflection on another work of art – this one a painting I myself created many years before 9/11, but pertaining to the same parental dilemma that served ultimately to father both the destruction I witnessed on that terrible day in 2001, and midwife the subsequent healing I witnessed in our study group. It is called The Lord Will Provide. Here again the great patriarch Abraham is faced with the imminent loss of a beloved child by his own action, this time his child by Sarah, Isaac. I wanted to capture the moment of the conflict in a father's mind and the unconditional trusting and acceptance of both father (to God) and child (to his father). First-time viewers who cannot read the Chinese inscriptions or do not know the Bible are often surprised to learn the subject matter, since the painting appears to be so gentle and loving. I painted this for an exhibition in Nanjing. When it was displayed, a father was standing before this painting and pondering it. I saw tears in his eyes. I found out that his seven-year-old son had been diagnosed with leukemia and was receiving treatment. He had lost all the hair on his head. The father told me that this

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painting strengthened his faith. I gave him the painting. So I decided to paint another one for myself. Figure 2 shows the second painting. The first one was published in the book, The Bible through Asian Eyes (Pace Publishing/Asian Christian Art Association 1991). My perspective on what is depicted is as follows. I show no weapon or violence in my art works. Abraham is supposed to have a knife at hand in preparation for the sacrifice of Isaac on the altar, but I only portray Abraham's submissive trusting in his face and gesture. He was holding his child and looking upon the Lord and waiting for an answer. Abraham's faith here is based on his knowing that God will not harm an innocent or break his word, is unconditional and patient. This story contrasts to the story of Abraham and Hagar. While that story is also about following the divine purpose and trusting the divine promise, even though, in that case, its fulfillment may reside in a far-off future, it is in addition an illustration of the human will to dominate and manipulate the course of events. So it is no wonder that the consequences are conflict and tragedy. In the story of Abraham and Isaac, however, there is nothing but trust in God, and God does provide (in the form of a ram caught in the thicket). While God does control the overall course of events in the world, we have been made in his image with the capacity to make choices. With this capacity come both freedom and responsibility. God has also provided us with timeless principles to guide our choices, and has ordered the universe in such a way that our choices will have determinate consequences. When difficulties occur we often do not pause to meditate on God, nor even take the historical and social context into consideration, but instead exercise a corrupted freewill, and our other powers, to fit reality to our expectations and derive a quick benefit. Thus it is that human beings bring about perennial strife and frustration. The story of Abraham, Sarah, Hagar and Ishmael is paradigmatic of this theological insight. The story of Abraham and Isaac shows us the other way. I feel that I am affirming the way of reliance on God when I look for the good in people and the world and portray it in my artwork.

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Figure 1. George Segal, Abraham’s Farewell to Ishmael, 1987 Painted plaster. 107 x 54 x 54 inches. Collection Pérez Art Museum, gift of The George and Helen Segal Foundation, Inc. © Pérez Art Museum Miami. Photo: Allan Finkelman

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Figure 2. The Lord Will Provide, 1988, painting by Huibing He. Scroll; 23.5 x 65 inches. On loan by the artist to the Overseas Ministries Study Center, New Haven, Connecticut. Photo credit: Huibing He. Chinese inscriptions read: ‘Jehovah (or the Lord) Will Provide’ (right vertical line from top to bottom); ‘Huibing painted the theme of Genesis Chapter 22’ (left vertical line from top to bottom); ‘May the Lord be with you’ (red stamp on top); ‘Huibing He’ (smaller red stamp below).

10 THE PROCESSES OF COMMUNITY PAINTING: A THEOLOGICAL ENQUIRY JENIFER M. BAKER

In the past, theological consideration of paintings has usually been from the ‘outside’. In contrast, the viewpoint here is that experience of painting processes from the ‘inside’, as experienced by the painters, is at least as important as the contemplation of completed artworks. This argument is of particular relevance for collaborative and community-building initiatives where contributors from different backgrounds work together to produce communal paintings. It is suggested that in such cases the dynamic picture-painter relationship interacts with the experience of contributing alongside others, and so the likelihood that people will be open to new perspectives is increased. As artist-facilitator, I describe, analyze and compare experiments with three communal painting projects carried out in two adjacent rural English parishes with their numerous village sub-groups. Sufficient detail is given for the experiments to be followed by others if desired. The projects were all organized through the Church of England using the parish or communal church model seen as conterminous with the villages and concerned with reaching out to all local people; rather than the gathered or associational model in which the church is seen as a separate organization with its own membership (Russell 1986: 257-59). The rationale was that community paintings can involve diverse groups and provide an attractive ‘space’ for discussing and working together, and that both participants and organizers may benefit from new insights. Similarly, Cohen sees art as promoting coexistence because it is pleasurable, invites creativity and reciprocity, and because ‘artists can serve as mediators’ (2003: 271-72). The three different approaches used can be summarized as ‘Street Art’, ‘Collage’, and ‘Focus Group with Artist’. For each the term ‘painting’ is interpreted broadly, to include mixed media with, for example, felt-tip pen, wax crayon and pencil used in addition to paint. The diverse subjects

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incorporated in the paintings were not only personal and local but included wider concerns about good and evil, war and peace, reconciliation, and international harmony. Theological insights arising from the painting processes are identified, both as expressed by the contributors themselves whether or not they saw them as ‘religious’ insights, and my own theological interpretation. In the light of this study, brief consideration is given to published descriptions of community paintings elsewhere in the world, of particular relevance to peace and reconciliation. Several different approaches have been used, to which the three experiments contribute some diversity. Characteristics of the different approaches are summarized with reference to appropriateness for various situations. On the basis of this overall spectrum of experience, concepts of dialogic imagination originated by the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin are proposed as an appropriate conceptual framework for community painting processes, relevant for peace and reconciliation initiatives.

The street art approach This project was carried out in St John the Baptist churchyard, Ruyton-XITowns, Shropshire, from 24 June 2010 to 6 September 2010. Three weather-resistant boards painted pale grey were set up end-to-end adjacent to a well-used public footpath with disability access. The total area was approximately 7.3 m wide x 1.3 m high. A notice was provided adjacent to the boards, giving information about the project, an invitation to join in with a contribution on any subject, and contact details in case of enquiries. There was no attempt to influence what people contributed. Wax crayons and coloured pencils were left on-site at all times, and water-based emulsion and acrylic paints were also used. However, to minimize the possibility of accidents or vandalism with paint affecting the church building or churchyard memorials, paints were only made available to responsible groups. By invitation, the project was initiated by the Ruyton-XI-Towns Art Group, a group of amateur artists who meet regularly for both indoor and outdoor sessions. Members discussed the project and decided to make diverse individual contributions distributed all over the available area. During the subsequent ten weeks, the boards were visited frequently and used by people of all ages. Numerous spontaneous discussions took place as part of the creative process within the context of visits by families and groups from the school, church and youth club. The final picture had many distinctive characteristics. It had no central

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focus, and the pictorial images were diverse, including cartoon characters and other images from popular culture, and local landscape and nature. Many people chose to give names and words instead of, or in addition to, pictorial contributions. On the final picture, there were about seventy five names including some apparent repetitions, many small, or faded or partially obscured at this stage. Different levels of detail were apparent, with a degree of self-similarity between the different levels. This results from the fact that different people made contributions over a range of scales from the large and eye-catching to very small images which could only be appreciated on close scrutiny. Distinction between levels was reinforced in many cases by variation in intensity of colour, with many of the small images being relatively faint. Several contributions communicated messages of ethical or religious significance, e.g. there were several crosses; the words peace, love, joyful noise, and the whole world in his hand; and paired words including love-hate, famine-greed, silence-noise and yes-no. Some of these details are visible in Figure 1, which also illustrates some of the interactivity which took place. The original image in Figure 1 was the large butterfly, which attracted another contributor to add a group of small butterflies. Subsequently a house with garden, and a cross emitting light rays, were fitted in above and under the large butterfly’s wings. On the wings themselves appeared (faintly) a heart, two human figures, the words love and hope, and the greeting ‘hi + hello’. To investigate participants’ reactions to the project, the ‘focus group’ interviewing approach was used for groups, characterized by ‘a nondirective style of interviewing, where the prime concern is to encourage a variety of viewpoints on the topic’ (Kvale and Brinkmann 2009: 150). For individuals willing to give their views, questions were open-ended, following Fink: ‘Open-ended questions are useful if you are interested in getting unanticipated answers or in learning about the world as your respondents really see it’ (2003: 35). In summary, these interviews identified several processes and motivations which had been involved during the picture’s production, in three main areas. With groups, there had been enjoyment of group support within the context of which individuals had made their own contributions; and an experience of fun. Group support helped some people, both children and adults, to overcome inhibitions, fear of ridicule, and feelings of limitation about their techniques being inadequate to express their ideas. Three desires were specifically identified, namely writing one’s name, brightening the place up, and provocation. The desire to challenge and provoke, in religious terms, the prophetic voice, was expressed particularly

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by the individual who contributed the paired words such as love-hate and famine-greed. With respect to interactivity, there had been initial reticence about impinging on others’ images. There was a feeling that it was not a polite thing to do. However, once this process had started, notably by a youth group member painting poppies in an existing wheat-field scene, several other contributors followed suit. One of them spoke of ‘envisioning connections and potential’, and one child described how an image could attract a ‘kingdom’ around it. Overall, there was widespread appreciation of whole-community involvement, and some surprise concerning the lack of vandalism. The naming of this approach as street art was retrospective, for at the outset we had no idea what would happen. However, the overall appearance of the painting when it was concluded is reminiscent of examples of street art such as the New York wall depicted by Shove where ‘many folks over much times painted and stuck and such, all manner of things and pictures and words’ (2008: 9). Further, with reference to the discussion in Lewisohn the picture can be characterized as encompassing the two interrelated genres of street art and graffiti writing (2009: 15-23). The former focuses on visual images, which in some cases relate to social and ethical issues (e.g. Banksy 2006: 28; 40); the latter is particularly concerned with typography. In retrospect, it can be seen that setting up the boards in the churchyard was in effect establishing a ‘legal wall’, hence the ‘adrenalin rush of illegality’, an attraction to graffiti artists according to Lewisohn (2009: 45) would be absent in this case, though there is still the possibility of an adrenalin rush of creativity and related feelings associated with overcoming inhibitions.

The collage approach The Nesscliffe Community Picture was produced for the Nesscliffe Community Festival which took place on 1 September 2012 at St Andrew’s Church, Great Ness, Shropshire. In discussion with members of the organizing group, and taking into account the lack of a suitable outdoor site in the churchyard, it was decided to use a collage approach in which participants all made their contributions on 15 cm squares of light card. This involved the distribution of cards to groups and individuals within the parish, and subsequent assembly of the picture on fabriccovered boards totalling 4.4 m wide x 0.8 m high. These were fixed to a wall inside the church, and the individual cards were attached to the boards using Velcro®.

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Baskets full of 15 cm square cards together with instructions were placed at key local sites such as the Post Office, on 1 July 2012. Individuals, families and groups were invited to contribute on the theme ‘Nesscliffe: Past, Present and Future’ (agreed by the organizing group), and to return their contributions to a large envelope fixed to each basket. Instructions included the following general guidance: ‘Focus on something…which is important to you (e.g. a view, a building, a tree, an event), and draw or paint it on the card. If you prefer you can do something abstract, or a pattern, or you can write a word or a sentence…Or you could do a picture with words on it as well.’ Contact details were given in case of enquiries. Additionally, visits were made to three groups – St Andrew’s Primary School, Nesscliffe; the Golden Years Club (for senior citizens); and the Nesscliffe Youth Club. Cards were distributed to those present, also art materials in the case of the latter two groups. The project was introduced, questions dealt with, and cards collected when completed. The collage was assembled in stages when large batches of cards had been collected, and this involved arranging the cards on the church floor before attachment to the boards. In practice this meant that similar subjects were grouped together, e.g. the cards depicting hills prominent in the local landscape. Direct additions to the boards were made by congregation members in a café church service in which picture-making was an option; and the project was finished with several contributions added during the Community Festival Day itself. The Festival ensured a large audience. The diversity of the final picture included local landscape, agriculture, buildings, and the war memorial; also the names of most local groups. In addition to the above-mentioned there was the Women’s Institute, the Young Farmers’ Club, the Dog Club, Nesskids (a children’s club), the Bowls Club and the Parish Council. Several people put their names on the backs of the cards rather than have them openly displayed. There were a number of messages of a specifically ethical nature, especially, and encouragingly, from the Youth Club. Examples are: help more people in the village, more eco-friendly environment, happiness everywhere, and love. Unlike the previous project, there was no pictorial evidence of interactive responses to existing images, and this can be interpreted as a result of this particular collage method. Detail from the central part of the picture is shown in Figure 2, which includes some landscape contributions top left; some Youth Club contributions together with the Young Farmers’ Club top right; various buildings including the church; a local singing group; and ‘Christmas geese’ produced on a local farm. Most of the contributions were made by

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people working in family or other groups. Interviewing, as in the previous project, identified the problem of overcoming inhibitions, but it seemed to be less significant than with the street art approach, perhaps because it is less intimidating to approach a small square of card than a large obviously public board. The primary school (about sixty pupils, age range 4-11 years) helpfully decided to have teacher-mediated discussions about possible themes, with the aim of achieving a representative balance of local subjects from the children. In other words, there had been interaction within the group before the children produced their images. Many people enjoyed the experience and the finished picture, which remains in situ, has been described as ‘an asset to the church.’

The focus group with artist approach This, the largest and most complex project in that it involved five groups over a long period, was carried out at St John the Baptist Primary School, Ruyton-XI-Towns, Shropshire, between February 2010 and June 2012. The school has about 150 children with an age range of 4-11 years, organized in classes from 1 (the youngest) to 5 (the eldest), and the five classes formed five focus groups. The main aims were to produce a series of original paintings using collaborative processes involving the children; to base the subject-matter wholly on the children’s suggestions; and to analyze and reflect on the results. It was also agreed with the staff that one painting per class would be produced, with a size of 60 x 80 cm. All paintings were produced using mixed media, primarily acrylic paints but with pen and ink work, pencil, and small insertions of paper collage contributing to the fine detail. Anticipating handling by the children, all were done on 6mm medium density fiberboard (MDF) and varnished, so they were as robust as possible. Each painting was initiated by the children working with their class teacher, in my absence. At this stage all children could express their ideas through producing their own pictures and/or words. This material provided the basis for me to have a first discussion with the class (through the mediation of the class teacher), following which I produced a first-draft painting. Subsequently, in discussion with the class and noting additional suggestions made verbally, further draft paintings were produced. A total of three stages proved to be adequate for each class. The successive drafts incorporated the additional ideas, corrections or deletions requested by the children, until all were satisfied with the picture. Thus the children were involved in a central way, and were able to see the picture change in accordance with their suggestions. For most children, it was of foremost

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importance that they could see their individual suggestions in the painting, as reflected in comments such as ‘there’s my dog’, or ‘my favourite bit is my footballer’. Supply of ‘before’ photos with new drafts allowed ‘before and after’ comparisons so children could pinpoint changes resulting from their suggestions. The five picture titles chosen by the children were: Class 1 ‘Our safe places’; Class 2 ‘A walk along the rainbow’; Class 3 ‘Our wonderful world’; Class 4 ‘Celebrating life and friendship’; Class 5 ‘All together in one world’. The children’s suggestions for details encompassed a huge variety of subject matter and sizes of objects, and several techniques were used to accommodate this diversity, making it possible for the pictures to present an overall appearance of coherence without distracting clutter. The variety of the children’s suggestions reflected many sources of ideas, beginning with home (and its loved family members, pets and toys, rooms and gardens); and expanding with travel, holidays, books, television and the internet with their diverse memories, impressions and images. Analysis of subject matter quantified the progressive widening of the children’s worlds, with home subjects dominant in Class 1; the village and environs in Classes 2 and 3; and the wider world and universe in Classes 4 and 5. The children’s suggestions were also influenced by the time of year, events in the news, and recent activities at the school. In some cases, similarities between contributions offered by the children reflected the fact that they worked together around their classroom tables so could influence each other. Consideration of all five paintings, together with the underlying classroom discussions, suggests three main areas of interest concerning the development of the children’s theological ideas. First, as implied already, there was an appreciation of the creation, moving outward from suggestions such as cherry blossom trees, pet animals, and local hills in Class 1’s painting to the world’s wild animals, the Himalayas, and outer space with Class 5. Second, Classes 3, 4, and 5 all wanted the presence of God represented pictorially - as a ‘misty face’ with Class 3, and as hands with Classes 4 and 5. Perhaps this represents a movement from the idea of God watching over to God holding. In either case it is a challenge for the artist, because from a theological viewpoint one cannot depict the invisible God and should not even try. I interpreted these aspects of the paintings as depictions of the cosmic Christ, and the subject led to some interesting classroom discussions. The children seemed to realize quite well that nobody really knows what God looks like, but nevertheless wanted God’s presence recognized in the paintings. The third area of interest may be called ‘dealing with the dark side’ and

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is discussed here in some detail because of its particular relevance to the subject of peace and reconciliation. For the first two sessions with Class 1 children, their chosen title ‘Our Safe Places’ was an accurate reflection of the subjects they suggested for their painting. For example, there are parents and grandparents holding children’s hands, children safe in bed, and children in gardens safely enclosed within fences or hedges. However, during the third (final) session, the suggestions included 10 items (for example, volcano, giant, wolf, and a ‘real’ bear as distinct from a teddy bear) which can be seen as distinctly unsafe. It was agreed in class discussion that it would be appropriate to include these in the picture, but in a way that made them safe - at one stage removed from the main picture in the form of pictures within the picture. Conceptually, the children seemed at home with different levels of reality, e.g. ‘real’ dogs in the gardens but the picture of ‘a real bear’ on a living room wall seen through a window occupying a different level of reality. The class teacher suggested that this move towards less safe items indicated that the children felt ‘visually safe’ with the preceding drafts of the picture and felt that they could now go ‘over the boundary’. The picture in itself was a ‘safe secure environment’ so was an aid to discussion, useful for talking about children’s fears as well as positive experiences. This relates to what happens in school when the classroom itself is experienced as a safe place. In the case of Class 2, suggestions reflecting fears and threats started appearing in session 2. They included an army base, army helicopter and tank, a police station, robbers and kidnappers, and pirates with a boat. There were also two requests for witches. When asked why we needed an army base, the children appeared to be hazy about the threats but settled on ‘pirates’, including ‘pirates of the Caribbean’. Session 3 suggestions included police chasing ‘baddies’, an ambulance with paramedics taking a person out on a stretcher, and a haunted house. Class 3’s concern about threats was clearer. From the outset, there were several requests for the armed forces, including details such as army people, army land-rovers, tanks, good jets and bad jets, good and bad battleships, submarines and weapons. When we discussed why the children wanted these things, they spoke about how important the armed forces are to protect us and keep us safe. There was a recognition that the things we value can be threatened by people doing bad things, and that we have to be ready to protect the good. It seems, therefore, that at this stage the children are becoming aware of the ongoing story of the fight between good and evil, which underlies so much literature through the ages. Class 4 also wanted the armed forces in their picture, but in a radically different way. The overall mood of the painting, ‘Celebrating Life and Friendship’ was exuberant, with requests

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including a disco party, a birthday party, and great lines of people holding hands standing around the earth and the sun. This is reflected in the military details, which were probably influenced by the fact that Class 4 had recently discussed World War II as part of the curriculum. The children requested Allied and German soldiers shaking hands, tanks blowing bubbles at each other, parachutes descending from the sky with presents for everyone, and love bombs for the scattering of love rather than shrapnel. This is Class 4’s vision of a better world. Such a vision reaches its culmination in Class 5’s ‘All Together in One World’ as shown in Figure 3, with its ring of ethnically and religiously diverse people holding hands; and its appreciation of our international cultural heritage in the form of numerous landmarks including the great wall of China, the Easter Island statues, the Sydney Opera House, Rio de Janeiro’s statue of Christ the Redeemer, the Empire State building and Stonehenge. It is reasonable to make a connection between this development of vision and the school’s ethos, reflected in consistently high grades for spiritual, moral, social and cultural development awarded by the Office for Standards in Education. Features common to all the paintings are the sun, rainbows, the school building and the church building – this was recognized by the children themselves in an interactive session during a whole-school assembly with all five paintings on display. The children did not themselves identify any of these subjects as symbolic, but precisely because they are obviously important to the children irrespective of age, the potential is there to draw out their symbolic significance – all of it relevant to the theme of peace and reconciliation. Biblically, Malachi 4: 2 ‘the sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in its wings’ (NRSV 1995: 905) refers to ‘the healing warmth of the sun of justice’ (Cody 1999: 361). Such symbolism is taken up in the New Testament, notably in the Benedictus, Luke 1: 78-79, which forms part of the Anglican liturgy for morning prayer (Archbishops’ Council 2000: 34). In particular, ‘In the tender compassion of our God, the dawn from on high shall break upon us, to shine on those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death, and to guide our feet into the way of peace.’ Also Biblical, the rainbow is a symbol of the covenant between God and all living creatures following the great flood (Genesis 9:12-17). With respect to the two other subjects requested by all classes, the school and church buildings can also be seen as having symbolic significance, standing for shared purposes and values, a sense of community, and the wider vision of the church as the people of God. In discussion it became clear that the children understand that the church is people as well as a building. Finally there is the development of my own theological understanding

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about the role of the artist. I came to realize that the paintings were truly collaborative in that I could not have produced anything like them without the children’s ideas, but neither could the children have produced a coherent picture by themselves for their inputs were so diverse. So the overall structures of the five paintings, though agreed with the children, were necessarily initiated by the artist, which paradoxically puts the artist in a powerful position notwithstanding complete surrender to the children’s suggestions for content. Though diverse, the structures were alike in being able to accommodate an evolutionary process with large numbers of details. Accommodation was achieved in various ways such as ‘pictures within pictures’ and zoning. The paintings can therefore be seen as giving a practical understanding of the relationship between the universal and the particular. There is scope for discussing them as visual metaphors of the creation, with God as the ‘artist’ imposing a structure, i.e. the ‘laws of nature’, allowing the accommodation of great diversity and human creativity.

Approaches and situations The three approaches summarized above can be located within a wider variety of approaches described in the literature, with three important interrelated variables being the degree of inclusivity, the nature and extent of dialogue among the participants, and the role of the artist-mediator. The street art approach is open to all, and can involve both groups and individuals. The maximum public visibility may be an encouragement for a high degree of participation. Overall control is minimal, however specific groups who wish to participate may opt for a more structured approach within the group. In addition to intra-group verbal dialogue there may also be a wider type of visual dialogue in which participants respond to existing images with their own images. This gives the painting an organic appearance, with different levels of scale. It is not essential to have an artist as the facilitator. Because of the minimal control this approach is of doubtful suitability in situations where there is a danger of hi-jacking by any sectarian group. The collage approach as described above is unusual in terms of community painting projects described in the literature, but it provides maximum inclusivity. Any groups or individuals including house-bound people can make contributions, with the house-bound later being given photographs of the finished work. There is scope for intra-group discussions, but possibilities for visual responses to existing images are minimal. An artist is not essential but a facilitator is needed; this person, or

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persons, may have to be involved in the assembly of the final picture and so undertake responsibility for structuring. The fact that the primary artwork can be done in several different places can have logistical advantages in some situations where, for whatever reason, it is difficult for some individuals or groups to come together. In this respect, collage could perhaps be relevant for the parallelism approach defined by Guth as ‘the process of allowing former … adversaries to work through separate but harmonized … activities toward a common goal’ with a ‘capable third party mediator’ (2003: 312). Guth does not, however, give any artistic examples so this use of collage remains speculative. Murals and related artworks are not represented in the experiments described above, but have been used for several peace-building and community projects, for example in Northern Ireland attempts have been made to transform the tradition of sectarian mural painting into something more likely to bring communities together (Hill and White 2012: 73-80). Like street art, murals may be executed on exterior walls or large exterior boards, with the benefit of conveying messages to many people (Feinstein and O’Kane 2008: 19-20). However, some are painted inside on large canvases and as such can be transported to various venues, as in the case of Kids’ Guernica which is an international children’s peace mural and exchange project (Kids’ Guernica 2012). Typically, community or peace mural projects are not open to all but involve defined groups, e.g. children chosen to be representative of different backgrounds (Anderson 1997: 34); and unemployed young men in an urban area, as in the Bromford graffiti spiritualities project described by Shannahan (2012: 2). Also typically, they involve an artist (e.g. the Muslim graffiti artist Mohammed Ali in the case of the Bromford project) or artistic team facilitating the process of group members making contributions to the mural, with accompanying instruction, discussion, consensus building and decision making. The focus group with artist approach works with a defined group and an artist-mediator, so to some extent overlaps with mural production. However, an important difference from mural production is that the painting, whilst dependent on the group’s ideas, is produced solely by the artist. This is relatively unusual in terms of projects described in the literature, though it is related to the cathedral artistic commission with ‘pod’ group described by McFadyen and Inge (2002: 119-58). Given the relationship between the artist and the group, there is a clear ethical requirement that everything the artist does is discussed and approved by group members. Advantages are that the artist can express some things which group members would like to see but find difficult to paint

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themselves (e.g. concepts of God), and can aim to produce an aesthetically pleasing painting accommodating great diversity of input. Though the experiment in this case involved primary school children, in principle this approach could be used for any group. Several sessions are necessary, providing maximum opportunities for in-depth discussion and experience of reaching consensus. The group sees how diverse individual ideas can be woven into a coherent picture. Bi- or multi-communal artists’ activities involve artists from different backgrounds working together over extended periods of time, building relationships and usually producing artworks for exhibition. Examples from Cyprus are described by Gold (2006), who also concluded that ‘many of the artists involved…felt that the artistic process was more important than the works created’ and that ‘bi-communal art activities seem to have a greater effect on the artists participating than those individuals who just attend the exhibits’ (2006: 23, 32). Here, clearly, the role of the artists and the dialogue amongst them is foremost, and lasting friendships may be formed. The public are not included in the creative process but may have their horizons widened by visiting exhibitions, and may benefit from discussing the artworks.

The dialogic imagination An understanding of the artistic imagination as monologic, ‘largely based on the concept of individual expression’ (Kac 2004: 199-200) has often influenced art interpretation in the past. Whilst arguable even in the cases of individual artists, the monologic understanding clearly breaks down with the various projects considered here, in which a variety of dialogues can be discerned. For example, there may be verbal dialogue between members of a group which influences what they contribute to a community painting; an individual participant may be influenced by an existing image and respond to it in visual dialogue by alteration or by adding a related image; and an artist seeking to express the multi-faceted desires of a group may engage in a prolonged dialogical encounter. It is precisely the dialogic qualities of community paintings which fit them for peace and reconciliation projects. Moreover, from the dialogic imagination emerge images which the monologic imagination could not have produced. This became particularly clear through the production of the five paintings with primary school children in the ‘focus group’ approach. It seems appropriate to apply to community paintings the concepts of dialogism proposed by the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin (Bakhtin 1981: 411 ff), notwithstanding the fact that his work was primarily in

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literary criticism. In particular, it sprung from the novels of Dostoevsky, of whom he said: What unfolds in his works is not a multitude of characters and fates in a single objective world, illuminated by a single authorial consciousness; rather a plurality of consciousnesses, with equal rights and each with its own world, combine but are not merged in the unity of the event (Bakhtin 1984: 6; Bakhtin’s italics).

Developing this idea, any complex cultural discourse is seen as necessarily encompassing heteroglossia, a ‘multiplicity of social voices’ with their interrelationships (Bakhtin 1981: 263). Bakhtin’s work is increasingly seen to have a wider relevance both for the visual arts (e.g. Haynes 1995; Kac 2004: 199-216) and theologically, for example in Christian theological terms, the suggested relationship between diversity and unity is evidently Trinitarian (Price 2005: 4). In the context of this chapter, the engagement of the dialogic imagination with multiple voices includes discussions with diverse participants in community paintings and responses to their contributions. There is also an implication that all the past experiences which have a bearing on participants’ contributions are somehow part of this dialogue, for it is Bakhtin’s view that dialogue includes both past and future. This again is fitting for peace and reconciliation projects: There is neither a first nor a last word and there are no limits to the dialogic context (it extends into the boundless past and boundless future). Even past meanings, that is those born in the dialogue of past centuries, can never be stable (finalized, ended once and for all) - they will always change (be renewed) in the process of subsequent, future development of the dialogue. At any moment in the development of the dialogue there are immense, boundless masses of forgotten contextual meanings, but at certain moments of the dialogue's subsequent development along the way they are recalled and invigorated in renewed form (in a new context) (Bakhtin 1986: 170; Bakhtin’s italics).

In the present context, an example of a dialogue reaching back into the past could involve past sectarian murals in Northern Ireland approached with insights gained from more recent peace murals. As for the future, a requirement was in fact identified in discussion with staff at St John the Baptist Primary School, who wanted children in the future, who had not been involved in the production of the five class paintings, to nevertheless have some help in dialoging with them. A first response to this is the production of a set of open-ended questions to be used at the class teachers’ discretion. In more general terms, any present project which

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sparks off ideas for further development is reaching open-endedly into future dialogue.

Conclusion Communal paintings may be done in a variety of ways, so when planning any community-building or peace and reconciliation project one may look for the best fit between the painting approach, local circumstances, and the project aims. The three main variables with painting approaches are the degree of inclusivity, the nature and extent of dialogue among the participants, and the necessity or otherwise of an artist-facilitator or mediator. Experiments in English villages highlighted characteristics of three approaches as follows. First, ‘street art’ on a large public board (or wall) is open to all, and does not require that the facilitator be an artist. Participants include individuals and various groups, with numerous possibilities for spontaneous dialogue and also visual dialogue in which contributors respond to existing images with their own images. Second, the ‘collage approach’, in which artwork is done throughout the community and subsequently assembled, is similarly open to all. There is scope for intra-group discussions, but possibilities for visual responses to existing images are minimal compared with street art. Locating the production of images in several different places can have logistical advantages in some situations where, for whatever reason, it is difficult for some individuals or groups to come together. A facilitator is needed to structure the final assembly of the picture, but this person need not be an artist. Third, the ‘focus group with artist approach’ works with a defined group and an artist-mediator, with the painting wholly dependent on the group’s ideas and approval but produced solely by the artist. Advantages are that the artist can express some things which group members would like to see but find difficult to paint themselves; and the necessity for several sessions provides maximum opportunities for in-depth discussion and experience of reaching consensus. The group sees how diverse individual ideas can be woven into a coherent picture. The experience with these three approaches was that, notwithstanding the rural English setting, in every case some of the participants contributed messages of ethical or religious significance. In particular, with the primary school focus groups, there were clear concerns about good and evil, war and peace, and the place of God in the pictures; and visions of peace, reconciliation and global harmony coming from the older children. A fourth approach, well described in the literature, is the community or

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peace mural, executed on exterior walls or boards, or on large transportable canvases. Typically, such projects are not open-access but involve defined groups, and an artist or artistic team facilitates the process of group members making their own contributions. Finally, also described in the literature, a fifth approach is artist-centered and involves artists from different backgrounds working together over extended periods of time, building relationships and usually producing artworks for exhibition. What all these approaches have in common is the provision of opportunities for dialogue, though these opportunities vary in scope and duration. It is suggested that the dialogism developed by Bakhtin, with its recognition of the autonomy of multiple consciousnesses and encompassing both past and future, provides an appropriate conceptual framework for community paintings in the context of peace and reconciliation.

Acknowledgements The practical projects would not have been possible without muchappreciated support from many quarters, in particular Revd L. Foster (Vicar) and the Parochial Church Councils and congregations of RuytonXI-Towns and Great Ness; Mrs S. Irish (headteacher) and the staff and pupils of St John the Baptist Primary School, Ruyton- XI-Towns; Mrs D. Mills (headteacher) and the staff and pupils of St Andrew’s Primary School, Nesscliffe; Mr D. Dicken (chairman) and the members of the Ruyton-XI-Towns Art Group; Mrs M. Kuipers and the organizing group of the 2012 Nesscliffe Community Festival; Mr and Mrs M. Dransfield and the Nesscliffe Post Office; the Nesscliffe Golden Years Club; the Nesscliffe Youth Club; and all the many families and individuals who made their contributions.

References Anderson, T. (1997) ‘Art, education, and the bomb: reflections on an international children’s peace mural project’, Journal of Social Theory in Art Education, 17: 71-97. http://poieinkaiprattein.org/kidsguernica/the-start-of-kids-guernica-by-tom-anderson/ (accessed 9 December 2012). Archbishops’ Council (2000) Common Worship: Services and Prayers for the Church of England, London: Church House Publishing. Bakhtin, M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination; ed. M. Holquist; trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist, Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press. —. (1984) Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. C. Emerson,

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Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Bakhtin, M. (1986) Speech Genres and Other Late Essays; eds C. Emerson and M. Holquist; trans. V.W. McGee, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Banksy (2006) Wall and Piece, London: Century. Cody, A. (1999) ‘Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi’, in R.E. Brown, J.A. Fitzmyer, and R.E. Murphy (eds), The New Jerome Biblical Commentary, Upper Saddle River NJ: Prentice Hall. Cohen, C. (2003) ‘Engaging with the arts to promote coexistence’, in A. Chayes and M. Minow (eds), Imagine Coexistence: Restoring Humanity after Violent Ethnic Conflict, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass (a Wiley Imprint), 267-93. Feinstein, C. and O’Kane, C. (2008) I Painted Peace: Handbook on Peace Building with and for Children and Young People, Oslo: Save the Children, Norway. Online. http://resourcecentre.savethechildren.se/content/library/documents/ipainted-peace (accessed 27 November 2012). Fink, A. (2003) How to Ask Survey Questions, Thousand Oaks, CA, and London: Sage Publications. Gold, D. (2006) The Art of Building Peace: How the Visual Arts Aid Peace-Building Initiatives in Cyprus, SIT (School for International Training) ISP Collection, paper 370, http://digitalcollections.sit.edu/isp_collection/370 (accessed 28 October 2012). Guth, L.E. (2003) ‘The art of the possible: parallelism as an approach to promoting coexistence’, in A. Chayes and M. Minow (eds) Imagine Coexistence: Restoring Humanity after Violent Ethnic Conflict, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass (a Wiley Imprint), 311-33. Haynes, D.J. (1995) Bakhtin and the Visual Arts, Cambridge UK and New York: Cambridge University Press. Hill, A. and White, A. (2012) ‘Painting Peace? Murals and the Northern Ireland Peace Process’, Irish Political Studies, 27: 71-88. Kac, E. (2004) ‘Negotiating meaning: the dialogic imagination in electronic art’, in F. Bostad, C. Brandist, L.S. Evensen, and H.C. Faber (eds), Bakhtinian Perspectives on Language and Culture: Meaning in Language, Art and New Media, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 199-216. Kids Guernica (2012) http://www.kids-guernica.org/ (accessed 28 October 2012). Kvale, S. and Brinkmann, S. (2009) Interviews: Learning the Craft of Qualitative Research Interviewing (2nd Edition), Los Angeles and London: Sage Publications.

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Lewisohn, C. (2009) Street Art: The Graffiti Revolution, Paperback Edition, London: Tate Publishing. McFadyen, A. and Inge, J. (2002) ‘Art in a Cathedral’ in J. Begbie, (ed.), Sounding the Depths: Theology Through the Arts, London: SCM Press, 119-158. Price, G.C. (2005) ‘Russell Hoban: the heir to Bakhtinian vertical’, in Vertical Time and Space in Literature. Papers presented at a conference exploring the engagement of literature with religion, University of Durham, 20-23 July 2005, https://www.dur.ac.uk/theology.religion/research/projects/verticaltime andspace/ (accessed 10 December 2012). Russell, A. (1986) The Country Parish, London: SPCK. Shannahan, C. (2012) Bromford Dreams: Graffiti Spiritualities Project, Project Report Reference 18866636, University of Birmingham, UK. http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/Documents/collegeartslaw/ptr/theology/ research/bromford-arts-council.pdf (accessed 20 November 2012). Shove, G. (ed) (2008) Untitled. Street Art in the Counter Culture. Darlington, Co Durham: Pro-actif Communications.

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Illustra ations

Figure 1: Dettail from final ‘Street Art’ piicture. The sizee is 1 m wide and 1.3 m high, which iss about 14% off the total area of o the picture.

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Thee Processes of Community C Paiinting: A Theollogical Enquiry y

Collage’ picturee. The size is 1..3 m wide and 0.7m 0 high, Figure 2 Detaail from final ‘C which is abouut 25% of the tootal area of the picture. p

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Figure 3. The final Class 5 'Focus Group' painting, 'All together in one world' The size is 60 cm wide and 80 cm high.

PART II: MUSIC

11 MODELLING HARMONY: MUSIC IN PEACE-BUILDING JEREMY S. BEGBIE

There can hardly be a corner of the globe that has not witnessed the power of music to promote peace in the midst of conflict. This beguiling yet mysterious art form seems to possess remarkable capacities to generate trust, defuse aggression, quell violence, and negotiate ethnic and racial boundaries. Yet it is only in the last few decades, and especially with the rise of the so-called ‘new wars’ (the extended social conflicts typified by the wars of former Yugoslavia in the 1990s) that music’s powers to alleviate conflict have attracted sustained scholarly attention. Much of this writing has been relatively ad hoc and local, although in recent years it has increasingly involved bringing together music practitioners (and theoreticians) with those at work in the well-established disciplines of conflict transformation/conflict resolution.1 Needless to say, there is a dark side to all this. Music may have extraordinary peace-building promise, but it also has the potential to divide and alienate, provoke hostility and foment violence. It has been deployed to consolidate racist ideology, to intimidate, and as a tool of torture – in other words, to work against all that makes for peace.2 But this does not for a moment negate its considerable ability to help break hegemonies of suspicion, distrust and division, and further the aims of peace-builders in many parts of the world. One does not have to journey far into the literature of peace-building to find the language of ‘harmony’ being employed, and, not surprisingly, it is commonly used with reference to music (especially of European and Asian traditions), both metaphorically and literally.3 A recent volume on music and conflict transformation, for example, is subtitled Harmonies and Dissonances in 1

For an especially helpful survey, see Sloboda and Bergh (2010). See the section ‘Music in Conflicts’, in Sloboda and Bergh (2010). 3 See O’Connell (2010: 5-8). 2

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Geopolitics (Urbain 2008). Or again, concluding a lengthy study of collaborative encounters between Israeli and Palestinian musicians, Benjamin Brinner writes: ‘These bands provide . . . a model of how one might live together not only in peace, but also in mutually beneficial harmony’ (Brinner 2009: 326). Similar examples could be multiplied many times. In this paper, I want to probe the practice and concept of musical harmony, with a view to exploring the practices, discourse and conceptuality of peace-building. Attention to various senses and dimensions of musical harmony, I suggest, can do much to illuminate and clarify different conceptions of peace and peace-building already in use, as well as generate fresh and perhaps neglected ways of conceiving them in the future. There will also be consequences for the practical business of peace-building, and for how music is used in the process. Throughout there will be a particular orientation to theological themes. This is both for the sake of limiting the discussion, and because it is foolish to pretend that one could approach this field from some ‘neutral’ perspective. I write as a Christian theologian, and as one whose experience of music has been formed largely by the Western European tradition. At the same time, I write as one attempting to be alert to the wide variety of perspectives to be found in the music and peace-building literature, and all too aware of the often dismal record of the Christian church in fostering peace. I am taking for granted what has become a widely held conviction among contemporary music scholars: that music is best construed not chiefly as an object or objects (a ‘work’, or ‘works’) but as something done. Music is enacted, practiced, and usually in tandem with other actions whose range is virtually limitless: entertainment, healing, courtship, identifying a group, celebrating a victory, and so on. The two most basic practices we might call simply ‘music-making’ (the production and reception of musically organized sounds) and ‘music-hearing’ (the perception of such sounds). These practices are inherently social and culturally embedded, intertwined with a host of contingent circumstances, and it would seem, are in part grounded in the structural constitution of the physical world (which includes the human body) (Begbie 2007: 29-58). It is also worth bearing in mind that in most cultures, music is not a marginal or trivial activity but engrained in the human makeup and virtually impossible to suppress. As Ian Cross points out: in contemporary western cultures, there is a general expectation that everyone should be able to engage with music in listening, that is, to perceive something as music and to understand it as such. In many other, perhaps most other, world cultures, there is an expectation that members

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And even in the case of Western cultures: active engagement in music-like behaviours is perhaps more the rule than the exception, if we expand our notion of music to embrace those forms of behaviour such as dance that in other cultures are included under a broader umbrella term. And even in respect of a more limited notion of music that excludes dance, active participation in music making in western societies is still more widespread than is generally recognized. (Cross 2006: 116).

In short, then, it would seem strange if peace-builders attempted to ignore a practice so pervasive and so engrained in social and cultural life.

‘Vertical’ harmony Despite being widespread in the peace-building discourse, in the world of music, harmony is by no means a simple or uniform phenomenon to examine.4 And, needless to say, the concept has a long history outside the musical sphere. At any rate, a very broad distinction can be made between ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ harmony. The latter we shall deal with later; the former refers to the perceived consonance of two or more tones sounding simultaneously – as in a heard chord. In the Judaeo-Christian world, tones were not combined in this way in earnest until around 1000CE. Up until this time, unison had been the norm; musicians together would generally all sing or play the same notes (perhaps separated by an octave). But from around the ninth century (perhaps before), experiments appear: some sing a chant while others sing the same line four or five notes apart. And by the end of the eleventh century, musicians were able to combine two melodically independent lines of notes. However, whether the sounding tones were simultaneous or not, the vision behind this conception of harmony stretched back many centuries. In the music of classical antiquity – and both the concept and the term derive from ancient Greece – harmonia concerned the appropriate relationships between tones in an octave scale. Associated especially with the semi-mythical figure of Pythagoras, and carried forward by Christian thinkers such as Augustine and Boethius, a grand scenario emerged according to which musical sound, especially musical harmony, was regarded as coinciding with, and expressing cosmic order. Moreover, this musical order was in turn seen as

4

See Dahlhaus et al (2013); Gauldin (2004).

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reflecting, and in some manner giving access to the Creator. Earthly music sounds the harmony of the universe, and the harmony of God.5 Such was the breathtaking metaphysical vision which, in various forms, pervaded and sustained music theory in Europe throughout the medieval era. But we should note that although it entails vibrating bodies (strings, vocal chords, or whatever), the notion of harmony being employed here is relatively static. The music’s power depends not on the differences and contrasts between sounds as set out in a temporal sequence but on an established sonic structure with which the sounds resonate. Not surprisingly, conceptions of harmony of this sort have been widely employed to symbolize and enact social order, and far beyond the Western world. According to John O’Connell, for example, ‘musical overtones reflect distinct aspects of social and political order within a Confucian universe . . . cultural stability mirrors the structure of the harmonic series, with an invariable hierarchy of sounds mapping an immutable hierarchy in society’ (O’Connell 2010:13n.6). Accordingly, ‘peace’ will be interpreted in the light of this primordial harmony, and conflict seen as its disruption. In Western modernity, for a host of reasons this majestic harmonic worldview has come under heavy fire. In contemporary Europe and North America, music’s power and importance will commonly be interpreted largely in terms of human construction and human expression. It will likely be tied to the preferences and ideology of a culture, or the desires of the individual. The diversity of responses to the same music will be repeatedly stressed: ‘Serbian epic-singing is heard with pride by Serbs but terror by their Croat neighbors . . . in Ireland listeners of different backgrounds experience the sounds of the Orange flute and drums in contrasting ways, bound into long historical-mythic associations’ (Finnegan 2003:189, quoted in Cohen 2008: 28). Attempts to find ‘universals’ in music, meanings which transcend all local contingencies, will often be treated with intense suspicion as yet another example of socio-cultural domination: the attempt to justify our music as more ‘natural’ than theirs.6 Clearly, we need to be alert to such dangers in the context of peace-building. It is significant, however, that in recent years, scientific research has opened up the possibility of a rather more nuanced account of the factors shaping music, which at least in some respects harks back to more ancient intuitions. It would seem that there are good reasons for supposing that music typically achieves its effects both through its embeddedness in a physical order shared by all humans, including the 5

For surveys and discussions, see Bowman (1998: 19-68); James (1993); Fauvel, Flood, et al. (2006); Heller-Roazen (2011); Ito (2011). 6 For a milder, and more balanced expression of caution, see Cohen (2008).

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ordering of the human body,7 and through its social and cultural situatedness, and that the key cultural distortion involved is not so much the intuition that music might include universal-like features but rather the ease with which we oppose these two perspectives.8 As far as cross-cultural commonalities are concerned, scholars point to pervasive structural features in most musics, and (perhaps with rather stronger support) to common functions of musical behaviours worldwide.9 Whatever the precise conclusions of such research, it suggests that if music does contribute to peace-building, this may in part be due to its ability to exploit features of our biological constitution and of the physical world at large – including sounds-in-relation – which transcend sociocultural particularities. The point is hardly irrelevant to current discussions. A recent paper on music in Arab-Israeli peace-building by Micah Hendler, for example, begins with an all-too-familiar disclaimer: I want to make clear that I approach the relationship between music and peacemaking in ethnic conflict as a skeptic, and the arguments presented here do not depend upon a postulate of musical universals or an idealistic belief about music’s political influence to hold. In my experience, music is not a universal language that can somehow transcend barriers of ethnicity and culture to connect people through a shared meaning. Rather, music acquires its meaning through culturally-dependent signifiers or through connection with individuals’ life experiences. Furthermore, I do not believe that simply singing a song or playing a piece of music will have any tangible effect upon a situation as deep-seated and violent as an ethnic conflict, unless the music is similarly grounded in the performers’ and listeners’ culture or life experience and its performance carries sociopolitical signifiers.

But then he continues: as I will explain in this paper, I do believe that music can be used as a powerful tool for peacemaking in ethnic conflict if used within a social system that infuses it with meaning. (Hendler 2012: 1).

7

See, for example, the important research on music’s capacity to generate empathetic response, as in Cross, Laurence, et al. (2012); Rabinowitch, Cross, et al. (2012); Cross (2010). 8 A leading scholar in music and science, Ian Cross, laments the all too common split between a scientific approach which would focus on cognitive and biological commonalities involved in musical practices, and humanistic approaches that stress social and cultural determinants alone. He rightly refuses to set these against each other. Cross (2006: esp. 114-15). 9 See the summary discussion by Cross (2006: 117-25).

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Hendler’s own findings indicate that ‘music largely devoid of cultural signifiers can be used as a tool of cross-cultural identity formation in situations of ethnic conflict’ and that ‘it works with members from opposing sides of several ethnic conflicts – Israelis and Arabs, Indians and Pakistanis, Greek and Turkish Cypriots’ (Hendler 2012: 9). But how, we might ask, is such music ‘working’ in this way if not through engaging realities which to some degree transcend the distinctiveness of cultural groups, something Hendler seems determined to disallow? If the reply is that the social system is ‘infusing’ the musical sounds with meaning, we could ask: why rule out the possibility that features of the sounds themselves, or commonly shared biological or physiological factors might have a part to play in this ‘infusion’ process? Of course, these things are hard to demonstrate. But my primary concern here is not with details of acoustic research so much as what is implied and entailed in the exaggerated suspicion expressed in Hendler’s article, not least for peace-building. Massive and arguably crucial questions lurk here which can hardly be ignored. Can the ‘peace’ we seek ever be anything wider and deeper than a function of the localized ideologies of particular social groups? Does our pursuit of peace draw on anything other than interests that are entirely humanly constructed? Could the physical constitution of the world (including our bodies) in any sense be understood as ‘given’, not simply in the sense of being brute fact, but in the sense of being given benevolently? And more pointedly: is our engagement as physical beings with a physical world an activity that is intended in the wider scheme of things, and intended to be undertaken in particular ways? Whatever our theological convictions, such issues can hardly be deferred indefinitely if at least some vision of what constitutes ‘peace’ is guiding its pursuit. Before moving on, it is perhaps worth pointing to a very obvious feature of musical sound-perception, of considerable interest in this context, and yet one that seems to go unnoticed in the literature. It concerns the way we hear simultaneous sounds. Few at work in peace studies will need to be reminded that human conflicts have perennially been imagined in zero-sum, spatial terms. Each party occupies a clearly bounded place: the more I have, the less you have. Space, in other words, is pictured as carved up into mutually exclusive places – and of course, this is quite literally so in many cases. Fights are fights for the same space, because difference cannot be accommodated within the one space. In his book Playing Across the Divide, Benjamin Brinner observes: Most Palestinians and Israelis are caught in worldviews where a gain by one side must be a loss for the other. Even schools and communities

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Modelling Harmony: Music in Peace-Building founded expressly to educate Israeli Jewish and Arab children together as an antidote to hate, fear, and inequality have stumbled over this. The ethnic music scene has not addressed the issue head-on, but its very existence offers a third way, one of mutual benefit. (Brinner 2009: 325)

Brinner does not reflect on musical perception at this point, but he could well have done. I play a note on a piano. The tone I hear fills the whole of my aural field, my heard space. It does not occupy a bounded location. It is ‘everywhere’ in that space; there is nothing ‘outside’ it, no spatial zone where the sound is not. Suppose I then play a higher note along with the first. This second sound fills the entirety of the same (heard) space, yet I perceive it as distinct, irreducibly different. In this aural environment, two different entities, it would seem, can be in the same space at the same time, and heard as different. Contrast this with the world as we see it: we cannot see two different things in the same space at the same time as different. A patch of red will hide a patch of yellow, or they will merge into orange. We are unable to view red and yellow in the same space at the same time as red and yellow. In this (seen) world, a zero-sum logic holds: the more of one, the less of the other. But in the aural world, two tones can interpenetrate; they can be ‘in’ each other, while remaining perceptually distinct. The conceptuality opened up here is further enriched if we consider another feature of musical tones we can hear: sympathetic resonance. If I play middle C on a piano, and open up the string an octave above by silently depressing the appropriate key, the upper C string will vibrate (very quietly) even though it has not been struck – due to the phenomenon of the ‘harmonic series’. Again, we are not in a zero-sum world. The more the lower string sounds, the more the upper string sounds. The tones we hear are not in competition, nor do they simply allow each other room, tolerate each other. The lower sound establishes the upper, frees it to be itself, and enhances it, without compromising its own integrity. Indeed, the lower string also vibrates more freely in the process. To pick up Brinner’s phrase, there is ‘mutual benefit’. The aural experience of simultaneously sounding notes/tones opens to our imagination a kind of space in which radical unity (indeed, an interpenetrating unity) can be combined with irreducible distinctiveness (there is no merger or fusion into a tertium quid. This space is not simply the aggregate of places, but – so to speak – an edgeless space, indeed an abundant space. Music, then, can present to us a space of interpenetration and mutual inter-animation, where each sound is enhanced through the life of the other, but where difference and particularity are in just that way

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heightened and enlivened. We may be touching here on one of the reasons why music has been so pervasive in peace initiatives – that it affords an experience in which the zero-sum thinking which hinders so many struggles for peace is in effect challenged. Here is a sound ‘without borders’ to allude to Laura Hassler’s musical project. And in addition to this experience, a distinctive language and conceptuality also becomes available, arguably less encumbered than the more common visuallydominated habits of speaking and thinking. Further, and not least, it is replete with theological resonances: the repeated efforts of the Christian church, for example, to articulate its biblically grounded vision of unity and diversity among persons, a vision itself grounded in the ‘peaceful’ three-in-oneness of the Christian God, would be greatly advanced if visual models could give way more often to sonic modes of thinking and speaking.10

‘Horizontal’ harmony So far we have considered harmony in essentially static terms. Music, however, happens over time, not in isolated instants. If someone enrolls at a European or North American music college they will find that a course in harmony is not so much about vertical consonance (though this will be part of the story) as it is about features of music as it unfolds through time. Harmony in this sense concerns a process: in what is sometimes called ‘Western tonal music’, which emerged around 1600 and has come to dominate many parts of the world in modern times, harmony is a function of the temporal relationship of different intervals and chords to one another as they are sung or played in succession. Crucial to this process is the resolution of tension. So, for example, listeners will perceive the first of these two chords as requiring resolution (see figure 1). The first chord cannot be left as it is, it is expected to resolve on to the second. A sense of anticipation is aroused, a sense that matters cannot be left as they are. Configurations of tension and resolution work in many different ways and at many different levels, potentially engaging every element of music, generating a forward-moving, teleological dynamic. This music is sensed as directional, driving towards rest and closure, and often (though not always) leads to some kind of goal or ‘gathering together’ of the whole temporal process. We feel it is ‘going somewhere’. The ways in which tensions are resolved are massively 10

For further discussion see Begbie (2014: ch. 6).

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varied, assuming limitless permutations of endless interest to music theorists and musicologists. The resolution process can occur at different levels simultaneously, and over diverse time-spans; it can involve titanic struggles (as in Beethoven’s later symphonies) and be hugely delayed and extended (as in Coltrane’s ‘A Love Supreme’ or in much of the music of Richard Wagner). Another name for tension is ‘dissonance’, and for resolution, ‘consonance’. Consonance and dissonance, we should note, are not neat concepts. Not only is there disagreement about where the line between the two lies, but when we make judgments about consonance and dissonance, we are more often than not talking about intervals and chords in relation to each other, not in isolation.11 If you are playing an ‘Amen’ at the end of a hymn in G major (see figure 2). The first chord (C major) sounds consonant on its own but it is dissonant in relation to the ‘home key’, G major. We do not have space to enter the complexities of this kind of harmony in detail, and, of course, we are here dealing with only one musical tradition. Yet it should be clear that these observations considerably widen and complicate the concept of harmony beyond the ‘vertical’. In this horizontally-propelled world, to concern oneself with harmony is to concern oneself not merely with moments or individual sounds in isolation or with the goal of a process, but with the process itself. And tension, or dissonance – whether extreme or mild – becomes intrinsic to that process. For those involved in peace-building, this opens out a new set of questions about what it might mean to seek ‘harmony’ in situations of conflict, and, indeed, about the use of music in such contexts. It is surely significant that, as ethnomusicologist John O’Connell reminds us (and his interests here range much more widely than Western music): Music provides an excellent medium for identifying conflict resolution . . . [W]here musical systems acknowledge a dissonant register, they often recognize a consonant solution, thereby enabling the playful juxtaposition of conflicting and resolving elements within a musical frame (O’Connell 2010: 5).

I confine myself to reflections in five areas where awareness of these dynamics goes a long way, and I do so with theological questions especially in mind. 11

We need to make a distinction between ‘acoustic’ (or ‘sensory’) consonance and ‘musical’ consonance—the former applying to intervals and chords in isolation, the latter to intervals and chords as they appear in a piece of music.

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First, something needs to be said about the value of music in helping us live with, and live through tensions that cannot be speedily alleviated or resolved. Exquisite care is needed here, for it is all too easy to overlook or belittle the horrendous conditions in which peace-builders are often forced to live and work, and the need for a fierce impatience in contexts where immediate intervention is actually possible and will obviously be fruitful. Having said this, participating in music, especially corporately, can model critical patterns of thought and action which are highly relevant to the kinds of peace-building that requires, for example, long-term, extended negotiation and uncommon amounts of patience. Kathleen Marie Higgins has written of the ways music can illuminate tensions in our ethical experience (Higgins 1991). She notes how much writing in ethics employs static models when engaging complex ethical dilemmas, and these ‘tend either to promote unrealistic expectations or to arouse the belief that one’s situation is hopeless’ (Higgins 1991: 167). She believes that ‘well-handled maintenance of tensions is ethically desirable’, even ‘essential to living a balanced, happy life’, and contends that music ‘presents tensions, not as obstructions, but as themselves vehicles to the achievement of resolution’ (Higgins 1991: 167). What is at issue is learning through music ‘the possibility of graceful navigation within a texture of external and internal tensions’ (Higgins 1991: 168; my italics) and, by extension, developing capacities which can affect other areas of our lives. Higgins’ conviction that participating in music hones habits and skills which enable us to engage with and negotiate conflict is hardly new, but no less important for that. And it would seem to relate illuminatingly to the ways in which musical harmony of the sort we have been describing frequently operates: through the playing out of tension-resolution patterns, often in extremely protracted ways through ‘deferred gratification’ (Begbie 2000: 99-106). Second, there are countless examples of music, Western and nonWestern, where tensions are generated and resolutions anticipated but the resolution never arrives; the dissonance constitutes the ending, paradoxically denying closure. Sometimes this has been simply a matter of playful experimentation, sometimes it is linked to wider currents in culture at large: it is not hard, for example, to relate the extreme dissonance of at least some modernist music with a refusal to trivialize or evade the harsh realities of societies enmeshed in endemic violence, to sidestep the blatant fact that the world is not yet as it could or should be. Insofar as such realities need to be exposed and confronted in peace-building, music’s ability to evoke in sound the cruel ruptures of human life may have a crucial place, and not least in relation to matters of religious faith. Christianity, for example, holds that God’s supreme peace-making

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initiative has directly engaged these very ruptures: in the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth, fear, anxiety, hunger, loss, frustration, disappointment and death itself have all been drawn into – indeed, become the very material of – the re-harmonization of the world. Third, care is needed not to allow the concept of ‘harmonization’ to suggest that we can accord violent conflict a kind of primordial or foundational place, that the world’s radical disharmony has been, as it were, composed into the system from the start – in the way that a composer might plan and weave dissonance into a song or symphony. There are religious and philosophical traditions which affirm something like this, but we should be alert to their darker consequences. It is one thing to claim that God can and does bring good out of evil, and that sin and death are appropriated through divine action to serve God’s transcendent purpose – this is basic to the Christian tradition, which pivots on the raising of a murdered man to a new, transformed mode of life. But it is quite another to imagine that at the end of time when we might look back on some event of mindless violence and say: Now, in the total scheme of things, I can see why that had to happen. Attempts to justify God in the face of evil by appealing to some notion of cosmic or divine ‘necessity’ are notoriously problematic. Applied to humans, this kind of scenario can be used to sanction quite horrific acts of violence. Applied to God, it either puts God above good and evil (and thus essentially amoral) or makes God inherently evil himself.12 There is a classic wrestling with these matters in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov: what aesthetically harmonized final bliss, asks Ivan, could ever justify the torture and death of an eight-year-old child? ‘I don’t want harmony. . [T]oo high a price has been placed on harmony. We cannot afford to pay so much for admission. . . . It’s not God that I do not accept, Alyosha. I merely most respectfully return him the ticket’ (Dostoyevsky 1958: 287).13

The issue of whether the evil constitutes a kind of basic level of existence (an ontology of violence) is another question that can hardly be 12

See Tallon (2012); Hart (2005: 87-92). Significantly, in another place Ivan challenges Alyosha on the question of necessity: ‘answer me; imagine it is you yourself who are erecting the edifice of human destiny with the aim of making men happy in the end, of giving them peace and contentment at last, but that to do that is absolutely necessary, and indeed quite inevitable, to torture to death only one tiny creature, the little girl who beat her breast with her little fist, and to found the edifice on her unavenged tears—would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me and do not lie!’ Alyosha replies softly: ‘No, I wouldn’t.’ (Dostoyevsky 1958: 287-8; italics added). 13

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sidestepped indefinitely by those at work in peace-building (Milbank 1990: ch. 10). Fourth, some conceptions of harmony and harmonizing can be as violent as the ills being engaged. The ways in which visions of, and strategies for peace are inclined to be oppressive, totalizing, cancelling or excluding all difference, have been well rehearsed, especially in postmodern writing. And religious traditions such as Christianity have frequently been charged with supporting such moves. A profound suspicion voiced repeatedly is that even to speak of a final ‘resolution’ , a ‘grand temporal consonance’ (Kermode 1968) is to echo or extend the totalitarian impulse present in the worst of modernism, to smother difference and distinctions in homogenizing oneness. That the Christian church has frequently promulgated and enacted just this theology, to its immense shame, is undeniable. That in so doing it cuts against its foundational texts is perhaps less well known: it needs to be pointed out that a vision of harmony centring in the non-coercive generosity embodied in the crucifixion of Jesus points to a rather different mode of peacebuilding, and that the vista opened up in the last pages of the Bible evoke a ‘new creation’ that, far from smothering or ironing out difference, enables an enriching diversity, a proliferating ‘harmony’ towards which music, with its inevitable closures in time, can only gesture.14 Fifth, if we are thinking of the process of ‘harmonizing’ or, indeed, peace-building, the metaphor of ‘balance’ needs careful handling. Notions of symmetry and equivalence have, of course, pervaded much musical composition and theorizing, and the associated mathematics has been explored at length. However, when it comes to music’s form as extended in time, exact symmetry or balance is in fact fairly rare, since so much music depends on the principle of varied repetition, repetition-withdifference. Much commoner are forms where the logic of expansion or overflow is operating, at least on some level. And the business of tensionresolution of dissonance is rarely a matter of the cancellation of dissonance with an equal and opposite consonance; more often it is a weaving dissonance into the process, resulting in a resolution experienced as richer as a result (even where it might involve note-for-note repetition of previously heard music). The dynamic is immensely instructive for peace-building, not least for the way we conceive justice. It is commonly held that all religious traditions envisage justice in terms of a simple, retributive logic of exact equivalence – the logic played out in revenge, for 14

For a recent and rich discussion of these themes, see Hector (2011). Taking his cue from John Milbank’s use of the metaphor of musical harmony, it is striking how often the word ‘harmony’ and its cognates appear in this article.

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example. X amount of wrong demands X amount of wrong in return. Or – essentially the same logic – X amount of wrong is to be balanced out by X amount of right. But this hardly does justice to the logic of overflow in so many religions, a logic that is intrinsic to forgiveness. The Christian New Testament, for example, witnesses to a dynamic in which the wrongs are met, not with a corresponding good but a love that is absurdly lavish and profligate, surplus to all ‘requirement’, overflowing beyond anything demanded or expected and generous beyond measure.15 Insofar as music can evoke a dynamic abundance, a sense of excess and inexhaustibility that in some way ‘takes up’ the dissonance, it bears witness to this vision of peace, which is anything but ‘balanced’.

Conclusion: Personal reflections We have attempted to show something of how a pervasive concept in peace-building studies – ‘harmony’ – can be greatly illuminated when explored through music, and that this has implications not only for the way we imagine and practise peace-building, but also for the way music is actually used in such contexts. I want to end by returning to a point made near the start – that music is best conceived not fundamentally as an object or objects, but as a human practice. Peace-building, to state the obvious, is a function of persons in interaction – the Hebrew shalom, we recall, is a corporate, dynamic notion. Near the heart of any quest for peace lies the question: what kind of persons do we, together, want to become? Or, in terms of the focus of this paper: what kind of persons do we together, want music to help us become? This pushes us beyond the question of how music can help us alleviate this or that conflict crisis – something which, understandably, has been uppermost in a great deal of the literature in music and peacebuilding. In line with a strong stream of ethical thought, much discussed by theologians in recent years, we are asking: how might music encourage what an ancient tradition would call ‘the habituation of virtues’, the fostering over a long period of human virtues that make for peace, thus nurturing what Maria Elena López Vinader calls ‘a culture of peace’? (López Vinader 2008).16 To express it like that will of course make many very wary, as if we were implying that music was some kind of potion that can permanently turn us into better people. Things are not that simple, and 15

See Torrance (2006). On virtue ethics, see, e.g. MacIntyre (1984); Russell (2013); Bretherton and Rook (2010); Wright (2010).

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from most theological perspectives, this would be deeply suspect. Yet those who have pioneered the use of music in peace-building, and persuaded us of its potential, are by that very commendation implying that music can play a part in changing the moral disposition of participants, however inchoately, indirectly, temporarily, and unpredictably. Participating in music can shape us, help form us towards peace. Undoubtedly, music can de-form us, mis-shape us, often, perhaps, without us knowing it. But we also know the opposite can happen. The issue that now needs pressing is: how might that shaping towards virtue become an enduring phenomenon? How might music form us towards long-term habits that make for peace?

References Begbie, J. (2014) Music, Modernity, and God: Essays in Listening, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Begbie, J.S. (2000) Theology, Music and Time, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. (2007) Resounding Truth: Christian Wisdom in the World of Music, Grand Rapids, Baker Books. Bowman, W.D. (1998) Philosophical Perspectives on Music, New York: Oxford University Press. Bretherton, L. and Rook, R. (eds) (2010) Living Out Loud: Conversations about Virtue, Ethics, and Evangelicalism, Carlisle: Paternoster Press. Brinner, B.E. (2009) Playing Across a Divide: Israeli-Palestinian Musical Encounters, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cohen, C. (2008) ‘Music: A Universal Language?’, in O. Urbain, Music and Conflict Transformation: Harmonies and Dissonances in Geopolitics, London: I.B. Tauris in association with the Toda Institute for Global Peace and Policy Research: 26-39. Cross, I. (2006) ‘Music and Social Being’, Musicology Australia, 28: 11426. —. (2010), ‘The Evolutionary Basis of Meaning in Music: Some Neurological and Neuroscientific Implications’, in F. C. Rose, The Neurology of Music, London: Imperial College Press, 1-15. Cross, I., Laurence, F. and Rabinowitch, T.C. (2012) ‘Empathy and Creativity in Group Musical Practices: Towards a Concept of Empathic Creativity’, in G. McPherson and G. Welch, The Oxford Handbook of Music Education, Oxford: Oxford University Press, vol.2: 337-53.

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Dahlhaus, C., Anderson, J., Wilsom, C. and Cohn, R. (2013) ‘Harmony’, Grove Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/508 18> (accessed 13 May 2013). Dostoyevsky, F. (1958) The Brothers Karamazov, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Fauvel, J. and Flood, R. (eds) (2006) Music and Mathematics: From Pythagoras to Fractals, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Finnegan, R. (2003) ‘Music, Experience and the Anthropology of Emotion’, in M. Clayton, T. Herbert and R. Middleton, The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction, Oxford: Routledge, 181-92. Gauldin, R. (2004) Harmonic Practice in Tonal Music, London: W. W. Norton & Company. Hart, D.B. (2005) The Doors of the Sea: Where was God in the Tsunami? Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Hector, J.R. (2011) ‘Ontological Violence and the Covenant of Grace: An Engagement between Karl Barth and Radical Orthodoxy’, in B.L. McCormack and C.B. Anderson, Karl Barth and American Evangelicalism, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 323-46. Heller-Roazen, D. (2011) The Fifth Hammer: Pythagoras and the Disharmony of the World, New York: Zone Books. Hendler, M. (2012) ‘I am a Seed of Peace: Music and Israeli-Arab Peacemaking’, http://ssrn.com/abstract=1982231 (accessed 28 May 2013). Higgins, K.M. (1991) The Music of Our Lives, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Ito, J.P. (2011) ‘On Music, Mathematics, and Theology: Pythagoras, the Mind, and Human Agency’, in J.S. Begbie and S.R. Guthrie, Resonant Witness: Essays in Theology and Music, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 109-34. James, J. (1993) The Music of the Spheres: Music, Science, and the Natural Order of the Universe, London: Abacus. Kermode, F. (1968) The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, New York: Oxford University Press. López Vinader, M.E. (2008) ‘Music Therapy: Healing, Growth, Creating a Culture of Peace’, in O. Urbain, Music and Conflict Transformation: Harmonies and Dissonances in Geopolitics, London: I.B. Tauris in association with the Toda Institute for Global Peace and Policy Research, 147-61. MacIntyre, A.C. (1984) After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.

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Milbank, J. (1990) Theollogy and Social Theory: Beeyond Secularr Reason, Oxford: Basil Blackw well. O’Connell, J.M. (2010) ‘An ‘ Ethnomu usicological A Approach to Music M and Conflict’’ in J.M. O’Connell and d S.E. Castello-Branco, Music M and Conflict,, Urbana: Univversity of Illin nois Press, 1-114. Russell, D..C. (2013) The T Cambrid dge Companiion to Virtuee Ethics, Cambriddge: Cambridgge University Press. Sloboda, J. A. and Beergh, A. (2010), ‘Music and Art in Conflict Transforrmation: A Reeview’, Musicc and Arts in A Action, 2 (2). Tallon, P. ((2012) The Poetics P of Evil: Toward aan Aesthetic Theodicy, T Oxford: Oxford Univeersity Press. Torrance, A A.J. (2006) ‘The Theollogical Grouunds for Ad dvocating Forgivenness and Recconciliation in n the Sociopoolitical Realm m’, in D. Philpott,, The Politicss of Past Evill: Religion, R Reconciliation,, and the Dilemmaas of Transitiional Justice,, Paris: Univ ersity of Nottre Dame Press, 455-85. Urbain, O. (2008) Musiic and Conflict Transformaation: Harmo onies and Dissonannces in Geopoolitics, London n: I.B. Tauris in association n with the Toda Insstitute for Global Peace and d Policy Reseaarch. Wright, N.T T. (2010) Afterr You Believe: Why Christiian Characterr Matters, New Yorrk: HarperOne.

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12 ART, PEACEBUILDING, AND RECONCILIATION: WILL FORMATION AND CONSEQUENCE MICHAEL MINCH

On August 5, 2012, Wade Michael Page walked in to a Sikh Temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, and killed six people. He wounded four others. A former member of the United States Army (1992-1998), he had ties to white supremacy and neo-Nazi groups. He was a musician and played in several neo-Nazi bands. He founded the band End Apathy and played in the band Definite Hate, both considered racist ‘white-power bands’ by the Southern Poverty Law Center (Romell 2012; McGreal, Williams and Choudhury 2012; Beirich and Potok 2012). A recent story on National Public Radio reported on the research of Professor Glenn Schellenberg of the University of Toronto on a new trend in popular music written in the U.S. which uses minor keys so as to convey ‘sadness’ in the music. Schellenberg says, ‘People have come to appreciate sadness and ambiguity more. Life is more complicated, and they want the things they consume as pleasure to be complex similarly’ (Schellenberg 2012). If you want to convey this affect musically, then use a minor key and a down-tempo meter. The important folk musician Woody Guthrie wrote the following on his guitar: ‘This machine kills fascists’ (Guthrie 2008, DVD). Following his friend, Pete Seeger wrote on his banjo: ‘This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender ’(Rosen 2014: 1). In Israel today, a song written by Alona Kimche and sung by Izhar Ashdot, entitled Like a Habit is banned by the Israeli Defense Forces radio. The song presents the idea that killing can become too easy, ‘like a habit,’ and apparently for this reason is said by some IDF officials to ‘degrade’ the armed forces (Halpern 2012). The history of Haiti shows a number of musicians, for example, Manno Charlemagne, the mizik rasin band and Boukman Eksperyans, who have needed to go into hiding because their songs were rightly understood as subversive to authoritarian regimes in Port-au-

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Prince. In these cases, both lyrics and music helped to mobilize resistance to thuggish governments.1 In the U.S., millions of Christians listen to and sing contemporary music as a part of worship services. These songs are written so as to engineer emotions tied to devotion, adoration and sentimentality, sometimes melancholy and sorrow. So tied to the emotion understood to be intrinsically a part of worship, or worshipful, the musical component of worship is often referred to as worship itself, worship proper; and the musicians who lead the bands are often given the title ‘worship leaders.’ Lastly, note that fascist regimes seek to control art, bending it to their purposes, and concomitantly, limit the freedom of artists.2 The brief reports I have given signify something we all know and experience in various ways. Music affects our emotional state and our will formation. In conjunction with other important variables, it motivates us toward feelings, beliefs, judgments, conclusions, and actions. We often use art when we feel, believe, and act, in order to give descriptive expression to these phenomena; but we also use art to promote, persuade, manipulate, exploit, and coerce. We are changed by art (poiesis), and we use it to change others. Not only are we affected by art as individuals, but also as groups, communities, and other assemblages. Art has both centrifugal and centripetal power. In this chapter I will sketch an argument about the relationship between art, especially music, peacebuilding, and reconciliation. First, I will note some consonances between art and democracy, focusing on music; second, I will note connections between art and peacebuilding; then I will address the relationship between democracy and peacebuilding; and last, I will turn to will formation and reconciliation.

Democratic foundations Art is one of the training grounds for democracy. Both rely, in their essence, on creativity, innovation, improvisation, and therefore, imagination. If people are to learn how to be democratic citizens in respect to an organization, a society, or the planet, they will have to find democratic education in a multitude of locations. Art is one of them.

 1

My thanks to Ms. Denise Windley, who has been doing interesting research on the peacebuilding capacity of music in Haiti. See her, ‘Harmonious Dissent: Music as an Instrument for Justice in Haiti’, (2013) JustPeace, 3(I), (JustPeace is the undergraduate journal of Peace and Justice Studies at Utah Valley University). 2 See, for example, Britt, L.W. (2003) ‘Fascism Anyone?’ Free Inquiry Magazine, 23(2) (Spring).

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Music, for example, is a training ground for democracy, for among other reasons, the learning and performance of music—which are intrinsically connected, as is orthodoxy and orthopraxy—like the learning and practice of democracy, entails give-and-take, speaking up, listening well, doing one’s share and sometimes more than one’s share, and letting others shine. 3 As noted above, it is a commonplace that under authoritarian regimes, art suffers. The last thing totalitarian ‘leaders’ want is freedom of expression or the courageous and constructive energies of creativity and imagination to flow.4 Democracy itself is an art at least as much as it is a science. Democracy is poetry, music, and dance. It is poiesis, art. It swirls and is hectic and hesitant. It is thick and thin, fugitive,5 seditious, flirtatious, sometimes evanescent, sometimes a blow to the gut. It is never fixed or finished, settled, supine, or sedate. Indeed, there is, in a sense, no such phenomenon as democracy, but only democratization or its lack, for all societies have nested in them movements of democratization and movements of de-democratization. No society has simply ‘become’ a democracy. Like music and other art and craft, it is hard work, and often heartbreak; if comes from inspiration and imagination and gives it in return. Democracy is poiesis and praxis.

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My comments on art, music, and democracy draw from Minch, M. and Sanders, C. (2009) ‘Democracy as Music, Music as Democracy’, Radical Philosophy Review, 12 (1 & 2), 219-39. An anonymous reader of that article commented that in Fellini’s film, Orchestra Rehearsal, the Italian orchestra struggles with its new director, a dictatorial German. The result is not music, but rather, chaos. 4 David Noel Freedman notes that the characteristic means of confronting oppressive power among the prophets in Israel was that of poetry and music; and Walter Brueggemann writes that the role of the prophet is to ‘keep alive the ministry of imagination’, see Brueggemann, W. (2001) The Prophetic Imagination second edn., Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 40. Goebbels joked, ‘When I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun.’ The poet Heine remarked prophetically, ‘Wherever they burn books they will, in the end, burn human beings’, in McCarthy, P. ‘Peace and the Arts,’ in Webel, C. and Galtung, J. (eds) (2009) Handbook of Peace and Conflict Studies, New York: Routledge, 363. 5 On ‘fugitive democracy’, see Wolin, S.S. (2006) Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought, expanded edn, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 601-06; Wolin, S.S. (1996) ‘Fugitive Democracy’, in Benhabib, S. (ed) Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 31-45; and Wolin, S.S. (2008) Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 287-92.

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Foundations are what constructions are built upon. They are necessary. Democratization, as with all building projects, needs foundation. I here offer the components, criteria, and conditions of democracy. The very word is our first clue. Democracy means, of course, ‘people power’ (demos: people, kratos/kratia: power). 6 Democracy names a form of human association in which people as such, all the people, inform and shape the structures, assemblages, decisions, actions, potentialities, and future which belongs to them. The ways the demos inform and shape is nearly limitless. But there must be equal and sufficient means available to all to make the power to inform and shape actual and authentic. We can take Samuel Huntington as a representative of the minimalist, and therefore, inauthentic, understanding of democracy when he writes: Elections, open, free and fair, are the essence of democracy, the inescapable sine qua non. Governments produced by elections may be inefficient, corrupt, shortsighted, irresponsible, dominated by special interests, and incapable of adopting policies demanded by the public good. These qualities make such governments undesirable but they do not make them undemocratic (Huntington in Wolin 2008: 166).

Of course open, free, and fair elections are essential to democracy, but other criteria are as well. Indeed, if a government fits Huntington’s description, it is decisively, and at best, undemocratic. Corruption and domination by ‘special interests’ are anti- democratic.7 Democratization is a political manifestation of the moral commitment to equality. 8 Persons as equal subjects of dignity, worth and the concomitant respect due to each are the most basic components of the foundation. To take the idea of equality seriously means that our political associations will be deeply democratic. This means that democratization is not political phenomena suspended above other, more basic aspects of human life and conduct. Rather, democratization is political life fully consonant with our deepest moral commitments. Whitman referred to democracy as ‘openhandedness’ (Caplan 1982: 6). Dewey wrote that it is

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See Ober, J. (2000) ‘The Original Meaning of ‘Democracy’: Capacity to Do Things, not Majority Rule’, Constellations, 15 (1) (March), 3-9. 7 It is an interesting question as to what ‘special interests’ are. One person’s ‘special interest,’ is another’s valuable citizen’s group. This question, of course, overlaps the question of what ‘pork’ is in government spending. ‘Pork’ refers, in U.S. parlance, to wasteful spending. 8 That is, demokratia bears an essential relationship to isokratia. See Ober, J. op. cit.; and Christiano, T. (1996) The Rule of the Many: Fundamental Issues in Democratic Theory, Boulder: Westview Press.

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a form of government only inasmuch as it is first ‘a form of moral and spiritual association’ (Dewey 1969: 240). Gandhi said ‘The spirit of democracy cannot be imposed from without. It has to come from within,’ and that ‘is not a mechanical thing to be adjusted. It requires change of heart’ (Cited in Diamond 2008: page prior to table of contents). Democracy grows into the state from human association and society, from persons shaped by democratic virtues. Deep democracy arises, it is not imposed. Following from equality, radical democracy (or to go to the Latin from which ‘radical’ derives), the root (radix) meaning of democracy calls for principles, laws, procedures, and technologies that protect, encourage, enable, and employ: inclusivity, reciprocity, mutuality, publicity, transparency, and accountability. These criteria are necessary embodiments of equality and the way we know equality is being taken seriously. These criteria lead to what I call the principle of affectedness, i.e., insofar as a political association is democratic, all persons affected by a decision or a course of action, will have roughly and sufficient input into the making of such decisions and the undertaking of such actions. 9 Democracy is power sharing. It is a distribution of power based upon the moral foundation of equality and the manifestations of equality mentioned above. It must logically give rise to discourse and deliberation that is informed, given sufficient time, serious, inclusive, transparent, public, open to revisit, insurgency, and contestation.10 It is discursive in terms of the range of its participants, scope of their discussions, and depth of their concerns. Collective and reflective preferences must determine collective outcomes. Citizens in equal and free partnership determine their common/wealth. All these components, criteria, and conditions must be constitutionally protected, yet, even at this foundational level, open to challenge and amendment.

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Of course this principle is elastic and various forms of it can be argued and adopted. See for example, Goodin, R.E. (2012) Innovating Democracy, New York: Oxford University Press, 136-52. It may be that this principle leads to the conclusion that we have a moral responsibility to give nonhuman biota representation in various democratic fora. 10 For reflection on the importance of democracy as contestation and agonism, see Dryzek, J. (2006) Deliberative Global Politic, Malden, MA: Polity Press; Bell, D. (2008) ‘Agonistic Democracy and the Politics of Memory’, Constellations, 15 (1) (March), 148-66; Honig, B. (1993) Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics, Ithaca: Cornell University Press; Mouffe, C. (2005) On the Political, London: Routledge; and Connolly, W. (2005) Pluralism, Durham: Duke University Press.

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This is the foundation of democracy, the nurturing soil of democratization. It is easy enough to see how the minimalist, majoritarian, conventional talk of democracy is not only inadequate, but indeed, how it makes a cruel mockery of the real thing. This thin gruel of conventional ‘democracy’ serves, I believe, as an inoculation, where the body politic gets just enough (a very small dose of) democracy to inoculate us against democracy proper.

Democratic flows I have been discussing the foundations of democracy, but I also want to say something about its flows. Above I said that democracy is art, it is music, it dances and swirls. Democracy is dynamic, unsettled, creative, and rhizomatic. In saying that democracy is dynamic, let us not forget the Greek root of that word, dunamai, meaning both authority and, along with kratos, power. Note too, that the cognate term dunastaes refers to the potentate, the sovereign, the one with political authority. Our word dynamite comes from this root. To advocate democracy is to work for authentic and authoritative people-power that can be explosive in its powerful effects when it is working well.11 The flows of democracy emerge from the fertility of the foundation. If the foundation contains procedures, the flow of democracy is fecund with processes. As noted above, democracy is rhizomatic, inventive, and often ad hoc. It is ‘grass growing through cement.’ 12 Citizens in the United States can easily conclude that there is no hope for democracy, but around the world, insurgent democratic mobilizations are developing new networks, modes of organizing, powers, and grassroots experimental practices… as well as visions that promise serious resistance, [and] prefigure brighter days. Hope lies in hyperactive efforts to invent arts of receptive democratic engagement across differences, though which alternative collective powers might gather the strength to actually make another world quite possible… We live in dangerous times, but when has democracy not been endangered? … [it] has never been a safe… possession; rather, it has been a practice in search of itself (Coles 2005: x-xi).

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Of course the critics of democracy have also worried, and worry still, about the explosive effects of democracy. But overwhelmingly, they worry that the people will endanger or defeat their own bases of power and the privileges that flow from that power. It is no accident that those opposed to democracy are privileged elites. 12 Lyric from Bruce Cockburn’s song ‘Santiago Dawn’ from album Cockburn, B. (1969) World of Wonders, True North Records.

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Democracy is connective tissue that is always alive and growing. It connects persons and peoples, ideas and institutions, regimes and reasons, aspirations and assemblages. Communities, narratives, hostilities, differences, and commonalities all have the chance of being transformed through this flow of connectedness. Democracy gives us the power and space to listen, learn, grow, and change. In democracy we ‘learn and invent arts of juxtaposing these tensional responsibilities’ and of handling ‘polysemous tensions and fluctuations’ because we live with ‘the demands of everyday existence and are therefore stretched between multiple imperatives, concerns, identities, impulses, legacies, languages, roles, spaces, and responsibilities’ (Coles 2005: xvi). Democracy is about inquiry, vision, struggle, and movement beyond mere conventions. It is ‘radical resistance to… recolonizing interpretations and practices’ (Coles 2005: xvi). Analogous—and perhaps related—to Christian eschatology, it is the flow of becoming in ‘encounters that always remain significantly “not yet”’ (Coles 2005: xvii). Democracy is the moral and political energy that flows within the radical ordinary of everyday life. 13 It is thus, beautiful, gut wrenching, and artistic. The existential power of making various forms of art with others, and here I want to focus on music, the freedom of expression one is given and must seize, allows for easy metaphors of community and other social and political concepts, but none more so than democracy. Making music under communal and democratic conditions is indeed a kind of oikonomia, an order, economy, and ecology; it is indeed a kind of demokratia, a power of the people shared with equality, respect, mutuality, and accountability.14 Winton Marsalis says, ‘You have that question of integrity, the intent, the will to play together… So you have yourself, your individual expression— and then you have to figure out how to fit in with everybody else. And that’s exactly like democracy…’ (Quoted in Ward and Burns 2000: 116). Cornel West finds in ‘the painful eloquence of the blues,’ and the ‘exuberantly… improvisational virtuosity of jazz’ the ‘tragicomic hope expressed in America’ and in our immature democracy. We, ‘as a blues nation,’ he writes, ‘must learn from a blues people how to keep our deep democratic energies in dark times’ (West 2004: 16, 21). He continues. ‘I



13 See Hauerwas, S. and Coles, R. (2008) Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary: Conversations between a Radical Democrat and a Christian, Eugene, OR: Cascade Books. 14 On the relational power of music and the essential nature of music as communal, see Christopher Small (1998), who writes provocatively that there ‘is no such thing as music’, but only ‘musicking’, in his Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening, Middletwon, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2.

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have always marveled how such an unfree people as blacks have created the freest forms in America, such as the blues and jazz. I have often pondered how we victims…invented such odes to democratic individuality and community as in the blues and jazz’ (West 2004: 216). West finds in blues and jazz, a way of ‘extending our courage and vision, manifesting our freedom,’ a way to ‘preserve those nonmarket values that convince ordinary people that it’s worth taking a risk to fight for democratic principles’ (West 1999: 558-59). Rebecca Solnit counts the ‘strange trajectory that created rock and roll out of African and Scots-Irish musical traditions in the American South, then sent rock and roll around the world’ as a kind of resistance to oppression, and therefore a not insignificant piece of peace; a ‘strange working of history’ (Solnit 2004: 31-32).

Art and peacebuilding Having sketched consonances with democracy and art, especially music, let me now turn to a sketch of consonance between art and peacebuilding. Here I want to draw primarily on two sources, John Paul Lederach’s The Moral Imagination, and Cynthia Cohen’s ‘Recasting Reconciliation through Culture and the Arts’. I will begin by summarizing and reporting some of the work by Lederach and Cohen. Then I will move to my own analysis and contribution. I take Lederach’s book to be a statement about how, looking back over his years of peacebuilding work, he has discovered that it is more art than science, and that wild imagination is its key. He explicates the idea that four disciplines make peacebuilding possible. They are relationship, paradoxical curiosity, creativity, and risk. He notes wherever the shackles of violence are broken, the ‘single tap root that gives life to the moral imagination’ is the capacity to place ourselves in ‘a web of relationship’ with our enemies (Lederach 2005: 34). Of course, Jesus’ command that we love our enemies contains this relational dimension since love cannot exist without relationship (Matthew 5.43-48; cf. Romans 12.17-21). The moral imagination, Lederach tells us, gives us the capacity, to understand that the welfare of one’s community is related to the welfare of other communities. I would add this is particularly relevant and necessary in respect to other communities we consider enemies. Moral seriousness will not allow us to frame life’s challenges and problems as dualistic polarities. So, how do people living in geographies of violence change? Memory and vision must be connected in such a way as to move us toward relationship and reconciliation, and that requires moral imagination. Indeed, ‘the mystery of peace’ is located in the nature and quality of

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relationships developed precisely with those most feared (Lederach 2005: 62-63).15 Lederach thinks that listening itself— surely an essential component of conflict transformation and reconciliation— is ‘about’ aesthetics. It is, he writes, like haiku—the art of capturing ‘the complexity of history in the simplicity of deep intuition.’ It is attending to ‘a sharp sense of what things mean.’ Indeed, the word aesthetic comes from the Greek that means ‘being sharp in the senses’ (Lederach 2005: 69). Acute observational power is an essential part of peacebuilding. And this power is not fundamentally technique, but rather, ‘the art of giving birth to and keeping a process creatively alive,’ a ‘connection of discipline and art, the integration of skill and aesthetics’ (Ledearch 2005: 70). Once again, moral imagination is necessary to attend to intuition. This kind of language will make many nervous, of course. Peace-builders from security studies in particular will most likely be uncomfortable with images of haiku, music, and aesthetics. But the skill invoked here is not simplicity. Listening and peacebuilding do not trade in reductionism, they employ the difficult art of synthesis. In keeping with this complex and challenging demand, Lederach writes that when he listens to a warlord, commander, taxi driver, or housewife, he listens for poetry (Lederach 2005: 71). All conflict contains poetry. And sometimes ‘a single conversational poem captures the complexity of a whole situation’ (Lederach 2005: 71). There is an aesthetics of social change, and it circulates around a crucial conviction: ‘building adaptive and responsive processes requires a creative act, which at its core is more art than technique.’ Creativity brings into existence ‘processes that have not existed before’ (Lederach 2005: 73). Therefore peace-builders must understand themselves as artists, not technicians (Lederach 2005: 69-73). Peace cannot be built out of violence without radical newness inventively imagined and courageously risked. To think of transforming conflict, building peace, and fostering reconciliation must bring us, sooner or later, to matters of the soul. This is because we are willing to kill others almost always only when what is most precious to us seems in jeopardy and killing seems the only available means to protect it. Our most cherished values, needs, aspirations, and fears—yes, we cherish our fears—are tied to, if not anchored in, our souls. Lederach writes of three ‘soul disciplines’: stillness, humility, and perception (Lederach 2005: 103). I think there are other soul disciplines, for example, honesty, courage and forgiveness. But an inventory aside, I want to note how closely related stillness, humility, and perception are to

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Those most feared, are usually, of course, our enemies.

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the artist’s work. There is no way to do real art, perhaps, without ample use of stillness, quietude, humility, and hunger for both vast and acute perception. Not quite a discipline perhaps, but maybe a ‘gift of accidental sagacity,’ Lederach also writes of the importance of serendipity. He notes that in his years of peacebuilding, the more he wanted to produce a particular result, the more elusive it was. The more he ‘let go’ and discovered ‘unexpected openings,’ the more progress was made (Lederach 2005: 115). This serendipity is more like soccer (football) than football (American football). There is flow and weave to it, and it comes with peripheral vision. It is not measured by steady and linear progress forward. The kind of imagination that nurtures possibilities of serendipity is not unlike what Paolo Freire called ‘conscientization,’ the learning, identity formation, and mobilization in which people discover what they know and innovate responses and solutions, seizing the power of themselves as actors (Lederach 2005: 103, 115, 121, 125; Freire 1970). For persons in various faith communities, this sounds a lot like trust, faith, and grace. Artists know perfectly well how their art is beyond their control. While I was writing the paragraph above, my wife called me and asked when I would be finished writing this paper. I responded, ‘Who knows? When you’re writing, it takes over and controls you.’ Lederach reports concrete instances of peacebuilding work in conjunction with ‘artful change.’ I will summarize one of these cases. In the 1980s Burkina Faso and Mali exploded into war over border issues. International mediation efforts failed on numerous occasions to stop the killing. At one point in the conflict, the president of Guinea, Ahmed Sekou Toure, persuaded the presidents of Burkina Faso and Mali, Thomas Sankara and Moussa Traore, respectively, to attend a meeting at his palace. There, they witnessed poetry, song, and dance that was created as part of a peacebuilding effort. The two presidents not only shed tears and embraced, but took a solemn oath before the public witnesses that they would not return to war. In the next few months a peace agreement had been signed, on 30 December 1985, and it has not been violated since (Doe and Bombande 2002: 159-72). The dispute over the territory thought to hold valuable natural resources was resolved by the International Court of Justice, which released its decision on 22 December 1986. The Court determined that the land should be divided between the countries in nearly equal proportions. Toward the end of his book Lederach makes a startling claim. He writes, ‘Art is a form of love.’ He continues, it is ‘finding beauty and connection in what we do.’ The challenge of the ‘artful connection is how to respect what we create, nurture love for what we do, and bring beauty to

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what we build… it requires that we pay attention to what already lies within us, within our capacity’ (Lederach 2005: 162). If the Good, the True, and the Beautiful are ultimately the same thing, or at least, very much interconnected, love and peace are connected as well. From a Christian perspective, none of these are possible without love because Love is the originating Energy and Purpose of all peace, all truth, all goodness, and all beauty. 16 Of course, one need not be a Christian to experience art, or peace, as forms of love. All know that love and risk are intrinsically related and that art and risk are very much related. Because peacebuilding is in part, capacity building — discovering, affirming, and drawing on the capacities of people in conflict to know and share their understandings and partial holdings on the Good, True, and Beautiful is a crucial part of building peace. To draw our attention back to blues, jazz, and improvisation, and connect to what I have been saying about imagination (using Lederach to do so), I want to pull our attention to improvisation. In his article, ‘Improvising a New World,’ Ken Butigan writes that it is time for us to gamble our future on the proposition that everyone matters. He thinks we have something on which to build. He notes that ours is an Era of Nonviolent Improvisation: from Gandhi to the 2012 fracktivist flash mob, activists have improvised compelling dramas designed to counter society’s policies of violence and injustice, and the social frames, myths, assumptions and scripts that reinforce them. Today, the multiple emergencies facing the planet require more creative engagement than ever, including the audacious, long-term project of improvising a new world (Butigan 2012).

Improvisation derives from a word meaning ‘unforeseen.’ By definition, it arises spontaneously. But spontaneity does not emerge from a vacuum. Training, tradition, community, narrative, identity, experience, skill, reflection and reason, are some of the components that exist in the reserve from which spontaneity springs, or from which it draws. Butigan points out the important fact that improvisation is not simply something belonging to, say, great musicians; but rather, all people improvise all the time (Butigan 2012). This is a crucial fact, in my view, because it is powerfully hopeful to be able to ask people to do what they do all the time, and to simply turn their accustomed skills to new domains of activity. And all the more so for great purposes like building peace and reconciliation.

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1 John 4.16 states “God is love” and James 1.16 states that all good and perfect gifts come from God.

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Butigan tells a story of improvisation that changed a moment and changed a person. He was among a group protesting a laboratory because of its contribution to the design of nuclear weapons. When a police officer grabbed him to put him under arrest, he refused to get up off the ground and the office pulled at him. The officer’s superior witnessed this event and yelled to the engaged policeman, ‘Just break his wrist’ At that point it appeared he might do so, as he increased his twisting pressure. Butigan said to him spontaneously, ‘You don’t have to do this.’ In response the officer relented and said to Butigan, ‘Thank you for telling me that I didn’t have to break your wrist! I was in a spell, under orders, but you broke that spell!’ (Butigan 2012). This story, read in isolation from a large body of empirical and historical evidence that supports it, seems hokey or fanciful. But I report it because it is a narrative that has been repeated a million times in a thousand places. Moreover, it points to a fact of violence and injustice: people who comply with the systems, structures, assemblages, and technologies of direct and indirect violence typically live their lives of complicity as if in a spell simply because they feel they are under the orders of convention, expectation, assumption, and ordinariness. That spell-like conformity gets broken by creative, inventive, artistic, imaginative, improvisation, as well as rational strategy. Butigan notes that nonviolence education often employs role-plays, real-plays, socio-dramas, and psychodramas; and improvisational theater more broadly (Butigan 2012). Such companies include the Theater of the Oppressed, the Living Theater, Theatre Without Borders, and Theatre of Witness in Northern Ireland. He also notes the manual about how to do improvisation, entitled Truth in Comedy, written by the Improvisation Olympics (now, iO) founders, Charna Halpern and Del Close, with Kim ‘Howard’ Johnson. Truth in Comedy is about laughs, but it is also about truths that lead to change. In this manual, the authors write that performers are to treat each other as poets, geniuses, and artists, to ignore nothing, and follow unexpected twists. This sounds like much of what Lederach has learned over his many years as a successful global peace-builder. In a rather fitting crescendo to his article, Butigan notes that the Nobel Prize winner Leymah Gbowee improvised ‘dramatic action’ to break the log jam at the 2003 Liberian peace talks (Butigan 2012). Although I have devoted three paragraphs to Buitgan’s small article, it needs to be added that his observations are in no way novel. There is a rapidly growing literature about the growing ‘Era of Nonviolent Improvisation.’17



17 For example, Ackerman, P. and Duvall, J. (2001), A Force More Powerful: A Century of Nonviolent Conflict, New York: St. Martin’s Press; Schell, J. (2003)

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Cynthia Cohen reports on an international fellowship program held at and through Brandeis University in 2003 and 2004 (Cohen 2009: 105-11). She played an important role in the program entitled Recasting Reconciliation through Culture and the Arts because of her position as director of Coexistence Research and International Collaboration in the Slifka Program at Brandeis. She was assisted by Jonathan Fox, the founder of Playback Theater, an improvisational theater in some 60 countries, including countries in violent conflict. I want to pass along her report of some engagements and conclusions generated by the program. The fellowship participants were accepted as two-person teams. Here is what some of them did in terms of their research, peacebuilding, and reporting. One team working in Burundi, promoted reconciliation through African drumming, music, and song. One of the team members, Nicholas Kotei Djanie, is a master drummer. Another team used Playback Theater to create ‘deep community dialogue’ including the sharing of very difficult experiences. One of this team’s members, Beverley Hosking, had been a PBT trainer in New Zealand, India, and Fiji. A third team came into the program with years of experience running community outreach and development programs that use art as a medium for social change. Another team, from the U.S., collaborated on a documentary film in the war-torn country of Sri Lanka. The theoretical work these teams produced is articulated in Recasting Reconciliation through Culture and the Arts: A Virtual Collection, an online anthology where the fellow’s papers are collected.18 Conclusions reached by these fellows include consensus about the close relationship between aesthetic practices, processes, and forms, and peacebuilding and reconciliation. Also, that the necessary learning and capacity building ‘does not happen simply through books, lectures, or discussions.’ Together, they stated, ‘Rational discussion alone may not be enough to help people who have been at war with each other to begin to imagine a different and more peaceful future. Rather, the learning required for reconciliation must be felt, must take place on the levels of the body and spirit as well as the mind’ (Cohen 2009: 112). Space will not here

 The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People, New York: Metropolitan Books; Roberts, A. and Ash, T.G. (eds) (2009) Civil Resistance and Power Politics: The Experience of Non-violent Action from Gandhi to the Present, New York Oxford University Press; and Chenoweth, E. and Stephan, M.J. (2011) Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict, New York: Cambridge University Press. 18 See Djanie, N.K., Slachmuijlder, L., et.al. https://www.brandeis.edu/ethics/peacebuildingarts/recasting/contents.html

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allow me to detail the ways these various teams did their work of peacebuilding and the results they achieved. But I will report that as a whole, the work and results make important concrete differences of various kinds in building peace and reconciliation. For example, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) signed a collaborative agreement to use interactive theatre techniques in South Kivu regarding the return of 150,000 Congolese refugees from Tanzania. Conflicts were inherent in that return and the theatre techniques were used to prevent violence (Cohen 2009: 126). My brief survey of democratic foundations and flows, and of the relationship of art to peacebuilding, leads us to consider the relationship between democracy and peace, between democratization and peacebuilding. I will be even more brief here because there is a gigantic literature and research program about what is often called the Democratic Peace Theory, that goes back before Kant (with, for example Cobden), but that found its most influential expression in Kant’s small pamphlet of 1795, Perpetual Peace. As is well known, the basic idea is that democracies do not go to war with one another, and if all states were democratic, we would experience perpetual peace. The reason democracies do not kill one another’s citizens is that they share sufficiently common values, and that they engage in commerce with one another. Since peoples are locked into mutually beneficial relationships that they freely choose, and hold similar values, they will handle their conflict nonviolently. This is the thesis. Among some theorists, it is thought to be the nearest thing social scientists have to an analytical truth. But, of course, everything depends on the meaning of ‘democracy’ and ‘war.’ By different accounts of these terms, the theory holds up between invariably true and very often true. It needs to be quickly added that by conventional, and therefore, minimalist accounts of democracy, democracies are quite eager and proficient at waging war against nondemocracies. What I want to add, and this is a point not made in the vast DPT literature, is that I think there is a strong positive correlation between radical or deep democracy and peacefulness. While it is true that majoritarian, minimally democratic governments conduct wars against less democratic governments or peoples, it is the case that the more robustly democratic a society, the less likely it will use its government to kill people in other countries, or kill its own citizens within its own borders. Indeed, the more democratic a society, the less likely it will harm people at home or abroad. The conventional DPT literature concerns itself with very conventional, minimal accounts of democracy, and then argues over

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small data points. My point is larger and more important: the more democratic a society and thus its state, the more peaceful it is. A close look at the criteria and conditions of democracy that I summarized above make this correlation jump out, once you look for it. It is not only the case that democratization brings peace, but that peace brings democratization. And, in fact, each variable reinforces the other in a mutually supportive feedback loop. The key to this truth is in understanding democracy as morally demanding as I argue to be the case. Of course, I don’t argue that democracy is morally demanding so that it will turn out to be peaceable. I argue that it is coherent only when it is morally demanding, and it then logically turns out to be peaceable. To provide a carefully argued case for this premise, I would need space I cannot afford here. In this context, I can only suggest the premise, although I would not do so if I did not think its plausibility to be both straightforward theoretically, and prima facie true when considering empirical evidence. Simply think of the most democratic societies on the planet at this time. Do Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Switzerland, Sweden, Costa Rica, and Bolivia pose lethal danger to other societies? Do their governments seriously harm their own citizens, or do those governments work rather effectively, resources considered, at assisting their citizens toward flourishing lives? I realize, of course, that there are complicating factors embedded in these questions, but the prima facie nature of the evidence is strongly suggestive of the coherence of my thesis.

Reconciliation I now turn to the last component of my argument before reaching conclusions. I indicated something in my introduction that has been tacitly swirling beneath or among the components of the argument I have been building. It is this. The power of art, whether theater, music, dance, painting, film or other of its forms, the purpose of democracy, and the purpose of peacebuilding is to reconcile human beings, to empower us to live our lives at peace and in community with one another. And this community and peace is brought about through our wills for it to be so. Obviously I am not claiming that all we need do is will peace and we will have it. I am claiming that, whatever else is needed — and much is needed, indeed — our wills must be moved and mobilized in order for peace and reconciliation to be built. Music moves us, dance moves us, art moves us, and democracy moves us. Whereas art can move us toward injustice, oppression, domination, bigotry, ignorance, and violence — democracy, as I theorize it, cannot do so. So, if art is put to peaceable

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ends, and joined with democratization, powerful flows toward peace and reconciliation ensue. It is common to think of reconciliation as occurring at the end of a linear process. The process moves from (1) transgression and violence, indirect and/or direct, to (2) moments, (2.1) processes, and (2.3) institutions of justice that take hold and (3) make peace possible, which in turn, (4) makes reconciliation possible. Often, and in respect to certain conflicts, forgiveness is seen as a stage between justice and peace and/or peace and reconciliation. In this conventional conception, reconciliation is the crescendo and capstone, and it confirms and finalizes the process. The second claim I make in this chapter which goes against convention, (the first being my claim that deep democracy and deep peace are intrinsically related), is that this linear logic is wrong. It is not only that forgiveness must come into the equation at any number of junctures, and that justice and peace are not empirically separable, or separable on the ground and quite difficult to conceive in clean distinctions conceptually as well, thus injustice as structural and indirect violence. It is also the case that reconciliation begins with the will to be reconciled, and the will to be reconciled often, if not typically, comes while the bullets are still in the air and the blood still runs. Our yearnings may be for revenge or savagery or cold-blooded ‘justice’ (misunderstood as such), in the short run; but they are more deeply the desire to know wholeness, security, peace, and restoration of brokenness, including broken relationships. This restoration is reconciliation. Our deepest yearnings for wholeness, restoration, and reconciliation are there from the start. The desire for reconciliation energizes the movements and processes we call conflict transformation and peacebuilding. The will to be in conciliation with others, even our enemies, perhaps especially our enemies, is a force that drives us through ‘stages,’ if you will, to the proper end of human relationships.19 Rather than a linear process, one is tempted to suggest that we conceptualize the elements of peacebuilding in circular fashion, and I have drawn it on classroom blackboards this way many times. In this conception, the components of peacebuilding feed each other over and over.20 Importantly, I think, in this scheme, conflict prevention is an end

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On arguments about the relationship between reconciliation and justice consonant with my view, see Lederach, J.P. (2007) Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies, Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press; and Philpott, D. (2012) Just and Unjust Peace: An Ethic of Political Reconciliation, New York: Oxford University Press. 20 On the nonlinear processes, methodologies, and technologies of peacebuilding, see the excellent contributions in Körppen, D., Ropers, N. and Giessman, H.J.

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that is also a beginning. Yet, even though the circular is a great improvement on the linear conception, it too is insufficient. The fact is that there is a web or ecology of peacebuilding and reconciliation. The connections, in the real world, jig and jag among one another, overlap, interpenetrate, exist now in tension, then in embrace, and dynamically dance in perichoresis with one another. In other words, peacebuilding and reconciliation are a lot like music, dance, drama, painting, sculpture, poetry, and more: art, poiesis. It is also a lot like democracy. Indeed, democratization just is peacebuilding, usually in slow motion.

Conclusion In this chapter I have sketched a set of frames, or offered a kind of rough scaffolding. The space I have created provides places to build an argument more thoroughly. In these spaces one would have to dig deeper into democracy, deeper into the concrete and empirically measured relationships between artwork and peace work, and deeper into the components of peacebuilding that I have suggested are more of an ecology than a linear process. Conflict transformation and reconciliation do relate to one another in terms of cause and effect, but rather, infuse one another with energy and motivation. Art, and here I have focused on music, often inserts dynamics of solidarity, community, enthusiasm, passion, and will formation in the processes of peacebuilding and reconciliation. The sketch or scaffolding notwithstanding, I hope the reader is challenged to think critically and hopefully about these connections.

References Ackerman, P. and Duvall, J. (2001) A Force More Powerful: A Century of Nonviolent Conflict, New York: St. Martin’s Press. Beirich, H. and Potok, M. (2012) ‘Alleged Sikh Temple Shooter Former Member of Skinhead Band’, Southern Poverty Law Center, August 6, http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/news/alleged-sikh-templeshooter-former-member-of-skinhead-band (accessed 23 January 2014). Bell, D. (2008) ‘Agonistic Democracy and the Politics of Memory’, Constellations, 15 (1) (March): 148-66; Britt, L.W. (2003) ‘Fascism Anyone?’ Free Inquiry Magazine, 23(2) (Spring).

 (eds) (2011) The Non-Linearity of Peace Processes: Theory and Practice of Systemic Conflict Transformation, Farmington Hills, MI: Barbara Budrich Verlag.

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Brueggemann, W. (2001) The Prophetic Imagination second edn., Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Butigan, K. (2012) ‘Improvisng a New World’, Nation of Change, 20 October, http://www.nationofchange.org/improvising-new-world-1350 740588 (accessed 23 January 2014). Caplan, J. (1982) (ed) Whitman: Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, New York: Library of America. Chenoweth, E. and Stephan, M.J. (2011) Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict, New York: Cambridge University Press. Christiano, T. (1996) The Rule of the Many: Fundamental Issues in Democratic Theory, Boulder: Westview Press. Cockburn (1969) World of Wonders, True North Records. Cohen, C. (2009) ‘Recasting Reconciliation through Culture and the Arts: Strengthening Peacebuilding Capacity through the Brandeis International Fellowship Program’, in C. Zelizer and R. A. Rubinstein (eds) Building Peace: Practical Reflections from the Field, Sterling, VA: Kumarian Press. Coles, R. (2005) Beyond Gated Politics: Reflections for the Possibility of Democracy, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Connolly, W. (2005) Pluralism, Durham: Duke University Press. Dewey, J. (1969) ‘The Ethics of Democracy’, in J.A. Boydston (ed) John Dewey The Early Works 1882-1898, Vol. I, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Diamond, L. (2008) The Spirit of Democracy, New York: Times Books. Doe, S.G. and Bombande, E.H. ‘A View from West Africa’, in J.P. Lederach and J.M. Jenner (2002) Into the Eye of the Storm, San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 159-72; in J.P. Lederach, (2005) The Moral Imagination, New York: Oxford University Press. Djanie, N.K., Slachmuijlder, L., Berman, K., Selibe, D.S., Hutt, J., Hosking, B., Daravuth, L. Muan, I., Fatima, I. and Kois, L. ( 2004) Recasting Reconciliation through Culture and the Arts: A Virtual Collection, https://www.brandeis.edu/ethics/peacebuildingarts/recasting/contents.h tml (accessed 23 January 2014). Dryzek, J. (2006) Deliberative Global Politic, Malden, MA: Polity Press. Freire, P. (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, New York: Seabury, 1970. Freedman, D.N. (1977) ‘Pottery, Poetry and Prophecy: An Essay on Biblical Poetry’, Journal of Biblical Literature, 9 (1): 5-26. Goodin, R.E. (2012) Innovating Democracy, New York: Oxford University Press.

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Guthrie, W. (2008) This Machine Kills Fascist, DVD, Snapper Music. Halpern, O. (2012) ‘A Matter of Habit’, The Daily Beast, 15 October 2012, http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/10/15/a-matter-ofhabit.html (accessed 23 January 2014). Hauerwas, S. and Coles, R. (2008) Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary: Conversations between a Radical Democrat and a Christian, Eugene, OR: Cascade Books. Honig, B. (1993) Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Kant, I. (2005) Perpetual Peace, New York: Cosimo Inc. Körppen, D., Ropers, N. and Giessman, H.J. (eds) (2011) The NonLinearity of Peace Processes: Theory and Practice of Systematic Conflict, (Farmington Hills MI: Barbara Budrich Verlag). Lederach, J.P. (2007) Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies, Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press. Lederach, J.P. (2005) The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace, New York: Oxford University Press. McCarthy, P. ‘Peace and the Arts,’ in C. Webel and J. Galtung (eds) (2009) Handbook of Peace and Conflict Studies, New York: Routledge. McGreal, C., Williams, M. and Choudhury, C. (2012) ‘Wade Michael Page Named as Temple Gunman as FBI Examines Far-right Links’, The Guardian, August 7. Minch, M. and Sanders, C. (2009) ‘Democracy as Music, Music as Democracy’, Radical Philosophy Review, 12 (1 & 2): 219-39. Mouffe, C. (2005) On the Political, London: Routledge. Ober, J. (2000) ‘The Original Meaning of ‘Democracy’: Capacity to Do Things, not Majority Rule’, Constellations, 15 (1) (March): 3-9. Philpott, D. (2012) Just and Unjust Peace: An Ethic of Political Reconciliation, New York: Oxford University Press. Roberts, A. and Ash, T.G. (eds) (2009) Civil Resistance and Power Politics: The Experience of Non-violent Action from Gandhi to the Present, New York Oxford University Press; Romell, R. (2012) ‘Oak Creek Sikh Temple Shooter had Military Background, White Supremacist Ties’, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, August 6. Rosen, R.J. (2014) ‘This Machine Surrounds Hate and Forces it to Surrender’, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/01/this-machine-

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surrounds-hate-and-forces-it-to-surrender/283414/ (accessed 23 January 2014). Schell, J. (2003) The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People, New York: Metropolitan Books. Schellenberg, G. (2012) ‘Why We’re Happy Being Sad: Pop’s Emotional Revolution’, “All Things Considered,” National Public Radio Morning Edition broadcast September 4, 2012, http://www.npr.org/2012/09/04/160548025/why-were-happy-beingsad-pops-emotional-evolution (accessed 23 January 2014). Small, C. (1998), Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening, Middletwon, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Solnit, R. (2004) Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, New York: Nation Books. Ward, G.C. and Burns, K. (2000) Jazz: A History of America’s Music, New York: Knopf. West, C. (1999) ‘Chekhov, Coltrane, and Democracy’, in The Cornel West Reader, New York: Basic Books. —. (2004) Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight against Imperialism, New York: Penguin. Windley, D. (2014) ‘Harmonious Dissent: Music as an Instrument for Justice in Haiti’, JustPeace, 3:I: 11-20. Wolin, S.S. (2008) Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism, Princeton: Princeton University Press (citing Samuel Huntington, The Third Wave). —. (2006) Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought, expanded edn, Princeton: Princeton University Press. —. (1996 ‘Fugitive Democracy’, in Benhabib, S. (ed) Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

13 THE ROLE OF MUSIC AND DANCE IN PEACE MAKING AND RECONCILIATION: THE CASE OF RWANDA AFTER THE 1994 GENOCIDE JAMES N. AMANZE

This paper examines the role that music and dance have played towards the establishment of peace and reconciliation in Rwanda after the 1994 genocide. The argument of the paper is that, in their wisdom, the government of Rwanda and its people have successfully used music and dance to establish peace, reconciliation, harmony, unity, collective identity and social solidarity among the different ethnic groups in the country despite their religious and political affiliations. It is further argued that if this has worked in Rwanda, it can, certainly, work elsewhere where there is conflict among people of different cultures, religions and political ideologies.

The theological basis of peace and reconciliation It should be noted from the outset that reconciliation has its roots deep in God’s hands. It is God’s activity from beginning to end. Etymologically, the word reconciliation derives from the Latin word conciliatus which means ‘coming together’. Strictly speaking, therefore, reconciliation implies a process that restores the shattered relationships between two conflicting parties. Allen A. Belton has defined reconciliation as ‘the process of resolving conflict through the act of forgiveness by the person wronged and the acceptance of responsibility and lament for his or her actions by the person who inflicted harm in order that the relationship between the parties might be resolved’ (Belton n.d.). Such a resolution would, normally, lead to peace among warring factions. James T. Johnson

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has observed that in ordinary usage the term ‘peace’ denotes the absence of conflict, the state that is obtained between wars. It is also the term used to describe the end of a war. Similarly, an individual is at peace when he or she is not disturbed by internal conflicts. However, in Christian thought the term peace carries more than this negative implication. It also refers to a positive state of individual and communal life in the presence of the power of God (Johnson 1986: 460). It is important to note that from a theological perspective, the drama of reconciliation, which leads to peace with oneself, peace with other people in the community, peace with the social order, peace with nature, peace with the spiritual realm and, ultimately, peace with God, begins at the incarnation when God took human flesh and ushered it into the world two thousand years ago in order to reconcile the broken world with himself through the life, work, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This act of reconciliation became the heart of the gospel and the central mission of the Church. Reconciliation occurs when individuals are prepared to change their attitude of hurt towards each other and build bridges of forgiveness and repentance. Reconciliation demands total transformation, the acquisition of a new personality, that is, of becoming a new person. St. Paul puts it this way: Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed way, behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. So we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us (2 Cor. 5: 17-20 RSV).

It has been observed that the Church has always understood healing and reconciliation along with preaching as essential functions of its calling. The Church has responded to this call through a ‘holistic’ approach by going beyond the healing of the body to the healing of the soul, by reconciling the individual to the community. In this context, healing happens when a person is reconciled to all relationships that are essential to the well-being namely, spiritual, social, economic, political and environmental (Difäm 2004). By and large, it has been observed that the need for reconciliation arises from the fact that conflict and brokenness results in wasted human potential, repression, isolation, racial and ethnic divisions, fragmented families, violence and war. When war occurs between two conflicting parties the best way to restore peace and harmony is through reconciliation, for war breeds war. Reconciliation enables

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God’s people to be reconnected and live together as the family of God, whatever we conceive Him to be.

A brief political history of Rwanda The Republic of Rwanda is a land-locked country located in central Africa. It is bordered on the east by the Democratic Republic of the Congo, with which it shares the shores of Lake Kivu; on the north by Uganda; on the west by Tanzania; and on the south by Burundi. Rwanda is a small country with an area of 26,340 square kilometres, which is approximately 10,169 square miles (Bissio 1995: 471). The capital city Kigali is in the centre of the country. At the time of the genocide in 1994, Rwanda's population was estimated at 8,057,000. Rwanda is populated by 3 ethnic groups: Hutu (84 percent), Tutsi (15 percent), and Taw, or Pygmoid (1 percent) and is considered as one of the most densely populated countries in Africa, with 317 persons per square kilometre on average (or 820 people per square mile). Rwanda became a German colony in 1897 following the 1885 Berlin Conference. In 1918 Rwanda was placed under Belgian custody which implemented a system of indirect rule that exploited and intensified divisions between Tutsi and Hutu (Embassy of the Republic of Rwanda in Washington, D.C. 2014). The friction between the two ethnic groups during the colonial period was caused by the Belgians who considered and promoted the idea that the Tutsis were superior to the Hutus. This was based on their physical appearance: the Tutsis are typically taller and lighter-skinned and therefore were considered to be closer to Europeans. As a result of this, the Tutsis were given charge of the colonial administration and were given certain powers and privileges, and higher education and government jobs were reserved for Tutsis at the expense of the Hutus. This situation created a lot of resentment among the Hutus (TRIAL 2014). According to the sources available, the situation was made worse when the Belgian colonial administration imposed the use of identity cards that indicated the race of each group namely, Tutsi, Hutu and Twa. These cards played a very negative role during the genocide because they were used to determine the fate of its owner. In 1962 Rwanda became an independent country but the controversies between the ethnic groups continued unabated. These controversies undermined national unity. As a result, the political situation was dominated by civil wars in which the Hutus and Tutsis considered one another as enemies and fought to have control of the land. As time passed on, existing ethnic tensions gave rise to new and violent outbreaks that

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resulted in the death of thousands of people on both sides and the displacement of others into the neighbouring countries in the region.

Ethnic tensions reach boiling point: The genocide The ethnic tensions in Rwanda reached fever pitch when the Rwandan Civil War was fought between the Hutu regime with support from Francophone nations of Africa and France on the one hand and the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) with the support from Uganda on the other. The war began in October 1990 when the Tutsi RPF invaded Rwanda from Uganda in an effort to unseat the government of President Juvenal Habyarimana. As a result, government forces attacked minority populations and moderate Hutus. In turn, the RPF attacked numerous Hutu civilian targets and recruited child soldiers (United States Institute of Peace 1999). This gave rise to Hutu power and an ideology that stressed that the Tutsis intended to enslave Hutus and this must be resisted at all costs. The tensions reached their climax with the assassination of Juvenal Habyarimana on 6 April 1994. This caused the mass killings of Tutsis and moderate Hutus, who did not support the genocide, by Hutu militias. The latter were associated with two political parties namely Interhamwe and the Impuzamugambi. The genocide was directed by a Hutu Power group known as the Akazu. While it is true that in the rural areas violence against the Tutsis had taken place before April 1994, killings in a large scale of the members of the Tutsi group by the Hutus only took place after the assassination of the president (Newbury 1998). The Rwandan genocide in 1994 is considered as one of the most extensive of the twentieth century. Statistics show that in the course of three months from April to July 1994 approximately 1 million people were killed and as many as 250,000 women were raped. Most of the people who were killed were slaughtered with machetes and clubs in their homes, on the streets, in churches and in work places. Death lists were used to kill people and many neighbours took part in the killing (Melvern 2011). It is claimed that the genocide was actually planned and organized by the government party, the Rwandan Armed Forces and the militia Interhamwe together with mayors and leaders of sectors and cells. The purpose of the killings was to exterminate the Tutsis and opponents of the government among the Hutus. Statistics vary but sources claim the genocide left approximately 100,000 orphans and 250,000 widows (Melvern 2011). By most accounts, the genocide left the country’s population traumatized, its infrastructure decimated and sending shock waves throughout the international community (United Nations 2005).

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The role of music and dance in Rwandan society A number of writers such as Timothy Longman and Joseph Mudingu have noted that music and dance have played a very important role in the history of Rwanda in different ways (Longman n.d.; Mudingu 2006). It has been observed that in Rwandan society, where history has been kept primarily through the spoken word rather than the written word, music has been used to keep the memory alive. Before going further to examine the role that music and dance have played in bringing reconciliation and peace in Rwanda, it is important first and foremost to understand the nature and importance of music and dance in human societies. Music is an art form consisting of sequences of sounds in time, especially tones of definite pitch organized melodically, harmonically and rhythmically. Normally, music produces sound especially by singing or using musical instruments (Sinclair 1999: 972). In this regard music is, ‘vocal, instrumental, or mechanical sounds that have rhythm, melody, or harmony’ (Allen 2000: 914). By and large, the sound of music is accompanied with dancing. Collins Concise Dictionary has defined dance as the art of moving the feet and the body rhythmically, especially in time to music. Normally, the dance consists of series of rhythmic steps and movements usually in time to music (Sinclair 1999: 972). In defining what dance is about Allen has added that dance is essentially a social gathering at which dancing takes place (Allen 2000: 914). Viewed from this perspective, it can be argued that dance is a community affair in that it draws people from different places to a common place to dance together in unison. The unitary nature of music and dance, have been clearly expressed by Curt Sachs in the following words: The dance is the mother of arts. Music and poetry exist in time, painting and architecture in space. But the dance lives at once in time and space. The creator and the thing created, the artist and the work are still one and the same thing. Rhythmical patterns of movement, the plastic sense of space, the vivid representation of a world seen and imagined-these things man creates in his own body in the dance before he uses substance and stone and word to give expression to his inner experiences (Sachs 1938: 3).

It has been generally noted that from a theological perspective, music and dance play a very important and significant role in rituals of worship in Africa something that is also common in the Bible especially in the Old Testament. For example, in Exodus 15:20-21 we are confronted with the figure of Miriam, Aaron’s sister, who, with a group of women with a tambourine in her hand performed a liturgical dance praising the Lord for

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their deliverance from slavery in Egypt. In Judges 11:43 we come across the story of the daughter of Jephthah who came out to meet him dancing with the sound of tambourines when he returned from his victory over the Amorites. Again, it is recorded in 1 Sam. 18:6-7 that upon his victory over Goliath, David was welcomed by a group of dancing girls. Similarly, in 2 Sam. 6:14 we read that when David was transferring the ark of the Lord from the house of Obed-edom to Jerusalem he danced before the Lord with all his might. It is reckoned that King David was an accomplished musician who paid much attention to its cultivation and introduction into the temple worship (Peebles 1996: 484). Psalm 150, which is a praise of God’s surpassing greatness, speaks a great deal about music and dance at the accompaniment of trumpets, lute, harp, tambourine, strings, pipe and clanging cymbals in the worship and praise of the Lord. There are also indications that in the Old Testament Israel’s prophetic groups used to perform ecstatic dances to induce ecstatic trances (1 Sam. 10:10; 19:20; Ps. 149:3) (Peebles, 1996: 484). In the New Testament the beheading of John the Baptist took place in the context of the dance, something which shows that dancing can have a great of psychological impact in the lives of the people (see Matt. 14: 6-11) (Peebles 1996: 144). In Africa dancing occupies a place of great prominence in the lives of the people. Like in Jewish culture, dancing is a way of life of the African people in their political, religious, economic, social and spiritual life. The custom of dancing is part of their psyche. There is a dance for everything (Peebles 1996: 144). In the African context, dances are performed during the birth of a child, naming ceremonies, weddings and, in some societies, dancing forms part of death rites. Dance and music accompanies the individual from the cradle to the grave. Liturgically, music and dance accompanied by clapping of hands is typical of traditional ways of worshipping God. With the advent of Christianity in the nineteenth century and the formation of African Instituted Churches (AICs) music, dance and clapping of hands have become an integral part of worship in African Independent Churches across Africa. It should be borne in mind that, like in many other African countries, the music of Rwanda consists largely of African folk music. Traditionally music and dance are taught in amatorero dance groups which are found across the entire country. One of the most revered musical traditions in Rwanda is the ikinimba. It is a dance that tells the stories of Rwandan heroes and kings accompanied by instruments such as ingoma, ikembe, iningiri, umuduri and inanga. Interestingly enough, music in Rwanda has been used both in a negative and positive way.

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The role of music in politics: Music of hate to kill During the genocide music in Rwanda was used in a negative way. It was an essential tool to initiate and promote hatred and terror against the Tutsi minority and Tutsi-friendly Hutus. In this context, rhythm of hate speech was broadcast daily on Radio Television Libre des Mille Collines (RTMC). This was a popular, nationalistic-oriented but unofficial Hutu radio station based in Kigali. The RTMC broadcast music that was not allowed to be played on official radio. The music included extremist nationalistic folk songs by Hutu singers. This radio station told all ‘true Rwandans’ to murder the Tutsis. The station which was established in 1993 by members of the Akazu clan, called the Tutsis ‘inyensi’ which means ‘cockroaches’ which were to be killed, and played Hutu nationalistic pop music. The words were ‘make sure the cockroaches don’t get through’, ‘the graves are only half-full, who are going to fill them?’ By and large, the lyrics of the songs emphasized the superiority of the Hutu race and encouraged people to kill their Tutsi neighbours. Quite often a single extremist song would be played several times every day in order to enable people to learn its lyrics by heart. The intention for doing this was to incite hatred and separation within communities. It is reported, for example, that Hutu killers sang songs of hate as they slaughtered Tutsis. Some of such songs were produced by Simon Bikindi considered to be one of the most famous folk singers of his generation. His voice dominated the airwaves of the RTMC during the genocide. His rap songs promoted ethnic hatred. Eye witnesses tell that Hutu killers sang Bikindi’s songs as they hacked or beat to death the Tutsis using their government issued machetes. In his songs, Bikindi encouraged the Hutus to fight the Tutsis with all their strength because they wanted to bring back serfdom. His message told the Hutus to rise against the Tutsis. The broadcasting of his songs on the radio served to amplify the genocide. His music clearly provoked Hutu extremists to slaughter moderate fellow Hutus and minority Tutsis during the killing spree.

The role of music in politics: Music for peace and reconciliation It is important to note that it has been established that for hundreds of years music has been used by many cultures to help those suffering psychologically and spiritually. There is ample evidence of therapeutic value of music in hospitals, nursing homes, hospice settings and other healthcare facilities. Music is an invaluable tool for psychological

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integration and wholeness through pitch, resonance, rhythm and entrainment. Therapeutic music is used to assist the healing of different types of patients including those who are acutely ill or injured, chronically ill, critically ill, suffering dementia, premature babies, birthing mothers, comatose and those who are dying. It should be noted that after the genocide in Rwanda the sound of music and dance changed from instigating hatred to promoting love, peace and reconciliation. Their lyrics and rhythms are used to achieve the opposite, that is, the need to bring together communities that had once been driven apart and separated. The Rwandan people have a variety of music and dance which range from acts that demonstrate epics commemorating excellence, bravery, humorous lyrics and hunting. Traditional songs are often accompanied by a solitary lulunga, a harp-like instrument with eight strings. More celebratory dances are backed by a drum orchestra which typically comprises seven to nine members and collectively produce a hypnotic and exciting explosion set of intertwining rhythms (Guide Africa 2009). Curt Sachs has indicated that music and dance enable people to create a sense of common or collective identity and brotherhood. They also enable people to transcend the limitations of their physical existence to the spiritual powers upon which their lives depend (Amanze 2002: 53). Furthermore, ritual dance seeks to integrate humanity and the cosmic forces in a harmonious and fruitful manner, so as to transform and renew the universe. Through music and dance the participants not only achieve social and spiritual integration with their fellow members but also affirm before the world their spirituality and allegiance for peace (Zuesse 1979: 5). In the traditional African setting ritual dances, which are always accompanied by music are intended to draw people away from the social disorders in the social and political microcosm which bring adverse effects in the ecological order to a new dispensation of peace and harmony. By drawing people together, through music and dance, a certain degree of unity is achieved and social and political tensions within the community are transcended. In African traditional settings, traditional dance and music function as regulative institutions because they are directed towards creating a balance in a destabilized social and political situation. Music and dance have the effect of ‘liberation’ or ‘salvation’ in that they free people from their anxiety due to fears created by disturbing wars or other frightening experiences. Music and dance instill a sense of hope to hopeless people by assuring them of a bright future together. Music and dance have the capacity to draw together different political, social, economic and religious segments of the community. Through music and dance people are able to communicate through the rhythmic movements of

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their bodies in a way which would be impossible by using the written or the spoken word in a political speech. In traditional Africa the music and dance are considered as effective means of communication not only with supernatural powers but also with the people at large (Amanze 2002: 55). Music and dance have the effect of cementing the relationship of the hearers and the dancers even in circumstances in which these are nonexistent. Music and dance create a unitary cosmology not only among human beings but also between them and spiritual forces. We may also assume that, by implication, a certain degree of harmony with nature is achieved. All in all, music and dance performed where a political rally is held can be said to be the music and dance of total incorporation. For in a dance, the dancers are required to adopt the same rhythm, in other words, they must look alike in their steps for it is the harmoniously coordinated way of the dancers’ movements dancing in unison with nature and the spirit world which makes music and dance religiously meaningful in bringing peace and reconciliation. Music and dance are a re-enactment of the creation story whereby order is established over chaos (Amanze 2002: 68).

Promoting peace and reconciliation through Gacaca courts There is a general agreement among scholars that reconciliation needs a conciliar process through which either side of the process can bring forward its grievances and describe the destruction that has been done (Difäm2004). One good example of how music brought reconciliation among the Rwandans after the genocide is the Gacaca Courts. The Gacaca system has been the traditional way of resolving conflicts among Rwandans. It has been used for centuries to solve local and regional conflicts. The goal is to heal the wounds, to bring forth the truth, to create justice and to contribute in the reconciliation process. In 2002 the Rwandan government under President Kagame established traditional courts to hear the trials of genocide suspects. During such occasions, the radio played music that was intended to achieve reconciliation. Folksongs such as Now here they are: The Gacaca tribunals. The tribunals which should help to strengthen reconciliation and unity were aired on the radio. The song explained the idea of the popular courts and their procedures to listeners. It encouraged people to cooperate. Words such as ‘My dear fellow countryman; witness of the tragedy without name; tell the truth. Tell who is innocent and who is guilty’ (Salafina and Krämer 2002: 4). It is reported that many such songs were

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broadcast on national radio, Radio Rwanda, as part of a campaign to sensitize the population of the upcoming court procedures. It should be noted that during actual court hearings, music was used by the suspects to ask the audience for merciful treatment. Normally, the prisoners, dressed in rose-coloured prison uniforms, start to dance and sing together before the start of the hearing. They sing about what they have done and ask the survivors and families of the victims for forgiveness. It is reported that in other cases prisoners sing about being wrongly arrested and they plead their innocence. When the singing and dancing come to an end, the actual court proceedings start. It has been noted that here the singing and dancing are used as a tool to build a bridge between perpetrators and victims. This in line with Krishna Kumar’s theory: that uncovering the past is an essential step in the social reconciliation process. Without a comprehensive examination of the violations experienced on all sides, mutual acceptance remains elusive at best. It is important to bring to light those traumas - acts of violence, human rights abuses, disappearances, and loss of property sustained during the conflict and often hidden from the general populace (Kumar 1999: 11).

The Gacaca trials served as a means of promoting reconciliation by providing a means for victims to learn the truth about the death of their family members and relatives. They also gave the perpetrators the opportunity to confess their crimes, show remorse and ask for forgiveness in front of their community. The courts gave lower sentences if perpetrators were repentant and sought reconciliation with the community. The reconciliation process focuses on reconstructing the Rwandan identity as well as balancing justice, truth, peace and security in the country (United Nations 2005).

Promoting peace and reconciliation through solidarity camps Another good example on how music is used to reconcile communities torn apart is found in the government sponsored reintegration or solidarity camps known as indando. The camps were intended to promote integration of newly returned emigrants by ensuring their safety and initiating them into the principles of peaceful co-existence, tolerance and good governance preached by the government. The camps brought together different groups of people- namely former members of the Rwandese Armed Forces, Interahamwe militias, youth, teachers, government workers, doctors and those suspected of having participated in the genocide (TRIAL 2014). After the fall of the regime many of those

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who participated in the genocide fled to neighbouring countries. On their return to Rwanda they were required to stay in solidarity camps for several weeks during which they received counselling, medical screening and psychological treatment. The solidarity camps were under the supervision of the Rwandan Demobilization and Reintegration Commission and the National Unity and Reconciliation Commission. During their stay in the solidarity camps people were taught and required to sing songs with lyrics such as ‘We are no Hutus, we are no Tutsis. We are all Rwandese now’. It is reported that most of the songs sung in camps were about peace, unity, and how to live together. Through such songs, former soldiers were asked to learn the new framework of the State: a united reconciled Rwanda. Songs of peace and reconciliation sung in reintegration camps were intended to give ex-combatants and all those who participated in the genocide a new identity. They were made to sing the songs together accompanied by clapping hands in unison. It is important to note that songs and dancing as tools of reconciliation were particularly beneficial to young people many of whom had suffered greatly during the genocide. Many young people were recruited by the militia at the time of the genocide. More than three thousand of these were to be integrated into society most of whom had to learn how to live as children again. In order to achieve this, special camps and schools were established where they had to undergo sensitization and counselling activities. It is generally held by many Rwandans that singing and dancing have had good effects on such children many of whom have been living in orphanage centres throughout the country. In this regard, in order to promote and enhance reconciliation, peace and harmony, music projects involving modern dance and modern music have been set up to give young people their own voices and help them overcome the traumas of their past. This is done by integrating into the projects all types of artistic expressions- theatre plays, music bands, and dancing by various nongovernmental organizations working in Rwanda as well. One good example of this is the Kimisagara Youth Centre on the outskirts of Kigali which offers children and teenagers singing and dancing classes in which they can talk about their future (Rippe 2007).

Promoting peace and reconciliation through community festivals In 1999 the National Unity and Reconciliation Commission (NURC) was created. Its primary goal is to combat discrimination and to erase the negative consequences of the genocide on the Rwandan people. The Commission supports annual community festivals that play an important

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role in the reconciliation process. It encourages cultural activities such as theatre, music, dance and arts as tools of social transformation and strengthens unity as Africans. The festivals have a message of peace, tolerance, unity and social justice (TRIAL 2014). As a matter of fact, the Iranian pop duo Abjeez has observed that music creates unanimity. ‘No matter what religious or political view we might have, music resonates in the same way in our bodies’ (Aromero 2012).

Peace camps One of the most anticipated parts of the day at peace camps are the ‘talent nights’ when youths create and perform their favourite dances, songs, skits and poems. Youths are finding that song and dance are popular ways to create some common ground and to spread their message of peace. Some clubs have incorporated learning traditional dance in their community activities. They are finding that it is also a good way of building more understanding between generations and learning more about their shared culture. By and large, songs in the peace camps urge the youth to strive for peace and emphasize the fact that peace and reconciliation are the only means that can help Rwandans to solve their economic, social and political problems. In the songs reference is made to Jesus who before his ascension to heaven gave his disciples peace that the world cannot understand. Through singing and dancing young people are urged to go out to teach peace, to love people, to avoid conflicts and disputes and to let peace prevail in the country for ever.

Concluding remarks This chapter has examined the process of peace making in Rwanda after the 1994 genocide showing that the social and political history of the people of Rwanda has been characterized for a long time by ethnic tensions. From time to time, this led to outbreaks of violence which led to the deaths of thousands of peoples and the displacement of others into the neighbouring countries. Ethnic tensions reached boiling point during the 1994 genocide when more than a million Tutsis and Hutus friendly to the Tutsis were killed. After the fall of the Hutu regime there was a need for reconciliation for the warring parties and establish a new Rwanda based on a new identity. This was achieved through music and dance during Gacaca courts, solidarity camps, community festivals and peace camps. The Rwandan case teaches us that used wisely music and dance can be essential means of establishing peace, reconciliation, harmony, social

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solidarity, common identity and unity in the world. This is because through music and dance performed in unison people are able to communicate with one another through the rhythmic movements of their bodies in a way which would be impossible by using a written word. Thus music and dance have the effects of ‘liberation’ or even ‘salvation’ since they free people from anxiety due to fears of hatred and animosity of one another. By and large, music and dance have an integrative nature of their own. Estranged dancers through their involvement in the dance are brought back into the social fabric. Thus music and dance make good relationships between enemies possible and help not only to strengthen the existing bonds but also to establish new ones (Amanze 2002: 54-68).

References Allen, R. (ed) (2000) The New Penguin English Dictionary, London: Penguin Books. Amanze, N.J. (2002) African Traditional Religion and Culture in Malawi: The Case of the Bimbi Cult, Blantyre: CLAIM. Aromero (2012) ‘Wan Fambul Catalyst for Reconciliation’, World Music Central http://worldmusiccentral.org/2012/03/25/wan-fambul-catalystfor-reconciliation/ (accessed 1 February 2014). Belton, A.A. (n.d.) ‘Reconciliation Ministries’, Breakthrough Partners, http://www.breakthroughpartners.org/media/2396/reconministries_case _statement_final.pdf (accessed 22 June 2012). Bissio, R.R. (1995) The World: A Third World Guide 1995/96, Montevideo, Uruguay: Instituto Del Tercer Mundo. Difäm (2004) ‘Healing, Reconciliation and Power: A Tool for use in Congregations’, Afro-Asian Mission Consultation on the Ecumenical Response to the Challenge of Healing Ministries in Afro-Asia, Bangalore: Difäm, 13-20 November 2004. http://www.difaem.de/fileadmin/dev-difaem/files/Dokumente_ AErztliche_Mission/healing_reconciliation_power.pdf (accessed 6 February 2013). Guide Africa (2009) ‘Rwanda Culture and People’, Guide Africa, posted 09 June 2009. http://www.guideafrica.com/?s=Rwanda&x=0&y=0 (accessed 14 Feb 2014). Kumar, K. (1999) ‘Promoting Social Reconciliation in Post Conflict Societies’, Selected Lessons USAID Experience, USAID Program and Operations, Assessment Report No. 24, Centre for Development

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Information and Evaluation, Washington D.C.: US Agency for International Development. http://www.oecd.org/derec/unitedstates/35112635.pdf (accessed 21 February 2014). Longman, T. (n.d.) ‘Rwanda’, Every Culture, http://www.everyculture.com/No-Sa/Rwanda.html (accessed 7 February 2014). Newbury, D. (1998) ‘Ecology and the Politics of Genocide: Rwanda 1994’, Cultural Survival Quarterly, 22 (4) (Winter 1998), http://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survivalquarterly/rwanda/ecology-and-politics-genocide-rwanda-1994 (accessed 7 Feb 2014). Peebles, J.W. (1996) Original African Heritage Study Bible: Encyclopedia Concordance, Nashville: Winston Publishing Company. Melvern, L. (2011) ‘A Country Ransacked’, Rwandan Stories, http://www.rwandanstories.org/aftermath/a_wasteland.html (accessed 7 February 2014). Mudingu, J. (2006) ‘Rwanda: The Importance of Music in our Society’, All Africa, http://allafrica.com/stories/200610180127.html (accessed 7 February 2014). Rippe, T. (2007) ‘Kimisagara Illustrated’, Wanderings, http://www.trippe-rippe.blogspot.co.uk/2007/08/kimisagaraillustrated.html (accessed 21 February 2014). Salafina, F. and Krämer, T. (2002) Living with the Past. Rwanda: Searching for Reconciliation and Unity. Kigali: Radio Rwanda and Detsche Welle, http://www.dw.de/popups/pdf/839485/living-with-thepast.pdf (accessed 14 February 2014) Sinclair, J.M. (ed) (1999) Collins Concise Dictionary, Glasgow: Harper Collins. TRIAL (2014) National Unity and Reconciliation Commission – Rwanda, http://www.trial-ch.org/en/resources/truthcommissions/africa/rwanda.html (accessed 21 February 2014). Embassy of the Republic of Rwanda in Washington, D.C. (2014) Discover Rwanda: Traditions of Rwanda, http://www.rwandaembassy.org/discover-rwanda/traditions (accessed 7 February 2014). United Nations (2005) ‘Outreach Programme on the Rwanda Genocide and the United Nations’, United Nations, http://www.un.org/preventgenocide/rwanda/about/bgjustice.shtml (accessed 16 August 2012).

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United States Institute of Peace (1999) Truth Commission: Rwanda 99, http://www.usip.org/publications/truth-commission-rwanda-99 (accessed 7 February 2014). Zuesse, E.M. (1979), Ritual Cosmos: The Sanctification of Life in African Religions, Ohio: Ohio University Press.

14 IN SEARCH OF AN AESTHETIC OF PEACE: EMPATHY, LAMENT AND FORGIVENESS IN CONFLICT TRANSFORMATION CHIJIOKE JOHN OJUKWU

At its core, this paper postulates that empathy and lament which will be explored through an aesthetic of song and poetry can function as key instruments of Conflict Transformation which allows us to connect with our common humanity, and share in the experience of victims of injustice. Accordingly, the emerging discourse will focus on the power of song and poetry to cultivate and communicate empathy and transform dialogue into a deeper and much more meaningful engagement with the ‘other’ through empathetic listening. Towards this end, this paper will critically examine a song from the Negro Spirituals, a poem from the Harlem Renaissance and a song Palava by Fela Kuti, with a central emphasis on the underlying themes of empathy and lament within their respective contexts. In conclusion, however, it will argue that the power of arts (in this case poetry and song) in the concrete reality of conflict transformation does not lie solely in cultivating empathy or unmasking violence through lament, but in its creative power to embody and express the message of forgiveness. It is this message of forgiveness and reconciliation when inserted into a framework of empathy and lament that holds the true potential of poetry and song as key instruments of Conflict Transformation. A recent experience at a funeral amongst the Nigeria Diaspora in Leeds, which echoed Ubuntu, the African concept of personhood (Battle 2009:1) that places emphasis on interdependence and communal solidarity (Battle 2009; Murithi 2006) provides a good outline for the content and context of this paper: Creativity and Conflict Transformation. The tragedy in this case was the death of Mrs Caroline Shola Olaleye, a person who was considered ‘a pearl’ among the Nigerian Community in Leeds. Her

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affection and compassion had touched the lives of many in the funeral procession who had defied the rigid schedule of work, the temperament of the British weather, and the social barriers of ethnicity, religion and class to mourn and celebrate a human life- which is one of God’s precious gifts. In this moment of communal grief and shared vulnerability, song and poetry became the primary mediums of articulating loss, lament, longing and hope, lending voice to our common humanity embodied in emotions of sorrow and hope. A few lines from a poem by Henry Scott Holland (1910) that was read at the funeral capture the power of the creative art to embody and convey human emotions and connect people from diverse backgrounds at a level of shared vulnerability: Death is nothing at all I have only slipped away into the next room I am I and you are you Whatever we were to each other That we are still. (Holland 1910).

It is precisely this power to express the human essence and experience and to affirm our common humanity that underscores the need to engage the creative arts in Conflict Transformation. It is in this sense that the context of this paper is Conflict Transformation, in that it situates the creative arts in a milieu of social conflict embodied in estranged human relations, divided communities and direct and indirect violence. To put it in theological parlance, the creative art in the context of this paper can be said to mediate human brokenness; the breakdown of trust and trustworthiness (Schoeninger 2007: 64), the fragmented human sense of community and mutual belonging and the existential conflict between love and death (Ojara 2006: 149). This human brokenness can be understood as a crises of being and living truly human together, in the fullness of our God-given humanity in a world marked by dehumanizing socio political and economic structures of violence that violate human dignity and perpetuate indifference and exclusion. Therefore, this paper will argue that the creative arts, in this case song and poetry can play a positive role in mediating and transforming conflict by enabling people caught in conflict to cultivate and communicate empathy, affirm and connect with their common humanity, and enter into a constructive dialogue that unmasks violence and expresses forgiveness. To be clear, the interpretation of empathy and lament through song and poetry will come to have a significant bearing on one cardinal aspect of Conflict Transformation, namely, Dialogue. The context of the selected poem and

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songs will be foregrounded concisely, with emphasis on their function in affirming a common humanity in the face of violence.

Conflict transformation and creativity: Locating meaning and making connections Conflict Transformation, according to foremost peace scholar and practitioner, John Paul Lederach (1995: 2003) is predicated on a striking paradox: despite the violence and human suffering that can result from conflict, conflict still remains a window of opportunity for constructive processes of change. Lederach explains this transformational approach succinctly: Conflict Transformation is to envision and respond to the ebb and flow of social conflict as life-giving opportunities for creating constructive change processes that reduce violence, increase justice, in direct interaction and social structures and respond to real-life problems in human relationships (Lederach 2003: 14).

The two phrases ‘life-giving opportunities’ and ‘constructive change’ in the above quote point to the distinct feature of Conflict Transformation, namely: the reframing of conflict into a phenomenon of both possibility and potentiality for social harmony and human wellbeing. It is this positive conception of conflict that acts as the point of departure where Conflict Transformation transcends Conflict Resolution, although the existence and degree of variation between the two remains a bone of scholarly contention (Botes 2003; Kriesberg 2006; Ramsbotham, Woodhouse and Miall 2011). Ben Hoffman reinforces this positive approach to conflict embedded in the transformational lens when he intimates that ‘Conflict is not the enemy of peace, violence is’ (Hoffman 2007: 18). For Lederach (2003) however, the reframing of conflict into a window of opportunity, which the transformational approach asserts, does not merely take place on the abstract or conceptual level. Instead it involves a robust engagement that upholds the centrality and interplay of the following variables at its theoretical and pragmatic core: human relationships, personal and systemic change, reducing violence and promoting justice (Lederach 2003: 24 & 25). The primary point to be noted here is that Conflict Transformation is poised between the personal and the systemic, with both intersecting and overlapping. Building on this transformational premise of conflict, Galtung (1996: 96; 2000: 14) locates creativity as the primary vehicle that transforms,

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transcends and transports conflict from a place of intractability and deadlock to a promising place where social relations based on equity and empathy can be forged. Creativity, for Galtung constitutes an agency of Conflict Transformation which bestows new meaning and an alternative paradigmatic lens to engage the heart and the head in Conflict Transformation (Galtung 2008: 60). However, it is Lederach’s (2005) ground-breaking concept of the Moral Imagination that explicates the sheer importance of creativity in Conflict Transformation instructively. Put simply, the Moral Imagination, according to Lederach connotes a unique approach to peace building that involves the capacity to imagine, mobilize and initiate processes which transcend violence and create an aperture to enter a wide web of constructive relationship even with one’s enemies, whilst inhabiting geographies of violence. It stems from the fundamental question which forms the core of Lederach’s argument: ‘how do we transcend the cycles of violence that bewitch our human community while still living in them?’ (Lederach 2005: 5). He posits creativity, which he loosely describes as the creative act, as the answer to this question, and places it as an essential component of the moral imagination that can contribute to the transformation of conflict. Lederach spares no word in articulating this claim, convincingly: Art and finding our way back to our humanity are connected. Politics as usual has not shown itself particularly capable of generating authentic change for the good of the human community. We have to recognise that constructive social change, like art, comes in fits and starts. The greatest movement forward, when you look really close, often germinated from something that collapsed, fell to the ground, and then sprouted something that moved beyond what was then known. Those seeds, like the artistic process itself, touched the moral imagination. To believe in healing is to believe in the creative act (Lederach 2005: 162).

To be clear, the word creativity is used broadly in this paper to encompass the aesthetic, imaginative and unconventional (Arai 2012) expressed in diverse art forms including but not limited to music and literature. It is also used interchangeably with the creative arts, which for the purpose of this paper focuses on poetry and music. Having now provided a conceptual framework of Conflict Transformation, with the corresponding argument that creativity has a special place in its praxis, we shall now proceed to understand how it can be harnessed to cultivate empathy, affirm and connect people to their common humanity in a concrete context of Conflict Transformation. However, it is well worth stressing that the creative arts can also function as an instrument of violence used to perpetuate mistrust and sow seeds of discord, in as much as they can be an

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instrument of Conflict Transformation. Following this point, George Kent draws a similar conclusion when he notes that the usefulness of the creative arts, music in particular, in resolving conflict must be juxtaposed with its antithesis, namely: music can also be used to spread hate and build and consolidate solidarity between members of violent groups (Kent 2008: 115). Using the metaphor of Unpeaceful Music to describe the latter forms and function of music, Kent’s argument is as compelling as the examples that he uses to illustrate his point; notably, racial supremacist music which spread hatred (Kent 2008: 115). This point should not be taking for granted, but should be clearly upheld and examined in conjunction with the positive role of the creative arts in Conflict Transformation. One only needs to examine the Rwandan genocide to capture the power of music to incite and mobilize mass communal violence: this can be observed in the hate filled, divisive music of Simon Bikindi during the genocide which one observer described as ‘the soundtrack to genocide’ (La Mort 2010).

Empathy: Constructing a coherent meaning In her book, the Moral Dimension of Empathy, Julinna Oxley (2011) provides a robust definition of empathy that delineates its epistemic function in a relational context where Conflict Transformation is grounded. Oxley’s definition of empathy is instructive: Empathy enables people to understand how others see the world, helps them to appreciate others’ perspectives and connect with them emotionally, eliminates the perception of conflict between oneself and others, and makes possible the perception of similarity between oneself and the other (Oxley 2011: 5 - 6).

This definition by Oxley presupposes a corrective function for empathy in human relationships that is foremost epistemological, in that it overcomes alienation and enables people to truly understand, appreciate and connect with one another by acquainting them with an imaginative or projected knowledge of the other. In making this point, Oxley (2011) maintains that empathy gives us knowledge and information about the experience of others which engenders transformation in human relations through an enlargement and expansion of views and beliefs. In other words, we locate empathy and its importance in the concrete relationality of the human experience marked by plurality and difference; the self and the other, regardless of the context. Jaana Parviainen brings this point to the fore in her concept of kinaesthetic empathy, in which she argues that empathy entails ‘a re-living or an epistemological placing of ourselves “inside” the

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other’s kinaesthetic experience’ (Parviainen 2003: 152). Building on the work of Edith Stein, Parviaine applies empathy in the creative context of dancing and goes ahead to illustrate how empathy can transform the relationship between a dance teacher and a dance student by allowing the teacher to experience the feelings of the student through body movement. From Parviainen’s perspective, empathy is an act of knowing and, consequently, it is through this act of knowing, through body movement, in the context of her kinaesthetic empathy, that recognition and reciprocity is achieved in human relationships. A significant point that she observes is the need to recognize the distinction between association and empathy: a distinction which discloses the difference between the originality of the pain of the other, and the person empathizing (Parvianien 2003: 154). This distinction is important in one major respect: it provides a modest and objective understanding of empathy which balances its enormous transformative potential with its inherent limitation. Following on the latter point, David Brook (2011) questions the assumption that empathy necessarily translates into moral action and argues that empathy, in its modern context has ‘become a way to experience delicious moral emotions without confronting the weaknesses in our nature that prevent us from actually acting upon them’ (Brook 2011). This limitation of empathy, however does not devalue its importance in Conflict Transformation, especially in conflicts where social actors jealously cleave to fixed and exclusionary identities that reinforce alienation and indifference. As Titulaer puts it, quite succinctly: Empathy enables individuals to open their hearts and minds to not only see and understand the world from the perspective of others, but also to act in a way that is more likely to lead to a peaceful solution (Titulaer 2012).

To substantiate the veracity of her claim, the metaphor of movement is very useful. This is because empathy involves distance and displacement: it is about bridging the distance between the self and the other, as well as the distance between a self-enclosed self that denies the humanity of the ‘other’ and the open-possibility of discovering a common humanity The focal point here is that the concept of empathy denotes movement which is concretely demonstrated in patterns of social interaction and the underlying attitudes and emotions that mediate such interaction. In the context of a conflict where incompatible goals become a ground for violence empathy entails a movement away from self and its ethical, moral, identity, issue based, and Right-focused grounding (positions), the self-enclosed, into the open possibility of a shared human relational experience with another person as a human being. In essence, empathy

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requires the coming into unity with the human essence of every social actor, and recognition and touching of their common God-given humanity, whilst confronting violence and social conflict. In cases of escalated social conflict in divided societies characterized by violence, empathy demands a paradigmatic shift that puts the experience of victims of injustice at the fore and accordingly unmasks the violence through a displacement from self and corresponding identification with the victim. This, however, does not imply an ethical or moral vacuum in Conflict Transformation that sacrifices issues of justice and causes of conflict on the altar of our common humanity; rather it implies an approach of Transforming Conflict which begins by recognizing that violence violates all of humanity, not one person or one side. In addition, it calls for an acknowledgment of the distinction between abstract issues and the concrete human experience of suffering. It is in this displacement from the abstract that empathy identifies with the victims and negotiates the causes, solutions of conflict, and the moral and ethical standing of social actors through a relational paradigm that recognizes human brokenness and dignity, paradoxically. This speaks of both privilege and immediacy. By privilege, it points to a reframing of conflict, especially one marked by violence, to a context of relationality where victims of injustice enter into dialogue with their authentic cry of oppression which can assume any aesthetic and artistic expression. In other words, it is to de-politicize human suffering, which implies severing the cry and narrative of oppression from the desire for power and revenge, and to situate it in a dialogue that makes room for vulnerable truth telling. This is not to say that this cry of oppression becomes the only dominating voice of dialogue or that is infallible in terms of its factual substance but that the presence of human suffering should disrupt self-enclosed identities and fixed positions which obscure the truth of our common humanity. To privilege the voice of victims of injustice as an authentic human cry that transcends political, social or any identical boundaries requires the immediacy of silence, which can be understood as an openness, vulnerability and willingness to be present in the moment and to listen to the voice of the other. Silence, in this context of dialogue in Conflict Transformation involves an empathetic movement into the space where the cry of victims of violence is located and embodied in social conflict. It is the space where human rationality and technique driven mechanisms of dialogue give way to an imaginative and attempted entrance into the experience of the victim, without seeking to analyze, justify or even validate their experience. In this vein, empathy requires a voluntary displacement from self-enclosed selves, identities, communities, positions, into a land of the unknown where the unheard

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story of the other resides. As a bridge, empathy helps us connect with another story, the story of the ‘Other’, and it is in our vulnerable acquaintance with this narrative that we are invited to recognize and touch our own humanity. From this perspective empathy becomes both a place and a journey: a journey towards the other into the unknown and a journey towards self because we can only be human together, and a place of encounter where we imaginatively encounter and recognize our common humanity, which will be manifested in the attitudes, rhetoric, and approach that social actors adopt to transform conflict, and their willingness or unwillingness to use violence to resolve conflict. To connect with the humanity of the other in the context of conflict where boundaries of belonging are visibly marked with fixed, incompatible identities requires a journey of discovering the full stature of ones God-given humanity, which transforms the technique ridden, institutionalized, and political framework of dialogue. The creative art provides the vehicle to embark on this journey of discovering, affirming and connecting with our common humanity even in the face of seeming intractable conflict through its visual, aesthetic and invisible representative power to embody the human experience. The Negro Spiritual, Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen illustrates this point poignantly: Nobody knows de trouble I’ve seen Nobody knows de trouble but Jesus Nobody knows de trouble I’ve seen Glory Hallelujah! Sometimes I’m up, sometimes I’m down Oh, yes, Lord Sometimes I’m almost to de groun’ Oh, yes, Lord Although you see me goin’ ‘long so Oh, yes, Lord I have my trials here below Oh, yes, Lord If you get there before I do Oh, yes, Lord Tell all-a my friends I’m coming too Oh, yes, Lord (quoted in Allen, Ware, and Garrison 1867).

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Prima facie, the lyrics of the song seems to be a counter argument to the foregone assumption that the creative art can cultivate empathy, given that the words ‘nobody knows’ suggests inaccessibility to the experience of the interlocutor. On the other hand, in articulating that ‘Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen’, this song unearths the experience of the victim as ‘Troubles’, which however ambiguous points to the possibility of disclosing the unknown. However when this lament is placed in the historical context where it emerged, as part of a larger collection known of Sorrow songs known as the Negro Spirituals, then the troubles become apparent: the racial injustice of slavery, and discrimination. While the origins and meaning of the Negro Spirituals remain strongly contested however, there is a wide spread consensus about its roots in African musical style, culture of communal belonging, and its underlying liberation-theological motif that affirms trust and hope in a Personal God, in the face of a dehumanizing violence (Du Bois 1994; Cone 1992; Thurman 2003). The late erudite African American scholar Du Bois explains the meaning of the Spirituals succinctly: What are these songs, and what do they mean? I know little of music and can say nothing in technical phrase, but I know something of men and knowing them, I know that these songs are the articulate message of the slave to the world (Du Bois 1994: 157).

Fusing African musical rhythms with Christian themes of Liberation and Freedom, the Negro Spirituals invite the world at large into the experience of slavery in America. In this peculiar experience of exceeding cruelty, human dignity is the main casualty of unequal and unjust race relations which reduces enslaved Africans into a ‘tool, a thing, a commodity, a utility’ (Thurman 2003: 30). Theologically, the Negro Spirituals sit comfortably in the Biblical motif of lament and it is in this form that they exemplify the role of the creative arts in informing and transforming dialogue in Conflict Transformation. Claus Westermann places the practise of lament at the heart of God’s relationship with his people, Israel, and by extension, humanity, and further argues that lament, in the Judeo Christian heritage has a three dimensional dialogical character involving God, the individual and the community (Westermann 1980: 213; 260). According to Westermann, lament provides a language to expose and express human suffering and the emotions it arouses against the ‘enemy’ or person who inflicts it before God (Westermann 1980: 213). To put it differently, Lament, in the Judeo Christian heritage, can be said to be rooted in a liberating dialogical space of covenant relationship (Brueggemann 1995:

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102), between God and his people, where the human voice honestly confronts, challenges and calls into question the problem of evil, and the power of God to overcome evil in a world where human beings are both perpetrators and victims of evil. As Todd billing notes: Lament encourages the sufferer to protest against evil, crying out with the Psalmist and the Messiah, ‘my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ If one is the sufferer, she speaks this for herself; if one is responding to evil harming another person, she protests against the evil—and the delay of God’s reign—by empathetically identifying with the sufferer in compassionate action. With this rendering of lament, it is not only possible, but essential to keep the problem of evil an open question rather than an answered one (Billing 2003: 3).

It is imperative to state, emphatically, that lament is also an ancient and ubiquitous practise that can be traced across cultures) beyond the Christian faith or Negro Spirituals (Lee 2010: 24). In this vein, Emezue expresses the centrality of lament in the human experience succinctly in her observation that ‘frequently the tragedy of human loss and destruction elicits a great need to sing. Lamentation becomes a precious outlet for the gnawing spirit’ (Emezue 2001: 18). In their contextual particularity, the Negro Spirituals lament the violence of slavery and the dehumanizing condition of being a slave in a world where one’s humanity and dignity is denied. Thurman interprets this particular spiritual, and other Negro Spirituals as an essential testimony of life and death: the miserable life of the enslaved community and their struggle to retain value and meaning in the face of a meaningless human cruelty that strips even death of its dignity (Thurman 2003: 29). This testimony, according to Thurman bears the authentic human cry of a people struggling to affirm their humanity and mutual bonds of belonging, in essence, Ubuntu (Thurman 2003: 29). Central to this experience of slavery is an estranged communion and rupture in relationships, a social death of alienation (Powery 2009: 3), that fragments the bonds of kinship and belonging, Ubuntu, between the enslaved and their homeland and families, (Cone 1992: 30) and also between the enslaved community and the Slave Masters. It is this violence of rupture in a web of relationships, and the dehumanizing treatment of the enslaved as a thing, a commodity, a utility, rather than a human being that gives voice to the communal lament of the Negro Spiritual (Thurman 2003: 30). It is this condition of violence that the enslaved community laments contends with a discernible hope and trust in a Loving Personal God that knew the slave by name (Thurman 2003: 47). This does not suggest that dialogue in Conflict Transformation should be reduced to a philosophical reflection on the problem of evil

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without any practical implication. Instead it is to say that the significance of lament in Conflict Transformation is that it symbolically puts the voice of victims of injustice at the epicentre of dialogue as an authentic human cry that invites every social actor into a shared suffering that can provoke empathy, mutual respect, and understanding. In essence lament transforms dialogue from a polarized, right-centred, morally charged discourse into an intimately human conversation where the wounds of oppression are laid bare before victim and perpetrators in a vulnerable gesture of reconciliation and hope devoid of revenge. To understand dialogue in Conflict Transformation as a site of lament is to create a space for being human; this entails recognizing and revealing the rage, pain and wider range of emotions behind the cry against oppression and the struggle to make sense of human suffering, even whilst learning to make space for those who inflict violence. This assumption, however, is predicated on the transformative power of dialogue in Conflict Transformation as a tool that opens up the possibility of mutual learning and respect, which functions as an alternative to violence. This is in harmony with Doxtader’s claim that ‘reconciliation begins with a struggle to discern the potential of difficult words’ (Doxtader 2009: 1). The poem, I too by Langston Hughes treads a similar path of lament and transforms dialogue into a site of reconciliation discourse where the dehumanizing violence of racial segregation and discrimination is unmasked without dehumanizing its functioning agents: I, too, sing America. I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the kitchen When company comes, But I laugh, And eat well, And grow strong Tomorrow, I'll be at the table When company comes. Nobody'll dare Say to me, "Eat in the kitchen," Then. Besides, They'll see how beautiful I am And be ashamed

(Hughes 1992: 145).

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This poem by Langston Hughes belongs to the Harlem Renaissance, a cultural and literary movement (Wintz 1996; Thompson 2008) that expressed African American racial pride and human dignity (Locke 1992: 11). It was both preceded and set against the background of heightened crises in race relations, epitomized in race riots, lynching, and the infamous caste system of Jim Crow (Wintz 1996; Thompson 2008) and another significant human movement, the Great Migration of African Americans to the north in search of a more promising life (Locke 1992: 6). It is in the shadow of this human exodus that Harlem emerged as a melting pot, where African American creativity, embodied in literature, sculpture and music flourished, paradoxically with exclusion, poverty, unemployment. (Thompson 2008: 479; Huggins 1995; Wintz 1996: 29). In this poem, Hughes laments the injustice of racial segregation not merely as an abstract, legally codified system but as a rupture in human relationship which violates and undermines the dignity and life of the African American community without dehumanizing the perpetrator of this unjust order (Hughes 1992: 145). To explicate this point, the untransformed conflict at the heart of Hughes’s poem, Segregation, needs to be brought under closer scrutiny if we are to truly appreciate the relational dynamics and reconciliatory tone of his lament. Politically, while the injustice at the heart of this lament entailed a systematic disenfranchisement and disempowerment its social character also took the form of a caste system that created a wall separating people (Bennett 1993: 256). It is in this socio-political milieu that the line ‘I am the darker brother’ betrays a reconciliatory tone that symbolically represents the human cry of an oppressed community for justice and belonging. This is to say that the poem laments the crises in race relations in America and the legal and cultural foundation which reinforce it; even as it also affirms the beauty and humanity of the oppressed and their desire to break bread with the oppressor. Here the function of the creative arts in fostering empathetic dialogue is twofold: firstly it invites us into the African American experience of racism and segregation, which requires the immediacy of silence which requires an empathetic identification with the victim of violence as a human being rather than an abstract member of an identity group. Secondly, it transports dialogue from an abstract morally charged discourse devoid of empathy to level of human relationality where the truth of our common humanity remains at the fore even whilst negotiating the violence of a dehumanizing social order predicated on exclusion and discrimination. This raises the following question: how can dialogue in Conflict Transformation shift from a place of a dehumanizing, polarized, discourse that perpetuates estrangement and distrust, to a human centred,

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and relational activity that provides space for every human voice, despite the diverse ethical, moral, political positions that contending social actors bear? More importantly, it raises the question of how communities who have suffered systematic historical violence can find a non-violent and accessible rhetorical language to reveal their experience that allows them to articulate forgiveness, reconciliation, and hope for transformation. Another profound example of Lament that demonstrates the power of song to lend voice to victims of injustice and to also unmask violence is the song Trouble Sleep, Yanga wake am by late Afrobeat legend Fela Kuti (1972). Colloquially known as Palaver, a word etymologically rooted in Portuguese with a historical presence in Africa which means trouble (Dillard 1975: 207; Adejunmobi 2004), this song encapsulates the postcolonial experience of Military rule in Nigeria from the perspective of those at the margins of society. Grounded in the context of Military rule in Nigeria, where State violence, chronic poverty and endemic corruption were pervasive (Ogbeidi 2012; Human Rights Violations Investigation Commission 2002; Kukah 2003; Falola 2009; Odemene 2011) it laments, amongst other things, the abuse of power in State-Citizen Relations. It functions as a mirror of human suffering as experienced by the poor and powerless who are the central victims of a militarized Post-colonial state that. In Palava, Fela Kuti sings My friend just come from prison Him dey look for work Wakawaka day and night Policeman come stop am for road He say mister I charge you for wandering Wetin him dey find? (Kuti 1972).

Translated into English from vernacular, this verse above reads: My friend just came out of Prison He was looking for a work He walked day and night A policeman stopped him on the road And said “Mister I charge you for wandering” What is he looking for?

The verse captures State-Citizen Relationship poignantly and illustrates a pattern of abuse of power that pervaded the post-Colonial state under Military rule. As the lyrics illustrate, the released prisoner who Fela sings about is stopped by a policeman and charged for wandering, which

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represents an informal request for bribe. As a form of lament, it brings the abuse of power into light, foregrounding the violation of human dignity that characterises the interaction between a Citizen and the agent of the State. In his report, Human Rights in Nigeria: Hopes and Impediment, the Catholic Priest Matthew Kukah describes this abuse of power unequivocally: Massive violations of human rights took place in Nigeria during the period of military rule. Unlawful activities, such as the killing of citizens by law enforcement agencies, arbitrary arrests and detentions etc., were rampant. A climate of insecurity permeated the nation, and individuals and groups began to find ways of protecting themselves, since the state no longer commanded their trust (Kukah 2003: 10).

Labinjoh stresses the validity of using Fela’s personal life as a reflection of this experience which Palava laments, given that it mirrored the themes that formed the core message of his music (Labinjoh 1982: 119). To make this point requires a delicate hermeneutical act that presents Fela both as the embodiment of the lament in the song Palava and an analogical representative of Nigeria, embodying the dreams and aspirations of her citizens. This is not to reduce the Afro Beat legend into a mere victim of State repression or to bestow on him a saint status, given that he challenged the violence, corruption and abuse of power through his music, whilst, paradoxically, reflecting elements of it in his cult personality, sexist message and self-indulgent lifestyle (Olaniyan 2004; Moore 2009). Rather, it is to recognize in his lament, an authentic cry of conscience which calls into question the problem of evil, as manifested in life under Military rule in Nigeria, without dehumanizing or prescribing violence against its principal agents. It is in this sense that the lament in Palava transcends Fela and becomes a communal lament: a social dialogue of transformation that reveals the dysfunctional relationship between the people of a nation and the agents of the State. In this regard, whilst the abuse of power which Palava laments, can be witnessed at various times in Fela’s life when he and his wives were both the subjects and objects of Police and military brutality (Saleh-Hanna 2008; Lynskey 2010; Olatunji 2007; Veal 2000) it is the Kalakuta Massacre which took place in February 1977 that best sums up the lament of the abuse of power. Emblematic of the abuse of power, the Kalakuta Massacre refers to a military raid on Kalakuta republic, the commune where the singer lived with his singers in February 1977 (Tchouaffe 2005: 316). In the course of this military incursion into civilian space, which involved sexual violence and physical brutality by agents of the state, his mother, Mrs Funmilayo

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Kuti was thrown from the window of the second floor by an ‘Unknown soldier’ and died a year later from wounds sustained from her injury (Saleh-Hanna 2008; Lynskey 2010; Olatunji 2007; Veal 2000). This tragedy can be considered an embodiment of the lament in Palava because it discloses the rupture in the relationship between citizens of the state and those entrusted with their security, which delineates the way in which the abuse of power violates human dignity. Accordingly, the logic of lament in this context becomes embedded in its very practise: it captures the experience of human suffering, and in so doing creates the condition for an empathetic identification with victims of injustice. Correspondingly lament also gives visibility and voice to the human cry for justice, which interrogates and critiques the exercise and abuse of power in any human relationship. Interestingly enough, and quite tragically, the State-Citizen relationship in Nigeria still reflects this pattern of abuse of power, as reflected in the entrenched culture of government corruption, police brutality and profound distrust between the citizens and the leaders (Human Rights Watch 2010; Open Society Justice Initiative 2010).

Conclusion Creativity, or the creative arts can inform and transform Conflict Transformation by providing the resources and dialogical space to cultivate empathy and affirm our common humanity even whilst addressing violent conflicts rooted in seemingly irreconcilable differences. However, to insert the creative arts, either song or poetry in Conflict Transformation, in particular, the practise of dialogue, is to be open to the possibility of constructive human interaction: based on a deeper connection and mutual understanding as human beings and also the risk of closure; given that the creative arts can provoke strong negative emotions and possible violence. Therefore if the creative arts through song, poetry, or whatever form they assume, are to function as key instruments of Conflict Transformation that can potentially affirm and connect us to our common humanity and enable us cultivate empathy, especially in the moment, aftermath and continuous cycle of direct and structural violence, then they must embody the message of forgiveness. This is to say that wherever conflict exists, in its multiplicity of forms, diverse power relations and social dynamics, creativity must be present as a voice of forgiveness: a voice that creates an opportunity to repair fragmented social bonds. The substance of this claim lies in the power of forgiveness as one aspect of Conflict Transformation with the most potential to disrupt the cycle of violence, particularly those rooted in

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historical memories of oppression. In the words of Johann Christoph Arnold, the Christian theologian: Forgiveness is power. It frees us from our Past, overcoming every evil. It can heal both the person forgiven and the person forgiving. In fact, it could change the world if we would only allow it to flow through us unchecked. (Arnold 1998: 142)

In this regard, forgiveness creates an opportunity for constructive, empathetic and renewed human communion rooted in an ethic of our common humanity which recognizes and mediates human brokenness, and the narratives of violence that mark the human experience. Therefore it is in upholding and expressing the message of forgiveness, creatively, together, with empathy and the truth of our common humanity that conflict can be potentially transformed and embedded in a promising and new place of possibilities, to borrow Galtung’s words (Galtung 2000). This new place, however, is not entirely new in the literal sense of the word; rather it is the old and only ground of Conflict Transformation where every conflict is situated: human relationship. It is precisely here that the God of humanity is encountered in every human face in a way that gives substance to our common humanity and mutual belonging as one human family that belongs to a Loving God; it is in this encounter that the desire for reconciliation and restored union amongst social actors divided by conflict is discovered and affirmed, reflecting God’s own desire to be reconciled with humanity which finds concrete expression on the Cross. The task for those caught up in conflict is to express and embody this desire for reconciliation, creatively, in a way that disrupts the cycle of violence. This desire for reconciliation can take a myriad of creative expressions as long as it intentionally affirms our common humanity such as in the poem The Siege by Palestine Writer, Mahmoud Darwish: You there, by the threshold of our door Come in, and sip with us our Arabic coffee [you may even feel that you are human, just as we are] you there, by the threshold of our door take your rockets away from our mornings we may then feel secure [and almost human] (Darwish 2010: 21).

Ultimately, for those who ground their conviction in the God of Jesus Christ, every act of reconciliation points beyond the wounds of victim, the face of the perpetrator and the violence that disrupts human communion,

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towards a forgiving and reconciling God, who daily overcomes human brokenness with perfect, unconditional love.

References Adejunmobi, M. (2004) Vernacular Palaver, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Ltd. Allen, W.F., Ware, C.P. and Garrison, L.M. (1867) Slave Songs of the United States, New York: A. Simpson & Co.. http://archive.org/details/slavesongsunite00garrgoog (accessed 18 February 2013). Arnold J.C. (1998) The Lost Art of Forgiving, Sussex: The Plough Publishing House. Arai, T. (2012) Creativity and Conflict Resolution: Alternative Pathways to Peace, London: Routledge. Battle, M. (2009) Ubuntu, New York: Seabury Books. Bennett, L. Jr. (1993) Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America, New York: Penguin. Brook, D. (2011) ‘The Limits of Empathy’, New York Times, September 29, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/30/opinion/brooks-the-limits-ofempathy.html?_r=0 (accessed 20 March 2013). Brueggemann, W. (1995) ‘The Costly Loss of Lament,’ in P. D. Miller (ed) The Psalms: The Life of Faith, Minneapolis: Fortress. Billing, T. (2003) ‘John K. Roth, the Psalms of Lament and the Place of Theological Reflection on the Problem of Suffering’, The Other Journal, 1-5, http://theotherjournal.com/2003/04/07/john-k-roth-thepsalms-of-lament-and-the-place-of-theological-reflection-on-theproblem-of-suffering/ (accessed 18 February 2013). Botes, J. (2003) ‘Conflict Transformation: A Debate Over Semantics or a Crucial Shift in the Theory and Practice of Peace and Conflict Studies?’ International Journal of Peace Studies, 8(2), http://www.gmu.edu/programs/icar/ijps/vol8_2/botes.htm (accessed 15 February 2013). Carson, C. (ed) (2002) The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr, New York: Abacus. Cone, J.H. (1992) The Spiritual and the Blues: An Interpretation, New York: Orbis Books. Darwish, M. (2010) The State of Siege, New York: Syracuse University Press. Dillard, J.L. (1975) Perspectives of Black English, Hague: Mouton & Co.

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Du Bois, W.E.B. (1994) The Souls of Black Folk, Chicago: Dover Publication, Inc. Doxtader, E. (2009) With Faith in the Works of Words: the Beginnings of Reconciliation in South Africa, Claremont: David Phillip. Emezue, M.G. (2001) African Dirge Poetry, Enugu: Handel Books. Falola, T. (2009) Colonialism and Violence in Nigeria, Bloomington: Indian University Press. Falola, T and Genova, A. (2005) Yoruba Creativity: Fiction, Language, Life and Songs, Trenton: Africa World Press Inc. Galtung, J. (1996) Peace by Peaceful Means: Peace and Conflict, Development and Civilization, London: Sage. —. (2000) Conflict Transformation by Peaceful Means, Participants’ Trainers Manual, http://www.transcend.org/pctrcluj2004/TRANSCEND_manual.pdf (accessed 10 February 2013). —. (2008) ‘Peace, Music and the Arts: In Search of Interconnections’, in O. Urbain (ed) Music and Conflict Transformation: Harmonies and Dissonances in Geopolitics, London: I. B. Tauris. Galtung, J. and Webel, C. (eds) (2007) Handbook of Peace and Conflict Studies, London: Routledge. Hoffman, B. (2007) The Peace Guerrilla Handbook, York: York Publishing Service. Holland, H.S. (1910) The King of Terrors, http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_King_of_Terrors (accessed 18 February 2013). Hughes, L. (1992) ‘I Too’, in A. Locke (ed) The New Negro, New York: Macmillan. Huggins, N. (1995) Voices from the Harlem Renaissance, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Human Rights Violations Investigation Commission (2002), Summary, Conclusions and Recommendations, http://www.dawodu.com (accessed 18 February 2013). Human Rights Watch (2010) Everyone’s in the Game: Corruption and Human Rights Abuses by the Nigeria Police Force, New York: Human Rights Watch. Kent, G. (2008) ‘Unpeaceful Music’, in O. Urbain (ed) Music and Conflict Transformation: Harmonies and Dissonances in Geopolitics, London: I. B. Tauris. Kriesberg, L. (2006) Constructive Conflicts: From Escalation to Resolution 3rd edn, Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield. Kukah, M. (2003) Human Rights in Nigeria: Hopes and Impediment,

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http://www.missio-hilft.de/media/thema/menschenrechte/studie/14nigeria-en.pdf (accessed 18 February 2013). Kuti, F (1972) Lyrics of Trouble Sleep Yanga Wake Am (Palava), http://www.nigerialogy.com/about-nigeria/nigerian-musicians/troublesleep-yanga-wake-am/ (accessed 18 February 2013). Fela K. (1972) ‘Trouble Sleep, Yanga Wake Am’, Roforofo Fight, Paris: Translab. Labinjoh, J. (1982) ‘Protest Music and Social Processes in Nigeria.’ Journal of Black Studies, 13(1): 119-34. La Mort, J.R. (2009) The Soundtrack to Genocide: Using Incitement to Genocide in the Bikindi Trial to Protect Free Speech and Uphold the Promise of Never Again’, Interdisciplinary Journal for Human Rights Law, 4. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract (accessed 18 February 2013). Lederach, J.P. (1995) Preparing For Peace: Conflict Transformation Across Cultures, New York: Syracuse University Press. —. (2003) The Little Book of Conflict Transformation, Pennsylvania: Good Books —. (2005) The Moral Imagination, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lee, N.C. (2010) Lyrics of Lament: From Tragedy to Transformation, Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Locke, A. (1992) The New Negro, New York: Macmillan. Lynskey, D. (2010) 33 Revolutions per Minute: A History of Protest Songs, London: Faber and Faber. Moore, C. (2009) Fela: This Bitch of Life: The Authorised Biography of Africa’s Musical Genius, Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books. Murithi, T. (2006) ‘Practical Peacemaking: Wisdom from Africa: Reflections on Ubuntu’, Journal of Pan African Studies, 1(4): 25-37. Odemene, A. (2011) ‘The Nigerian Armed Forces and Sexual Violence in Ogoniland of the Niger Delta Nigeria, 1990-1999, Armed Forces & Society, http://afs.sagepub.com/content/early/2011/08/23/0095327X11418319.f ull.pdf (accessed 18 February 2013). Ogbeidi, M. (2012) ‘Political Leadership and Corruption in Nigeria Since 1960: A Socio-economic Analysis’, Journal of Nigerian Studies, 1(2), http://www.unh.edu/nigerianstudies/articles/Issue2/Political_leadership .pdf (accessed 18 February 2013). Ojara, P. (2006) Toward a Fuller Human Identity: A Phenomenology of Family Life, Social Harmony and the Recovery of the Black Self, Bern: Peter Lang.

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Olaniyan, T. (2004) Arrest the Music! Fela and His Rebel Art and Politics, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Olatunji, M. (2007) ‘Yabis: A Phenomenon in the Contemporary Nigerian Music’, The Journal of Pan African Studies, 1(9): 26-44. Open Society Institute (2010) Criminal Force: Torture, Abuse and Extra Judicial Killings by the Nigerian Police Force, New York: Open Society Institute. Oxley, J.C. (2011) The Moral Dimensions of Empathy, New York: Palgrave Macmillian. Parviainen, J. (2003) ‘Kinaesthetic Empathy’, Dialogue and Universalism, 13(11/12): 151-62. Powery, L.A. (2009) Spirit Speech: Lament and Celebration in Preaching, Nashville: Abingdon Press. Ramsbotham, O., Woodhouse, T. and Miall, H. (2011). Contemporary Conflict Resolution, Cambridge: Polity Press. Saleh-Hanneh, V. (2008) Colonial Systems of Control: Criminal Justice in Nigeria, Ontario: University of Ottawa Press. Schoeninger, D. (2007) ‘Christian Anthropology for the Healthcare Professions: The Nature of the Human Person, Human Brokenness and Healing’, Journal of Christian Healing, 23(2) (Fall/Winter): 32-49. Tchouaffe, O.J. (2005) ‘Black Icons and Issues of Representation’, in T. Falola and A. Genova (eds) Yoruba Creativity: Fiction, Language, Life and Songs, Trenton: Africa World Press Inc. Titulaer, A. (2012) ‘The Power of Empathy in Conflict Resolution’, Peace and Conflict Monitor, http://www.monitor.upeace.org/innerpg.cfm?id_article=907 (accessed 18 February 2013). Thompson, J.E. (2008) ‘Identity, Protest, and Outreach in the Arts’, in A. Hornsby (ed) A Companion to African American History, Oxford: Blackwell. Thurman, H. (2003) ‘The Negro Spirituals Speaks of Life and Death’, in C. West and E.S. Glaude Jr (eds) African American Religious Thought: An Anthology, Kentucky: John Knox. Urbain, O. (2008) Music and Conflict Transformation: Harmonies and Dissonances in Geopolitics, London: I. B. Tauris. Veal, M. (2000) Fela: The Life and Times of an African Musical Icon, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Westermann, C. (1980) Praise and Lament in the Psalms, Minneapolis: Augsburg. Wintz, C.D. (1996) Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance, Texas: A & M University Press.

15 CULTURALLY SENSITIVE MUSIC ACTIVITIES IN CONFLICT AREAS: INCREASING MUTUAL LEARNING, RESPECT AND SELF-ESTEEM THROUGH MUSIC WORKSHOPS FABIENNE VAN ECK

At a time that traveling abroad to teach music in areas of conflict becomes more common among Western musicians, the danger of imposing one's musical culture and neglecting or even damaging the local musical culture increases. Even with the best intentions, we might do more harm than good when lacking the commitment to understand the local (music) culture. Therefore one has to ask oneself: What are the most appropriate ways to carry out musical activities in a society whose musical culture may be radically different from that of the workshop leader? Through reflection and analysis of my own experiences as a workshop leader in areas of conflict and post-conflict I tried to find answers to this question.

Context In my work with Musicians without Borders1 (MwB) I find myself working in vulnerable communities in conflict and post-conflict areas. This means I do not only have to be sensitive towards the local culture, but also towards the local political, social and economic complexities that many live within.

1 www.musicianswithoutborders.org ; http://musicbusgoespalestine.blogspot.com and http://musicbusgoesafrica.blogspot.com

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Context is often the keyword when it comes to working with different musical cultures. Without taking into account the context in which music is made, misunderstandings often occur. When we listen to music from another culture we should try to listen to the music with ears from that particular culture. And these ears have to be connected to a different body from our own, situated in a different environment, surrounded by different norms, values, and etiquette. The nerves in these acculturated ears send their sound signals to a brain that holds different kinds of information, shaped by earlier memories and experiences. While this ideal scenario is impossible in real life, we can at least try to get as close as possible to feeling, breathing, seeing, and hearing the way one would if embedded in this different context. In other words, we have to try to be as wholly empathic as possible to the people we encounter and their culture. Seven years ago I gave my first music workshop to a group of Palestinian children during a summer camp in a remote village south of Hebron. I thought I was well-prepared. Although I didn't speak a word of Arabic, an Iraqi refugee in Holland, my home country had taught me a famous Arabic children’s song from Lebanon and one day before the workshop I asked one of the Palestinian volunteers to write some words in Arabic to a melody. Actually it wasn't really a melody but just a Western scale, do-do re-re mi-mi. He also wasn't really a Palestinian but an Iraqi Jew who I had mistaken for a Palestinian. The kids loved the workshop. But they loved anything in the summer camp. Coming from villages without electricity or running water, and facing the daily hardships of living under military occupation, any activity that distracted them from the daily hardships was fun for these children. I learned during these first workshops that I knew nothing. The first day I felt prepared, because I was prepared in my own Dutch context. I was looking at my surroundings with Dutch glasses and I was listening with Dutch ears. Since those workshops I began my unfinished journey to seeing, listening, and feeling as close as possible to the people I work with. I'm discovering new contexts.

What is my role? Why do we do music in conflict and post-conflict areas? Do the people really need us? Don't they have their own music? Every society has its own musical culture, but due to conflicts in some unquiet areas, people can lose their motivation or opportunity to make music. The task of foreign musicians traveling to such areas should not be to bring the people a new musical culture; instead a visiting musician can bring new hope, energy, and inspiration to continue or to revive the celebration of the community's

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own musical culture. For people who have experienced a period of war or conflict, music can be a great tool for returning to their roots, to rediscover their own culture and to celebrate their traditions. The last thing a musician or any other artist should be doing when working in conflict areas is creating new conflicts by introducing foreign ideals or being insensitive to the local culture. Seven years ago I believed I should bring music to children in conflict areas. But years of working with disadvantaged communities in Palestine, Jordan, Uganda and Rwanda have taught me something else: I should not bring music to these communities because they all have an immensely rich music culture. Instead I could offer them a safe space to be creative and play music. This was a space where daily worries can be replaced for a moment by the healing power of music. Instead of a music teacher I became a facilitator, always looking for music activities that give the participants the freedom to choose their own music material. The unfinished journey from being a completely naïve and ignorant music teacher to a more sensitive music facilitator evolved in four phases: 1. I need to teach 'my' music (Western classical music). 2. I need to teach 'their' music but I don't have the knowledge to do so (attempts to adjust Western songs to the other culture by using for example their language). 3. I need to teach 'their' music and keep them away from any Western music (only using their traditional music and avoiding any Western music element, even when Western songs are requested). 4. I need to create an environment in which every participant feels safe and inspired to use whatever music they like and create something together (developing activities in which the music material comes from the participants). In 'Towards Responsive and Responsible Practice' Mercedes Pavlicevic writes about the challenges she experienced when working as a music therapist with the NGO Thembalethu in South Africa (Pavlicevic 2004). This organization trains care-workers and supports HIV-positive patients and AIDS orphans in a very poor rural area, where unemployment is prevalent, and the number of people infected with HIV and dying of AIDS is shockingly high. Pavlicevic describes how she had to constantly rethink her role as a music therapist. In order to do so she had to question who she was and what she was doing there. The whole approach that Thembalethu takes to its work is different from the settings in which Pavlicevic usually worked. If she had not been sensitive and adapted to the culture of

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Thembalethu the project would probably have failed badly. Pavlicevic spent three days with women from Thembalethu who work as home-based care-workers, caring for people suffering or dying from AIDS. These women visit the patients in their humble homes which are often no more than huts and give them basic medical and psychological support. From the moment she arrived it was clear that music was already very much a part of the Thembalethu culture. She was welcomed by the women with a song and learned that the group had a daily repertoire of songs. Impressed by the women's musical energy, she asked herself: ‘Why am I needed, they already know how to use music to shift their own energy’ (Pavlicevic 2004: 38). She realized that the music was happening anyhow with or without her presence. When she asked the group what they expected from her they told her they wanted 'to sing and dance to de-stress', and they wanted to make music because it makes them feel different (Pavlicevic 2004: 37). Because of their request Pavlicevic felt even more incompetent and useless. Not only did these women know how to sing and dance they were actually singing and dancing together every day already and they were aware of the positive effects of their musical sessions. So why did Thembalethu invite a music therapist to work with the women? What could the role of Pavlicevic be? This question was asked by Pavlicevic but it can be asked by any musician visiting another musical culture with the intent of bringing music. Pavlicevic’s example may be a little extreme because in this specific situation there was lots of music present and this is not always the case. But even when there is less visible (or audible) music in a place, music exists already in every culture so a visiting musician should always question their role. Because there was already lots of music in the Thembalethu culture Pavlicevic’s role was not to bring music to the place. So what could her role have been? Shall I take them through a group improvisation, using musical instruments, and then invite them to reflect on this event? This feels inappropriate, and in any case, musical instruments are not part of the women's reality (Pavlicevic 2004: 39).

Pavlicevic concluded that although she felt highly uncomfortable and destabilized it also helped her to revise her music therapy skills. She found out that context is a very important factor in music therapy and that it should define the framework of the music therapy session. The same can be said of music workshops: the content of a workshop and the way it is presented and executed should be dependent on the context of the place and the culture. In Pavlicevic's case she might have felt useless not having

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a clear role. A similar thing happened to me when the mother of a friend reminded me what my role was by taking the lead and replacing me.

Example: Singing makes me feel good! As I wrote before, I believe the role of musicians visiting a (post-) conflict area is to bring music back to the people. But sometimes the local situation can be so stressful for the outsider that this role is completely forgotten. In the following story I recount an incident where I forgot the power of music and felt helpless. A Palestinian woman, who had terminal cancer and who was living under curfew, helped me to remember the importance of music during difficult times. During the summer of 2011 I organized a music workshop for about 80 children in a Palestinian refugee camp. After the workshop a music band from Europe played and marched through the narrow streets of the refugee camp. Children mingled with the musicians, clapping their hands and dancing, while women leaned out of windows to catch a glimpse of the happy parade and to throw sweets to the children and musicians. The event coincided with the announcement of the final high school exams results so many families were celebrating, and the overall atmosphere was exuberant. Three days later the situation in the refugee camp could not have been more different. Instead of musicians marching through the camp, soldiers were standing on every corner of the streets. Instead of women leaning out of windows, soldiers had set up posts on the roofs. No happy children were running around. Actually, there were no children in the streets at all. There was a curfew so everyone either stayed in their houses or left the camp. The reason for the curfew was a fight between two families which had resulted in many victims, some of whom were hospitalized, others imprisoned and one dead from his injuries. That week I spent many days in the house of my friend Yasmeen2 who lives in the camp and needs help as she is wheelchair-bound. One day her mother, who was suffering from leukaemia and could barely walk, was sitting on the floor in the middle of the living room surrounded by sewing material. Yasmeen and I were feeling tired and sad because of the situation in the camp. I often visited Yasmeen and used to sing together, with her mother accompanying our voices on my guitar. But I had left my guitar home because I did not have the energy or the right mood to make music in such a depressing situation. It was during the month of Ramadan, and 2

All the names of people appearing in the anecdotes of this article are fictive names in order to protect their privacy.

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Yasmeen's mother was fasting; she did not drink or eat during the day. It was 36 degrees celsius outside but Yasmeen's mother was busy sewing blankets. Not only that, she was actually singing joyous traditional Palestinian songs. I asked her how she had the energy to sing those happy songs when we were all feeling so washed-out. She asked if I would prefer her to just sit, stare sadly and not achieve anything or to cry and then she continued to sing. We all had to laugh because the happiness from her songs was so contagious. ‘Singing makes me feel good and happy, we need that in these difficult times!’ she added. And she was right. I had forgotten about the positive influence of music and, instead of fulfilling my role of bringing music to the people, I had been passive, negative, and apathetic. Yasmeen's mother gave me a wake-up call and reminded me why I had come there in the first place. She had taken my role upon herself by singing and reviving the positive mood in the room. Two months later, Yasmeen's mother passed away. During the three days of mourning in the refugee camp, I kept hearing her voice in my head, singing songs and keeping the morale and spirit high.

Diversity of one music culture Although I'm not a music therapist, Dorit Amir's3 question is relevant to my fourth phase described previously: ‘How can music therapists use music in order to build and strengthen the identity of clients who suffer from cultural loss and shaken identity?' (Amir 2004: 250). This question is especially important when working with people in conflict areas. The cultural heritage is likely to have been neglected in areas that suffer or have suffered from conflicts. People often have other priorities besides music like safe shelter, food, or improving their economic situation. In some cases people might be too depressed or suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder and lack the energy to organize a music activity. At the same time, the traditional ways of transferring cultural heritage from parents to children can be damaged by war. Specific traditions might be suddenly forbidden and others might not be appropriate. For example, traditional religious songs might be forbidden by a regime ruled by another religion, or dancing a festive dance can be inappropriate during times of mourning. Not being aware of these issues can create new conflicts.

3

Professor Dorit Amir founded the Music Therapy Program at the Bar Ilan University, Israel, in 1982.

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Another pitfall of working in an area in conflict is the generalization of customs, habits, ideas, etc. Every culture has numerous subcultures and a high diversity in for example lifestyle, political opinions, educational background, traditional proceedings or musical preferences. It is simple and easy to categorize and define one culture by applying the same rules on everyone living in that specific culture. Obviously this will not teach anything about the reality but instead create a gap between the imposed ideas and the real elements of a culture. By acknowledging that there are many differences in one culture a new world can be discovered and explored. Learning about a new culture is first of all getting rid of prejudices and generalizations. This can also be applied to music, as Bruno Nettl describes: The long-held belief that rural communities, indigenous nations, and tribal groups are homogeneous in their musical and other experiences has contributed to the neglect of the individual, as has the long-held assumption that music in non-Western and folk cultures is stable and unchanging until polluted by the West. (Nettl 2005: 172).

Music is alive and developing constantly and a visiting musician should be aware of this. Someone looking for authentic local music and expecting to find a completely isolated music culture should visit a museum, watch a documentary or attend a concert of traditional music. Western music these days is full of influences from other cultures, so why do some expect that non-Western music should be 'purely traditional'? During one regular day of work in Palestine it is not an exception for me to travel through the following music styles: ¾ In the morning I sing Arabic children songs in a kindergarten. Although the songs are written by Palestinian or Lebanese musicians, the Western major or minor scale is used and if the words were in English, it is likely that a Western audience would not realize it is an Arabic song. ¾ In the early afternoon I teach the cello to Palestinian children at the Magnificat Music Institute in the Old City of Jerusalem. We play classical Western music on the cello. ¾ I listen to a Palestinian radio channel where classical Arabic music by Um Kulthoum is broadcast. When the program is interrupted by commercials, I switch to another Palestinian channel with Arabic pop songs. ¾ In the late afternoon I visit a recording studio in Dheisheh refugee camp where young Palestinian rappers record a new rap song. They

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use beats based on Western pop music or they sample traditional or classical Arabic music. ¾ In the evening I attend a rehearsal in Jericho where we prepare a concert with Arabic songs about peace. The conductor has arranged more than one hour of music for choir, piano, cello (me), flute, nay (Arabic flute), Arabic percussion and a drum set. The choir do not read notes, they make remarks in the text to remember the musical suggestions of the conductor. The pianist improvises on the score, the flutist and cellist play exactly what is written in the score, the nay player improvises or plays the melodies, and the percussionist writes down which percussion instrument and which rhythms he needs to play in every song. But even in the Magnificat Music Institute where only Western classical music is taught, the complicated diversity of Jerusalem is challenging. In the following anecdote I describe how my over-sensitivity towards the different religions almost created a conflict.

Example: Jingle Bells At least three different religions are practiced in Jerusalem: Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. As a cello teacher at the Maginifcat Music Institute, a Palestinian music school in the Old City of Jerusalem that is open for all religions, I have to be sensitive towards the different religious practices. During my second year as a cello teacher at the Magnificat I had become more aware of the different backgrounds and religions of my students. Most of my cello students in that school year were Christian Palestinians or Armenians - only two out of the ten students were Muslim. I learned to wish my Orthodox students Merry Christmas two weeks after my Catholic students and to expect my Muslim students not to show up during Eid al-Adha. In the first week of December I gave my students the song Jingle Bells to play on the cello. Every year this song is a big hit and even the more advanced students insist on playing it. Trying to be sensitive to the different cultures and religions that come together in the Magnificat, I decided not to play this song with my two Muslim students. I did not want them or their parents to think that I was trying to convert them to Christianity by teaching them a Christmas song on the cello. Two weeks later the father of one of the Muslim girls came up to me after his daughter’s lesson, ‘I heard many kids playing Jingle Bells on the cello, why isn’t my daughter playing that song as well? Is it too difficult for her?

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Does she play less good than the other children?’ For a moment I did not know what to say. The song was definitely not too difficult for his daughter. I told him, a bit embarrassed, that I had avoided the song because of her religion. He looked at me in astonishment. ‘But Jingle Bells is for all of us! We all like the song!’ I wondered how I could be so patronizing as to decide for my students that Jingle Bells is a song for Christians only. I thought I had been sensitive but instead I had almost created a conflict. In a community where Religious holidays are shared, where Muslims wear Santa Claus hats and Christians join Iftar dinners, I had created a division between my Muslim and Christian students. Since that learning experience all my students play Jingle Bells because instead of deciding for them I ask the students every year if they want to play the song or not, giving them the opportunity to choose for themselves. A visiting musician can never be aware of all the different music styles and that is exactly why it is so important to work with the musical material that the participants offer, may it be classical Arabic music, rap songs, or Western music. Being aware of a multi-layered music culture is the first step to avoid new conflicts. In the following anecdote participants of a MwB music workshop leader training disagree about the use of movements on music. A simple music activity almost ended in a conflict between the participants:

Different interpretations of a movement A MwB colleague and I gave training to future music workshop leaders. The participants were eight Palestinian women from the Bethlehem district, ages ranged from nineteen to thirty five. For one of the activities to develop their own material and a sense of ownership the group was divided into pairs. Every pair had to choose a song and come up with movements to accompany the song. Afterwards they were invited to show their movements and teach them to the rest of us. When it was Rowan’s and Hidaya’s turn, Nura refused to make one of the movements shown by the two women. Rowan and Hidaya had made a movement in which they clapped on their cheeks. We asked Nura why she did not want to make the movement. Nura explained that in her culture this is the movement mothers make when they lose a child. In other words, this movement was a sign of mourning to her and not appropriate for a music activity. Rowan immediately defended the movement and told us that this was not true as it was not used that way in her village. Nura lives in al-Azzeh refugee camp in Bethlehem while Rowan and Hidaya live in Battir, a rural village about a 20-minute drive away from

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Bethlehem. The three of them were Palestinian women living in the same district but apparently this movement had a very different meaning for each of them. The rest of the group agreed with Nura that this was an inappropriate movement and we decided together not to use it. We spoke about how one movement can have different interpretations and discussed what to do if a workshop leader figures out during a workshop that a movement seems inappropriate. We agreed that being sensitive and, if needed, changing the movement, are essential to maintaining a comfortable atmosphere and spirit within the group.

Open and sensitive attitude When we try to adjust to a different context we might encounter situations that we do not understand or agree with. That is fine. Being culturallysensitive does not mean that we have to like or approve of everything we see. Every person has his or her own values and boundaries. For example, someone might not understand how a person can think that religion forbids something as beautiful as music. But if someone decides to work in a culture where this is a common way of thinking, he or she needs to accept that different opinions about music exist. Instead of trying to convince people that someone's opinions are right, he or she needs to find a way to deal with these challenges. In the following anecdote I describe how I completely disagreed with the opinion and belief of the mother of a child I was working with. Nevertheless, I realized that her interpretation was actually more useful in her context than my Western influenced interpretation.

Example: The devil is gone Pierre was twelve years old when he participated in a three weeks summer camp in Kigali, Rwanda. Pierre is HIV-positive, deaf, and has not been able to talk since his birth. He comes from a poor family. His family could not afford medicine for him so he joined the WE-ACTx program, which provides free medicine and a social program, including the summer camp for HIV-positive children. One of the main goals of this summer camp is to empower the participating children by increasing their self-esteem and resilience. Every day of the summer camp, the children received a music workshop. During the workshop we danced, sang, and played rhythms as well as musical games. Although Pierre is deaf he participated very well in the music workshops. When we were doing activities with sticks and

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playing rhythms, it was difficult to tell that Pierre could not hear the sounds. He repeated the rhythms and played his own rhythms as if he could hear the sounds clearly. All the songs we sang with the children included movements, which Pierre repeated flawlessly. When my colleague accompanied a song on the guitar Pierre would sit next to him and put his hand on the wood of the guitar, feeling the vibrations. In the last week of the summer camp the final show was prepared. Many dances and songs were combined with some text and theatre to create a fun show for the mothers of the children. The children had chosen the repertoire together with their Rwandan workshop leaders during a brainstorming session. The dances included contemporary and traditional African dance, salsa, and belly dancing. The children were divided into groups and the workshop leaders taught the children choreographed steps for every dance style. These dances seemed too difficult for Pierre. He did not fit into any of the groups and the movements were too fast and complicated for him to learn in such a short period of time. Pierre gave up and sat alone on the stairs. As I was not involved in any of the dances either, I joined Pierre and tried to figure out what to do to make him happy again. He seemed sad and bored so I decided to pass him the guitar and let him play it for a bit. Pierre was eager to hold the guitar and immediately started strumming the strings with a sensitivity that gave the impression that he was carefully listening to the sounds it made. I decided to teach him one of the songs that the children chose for the performance. The song, Aram Sam Sam, has only two chords and they were not difficult to play. First I showed Pierre the chords letting him get used to making the transition between them. Then I sang the song to him while making the movements we used in the workshops. Using these movements as cues, I taught him which rhythms to play on the guitar and when to change the chords. Pierre had a full week to practice while the other children were practicing their dances. The song, Aram Sam Sam, was repeated a couple of times throughout the final show because it had been chosen by the children as the ‘secret travel song’ which brought all the children to a different continent in the world every time the song was sung. During the performance, Pierre sat on stage next to my colleague who was playing on another guitar. Every time Aram Sam Sam was sung they played the chords together. Pierre was shining the entire performance day. I felt the goal of increasing his self-esteem was definitely reached. After the performance we met his mother, who is HIV-positive herself. Dressed in traditional Rwanda attire, she came to thank us for the summer camp. We told her that we were so proud of her son and that he was such a

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talented boy. She was eager to explain to us why he managed to play the guitar in the final show: Three weeks before, she took him to an exorcist in a local church. He treated Pierre and drove out the devil that was inside Pierre’s body. Because of this, Pierre was capable of playing the guitar now. I was amazed. I was convinced he had learned to play the song because we taught him the chords. I thought his behaviour and skills had improved during the three weeks because of all the personal attention he had received during the summer camp, because he had discovered a talent, because he was accepted by the other children, or because he had spent three weeks having fun. Although my first reaction was one of being offended by the words of his mother, I soon realized that this reaction was unnecessary. I still believe that Pierre managed to play the guitar because of the summer camp activities and not because the devil was driven out of his body. But it was completely fine that his mother had another opinion and maybe her reason for his improvement was even better because the summer camp was over and Pierre had to go back to his normal daily life. Going to church with Pierre gives his mother hope and can continue to give his mother hope weekly or even daily while the summer camp only happened once.

Chain of sounds Let's go back to Amir's question in which she wonders how music therapists can use music in order to build and strengthen the identity of clients who suffer from cultural loss and shaken identity (Amir 2004: 250). Phase four, the phase where I find myself currently and which I described on page four, asks for a repertoire of music activities in which music material from participants is requested. This way the participants can share any musical material from their own culture. This can help to rediscover the music culture and identity, experimenting with someone's musical taste and preference. The following activity is excellent to achieve the goals described above. It is based on a very simple technique and can be done by using voice, body percussion, sticks, or musical instruments: 1. The workshop leader plays a simple, clear, repetitive rhythm with sticks, body percussion or drums or makes a repetitive sound with her/his voice. 2. The person next to the workshop leader joins the sound with a different rhythm or sound. 3. The person next to this person joins as well until everyone in the group is playing together.

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4. After a while the workshop leader stops playing. 5. The person next to the workshop leaders stops playing and then the next person stops until the final person stops playing. Variations: ¾ Change the sitting order so that the participants will have different roles in making the music (starting, in the middle or ending). ¾ Let others start the first rhythm or sound. ¾ Discuss with the participants how they felt during this improvisation. Questions that can be asked: How did you decide which rhythm/sound to play? How did the first person to play after the leader feel? How did the last person to play feel? How did the music change? (start, middle, end) Did you listen to the other participants? If you were to start first, which rhythm or sound would you choose? Why? The Chain of Sounds has numerous benefits for both the individual and the group. For example, every participant has the same importance for the result and everyone is needed. While waiting for their turn the participants have to listen to the others and be patient and although they are free to choose any sound or rhythm they have to listen to the others in order to choose a sound that fits into the music already created. Not only is this an activity in which creativity from the participants is required, the workshop leader can also learn a lot from the group culture. The following three examples show how different outcomes of the same activity can be interpreted and provide information about the group.

Example: Empower African children in Kampala, Uganda The first group consisted of twenty orphans from Uganda, age 9-22, taking part in a dancing and music training program of Empower African Children (EAC) which gives them free education and accommodation in exchange for performing dances and songs. I spent two days with them, giving workshops and receiving beautiful performances of their traditional dances, songs and music. During the lunch and banana breaks many of them had expressed their gratitude of being part of the EAC program. Although their past might have been horrible they were all very optimistic and positive about their future. During the Chain of Sounds this hopeful and lively spirit was easy to discover. Every participant in the circle was

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creative, enjoying the sounds and becoming one music-making body. The Chain of Sounds felt like a celebration of every single person and the group as a whole.4

Example: Support group for HIV+ women in Kigali, Rwanda The second group couldn't be more different from the youth group described above. It was a support group for twenty five HIV+ women suffering domestic violence in Rwanda. Once a week they gathered in a shack, hidden from the bustling streets of Kigali, in order to protect the women from being identified. Together with a local social worker I joined these meetings to make music with them. When we did the Chain of Sounds with sticks for the first time the women barely produced any sound: some of them made soundless movements with the sticks in the air, others rolled the sticks between their hands, creating a soft cracking sound. Some chose to hit the endings of two sticks softly against each other or played a slow rhythm on the ground. It seemed as if they were afraid to let us hear their voices, as if they preferred to stay silent and continue to carry all their troubles on their own shoulders. During the workshop we repeated the Chain of Sounds a couple of times and every round the women would make more sound and bigger movements. At the end of the session one woman told us that this was the first meeting that she had seen others laugh instead of cry and she added that it was a good experience to discover this new side and possibility of the group.

Example: Social work students in Hebron, Palestine Some thousands of kilometres away from Kigali lies the Palestinian city of Hebron. I gave a music workshop to a group of thirty social work students. Hebron is a conservative city with a mainly Muslim population and it is difficult to discover a woman at the Hebron University that does not cover her hair. I was happy to see that the group of students that took part in the workshop were of mixed gender. Some women preferred to stand only next to other women while others mingled easily between the male students. Nevertheless, singing, playing body-percussion and making movements on music was enough for many of them to feel a bit uncomfortable with the presence of the other sex. When we did the Chain of Sounds with sticks I felt that the group was trying to stay safe by 4

A video recording can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNtrfcU_Esk (accessed 5 July 2014).

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repeating the same rhythms. Although some chose to play with a different technique (sticks on the ground, on the chair, etc.) they all played the same rhythm and only one student chose a completely different rhythm. I thought they might have misunderstood the activity and after one round I explained to them again that every person can choose his or her own rhythm. But also in the second round almost no one chose to play a different rhythm. By then I realized that they probably didn't feel safe enough to show the others their own rhythmical creations. What links these groups is the music that was created by everyone. The participants were all positively surprised by the result of the exercise: beautiful and meaningful music. The rules are simple, musical instruments are not needed and non-musicians can do it: creating music by sharing one's own sound. The Chain of Sounds is just one example of an activity that can be facilitated by a musician visiting another culture. The music created will always sound different and is unique. Even if the same group repeats it a couple of time the result will be different depending on many factors such as the timing, mood and creativity of the participants and the social state of the group. The music will always be made by the group as a whole and not by specific individuals like a workshop leader, a professional musician or a teacher. Everyone's input is equally respected and the music culture of that moment, of that place, in that group is expressed.

Conclusion In this article I investigated how musicians working in different (musical) cultures can do so in a culturally-sensitive way. This is necessary because nowadays more musicians increasingly travel to and work in cultural environments that are different from their own. There is the risk that they will diminish the local musical culture wherever they go by prescribing their own music - often unintentionally. In addition, any disrespect or ignoring of the local culture can lead to frustration for both parties. In order to learn from experiences, one has to constantly reflect on one’s own actions. Why did I come to this other culture? To teach my 'own' music? To learn from 'their' music? And if so, am I truly open to receiving 'their' musical culture? What if this does not match my expectations or interferes with my own cultural values? The less information we have about another culture, the more simplistic the culture will seem to be. Without knowing the details of a specific type of music we might think that the music is easy to play. But as soon as we learn more and delve deeper, the music will often turn out to be far more complicated than initially seemed, or even

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impossible to play for an outsider. By reflecting on what did not work, what went wrong, where a misunderstanding occurred, we can learn from our mistakes, decide to do things differently or change our goals. In the end, the world is changing and so are cultures and music. If we keep in mind that all musical cultures are worth learning and need to be respected we will probably be moving in the right direction.

References Amir, D. (2004) 'Community Music Therapy and the Challenge of Multiculturalism' in M. Pavlicevic and G. Ansdell (eds) Community Music Therapy, London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 249-268. Nettl, B. (2005) The Study of Ethnomusicology, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Pavlicevic, M. (2004) 'Learning from Thembalethu: Towards Responsive and Responsible Practice' in M. Pavlicevic and G. Ansdell (eds) Community Music Therapy, London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 3547.

PART III: FILM, LITERATURE AND PERFORMING ARTS

16 MEDIATING PEACE AND RECONCILIATION THROUGH FILM PETER MALONE

There’s an old truism, that peace is not simply the absence of war. That would be only a truce, whether it was in the context of war, of community confrontation, of family conflict or the struggle within the heart of a person. There are many kinds of peace. There are many ways to reconciliation. Art, music and film do not always top lists of ways of mediating reconciliation and peace. But they should be there – and substantially. This paper focuses on film: whether arthouse cinema or the popular movies. The paper consists of three sections: the importance of empowerment for really seeing, appreciating and understanding film; the Catholic contribution to this empowerment; some film case studies.

Empowerment for appreciating and understanding film ‘But, after all, it was only a movie.’

Only a movie? Right around our world, audiences in cinemas or watching movies on cassette or disk, are sharing in the popular art medium of the twentieth century (and into the twenty-first century), often sharing in a global experience as millions watch the same movie. Glance at the ads for the movies in the papers in the capitals of Asia, from Singapore to Manila, or in South America, from Quito to Buenos Aires, all over Europe, in the Pacific (though not so strongly yet in Africa), audiences are watching films, especially popular movies, some home-produced, mainly American. The first contribution to promoting film as a medium for peace is to work with people so that they are empowered to watch films well, to appreciate and to understand what they are seeing, so that it will pervade their minds and hearts. We often hear that education and literacy are keys to progress of any kind. We lament illiteracy. However, we need to lament

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the fact that what is missing in education is ‘visuacy’, the capacity, the ability to truly see what is before us. We should lament ‘ivvisuacy’. We need to look at words and images, and moving images. One way of considering this is to contrast our response to looking at words and to looking at images. Our eye is the principal sense involved in reading (although we may follow the line along with our finger). But, even though the eye is used, its function is mainly mechanical and utilitarian. The words are merely signs and the imagination has to take over and provide the material for our minds and understanding to work on. If we grasp the words, if our imaginations are activated and we understand, then we can get emotionally involved in what we read. The process runs: sensory experience, initial intelligence, initial intellectual grasp, imaginative response, emotional response, intellectual understanding and evaluation - all parts of a process that are operating simultaneously. When we respond to moving images, the process is different. We certainly use our eyes at once (and with sound films, our ears) but the images are not merely conventional signs of communication. Design, colour, movement, rhythms, are all presented to us at once. And at once we respond on the level of pleasurable or unpleasurable sense and emotional response. Our primary, or initial, intellectual grasp coincides with this vivid sensory and emotional response. The imagination does not have to work as hard as it does in reading because images are provided to the senses, but the imagination is at work nonetheless, along with emotions, as regards identification with or rejection of the reality presented by the images. It is then on this personal response process that intellectual understanding is based. The process runs: sensory experience, emotional experience, emotional response, initial intellectual grasp, imaginative collaboration, intellectual understanding and evaluation - again all parts of a process that are operating simultaneously. The difference between responding to words and responding to images lies, first of all, in the immediate sense response. There is so much more demand on us at once in the response to images. The personal involvement is more immediately greater. The initial impact should be so much more forceful than from words which are read. Since the emotions are involved immediately with our senses, the imaginative collaboration is also felt more emotionally. The value of reading is that, at our own pace, according to our own choice, so much demand is made on our concentration that the work of the imagination seems much more intense; we put more of ourselves, perhaps, into our imaginative response which then calls for our emotions to join in. Ultimately, both experiences bring forth insight and

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understanding. But the interplay of sense, emotions and imagination is where the differences lie. We could read a biography of Gandhi, perhaps should. But we can watch Richard Attenborough’s movie, Gandhi (1982), and experience the visualizing of Gandhi. But, the other point that is important is that we are watching a story. Human beings are people of story. One of the schemas that has been helpful in reminding us how stories work on us is that of Claude Levi-Strauss. It has been popularized by John Dominic Crossan (Crossan, John Dominic (1975) The Dark Interval, Niles, IL: Argus.) The subtitle is ‘Towards a Theology of Story’. Crossan acknowledges his debt to literary critics, anthropologists and structural philosophers. For myth and parable, Claude Levy-Strauss, The Savage Mind (University of Chicago Press, 1970) and for satire, apologue, action, Sheldon Sacks, Fiction and the Shape of Belief (Berkeley and L.A., University of California Press, 1966) in his book on parables. A summary indicates the power of stories and the different modes of storytelling which have been taken up by film-makers. The Levi-Strauss schema for storytelling is Parable Satire Action Apologue Myth How does this work? Crossan suggests that: Parable: Satire: Action: Apologue: Myth:

subverts its world attacks its world investigates its world defends its world creates a new world.

Parable Parable is a story which seems to accept the audience world view but then begins to undermine assumptions by criticism, focussing on characters and situations at unanticipated angles and then questioning, or even disrupting, the values system of the audience. The parable can be both subversive and didactic. The effective parable does not need to highlight any moral or

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conclusions. These should be evident from the experience of hearing the parable - or some unsettling questions should be evident, even if there are no ready answers. The role of the parable is to provoke, to ensure that complacency is not regarded as a virtue either in individuals or in society. The parable tends to change, question, alter a view or values.

Satire Satire is a black form of storytelling. Of set purpose, the satirist is negative. A caustic moralist, the satirist knows that the real world should be better than it is. Since it is not, the satirist picks the faults, the abuses, the sins and holds them up to the light but then mocks and invites the audience to laugh at them. Some audiences take everything at what they think is face value, interpreting satire too literally and are offended. John Dominic Crossan quotes Sheldon Sacks on the attack of satire: ‘A satire is a work organised so that it ridicules objects external to the fictional world created in it’. The satirist wants to offend those who subscribe to the follies, the abuses being attacked but the satirist also implies that there are positive values to be believed in.

Action This kind of story is the easiest to respond to. It describes a world and investigates it. Most popular entertainment fits into this category: from the basic narratives of situation-comedy or soap-opera to the dramas that mirror the concerns of contemporary society. While the world of the Action story has its own inner coherence as well as its boundaries, it is readily entered into for acceptance or rejection by large audiences.

Apologue Apologue seems an off-putting term, especially in comparison with the others. Yet from the point of view of traditional terminology, it has some merit. An old word, ‘apologetics’, was used in a religious context. It has always been understood as the explanation and defence of faith. Taking the key ideas, ‘explanation’ and ‘defence’, we can say that an apologue is a story that offers its audience a world that promotes itself, by explaining or defending itself. Many explicitly religious films can be seen as apologues. Apologue defends world - in the sense that it presents an explanation and defence of a world credible for believer (so to speak) and unbeliever alike.

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Myth Myth can be described as the profound and positive story. It creates world. It creates world in the sense that the story can use for plot and characters real/historical personages or fictitious persons and tell a story where meaning is the important thing. Thus in the classic literature of cultures and religions, there are `myths' that are the means for getting in touch with and communicating the spiritual meaning of the culture and religion. The creation and development of myths has been influenced at times by oral traditions, literary forms and popular modes of storytelling. There is no reason why contemporary cinema styles and ways of communicating cannot shape myths or reshape old myths. Some films on the theme of peace and reconciliation can illustrate these different ways of storytelling. Sometimes they are told within different genres (from thriller to western to musical) which can be studied further to understand the different conventions of each genre. After all, we are able to suspend expectations of realism when somebody bursts into song in a musical – and Les Miserables offers fine melodies and lyrics on themes of the longings of the human heart and peace. To interpret a hero movie based on a graphic novel as realism would be to endow Batman, Spiderman or Electra with superhuman powers that exist only on the page or on the screen. An example of a movie which is a parable on war is Stanley Kubrick’s 1957 film, Paths of Glory, one of the most potent critiques of some of the stupidities in warfare. The setting is France during World War I, a confrontation by an ordinary soldier of the smug and elitist officers who have little experience of action (or have forgotten or glorified it) and assume deity-like powers of life and death for their men. Still with World War I, there is Richard Attenborough’s film of Joan Littlewood’s, Oh What a Lovely War (1968). This is a musical satire on the same kinds of authoritarian stupidity in the conduct of war. The film was released in one of the hardest-fought years of the war in Vietnam. When it comes to films that can fit the description of Action, we could take as examples so many of the straight-to-DVD films which have war settings all over the world. These are the films which star such performers as Jean-Claude van Damme or Steven Seagal. Clearly they are stories of the struggle between good and evil, but the plotting and the writing is basic, not inviting the audience to do much reflection at all, except to decide whether they will watch the soon-to-come next similar actioner. While we do not begrudge audiences some entertainment, these films, like many a military video game, reinforce stereotypes of action and expectations of fighting for their mainly male audiences.

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When it comes to the Apologue, these are the patriotic films which urge one to identify with their country right or wrong (expecting it to be right). During World War II, in 1942 and 1943, two American apologues won Academy Awards for Best Picture. They were war stories, but well made, entertaining, and stirring. They still have strong reputations, Mrs Miniver for 1942 but the 1943 winner, Casablanca, is still considered a classic. But, it is useful to remind ourselves that it is propaganda, an Apologue. There have been many myths, heroic myths since the epochs of Greek and Latin literature as well as in countries of Asia, Africa and the Americas. During the twentieth century with the popularity of the comic books and the comic strips, many pop mythologies were created. Since Star Wars (1977) and its sequels, the mythologies have not been confined to earth but to galaxies far, far away. These stories are self-contained myths with allusions to other myths. They work on the level of image, of icon, of symbol. And, whether it be marketing or not, these myths have had universal appeal. Look at box-office returns for myths from The Lord of the Rings to The Dark Knight/ Batman franchise. Cinema offers a vast resource for peace and reconciliation processes and studies – but educators still have to work with people as to how to truly watch and see them and to reflect on their meanings.

A Catholic Contribution This paper is written by a Catholic who headed up the Church’s international organization for cinema, from 1998 to 2001 when it merged with the Catholic organisation for radio and television, Unda, and heading (2001-2005) the new body, SIGNIS, The World Catholic Association for Communication. Before outlining some of the activities for promoting peace through film, it may be useful to outline some of the emphases in the twentieth century Catholic tradition on cinema. The tone was set in 1936 in a letter to the Catholic Church by the then Pope, Pius XI, Why indeed should there be question merely of avoiding what is evil? The motion picture should not be simply a means of diversion, a light relaxation to occupy an idle hour. With its magnificent power, it can and must be a bearer of light and a positive guide to what is good. (Pius XI, Vigilanti Cura 1936)

Another quotation from this letter is surprising:

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Mediating Peace and Reconciliation through Film 1. '... more effectively than abstract reasoning...' 'Since then the cinema is in reality a sort of object lesson which, for good or for evil, teaches the majority of men more effectively than abstract reasoning...' (Pope Pius XI in Vigilanti Cura 1936, n.23)

The book culture, especially under the influence of European culture, has promoted reading as one of the principal ways of educating. This was not always the case for the majority of people. Most cultural traditions have been firstly oral and then visual. Stories were told and handed on. Paintings provided images and symbols for people to explore meanings. With the cinema, oral and visual traditions have received new life. One of the consequences of the reading culture was the growth in importance of abstract reasoning, the emphasis on the truth as the key to knowledge and understanding. In religious communities and churches, this has meant an emphasis on expressions of doctrine and catechism as a test of being orthodox. But it has often meant the loss of the importance of storytelling and images. Cinema has contributed to bringing back stories and images as a means for education and learning. There has not been any forfeiting of truth but, rather, a re-emphasis on goodness and beauty. So, the first step in cinema appreciation is to know the 'grammar' and 'syntax' of the moving image because cinema is built on the unit of the moving image. We have to learn about shots, about techniques for getting the shots, editing them together, adding soundtrack. We also have to learn the who's who of film-making, the role of directors and producers, of writers, of the cast, of the directors of photography, of lighting, of design and costume. And, since, the promotion of movies is business, we need to have some background in how movies are marketed and distributed. 2. '... understand the form proper to each of the arts... and be guided by a right conscience.' 'It is essential that the minds and inclinations of the spectators be rightly trained and educated, so that they may not only understand the form proper to each of the arts but also be guided, especially in this matter, by a right conscience. Thus they will be enabled to practise mature consideration and judgment on the various items which the film or television screen puts before them.' (Pope Pius XII in Miranda Prorsus, 1957, n.57)

We not only have to learn how moving images work and work on us. Cinema appreciation means that we have to understand the forms of cinema, but we need to work on ourselves and our sensibilities, 'the way we tick'. We know that one kind of movie appeals to us whereas our friends may not be able to stand watching the same movie. Pius XII suggests that we know something of ourselves and our responses so that

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we can make mature judgments about movies, especially those that are more morally complex, and make suitable recommendations for ourselves and for others. Cinema appreciation means understanding how our own sensibilities operate and how they may differ from the sensibilities of others. These are 'pre-moral' considerations, considerations of our interests, our styles and our tastes. When we are at home with our own sensibilities, we will not be wanting to impose our own likes and dislikes on others, let alone make moral judgments on people's movie choices. What does sensibility include? Aspects which are worth considering are: how outgoing are we, how extraverted, or how much do we find our energy within us, how introverted? Outgoing people tend to like stimulating action, whereas the more inner people often enjoy more introspective movies (a contrast between Hong Kong action shows and northern European dramas). Another aspect is our attention to what is on the screen: most enjoy scenery, costumes, decor and the detail they see and hear whereas others get caught up in the meaning of the movie, not noticing a lot of the detail. Again, some audiences get very personally involved in plot and with characters while others look more objectively at the movie. (Someone has noted that when husbands and wives go to hire a movie, he goes one way to action or comedy, while she goes to the more personal stories - not an absolute criterion, but it does remind us of differences in sensibility.) On the moral level, so necessary when movies that suit one personal or national sensibility and not another are screened everywhere (a 'postmodern' thriller like Pulp Fiction or a religious satire like Dogma), we need to work on our cinema appreciation, our moral sensitivity. We have to make the distinction between 'what' we see on the screen because everything human is a valid topic for cinema - and 'how' it is presented. Serious material that makes mature moral demands on our response can be treated in a profound and insightful way (as are so many of the 'scandalous' stories from the Bible like that of David and Bathsheba). Our sensitivities, like our consciences, need to be fine-tuned, able to be robust enough to see disturbing material and not be overwhelmed by it. On the other hand, the seemingly nice sensitivity that has avoided facing anything difficult is not fine-tuned but merely fragile and could easily break. And, of course, there is, unfortunately, the sensitivity that has been desensitized and is merely crass. 3. ‘expressing interpretation of life’ 'The artist finds in film a very effective means of expressing his interpretation of life... it is possible to derive a deeper appreciation and a

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Mediating Peace and Reconciliation through Film richer cultural dividend from the film and filming... Many films have compellingly treated subjects that concern human progress or spiritual values... among films which have been widely accepted as classics, many have dealt with specifically religious themes.' (Pope Paul VI, Communio et Progressio, 1971, nn.142, 144)

Cinema appreciation leads us into the area of values and, indeed, of spirituality. With a grounding in 'visuacy' and a fine-tuned and robust sensitivity, we can learn more about the values dramatized in the cinema. One way of appreciating the values in movies that are not explicitly religious is by asking how they illustrate the basic human drives. These basic drives are what we all identify with and which the movie-makers implicitly know their audiences are interested in. There is the basic drive to life with movies that show us characters struggling with identity questions, with the quality of their lives, with the threat to their lives and of people opting out of life in suicide. There is also the basic drive to love and be loved, in the intimacy of personal relationships, in the starting and fostering of a family and in the shared vision of friendships. And there is the basic drive to be in community and in society, the stories of family, of history, of religion and church, of the threats to society, especially through war and now, for instance, in the threat to the environment. Finally, there is the basic drive towards what is beyond us, to the transcendent, the religious drive towards God. Cinema appreciation leads us to meanings in the movies and to religious and spiritual themes, whether explicit or implicit. 4. '...cinema, a place of reflection, a call to values, an invitation to dialogue and communion.' '(Humans) created in the image and likeness of God, is naturally called to peace and harmony with God, with our fellows and ourselves and with all creation. The cinema can become an interpreter of this natural propensity and strive to be a place of reflection, a call to values, an invitation to dialogue and communion... The cinema enjoys a wealth of languages, a multiplicity of styles and truly great variety of narrative forms: from realism to fairy tales, from history to science fiction, from adventures to tragedy, from comedy to news, from cartoons to documentaries... It can contribute to bringing people closer, to reconciling enemies, to favouring an ever more respectful dialogue between diverse cultures.' (Pope John Paul II, Address to Festivale del Terzo Millennio, December, 1999)

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John Paul II shows he has the touch of the movie buff when he makes explicit some of the genres that we enjoy with the movies: fairy tales, history, science-fiction, cartoons, documentaries... There is something for everyone. But he also knows that we live in the ‘real world’. We need a delicacy and robustness that acknowledges the work of grace but also acknowledges the sinful realities of the human condition: …even when they explore the darkest depths of the soul or the most unsettling aspects of evil, artists give voice in a way to the universal desire for redemption. (John Paul II, Letter to Artists, 1999.)

The initial slogan used by SIGNIS, 2001-2007, was ‘Media for a Culture of Peace’. As regards cinema this was done through film reviews and critique, by dialogue with film practitioners, promoting distribution of significant films and, especially, through its juries at major film festivals around the world. One of the reasons for the Catholic presence in international film festivals goes back to the Catholic Action movement in western Europe of the 1920s. Catholic women urged those professionally involved in film to better co-ordination, to inform Catholics about films based on Christian values, to promote these films and influence production and distribution. The first award in 1947 in Brussels was to Vivere in Pace by Luigi Zampa because, according to the jury, the film contributed to the spiritual and moral revival of humanity: peace, spirituality human understanding, hope and dialogue beyond racism. OCIC wanted to broaden the cinema horizons of the public and to demonstrate that cinema of quality, portraying values which are human, social, cultural and spiritual, are produced by film-makers of every nationality and culture. The presence of critics from different national Catholic organizations gave the juries the possibility for seeing and discussing films together. Since 1973 OCIC, then SIGNIS, and Interfilm, the Protestant organization for cinema, have worked together in Ecumenical juries. At the Locarno film festival, the first Ecumenical jury was inaugurated. The second was in Cannes in 1974 and juries in Berlin, Montreal, Karlovy Vary, Mannheim and others followed. In more recent times, Ecumenical juries have been established in Kiev, Yerevan, Warsaw, Bratislava. The Ecumenical juries mean that there is a collaboration between quite a wide range of Christian churches. Dialogue with other religions has come more to the foreground of the association, working together with representatives of non-Christians and Christians in interreligious and interfaith juries at international film festivals offering another contribution to the promotion of media for a

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culture of peace. In 2002, SIGNIS negotiated with the management of the Fajr Festival in Tehran film for setting up an interfaith jury, a concrete way of showing this Catholics and Muslims could watch and discuss films and values which they have in common. In that way, the first Interfaith jury was organized in Tehran in 2003. The interfaith jury comprises two jury members selected by SIGNIS and one or two Muslim jury members selected by the festival direction. This jury has to consider for its award the section of new Iranian feature films. The idea of jury representatives from different faiths opened the way to interfaith juries at the Brisbane film festival (2003), Nyon (2005), Dhaka, Bangladesh (2006) and a collaboration with the Trento-based Religion Today Festival (2008) which screens films from all religions. Members of SIGNIS are present now in almost forty international juries.

Case studies War and peace France: Joyeux Noel/ Merry Christmas, (2005, directed by Christian Carion) Stories have long been told of how the troops in the trenches, often only four or five metres apart, sometimes fraternized during lulls between bombardments. This story focuses on a French troop, a Scottish troop and a German troop. We are given something of their background, the harking back to the styles and codes of nineteenth century warfare by the French officers who had little understanding of what fighting in the trenches was like. It was the same with the German officers who enjoyed lavish meals and listened to opera singers while their men were in the bitter cold of the trenches. The Scottish story is somewhat different. Two brothers eagerly join up while their parish priest becomes a chaplain. One of the brothers is killed and the other becomes bitter. The chaplain is a fine man and a compassionate minister. When husband and wife opera singers visit the German trenches, they hear the Scots playing their bagpipes. The tenor sings Silent Night and the bagpipes then accompany him. The result is that all the troops come out of their dugouts, join in the singing, listen to the soprano sing Ave Maria, exchange food and drink and attend, all together, a midnight service led by the chaplain. The screenplay is very strong in highlighting that this is truly the Christmas message of peace on earth to all people of good will. The German officer is Jewish and explains that this is not part of his religion but that he was very glad to be able to share

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in it. The officers call a truce on Christmas Day and the men once again show their common humanity. Some play football, others cards. Addresses are exchanged for meetings after the cessation of hostilities. Had the film ended with this joyeux noel, this merry Christmas, it might have seemed rather sentimental, even though there are records of this kind of fraternization happening. (The director has pointed out that photos appeared on the front pages of British newspapers of the time but that the French concealed these happenings.) To our dismay, the final part of the film presents the official reaction to what the authorities call treason and conduct unbecoming soldiers in war – even ludicrously condemning the cat who moves from trench to trench. The Germans are humiliated by commanding officers and sent to the Russian front. The French would like to execute the men for treason but 200 is too many, so they are transferred to Verdun. The Scots chaplain is visited by his bishop who lectures him on the text that Jesus came not to bring peace but the sword and gives a sermon to the troops on the war being a crusade, on the inhumanity of the Germans and, in the name of superior culture and civilization, urges the men to kill Germans, all of them. Director, Christian Clarion, has said that he would like his film to be screened in every country which is involved in war. His humane film, classical in its cinema style, is an appeal to promoting a culture of peace rather than putting a priority on a crusade of destruction. It appeals to the deepest message of peace from the JudeoChristian tradition and Gospel teachings UK/US: War Horse (2011, directed by Steven Spielberg) War Horse has been a very successful theatre drama (with actors using masks and puppets for the horses). Most audiences will find this a very moving film and not just those who like stories which feature horses. The first forty five minutes show ordinary farmers, landowners and tenants, on impoverished properties in Devon. Ted Narracott (Peter Mullan) and his wife (Rose) are in debt to the wealthy Mr Lyons (David Thewlis). They have a teenage son, Albert (Jeremy Irvine). Spielberg obviously loves the countryside and immerses us in it. And we share the anxieties of the farmers, especially when a horse is auctioned which Ted sees as having great potential – when all he really needs is a draft horse for ploughing the hard fields. Albert volunteers to look after and train the horse, naming it Joe. They develop a great bond which is tested when Albert volunteers to guide Joe in ploughing. The neighbours and Lyons gather to watch and we are all moved by the spirit of the horse in succeeding in ploughing the whole field.

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Then World War I begins and Ted Narracott decides to sell the horse to the army. The friendly Captain Nichols reassures Albert that he will look after the horse. He does, even sketching Joe to send to Albert. The young English officers, like their French counterparts seen in so many films critical of them, are caught up in spirit and pride so that when they charge a German camp at dawn, presuming they have the upper hand, they are led into a forest where they are mown down. Joe and the other horses are taken – and almost destroyed when they are judged as too fine and too useless for the work of transporting weapons and goods. Joe has several adventures during the war, episodes set in France and Belgium, which also illustrate how the war affected soldiers and ordinary people. A young horse trainer decides to desert to protect his younger enlisted brother. They ride away and hide in a windmill, but to no avail at all. A grandfather who makes jams (Niels Arestrup) cares for his granddaughter who comes across Joe and takes him in. However, the German troops come to the farm demanding food and, tragically, the horse is taken. As the war goes on, Joe is involved with transport. Spielberg creates a powerful sequence where the exhausted horses drag large cannons up a hill. He then tops that with an extraordinary scene where Joe breaks free and gallops wildly through the lines, through the barbed wire, tangling it around his body and comes to a standstill in no man’s land. There is a fine sequence where a British soldier comes out of the trenches and enlists a German soldier and his wire-cutters to free Joe. This is one of those scenes where the futility of the hostilities is dramatized as each side works with the other and join in a common cause which is peaceful. Beautiful to look at, with a moving John Williams score, an emotional film that appeals to the best feelings in us. It does not aim at the critique of World War I as in films like Paths of Glory. But, it offers some of the best of British heritage and a reminder that World War I is passing into history as modern warfare is so technological compared with the human endeavour and suffering in the trenches. A story where we focus on the horse’s heroics symbolizes the harshness of the human experience as well.

Anti-Semitism Poland: In Darkness (2011, directed by Agnieszka Holland): Poland’s nominee for Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, 2011, indicative of the esteem for the film and its themes. We are taken back to the city of Lvov, at the end of 1942, beginning of

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1943, a severe winter. Lvov is occupied by German forces. Jews are being rounded up or fleeing. This is material from many a similar story. However, director Agnieszka Holland, returning to her Polish roots (both Jewish and Catholic) and drawing on a book about these events and the memoirs of one of the children, has made quite a distinctive and powerful drama. In some ways, it is reminiscent of the story of Anne Frank and her family and friends, trapped for safety in an attic. Where this family and group are trapped is far more difficult, even grotesque, than the Frank story. At first, we are introduced to two sewer officials who are seen robbing the homes of Jews who have fled. No righteousness here. The central character, Leopold Socha (Poldek) (Robert Wieciewicz, seeming at first like an anonymous, ordinary man who could have a supporting role) has a wife and sick daughter in their impoverished home. Poldek is also beholden to a local policeman who is determined to find and root out Jews. Then Poldek discovers a group of Jews who have been digging through their floor to the sewers. What will he do? Report them? Or capitalize on their predicament? He chooses the latter, taking money after bargaining with them, supplying them with food and necessities as they conceal themselves, literally, in darkness. This is a long film which immerses the audience for a long time in the squalor, the stench, the cramped spaces, the darkness, as day after day the small group, supports each other, squabbles, hangs on to life to survive. It is something of a relief when the audience is able to get out of the sewers and see Poldek in his daily rounds, the fear of his partner, being upbraided by his wife who is suspicious of the Jews. There is a disaster when a German guard is killed by Poldek and Mundek, one of the Jews who is able to come out of the sewers. The Germans exact a terrible toll on Lvov, hanging many locals. This affects Poldek who has become attached in some ways to the hideaways. And it is compounded as the film proceeds: the birth of a baby in the sewers and his and his wife’s willingness to take the child in – but there is no easy solution to this crisis. He helps Mundek to go into the concentration camp to find some of those interned there. And, after his daughter’s first communion Mass and the thunderous storm which floods the sewers, threatening the lives of the Jews, venturing in to lead them to safety. Eventually, the Russians drive the Germans from Lvov. At the end, there is a tribute to Poldek and his wife, their being acknowledged as Righteous Persons because of their sheltering the Jews. It is a sombre reminder that many of the Righteous helpers, like Oscar Schindler, were not as noble as they became – that involvement with

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suffering people drew on their better selves and enabled them to be heroic. This is a holocaust and help story for a twenty-first century reminder of suffering and kindness. Germany: Wunderkinder (2011, Directed by Markus Rosenmuller.) Wunderkinder are child prodigies. The three children in this moving World War II drama are musically talented, two violinists and a pianist. They are around 12 years old. The setting is a town in Ukraine. It is 1942. The population consists of Ukrainian traditional families as well as Jews. Two of the children are Jews. The other, who becomes friends with them, plays music with them, introduced by the local music teacher, herself Jewish. All seems to be calm despite the war. And that other girl is German, daughter of the local diplomatic representative who also owns the local brewery. When German troops arrive, the purging of Jews begins, aided by the anti-Semitism of the townspeople. However, the three children are still in demand for performances. But, then, the German pact with Stalin broken, Russian troops arrive and situations are reversed. While the Jews are still cautious and have been sheltered in a country house by the benign German, it is the German family which now has to go into hiding. And, in a reverse of so many films where Jews are sheltered by sympathetic locals, it is now the German girl who is protected by them. The film presents the possibilities of harmonious living but does no shirk the anti-Semitism which is quick to rise to the surface, the exercise of power by local officials (who then have to go into hiding when the politics change). However, it is the basic, common humanity which underlies this portrait of people who share values, who communicate by music. It is a sad story of childhood, with some tragic consequences. Audiences will appreciate this different perspective on World War II, the experience of Ukraine, and the effect on children.

Racism and reconciliation Australia: Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002, Directed by Phillip Noyce) Rabbit Proof Fence is a story of the ‘Stolen Generation’ of aboriginal children. In 1930, three young girls (two of whom, in their 80s, appear at the end of the film to add some heart-rending detail of how their story happened all over again with the next generation) escaped from a settlement presided over by a government official who had 'protective' rights over all aborigines in Western Australia. They returned home in a

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months' long trek along the fence erected to keep out rabbits. The context of the film is that of the white culture in the management of empire. The aboriginal culture was focussed on tradition, myths and lore. The white culture was action-oriented and governed by bureaucratic detail. The world of Mr Neville, the official 'Protector', played with earnest righteousness that manifested itself in an unswerving paternalism by Kenneth Branagh, is one of clear (and unquestioned) principles. These 'objective' criteria included such policies as the lighter the skin, the more clever the child, which he alone could authoritatively determine. He quotes mathematical statistics to explain how their aboriginal blood can be 'bred out of them'. This is the logic of supremacy. Mr Neville (whom the children nickname 'Mr Devil') does appreciate that he does not understand the aboriginal mind: 'they may have neolithic tools but they do not have neolithic minds'. ‘The natives must be helped.' He is outwitted by Molly's combination of doggedness and ingenuity as she takes the children on their epic walk, surviving off the land, making friends along the way and good luck. Mr Neville laments, 'If only they would understand'. For the girls, the shock of their being abducted from their desert home, separated from their mothers and their families, highlights the close world in which they live. It is a world of love and relationships that can make no sense of their being taken to the custody of the institution, let alone the minutiae of the rubrics for orderly living there. Their language is referred to by the nurses as 'That Jabber'. The only reality for them is HOME. This is the reality expressed in the voiceover comments and in the statements by the two surviving sisters at the end of the film. Mr Neville, his secretary and the home officials live in a world of rules and regulations, of forms, of budget and cost preoccupations. The externals of Mr Neville's office are neat and tidy. Everything is orderly as the criteria are scrupulously applied. Duty means responsibility. This contrasts with the world of Molly and the girls. Their senses of seeing and hearing are acute. They are able to elude the aboriginal tracker pursuing them by moving into the water, by disguising their tracks. Their sense of traditional lore helps them to food, to follow the sun, to work out where the rabbit proof fence might be so that they can follow it home. The apology to the Stolen Generation issue that has dogged Australian society and politics since the early 1990s emerges as an echo of the differences between the protectors who knew they were doing the right thing and the people whose lives were often destroyed by the separation of children from parents and families. Rabbit Proof Fence is a proof for the Australian late-comers to the land to be (and to express) sorry. Finally, Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, made the formal apology in 2009.

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Australia: Murundak (2011, Directed by Natasha Gadd, Rhys Graham) Murundak means ‘alive’ in the Woirurrung language. Murundak was also the title of a travelling concert in 2006 by the Black Arm Band. The band’s name derives from the Prime Minister, John Howard’s statement about not having a black armband view of history, indicating his unwillingness to make an apology to the aboriginal people of Australia. The band continues to tour Australia and this documentary film captures performances at various venues around the Australian states. The film offers opportunity for many of the members to perform individually. Their songs are protest songs from the past and from more recent times. Many have made their mark on Australian consciousness. But, the film is not simply a selection of songs excitingly performed. Murundak also narrates the history of indigenous Australia since 1788. There is voiceover information and commentary. There is historical footage (including John Howard’s speech and Kevin Rudd’s apology). There is a glimpse of Burnum Burnum on the coast of Kent taking possession of Britain on behalf of the aboriginal people – tongue in cheek but telling. Many questions are raised, many of them the main ones like the Stolen Generation and the repercussions. However, one important question comes to the fore (also in the context of missions): when and how was the link broken for nineteenth and twentieth century aborigines between them and their millennia-old heritage? The performers speak genially and articulately. They value the songs. In recounting their history and life stories, the audience is impressed and moved.

Conclusion This presentation on peace and reconciliation has grounded its argument on the significance of cinema, especially during the twentieth century. ‘It’s only a movie’ does not respect the power of the cinema. There is still a lot of education, both for adults and children, in learning how to watch a film, reflecting on it and sharing reflections, a greater involvement in cinema and its power to affect imagination, heart and mind. A way of developing this is through reflection on storytelling through film. Categories of storytelling and the different impacts, like those developed by John Dominic Crossan: parable, satire, action, apologue and myth, remind us that different ways of storytelling elicit different creative responses.

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From a Catholic perspective, this has been significant for a long time. During the twentieth century, official documents encouraged members to appreciate a medium that is more powerful than abstract thinking, has its own media styles, and probes even into the darkest recesses of human nature. The Catholic Church has had its international film organizations, OCIC (Organization Catholique Internationale du Cinema), then SIGNIS (World Catholic Association for Communication), since 1928 and has promoted this kind of cinema culture as well as having a jury presence at forty world film festivals, some ecumenical and some, as in Tehran and Dhaka, interfaith. Film case studies can be described, as in this presentation. But, the films are to be seen, appreciated, discussed and acted on.

References The material in the first two sections draw on treatments in: Malone, P. (2008) Film and Faith, Manila: Communications Foundation for Asia. —. (2001) On Screen, Manila: Pauline Media. —. (2008) ‘From Conflict to Reconciliation in World Cinema’, in Studies in World Christianity, Volume 14, part 2, The Edinburgh Review of Theology and Religion. Pope John Paul II (1999) ‘Address to Festivale del Terzo Millennio.’ December. —. (1999) ‘Letter of his Holiness Pope John Paul II to Artists’, The Holy See, http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/letters/documents/hf_j p-ii_let_23041999_artists_en.html (accessed 20 January 2014). Pope Paul VI (1971) ‘Pastoral instruction “Communio et Progressio” on the means of social communication written by order of the Second Vatican Council’, The Holy See, http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/pccs/document s/rc_pc_pccs_doc_23051971_communio_en.html (accessed 20 January 2014). Pope Pius XI (1936) ‘Encyclical Letter of Pope Pius XI on the Motion Picture, Vigilanti Cura’, The Holy See, http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xi/encyclicals/documents/hf_p -xi_enc_29061936_vigilanti-cura_en.html (accessed 20 January 2014). Pope Pius XII (1957) ‘Encyclical Letter of His Holiness Pius XII by Divine Providence Pope. To our venerable brethren the Patriarchs,

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Primates, Archbishops, Bishops and other Ordinaries in peace and communion with the apostolic See on motion pictures, radio and television, Miranda Prorsus’, The Holy See. Online. Available HTTP: http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xii/encyclicals/documents/hf_ p-xii_enc_08091957_miranda-prorsus_en.html (accessed 20 January 2014). The Case Studies come from film reviews by Peter Malone, http://petermalone.misacor.org.au/tiki-index.php (accessed 9 January 2014).

17 PORTRAYING FORGIVENESS THROUGH DOCUMENTARY FILM DUNCAN FISHER AND JOLYON MITCHELL

Ritualized traditions of forgiveness and reconciliation can be widely discerned within African systems of social justice. These traditions generally pre-date the arrival of Christianity and are employed in various ways by African Christians. In this article, we analyse two documentary films, Rwanda: Living Forgiveness (Agape International, 2005) and Uganda: Ready to Forgive (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, 2008), which focus on different expressions of these ritualized traditions, especially in their Christian iterations. These documentaries are intended mainly for international audiences and their message is that African patterns of forgiveness have much to teach the rest of the Christian world. Both films focus on the practice of forgiveness, one in Rwanda in the wake of the 1994 genocide and the other in northern Uganda following the ravages of the Lord’s Resistance Army. Both have comparatively high production values; the stories they tell are ruggedly moving and indeed harrowing: lips are cut off, people are immolated, and children are marched to death. Both films treat the narrative like many other Christian documentaries about politics, crises, and healing: conflict is followed by resolution and acts of violence are explained through references to supernatural power. Both include interviewees who ascribe the origin of the conflict to an individual’s cooperation with the devil. What is distinctive about these films is their use of Rwandan and northern Ugandan traditions, or folk-mechanisms, for healing the wounds in society. In Rwanda the process is called Gacaca, commonly translated as ‘justice on the grass’, which consists of community-based hearings where locals can become involved as defendants, witnesses, or judges. In some ways Gacaca trials are similar to the northern Ugandan traditional practices for resolving disputes among the Acholi people known as Mato Oput, a ritualised form of reconciliation, which includes ‘drinking bitter

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root herb’ (Drumbl 2007: 144).

Background Rwanda: Living Forgiveness (2005) was directed by Ralf Springhorn and produced by Tom Sommer.1 It was co-produced by German and Swiss production companies (Life House and Visual Productions) and supported by the Swiss charity, Agape International, which, as its name suggests, has a global presence. It cost about 80,000 Swiss Francs to produce. It was two-thirds funded by a Swiss evangelical businessman and the remaining costs were covered by the media budget of a Christian conference in Basel, Switzerland, where it premiered in 2004.2 Some television stations in Switzerland and other European countries then broadcast it. The film won an award in 2005 in the US for best international contribution (Golden Crown Award International Christian Visual Media Association). It was also produced as a DVD in 3 languages, (German, French, and English). The narrator’s deep, rich, and resonant American accent makes it clear that, for the English version at least, there is a North American market in mind. It has been adopted and distributed in the US through Vision Video, a company started by the minister and television producer Ken Curtis, who along with Hollywood producer Dick Ross, produced a range of Christian films including The Cross and the Switchblade (1969). Vision Video also marketed Uganda: Ready to Forgive (2007), a documentary produced, directed, and written by Tim Frakes (with drama re-enactments directed by Jim Quattrocki), who along with a few others filmed in Uganda between 27 September and 7 October 2006. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ECLA), which has produced a broad range of documentaries (e.g., Native Nations: Standing Together for Civil Rights, 2009), funded the production. Uganda: Ready to Forgive was broadcast on NBC affiliate stations in the US between 2 December 2007 and 2 May 2008, and on the Hallmark Channel on 23 December 2007.

1

Our discussion on Rwanda: Living Forgiveness draws on earlier work by Jolyon Mitchell. For more detail on this and other documentaries about the Rwandan genocide and forgiveness, see Mitchell (2012), especially chapter 4. 2 T. Somner, e-mail message to authors, 13 April 2011.

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Historical Context Before examining these two documentaries in detail, it is useful to reflect briefly on the historical and political contexts in which these tales of violence and forgiveness are set. While a number of other documentaries (e.g., Robert Genoud’s 1995 film Rwanda: How History Can Lead to Genocide) put greater emphasis on the importance of understanding historical context,3 Living Forgiveness offers less than 90 seconds of history near the beginning of the film. Viewers are informed that ‘this land of a thousand hills is one of the most densely populated nations in the world’ and it ‘has a turbulent and bloody past’. The narrator then controversially asserts that this is ‘owing to the age-old power struggle between the Hutu and Tutsi tribes, which has lasted over centuries’ and was reinforced by colonial rulers. For some, such as the scriptwriters of this film, the genocide in Rwanda itself arises from the story of ancient ethnicities not very different from each other but made administratively distinct and ultimately toxic to each other by colonial German and Belgian overlords, whose role is also briefly mentioned in Living Forgiveness. These colonisers ensured that the Tutsi held onto the reigns of power during the first half of the twentieth century. Among historians, the increasingly accepted reading of this period of Rwandan history, which is overlooked in Living Forgiveness, is that the ethnic divide became more sharply defined because the colonial rulers and the Catholic missionaries initially tended to favour the Tutsis (the minority in Rwanda) over the Hutus. The two groups are not actually radically separated by history, language, custom, geography, or even DNA. Members of both groups frequently belong to the very same families, a point revealed in the penultimate story of Living Forgiveness in which we encounter a Hutu uncle who refuses to provide shelter for his Tutsi relatives. Although there may be some continuing academic debate over the extent to which the colonial powers created the ethnic divide, rather than simply reinforcing it (see, for example, Cantrell 2007; see also Linden 1977; Longman 2010), there is no doubt that colonial rule did foster division in many ways. For example, as is mentioned in Living Forgiveness and highlighted in many other documentaries, the Belgian authorities introduced identity cards in 1933 that made clear ethnic distinctions between Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa. The film overlooks, however, the fact that during the 1950s French and Belgian colonial patronage, with the support of the Catholic Church, 3

See, for more detail, Mitchell (2012).

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shifted to the Hutu majority, which became increasingly violent toward the Tutsi minority. This local violence, and the rhetoric of violence, arguably corresponds to colonial intrusion, unfairness, and withdrawal. Beginning with the violent overturning of Tutsi power in 1959 and again in 1963, 1970, 1972, 1988, and 1993, increasingly intense eruptions of conflict were already occurring prior to the Rwandan genocide in 1994. The belligerents often characterized these eruptions as wars of extermination, or, at least, wars designed to prevent extermination. Increasingly, during the 1990s, racial stereotypes and fear of the ‘other’ were reiterated and promoted via extremist newspapers (e.g., Kangura, and the less wellknown La Medaille Nyiramacibiri, Ijambo and Umurwanashyaka) and radio broadcasts (on RTLM, Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines) (see Mitchell 2007b). Tutsis were characterised as ‘tall and lean’ aristocrats, supposedly finding their origins in Ethiopia and descending from cattle-owners, whereas Hutu ancestors were all peasant cultivators and had been oppressed in the past by their Tutsi overlords. In these and many other public contexts, Tutsis were caricatured, vilified, and demonized. To understand what happened in 1994, it is important to go beyond the spiritual categories and compressed historical comments provided by Rwanda: Living Forgiveness, and also to distinguish between the war and the genocide. In 1990 the largely Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) invaded from Uganda, and after initial successes, they were turned back by troops loyal to the rule of the Hutu president, Juvénal Habyarimana. An RPF-led insurgency followed that only ended with the Arusha peace accords in 1993. The shooting down of the president’s French jet on 6 April 1994 shattered the fragile and incomplete peace. In the 100 days that followed, war raged between the two comparatively well-trained armies. Behind this fighting, about 800,000 men, women, and children, mostly Tutsis or moderate Hutus, were murdered by their neighbours and local militias (interahamwe) in the last genocide of the twentieth century – a rate of killing that even the Nazis never matched. Reprisals, pogroms, pre-emptive strikes, and an ever-sprawling diaspora have meant that related and separate conflicts continue outside Rwanda, well into Congo, Burundi, and Uganda. As we briefly learn from Uganda: Ready to Forgive, the nation of Uganda, which gained independence from the British in 1962, has avoided a full-scale genocide; however, since 1987, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) led by Joseph Kony has been fighting the Ugandan government of Yoweri Museveni. While the film makes clear that the fighting in Northern Uganda has been marked by atrocities on both sides, the LRA have been particularly brutal with their abductions of children, savage mutilations, rapes, and killings.

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The region has not been helped by dishonest governance at home and abroad: Robert Mugabe, the presidential dictator of Zimbabwe, talked for a while of sending his army against the Tutsis in Congo (Chan 2003: 136), where diamond mines are located. All in all, there has accrued a history of local feuds, land-grabs, and overlying wars of astonishing scale. Congo alone, it is well to remember, is the size of Western Europe, and it should be emphasised that the borderlands of Rwanda are but one area of conflict. The complexity of the conflicts possibly now rivals anything in the Middle East and the intensity is heartbreaking. During the second war in Congo (1998–2003), for example, over 3.8 million people died, largely of starvation and disease. For the most part, these conflicts remain outside of Western news frames.4 The fact that Uganda: Ready to Forgive offers some detail on the tactics of the LRA sets it apart from mainstream news organisation agendas. The makers of the Rwanda and Uganda documentaries spend relatively little script time on politics and history, or the troublesome legacy of colonial regimes; instead, the filmmakers frame the killing and cruelty primarily through the use of spiritual categories. The script is almost entirely apolitical, touching only on rudimentary history and focusing mainly on how the interviewees, who lived through the conflict, now explore the nature and function of forgiveness. Historical context is therefore largely, though not completely, absent. This approach implies that disaster struck when people turned from Christ to the devil and that restoration is now occurring because people are renouncing the devil and returning to Christ.5 This restoration is neither an institutional or political undertaking nor a national revival accompanied by ceremony and sacraments; its primary focus is on the individual, or sometimes the local community. The priority is on the conversion of the individual who then actively shares his or her commitment with others. Biblical authority, which is thought to be intelligible to any believer, is the framework within which restoration works out practically. Ultimately, it is union with the risen Christ that assures personal, communal, and national healing. These beliefs represent some of the pillars of faith for many of the Christians portrayed in these two documentaries. With the obvious exception of Ethiopia, Christianity in East Africa is only a little over a century old, though it has grown rapidly. Christianity was largely introduced by Catholic White Fathers and the Anglican Church Missionary Society in the 1870s and 1880s (see Hastings 1994: 4

See Mitchell (2007a), especially Chapters 1 and 2. This claim resonates with the research of Nick Godfrey on Anglican survivors of the genocide. See Godfrey (2010: 249-67). 5

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253-55; 298). Other Catholic groups like the Mill Hill priests and sisters arrived to reinforce the White Fathers from the turn of the century onwards. The Anglican missionary effort profited considerably from the East African or Balokole (a Luganda word meaning ‘The Saved People’) revival movement that began in the 1930s, as did other Protestant denominations that established themselves in the twentieth century, during which schismatic independent churches set up as well. Christianity caused some friction in the first generation, but, over time, became overwhelmingly successful (see Isichei 1995). By 1990, 90% of Rwandans and 80% of Ugandans identified themselves to census-takers as Christian. By 2007 in Uganda, ‘approximately 85% of the population’ of 28.1 million people are Christian, with about 42% Catholic, 36% Anglican and 12% Muslim.6 In Rwanda, according to the Rwandan Government in 2006, over 56% are Catholic, 26% Protestant and 4% Muslim, of a population of about 9 million people. There are increasing numbers of Pentecostal groups and Muslims in both countries with smaller numbers of followers of indigenous beliefs.7 The interviewees in both films tend to be Protestant, which may be by design. Since 1994 there have been accusations and legal proceedings against some Catholic clergy concerning their complicity in the genocide in Rwanda. As the de facto state religion, the Church should have been the principal force for peace, say critics. Although their original aim may have been to Christianise Rwanda, by seeking to hold onto power and work closely with the colonisers, and subsequently with the Tutsi rulers and the post-1959 Hutu regime, the leaders of the Catholic (and other) churches contributed to an environment in which genocide could take place (see Rittner, et al. 2004: 158–60). Perhaps it is not only the theology of the producers and backers but also the possibility of a political calculus within those alliances that explains the films’ editorial slant away from Catholics, just as it slants away from political or historical discussion of the conflict.

Rwanda: Living Forgiveness At the centre of Rwanda: Living Forgiveness are several convicted prisoners who upon release return to their communities and discover, to their surprise, that they are accepted and forgiven. While the trauma is not 6

See ‘Uganda: International Religious Freedom Report, 2007’, http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/irf/2007/90126.htm (accessed 19 July 2011). 7 See ‘Rwanda: International Religious Freedom Report, 2007’, http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/irf/2007/90115.htm (accessed 19 July 2011).

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denied, there is a definite movement towards hope and closure. This is most clearly seen in the final sequence, which oscillates between a perpetrator, Kamuzinzi, and a survivor, Jean-Claude. Kamuzinzi describes how he heard on the radio that the president’s plane had been shot down by Tutsis, that he was ‘required to separate the wheat from the tares’, and how the authorities then furnished them with machetes and other weapons to eradicate the Tutsis. Kamuzinzi and others arrested and killed people at Lake Kivu on 7 April 1994. This testimony of violence juxtaposes with Jean-Claude’s description of losing members of his family. From talking heads to a roaring motorbike, we are then shown them driving together: the narrator steps in, explaining that Kamuzinzi and Jean-Claude, once sworn enemies, now ‘relentlessly’ tour the country preaching forgiveness and restoration in churches and remote places. What has brought about this extraordinary change? Throughout, Kamuzinzi’s words are translated into English, spoken with a strong North American accent: ‘In prison I heard the word of God. I deeply regretted what I had done. I confessed everything’. Even though Kamuzinzi had killed fourteen members of Jean-Claude’s family, Jean-Claude forgave him, believing that ‘we should not judge him, since it’s clear that evil forces were at work within him’. The film reveals how Jean-Claude believes that he is called ‘to preach to perpetrators’. He believes that the combination of telling his own story of forgiving those who killed his family and showing The Jesus Film (1979) is deeply moving for his listeners. Jean-Claude believes that when people hear his story they realise that they too must forgive. The stated result for Kamuzinzi is that ‘I feel genuine peace. People accept me. They have forgiven me. Now I will have to face Gacaca justice, where I will have the opportunity to confess my guilt openly. I have been forgiven, which is why I can live in peace with people’. At the climax of the documentary we see them both outside, dancing and singing praise songs together in front of a rapidly assembled film screen. The final shots of the documentary depict a gathered crowd in the semi-darkness viewing The Jesus Film, the opening scene of which shows Jesus welcoming the tax collector Zacchaeus to come down from his tree (Luke 19:1–10). The style of worship and teaching in this sequence are instantly recognizable as a form of evangelistic outreach. They are shown in this documentary using The Jesus Film (1979), a project promoted and largely funded by Campus Crusade for Christ, to reinforce the message of forgiveness.8 This is an outdoor screening, which appears to have been 8

On The Jesus Film see Turner (2008: 181-97).

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preceded by singing and preaching. It is striking how several figures in this film take on the role of itinerant preacher, visiting healer and evangelist, through telling their own traumatic and troubling stories. Interestingly, neither is there is any formal discussion of reward in the afterlife, anywhere in the film, save one wish by Jean-Claude that he hopes the old tormentors make it to heaven too. The film also affirms that it is nearly impossible to judge the killers, led as they were ‘by an evil spirit’. This simple idea is not, however, simple-minded: in a context where evil spirits are understood to be real, it is a logical explanation for what drove neighbours to commit acts of apparent madness. Understanding brokenness in this way certainly simplifies the prospect of, if not the reality of, reconciliation. It may be because forgiveness is such a small-scale affair that the film includes no sacramental discussion of absolution at all, although not every religion has a sacramental expression of forgiveness. In general, reference to liturgy is almost completely absent, even in Anglican settings. This is not surprising given the dominant tradition of the Rwanda Mission of the CMS (Church Missionary Society), which was influenced by extremely low church Anglicanism as found at the Keswick convention and at the CICCU (Cambridge Intercollegiate Christian Union). There is an informality to the whole ecclesial undertaking that, in fact, would look familiar to many evangelical Protestants. In summary, forgiveness appears to function here on the same personal level as society itself. These people – Hutus and Tutsi often in the same family – ‘are dear to me’, we are told by one woman. It is worth considering why there is no language of martyrdom in the film: is it because there is no real separation between people in these individuals’ hearts, or is it because the government forbids the public use of ethnic categories? The film also largely overlooks how the government is attempting to drive forward a number of social transformations. There are several linguistic transformations currently under way in Rwanda. Originally, Kinyarwanda and French dominated but with an influx of an estimated 800,000 people in the years following the genocide, many from Anglophone Africa, English has become the third official language. English is increasingly the language of government and trade, which ensures more openings for North American or European evangelistic projects with which this film resonates. Translation from Kinyarwanda into a European language, such as English, inevitably changes the precise meaning of what is being expressed by interviewees and witnesses. Almost inevitably categories blur in this short film. Reconciliation between neighbours comes through prayer and personal forgiveness,

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reconciliation workshops, and the local Gacaca system. Little film time is given to explaining the Gacaca system of community justice in Rwanda, which forms the basis of the local judicial system set up to try people accused of atrocities in 1994 (see Clark 2010; Corey and Joireman 2004: 73-89). The Gacaca method of restorative justice attempts to heal disruptions in society and move people’s lives forward and together. The word Gacaca literally refers to grass that is cut and clean. In this restorative system, the centre of the process traditionally lies in the village. Judges, in panels of nine, are local elders chosen for their integrity; this court has the authority to imprison but may not condemn anyone to death. The process in Rwanda is continuing to evolve. Proceedings are public, interactive, fairly free in form, and encourage reconciliation between accused and accusers. Above all, it is a collaborative exercise aimed at the restoration of order. The film implies that if someone comes before the court in a spirit of contrition, and if he (they are all male in this film) confesses and asks forgiveness from those he has hurt, and if the victims are in attendance, granting forgiveness is mandatory. The narrator declares that ‘whoever confesses his guilt here can expect not to be punished’. Although this is not strictly accurate, perpetrators may receive a less severe sentence. The documentary does not dwell on the complexities and difficulties of this system, nor does it explore issues such as when the killers of one’s family return to live as neighbours, as other filmmakers like Anne Aghion have done.9 By contrast, Living Forgiveness focuses only on the dramatic story of forgiveness. Overall, Rwanda: Living Forgiveness divides viewers and critics. Some have found it moving: one viewer in Florida wrote, ‘What took my breath away was the ability of these particular victims of unspeakable horror and betrayal to forgive the very people who slaughtered their families and children. The bravery of these loving souls will stay with me forever’.10 For others the lack of historical context, the spiritualizing of the genocide, and the desire to reflect positive and complete closure, like a Hollywood movie rooted in Christian faith, has been extremely problematic. One Canadian viewer wrote, ‘I was not impressed with this 9

For example, Anne Aghion’s four films on Gacaca justice: Gacaca, Living Together Again in Rwanda? (2002), In Rwanda We Say … The Family That Does Not Speak Dies (2004), The Notebooks of Memory (2009), and My Neighbor, My Killer (2009). These are discussed more detail in Mitchell (2007a), Chapter 4. 10 Amazon, ‘Customer Reviews: Rwanda: Living Forgiveness’, http://www.amazon.com/Rwanda-Living-Forgiveness/dp/B000CR5EES (accessed 7 July 2011).

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film, clearly presented from an evangelical perspective’.11 They are particularly critical of how ‘several victims talk about the “devil” entering the hearts of the Hutu. As long as the Devil is blamed for this appalling genocide, how much progress is really made – for, in the end, no human responsibility is actually taken for it’.12 For this viewer, ‘the reconciliation that occurs seems hollow and untrustworthy’.13 These contrasting responses illustrate how a film can become a mirror reflecting the presuppositions and beliefs of the viewers themselves.

Uganda: Ready to Forgive The Rwanda documentary (27 minutes) differs from the Uganda documentary (60 minutes) not only because it is half the length and focuses on three particular stories of forgiveness, but also because it uses an off-screen narrator. By contrast, in Uganda: Ready to Forgive, Immaculée Ilibagiza, one of Rwanda’s best-known survivors of the genocide, hosts the film. The result is that the tales of forgiveness from Northern Uganda are connected to the genocide in Rwanda. The film briefly introduces her by showing how Immaculée hid in a tiny, three-by-four foot bathroom with seven others for ninety-one days. Immaculée’s Catholicism, her praying of the rosary while in hiding, is not mentioned. She does however provide a bridge into the world of Uganda by asserting that ‘Rwandans are not the only people to suffer and forgive’. Uganda: Ready to Forgive largely overlooks background detail, focusing more on dramatic incidents than on historical context. The historical details that emerge from this documentary come from stories about the strange, incoherent, and cruel campaign of Joseph Kony, the mystic of unclear or unspoken ambitions, and his ‘Lord’s Resistance Army’ (LRA) of fanatics and kidnapped children (see Doom and Vlassenroot 1999: 5-36; Ward 2001: 187-221). Established in 1987 in Northern Uganda, the LRA (also known as the Lord’s Resistance Movement), is infamous for its atrocities against local populations in the Acholi region. One of the difficulties with Kony is that he does not articulate his aims well or consistently, which makes him difficult to negotiate with. Like his ‘army’ of followers he appears to be driven by a 11

Ibid. Ibid. 13 See R. Doom and K. Vlassenroot, ‘The Lord’s Resistance Army in Northern Uganda’, African Affairs 98:390 (Jan. 1999), 5-36; and K. Ward, ‘“The armies of the Lord”: Christianity, rebels and the state in Northern Uganda, 1986-1999’, Journal of Religion in Africa 31:2 (May 2001), 187-221. 12

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syncretistic set of beliefs. It is possible that Kony, having failed to topple the government in Kampala, is primarily concerned with survival. His clearest expressed wish is to rule Uganda in accordance with the Ten Commandments; to this end, his followers abduct, rape, enslave, maim, and kill by the thousands. Viewers learn that they have displaced some two million people, mostly among the Acholi people, the tribal group of Kony and most of the LRF, in the north near Sudan. Almost everyone in his home patch is a refugee or an ‘internally displaced person’ (IDP), which is worse because an IDP lacks the refugee’s usual rights of sanctuary and an income. We are shown IDP camps where lack of water, malaria, TB, and cholera continue to claim lives. We learn that the conflict is mostly internecine, between Acholi brothers, which makes it all the more obscene in local eyes. Immaculée’s script is dramatic: ‘Forgiving the rebels seems impossible. Reconciliation appears hopeless’, she says. Nevertheless, ‘the nation is longing for peace’. Forgiveness and reconciliation are on ‘the hearts, minds and lips of the Acholi people’; some of them ‘combine the Christian teaching of turning the other cheek’ with a tested traditional practice of Mato Oput. Mato Oput, as it is known in Uganda, is an Acholi tradition of asking and receiving mandatory forgiveness. The film reveals how traditionally the mechanism is very well laid out. According to local Anglican bishop emeritus Ochola, if a criminal (read: sinner) accepts responsibility, he is guaranteed forgiveness from the victim (more to the point, from the ‘victim community’). Rather than following a western judicial paradigm in which the establishment of truth precedes justice, the Mato Oput paradigm moves from truth to mercy, and only from there to justice, then to peace, restoration, and finally transformation. Ochala argues that this paradigm is biblical; it is Christian, after all, to ‘focus not on the crime but on religion’. The key, Ochola says, is to imagine the connection between people restored. In the West such a connection is not fundamental to the concept of society; this is so in spite of the Christian principle, famously expressed by John Donne, that no human being is an island, naturally separate from others. If we forgive, we restore unity, and we are happy again; if we do not forgive, we will not – we cannot – know peace. In the West, the tendency might actually be to insist on the opposite: that one first causes peace to happen, and then, once things are quiet, one can consider forgiveness (see Volf 1996; Jones 1995). With God’s help the LRA will ‘come back’ to unity with the people from whom they separated. Outsiders have arrived, offering to set up a United Nations ‘international criminal court’ (ICC) alliance, in the manner of the Nuremburg, Hague, or

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Arusha trials. The Acholi feel that this would be a big mistake. Such a thing would actually impede the peace process. Let it be done through Mato Oput, they say through this film, and it will be done lastingly. Does this obviate legal action in the usual sense? Of course not. As of this writing, Ugandans are encouraging parliamentary action to embed the traditional, restorative paradigm in constitutional law, to guarantee its primacy if and when outsiders intervene with their own, foreign ideas of legal redress. If the film is any evidence, Mato Oput shows signs of working, too. In the 2006 ceasefire talks, LRA men made tours of the refugee camps and asked for forgiveness. They used worldly language, like ‘implementation protocol’, but they came and asked, in possibly real contrition. Even Kony wants forgiveness, they said. Cleave to Oput and not the ICC mandate, they promised, and he will emerge from the bush in peace. If it does work, say the Acholi, it will be a big lesson for the world. There has been no retribution, so far, they point out. If no forgiveness is promised, they say, Kony will not sign a ceasefire. ‘Of course not’, cynics are sure to say. But then, what is wrong with promising forgiveness? Fear keeps people apart and, for the Acholi, there has been fear enough. From several of the film’s interviewees emerges the insight that anger only perpetuates pain. The Acholi admonish others to learn this truth from their story of anger, sickness, and waste. Immaculée suggests that people who have known enough pain always come to forgiveness – it is inevitable. It is doubly urgent in the case of the Lord’s Resistance Army: these are brothers and sisters, family, who were led by the devil. With God the end of pain is inevitable because restoration is inevitable. People who believe in Christ the Reconciler must also reconcile. Does one adopt peace today and tomorrow take his neighbour to court? No. This is justice restorative and transformative: becoming friends again means becoming new persons in Christ.

Conclusion The hopefulness of this language in Rwanda and Uganda is amplified by what has gone before. Both documentaries illustrate the power of providing a simplified narrative, a neat sense of closure and restrained speech. Victims describe in graphic detail how they or their closest relatives suffered at the hands of the interahamwe, their neighbours, or the Lord’s Resistance Army. It would not be surprising for these accounts to be followed by expressions of anger and yearnings for revenge; instead, viewers are presented again and again with words redolent of forgiveness.

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These words are reinforced, especially in the film about Rwanda, with spontaneous music, accompanied and amplified, both outside on the grass and inside a hanger-like church. The music runs all through Rwanda: Living Forgiveness, both connecting scenes and adding drama. It has the effect of connecting the narrative and on screen ‘testimonies’ with acts of worship. This adds another layer to both films and contrasts with the more uncritical discussions of justice and forgiveness. Rwanda: Living Forgiveness offers only a sketchy account of Gacaca, and Uganda: Ready to Forgive describes Mato Oput only as a process of establishing truth, mercy, justice, peace, restoration and transformation (in that order). Neither film actually shows the village Gacaca gathering nor Mato Oput rituals at work, but they do draw these practices into a larger narrative about forgiveness. The filmmakers have appropriated and used these practices for a particular rhetorical purpose: to show how forgiveness is possible even after unimaginable cruelties. Gacaca and Mato Oput have been transformed from practices intended to bring about restorative justice into visual synonyms for forgiveness. The result is that simplified forms of both Gacaca and Mato Oput are celebrated in both films. It is hard to find American or European analogues to this, though one wonders if the same kind of appropriation and transformation of restorative justice existed in iterations and later interpretations of African-American spirituality, for example, in the generation of Martin Luther King, Jr. In any case, it is noteworthy how these practices, which derive from central East African local traditions, have made their way into documentaries largely for American and European Christians, where they are portrayed as legitimate, if foreign, features of Christianity.

References Barlet, O. (2001) African Cinemas: Decolonizing the Gaze, London: Zed. Bickford-Smith, V. and Mendelsohn, R. (2007) Black and White in Colour: African History on Screen, Oxford: James Currey. Clark, P. (2010) The Gacaca Courts, Post-genocide Justice and Reconciliation in Rwanda: Justice without Lawyers, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Corey, A. and Joireman, S. (2004) ‘Retributive Justice: the Gacaca Courts in Rwanda’, African Affairs, 103, 73-89. Corner, J. (1996) The Art of Record: A Critical Introduction to Documentary, New York: Manchester University Press. Doom, R. and Vlassenroot, K. (1999) ‘The Lord’s Resistance Army in

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Northern Uganda’, African Affairs 98:390 (January), 5-36. Drumbl, M.A. (2007) Atrocity, Punishment, and International Law, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harrow, W. H. (2007) Postcolonial African Cinema: From Political Engagement to Postmodernism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hastings, A. (1994) The Church in Africa, 1450 – 1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Isichei, E. (1995) A History of Christianity in Africa: From Antiquity to the Present, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Godfrey, N. (2010) ‘Anglican Revivalists and the Rwandan Genocide: Survivors’ Narratives of Divine Intervention’ in K. Ward and E. WildWood (eds.), The East African Revival: History and Legacies, Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 249-67. Gregory, J.L. (1995) Embodying Forgiveness: A Theological Analysis, Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans. Linden, I. (1977) Church and Revolution in Rwanda, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Longman, T. (2010) Christianity and Genocide in Rwanda, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mitchell, J. (2007a) Media Violence and Christian Ethics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. (2012) Promoting Peace, Inciting Violence: The Role of Religion and Media. London and New York: Routledge. —. (2007b) ‘Remembering the Rwandan Genocide: Reconsidering the Role of Local and Global Media.’ Global Media Journal, 39 (Autumn). http://lass.calumet.purdue.edu/cca/gmj/fa07/gmj-fa07mitchell.htm (accessed 7 July 2011). Rittner, C., Roth, J.K. and Whitworth, W. (eds) (2004), Genocide in Rwanda: Complicity of the Churches? St Paul: Paragon. Shaka, F.O. (2004) Modernity and the African Cinema, Trenton and Asmara: Africa World Press. Shohat, E. and Stam R. (1994) Unthinking Eurocentrism; Multiculturalism and the Media, New York: Routledge. Thackway, M. (2003) Africa Shoots Back: Alternative Perspectives in Sub-Saharan Francophone African Film, Oxford: James Curry and Cape Town: David Philip. Thompson, A. (ed) (2007) The Media and the Rwanda Genocide. London: Pluto. Volf, M. (1996) Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation, Nashville: Abingdon Press.

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Ward, K. (2001) ‘“The armies of the Lord”: Christianity, rebels and the state in Northern Uganda, 1986-1999’, Journal of Religion in Africa, 31:2 (May), 187-221.



18 VALLEYS OF HOPE AND DESPAIR: PEACE BUILDING THROUGH INDEPENDENT ENVIRONMENTAL DOCUMENTARIES JOSEPHA IVANKA WESSELS

This paper is written within the framework of the project ‘Hydropolitics in the Jordan River Basin’, as part of the Middle East in the Contemporary World programme at Lund University, Sweden. In 2009, working as a freelance documentary filmmaker, I started to film in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories for the development of a documentary project about the Jordan River. On one of these occasions, I met with Palestinian villagers in Wadi Fukin working together with Israeli citizens of the neighboring village of Tsur Haddasah inside Israel proper, which is within the 1967-borders. Wadi Fukin is part of a wider ecological peace building project run by the regional NGO of Friends of the Earth Middle East, called Good Water Neighbors (FoEME 2010). The self-funded research and development trips resulted in a documentary called Valley of Hope and Despair of which a shortened version was broadcast worldwide at Al Jazeera English in November 20101. This paper describes the initial encounter with the people and locations, the experiences and challenges of filming in a protracted conflict zone, the importance of the use of film for conveying realities of conflict & peace building and how environmental filmmaking can contribute to new understandings and an awareness of ecological peace building. Furthermore, the paper will discuss the impact and the audience feedback during the outreach and distribution process, both in Europe, on worldwide television and during the community screening tour. The aim of these screenings was to inform, assist people and policy makers to

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Available to watch on-line at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTa4JARwkyY

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engage in a debate about environmental dimensions of armed conflict and to contribute to processes of building a just and ecological peace. Environmental effects and causes to armed conflict and the potential of a shared environment for peace building is a relatively under researched area in peace and conflict studies. The empirical body at local level is slim. However, in each conflict on our planet, environmental aspects and causes can be identified and often they are an integral part of a plethora of political, psychological, cultural and territorial dimensions that lead to armed conflicts. This paper looks at the use of environmental documentary film as a peace-building tool, as well as the emotional and political consequences of filming in a hostile environment on both sides of the divide. The paper concludes with an evaluation on the possible impact of environmental filmmaking for global change, environmental justice, peace and reconciliation.

Ecological peace building: environment, democracy and peace The overwhelming common denominator in all six basins in the Middle East - the Euphrates, the Tigris, the Jordan, the Nile, the Litani and the Orontes - is the potential of water body management to foster peace and democratic stability in the region (Amery & Wolf 2000; Wessels 2009). Environmental politics and political ecology are areas of social research investigating the environmental dimensions to armed and unarmed conflicts. The basic research question in political ecology looks at who plays a role in resource extraction and maintenance in an environment where people interact at different levels between which various power relations exist (Dietz 1996). All armed conflicts have environmental dimensions whether it is the impact of bombing campaigns leading to soil pollution and demolishment of natural heritage and infrastructure, to the root cause for colonization and the competition over natural resources.

The divinity of nature, reaching paradise Environmentalism can be seen as a potential principle of finding common ground in both interfaith peace building efforts and environmental activism in civil society with NGOs like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth (FoEME 2008; Schoenfeld 2011). Looking at environmentalism in religion, we can distinguish the common ground of perceiving nature as divine and God given (Tucker 1999). God as universal power has created nature and therefore our environment can be regarded as sacred and

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divine. Next to many nature religions throughout the world, which regard nature as the embodiment of divinity, sacredness and spiritual power, these principles can also be traced back in Islam, Judaism and Christianity, the three main religions in the Middle East and North Africa. This type of holistic approach is often neglected or regarded as a lower priority in conventional and liberal peace building efforts. The liberal peace is a discourse, framework and structure, with a specific ontology and methodology. Its projected reform of governance entails a communicative strategy on which depends its viability and legitimacy with its recipients, both at a social and a state level. It cannot be achieved without significant resources (Richmond 2008: 20)

Liberal and neoliberal peace building, influenced by rational choice theory and a Western-centric approach to peace, often focuses on economic and state building benefits, the victor’s peace, the institutional peace, the constitutional peace and the civil peace and the goal of democratic state building (Richmond 2010; Rittberger 2008) and is much less concerned with sustainable environmental development or ecosystem services. Ecological peace building is outside of the spotlights of mainstream media covering international conventional peace building initiatives. Ecological peace building is based on a more holistic approach to peacemaking; for this approach of peace building, there are no ‘war heroes’, there are ‘peace heroes’ (Amery 2000; FoEME 2008; Wessels 2009). Whilst liberal peace building and rational choice tend to ignore biological, psychological, cultural and sociological dimensions of violence and conflict, ecological peace building gives room for new thinking in peace building, for developing more holistic and cognitive theories on the relationships between Humanity & Nature in a changing global ecosystem. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz’ theories of culture, the ‘dreamed-of order’ and his methods of thick description, provide an analytical framework to apply in peace & conflict research. Geertz defined culture as ‘a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life’ (Geertz 1973). When local cultures, religions or ideologies of a particular society are heavily influenced by the worship of nature and the ‘dreamed-of order’ of a ‘human ecological paradise’, there is a suggested tendency of members and religious leaders of that society to work together to reach that ecological paradise. This perceived human ecological paradise could form common ground between environmentalists and farmers sharing an ecosystem. Any destruction to that perceived natural environment is considered a threat and unites those

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opposed to this threat in their struggle to preserve the environment. This is the core principle of ecological peace building. Thick descriptions of specific case studies of ecological peace building provide an insight in the human cognitive processes of peace building. Our shared environment is a positive incentive for enemies to cooperate to achieve the ‘dreamed-of order’ of an ecosystem whereby human beings have the right to healthy and sustainable environment, of being at peace with nature, with the divine, which constitutes a process of healing and the achievement of an almost religious ‘inner-peace’. Geertz’ symbolic anthropology, where the role of symbols in constructing culture and public meaning is emphasized, describes the ‘dreamed-of order’ (Geertz 1973). Ecological peace building is based on the principle that a balanced human ecosystem with fair distribution of natural resources leads to a societal order where peace, democracy and environmental awareness provide the pillars for sustainable human development and peace.

Global environmental mobilization and cooperation The concept of transnational environmental mobilization and cooperation emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s when NGOs such as Greenpeace, World Wildlife Fund and Friends of the Earth were formed (Schoenfeld 2011). In these years, the United Nations Environment Programme was formed. Academics, policy institutes and international agencies developed a body of interdisciplinary literature devoted to the role of the environment for sustainable development and mechanisms of collective action related to the management and governance of natural resource commons (Olson 1965; Ostrom 1990). The Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 brought together many thinkers and practitioners which in turn lead to a commitment of world leaders to a comprehensive programme of environmental concerns, not in the least sustainable water supply and sanitation services (Schoenfeld 2011; Wessels 2008) and thinking emerged for the potential of environmental peace building that promotes dialogue between hostile states. This thinking reached the eastern Mediterranean by the end of the 80s and in 1991 the framing of Eastern Mediterranean environmental peace building began, triggered by the Madrid conference sponsored by the United States and the Soviet Union and involving Israel, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and the Palestine Liberation Organization (Schoenfeld 2011). The Israeli-Palestinian Declaration of Principles – DOP – that were produced during the back-channel negotiations included environmental peace building framed as an opportunity, based on cooperation in water, energy,

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and environmental protection (Schoenfeld 2011). However as the ongoing peace negotiations stalled and eventually failed, the environmental provisions and dimensions of the Interim Agreement were not implemented and it led to a skewed and asymmetrical power relationship between the parties, particularly on issues of water and pollution (Jägerskog 2009; Schoenfeld 2011; Selby 2005; Zeitoun 2008). Despite its current failure at political level, environmental peace building and its frame, still resonates with a small and loose network of peace activists, environmental activists, professionals and academics (Schoenfeld 2011). In the following paragraphs, I will share an example of how the remaining sentiments for local environmental peace building are being implemented at local level in Palestine and Israel, despite the deadlock of the political situation at the higher peace negotiation level.

Wadi Fukin, shedding a tear for nature The following paragraphs will give a thick description of a specific case study of environmental peace building and the use of documentary film. Wadi Fukin is a Palestinian village located in Area C2 with a population of 1322 inhabitants and forms part of the group of West Bethlehem Villages (WorldBank 2012; Wessels 2015). The West Bethlehem Villages face severe environmental, social and public health problems due to the pollution of springs by untreated wastewater, the deterioration of the water supply system and poor sanitation infrastructure (WorldBank 2012; Wessels 2015). In my recent article for the International Journal of Environmental Studies (IJES), I have described the village of Wadi Fukin as follows; The area and valley where the village of Wadi Fukin is located, 9.4 km west of Bethlehem City, are considered among the best-preserved natural heritage sites in the Occupied West Bank. Traditional farming practices are still being practised. The landscape is made up of very old terraces, which surround the village. The terraces of Wadi Fukin comprise dry stone retaining walls, bushy vegetation and soil. The eight springs of Wadi Fukin are used mainly for agricultural purposes. Change in land use, climate change and droughts have impacted the springs and all of them are polluted because of wastewater leaking into the local aquifer from both

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Under the Oslo Interim Agreement the Occupied Westbank is divided in Area A, B and C. Area A: Full Palestinian civil and security control Area B: Full Palestinian civil control and joint Israeli- Palestinian security control͒ Area C: Full Israeli control over security, planning and construction. Source: (OCHA-oPt 2011)

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cesspits in the village and waste water overflow from the nearby Israeli settlement of Bitar Illit. While the construction of Bitar Illit continues, the Palestinian villagers of Wadi Fukin face land confiscation orders and building demolition orders by the Israeli civil administration for building of roads and settlement houses. Bitar Illit is an ultra-orthodox settlement where strict rules apply for dress code of women and most male inhabitants are religious students at the local yeshivas or Jewish schools. Farmers in Wadi Fukin face regular settler violence and harassment in their garden; and Israeli soldiers come and swim in their irrigation pools. Through the Israeli occupation forces’ restrictions on mobility of Palestinian villagers in the West Bethlehem villages, the agricultural production is becoming increasingly marginalized (Wessels 2015:14).

Wadi Fukin is part of the ‘Good Water Neighbors project’, which was implemented by the regional NGO Friends of the Earth – Middle East/ECOPEACE: Initially eleven Israeli, Palestinian, and Jordanian communities were selected to participate in Phase I of the project from 2001 to 2005. The project has successfully been expanded to seventeen communities. Each community is partnered with a neighboring community on the other side of the border/political divide to work on common water issues. On the local level, GWN works with community members to improve their water situation through education and awareness activities, and urban development projects (FoEME 2008: 2).

Research, story development and the challenges of raising funds for environmental documentaries Through contact established with the regional NGO Friends of the Earth Middle East/ECOPEACE, the only environmental organization with offices in Tel Aviv, Bethlehem and Amman, I had heard about their brave initiatives of ecological peace building across national divides in the Lower Jordan River Basin. Staff of FoEME/ECOPEACE told me stories from the 25 villages that are part of their Good Water Neighbors project, in which villages and towns across the borders are being connected through common water challenges (FoEME 2008). This is how I came across the story of the village of Wadi Fukin, as being part of the FoEME/ECOPEACE project and I initially started filming in the village to collect water stories from the ground to eventually develop it into a potential film project proposal on the Jordan River Basin. The highlight

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came when FoEME/ECOPEACE organized a visit of the Elders3 to Wadi Fukin and I was given permission to film the event. High profile world leaders like Jimmy Carter, Desmond Tutu and Gro Brundlandt were scheduled to visit Wadi Fukin in a public awareness raising campaign organized by FoEME/ECOPEACE. Although I had not secured any funding, I booked my flight from Europe, investing in the trip myself. With the collected footage from various locations, I put together a trailer for a proposal of a film and web-documentary about the Jordan River called Share The Drop. Despite fundraising efforts with various European broadcasters, NGOs and media organizations, I failed to raise any further funds to be able to produce this project. However, some positive developments emerged when after my pitch of several stories about pollution in the Occupied West bank and in particular of Wadi Fukin, my idea attracted the attention of a producer of the Al Jazeera English ‘Witness’ Documentary Series, who had broadcast a film directed by me before. She proposed to accept the story of Wadi Fukin as a documentary film proposal for broadcast. After several months of waiting for approval from Al Jazeera general management in Doha, I finally did receive some funds to produce a 23-minute documentary in May 2010. This resulted in the film, Valleys of Hope and Despair for which production started in July 2010, when I visited Palestine again, this time not self-funded and for a much longer period to shoot material for the Valleys of Hope and Despair film.

Challenges of production and filming on hostile locations This paragraph will deal with the various challenges of production and filming at locations, which are divided by a protracted armed conflict.

Mobility As a foreign traveller to the Palestinian territories of the occupied West Bank, you can only enter through Israeli border controls over land from Jordan or by air through Tel Aviv Ben Gurion airport. As a Dutch citizen, I did not personally experience any major hassles at the border controls except from a few awkward repetitive security questions, long waits and thorough checks of my luggage. However, you do have to be strategically

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the Elders is an independent group of global leaders who work together for peace and human rights www.theelders.org

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silent and I never mentiooned to Israeli border offiicials that I was, w apart from Tel Avviv and Jerusaalem, also trav velling to the P Palestinian terrritories.

Connectin ng with the people p and interviewees, i , behind the scenes After I receeived approvall and acceptan nce for produuction from Al A Jazeera English, I haad productionn funds to put together a relliable crew att location. I was lucky to find an excellent Palestinian productiion assistant from f Beit Sahour and a Swiss-Israeeli camera assistant from T Tel Aviv who o did not mind workinng together evven though co oming from bboth sides of the t divide Israel-Palesttine.

Figure 1 Ourr Dutch-Palestinnian-Israeli film m crew with thhe film’s protag gonist and his wife in W Wadi Fukin

With our sm mall but effecctive female-o only crew wee were able to o film on both sides and communnicate with local people in their ow wn native language, eiither Hebrew or Arabic. Th his gave our crrew access to all areas, including thhe ultraorthodoox religious illlegal settlemeent of Bitar Illit. Connectiing with the people p of Wad di Fukin and T Tsur Hadassah h was not difficult. Wiith a previous experience off visiting bothh communitiess with the NGO Friendds of the Earrth Middle Eaast during thee visit of the Elders in 2009, our IIsraeli camerra assistant, who had woorked previou usly with

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FoEME/ECOPEACE as a student and the Palestinian production assistant, we could build up a good rapport with both the Israeli and the Palestinian protagonists of the film. Finding someone to interview and talk to in Tsur Hadassah was also not so difficult as the group of activists working with villagers of Wadi Fukin is quite well known and open to any media to tell their story.

Trust and suspicion One of the main challenges we faced whilst filming on both sides of the divide is gaining trust of people. For example, in Wadi Fukin there are some villagers with strong anti-normalization sentiments who oppose any contact with Israelis. These villagers for example oppose the Good Water Neighbors project and do not trust anyone who either are in touch with Israelis or connected to the project, as long as there is still an Israeli military occupation and confiscation of Palestinian lands. It was difficult for these people to gain their trust, as they are cautious and suspicious. Interviewing them was no problem but they did not want to be portrayed as ‘friends of Israelis’. Their mistrust stems from a deep suspicious attitude towards people who could be perceived as enablers of the Israeli military occupation. Regular house raids by the Israeli forces and arbitrary arrests by the internal Israeli security service Shin Bet are the main cause of this fear and mistrust. As one of our Israeli interviewees from Tsur Hadassah in the film said ‘the tear is deep’ and also they themselves face this type of mistrust when they work together with Palestinian villagers in their environmental activism to save the valley of Wadi Fukin. Our Palestinian protagonists who are involved in the Good Water Neighbors Project and have friendships with Israelis from Tsur Hadassah, explained to me that they themselves face these kinds of challenges with their fellow villagers who are against any form of normalization with Israel. Despite the fact that their environmental activism together with Israelis from Tsur Hadassah has led to the halt of the building of the wall and yielded some positive results to stop colonization practices, the main issue is the suspicion that the Israelis from Tsur Hadassah have similar motives as the religious settlers of Bitar Illit, the illegal settlement close to Wadi Fukin. Despite our Israeli interviewees stating that they feel more threatened by the religious settlers and expansion of Bitar Illit than the friendly villagers of Wadi Fukin, they are regarded the same as Israeli Zionist settlers in the occupied West bank by those who are against normalization. The emotional pain for these anti-normalization villagers is too deep to be able to distinguish between Israeli activists from Tsur

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Hadassah and religious Zionist settlers and have real distrust towards Israelis. Being a Dutch filmmaker has the advantage of not being associated with either Israelis or Palestinians however having a SwissIsraeli crewmember is something we kept low profile whilst interviewing villagers in Wadi Fukin who are anti-normalization. Our Palestinian crewmember then would be of great help explaining why we were filming and what we were doing. Often this removed the suspicion completely and a good rapport was built. One several shooting occasions it was an advantage to have a SwissIsraeli crew member; when we were filming soldiers and settlers in the garden of the farmers of Wadi Fukin on a Friday afternoon. During this day, our Swiss-Israeli crew member conducted the interviews in Hebrew, whilst our Palestinian crew member kept a low profile. When we were entering the Bitar Illit settlement trying to interview settlers we assumed it would work similarly. But despite our efforts, the people in Bitar Illit refused to talk to us. During an interview that we filmed in Wadi Fukin, one of the villagers told us that on Friday afternoons, Israeli soldiers and settlers would sometimes swim in the private irrigation pools of the Palestinian farmers. To be able to film this, we headed towards the gardens the next Friday. Indeed, after a while we noticed family groups of settlers coming down from the hills to the valley. The group consisted of different men, women, and their children, the men in these groups were armed. They were on a hike. Arriving at the traditional irrigation pools, the men undressed and took a bath in the pools. They consider it as a religious purification ritual to swim in natural water before the Saturday Shabbat, it is called mikvah. The Palestinian farmers are afraid to come down to the gardens when these settler groups are swimming there. We went towards the location to film general view shots of the swimming settler families; there was no problem filming and some asked what we were doing and our Swiss-Israeli crewmember explained to them in Hebrew that we were making an environmental documentary. We decided to do some interviews with the Israeli settlers. We asked a settler whether he was aware that he was swimming in private property. His reply was ‘I can swim in any lake or any river, I didn’t see a sign’. The settlers left. One final interview was with a young teenage settler who mentioned that he really enjoyed and liked the traditional terraces. He didn’t like how the settlement construction of Bitar Illit was damaging the environment. He ended with the remark that he can only come down the gardens with hundreds of people and arms because ‘otherwise the Palestinians will stab me’. The fear for Palestinians was real for him and

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mutual mistrust defines much of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Suddenly, I realized how much of an uphill struggle environmental and ecological peace building must be if it is already so difficult for both parties to gain basic trust in each other. That day, we also heard a couple of Israeli army vehicles had parked near an irrigation pool and decided to go and film there as well. A group of Israeli soldiers had taken over a little garden shed and were swimming naked in the Palestinian irrigation pools, a practice that really upsets the Palestinian farmers. After some of our questions, we got completely ignored by the soldiers and they stopped talking to us. The soldiers left with making loud noise with their vehicles. It was a strange and surreal experience to be in the gardens of Wadi Fukin that day but that one afternoon for me it also summed up the emotional experience of working in an occupied and hostile territory as an outsider to the conflict. The frustrations you feel about the military occupation; the discussions with the farmers who want to save their environment and beautiful valley and the desire to document on video what is happening in Wadi Fukin for our environmental documentary. The rapport that we had built up with the Palestinian Authorities in the West Bank was very good, like our relationship with the Israeli and Palestinian staff of Friends of the Earth - Middle East/ECOPEACE both at their offices in Tel Aviv and Bethlehem. There was none of the mistrust that we as a film crew experienced in the valley of Wadi Fukin with Palestinians who are against normalization or the encounters we had with Zionist settlers or Israeli soldiers. Both academically and for making the film Save Local, Solve Global and during the inception tour we had build up good rapport and I had been regularly in touch with staff of the Palestinian Water Authority, PWA, and the Palestinian Minister of Water, Dr. Shaddad Attili. On one occasion when we were filming in Wadi Fukin, we had the opportunity to interview the Palestinian Minister of Water on his regular fieldtrip to Bethlehem and the West Bethlehem villages. We entered the orthodox settlement of Bitar Illit located next to Wadi Fukin for one day, dressed modestly and entered with a car with Israeli license plates. In fact with our modest dresses, covering our arms, necks and hair, we could be mistaken for settlers ourselves. Our Palestinian crewmember kept low profile during our visit. Our narrative for explaining our presence was that we were filming the architecture of this settlement. This was our reply to anyone asking suspicious questions. Interviewing Israeli settlers inside Bitar Illit was not possible. They declined any interviews with us. We were not allowed to film the supermarket.

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Interviewingg Israeli waterr officials also o proved to bee difficult as the t Israeli Water Authoority officials declined interrviews with uus.

Figure 2 Interrview with Palestinian Ministter of Water onn location in Wadi W Fukin, Palestine

For our secoond interview with the Israeeli protagonistt in Tsur Hadaassah, we showed her some of the footage f from the t gardens off Wadi Fukin on which she reacted and explainedd her view on life in the occcupied Territo ories. She felt ashameed watching the footage and expresseed this clearlly in her interview. D During the finnal days of our o shoot in W Wadi Fukin and Tsur Hadassah, w we asked our Israeli I protago onist if she waas prepared to o visit her friend, our Palestinian protagonist p in n Wadi Fukinn. We had asked a her whether we could film it. It was no pro oblem. We sugggested that th hey could meet in the gardens of Wadi W Fukin forr an interview and conversaation with both of them m. This was the t conversatiion we neede d to film to show s that despite diffeerences, thesee two people were able to connect thro ough their environmenttal concerns and a special frriendship. Eveerything went well on that day, thee light was goood, the circu umstances finee, no obstaclees and all was going ssmoothly. It was w one of theese shooting ddays where yo ou know, as a filmmakker, it will be great materiall.

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i the gardens oof Wadi Fukin, Palestine Figure 3 Our two main charaacters meeting in

At the end oof this shootinng period in Palestine P and Israel, we weere rather satisfied thaat we had enouugh rough footage material for finalizing the film.

World dwide broad dcast, screeenings, a coommunity tour t an nd audiencee feedback The film Vaalleys of Hopee and Despairr for Al Jazeeera English was w edited and cut in m my studio in thhe Netherlands whilst the fiinal and on-lin ne editing was done att a productionn house in London. Two of the most important i aspects and themes to keeep in the film m were the ennvironmental impact i of the Israeli ooccupation annd personal sttories of our protagonists and their special frieendship, findding common n ground inn their love for the environmentt and nature. To highlight the potential of environm mental and ecological ppeace buildinng stressing th his unique frriendship betw ween our protagonistss would give hope h for peacee in times of ddespair. In Noveember 2010 the t film was broadcast wiith repeats th hroughout 2011. It creeated an onlinne buzz, with articles and bblogs and the audience reactions weere in generall positive and encouraging. Most people liked the film and its message of environmenta e al and ecologiical peace. Su ubsequent screenings ffollowed at ennvironmental festivals, f in thhe Netherlandss, the UK and Swedenn throughout 2011. 2 In all sccreenings, the audience reacction was enlighteningg, positive annd the film proved p to be a good facilitator for

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debates on ecological peace and the positive message the film is giving, despite the enormous hurdles for peace building between Palestine and Israel. The film gave the audience some hope. In the meantime, we had agreed with Al Jazeera English that all of the shot material we could use for editing a longer version for non-commercial outreach and educational purposes. In my spare time, I edited a 45 minute director’s cut to be used in outreach activities. In the Spring of 2011 we started a crowd funding action on-line to be able to fund a community tour with Palestinian Mobile Cinema Association located in Ramallah, which took place in September 2011. The aim of these screenings was to inform, assist people and policy makers to engage in a debate about environmental impact of conflict and start processes of ecological peace and justice building. The screenings were done in various other Palestinian villages, close to the Separation wall and facing similar problems as Wadi Fukin, such as Nili’n, Bili’n. At these locations non-violent protests against Israeli occupation are regularly taking place on Fridays. The film was well received by those we worked with in Wadi Fukin but we didn’t have a public screening in the village as the protagonists were warning us that settler violence had been increasing and the anti-normalization sentiments were quite strong in Wadi Fukin. People might not appreciate it if a film shows cooperation with Israelis. This was unfortunate but we respected the wishes and didn’t organize a public screening in Wadi Fukin. We also organized a public screening in a cultural art center in Bethlehem, which was attended by people from the City of Bethlehem. In general the reaction of Palestinian audiences was overwhelmingly positive towards the film with some expressing anti-normalization sentiments. Unfortunately we did not raise enough funding to have many screenings in Israel but the film was screened for small audiences in Israel. Most Israeli reactions, are fairly similar to the Palestinian reactions, the care for the environment and the hope on a future peace cools the flames towards the ‘other’, the ‘enemy’.

Realities of conflict, recognitions, fear and mistrust – conflict transformation and peace The objective of ecological peacebuilding is to transform conflict into a more peaceful and sustainable relationship between enemies (FoEME 2008). In constructing an envisioned future reality reminiscent of Clifford Geertz’ dreamed-of-order, it is supposed that former enemies will connect through structural cooperation on shared environmental issues.

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Valleys of Hope and Despair Its corresponding action, environmental cooperation, plays a significant role when aiming at transforming a conflict in a constructive way as it literally constructs new and better environmental realities in regions where either the environment was devastated or concern for environmental hazards was put aside due to the conflict situation’ (FoEME 2008: 6).

The main question is whether this dreamed of order is too naïve and denying an emotional and cognitive reality that is much more complex than what ecological peacebuilding tries to construct? Through environmental filmmaking, the goal is to provide a glimpse into this dreamed-of-order, to positively show that people on different sides of the divide do connect through nature, but also to start a debate on how a shared care for the environment can contribute to creating a reality of peace. The experience of filming Valleys of Hope and Despair left me with an insight into the human dimensions of living in a hostile environment and under military occupation. The reality of continuous armed conflict is apparent in the fear, mistrust, judgment and suspicion that I observed with people involved in the conflict, on both sides of the divide. When I observed the anger towards Israelis from villagers of Wadi Fukin who are against any contact with Israelis, I understood, as I felt the same frustrations with the Israeli military occupation and the destruction of the environment. It must be continuously traumatic to be living under Israeli occupation. Neo-liberal and conventional liberal peace building does not take into account enough the profoundness of cognitive and emotional dimensions of violence and armed conflict such as fear, trauma, mistrust, suspicion and prejudice, which is the daily reality and emotional experience for those living in an environment of protracted conflict at local level. The wall of fear is often too thick to be able to cooperate, to connect and to trust ‘the other’. Especially if there is no official recognition of trauma and any form of justice towards inflicted pain of victims of violence and repression, it is almost impossible to expect people on both sides of the divide to fully trust each other. Despite the failed liberal peace building efforts of the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations at political level, ecological peace building between individuals, from people-to-people, seems to be possible to transform conflict at local level. The dreamed-of order of a sustainable shared environment provides a common ground to cooperate but the condition for cooperation and conflict transformation is the establishment of trust. This is where we find the main obstacle to environmental peacebuilding. How to establish a relationship of trust when the Israeli occupation is still in place? When

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daily violations still take place? When the power relations at political level between Israel and Palestine remain asymmetrical and without recognition and resolution of traumas inflicted on both sides? The consequent removal of the imaginative wall of fear is difficult and a main condition for successful and sustainable environmental cooperation. Filming with protagonists from Wadi Fukin and Tsur Hadassah has proven that at local level, people on both sides of the divide do manage to work together despite the protracted conflict and the challenges they face from their respective communities. However, the film shows a glimpse of the dreamed-of-order in order to show it is possible. The protagonists of the film are brave and courageous non-violent people, going through that fear for the other, breaking the barrier for a common ground, which is the desire for a preservation of nature and beauty and to reach the ‘dreamed-of order’ of ecological peace and coexistence. The use of film to build peace positively can help encouraging others to take the same steps as the protagonists of the film. From a perspective of ecological peacebuilding being continuously angry and hateful, is violent and destructive towards self and the shared ecosystem. However, the film also shows the environmental injustice which is being addressed through legal processes, therefore a utopian dreamed-of-order is not something that is portrayed, only wished by the protagonists. This is clearly expressed when the Palestinian protagonist points at the son of the Israeli protagonists in their final dialogue in the garden of Wadi Fukin and says: ‘He is the generation of peace’. This is an expression of hope, opposite of fear, of positivity as opposed to a negative future outlook. Ecological peacebuilding through environmental filmmaking tries to frame a positive future and vision in order to induce peace between people. But as long as the reality on the ground prevents recognition and justice for victims of violence, peacebuilding has a long road to travel before the dreamed-of-order is reached. Realizing the enormity of the many challenges to build trust between Palestinians and Israelis, peace building through environmental filmmaking becomes a challenging task. The glimmer of hope comes from the feedback of the audiences at local level who have watched my film. There is a feeling of hope that there are common environmental grounds for people to find, that people empathize with each other and are able to build friendships across the divides. But as long as suspicion determines the way that enemies behave towards each other, ecological peace building is going to be a long road. Despite the challenges, I remain positive that environmental documentaries can contribute towards turning the mutual suspicion into trust and start on a road to a more peaceful and just solution.

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Trust in a more sustainable and peaceful future for all. Trust in hope and justice for our shared environment.

Conclusion This paper described an effort to use the medium of film for ecological peace building at local level in a hostile environment in a protracted conflict zone. Contrary to liberal peace building, ecological peace building is approaching the process of peace building in a more holistic manner. Based on the principles of caring for our shared environment, the film attempted to highlight and frame the potential for a peaceful and more sustainable future. Challenges during the development and production of the film were described and analyzed. These challenges deal with the presence of mistrust, daily confrontation of violence, military occupation, colonization, fear and suffocation of livelihoods of Palestinian farmers. Arabophobia and anti-normalization sentiments on each side of the divide in the conflict zone hamper efforts for people to trust and reach out to each other and work together for an ecological and just peace. It also is reflected in the hostile attitude towards those neutrals who cross this divide. Despite these sentiments, the efforts of ecological peace building that were observed have managed to create an enabling environment for those people on both sides of the divides who manage to break through the barriers of fear and mistrust for each other and realize their common interests and respect for each other and the environment, which led to positive developments at local level. Audience feedback of the film during broadcast and outreach activities indicated that the desire and hope for peace is present on both sides at local level and the willingness to engage in managing the environment together is a starting ground for successful ecological peace building from the grassroots. However, the main challenge for peacebuilding is establishing trust through recognition of pain and providing justice for violence inflicted; as long as this condition is not met, the success for environmental peacebuilding will remain elusive.

References Amery, H.A. and Wolf, A.T. (2000) Water in the Middle East: A Geography of Peace (1st ed.), Austin: University of Texas Press. Dietz, T. (1996) ‘Entitlements to natural resources; contours of political environmental geography’, Inaugural speech University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam: International Books.

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FoEME. (2008) Environmental Peacebuilding Theory and Practice, Amman, Bethlehem, Tel Aviv: FoEME. —. (2010) Why Cooperate Over Water? Shared Waters of Palestine, Israel and Jordan: Cross-Border Crises and the Need for TransNational Solutions, Tel Aviv: Friends of the Earth Middle East. Geertz, C. (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures : Selected Essays, New York: Basic Books. Jägerskog, A. (2009) Water Resources in the Middle East, Sweden: Stockholm International Water Institute. OCHA-oPt (2011) Occupied Palestinian Territory West Bank: Area C Map Olson, M. (1965) The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups, USA: Harvard University Press. Ostrom, E. (1990) Governing the Commons; the Evolutions of Institutions for Collective Action, UK: Cambridge University Press. Richmond, O.P. (2008) ‘Reconstructing the Liberal Peace’ in V. Rittberger, M. Fischer (eds) Strategies for Peace, Contribution of International Organizations,States and Non-State Actors, Germany: Barbara Budrich Publishers. —. (2010) Advances in Peacebuilding, Critical Developments and Approaches, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Rittberger, V. and Fischer, M. (eds) (2008) Strategies for Peace, Contribution of International Organisations, States, and Non-State Actors, Germany: Barbara Budrich Publishers. Schoenfeld, S. (2011) ‘Contrasting Regional Environmentalisms in the Eastern Mediterranean: A Social Constructionist Perspective’, L'Espace Politique 14(2) : 25. Selby, J. (2005) ‘The Geopolitics of Water in the Middle East: Fantasies and Realities’, Third World Quarterly, 26(2): 329-34. Tucker, M., Grim J. (1999) ‘Religions of the World and Ecology: Discovering the Common Ground’, Religious Studies News, May 1999, USA: Yale. Online. Available HTTP: http://fore.research.yale.edu/publications/journals/rsn.html (accessed 11 January 2013). Wessels, J. (2008) To Cooperate or not to Cooperate…? Collective Action for Rehabilitation of Traditional Water Tunnel Systems (qanats) in Syria, PhD, Netherlands: University of Amsterdam Press. —. (2009) ‘Water Crisis in the Middle East: An Opportunity for New Forms of Water Governance and Peace’ Whitehead Journal of Diplomacy and International Relations, 10(2): 131-41.

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—. (2015) ‘Challenging Hydro-hegemony: hydropolitics and local resistance in the Golan Heights and the Palestinian Territories’, International Journal of Environmental Sciences, 72(4), 601-623. WorldBank (2012) Environmental, Social and Cultural Heritage Impact Assessment to Support Water Supply and Sanitation for West Bethlehem Villages, Palestine: Palestinian Water Authority. Zeitoun, M. (2008) Power and Water in the Middle East, The Hidden Politics of the Palestinian-Israeli Water Conflict. London: I.B: Taurus.



19 UNHOOKING THE HOOKWORM: THE ROCKEFELLER FOUNDATION AND MEDIATED HEALTH MARINA DAHLQUIST

It is hoped that with these lectures, illustrated by lantern slides and moving pictures, and with the usual chart lectures and house to house talks of the Nurses, that the people will realise the importance of the campaign being conducted, and will gradually develop a public health sense (Dr Cruchley 1927: 4).

The point of departure for this article is neither armed conflicts nor processes of peace or reconciliation in areas afflicted by agonizing current histories. Instead my focus is on sustained efforts to establish standards when it comes to cultural as well as medical systems in the international arena in the 1910s and 1920s. In this context, visual instruction was a key pivot. And, this is my thesis, such efforts were put in motion by convictions and outlooks aligned with those explicitly seeking cultural reconciliation In the beginning of the twentieth century, a wide array of progressiveera projects aimed at improving and modernizing metropolitan everyday life. These didactic initiatives, working top-down, brought together a cross-section of civil movements at a time when many federal and municipal organizations still were in the bud. These uplift and reform campaigns zoomed in on sanitation, working conditions, childcare, education, and recreation. Initially, the campaigns mainly had a local focus such as clean-up campaigns, milk- and child care campaigns, but their range gradually expanded with the aspiration to engage with localities across the US and eventually also outside the American borders. My current research project ‘Cinema and Uplift: Health Discourses and Social Activism in the U.S. 1910-1930’ deals with the emerging role of

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cinema as a medium for social activism, especially in the context of public health discourses and with a focus on prominent civic organizations in the United States. The aim is to investigate the manners in which visual aids— especially moving pictures—were used in campaign work to raise sanitary and civic awareness. These efforts emerged within non-profit organizations and had pioneer status when it comes to social and medical activism. The main goal was to reduce the considerable gaps in education levels, which, according to the acclaimed historian Eric Hobsbawm (1994), represent one of the decisive changes in history from 1914, the very year my study takes off from and up until today. Even though the cause and motivation for the projects were founded on aspirations to improve living conditions especially for the poor and uneducated, bringing standardization ideals and knowledge of modern society to those still on the edge, such undertakings are never neutral processes. Irrespective of well-meaning intentions animating organizations and individuals, education, information, and implementing uniform standards and cultural cohesiveness always come with an ideological flipside. Thus in my examples, the political implications were considerable.

Rockefeller Foundation and progressive-era health projects Progressive-era ventures often had an Americanization slant targeting Americans in the making. In the case of Rockefeller Foundation, the aim was to spread the ‘scientific model’ of medicine and public health that had emerged in Europe and the United States and make it a universal norm. In the process a swath of mutually reinforcing media was mobilized to spread medical awareness on a global scale defined as a civilizing project: not least as the hookworm disease, initially the target for Rockefeller’s national as well as international campaigns, was associated with crime, degeneracy, and laziness. According to the Atlanta Constitution’s alarmist prose, the hookworm disease was a ‘menace and an obstacle to all that makes for civilization’ (12 November 1922: B2). Victims of hookworm disease became anemic, weak with impaired abilities and amongst children their physical and mental development were delayed. The Rockefeller Foundation was an important organization in the American tradition of social activism that was established in the name of the industrial tycoons in the late 19th century. In the case of Rockefeller, the fortune was of course amassed from the Standard Oil Company, founded in 1870, which had become the dominant force on the international oil market and often described by the unflattering metaphor

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octopus. In 1891 Frederick Gates became John D. Rockefeller’s principal aid in philanthropy and he would turn the focus towards medicine. Rockefeller Foundation was founded by John D. Rockefeller in 1909 with the mandate to: ‘promote the well-being of mankind throughout the world.’ Soon the organization became a prominent player in philanthropy with an international scope. Later that year, the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission for the Eradication of Hookworm Disease was founded after a donation of one million dollars by John D. Rockefeller. A five-year campaign was planned for eliminating hookworms in the Southern States by educating the public, especially school children. Parallel to this, the aim was to bolster public health agencies and promote future coordination between the medical profession, public health officials, schools, civic organizations, and the press (Ettling 1981, Fosdick 1956). Visual media such as sciopticon images, moving pictures, charts, models, articles and ads was widely used for advertising the events as well as to reach out with information. One of the main reasons to settle for hookworms and the socalled ‘laziness epidemic’ in the rural south as the main objective was because it was an ‘easily identifiable, treatable, and preventable disease’ thus calling for public health initiatives. The commission’s first director, Wickliffe Rose, announced that he might not be able to wipe out the hookworm, but the campaign would rather be used to create ‘consideration of the whole question of medical education, the organizing of systems of public health, and the training of men for the public health service’ (Page 2007: 5). The aim was thus both to reach out to victims of hookworms as well as those able to build a public health infrastructure. The Sanitary Commission started its activities in Virginia, in 1910. According to Benjamin E. Washburn, who after service in the South became one of the most important figures in the hookworm campaigns in the West Indies, the campaign was not pursued without resistance. One theory in the local press in North Carolina, for example, was that Rockefeller was preparing a foray into the shoe business and had financed the hookworm campaign as a preliminary move to scare the people into wearing shoes at all times and not only in the winter. Other dissenting voices regarded Rockefeller’s gift as a way to control education. The attitude of the press would, however, soon change (Washburn 1924: 5-6). But the hookworm, was not a plague only painfully present in the Southern States of the U.S., but also in the equatorial belt worldwide or as it was called the ‘hookworm belt’ from 36° north to 30° south. In January 1913, the secretary of Rockefeller Foundation, Jerome Greene, published an article in The New York Times arguing for the need to extend the hookworm campaign beyond the South:

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‘for its eradication must … be made a world campaign—not for altruistic motives but because no one country can be safe until all have been cleared of this pest’ (Farley 2004: 4). One problem was of course immigrants bringing the disease to the United States. Thus one of the reasons to embark on an international campaign was the apprehension of a threat from the outside world.

Going international: The International Health Commission in the West Indies Before the 1948-founding of the World Health Organization, the International Health Commission (1913-1916) to become the International Health Board (1916-1927)—and later the International Health Division— was the world’s leading agency for public health work. The International Health Commission took over the responsibilities of Rockefeller Sanitary Commission in 1914 and their initial efforts were directed towards the British West Indies. The international campaign strategies hoped to institute a form of cultural reconciliation by eliminating differences in sanitary and social conditions and standards worldwide. The International Health Commission started their work with the ambition to control or eradicate hookworms as part of their overarching goal to contribute to a public health infrastructure (Farley 2004: 2). The Commission would soon engage in campaigns against malaria, yellow fever as well as a tuberculosis campaign in post-war France. The work was undertaken in four areas; the Southern states of the US, a continuation of the work made by the Sanitary Commission that closed down in December 1914, Latin America, and the British colonies in the Far East and in the West Indies. The international campaign work started in British Guiana in 1914, later moving on to other parts of the British colonial territories in the West Indies such as Trinidad and Jamaica. The crusades against hookworms continued, now on an international scale using the infrastructure of the British colonial powers to reach out to local populations and health agencies. At this time the methods of carrying on the work had been standardized. A majority of the field workers in charge had already organized campaign work in the American south and the strategies used in the health campaigns in the United States were passed on to the international campaigns, and the same visual material was used, at least initially. The field workers also brought with them their life styles and cultural outlooks. Correspondence between field officers and the main office shows that at least some of them had quite some trouble adjusting to the ‘lack’ of standard in the colonies. Washburn for example vividly

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describes how the ‘greatest problem’ in Georgetown at this time was the invasion of insects at dusk. In British Guiana, as in other British colonies none of the houses were screened to keep up the ventilation, forcing the Americans to withdraw to the mosquito nets early in the evening to stay out of reach of the flying insects approaching together with the tarantulas, scorpions and centipedes (Washburn, 1924: 61) (Figure 1). Hookworms remained the prime target. In its Seventh Annual Report, the International Health Board states: that even if Hookworm was one of the most serious of the disabling diseases this was not primarily why it was selected. The disease, easily justifiable on its own account, was much more important as a means to a larger end. The disease lends itself readily to purposes of demonstration: ‘It affects fundamentally the welfare of mankind over vast regions, and yet in its cause, its cure, its mode of transmission and means of prevention, it is so simple and tangible that the layman—even the illiterate—may be made to see and understand it’ (The Rockefeller Foundation Annual Report, 1920: 109-110) And the benefits of the treatment are described in line with American standards of the 1910s and 1920s as it according to Washburn, when medical officer in charge in Jamaica, resulted in ‘better health, the ability to earn more money, to be better citizens, the improvement in living conditions and increase pride of home ownership on the part of the small settlers’ (Washburn, 1924: 1) (Figure 2). Usually Rockefeller employees would start the campaigns with several lectures illustrated by photographs and charts showing hookworm victims meticulously labeled and often set off against a healthy person of the same age. The victims were often depicted in front of their homes. More or less sanitary privies were another recurring motif. According to Washburn, as a conclusion after the work in Trinidad, language offered a difficulty. At times the screen for the lantern slides was placed on a tree or the wall of a house. The audience, if speaking different languages like Hindi, Spanish or ‘patois,’ would be grouped, and members of the staff would act as interpreters. Each interpreter was supplied with a small handbell, while the chief clerk situated on a platform would have a larger one. The slides shown on the screen would first be explained in English by the lecturer. When the explanation was finished, the clerk tapped his bell and the interpreters would then explain what had been said by the doctor. When an interpreter had finished he would in turn tap his bell. These screenings could be a quite lengthy affair, continuing for an entire evening (Washburn 1960: 82-83). Locally recruited sanitary inspectors trained in microscopy would then collect samples of feces that were examined for hookworm eggs. At least in Jamaica and Trinidad, certificates were handed out to

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verify that the person in question was not infected with hookworms. Such documents could be vital for the inhabitants in the West Indies to get a job on the plantations (Figure 3).

Unhooking the Hookworm: Global aspirations versus cultural diversities One of the key educational tools produced by the Rockefeller’s was the 1920-moving picture Unhooking the Hookworm. The film became a centerpiece of the organization’s efforts in medical education and the multiple script versions neatly illustrate their search for a formula that would have an international appeal and would work in trans-cultural contexts for diverse audiences. Moving pictures’ pedagogical might and their potential for civic education infused high hopes for the work to raise awareness about modern society and its social and sanitary evils. This didactic is particularly prominent in the United States during the Progressive Era 1910-1930. The emergence of educational film actually coincides with the growing domination of the American fiction film on the international market. Combined, both strands of cinema spread American values and life styles influencing global audiences across a mix of genres. The perceived ability of the film medium to reach a wide audience underpinned an array of campaigns, and was to be used for large-scale but heterogeneous information and educational projects managed primarily by private organizations. The educational strategies and tools used in Rockefeller Foundation’s international campaigns originated from earlier campaigns in the United States such as the New York Health Department’s campaigns that gathered large audiences in free outdoor exhibitions in the city parks from the summer of 1912 on screening healthrelated moving pictures (Dahlquist: 2012). As early as 1913, the staff of the International Health Board devised a script for an educational film about the dangers of hookworms. The filming of scenes began during the summer. Initially, the film was planned for exhibition in Southern rural communities in the United States. But during 1920 it was clear that the film would be used world-wide and the script became subject to a series of reviews and revisions by educators, scientists, and health officials, and translations of intertitles were made into Spanish, French, and Portuguese. Still, with a few exceptions, the scenes were all distinctly American. As in the campaign work the film combined several kinds of visual media to get the story across: maps, animated diagrams, microscopic

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images, charts, photographs of victims and sanitary privies. Here, however, a dramatic story was included. And by way of intertitles and editing the microscopic images, the life cycles of the worm and other scientific images were arranged in order to be perceived as relevant for the audience in their everyday life. The film can be said to consist of three parts: First a description of the dangers of hookworms starting off with a world map to show the international spread of the disease. Then the cure is displayed: go to the doctor and get treatment. And finally prevention followed by a happy ending featuring the sanitary home as a beacon for a happy and prosperous life. Already in a memo written on March 12 1920 by E. C. Meyer, responsible for producing the film, the problem of operating with one and the same film for a global audience was recognized. Hence revisions were made several times after responses and comments from people in the public health field both in the United States and abroad. The key problem was the absence of ‘local color’ or connection to ‘local conditions’—what we today would call glocalization. Revisions were suggested in this spirit. For example: Football would be a better example than swimming in Brazil. The intertitle: ‘Our Southern Cotton Field’ should be replaced for the use in Ceylon, and ‘if the improved family conditions of a colored family were shown, it would leave a stronger impression than the white man’s house in the closing picture’ (Memorandum concerning Revision of the Film ‘Unhooking the Hookworm’ 1921). The Educational Films Corporation was recommended as producer of part of the film. ‘The rest of the hookworm story might probably be prepared independently in each country in which the film is to be used’ (Meyer March 12 1920). According to Rockefeller Foundation’s annual report of 1920, the film Unhooking the Hookworm ‘is now being sent out for use in different countries and will doubtless be modified as a result of actual tests in the field’ (RF Annual Report 1920: 49). But this solution would not be fully applied. Even with this ‘openness’ to adjust to cultural diversity the goal seems to have been to use one and only one film that would accommodate all suggestions offered (see for example unsigned letter to Dr Ferrell December 17 1923). The one reel drama was finished late 1920 and ready for the field by 1921. In a memorandum from April 1921 it was suggested that an effort be made to substitute local scenes at every point in the film where this was necessary. These changes would be made at the Rockefeller Foundations home office for every particular country (Memorandum No. 3). But records show that occasionally parts of the film were cut out locally when

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they were not considered applicable for a specific audience (‘Suggestions for the improvement of the hookworm film’). Moving images were also taken by local field agents in for example Trinidad, and in Puerto Rico an independent film was made. Comments and suggested revisions continued to drop in. In 1922 W. C. Hausheer in Dutch Guiana sent a letter to Dr. Howard in regard to the Hookworm film from a field worker’s point of view. He divided his criticisms into four parts: Sanitation, Race, Treatment, and finally Appeal. According to Hausheer the sanitary part should have been more instructive and applicable to tropical conditions. The importance of sanitation was not made clear to the local audience when the latrine shown in the film looked in better shape than the ones used locally, and also did not correspond to the types built in tropical areas. More importantly: the writer claims that the fact that only white people were shown in the picture could distract the audience from the point being made as it ‘brings down a roar of laughter.’ Furthermore, the appeal of a ‘happy childhood’ would not be as great to the local audience in Dutch Guiana as the ‘bread winner’ would have been (Hausheer 2 December 1922). According to the International Health Board, a considerable proportion of the film was distributed to foreign countries. Their recommendation was that in many parts of the world in which hookworm disease was a serious problem, the film could be used to good advantage. Wherever ‘movies’ have become an established institution and are commonly used for education and entertainment, the hookworm film was recommended as part of a remedy package. However, the attempt to use the film in ‘backward’ countries where the moving picture theater had not yet been developed on a commercial basis, was, on the other hand, considered unwise. Mainly because the necessity to provide a portable projection apparatus as well as the film itself: ‘lantern slides, charts, and other propaganda material available may give quite as good results as the film’ (Memo ‘Unhooking the Hookworm’: 1). Also the purchase of a portable generator by field agents to permit the use of the film in regions where electricity was not available was discouraged due to the expense (‘Unhooking the hookworm’: 2). But wherever moving pictures had become an established institution and were commonly employed for education and entertainment, its use seems to be entirely practicable. In this case it was recommended that local moving picture theaters be utilized as far as possible (Memorandum No. 3). With the development of 16 mm equipment screening problems more or less disappeared. Even though the International Health Board was a pioneer in bringing

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moving pictures to rural communities worldwide this was not their main objective. Nevertheless, not only the medium itself together with its educational content was exported, but also the American exhibition set up. The health programs in Jamaica did for example resemble the vaudeville shows in the United States. With moving pictures mixed with live performances such as songs, and recitations, theater plays; all addressing health issues (Figure 4). Not only the exact number of people examined, treated and cured but also the exact number reached by different kinds of visual material was accounted for. And in reports the cooperation of the inhabitants or the lack of it is currently noted, as the sanitary projects were leveled at groups of people. For example was the lack of cooperation in the Prospect district in Jamaica where the inhabitants were considered to be ‘ill mannered and undisciplined’ met by additional screenings of motion picture shown in an attempt to make ‘treatment work easier’ (Hall: 5-6). Moving pictures together with lantern slides proved to be the most effective campaign tool and the topics gradually became more varied. In 1926 the Bureau of Health Education took over the educational work of the Jamaica Hookworm Commission and immediately acquired two moving picture outfits, magic lanterns and slides, and other educational material for use by medical officers of health and others in giving health lectures and demonstrations. The object lesson continued to be the development of public health consciousness among the people by the use of lantern-slide lectures and moving-picture demonstrations. Sets of lantern slides were prepared to illustrate lectures on Malaria, Tuberculosis, Sanitation, Smallpox, School Hygiene, and Child Hygiene. These magic lanterns and slides were available for the use of teachers, ministers, physicians, and interested societies (Jamaica Preliminary Annual Report – 1926: 2, 13).

Conclusion Could one say that the philanthropic work of Rockefeller Foundation was peace building and if so in what sense? The documentation at Rockefeller Archive Center provide invaluable insights into overall strategies used for the health campaigns as well as problems encountered by health officers in the Southern States as well as abroad, but very little is said of the local reception of the health campaigns organized or the visual aids used, including moving pictures, or the local community life in terms of conflict. The campaign work and its media strategies rested on the unquestioned premise of the superiority of United States health standards. The campaigns

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hoped to win over local audiences for the practices the campaigns argued for and hoped to have adopted. Political and ideological undercurrents loomed large in this context and had to be negotiated in societies dominated by British colonial powers. How inhabitants in the West Indies, many of them working for United Fruit, perceived a multi-million American philanthropic foundation, is not clear. If the process generated more tensions or ushered in mindsets affiliated with reconciliation is not obvious. The spirit underlying the campaigns had such goals as epiphenomena to the hope-for success of building health infrastructures by focusing on primarily one curable disease. Hence, the mission to establish western medicine a global norm, and demonstrate the possibilities of preventive medicine did predictably meet with obstacles. One of the problems was related to the film Unhooking the Hookworm. The film had been particularly successful in domestic use in the Southern states especially for white audiences. In a letter written in 1936 by Mark F. Boyd, M. D., an example is taken from the work in Mississippi ‘We soon gained the impression that the exhibition of this film to rural negro audiences made very little impression. The technical features were above their heads and the human interest continuity based on a scenario dealing with whites made little impression’ (Boyd 1936). Its success was, however, even more limited in other countries. The work to produce an educational film for a global audience proved to be fraught with complications way beyond informing and influencing American immigrants, children and illiterate Americans. To spread ideas, influence behavior, and illustrate cause and effect mandated taking into account local cultural protocols. Behavior appropriate in modern American society needed cultural translation beyond the mere translation of intertitles. The correspondence and memos from the 1930s about the Rockefeller Foundation Hookworm Film and their Malaria film from 1925 show that the foundation still believed the film medium to be a particularly effective tool when it came to matters of disease prevention. At the same time it was obvious that the medium had limitations in that it was virtually impossible to produce a single film that would work with global audiences. Even if the film at times was said to have caused more or less a rush to the local laboratories or to the physicians for examination the main problem with the film was that many scenes displayed insensitivity in regards to cultural differences. By 1931 Unhooking the hookworm was considered to be obsolete, in 1935 terribly out of date. In 1936 it was decided not to sell any more copies or make any revised copies, and in 1937 the negative was offered to

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the Public Health Service in Washington DC to make the footage available for possible future films on the subject.

References Dahlquist, M. (2012) ‘Health Instruction on Screen: Campaigns, Expositions, and Sanitation Work under the Auspices of the Department of Health in New York City, 1909-1917’, M. Braun et al (eds) Beyond the Screen: Institutions, Networks and Publics, New Barnet, U.K.: John Libbey. Ettling, J. (1981) The Germ of Laziness: Rockefeller Philanthropy and Public Health in the New South, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Farley, J. (2004) To Cast out Disease. A History of the International Health Division of the Rockefeller Foundation (1913-1951), Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fosdick, R.B. (1956) John D. Rockefeller, Jr.: A Portrait, New York: Harper & Brothers. Hobsbawm, E. (1994) Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991, London: Joseph. Page, B.B. (2007) ‘Evaluation and Accountability: with a case study of the early Rockefeller Foundation’, in B.B. Page and D.A. Valone (eds) Philanthropic Foundations and the Globalization of Scientific Medicine and Public Health, Lanham, ML: University Press of America. The Rockefeller Foundation Annual Report 1920, New York: The Rockefeller Foundation. ‘Unhooking the Hookworm’, The Atlanta Constitution, Nov 12, 1922, B2. Washburn, B.E. (1924) Report of the Jamaica Hookworm Commission for 1924, Kingston, Jamaica: Government Printing Office. —. (1960) As I Recall. The Hookworm Campaigns Initiated by the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission and The Rockefeller Foundation in the Southern United States and Tropical America, New York: The Rockefeller Foundation.

Unpublished material Boyd, M.F., M.D. letter to John A, Ferrell, M.D. received April 15 1936. RF, RG 1:100, box 5, folder 39. Hall, J.M., M.A. Medical Director, ‘Monthly Report of no. 2 Unit for Month of October, 1927’ RF, RG 5: 3, box 181, folder 2250.

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Cruchley, F.H., M.A. Medical Director, ‘Report of Unit # 1 if the Jamaica Hookworm Commission for the Month of July, 1927,’ RF, RG 5: 3, box 181, folder 2250. Hausheer, W.C., M.A. letter to Dr. Howard 2 December 1922, Ankylostomiasis Commission, Dutch Guiana. Rockefeller Foundation (RF), RG 1: 100, box 5, folder 41. Jamaica Preliminary Annual Report – 1926 Narrative & Statistical, RF, RG 5: 3, box 181, folder 2249. Memorandum Concerning Revision of the Film ‘Unhooking the Hookworm’ (1921), RF, RG 1: 100, box 5, folder 40. Memorandum No. 3 is for the information of purchasers of the film located in foreign countries. RF, RG 1: 100, Box 5 folder 40. Meyer, E.C., letter to V.G. Heiser dated March 12, 1920, RF, RG 1: 100, box 5, folder 40. ‘Suggestions for the improvement of the hookworm film’, RF, RG 1: 100, box 5, folder 40. ‘Unhooking the hookworm’, Memo, RF, RG 1: 100, box 5, folder 40. Unsigned letter to Dr Ferrell, IHB dated December 17, 1923. RF, Film Reports 1917-1927.

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Illustrations

Figure 1. Caption ‘British Guiana, 1914. This is the first crew of the International Health Commission to give treatment against hookworms. No 5 sitting to the right was their first patient.’ Courtesy Rockefeller Archive Center

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Figure 2. Caption ‘Chart lecture at Sandy Gully, Jamaica 1920’ Courtesy Rockefeller Archive Center

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Figure 3. Caption ‘Microscopical demonstration in Scipic Foot Village, Jamaica 1920’ Courtesy Rockefeller Archive Center

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Figure 4. Caption ‘Example of health entertainment from Monthly Report of No. 2 Unit for Month of October, 1927’ Courtesy Rockefeller Archive Center

20 CHURCH CONFLICT AND THE ART OF HEALING THEODORA HAWKSLEY

Scholars and practitioners across a wide range of fields are beginning to recognize and explore the potential of creative arts in processes of conflict transformation and peacebuilding. In diverse settings around the globe, a growing number of projects are drawing on the arts to address the causes and effects of armed conflict. At the same time, there is growing theoretical interest in arts-based approaches to peacebuilding, particularly concerning how they can challenge and reshape established methods of conflict resolution in ways that better adapt them to the changing nature of twenty-first century conflict (Appleby and Lederach 2010). Both theorists and practitioners suggest that arts-based peacebuilding can do two things: it can help us to understand the complexity of conflicts in non-reductive ways, and it can help us to address conflict holistically, not simply seeking to bring an end to violent conflict in the short term, but seeking to build a sustainable just peace by addressing the personal, social and spiritual dimensions of conflict over the long term. John Paul Lederach (2005) speaks from over thirty years’ experience of peacebuilding of the way in which an image or poem can capture the essence of a conflict with an immediacy and subtlety that more flatly discursive efforts can lack. Lisa Schirch and Michael Shank (2008) explore the ways in which the arts can be used strategically to transform violent conflicts, providing ways of waging conflict non-violently through protest art and music, as well as offering resources for transforming broken relationships through the healing of personal and collective trauma, and ways of building capacity for sustaining peace in the long term through education. In this paper, I will explore how one art work – Mo Mhórchoir Féin, a televised dance piece by Irish choreographer and dancer Fearghus Ó Conchúir – provides helpful ways of understanding and addressing ongoing tensions and conflict within the Roman Catholic Church in

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Ireland (Ó Conchúir 2010). I will suggest that Ó Conchúir’s piece can help us to understand the personal, social and interpersonal complexities of the conflict in more constructive and sophisticated ways than simplistic media treatments, and I will also suggest that Mo Mhórchoir Féin offers helpful insights into the kinds of healing and peacebuilding the conflict might require.

Change and conflict During the course of my current research, I have often found myself saying ‘conflict’, ‘Ireland’ and ‘church’ in the same sentence, and almost as often found that my listeners immediately assume that I am speaking about the violent sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland, and the role of the various Christian churches in causing or addressing it. The fact that I am speaking about a less obvious, and less violent, social and historical conflict in the Catholic Church in Ireland takes some explaining, and it will be helpful to do so here before we go any further. When reflecting on the current situation of the Catholic Church in Ireland, the first word that comes to mind is not ‘conflict’, so much as ‘change’ and ‘crisis’. The current situation of the Church cannot be understood without setting it in the context of wider long-term changes in Irish society. Ireland over the last century has seen massive and fast-paced social change, which has become particularly acute in the last twenty years with the growth, and then collapse, of the ‘Celtic Tiger’ economy (Kirkby 2008: 25–42). These social changes, which include rising population, urbanization, growth in the media and entertainment industries and growth in both prosperity and wealth inequality, have also impacted on the Church, whose almost monolithic strength in the early twentieth century has weakened, at first gradually and now rapidly. There has been a steep drop in vocations to priesthood and religious life since the 1970s and, although rates of Mass-going are still higher than other northern European countries, major and lasting change is in already motion. In addition to the impact of these broader societal trends, the Church’s standing has also been badly damaged by the abuse crisis, in which hundreds of cases of physical, sexual, emotional and spiritual abuse of children by priests and religious, in care homes and schools as well as in non-institutional settings, have come to light. Public anger at these cases of abuse has been exacerbated by the fact that the abuse appears to have been of a systemic nature, rather than an accumulation of isolated incidents, and that the Church consistently failed to address, and often concealed, problems with abuse over a period of more than fifty years. These revelations have

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caused, to varying extents, a breakdown in communication and relationships of trust both within the church itself, between laypeople, religious, priests and bishops, and between the church and society at large (Apostolic Vistation 2012).1 While it is common to hear the current situation of the Church in Ireland described as a ‘crisis’ or a ‘dark night’, the framework of conflict and peacebuilding is much less frequently applied. This is partly because we tend to think of the word ‘conflict’, at least in connection with ‘peacebuilding’, as referring to armed or violent conflict. It is also because we tend to think of conflicts as involving two or more clearly defined sides, and an issue or set of issues over which they are in conflict. The Catholic Church in Ireland does not seem to be experiencing conflict in these senses. While historical violence against children is one of the issues at stake, the present conflict is not physically violent and, while there may be breakdown in communication and relationships within the church itself and between church and society at large, there are no clearly defined ‘sides’. This binary understanding of conflict is one of the things I want to challenge in this paper. The second assumption this paper challenges is the understanding of conflict itself as inherently negative. I have just spoken about the need for the conflict to be transformed, rather than solved or brought to an end, and the choice of vocabulary is important here. As well as something we think of as connoting violence, we also tend to think of conflict as something problematic, or at best regrettable. My remarks in this paper proceed on a different understanding, namely that conflict is natural and human: it is something that happens quite ordinarily in the transaction of our day-today relationships and the negotiation of our interlocking, and sometimes incompatible, needs and desires (Lederach 2003: 5). Dealt with constructively, conflict can be an important driver of positive social and personal change. It is when conflict is waged violently, or expressed in persistent destructive patterns of relating (Liechty and Clegg 2001: 102– 3), that it becomes problematic and in need of transformation. Here, then, I want to turn to Mo Mhórchoir Féin, and explore how it offers insights into 1

The visitators write: ‘…over and above the suffering of the victims, the painful events of recent years have also opened many wounds within the Irish Catholic community. Many lay persons have experienced a loss of trust in their Pastors. Many good priests and Religious have felt unjustly tainted by association with the accused in the court of public opinion; some have not felt sufficiently defended by their Bishops and Superiors. Those same Bishops and Superiors have often felt isolated as they sought to confront the waves of indignation and at times they have found it difficult to agree on a common line of action.’ (Apostolic Visitation 2012)

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the nature of the conflict in the Church that nuance our understanding of the nature of conflict itself, and provides helpful insights into how the conflict might be transformed.

Mo Mhórchoir Féin From the opening seconds of Mo Mhórchoir Féin, it is clear that the piece takes place within a church. As the altar candles are blown out at the end of Mass, the title Mo Mhórchoir Féin appears, and the subtitle: A Prayer. The title fades to darkness, and the first thing the viewer sees is a human foot, slightly out of focus, and then, as the camera pans upwards, the leg, knee, arm and chest of a male body which seems, at this stage, to be naked and inert. The visual connection with the body of Christ is immediate and strong, and the camera ranges contemplatively over the body, as a worshipper’s eye might linger on the corpus of a crucifix, or the sculpture or painting of a piéta. But then there is movement: the body rises, stands up. The camera is still close, focussed on the side of the man’s torso as it begins to move rhythmically, and the close angle allows the movement to remain ambiguously poised between evoking the liturgical and the erotic, an ambiguity that runs throughout the piece. At this point, the music that has been quietly swelling breaks into a recognisable song – Caoineadh na dtrí Mhuire, and the refrain, ‘Ochón agus ochón ó’ (‘Alas and woe to me’), which raises the pitch of ambiguity still further. What is happening here? As the camera pulls out, it becomes clear that we are watching a solo male dancer, clad only in white pants, within a fairly ordinary looking church. The location of the man’s movement, largely in the area between the front pews and the sanctuary steps, is significant: at times, the man’s movements reach towards the altar, as though seeking embrace, solace, or contact, and then pull away again, as though repelled by or repelling that same contact. Bodily gestures of liturgical and sexual approach interweave as the dancer kneels, open mouthed, to receive an invisible communion; gestures of liturgical repentance and personal shame also overlap as the dancer grasps his neck, bowing his head and striking his breast in a mea culpa. The camera pulls out again from its intimate engagement with the dancer’s spiritual and physical anguish, and we realise that the dancer is not alone, after all: an altar boy is clearing the vessels from the altar in the background, and the camera cuts to the body of the church to reveal an elderly woman sitting in a pew. While her attention, with a neutral facial expression, is fixed on the front of the church, it never becomes clear whether or not she is watching the dancer. For a while, as though seated behind the woman, we watch the dancer approaching the altar and

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retreating, and we are still watching from the same pew as the altarboy genuflects and leaves, schoolbag and hurley stick in hand. The dancer moves rapidly after him, reaching out briefly as though for some kind of contact, touch or recognition, before wilting, disconsolate. The elderly woman also genuflects and departs, and the camera pans out to show the whole church from above, as if we were observing from the choir loft. Alone in the empty space, the dancer returns to the space where we first saw him: on the sanctuary, bowing, engaged in what seems an unending repetition of a prayer that finds no satisfaction or reply. The dancer’s arms extend in an echo of the crucifix visible behind him, and the screen fades to black.

Understanding conflict So how does Mo Mhórchoir Féin help us to understand the tensions and conflict within the Irish Church? Earlier on, I noted that in popular usage and often in the context of peacebuilding discourse, conflict is often understood as a dispute between two or more distinct parties. When we want to understand a conflict, we look for the parties that are in conflict, and the issue over which they are in conflict: the Philippine government at the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, for example, and their conflict over regional self-determination, or the Seleka and anti-Balaka militias in the Central African Republic, and their conflicts over religious identity. This focus on identifying parties and issues can be a helpful way of quickly getting to grips with the basics of a conflict, and the use of this view of conflict as a framework for understanding the current tensions surrounding the Catholic Church in Ireland is fairly common. It is not, however, either subtle or particularly helpful, and attempting to identify ‘sides’ to the conflict quickly reveals the limitations of such an approach. First, any attempt to describe the conflict as one between the Church on the one hand and society on the other misses some of its most important dynamics. It is true that secular media have played an important role in uncovering and reporting abuse, and have been vocally critical of Church action, past and present. It is also the case that the Catholic Church and Irish society are more clearly distinct now than fifty years ago, in terms of the Church’s waning influence over political life, public and private morality and religious practice, and the abuse crisis itself has played no small part in widening this gap. But if still no clear or easy distinction can be made between Church and society in twenty-first century Ireland, this is even truer of the historical period to which the abuse claims relate. In the mid-twentieth century period that Irish

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theologian Ethna Regan refers to as ‘Hiberno-Christendom’, the Church’s influence was strongly felt in Irish politics, and the Church took responsibility for the provision of much education and healthcare (Regan 2013: 168–72). At the same time, the institutions that were managed by the Church existed because of the state: the ‘reformatories’ and industrial schools run by orders like the Christian Brothers, for example, were a system inherited from the British administration, which continued to exist ‘decades after it had been replaced by a more humane system in other countries’ (Dorr, 2009: 112; Earner-Byrne 2011: 61–3). The poor and ‘delinquent’ children placed in those institutions were placed there at the behest of state authorities, and their labelling as delinquent speaks to broader divisions in Irish society (Earner-Byrne 2011). This is noteworthy not because it dilutes the responsibility of the Church for abuse, far less exonerates it, but because it complicates any easy characterization of the conflict as one between ‘Church’ on one hand and ‘society’ on the other. The line between the two, if indeed we can speak in these terms at all, runs through institutions and individuals, and the task of understanding the conflict and the task of transforming it requires that we acknowledge this. Second, any attempt to describe the conflict in the Church as between clergy on one hand and laity on the other, or as ‘institutional Church’ on one hand and ordinary faithful on the other, is also less than helpful. It is certainly true that many laypeople feel deep anger and a sense of betrayal, and that this is directed not just at individual perpetrators of abuse, but at the Church authorities and system that provided a setting in which abuse was not just possible, but systemic, and which consistently placed the interests and reputation of the Church above those of the abused. When conducting fieldwork in Ireland on the abuse crisis, I found people indicating as general objects of blame variously ‘the Church’ (meaning the Church hierarchy) ‘the bishops’, ‘the orders’ and ‘the Vatican’. The same people, when explaining their understanding of the abuse crisis further, nevertheless tended to express approval of their own parish priest and local bishop, and approval of religious orders with whom they had come into contact. Many also voluntarily acknowledged that the current Church hierarchy in Ireland bears no direct responsibility for enabling abuse or for covering it up. So, although people pointed fingers of blame towards ‘the Church’, ‘the bishops’ and so on, when asked to follow their pointing fingers and identify more precisely the object of their blame, they were typically unable to do so. On one hand, respondents resisted the idea that responsibility for the abuse lies solely with culpable individual abusers, and insisted on an element of institutional guilt. At the same time, they also struggled to narrow down the institutional element to a particular

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structure or body within the Church at present: the enemy seems to have no name and no face. This is symptomatic of the fact that the conflict is as much between present and past as it is between any two or more identifiable groups within the present Church. What people blame is the clericalized ecclesial culture typical of the 1950s, and its vestiges in present attitudes and actions: what they struggle with is that the blame for that clericalist culture cannot be laid solely on the shoulders of the clergy themselves. Once you move beyond establishing the guilt of individuals – the abusers themselves and the superiors and bishops who knowingly concealed abuse– the institutional or cultural dimension of responsibility is hard to establish, and the lines of guilt and innocence do not fall easily along lay and clerical lines (Keenan, 2012: 73–94, 129–53). In a recent book on peacebuilding, sound and healing, John Paul and Angela Jill Lederach (2010) explore the importance of metaphors for peacebuilding. Much peacebuilding, they argue is dominated by the underlying metaphors: conflict is linear and peace is sequential (2010: 54). These metaphors create underlying assumptions –not always helpful ones– about the progression and character of conflict, the kind of peacebuilding activities that should be undertaken, when, and for how long (2010: 56–7). At the beginning of this paper, I suggested that much of our thinking about conflict is dominated by another metaphor: conflict is binary. I have also suggested that the assumptions that come with this metaphor are not particularly helpful ones for understanding or transforming the conflict in the Church in Ireland. So how does Mo Mhórchoir Féin help us towards a better understanding of the conflict in the Catholic Church in Ireland? The answer lies in the way the piece draws attention to bodies: to individual bodies and, by extension, to social and ecclesial bodies. Fearghus Ó Conchúir does not think of his work as directly addressing or responding to the abuse crisis per se. Instead, what he seeks to address in Mo Mhórchoir Féin and the 2011 piece Tabernacle is the relationship between the Church and the Irish body. Reflecting on his formation as a dancer, Ó Conchúir explains, It was in church that I learnt the choreography of control, of symmetry, of awe, of spirituality. As congregation or as altar boy, I knew when to stand, when to kneel, when to offer my tongue or beat my breast. As a budding performer, I also learnt how to deliver that movement with grace, precision and reverence. Some time later, my relationship to the Church has changed. Social and economic development in Ireland had already weakened the very precise control over personal and social choreography that the Catholic Church had exercised. The discovery of the Church’s complicity in the abuse of young Irish bodies weakened its remaining

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In the same way as churches and convent buildings remain a highly visible part of the built environment in Ireland in spite of the decline of the Church’s influence, the Church also remains inscribed in individual bodies and in the body of society as a whole – something rendered powerfully visible through the inclusion of various liturgical movements in Mo Mhórchoir Féin. What does this mean for how we characterise the conflict? First, it helps us to answer the question ‘who’ in a more sophisticated way. As Lindsey Earner-Byrne points out, dividing up the conflict into ‘Church’ on one side and ‘society’ on the other misses much of the complexity involved (2011:55–7). The Church runs through Irish individual bodies, and the body of society as a whole. Being in conflict with the Church, and deciding what to do about it, means for many people a significant interior battle, as well as concrete decisions like –for example– whether or not to go to Mass, have a Catholic wedding, or have children baptised. Commentators who argue, in quite understandable anger, that Irish society as a whole should just walk away and leave both Church and crisis behind, miss the fact that this is like advising someone to walk away from their broken ankle. The character of the conflict is much more like a wounded body than a fist–fight, and the process of healing and reconciliation, if it is to occur, needs to take account of this. As well as helping us to answer the question about who is in conflict in a more nuanced way, attention to bodies also helps us to understand, in a more subtle and holistic way, the reasons for the conflict. The betrayal and anger felt by many people towards the Catholic Church is not just about its failure to care for children. Both during and after the period of British rule, Irish people turned to the Roman Catholic Church to nurture and articulate a distinctively Irish identity in the face of sometimes brutal religious and cultural repression (Penet 2008: 71–5). The sense of betrayal of trust, although rooted in the abuse crisis, goes much deeper, and takes shape as part of an ongoing struggle to negotiate the relationship between Irish nationalism and Roman Catholicism. The conflict is also illuminated by looking at the body of the Church in Ireland, and understanding it as a complex historical whole. Irish Catholicism, partly because of its long roots in Celtic monasticism and the tradition of the Irish penitential handbooks, has always had a strong penitential streak (Mahoney 1987: 69–87). Being a faithful Catholic meant adhering to a strict moral code, and dwelling to greater or lesser extent in a spiritual landscape marked by guilt, shame and failure - an experience that was, for some, deeply

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spiritually, psychologically and emotionally damaging. The discovery that priests and religious, the teachers and enforcers of this moral code (as well as themselves its victims), were mired in the worst kinds of transgression, has unleashed a storm of resentment that has been brewing for centuries (Fagan 2009).

Addressing conflict Thus far, I have argued that Mo Mhórchoir Féin, in drawing attention to bodies, offers us a metaphor that helps us to understand the nature of the conflict surrounding the Catholic Church in Ireland, in ways that move beyond simplistic binary analyses. The question facing us now is how the same piece offers us insights about how the conflict might be transformed. I also want to suggest that Mo Mhórchoir Féin also offers insights into how the conflict in the Irish church might be addressed. The key here is space. The abuse crisis has generated a huge amount of media attention and wider public commentary, and there is a growing body of literature offering competing psychological, sociological and theological analyses of the cause of the crisis: too much celibacy, not enough celibacy, clericalism, lack of accountability, and so on (Egan, 2011: 51-2). There are also a range of competing accounts circulating regarding what should be done about the crisis: more celibacy, less celibacy, structural change, and so on. Although all these analyses and recommendations have important insights to offer, their usefulness is often mitigated by the way in which they offer a mono-dimensional analysis of the crisis, or insist on fitting other competing accounts into their overall analytical scheme: “Celibacy isn’t the problem, it’s really about lack of accountability” or “The system itself is fine, the problem is that perverts get into the priesthood in the first place: we need better screening procedures.” This tendency towards single-cause analysis of the crisis (Regan, 2013: 165) means that the public conversation on the abuse crisis can begin to look like a chequerboard of black and white positions, with little space for the many people who find themselves in a grey area. What can Mo Mhórchoir Féin offer us here? I have shown the film to many people, and seen a range of reactions: people who think it is beautiful, profoundly moving, disturbing, shocking, or all four at once. What Ó Conchúir’s piece offers us, I think, is space. It provides a space in which something of the complexity of the conflict can be expressed without being reduced to one factor or another, and a space to which

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people can bring their own experience and uncertainties.2 Commenting on another piece that engages the Irish body, Tabernacle, Ó Conchúir makes this connection to space more explicit: Visiting churches as we looked for locations for Mo Mhórchoir Féin, I was struck by the numbers of Eastern European men praying there, the African families, the Filipina young women and their older Irish counterparts. I was struck by the number of people who looked like they had nowhere else to go using the church building as a place of sanctuary and shelter. I heard stories of young junkies who came in to hold spoons over the votive candles. The church still manages to be a place where contemporary Ireland can be investigated and where the relationship between the contemporary and the traditional can be given form (2011).

Church buildings have often spaces of shelter and refuge for Catholics: what Ó Conchúir’s dance pieces provide are spaces of shelter, places to which people can bring their experience, at the same time as they raise questions about whether the Church can continue to be a space of shelter and refuge for them. It is also important in this connection that the church in Mo Mhórchoir Féin is a space of witness. Although the altar boy clearing the altar after Mass is oblivious to the dancer’s presence, the woman sitting in the pew sees everything: the man’s private prayer, his private struggle –trí mo chóir féin, trí mo chóir féin, trí mo mhórchoir féin, through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault– is witnessed and recognised by this very ordinary mother figure. The music in the background is ‘Caoineadh Na Dtri Mhuire’ (Song of the Three Marys), a traditional mourning song sung here by Iarla Ó Lionáird, and it reinforces the theme: Cé hé an fear breá sin ar Chrann na Páise? Ochón agus ochón ó! An é nach n-aithnír do Mhac, a Mháthair? Ochón agus ochón ó! Who is that fine man upon the passion tree? Alas and woe to me! 2

Again writing about Tabernacle, Ó Conchúir comments ‘Because I want in this choreography to model a way of organising ourselves that is more thoughtful, more open, more fruitfully challenging, it is important to me that Tabernacle is made in a way that allows into it many different voices and experiences.’ (2011) The same could be said of Mo Mhórchoir Féin, despite the fact it is a solo piece: it remains open to different voices, experiences and interpretations.

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It is your son, O Mother, don't you recognize me? Alas and woe to me!

Witness, in the sense of public recognition of the truth of abuse survivors’ claims, and recognition of their suffering, has already been incredibly important in addressing the conflict. The nine-year work of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, which culminated in the document known as the Ryan Report, allowed those who had suffered abuse as children to ‘recount in full the abuse suffered by them in an atmosphere that is sympathetic to, and understanding of, them, and as informally as is possible in the circumstances.’ (CICA, 2005: §4 b) This chance to speak, to be officially heard and witnessed, was particularly important given that so many poor, orphaned and ‘delinquent’ children placed in the reformatory and industrial schools had nobody to speak for them at the time. While the Irish state has done most to provide these spaces and signs of witness through the reports of commissions investigating abuse in institutions individual dioceses, the Church has also on an official and local level sought to bear witness to the faults of its past and present. Where the state’s witness is typically judicial and legal in form, the Church’s witness uses ecclesial language of confession of guilt and asking for forgiveness (Benedict XVI, 2010). A service in Dublin’s pro-cathedral in February 2011 saw Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston and the Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, preside at a liturgy of lament and repentance during which they washed the feet of abuse survivors. Such actions are important, but what judicial practices of witness and sacramental practices of confession have in common is their short-term nature. A legal trial provides a space in which witnesses have the chance to tell their stories, and in which the truth can be established, but once verdict is passed and a sentence handed down, the trial concludes, and the space of witness disappears. In sacramental confession, there is a chance to acknowledge harm done before a witness and to receive forgiveness but, once absolution has been received and penance given, the space of confession closes again. Transforming the conflict in the Catholic Church in Ireland will require not just occasional spaces of witness of this kind, but an ongoing commitment to providing spaces where people‘s experiences and struggles with the Church can be expressed and witnessed, without reduction, rejection, or over-quick resolution. The arts, I suggest, are already providing such spaces, and will continue to do so (Auge, 2008; Deane, 2008; McDonagh 2003). The metaphor of space and witness that runs through Mo Mhorchóir Féin also draws our attention to another key to transforming this conflict:

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proximity. Writing about the metaphor of voice, and its importance to peacebuilding, John Paul Lederach and Angela Jill Lederach (2010) observe that many people caught up in conflict feel powerless because they feel they lack a voice in the decisions being made about their situation, and the events taking place around them. During peace negotiations, the people bearing the brunt of violence on a local level are often talked about, but not talked with (2010: 65). Reflecting on what it means to give such people a voice, Lederach and Lederach suggest that Voice implies an image related to the proxemics of space and relationship. Voice signals that people are within hearing range, the shared space of a conversation…to have a voice suggests that people, and significant processes affecting their lives, are proximate: they are physically close enough that the vibrations of sounds touch each other, create an echo that bounces, reverberate and resonate between them. (65)

We can only hear one another if we are close enough. The metaphor of space and witness has something similar to teach us: the woman is able to witness the prayer of the dancer because she is close enough. Just as voice signals that people are within hearing range, a shared space of witness implies that people are close enough to see one another, and to see one another not in the sense of mere passive observation, but in the sense of bearing witness. The ecclesial culture of pre-Vatican II Irish Catholicism was characterised by a marked distance between laity and clergy. This distance between people and priests and priests and people was both physical and symbolic, and it fostered the disastrous belief that clergy were sinless and almost superhuman. It became a belief that led to reports of abuse being disbelieved, denied and concealed and it led, too, to inhuman burdens being laid upon clergy themselves (Keenan, 2012: 129–53). These distant relationships began to shift and change with the Second Vatican Council, and are still shifting today, towards relationships that are much more positive, accountable and human. If we are to transform the conflict surrounding the abuse crisis, that is, if we are to see it as an opportunity to seek and pursue positive change, then there needs to be a conscious commitment to transforming the quality of relationships between laity and clergy in particular, and also between priests and bishops (Visitation, 2014). Creating and reinforcing official processes and structures of accountability is an important part of this transformation, but only a small part of it. What is needed, too, is something less easily observable: a closeness between laypeople, clergy and their bishops that rids their

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relationships of that clericalist distance that prevents lay and clergy alike from seeing one another fully as persons.

Conclusion Arts-based approaches to peacebuilding have becoming increasingly popular over the past ten years as practitioners and theorists of peacebuilding have recognised their remarkable capacities for engaging the symbolic and cultural aspects of conflict. In this chapter, I have explored how Mo Mhórchoir Féin offers insights into the conflict currently surrounding the Catholic Church in Ireland, helping us to understand it in ways that move beyond unhelpful binary analyses, and helping us to address it in ways that that draw upon metaphors of vision, body, space and healing. The arts, including poetry, dance, drama, film sculpture and visual arts, are already playing important roles in the conflict, helping people to protest, remember, grieve and show solidarity. It is to be hoped that the arts will also be central to the slow process of healing and transformation that lies ahead.

References Apostolic Visitation (2011) ‘Summary of the Findings of the Apostolic Visitation in Ireland.’ www.vatican.va/resources/resources_sintesi _20120320_en.html. (Accessed April 6th 2014). Appleby, R. S. and Lederach, J.P. (2010) ‘Strategic Peacebuilding: An Overview’, in D. Philpott and G.F. Powers (eds) Strategies of Peace: Transforming Conflict in a Violent World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 19–44. Auge, A.J. (2008) ‘Sifting the Remains of Irish Catholicism: Relics and Nuns in Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s Poetry’, in J. Littleton and E. Maher (eds) Contemporary Catholicism in Ireland: A Critical Appraisal, Dublin: Columba Press, 220–241. Benedict XVI (2010) ‘Letter to the Catholics of Ireland.’ www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/letters/2010/documents/hf_b en-xvi_let_20100319_church-ireland_en.html §14 (Accessed 6 April 2014). Committee to Inquire into Child Abuse (2005) Committee to Inquire into Child Abuse (Amendment) Act 2005. www.irishstatutebook.ie/2005 /en/act/pub/0017/ (Accessed 10 April 2014).

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Deane, J.F. (2008) ‘The Jesus Body, The Jesus Bones’, in John Littleton and Eamon Maher (eds) Contemporary Catholicism in Ireland: A Critical Appraisal. Dublin: Columba Press, 242–58. Dorr, D. (2009) ‘Who Was Responsible?’ in Tony Flannery (ed), Responding to the Ryan Report. Dublin: Columba Press, 111–20. Earner-Byrne, L. (2011) ‘Child Sexual Abuse, History and the Pursuit of Blame in Modern Ireland’, in K. Holmes and S. Ward (eds) Exhuming Passions: Memory and the Pressures of the Past in Australia and Ireland. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 51–70. Egan, K. (2011) Remaining a Catholic After the Murphy Report. Dublin: Columba Press. Fagan, S. (2009) ‘The Abuse and our Bad Theology’, in T. Flannery (ed), Responding to the Ryan Report. Dublin: Columba Press, 14–24. Keenan, M. (2012) Child Sexual Abuse and the Catholic Church. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kirkby, P. (2008) ‘The Catholic Church in Post-Celtic Tiger Ireland’, in J. Littleton and E. Maher (eds) Contemporary Catholicism in Ireland: A Critical Appraisal. Dublin: Columba Press, 25–42. Lederach, J.P. (2003) The Little Book of Conflict Transformation. Intercourse, PA: Good Books. —. (2005) The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lederach, J.P. and Lederach, A.J. (2010) When Blood and Bones Cry Out: Journeys through the Soundscape of Healing and Reconciliation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Liechty, J. and Cecelia C. (2001) Moving Beyond Sectarianism: Religion, Conflict and Reconciliation in Northern Ireland. Dublin: Columba Press. Mahoney, J.A. (1987) The Making of Moral Theology: A Study of the Roman Catholic Tradition. Oxford: Clarendon Press. McDonagh, E. (2003) ‘Faith and the Cure of Poetry: A Response to the Crisis in the Catholic Church in Ireland’, in Andrew Pierce and Geraldine Smyth OP (eds), The Critical Spirit: Theology at the Crossroads of Faith and Culture. Dublin: Columba Press, 123–34. Ó Conchúir, F. (2010) Mo Mhórchoir Féin. Choreographed and perfomed by Fearghus Ó Conchúir. Directed by Dearbhla Walsh. Produced by Maggie Breathnach. Music by Iarla Ó Lionáird. RTÉ/An Chomhairle Ealaíon Dance on the Box Commission 2010. www.fearghus.net/projects/mo-mhorchoir-fein-%E2%80%93-a-prayer/ (Accessed 2nd June 2014).

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Ó Conchúir, Fearghus. Tabernacle, http://www.fearghus.net/projects/tabernacle/ (Accessed 2nd June 2014). Penet, J.C. (2008) ‘From Modernity to Ultramodernity: The Changing Influence of Catholic Practice on Political Practice in Ireland’, in John Littleton and Eamon Maher (eds), Contemporary Catholicism in Ireland: A Critical Appraisal. Dublin: Columba Press, 69–87. Regan, E. (2013) ‘Church, Culture and Credibility: A Perspective From Ireland’ New Blackfriars 94:1050, 160–76. Schirch, L. and Shank, M. (2008) ‘Strategic Arts-Based Peacebuilding’ Peace and Change 33:3, 217–42.

21 WORDLESS PEACE: THE RHETORIC AND POTENTIAL OF PHYSICAL THEATRE FOR COMMUNICATING PEACE GEOFFREY STEVENSON

In this illustrated paper I examine mime (or ‘physical theatre’) with respect to its non-verbal rhetoric in religious-oriented peacebuilding.1 In order to do this I analyse a piece of mime as an example, inviting readers to reflect on the nature of the communication act. I then analyse the roles of narrative and character in theatrical mime. The non-verbal arts highlight the tension between private and public narratives in a particularly acute form. Therefore I consider how an enacted mime narrative can bring together the physical performer and the engaged observer(s) in a communal enterprise of making meaning at the level of individual and collective interpretation, and making meaning in the larger sense, at the level of ethics and peace building. I reflect on the performed drama in terms of several major twentieth century movements in western theatre, seeking to show that its didacticism has various theatrical roots that go far beyond entertainment and diversion. I am seeking to show that theatrical mime expression, when interrogated through these rhetorical analyses, remains a significant means of embodying narratives, symbols and values that can be formative for a ‘virtuous’ community and inspirational for the empathetic individual engaged in building peace.

1

The principal focus of this paper is aesthetics and rhetoric. I deliberately leave undefined all of the words ‘religious communication in peacebuilding’ but I am arguing in terms that are largely independent of specific confessions and institutions, that lean to culturally creative (pace Quentin Schultze) rather than transmissive views of communication, and that are concerned with ethically oriented discourse and thematic tropes common to religion.

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Mime performance: The Poverty Chain The 8-minute mime accompanying this paper2 was devised in 1989 for a project by TEAR Fund. Their aim was to educate their supporters, who were largely from evangelical churches in the UK, by raising awareness of poverty in the two-thirds world.3 The outcome was a 40-date UK tour of a multi-media presentation from poet Stewart Henderson, singer-songwriter Garth Hewitt, filmmaker John Muggleton and mime J. Geoffrey Stevenson. Material was based on fact-finding trips to the Philippines and filming in several locations such as Smokey Mountain (Manila), Mindanao and a fishing village on Cebu. The style of mime is unusual in that it incorporates vocal sound effects generated by the performer. It begins in the style of mime blanc, with the ‘drawing’ of a sphere representing the earth, and this enables the audience to locate the characters geographically. It presents a series of character vignettes and events, with dislocations and jump cuts of time, space and character. Reception depends on a visually literate audience who are able to identify new characters and switch POV – point of view –as swiftly as the performer. We first meet the farmer, laboriously tilling a field and planting rice in an unnamed country of the southern hemisphere. Then we meet a woman and her complicit husband (with no apologies for crude cross-gender portrayal) located 20,000 km. away, cooking and catalogue shopping in a clear degree of comfort and affluence. She and her husband determine that their kitchen is dysfunctional and ugly and so she calls in a salesman, who is only too eager to measure up and send the order with a tap on his computer. The action moves across the stage as minor characters process the order: an office manager, lumberyard foreman, a chainsaw-wielding lumberjack, various drivers and carpenters. The farmer hears the chainsaws above the fields where he labours, shakes his head, and goes back to sowing. After the kitchen is installed with a last flourish of polish, the payment for the installation makes a similar journey, each link in the 2

The reader is encouraged to view a version of this drama should online at: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/8422396/MRC/index.html. Admittedly, the individual viewing a mass media version of the piece will find it a somewhat degraded experience. Not only is the immersive quality of a live performance impossible to reproduce, but as I will argue in this paper, the sense of a community mutually reinforcing its values in a shared experience is also powerfully present in live theatre to a degree unmatched by film and TV. 3 A second aim was to raise membership subscriptions by appealing to an audience younger than their aging constituency.

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chain receiving an (ever decreasing) amount – apart from the farmer, who receives nothing. He hears the chainsaws, and then a rumble of thunder: there is a new urgency to his sowing. Back in the kitchen, time has passed, the woman grows discontented – the kitchen is not ‘quite’ right. Husband agrees, the order for a new one is processed across the stage, more trees are felled, the timber comes back across, and –ping – she has another brand new kitchen. She claps her hands excitedly. On the other side of the stage / world, the farmer is planting out rice shoots, but the rains have started, and now from the deforested hillside comes a flood: washing away his crop, his livelihood, his family’s future. A cameraman appears, pleased to film such a dramatic event. Back in the kitchen, the woman is preparing ‘a little something’. She switches on her television, sees the plight of the farmer, and is deeply moved. She shrugs and takes another mouthful. Fade to black. The piece makes a visceral and tragi-comic connection between capitalist consumption in developed countries and the destruction of natural habitat and traditional livelihood in the Two-Thirds World. It is sharply satirical of heedless and self-centred consumerism, and compassionate towards the powerless and lowest paid workers in an economic supply chain. It contains a subtle reminder that consumers are linked to suppliers and to the unintended casualties of the process, not only by the direct chain of production and profit-making, but also by the mass media that relay images globally and trans-culturally.

On viewing mime In the cinema, reality is used in order to create illusion. In the theatre, we create reality through illusion. —Marcel Marceau (Marceau 1975).

In common with much mime of its type, on a primary level the entertainment value of this piece of mime lies in the viewer’s ability to decode the language and gestures of the silent theatrical storyteller, and to derive simple enjoyment of that process.4 But the potential affective power goes deeper and resides in several of the rhetorical dynamics of the mime performance. The first involves the recognition that body language is decoded and understood in ‘pre-verbal’ ways. A shrug of the shoulders does not just convey the idea of ‘don’t know’ or ‘don’t care’ (or something 4

Although that is not always the case. I would be the first to recognize that the art form has its detractors, and leaves others cold, or mystified. See comic Woody Allen’s gleefully satirical account ‘A Little Louder, Please’ in Allen 1971.

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else entirely: context is vital) but it invites, awakens and can even in the act of viewing evoke the psychological attitude, through a ‘kinesthetic empathy’ that is based on shared and culturally-located understandings. Such pre-verbal language can create in the viewer emotional sensations that ‘get under the skin’ and fly below the radar of the cognitive apprehension of what is taking place. In The Poverty Chain, the rice farmer’s backbreaking labour is ‘sketched’ ever so briefly. However at the kinesthetic level, the viewer may not just recall, but enter into something of the weariness and pain portrayed, and may readily and rapidly form an identification and empathy.5 What use the artist or the viewer makes of this will be considered later. Another rhetorical dynamic involves honouring and empowering the imagination of the viewer. Spaces, objects, actions, relationships are drawn and evoked by the mime in the empty space, but vivid and particular visual details are supplied by the viewer who is sometimes not aware of doing so. The mental images created by the viewer from the scant, economical gestures of the mime artist are owned, personal, and can be memorable.6 Why only ‘scant, economical gestures’? Why eschew voice, text, and the full range of realistic sets and properties, when with these the actor is most versatile, the playwright unfettered? One answer is that less can be more. The solo human body is capable of a gestural and narrative eloquence and this eloquence is effectively obscured, for the viewer, by the addition of the spoken word, colourful costumes, and a stage full of eye-catching scenery. Silent mime (although my piece is not an example of this in its purest form) invites an engagement and involvement from the viewer that can be missing from a more multi-sensory experience, however immediately engaging that might be. The concentration required may be unusual, but the rewards are great. Secondly, the mime works with a restricted palette in order to create a fragile atmosphere of suspense and expectation. The pictures created in the mind’s eye are the outcome of a delicate contract established between artist and audience. It does not take much to break the spell, to cease suspending disbelief. But that liminality, that vulnerability, that edginess gives a vital and suspenseful openness to the viewer of a good mime performance. And in those moments, there is potential for the cathartic, 5

We are surely somewhere near the root meaning of the term mimesis, the reproduction in the viewer of the emotions depicted on stage. See Golden 1992. 6 Not dissimilar to painting pictures with words, and the old adage ‘radio is superior than TV, because the pictures are better,’ a well-argued appeal for preachers to do this is in Mitchell 1999.

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and for what I would call touching reality, apprehending something that is true and beautiful.7 To quote Marcel Marceau again: ‘Mime is not a silent art – it is the art of touching people.’ (Martin 1978: 7) The suspension of disbelief to which I alluded earlier is of course an essential element of the way narrative functions in the theatre. As well as restraining the attitude of detached skepticism, the audience gives a generous and focused attention. Just as we do not give primary attention to the daubs of paint on the flat canvas but rather the skilfully painted figure which invites our very human responses, so an engaged theatre audience should see the character rather than the actor, should not be distracted by hard seats, cold draughts, nor the sweat marks and stains on the actor’s costume. Neither should they view the performer’s gestures and postures as abstract and meaningless movement in space. Attention allows the making of meaning. The attention of the viewer is a generous gift to the performer, and so the performer, bowing at the end to indicate the servantlike nature of her/his task, may only do so if s/he has honoured, respected and rewarded the viewer for their attention. In addition to enjoyment, emotion, imagination and attention, a successful performance is preeminently a function of the viewer’s relationship with and primal desire for narrative. Apart from some notable twentieth century experiments, western theatre continues to recognize and embody Aristotelian principles of narrative structure, and very commonly (but by no means universally) the principles of dramatic structure outlined by the nineteenth century playwright and novelist Gustave Freytag (Freytag 1968).8 In Aristotle’s Poetics (simply put) narrative requires beginning, middle and end. As analyzed by Freytag there are five parts to the plot of a drama: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and revelation/catastrophe. The Poverty Chain mime is no exception, as it seeks to carry the viewer through a sequence of emotions to an entertaining and satisfying conclusion, by which time, if not catharsis, then some kind of illumination has taken place. In addition to plot, the other essential element to narrative is character in conflict. In the mime there are three main characters. The first two are 7

Catharsis, described Aristotle’s Poetics variously as emotional cleansing and the release of pent-up energy, is an acknowledged aim of many forms of western theatre. This (notwithstanding Plato’s earlier condemnation of the theatrical arts) has the power and importance of any pursuit of truth. I will explore more fully the phenomenological nature of the theatrical communication event, below. 8 This has been visualized as a pyramid or triangle and has been well represented at Wheeler 2004. On the enduring structures of storytelling see also Propp 1968; Bettelheim 1991; and Booker 2004.

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the woman ordering her kitchens and the farmer in his paddy. I suggest that the third major character in the drama is the late twentieth century system of globalized production and profit. Like a snake, coiling and recoiling to strike and strike again, its action is seemingly initiated by the couple and incorporates all the characters before it strikes its victim. It is an agent or force in the drama, but can we properly call it a character? Does it have a life of its own? The point is moot. Moreover the piece is not economic analysis, still less neo-Marxist or Keynsian critique.9 But this chain or process involves not only the characters in the drama, but most of the audience watching the drama. The drama demands that we respond to the naming and symbolizing of this ‘character’ even as our emotions are drawn out by the other, human characters. The drama is a play of characters in conflict, and it leads us to consider how representative they are of our own experience, and how limited or broad are our horizons of view. I have begun to speak of ‘us’, not solely in order to implicate the reader in the ethical thrust of the drama, but also to move the discussion on from private to public reception of drama. This begins with the commonplace that theatre is (and there are of course culturally-specific exceptions) a dynamic meeting place between storyteller and listeners. Unique to the live theatrical event (as distinct from film or television) is the creation of a temporary community. There is a parallel here with live sporting events and those gathered to witness the high drama of athletic competition. This gathered community is bonded by sharing an experience of several of the senses, by putting aside individual rights and expressions in favour of shared and confined space, by a small range of approved postures and behaviours, and by collective and largely simultaneous expostulations and expressions of delight, laughter, approval and disapproval. The communal nature of theatre, along with some of its functions understood anthropologically, have been well explored in recent literature, especially that based on dialogue between theatre and theology.10 The roots of theatre are sometimes claimed to lie in religious ritual,11 but it is worth observing that religious ritual may be traced ethnographically to primitive social rites

9

The economist or civic policymaker may ask of what use then is this work of art? It is not the first time such a question has been asked. But of course it is the wrong question for art. 10 See especially Johnson 2009. 11 In English culture a line of development has been often traced from Christian liturgical tropes to the secular theatre by way of the medieval Mystery Plays. See Styan 1996.

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and animist religions in tribal collectives where it may not be possible to draw any distinction between religious and secular. For the purposes of this paper, I limit myself to the observation that The Poverty Chain has the potential, given its aim and its genesis, to act as a minor rite of shared remembrance, a reminder of values required and desired by a community assembled, however temporarily, in one place. Its success in that respect is another matter, and may be left to the critics to pronounce.

Twentieth century theories of western theatre I have earlier outlined the rhetorical potential of mime, and described ways in which an audience can respond. A brief look at the basics of how theatre communicates may usefully expand this discussion.12 Most commonly, theatre is often considered to be a process of interpreting and performing a text.13 The fact that plays are only very rarely written as literary works without the aim of performance gives us an indication of what might be particular and noteworthy about a performance as distinct from the written artefact. A theatrical performance is an event located in time and place, and further contextualized by culture and by the particular combination of performers, technicians and viewers assembled for the event. While wary of committing the so-called Intentional Fallacy (privileging the author / dramaturge), we will not abandon those agents (without whom nothing would take place) for the sake of Reception Theory. The performance of a mime drama is a prime example of holding in paradoxical tension these opposites in theories of aesthetics, as each audience member makes their own meaning from the cues provided by the performer. A brief look at several theatrical theories of the twentieth century will enable us to put mime into a broader theatrical context. Konstantin 12

Of course modern theatre has no shortage of discourse about what it thinks it is doing, and this paper cannot provide an exhaustive overview of all that is understood by the terms drama and theatre. Furthermore with my practical example I acknowledge the risk of using a frog, as it were, to talk about an alligator: my dramatic piece may be closely related, but still missing elements that are considered by some to be part of theatrical drama. 13 The mime too has a plotted shape that precedes the performance. This leads to philosophical questions beyond the scope of this paper, such as what is the ontological nature of the play if it is not the text, and if it is interpreted (like a musical score) on more than one occasion. See Wolterstorff 1980 and Joshua Edelman’s essay in Hart and Guthrie 2007.

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Stanislavski was a foundational theorist in the art of acting, developing in Russia at the beginning of the century a method of actor training and preparation for taking on a role that was simply called The System. It focused on both physical training and the development and use of the actor’s emotional abilities and memories. He said, [The artist’s] job is not to present merely the external life of his character. He must fit his own human qualities to the life of this other person, and pour into it all of his own soul. The fundamental aim of our art is the creation of this inner life of a human spirit, and its expression in an artistic form. (Stanislavsky and Hapgood 1980: 14).

Sometimes conflated with Stanislavski’s System, but with important differences, was the ‘Method’ approach developed by Lee Strasberg, a pupil of Stanislavski, in his New York acting studio. Both considered that the actor’s truthful identification with character is a prerequisite (however paradoxical the attempt) for theatre that has as its twin aims truth and beauty. We can identify the naturalistic acting and indeed the hyperrealism of most popular stage and screen productions up to the present as the theatrical descendants of this approach. Mid-century, two playwright / directors who reacted against Stanislavski’s approach were Dario Fo and Bertolt Brecht, both committed Marxists. Brecht, through what he called didactic or ‘epic’ theatre, aimed for the provocation, transformation and education of the audience, rather than the actor. If this meant subverting the cosy and intense relationship the bourgeois audience desires to form with the story and characters on stage, then any and all means were fair. But alienation (Verfremdungseffekt) and strong awareness of the artifice of theatre were not primary aims, as much as the invitation extended to the audience to consider themselves and their position with respect to the issues raised by the drama. I will shortly consider whether the audience for a mime drama is necessarily or only incidentally pushed to such reflection. A notable innovator and pioneer of the twentieth century was the Polish theatre director Jerzy Grotowski. He attempted to strip theatre down to its raw, bare essentials, which for him were the actor’s body on stage and the relationship with the spectator. His aim was nothing less than truthful encounter, fuelled by ambitions that he expressed in typically heroic language. This is Truth and Beauty with a decidedly ethical and virtuous aspect. Why are we concerned with art? To cross our frontiers, exceed our limitations, fill our emptiness – fulfill ourselves... In this struggle with one’s own truth, this effort to peel off the life-mask, the theatre, with its

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Mention too should be made of English theatre director Peter Brook who developed powerful work with performing ensembles, and the French physical theatre director Jacques Lecoq, who developed methods for releasing the actor’s playful inventiveness.14 Nor were these dynamics without effect within the kind of plays produced for audiences who were willing to experience departures from the stylized naturalism and ‘invisible fourth wall’ of mainstream theatre. Mime theatre undoubtedly developed and benefitted from newly trained and inspired performers, such as Steven Berkoff and Complicite.15 Arguably Stanislawski and Brecht, as well as Brook and Grotowski were all working from an assumption that theatre is capable of realizing, embodying or bringing to the viewer what has been termed ‘presence’. Presence is a philosophical concept imbued with the sense that truth, however difficult, may at least in theory be approached, apprehended or touched.16 Philosophically, this of course has been challenged, not least in the writings of Jacques Derrida, and neatly encapsulated by Cormac Power: Derrida’s writings disrupt the claims to meaning, truth, closure and presence in philosophy, in favour of absence, deferral, play and openness. In like terms, post-structuralist approaches to theatre tend to emphasise a shift from envisaging a stage which stressed the importance of the present, to a postmodern aesthetic of absence and textuality (Power 2008: 5).17

‘Presence’ and truth remain, however, the concern of most playwrights, and particularly so amongst those who bring moral concerns to their work, and look for an effect on the beliefs and practices of their audiences. When this over-balances other aesthetic elements, the terms ‘polemical’, ‘political’ or even ‘agit-prop’18 may be appropriate.

14

See Brook 1972; Brook 1987 and Lecoq, Carasso and Lallias 2002. Founded in 1983 and formerly known as Théâtre de Complicité 16 See Power 2008. 17 See Hayman 1979 and Lehmann 2006. I acknowledge that experimental theatre practice has in some places and examples reflected post-structuralism, but it shall not detain us here. 18 A combination of agitation and propaganda that aimed to combine emotional appeal with rational argument. 15

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Polemical theatre Theatre practitioners who seek changes in the viewer or in society are not of course limited to the modern era. Aristotle in his Poetics seeks to refine the concept of catharsis, and rescue theatre from Plato’s negative view of the effect of artistic mimesis on the audience.19 It is difficult, and perhaps a modernist vanity, to attempt to separate the individual from his/her society. But attempting to change society, and to make in particular political changes are associated with more recent, post-Enlightenment forms of western theatre. A prominent example is late eighteenth century French theatre, when theatre became something of a cultural weapon leading up to the French Revolution.20 It is not possible here to trace all the movements in polemical and political theatre but notable examples include Moscow State Jewish Theater, which from its founding in 1919 to its closing in 1948 specialized in polemic theatre.21 Also in postrevolutionary Russia, there was a stream of unabashedly propagandist touring theatre productions that gave rise to the term agitprop and most notably influenced Bertolt Brecht.22 In South America, Brazilian theatre director Augusto Boal developed popular pedagogical theatre forms. Boal was inspired by Brazilian educator and writer Paulo Freire as well as by his own experiences of political activity, leading to torture and exile. In the USA, reacting to the Vietnam War and other perceived establishment errors and injustices, several theatre groups became active such as San Francisco Mime Troupe, El Teatro Campesino, The Living Theater, and The Bread and Puppet Theater. The English stage has a long tradition of sharply pointed political theatre, stretching back to Elizabethan drama and finding twentieth century expression in the work of playwrights such as John Osborne and David Hare; in Scotland, John McGrath founded the Scottish popular theatre company 7:84 (Scotland), touring his most famous play, The Cheviot, The Stag and the Black, Black Oil (1974). All of the theatre companies I have mentioned are intentionally polemical, that is to say, concerned to produce change in their audiences, whether educational, spurs to political action, or resistance to oppression through the development of solidarity. Techniques of mime and physical theatre, by virtue of their ‘alternative’ status, are often found in theatre challenging the status quo.

19

Aristotle and Lucas 1968. E.g. Voltaire’s 1760 play Le Café, ou L’Ecossaise. See Connors 2012. 21 See Veidlinger 2000. 22 See Bodek 1997. 20

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Yet the theatre cannot be equated with ballots, bullets, protest marches or hunger strikes. John McGrath, in his introduction in a published edition of the aforementioned play, argued that ‘the theatre can never ‘cause’ a social change. ‘It can articulate pressure towards one, help people celebrate their strengths and maybe build their self-confidence… Above all, it can be the way people find their voice, their solidarity and their collective determination’ (McGrath 1981: xxvii). Not only is art incapable of causing social change, it has been argued that the more discursive a work of art is, the less it can be an agent for promoting peace, since its discursiveness and polemics may be felt as coercive, even violent. The free play of the imagination is vital in receiving so much art.23 My aim in this brief discourse on theatrical theory and practice is simply to be able to assert that a late twentieth century mime piece such as The Poverty Chain has theatrical roots in modernist methods aiming at ‘presence’ or truth, as well as intentional effects on anticipated live audiences who may be expecting more entertainment than education. There is, as has been stated, a delicate contract between performer and audience in a live context. The play of actions is laying narrative tracks within a play of emotions, and in relatively straightforward ways. This narrative, presented through a technical, rarified performing style, working with stereotypes and cultural symbols, is essentially alienating, in the Brechtian sense, although the viewer is not being deliberately repulsed or abused in order to prevent over-identification. But neither is it true-to-life immersive naturalism. The viewer is aware, and should be aware, that there is something challenging, there is a didactic purpose behind the drama. I have been influenced by the approach of Jacques Lecoq, incorporating into my mime style an eclectic mix of techniques that I have, in a spirit of play freely borrowed. Yet the Grotowskian element is also there (at least potentially, I humbly dare to hope) in the moments when the viewer recognizes, as deep calls to deep, the truthfulness of a gesture or an expression, and touches the spirit behind it. This theatre depends on the shock of recognition, and cannot achieve this without moments of significant psychological truth. In presenting this – very minor – piece I hope to evade restrictive dualisms such as theatre-as-art vs. theatre-as-propaganda. I have didactic aims, yet I invite contemplation more than activism. I work in a style that is ‘poor’ in the Grotowskian sense. There are no props, elaborate sets, costumes or lighting. Almost everything is dependent on the illusions, 23 I am indebted to the philosopher and aesthetician Adrienne Chaplin for this insight.

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gestures, and physical techniques. Yet it is the imagination of the spectator that completes the process, and that degree of spectator involvement can be neither compelled nor controlled. In important ways the power is with the spectator. The solo artist is more vulnerable than any other, and while this is distastefully intimate for some viewers, for others the artist’s poverty helps to create a psychological as well as theatrical space that is safe to enter, to explore, and to play in the richer senses of that word.

Mass media and televised suffering The next analysis of the rhetoric of this piece of theatre concerns its brief portrayal of the mass media at work. In my fictional world there are suggestions of a range of dramas being played out beneath and behind the primary drama. Behind the news event of a disastrous flooding of a community, there is the news cycle: a process of packaging and consumption information for the purpose of entertainment. This entertainment may consist of interesting factoids or stories that exist to entertain, to titillate, or to reinforce the viewer’s world-view or their political opinions. The status of news as educative and informative is called into question when such news items are effectively trivialized by appearing alongside the embarrassment of a dissembling politician, the success or failure of a sporting icon, the rescue of a cat, and a stream of advertisements for yet more unnecessary acquisitions.24 The woman and husband are in a state of ignorance and bliss regarding the chain that leads from their kitchen to the tragedy in the rice paddy. The point is made satirically that the news report has arguably not brought them any closer to redemptive or caring action. This is despite the usual ‘packaging’ of such a news story, i.e. ‘something must be done about this!’ and despite the viewer’s expressions of perhaps heart-felt but fleeting sympathy. It is the combination of easy-on, easy-off entertainment, in the cosy cocoon of middle class domesticity, which allows such a superficial response. This is more ‘faux compassion’ than genuine sympathy, and the seeking of emotion experienced on viewing the distress, pain, or difficulty of those with whom there is no close relationship has been called ‘recreational grieving’, ‘grief porn’ or ‘mourning sickness’. In this respect Susan Sontag’s essay Regarding the Pain of Others insightfully considers the nature of our attraction to photographs of war atrocities and explores 24

This cursory list can only begin to suggest the interplay of cultural factors at work in global news gathering and broadcasting. See Davies 2009 for a recent practitioner’s account of some of the more commercial aspects.

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how that is affected by our social or geographical distance from the victim (Sontag 2004). Barbra Zelizer has developed this theme in greater and more graphic detail in her 2010 About to Die: How News Images Move the Public, which is dedicated to Sontag. Here she explores the differences between what images denotate and what images connotate including the role of viewer and context (Zelizer 2010). The differences in connotation between images in photographs, films and television is also beyond the scope of this paper, but consider for a moment the placement of the transmitted image of the weeping farmer in his paddy. The mime drama finishes the story with a picture of the consumer, contentedly preparing her family’s meal. The image of devastation that she has witnessed on the built-in LCD screen of her custom-made kitchen is arguably not as strong in her mind as it is perhaps in the minds of some of the audience of the drama: they have seen a portrayal of suffering, over on the other side of the stage. That portrayal is less particular, in the sense that it is not a record of an historical event. However I am arguing that it will be at least for some the more vivid because of the involvement in the performance, according to the elements discussed earlier. Can this affective movement, if it exists, contribute to an ethical response? In terms of the news cycles of the mass media, the journalist is of course a vital link. Readers will know the debased trope of the detached professional journalist in the chimerical pursuit of objectivity. As an alternative, in his examination of ethics and mass media, Jolyon Mitchell pointedly quotes journalist Martin Bell, and a notable appeal Bell made for cultivating a ‘journalism of attachment’. Mitchell goes on to suggest that there is a place to nurture ‘audiences with attachment’ (Mitchell 2007: 140).25 Well-developed media literacy does not only include discernment, but empathy and the cultivation of virtues appropriate to citizenship in pluralist societies. It is this moral quality I attempt to evoke, using polemical tools of satire and pathos, in the Poverty Chain.

Peacebuilding, ethics and ubuntu I have referred to the theatre audience as a temporary community, and suggested that there can be in a live performance a shared rite of remembrance, built on the platform of hospitality. Solo mime has a particular link to the Everyman figure of medieval drama. As viewers we are invited to identify in part with this Everyman figure, and in so doing consider our shared humanity. The pan-African concept of ubuntu is also 25

See also MacIntyre 1985.

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useful here. Ubuntu is the cultural worldview or ethic that recognizes that the welfare of each member of society is fundamentally dependent on the welfare of all. Tim Murithi defined ubuntu as the idea that ‘a person is a person through other people. We are human because we live through others, we belong, we participate and we share.’ (Murithi 2009: 149). Desmond Tutu described ubuntu: A person with Ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, based from a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed (Tutu 1999: 34-5).

Martin Luther King similarly expressed the idea: All mankind is tied together; all life is interrelated, and we are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be -- this is the interrelated structure of reality (Warren 2001: 174).

Theatrical performances such as I have been describing are communal events depending on an extensive range of shared ethical values, shared literary and narrative tropes, and shared culturally-located understandings and perspectives. Laughter and applause are the most obvious evidence of group solidarity, but also in the silences and in the dark there are other tacit agreements that hold sway over the ideas and affections of the audience. Self-interested motives and narcissistic preoccupations are for a time suspended in favour of celebration, exploration, and the play and interplay of virtuous ideals. Thus I am arguing that there is the potential for an unconscious and temporary experience of ubuntu that may be present in even the most formal and reserved northern European audience settings.26 Through this concept of ubuntu we are at last at a place to consider peacebuilding. Here I refer to The Moral Imagination, John Paul Lederach’s 2005 seminal work on building peace. In it he asks how it is that society members caught in situations of conflict or division can see past the inherited blockages and emotional obstacles to a place of peace

26

Of course the dynamics and rhetoric of theatre are morally neutral, and capable of uses and effects both virtuous and Ubuntu-esque, or immoral and against the common good.

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and reconciliation? Lederach suggests that the moral imagination necessary to do this can and must be stimulated by processes that go beyond analytical dissection and rational negotiation of peace treaties and accords. These processes can include art forms such as song, poetry, drama, painting, and others. I am suggesting that in the live performance of mime theatre there is a unique potential for an audience to find and affirm the moral compass that is crucial to moving beyond the self-interest that can cripple justice negotiations, peace accords and reconciliation commissions. Though debate is suspended, and there may be no words at all, an audience is fully engaged in making meaning as well as in ‘colouring in’ the drama from their own imagination. This can lead to an affective engagement that is also appropriate to working for peace with compassionate as well as critical faculties. Finally, returning to rhetorical analysis of the mime drama, I invite consideration of its didactic modes of communication. The drama does not pretend to moral neutrality. It takes positions, makes judgements, attempts to build moral consensus, e.g., elaborate fitted kitchens are sometimes based on inconsequential, barely justifiable desires; the customer is king (or queen); the unrestricted profit motive leads to unintended consequences as well as ruthless efficiency; there is no point in questioning the system when you need to hold on to your job; to photograph injustice is not necessarily to fight it; to view a tragedy does nothing to alleviate its suffering. Recalling John McGrath’s statement about theatre and social change (above), a work of art is seldom if ever a definitive catalyst for change. Nevertheless some art may become emblematic, even iconic, and find its way into hard-nosed and practical negotiations.

Conclusion In this paper I have attempted to chart some of the ways a theatrical performance can be interpreted and analyzed both in terms of its origins and intentions as well as its context and reception. For the purpose of this academic enquiry, the pared-down nature of the mime performance, spare in both style and setting, was intended to facilitate analysis of its rhetorical aspects. I have suggested and attempted to demonstrate through a performed example, that an art form such as mime, inviting the imaginative engagement of the spectator, can also inspire affective and self-reflective levels of involvement, and that there are communitarian as well as individualized facets of this. I have used this concept of engagement to reflect on the disengaged nature of news consumption, and

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I have suggested that the cultivation of virtue is not an inappropriate aim for theatre (or for journalism). Using a piece of self-devised theatre, and building on twenty years’ experience as performer and director has enabled academic reflection from the performer’s authorial perspective. In the area of peace studies and the deployment of the arts, further work is needed from audience perspective. What are the critical reactions to a piece of theatre? How has being in an audience affected individuals and groups, when the aim of a particular performance has gone beyond entertainment and diversion? Are there examples of theatre usefully or helpfully performed in conflict situations or in neighbourhoods marked by sectarian strife? Are there metrics that can demonstrate funding effectiveness, cultural trends or reduction in violence and hate crime? Such work will need to be based on field studies, examining context and utilizing testimony and other social scientific research tools. Work will be needed to identify appropriate contexts and practitioners, but will have the potential to encourage more practitioners who are without doubt needed in the many strife-torn parts of the world where theatre, with and without words, is an accessible and readily understood language. Mime is a rarefied art form, but it is representative of theatrical art with the highest of peace-building aspirations, as it seeks to name truth, to convey beauty, and to draw performers and viewers into a shared experience of communal virtue and the re-kindling of cold or abandoned ideals.

References Allen, W. (1971) Getting Even, New York: Random House. Aristotle, and Lucas, D.W. (1968) Aristotle Poetics, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bettelheim, B. (1991) The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Boal, A., McBride, C.A. and McBride, M.O. (1979) Theatre of the Oppressed, London: Pluto Press. Bodek, R. (1997) Proletarian Performance in Weimar Berlin: Agitprop, Chorus, and Brecht, Columbia, SC: Camden House. Booker, C. (2004) The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories, London: Continuum. Brook, P. (1990) The Empty Space, London: Penguin Books. —. (1987) The Shifting Point: Forty Years of Theatrical Exploration, 1946-1987, London: Methuen London.

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Butler, J. (2009) Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso. —. (2004) Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, London: Verso. Connors, L.J. (2012) Dramatic Battles in Eighteenth-Century France: Philosophes, Anti-Philosophes and Polemical Theatre, Oxford: Voltaire Foundation. Davies, N. (2009) Flat Earth News: An Award-Winning Reporter Exposes Falsehood, Distortion and Propaganda in the Global Media, London: Vintage. De Gruchy, J.W. (2001) Christianity, Art, and Transformation: Theological Aesthetics in the Struggle for Justice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dillenberger, J. (1987) A Theology of Artistic Sensibilities: The Visual Arts and the Church, London: SCM. Freytag, G. and MacEwan, E.J. (1968) Freytag's Technique of the Drama: An Exposition of Dramatic Composition and Art, London: Benjamin Bloom. Golden, L. and American Philological Association (1992) Aristotle on Tragic and Comic Mimesis, American Classical Studies, Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press. Grotowski, J. (1991) Towards a Poor Theatre, London: Methuen Drama. Hart, T. and Guthrie, S. (2007) Faithful Performances: The Enactment of Christian Identity in Theology and the Arts, Aldershot; Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Hayman, R. (1979) Theatre and Anti-Theatre: New Movements Since Beckett London: Secker & Warburg. Holderness, G. (ed) (1992) The Politics of Theatre and Drama, London and Basingstoke: Macmillan. Itzin, C. (1980) Stages in the Revolution: Political Theatre in Britain since 1968, London: Methuen. Johnson, T.E. and Savidge, D. (2009) Performing the Sacred: Theology and Theatre in Dialogue, Grand Rapids: Baker Academic. Kershaw, B. (1992) The Politics of Performance; Radical Theatre as Cultural Intervention, London: Routledge. Khovaks, I. (2006) Divine Reckonings in Profane Spaces: Towards a Theological Dramaturgy for Theatre, unpublished PhD Dissertation, University of St Andrews. Lecoq, J., Carasso, J.G. and Lallias, J.C. (2002) The Moving Body: Teaching Creative Theatre, London: Methuen. Lederach, J.P. (2005) The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Lehmann, H.T., trans. Jürs-Munby, K. (2006) Postdramatic Theatre, London: Routledge. McGrath, J. (1981) rev. ed., The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil, London: Methuen. MacIntyre, A.C. (1985) After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd ed., London: Duckworth. Marceau, M. (1975) Introduction to 16mm color film No 47803 The Art of Silence, Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica Educational Corporation. Martin, B. (1978) Marcel Marceau, Master of Mime, New York; London: Paddington Press. Mitchell, J. (2007) Media Violence and Christian Ethics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. (1999) Visually Speaking: Radio and the Renaissance of Preaching, Edinburgh: T & T Clark. Murithi, T. (2009) The Ethics of Peacebuilding, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Ltd. Power, C. (2008) Presence in Play: A Critique of Theories of Presence in the Theatre, New York, NY: Rodopi. Propp, V., Wagner, L.A. et al, (1968) Morphology of the Folktale, 2nd edn, Austin: University of Texas Press. Sontag, S. (1977) On Photography, London: Penguin Books. —. (2004) Regarding the Pain of Others, London: Penguin New Edition. Stanislavsky, K., and Hapgood, E.R. (1980) An Actor Prepares, London: Eyre Methuen. Stevenson, G. (1984) Steps of Faith, Eastbourne, UK: Kingsway, —. (1990) Mime: The Next Step Eastbourne: Monarch. Styan, J.L. (1996) The English Stage, Cambridge: CUP. Turner, V.W. and Schechner, R. (1986) The Anthropology of Performance, New York: PAJ Publications. Tutu, D. (1999) No Future Without Forgiveness, London: Rider. Veidlinger, J. (2000) The Moscow State Yiddish Theater: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Warren, M. A. and Taylor, G.C. (2001) King Came Preaching: The Pulpit Power of Dr Martin Luther King Jr,Westmont, IL: IVP Academic. Wolterstorff, N. (1980) Art in Action: Toward a Christian Aesthetic, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Zelizer, B. (2010) About to Die: How News Images Move the Public, New York: Oxford University Press.

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Media Stevenson, J. G. and Burbridge, P. (1989) The Poverty Chain (performed and recorded 01 July 2012), https://dl.dropbox.com/u/8422396/MRC/index.html (accessed 5 January 2013). Wheeler, K (2004) Freytag’s Pyramid adapted from Gustav Freytag’s Technik des Dramas (1863), http://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/freytag.html (accessed 7 June 2012).

22 ‘OUR PEACE IS TO DO GOD’S WILL’: PEACEBUILDING THROUGH HAGIOGRAPHY IN THE WORK OF GEORGE MACKAY BROWN LINDEN BICKET

‘George Mackay Brown is outspokenly and unapologetically a poet of peace’ (Murray 1992).

In 1970, a young English composer visited the Orkney Islands for the first time. On the first evening of his holiday in these islands (an archipelago lying off the northern tip of Scotland), Peter Maxwell Davies read the poet and author George Mackay Brown’s An Orkney Tapestry (1969) – a rich fusion of poetry, prose, historical drama, folklore and personal polemic, and Brown’s guide to the history and culture of his native Orkney. More than anything else in this text, Davies was moved by Brown’s version of the life of St Magnus, Orkney’s patron saint. This ‘cast an “enchantment” over Orkney: an enchantment he [Davies] wanted to explore for himself, in his music’ (Fergusson 2006: 215). The next day, by chance, Davies was to meet Brown, and their first encounter marked the start of a long and creative friendship, with Davies setting a very large number of Brown’s poems and stories to music. Most famous is his adaptation of Brown’s novel Magnus (1973) into The Martyrdom of St Magnus (1977), a chamber opera of nine scenes, premiered at the inaugural St Magnus Festival in Orkney’s St Magnus Cathedral. Davies was struck by Brown’s novel which explored the life of the twelfth-century martyr and saint, whom Davies called ‘the first Viking pacifist’ (Maxwell Davies 1976: 21). Davies’s opera dramatizes the novel’s exploration of non-violent protest and self-sacrifice. This has had a profound effect on critics and audiences alike, with one critic stating: I will only say that I have found listening to this work both a disturbing and a healing experience. The painful harshness of its subject (and of

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The piece has also been called an ‘impassioned condemnation of men’s brutality to one another’ and ‘a dramatic work of overwhelming beauty, immediacy and force’ (Roberts 1977: 635; Loppert 1977: 29). Its most striking device – the anachronistic execution scene which transposes the murder of St Magnus into the twentieth-century execution of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in a Nazi concentration camp – is taken straight from Brown’s novel. At its performance at the Carinthia Summer Festival in Austria in 2005, Davies (by now Master of the Queen’s Music) found himself sitting next to the far-right politician Jörg Haider. ‘The execution scene was staged with the singers wearing contemporary Austrian police and army uniforms, and the political point came across very, very strongly,’ Davies recalled. He added, ‘in Austria, because of the neo-Nazi movement, the message seemed very powerful’ (Quoted in Smith 2008). This essay will not linger on Davies’s creative adaptation and setting of Brown’s text to music, nor will it explore what Davies identifies as the opera’s ‘political point’ (which was certainly not a feature of Brown’s novel – as I hope to make clear). Brown’s novel about twelfth-century sainthood clearly had a profound creative and personal effect on Davies. But this essay will not linger on Davies’s creative adaptation and setting of Brown’s text to music, nor will it explore what Davies identifies as the opera’s ‘political point’ (which was certainly not a feature of Brown’s novel – as I hope to make clear). The story of Davies’s creative interaction with the story of St Magnus suggests that the tale is not simply historical. It still speaks to twenty-first century readers and audiences, and resonates through time as a story which deals with issues of trauma and healing. This essay will focus on the ways in which acts of non-violence and sacrifice for the sake of peace are dramatized by Brown (1921-1996), who demonstrates his moral and sacramental imagination through his shaping of the life of St Magnus into fiction. The essay will then propose a number of ways in which Brown’s novel Magnus – a postmodern retelling of an ancient tale – can be opened up, used, adapted and put in place for practical arts-based peacebuilding strategies.

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An Orcadian Saint’s protest against violence Peter Maxwell Davies’s own adaptation of the novel demonstrates that this is a text that can, and has, been used in other creative ways. Indeed, Brown has revived and sustained interest in St Magnus like no other modern writer. This Orcadian saint’s peaceful protest against violence in the flame of battle is a subject that Brown re-worked in a variety of literary forms from the very start of his career, and his influence has extended to the legend being used creatively by composers, photographers, artists, schoolchildren, and in community projects. Magnus (1973) has been seen by the critic Richard Griffiths ‘more as a poem than a novel’, and Brown himself has been called ‘a poet in everything he touches’ (Griffiths 2010: 103; Spear 2000: 204). The text’s fluidity, flexibility and adaptability are a source of strength in terms of its usefulness as a toolkit for building empathetic and compassionate relationships across political boundaries. The questions it raises about the nature of violence and sacrifice may be used to cultivate and provoke discussion about hopes and aspirations for a peaceful future, particularly during, and in the wake of conflict. Broadly speaking, Brown’s work is characterized by both the bare style he learned from the Icelandic Sagas, and also by a lusher, decorative ‘Celtic element’, which he believed he inherited through his mother’s Highland, Gaelic-speaking ancestry. His work is highly evocative and symbolic in all the literary forms he adopts. His short stories are perhaps his finest works, but he also produced five novels to great critical acclaim (Magnus was the Hogarth Press’s submission for the Booker Prize in 1973, while Beside the Ocean of Time was shortlisted for this award in 1994). Brown also published several volumes of poetry, plays, some children’s stories, and volumes of collected journalism. In recent years Brown’s writing has received a good deal of critical and public attention in the wake of a spate of new publications about his life and work. These include an award-winning biography by Maggie Fergusson, George Mackay Brown: The Life (2006) and Collected Poems (2005). Brown weaves his fictional universe, as Seamus Heaney has said, ‘through the eye of the needle of Orkney’ (Quoted in Brown 1991: cover). Brown’s characters are Orkney’s crofters, fishermen, monks, Vikings and tinkers, and his vision is a sacramental one – both deeply spiritual and deeply physical. He writes in An Orkney Tapestry: ‘In the web of being, spiritual and corporal are close-woven’ (Brown 1969: 85). The possibility for grace is always present in Brown’s Orcadian landscape, and in his work he consecrates the everyday labours of Orkney’s agricultural workers. His major and recurrent themes are the value of the past, the

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elemental community (this often becomes a microcosm for the wider world in his work), the deep worth of art and storytelling, and the need for sacrifice. Much admired by Seamus Heaney, Cecil Day Lewis and Edwin Muir, Brown’s poetry and prose emphasizes ‘the web of creation’ – the connectedness of all things by God’s hand – and he laments when this web is breached by violence or conflict (Brown 1997: 186). As such, his meaningful, sacramental view of the world has much to offer a postmodern mind-set, and as Julian D’Arcy notes, ‘[Brown] consistently deprecated the wanton use of violence, both in Viking and modern times, regarding it as inhuman and essentially contradictory to the basic message of Christianity’ (D’Arcy 1996: 248). This is not to say that Brown refuses to depict violence and conflict. As a Catholic writer very much in the vein of Flannery O’Connor and Graham Greene, Brown is keen to ‘observe what man has done with the things of God’ no matter how painful this might be (O’Connor in Fitzgerald 1972: 150-51). Magnus (1973) occupies a central place within Brown’s overall body of work and creative career. Born in the fishing town of Stromness in Orkney in 1921, Brown’s first collection of poetry, The Storm and Other Poems (1954), was the work of a mature writer. A diagnosis of tuberculosis when he was nineteen prevented Brown from serving in the Second World War, and as a result he spent prolonged periods of recuperation in sanatoriums and in his mother’s care. Unable to work at anything other than occasional local journalism, Brown spent a great deal of time reading, and one text that fired his imagination early on was Orkneyinga Saga – an Icelandic Saga of c.1200, which fuses myth and history, and places medieval Orkney at its centre. The Saga deals with Orkney’s Viking Earls, their bloody battles, feuds, adventures, and sorcery. But one story shone out above the rest for Brown, and this was the tale of Magnus Erlendson (later St Magnus), who refused to fight during a battle of 1098 led by the King of Norway. The Saga relates: The King asked him why he was sitting around and his answer was that he had no quarrel with anyone there. “That’s why I have no intention of fighting,” he said. [...] Magnus Erlendson took out his psalter and chanted psalms throughout the battle, but refused to take cover (Pálsson and Edwards 1978: 84).

Magnus later ruled peacefully along with his cousin Hakon Paulson as joint-Earl of Orkney, but the Saga tells that the seeds of discord were sewn between the two by evil men, and soon there was civil war in Orkney, causing considerable bloodshed and misrule. A peace treaty was eventually called on the island of Egilsay on Easter Monday 1117, but

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Hakon treacherously brought ‘a large force of men and as many fullymanned warships as he would have taken for battle’ (Pálsson and Edwards 1978: 92). After Hakon’s men rejected the pleas Magnus Erlendson made for his life: as cheerful as though he’d been invited to a feast was the illustrious Earl Magnus. [...] he spoke neither in anger nor resentment, but knelt down to pray, covering his face with his hands and shedding many tears in the sight of God’ (Pálsson and Edwards 1978: 94).

Magnus forgave his enemies and asked to be cleaved through the head with an axe (saying, ‘it’s not fitting for a chieftain to be beheaded like a thief’), and so, relates the Saga, ‘with that he crossed himself, and stooped to receive the blow. So his soul passed away to Heaven’ (Pálsson and Edwards 1978: 95). Later many miracles concerned with healing were attributed to St Magnus, and the place of his execution became a site of popular devotion. In 1137 his nephew Rognvald Kolson (later a saint himself) began construction of St Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall, Orkney’s capital. This rose-coloured sandstone Cathedral still stands today. It holds the relics of St Magnus, and is popularly known as ‘the wonder and glory of all the north.’ Aside from teaching him the value of a sparse, uncluttered prose style, the Orkneyinga Saga and the story of St Magnus took on immense personal significance for Brown. He wrote: The Orcadians, if they thought about Magnus Erlendson, considered him to be a queer fish, one of those medieval figures, clustered about with mortifications and miracles, that have no real place in our enlightened progressive society. For me, Magnus was at once a solid convincing fleshand-blood man, from whom pure spirit flashed from time to time – and never more brightly than at the house of his death by an axe-stroke, in Egilsay island on Easter Monday, 1117 (Brown 1997: 52).

This text became a seminal one for the young Brown, providing him with a rich well of inspiration and a store of images that sustained him throughout his entire career. In an autobiographical essay published in 1982, Brown also attributed his conversion to Catholicism in part to the beauty of religious literature – and particularly to the story of St Magnus (Brown 1982: 584-85). His work on St Magnus the Martyr is central to his entire corpus; it is the major subject to which he continually returns and as such is of vital importance to an understanding of Brown as a Catholic artist. However, Brown’s writing on Magnus is not only of historical or devotional interest. It also shows the author’s re-fashioning of the saint to

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suit his own age, so that he implores Magnus to heal the wounds of battle and conflict in the twentieth century. This will be discussed in more detail shortly. It is surely no coincidence that the story of St Magnus appealed to Brown in his isolation, as he recovered from the first bout of tuberculosis which prevented him from serving in the army after receiving his call-up papers in 1941. Brown’s older brother, Norrie, served in the RAF at this time. Orkney was flooded with 60,000 servicemen (three to every Orcadian), who manned anti-aircraft guns and lived in tents and newlybuilt Nissen huts, and so the war would have been all-pervasive on the islands (Fergusson 2006: 44-5). Moreover, Norway’s invasion and occupation by Nazi Germany in 1940 meant that the British Isles were under constant threat of invasion from the north. Orkney and Shetland were closer to Norway than to major centres of population in mainland Scotland. The saga which dramatized the event that Brown considered ‘the greatest day in all our island history’ and which celebrated St Magnus’s non-violent response to both war and the prospect of execution. This fascinated the young Brown, who was unable to take part in the war effort in any way (Brown 1994: 14). But Brown was not the only writer connecting the vita of St Magnus with his contemporary context in this period. After reading Orkneyinga Saga, Brown soon fell eagerly upon a book by the Kirkwall businessman John Mooney. In his discussion of the saint’s refusal to take up arms in the midst of battle in St Magnus, Earl of Orkney (1935), Mooney writes: Heroic servant of the Lord! The North in that year of Grace, 1098, was in need of a protest like thine against the wars of plundering and massacres by covetous and ambitious princes. In this year of Grace, 1934, the hearts of men and women who worship the God of Love are praying and longing for the consummation of the same ideal as inspired the young nobleman from Orkney more than eight centuries ago (Mooney 1935: 97).

Mooney’s enthusiastic endorsement of Magnus is a post-World War One assertion, endowed with the language of conquered imperialism. Using vocabulary that (unwittingly or not) reveals his cultural context, Mooney continues, ‘It may be supposed that Magnus, the conscientious objector, would not have been eager to put himself in the way of Magnus, the warrior’ (Mooney 1935: 99). Later, George Scott Moncrieff (another Scottish writer and Brown’s contemporary) called Magnus ‘the Saint of Bad Form, for it was by flouting accepted convention that he established his title to martyrdom’ (Scott Moncrieff 1960: 30). In his completely unexpected refusal to fight during the sea battle in Wales in 1098, Magnus

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displayed strikingly what John Paul Lederach would today call his ‘moral imagination’ – the capacity to respond to violence with an action which ‘transcend[s] and ultimately break[s] the grips of those destructive patterns and cycles’ (Lederach 2010: 29). In acting upon his realization that he had no quarrel with any man of the opposing Welsh army, Magnus demonstrated a quality of imagination which was unthinkable to the Norsemen he sat alongside in the King of Norway’s long ship. Lederach notes: ‘Violence is the behaviour of someone incapable of imagining other solutions to the problem at hand.’1 Magnus’s singular quality of creative empathy impressed Brown deeply. The saint’s ‘conscientious objection’, or unexpected creative act would inspire Brown’s own moral imagination concerning medieval Orkney. Magnus is still the best-known evocation of the life of St Magnus, and has been extremely influential in terms of subsequent critical writings on this saint’s life. In 1978 Edwin Sprott Towill suggested that ‘had [Magnus] lived today he would probably have been a member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, perhaps even of the C.N.D!’ (Sprott Towill 1978: 100). More recently Maria-Claudia Tomany has noted the saint’s ‘pacifism’, and Gilbert Márkus has observed ‘his example of conscientious objection in Wales.’ (Tomany 2009: 43-44; Márkus 1992: 43-44) Most critics mention Brown’s interpretations of St Magnus as they discuss saga and hagiographic materials, and his fiction and poetry about the saint are arguably now a resource at least as, if not more, reached for than Orkneyinga Saga for understanding this saint’s vita (despite the artistic license which Brown uses in fleshing out the legend). Brown’s novel was written at a time when, all over the world, artists were articulating and forming a pacifist moral imagination against war in Vietnam. Benjamin Britten completed Owen Wingrave, his pacifist opera, in 1970, and Magnus emerges from the same political context, as well as responding to Brown’s earlier experiences of the Second World War. However, Brown never lost his faith that veneration of this particular saint would yield spiritual fruit and healing. In an article published two years before his death, he noted grimly: Every war since the time of Magnus and Hakon has become increasingly savage and destructive; so that the very idea of nuclear war is too hideous for the world’s statesmen to contemplate. And yet small countries are getting the means to make nuclear weapons, increasingly (Brown 1994: 14).

1

Paraphrase of Bruno Bettelheim by Vicenç Fisas, quoted in Lederach 2010: 29.

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Nonetheless, Brown ends his autobiography (which was posthumously published in 1997) with the words: We are all one, saint and sinner. Everything we do sets the whole web of creation trembling, with light or with darkness. It is an awesome thought, that a good word spoken might help a Beggar in Calcutta or a burning child in Burundi; or conversely. But there is beauty and simplicity in it, sufficient to touch our finite minds. I say, once a day at least, ‘Saint Magnus, pray for us.’ (Brown 1997: 186-87).

This suggests that Brown would have felt that peace could certainly be built, but perhaps only partially. It is highly likely that the Catholic convert Brown would have believed strongly that peace would also be something one could request, through prayer, and accept, through divine grace.

Peacebuilding and prayer With these concepts – peacebuilding and prayer – in mind, this essay will now address the ways in which Brown’s novel Magnus and his other works on the saint might be used in terms of strategic religious peacebuilding. Brown described his writing in this way: I believe in dedicated work rather than in 'inspiration'; of course on some days, one writes better than on others. I believe writing to be a craft like carpentry, plumbing, or baking; one does the best one can. Much mischief has been caused by a loose word like 'culture,' which separates the crafts into the higher arts like music, writing, sculpture, and the lowlier workaday arts (those, and the many others like them, that I have mentioned above). In 'culture circles,' there is a tendency to look upon artists as the new priesthood of some esoteric religion. Nonsense—and dangerous nonsense moreover—we are all hewers of wood and drawers of water; only let us do it as thoroughly and joyously as we can (Quoted in Ryan 1991: 415).

This ‘basic credo’ might inform the use of Magnus from the very start in contributing to post-conflict peacebuilding and the healing of trauma in a workshop setting. There should be no hierarchy where the ‘artistpeacebuilder’ remains at all times the ‘expert’, or, as Brown puts it, a member of ‘the new priesthood of some esoteric religion’, with the workshop participants relegated to the role of passive observers or learners. Drawing on Lederach’s ideas of elicitive peacebuilding in Preparing for Peace, Michael Shank and Lisa Schirch identify that:

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an elicitive peacebuilder is a catalyst and facilitator rather than an expert in a particular field. His or her central role is to provide a highly participatory democratic process for relationship building and decisionmaking. In an elicitive approach to peacebuilding, everyone teaches and learns, so leadership is shared; learners’ experiences and concerns are valued; there is a high level of interactive participation; people co-create new knowledge and engage in critical reflection; there is a connection made between the local and the global; and people work together for change (Shank and Schirch 2008: 232).

Part of the strength of Brown’s novel, as noted earlier, is its flexibility. There have already been several creative and artistic responses to Magnus, and with creative use of the novel in order to foster empathy, selfreflection and self expression in a highly participatory way, it can be used so that all workshop participants teach and learn, according to individual strengths and talents. The maxim ‘thoroughly and joyously’ should inform all activities surrounding the interpretation of the story of Magnus. The goal in workshops for people recovering from violence should not be to create ‘great’ art, but to create a safe space for participants to take ownership of their own creative responses to a story about responding non-violently to conflict. Workshops should work towards fostering imaginative responses in all participants (including peacebuilders or facilitators) in order to build confidence and create an enjoyable, and eventually prayerful atmosphere. It is true that this novel may not be appropriate for all groups of people who have been, or are involved in conflict. Though Brown’s novel Magnus is a rich and at times complex piece of work, it is at heart a parable, a fable, and a re-enactment of the Passion of Christ. It can be simplified, adapted and explored as a story which we can learn from in a number of different ways, but it is a very specifically Christian (and Catholic) story. St Magnus has been interpreted variously by different critics, as earlier examples show. He has been seen as simply a very brave and moral man – one who follows his conscience and behaves peacefully in a culture that only expects violent responses to confrontation. He has also been seen by writers like John Mooney and D.P. Thomson as a saint ‘who has led a godly life and can be used as an example for the reader to follow’ (Baker 2009: 62). But Brown regarded him as even more than this. For the author, St Magnus was a holy intercessor, to whom prayers could be addressed and veneration was paid. In Brown’s novel, Magnus declares: ‘My work is a work of peace, to bind up the wounds in the music.’ (Brown 1973: 79). But it is worth remembering that this story should be used judiciously according to the cultural needs and backgrounds of the people involved. While Julian D’Arcy argues that ‘a

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reader with no particular knowledge of Roman Catholicism or the history of Orkney can nonetheless engage deeply with the novel’, this should not be taken for granted (D’Arcy 1996: 270). Whether its Christian symbolism and themes (for example, that for Magnus ‘execution is a final participation in the Cross’) will be relevant to participants, is for peacebuilders to consider carefully (Bosco S.J. 2004: 68).

Brown’s novel in arts-based peacebuilding A brief overview of Brown’s novel might be useful before considering some of the ways it can be used creatively in workshop settings. Brown divides his novel into eight chapters: The Plough; A Boy and a Seal; Song of Battle; The Temptations; Scarecrow; Prelude to the Invocation of the Dove; The Killing; and Harvest. In the opening scene of chapter one, Brown sets up the medieval hierarchy of Church, earls and peasants. One of the main alterations that Brown makes in his own vita of St Magnus is his introduction of ordinary folk into the legend. This is particularly notable because ‘the callous scenes in the civil war section [‘Scarecrow’] provide a very effective condemnation of the pointlessness and barbarity of violence’ – violence which is particularly inflicted upon ordinary civilians (D’Arcy 1996: 267). Brown moves on in ‘A Boy and a Seal’ to introduce the young Magnus Erlendson, who tends to a wounded seal on the rocks. In ‘Song of Battle’ we witness one of the text’s key scenes – Magnus’s refusal to fight, and the reactions of those around him. In ‘The Temptations’, Brown creates a series of temptations which Magnus rejects, in the pursuit of weaving a seamless garment of sanctity, or imitation of Christ (imagery of the garment is threaded throughout the novel). In ‘Prelude to the Invocation of the Dove’ we witness the futile attempts of Magnus and Hakon’s men to force a peace agreement between the opposing factions in Orkney’s civil war. They decide that ‘frankness on both sides’ will create peace, but as the penultimate chapter ‘The Killing’ shows, this strategy fails (Brown 1973: 118). Finally, in ‘Harvest’, Magnus, by now a saint, answers the prayers of a lowly ‘tinker’, Jock, and restores the eyesight of his companion, Mary. In chapter one ‘Mary had large flashing eyes; as if they drew their light from the clear well of the sun’, but this clarity of vision soon disappears, as by the final chapter, Mary is blind (Brown 1973: 15). Her sight becomes gradually dimmer throughout the novel as the political situation worsens, and her suffering becomes an effective metaphor for the destructiveness of the war. In Peter Maxwell Davies’s opera, The Martyrdom of St Magnus, Blind Mary sings to the audience, ‘You are evil, you soldiers, whatever

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side you support.’ This confrontational moment is a striking condemnation of all violent behaviour and aggression. In a series of eight workshops designed to help people recovering from violence, and centring on this novel, a number of therapeutic arts-based approaches could be taken. One chapter could be explored each week, with storytelling providing the catalyst for group or paired discussion, and then some creative response to the tale. As the Scottish Storytelling Centre has noted, oral storytelling: is one of our oldest art forms. It brings words and the world to life together, stimulates the imagination, and builds a sense of community between tellers and listeners. [...] People of different ages, backgrounds, and cultures can communicate through storytelling. Storytelling is also a valuable tool in education, language development, therapy, and in building racial equality and religious respect (Scottish Storytelling).

The tale of St Magnus has been stripped down to some bare essentials and is recommended as an educational tool by Education Scotland, whose website includes videos and transcripts of the story of St Magnus, alongside other traditional tales, myths and legends (Scotland’s Stories). Indeed, one particularly striking use of the legend was made in 1980 by a small class of schoolchildren (aged thirteen) from the Isle of Arran, one of Scotland’s most southerly islands. The children created fourteen painted panels depicting events leading up to Magnus’s death. These colourful pieces are filled with energy and light, and each has been given a title, e.g. ‘Divided Loyalties’ and ‘Magnus Prays Alone’. These panels were gifted to St Magnus Cathedral and are still displayed there today, a testament to a communal artistic project in which there is real potential for workshop participants to reflect on and articulate feelings of fear, vulnerability and hope for the future (Education Scotland). One example for practical use is the key scene of Magnus’s nonviolent protest during battle in 1098, which Brown explores in ‘Song of Battle.’ He writes from the perspective of a civilian (Mans) from Orkney, who has been conscripted to fight: In the middle of every battle there is a still moment, when it seems that the swords hang suspended in the air and the enemies make stone gestures at one another. That moment – the eye of the battle – occurred now. Through the silence Mans heard a voice: Who is this that cometh from Edom, with dyed garments from Bosra, this beautiful one in his robe, walking in the greatness of his strength? . . . He turned. Magnus Erlendson was standing up in the bow, and he was reading words out of his psalter. ‘He has been there all the time,’ thought Mans. It was a dangerous place to stand. Three Welsh arrows were sticking awry out of

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Small scenes like this can be used as a means of opening up discussion to address trauma and safely articulate feelings about violence. This scene provokes several questions: why does Magnus refuse to fight in the seabattle? Why does he read psalms aloud? What do you think Magnus felt as he stood, unarmed and vulnerable, in the midst of a scene of very bloody and dangerous conflict? How do you think other people responded to him? Later in this scene, Brown has another soldier look at Magnus contemptuously: ‘Sigurd had heard the heralds speak of Magnus. He said to them, ‘There is a coward in every battle. Drops of blood feel from his axe. [...] A lonely figure stood in the bow of Sea Eagle in the darkness’ (Brown 1973: 59-60). Is Magnus really a coward? Why might he feel isolated by his experiences? General questions about the content of the story may then lead to personal reflections about the experience of fear, loneliness, anger, and helplessness. This section of the workshop might then be channelled into a creative task or activity relating either to the story or to participants’ own experiences. It may be best not to be too prescriptive about outcomes at this stage. The aim is simply to foster discussion and then to create something tangible in response to this. However, each workshop could focus on a different artistic form, or medium, and there is plenty of scope for this. Brown wrote several poems about St Magnus throughout his entire creative career, as well as a St Magnus play in 1972 (The Loom of Light). In 1987, Brown revitalised the legend still further, and wrote the text for a son et lumiére, which was published as A Celebration for Magnus, and was illustrated and accompanied by photographs, stained glass, painting, drawing, musical scores and the text for chant (Brown 1987). This suggests a number of creative possibilities for thematic workshops, each based on a chapter or episode from Magnus. Often Brown’s corpus of St Magnus pieces reflects very pointedly on what it might take to begin to build peace and restore a sense of gratitude to God

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for His gifts. Brown’s beautifully illustrated play The Loom of Light dramatizes this subject through the voice of Bishop William: Bishop: The business of a community is peace. The crofter at his furrow. The fisherman at his creels. The monk at his prayers. The shepherd with the new lambs. The weaver at his loom. The merchant sending out a ship. The woman at her hearth, well, cupboard. The tinker on the road. This peace is the heavy woven coat-of-state. The earl wears it. But it ought to warm and hallow and protect all the people. Rightly so; for it can be said that the whole community has worked at the weaving of it. Monks: (chanting) ‘My heart was prepared for disgrace and misery. I hoped that someone would weep with me, but there was no one.’ Bishop: It is a precarious thing at the best of times, this peace. Fishermen fight with shepherds in the alehouse on a Saturday night. The merchants squabble like gulls over every cargo out of Norway. There are differences at the well and the bleach-green. [...] Be sure that it’s the right kind of peace that you make. To make peace, the ‘pax Christi’, is to weave the seamless garment. But to make peace as politicians understand it – that is simply to patch an old scarecrow over and over again (Brown 1986: 10915).

This is not a work which suggests that the making of peace is easy, and it does not make claims for the quick healing of wounds. Brown’s characters in this play often display what Lederach identifies as the gift of pessimism. But the play is a rich work, full of opportunities for discussion, performance, role-play, and creative response to its symbolism. Its highly imagistic tenor means that this scene might lend itself well to muralpainting. How would you depict a peaceful community? Could the group work together to devise, draw, and bring to life a mural depicting a peaceful future? Could the group depict themselves in this mural: working together to restore peace? Brown’s poems about St Magnus may also provide a catalyst for imaginative response to the legend, through haiku, acrostic, runes and poems of personal reflection and devotion. Indeed, Brown wrote poetry in all of these forms, and Seamus Heaney has identified that His sense of the world and his way with words are powerfully at one with each other. His vision has something of the skaldic poet’s consciousness of inevitable order, something of the haiku-master’s susceptibility to the delicate and momentary, and since the beginning of his career he has added uniquely and steadfastly to the riches of poetry in English (Heaney quoted in Ferguson 2011: 175).

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Often Brown’s poetry concerning Magnus takes on the quality of prayer, with the speaker beseeching the saint to remember the people of Orkney. In ‘Song for St Magnus: 16 April’ Brown writes: Keeper of the red stone, remember well Sufferers today, those Who are to cross the dark firth, People in hospitals, In hospices, eventide lingerers, Children who look on daffodils (Both with the dew on) each To break today in spring tempest. [...] Magnus, friend, have a keeping Of the shepherd on the hill Whose ewes are having difficult birth In the last snow. Bestow peace to ploughmen in stony fields. Be present at the fires Of women in Bosnia and Somalia Kneading dough smaller than fists. [...] Magnus, pray for priests In this time of hate (Never such hate and anger over the earth). May they light candles at their altars This day and all days Till history is steeped in light. [...] Never so many strangers at Orkney’s doors ‘We need peace’. . . ‘We are here about the business of government’. . . ‘Our quest: silence and healing’. . .(Brown 2005: 402-04).

Poems about Magnus and his quest for peace can be read aloud to, or by, the group, who can then discuss their responses to these poems. What is Brown asking Magnus to pray for? Who does he remember in his prayers? If you could ask God for healing and peace, for whom and for what would you pray? What images and symbols of peace can you devise? The aim here is to create a reflective atmosphere, where participants can

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safely explore their own vulnerabilities and commit their feelings to the page. Ultimately, a group prayer could be created, with everyone contributing a line or two. In the years before his death, Brown was asked to compose a St Magnus prayer to be used in a Church of Scotland service by the then-minister of St Magnus Cathedral, the Reverend Ron Ferguson. This is what he composed: ST MAGNUS PRAYER St Magnus offered his transient power and riches in this world for the glory of God’s kingdom: not for himself only but on behalf of the people of Orkney and the north, and of all people everywhere. So we now offer thankfully the fruits of our various labour (Brown in Ferguson 2011: 234).

Creating a group prayer is another collaborative project where collective experience of trauma and hopefulness can be shared through imagination, discussion and creativity in a safe space. This activity might well be the best way to end the series of workshops, as it looks forward to and asks for a better future.

Conclusion Ultimately the activities stemming from the hagiographical tale that Brown dramatizes in Magnus are, as he would say of St Magnus’s miracles – manifold. Plenty of other activities suggest themselves, for example listening to hymns of peace for the saint (there are many), and composing lyrics to fit existing melodies. Chants could also be composed, and journals exploring participants’ responses to the tale and each individual workshop could be kept. The goal in these workshops is to create dialogue, let participants express and assert their feelings safely, foster empathy, and ultimately create a series of tangible pieces of art or craft which signal hope for the future. As a writer who struggled with depression throughout his life, Brown himself recognised what he called

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‘the healing power of art – the small treasure for the proper alleviation of suffering.’2

References Baker, T. (2009) George Mackay Brown and the Philosophy of Community, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Bosco S.J.M. (2004) ‘From The Power and The Glory to The Honorary Consul: The Development of Graham Greene’s Catholic Imagination’, Religion and Literature, 36 (2): 51-74. Brown, G.M. (1969) An Orkney Tapestry, London: Victor Gollancz. —. (1973) Magnus, London: The Hogarth Press. —. (1982) ‘The Way of Literature: An Apologia by George Mackay Brown’, The Tablet, 12 June: 584-85. —. (1986) The Loom of Light, Nairn: Balnain Books. —. (1987) A Celebration for Magnus, Nairn: Balnain Books, 1987. —. (1991) Selected Poems 1954-1983, London: John Murray. —. (1994) ‘The Magnus Miracles were Manifold’, The Orcadian, 3 November: 14. —. (1997) For the Islands I Sing, London: John Murray. —. (2005) The Collected Poems of George Mackay Brown, A. Bevan and B. Murray (eds), London: John Murray. D’Arcy, J. M. (1996) ‘George Mackay Brown’, Scottish Skalds and Sagamen: Old Norse Influence on Scottish Literature, East Lothian: Tuckwell Press, 242-283. Education Scotland, http://www.educationscotland.gov.uk/scotlandsstories/columbaandmag nus/index .asp (accessed 9 May 2014). Fanfare (Review) (1977) Intermusica. Online. Available HTTP: http://www.intermusica.co.uk/maxwelldavies/composer#reviews (accessed 2 April 2013). Ferguson, R. (2011) George Mackay Brown: The Wound and the Gift, Edinburgh: Saint Andrews Press. Fergusson, M. (2006) George Mackay Brown: The Life, London: John Murray, 2006. Griffiths, R. (2010) The Pen and the Cross: Catholicism in English Literature 1850-2000, London: Continuum, 2010.

2

G.M. Brown, in The Independent, 3 August 1991, quoted in Fergusson 2006: 247.

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Lederach, J.P. (2010) The Moral Imagination: the Art and Soul of Building Peace, New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press. Loppert, M. (1977) ‘The Martyrdom of St. Magnus’, Tempo, 122: 29-31. Márkus, G. (1992) The Radical Tradition: Saints in the Struggle for Justice and Peace, London: Darton, Longman and Todd. Maxwell Davies, P. (1976) ‘Pax Orcadiensis’, Tempo, 119: 20-22. Mooney, J. (1935) St. Magnus, Earl of Orkney, Kirkwall: W.R. Mackintosh. Murray, I. (1992) Scotsman, July. O’Connor, F. (1972) ‘The Church and the Fiction Writer’, in S. and R. Fitzgerald (eds) Mystery and Manners, London: Faber and Faber. Pálsson, H. and Edwards, P. trans. (1978), Orkneyinga Saga: The History of the Earls of Orkney, London: Penguin. Roberts, D. (1977) ‘Maxwell Davies in Orkney: The Martyrdom of St Magnus’, The Musical Times, 118(1614): 633-35. Ryan, B. (ed) (1991) Major 20th-Century Writers: a Selection of Sketches from Contemporary Authors, Vol. 1, Detroit; London: Gale Research. Scott Moncrieff, G. (1960) The Mirror and the Cross: Scotland and the Catholic Faith, London: Burns and Oates Scottish Storytelling. http://www.scottishstorytellingcentre.co.uk/storytelling/about_storytell ing.asp (accessed 6/4/2013). Shank, M. and Schirch, L. (2008) ‘Strategic Arts-Based Peacebuilding’, Peace and Change, 33(2): 217-42. Smith, R. (2008) ‘Murder in the Cathedral’, The Guardian, 6 June. Online. Available HTTP: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/jun/06/filmandmusic1.filmand music137 (accessed 9 May 2014). Spear, H.D. (ed) (2000) George Mackay Brown: A Survey of His Work and a Full Bibliography, Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press. Sprott Towill, E. (1978) The Saints of Scotland, Edinburgh: The Saint Andrew Press. Tomany, M.C. (2009) ‘Sacred Non-Violence, Cowardice Profaned: St Magnus of Orkney in Nordic Hagiography and Historiography’, in T. A. DuBois (ed.) Sanctity in the North: Saints, Lives and Cults in Medieval Scandinavia, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 128-153.

23 A LITURGICAL THEOLOGY OF WALKING: MEDIATING THE ESTRANGED AFTER WAR SIMON FETA

The theology of walking It’s worth noting that, constructing a theology of walking is not easy because there are no obvious resources in a library and the idea is new. So the methodology gathers things that can be broken open and put together in new ways. The newness of this requires modesty about what can be achieved by asking the most important questions. Similarly, with the image of walking in the Bible, the centrality of the body while in worship, emergence from war; a fusion of embodied demands echoing reconciliation frame sporadic opportunities for reviewing enacted liturgies to foster peace initiatives between individuals, communities and state. The description of the human situation and/or ministerial issue including use of appropriate non-theological disciplines also raises important conceptual clues for engagement in mediating the estranged after war. A question framed in my mind is, how different are the daily steps we take from the ones we witness and experience in processions carried out among religious circles, returnees, refugees? those returning from camps, acclaimed rebel groups marching home to embrace a possible amnesty, or even the experience of persons matching in a limited safe corridor to deliver humanitarian assistance after ceasefire? Isn’t there a simultaneous relationship or the experiences of the reality of war are independent islands shared by the same human beings? As such a liturgical theology of walking embodies tolerance to mediate reconciliation in a complex evolving pluralistic society. Indeed the interesting thoughts of Britain’s best-selling living artist, poet and an icon of contemporary culture, Edward Monkton complement this (Smith 2007). Where are we going? I don’t know. I thought you knew! No, I don’t know. May be he knows? No. He definitely

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doesn’t know. Pause. May be no one knows! Pause. Oh well, I hope it’s nice when we get there. In using the Three mile an hour God; In company with Christ; and A Christian Theology of place, an intersection to walking theology is grounded. What then are people’s perceptions when they walk? Who should get involved anyway or why should people be directed to walk in a particular space? Such questions demand an inter-disciplinary approach for better meaning making. Though place, space and time are central in liturgical use, the component of walking to embrace the estranged gives life to the liturgy in use and makes walking a pearl for theological enterprise. This approach thus invokes practical theology in my use of a relational conceptual framework for reconciliation. Thus, the need for a theology of walking guarantees embodied dimensions of worship, which are so important to celebration of the Liturgy. Within worship, one will often find him or her self pulled by the robustness of embodiment, where dancing, waving and testimony blend in the use of spiritual songs. This sharply contrasts the need to flip pages to follow a conventional written liturgy, even when the attained rhythm suggests a considered reinforcement of the embodied posture from outside the texts. The reference to texts, often convey nothing about what is distinctive and most treasured in the embodied aspects used for worship. Even where the texts refer to embodiment, there is need to teach, understand, weave and take the texts beyond what they present for daily worship. A theology of walking helps identify such gaps and engage theology in using the community’s embodied resource. Even in places where liturgy is daily office, repleteness within the language of journey seems unavoidable, but in practice accompanies very static forms of celebration. An embodiment of theology through walking enlivens understanding and probes the truth that worship is much more than texts. Conscious of Uganda’s state formation from wars and the nationalistic movements since 1950’s, unresolved conflicts continue to jeopardize the building of a sustainable nation. In fact in the process of delivering the Christian message to the vast majority of peoples around the world, walking has been an unavoidable experience. Within Africa, missionaries with their converts and the servants they employed have had to walk long distances to proclaim the Gospel message. Some of these experiences involved overt violence or assumed religious symbols to propagate belonging. Categorical in these were the manner of recruitment and caution offered to avoid being the other. Within Uganda, the various missionary groups (Church Missionary Society, Verona Fathers, Mill Hill Fathers), colonial administration, existing kingdoms, boundary making of Uganda and the

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nationalistic agitations assumed liberties and freedom to assert who they are. Such interface often did not heed to the voice of the one being estranged as necessary. Therefore, from the walk to death by bishop Hannington to the embrace of death by the Uganda Martyrs, a new perspective on authority and politics unveiled how best to treat all estranged persons within enacted liturgies of public worship. Indeed the battle of ideologies, sustained by nationalistic movements and various religious groups exposed the people to the various forms of structural violence (Galtung 1996: 40-49). This consequently conditioned the nature of political systems and governance in Uganda along religious lines after attaining independence in 1962. And nothing gives man a more unified identity, regardless of their race, other than religion (Shuriye 2011: 1-7; Carlyle 2007: 7). Within this context, Uganda has celebrated her Golden jubilee of independence from colonial rule and Centenary of Christian faith practices respectively. And with the fusion of these realities in the wake of structured violence (Galtung 1996: 40-49), the concepts of tolerance and plurality for enacted liturgies have continued to be teased in areas where people are emerging from war. As such, a revisionist view on praxis, history and experience of liturgical theology warrants consideration for better tolerance. Here the protagonists ask questions on their position in life, as they keep the other in constant view, if one is not rejecting the other. Also, it is the emphases on the creation of inter-personal connections and relations, after an experience of war where tolerance ought to be lived (Seligman 2004:14). As such, all liturgical rites grow and develop organically over time. For example, the Anglican Rite is sometimes criticized because the Book of Common Prayer has been revised over the centuries, and adapted by various national Anglican Churches. But until the adoption of the 1979 Prayer Book by the Episcopal Church and similar modern Prayer books by other provinces of the Anglican Communion, these revisions have always represented organic development (Novak 2012). In fact, during the colonization process of Uganda, religion was, and still remains, an essential component. Thus, in a society already open to new ideas, responsive to the technological, cultural and religious influence, a complex evolving pluralistic society remains detached to the rigor and resource of walking within liturgy.

Practical, relational and conceptual theological methodology In using the dialectic model as described by Whitehead & Whitehead (1995: 23) and Social Analysis: Tool of Pastoral Action to engage the

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resourcefulness of walking for theological enterprise, the model outlines three basic principles for praxis. These are attending, assertion and decision. Through attending, persons seek out the information on a particular pastoral concern that is available in personal experience, Christian Tradition, and Cultural Sources. In assertion, room is created to engage the information from these three sources in a process of mutual clarification and challenge in order to expand and deepen religious insight. The assumption here is that God is revealed in all the three sources and that the religious information in each is partial. Assertion is a kind of behaviour which acknowledges the value of ones own needs and convictions in a manner that respects the needs and convictions of others. And in decision making, protagonists move from insight through decision to concrete pastoral action. This method largely notes the importance of having a community of faith, being keen on the nature of ministry in the community; attend to seeking discernment of faithfulness to the gospel (Walk in Faith) and celebrate God’s saving presence in word and action and sacrament. Their perspectives on pastoral action complement the social analysis circle to pastoral action based on engagement of the now experience with the mediators. Their goal however is not simply to help ministers understand more clearly, but to help them to act more effectively. This is specifically for ways that are faithful to the good news of salvation made known in Jesus Christ. The limitation however is on the methodology being used by minister, which leaves the congregation solely on the receiving end. Nonetheless theology of walking broadens the scope by incorporating the resource of others within liturgical worship, making it easier to co-exist. The Social Analysis: Tool of Pastoral Action is largely a political, economic motivated pastoral approach. This assumes an existing experience of structural violence to which persons struggle understand the interplay of any theological process to it. Thus it seeks an insertion on the on-going experience to begin the exploration. This often leads to social analysis, theological reflection and pastoral planning so as to open a new opportunity of insertion on the now identified experience as the process continues endlessly. In critiquing this method, it is common to find action without reflection within any society. Especially for persons emerging from war, credibility of intentions being judged by the observed actions may not fully exhaust ones experience. Though it is not purely an instinctual society, reason nonetheless is not an all convincing sign of reflection. Reflection does take instinct (feelings) and reason to bear personal responsibility and consider accountability as necessary component. Aware of the historical root of this developed pastoral circle, which sought to find meaning and respond to

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political and economic structures of a community or nations, it certainly remains a useful model for liturgists. Also the model clarifies contextual assumptions of society and its needs for a systematic approach to well being. The critic to this method is that it stresses the social element as the most; having potential for meeting the political agenda within a social system and not the God agenda as part of its unavoidable alternative. Similarly, a consideration to embrace God as sufficient to affect all social concerns lacks. Also to use the see/judge/act principle as being demonstrated in this pastoral circle often deals with the present as the most base for doing theology, even when it fails to accomplish the sociopolitical task therein. Thus, in using these models, theology of walking becomes a deliberate response of the creatures to their creator. The admission that, worship involves motions signals reason for paying close attention to the object being used overtly or covertly by the persons in worship (Uzukwu 1997: x). Wendel adds to this concept of the body when she says, if we bless our bodies, they bless us. It promises us our power and our helplessness, our interdependence and our autonomy (Wendel 1994: 41-45, 105). Thus, this makes the human body a pivotal component while in worship. In view of this, a growing challenge of narratives after war is how to bridge the estranged, without necessarily mismanaging their body, trust of the community and affected individuals. This is crucial because the human body is revelatory: by its means people express themselves and encounter others (Prokes 1996: 79-90). Since bodies are communicators of meaning, the bodies of the ascetics can serve to communicate certain theological realities (Bell 2007: 29). For Searle (2004:23-47), Liturgy is more important than shared celebration meeting private needs. For it is an act of civic responsibility. The local church therefore has public responsibilities, among which not the least important is the offering of public worship. And no liturgy progresses without actual walking. Thus liturgy receives life when people walk. It’s a reminder that our lives are ordered, step by step. In his realistic imaginative creativity, Koyama (1979: 7) describes the implication of having a three mile an hour God from a historical root sense of coming and recovering out of the cause and effect of World War II. In his view idolatry is a key problem faced by people walking with God in times of war. While in pilgrimage or journey, he expects the people of God to be taught the truth and word of God. In so doing, they need a pace where they walk three miles an hour with three miles an hour God. Conversely, Ward (2005: 23) illustrates the need to be in Company with Christ through: Lent, Palm Sunday, Good Friday, Easter and Pentecost. Contrary to this, Inge (2003: 6) presents a rediscovery of the importance of place to an

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increasingly mobile society. Though this confirms the existence of space, there is a huge ground needing exploration on place as subordinate to space, as God is perceived as being outside time and space (Inge 2003: 92). The puzzle however is the nature of movement in this space to a place. And since pilgrimages are place oriented, no one consciously gives thought to the significance of walking to the place in the process. Another strand in thinking about a theology of walking can be found in the experience of the Uganda Martyrs and the East African Revival Movement. Through these, the gospel stories have become present in fusing complex historical estrangement experiences with politics and global culture. And Filippo Cianta’s comment in the article, ‘Witnesses from The Pearl of Africa’ recaptures so well what it meant to be burnt alive after ascertaining estrangement. They walked twenty-seven miles from Munyonyo to Namugongo after their sentence. Parents and relatives followed the group, trying to convince them to renounce their faith so as to be spared. Very few gave up their faith; most of them accepted their proclaimed punishment, encouraging each other and sang happily. After eight days, the condemned arrived at Namugongo. There, they were burnt alive (Moerlin 2012). It was vivid that, the journey from Munyonyo to Namugongo had tremendous results in engaging with an embodied theology as they walked the distance to their death. As a result, to date, there is a journeying of people the week or days before the actual date of 3 June every year from within and without the country. Such annual celebration of estranged people is not different from the narrative of one who received amnesty with the help of Kitgum Concerned Women’s Association (KICWA) in 2005. I was personally involved in killing people on command by my group leaders from the LRA ranks. At that time, my conscience was clear of the fact that I didn’t intend to kill anyone, but I coerced others at the expense of my personal life and safety. And on my return, I employed the help of my uncle and elders, as the memories of my actions were haunting. I remain grateful for the help of these senior members of my family, who stood to mediate in the communities where I killed. After days of walking to plead, accepting my wrong and valuing the innocence in the horrific acts committed, I was given a welcome and forgiveness by the affected families, individuals and the whole community. I now, feel free, restored and liberated after returning with my amnesty card / certificate to the community (Personal Interview 27 March 2012).

His claim, however was that amnesty helped him to reconcile with the government. That it also helped to open avenues for return to his home, Church and community. With the depth of gratitude, it was apparent that

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without the input of the uncle and elders who used their cultural mandate to mediate within the community, clan and family, the received amnesty card after serving the LRA ranks would have been meaningless. It is worth noting the amnesty recipient, his uncle and elders accessed each other by walking. With the kind of output, it is clear that the protagonists were doing theology through walking as they followed particular sporadic cultural and political clues to reconcile. Such depth of tolerance and determination is indeed what a liturgical theology of walking can offer. Having considered examples of worship and of pilgrimage from the wider Christian tradition and its particular expressions, many passages in scripture continue to illumine walking as a significant metaphor in engaging with daily life. The man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called the man, ‘where are you?’ he answered, I heard you in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid (Genesis 3: 8-10). In the tower of Babel story (Genesis 11: 5), the Lord came down to see the city and the tower that men were building. It’s not clear how He came down to do such inspection on the city men built. A similar thing happens when God comes down to rescue (Exodus 3: 8). Enoch who was a father at 65 and later grandfather, lived 365 years, walked with God; then he was no more, because God took him away (Genesis 5: 24). Such is a rigorous anthropomorphic use to picture God involving himself with human beings through walking. In yielding obedience to the Law, Israel was asked to be careful to do what the Lord God commanded. Do not turn to the right or to the left. Walk in all the way that the Lord your God has commanded you, so that you may live and prosper and prolong your days in the land that you will possess (Deuteronomy 5: 32-33). And in putting our imagination to significant questions like, what does the Lord require of me gives invitation to engage knowingly. Thus the response to act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God (Micah 6: 8) dramatizes unique life episodes. What does it mean to walk humbly with your God? How else would they have practiced their belief without walking? Psalm 119 is a Torah psalm as well as an elaborate acrostic poem. It stresses an ethic for all who walk in the Law of the Lord. Thus Howard (1993: 63) speaks of it as the massive and centrally located psalm and urges the use of it as model for an attitude of dependence and trust on Yahweh as obedience to Yahweh’s Torah. Millard (1994: 2) however notices that Psalm 119 ends in a kind of Lament and therefore falls in to a pattern of change between lament and praise, which is often seen in the Psalter. The lament sheds light on how far Israel has fallen away from the

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Law of the Lord and the praise uplifts the importance of what the Law of the Lord does for those who choose to walk in it. The stress in Psalm 119 on the need of being on the right way is a central Biblical theme re-echoed by Jesus in being the way, the truth and the life. ‘No one comes to the father except through me’ (John 14: 6) astonishes any reader. The metaphor to walk occurs repeatedly in Psalm 119. It begins with blessed are those whose ways are blameless, who walk according to the law of the Lord Psalm 119:1. The Aleph strophe shows the verb ‘to walk’ and word ‘way’ (V3, 5). The word ‘way’ reappears in V14, 26, 27, 29, 30, 32, 33, 37, 59 and 168. Other words indicating a way or path are used in V9, 15, 35, 101, 104, and 105. Another word from the same semantic field is the word ‘feet’ or ‘step’ which are found in V59, 101 and 105. Even expressions like I went astray V67 indicate the necessity of staying on the way of the Lord. Verses 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 17, 34, 44, 55, 57, 60, 63, 88, 101, 106, 134, 146, 158, 167 and 168. These verses depict the metaphor of walking as daily pilgrimage in keeping the Torah. The reflected description here is what we find our selves engaged with during any liturgical worship. Considerably, the challenge of disability as a result of war or other causes is well described by Avalos as, a ritual or a set of rituals intended to reverse, or aid a person with a disability to live with, the condition in question (Eiesland & Saliers 1998: 35). Thus disability is a physical or mental feature, real or presumed, which a society identifies as cause for devaluation of a person. Such a description helps to clarify the intension of the liturgy in use when referring to the disabled and what it should be able to accomplish in relation to the petitionary, therapeutic and thanksgiving aspects of the liturgy in as far as the estranged party is concerned. In fact, Porphyrius, a Greek author of the third century notes that at the famous shrine of Asclepius at Epidauros, purity was defined as a thought pattern. That is to say, thinking Holy thoughts was sufficient to render a person pure. Such a definition of purity seems to emphasize the fact that illness itself was not an impurity that excluded the physically disabled from the temple. In contrast, the Levitical version of the temple in Israel had a definition of purity that regarded those with chronic illnesses as too impure to enter the temple. This, of course meant that the Temple of Yahweh could not offer direct petitionary and therapeutic liturgies for patients (Eiesland & Saliers 1998: 40-41). The processes to revive and develop these forms of liturgy relating to disability and illness, sustain the churches sociological, historical and theological quest for persons being estranged, even by war. To this a theology of walking seeks to communicate the need for inter-dependency and to see disability

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/estrangement as resource for viable engagement with theology. From the perspective of the disabled, physical walking can indeed be too distant to embrace, but a theology of walking transforms the literal view of physical walking to be an inclusive theology, even for the disabled. Patterson in Eiesland & Saliers (1998: 128) complements this when she says, as part of this emerging wholeness; our bodies participate in the powerful and flowing renewal of and for us all. Abundant, redemptive life has an expansive quality that recognizes all shared life in God and cherishes it. This holistic view of redemptive embodiment is counter to much of the contemporary emphasis on individual embodiment. It asks protagonists to approach embodied life not only as distinct, but also as shared experience. The more our hearts see the whole of embodiment, the more we can recognize and appreciate the diversity that shapes it. Hence through this, we recognize dissimilarities in the midst of similarities. In this, disability offers the challenge and clarity on the need to accept our limits, where our cultures are most pronounced about how much any body can do and still maintain health, emotional and spiritual flourishing. Patterson continues this argument by giving caution on embracing our limits. As such, people need to accept and be taught about the limits of our body anatomies. But if we can learn to accept our limits and live within them, we will discover that our limitations are problems and gifts. Recognizing that there may be mystery in limits, we can begin to see with God’s eyes that we are more a part of a larger body of God and that the whole body together is able. Our limits are real, and they are also not devastating because of the embodiment we share in Christ (Eiesland & Saliers 1998: 133-34). The acceptance of this is not a tool to calm attitudes or emotion of and to the disabled, as well as estranged persons, but rather confirms that individuals need others, in as much as others need ones input in comprehending the purpose of life. Such an understanding does unveil a growing edge to any one doing theology. A liturgical theology of walking therefore coordinates and processes for such diverse practice and understanding of tradition and scripture, by finding the inter-play in liturgical worship and offering a common ground for doing theology as community through walking. Thus, an amnesty recipients story from Uganda merits mention for better grappling with post conflict liturgical pastoral needs. It also offers an insight into Tongilo, a mode of communal reconciliation among the Acholi for embracing the estranged after war. He narrates, After being abducted by his own village mate, who made him to be his personal body guard; I was consistently mistreated by him from the first

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day, until when I was moved to a new group of command in the bush. On our return from the bush, both of us received amnesty at different times. One day, as he went to the church in his village, he sat at the back and had no idea that the village mate who abducted, mistreated and abused him was back too from the bush. As they stood to join in the closing song, he saw his village mate, standing in the front row. ‘I felt bad, bitter, and full of rage and revenge there and then’ he said. ‘I began to quake and all those around me wondered, as I recalled everything that he did to me while in the bush.’ Since we were within the church vicinity, I shrouded the pressure and later reported the matter to my parents and elders of the village for better settlement. After some days, this village mate passed by our home to cut trees for building. On seeing him, ‘I got so determined to seize the opportunity and revenge.’ When the people at home saw my reaction, nervousness and heard the words I had uttered! ‘I will kill him now!’ Without any delay, my parents struggled to hold and embrace me; and they quickly decided to restrain me and to ask me to share the full story of my experience with this former ‘boss’ of mine from the bush. They also encouraged me to state the reasons why I was eager to assault this particular village mate (Personal Interview 27 March 2012).

Later they counselled him to allow room for forgiveness so as to forget the difficult-painful past. After many sessions of advice, he decided to forgive his village mate. And as a friend with whom they used to play and pray together from the same church, he felt guilty after noticing that the village mate was back. For his own good, the one who abducted decided to leave for another village in a different sub-county. But, when the abductee discovered his new location, he visited to confirm that he had forgiven him in spite of this. And up to now, the abductee pays visits and his friend is slowly moving toward being accepted and living as a forgiven person within the community. Such liturgical encounter unfortunately was not known by the priest in charge. Much as the liturgical space created an opportunity, there was no specific redress by the liturgy then for the body in need (Dawson 1996: 1-28). For Uzukwu when in worship, the physical presence of the worshipper in a particular setting will often confirm the importance of any gesture used for the observer as well as the worshiper. And among humans, a gesture retains the characteristic of motion. It is the movement of the body; a measured movement (Uzukwu 1997: ix -1). The pattern of this movement depends on place, time and space, which display is vital for the understanding of worship, embrace and tolerance as reflected in the Tongilo wisdom for reconciliation.

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Tongilo as model for reconciliation The goal of a liturgical theology of walking is to reconcile all protagonists for meaningful belonging within community. This is so because, in being a common denominator for all engaged within liturgy, it easily offers hope to persons emerging from war or conflict. In arguing for a liturgical theology of walking, the paper has illustrated how walking embodies tolerance to mediate complex evolving pluralistic society members. This paper has also described the human situation and/or ministerial concerns after war; articulated practical, relational and conceptual theological methodology. In so doing, the place of the body in worship after war/ conflict has been discussed. Similarly, it has also conceptualized the theology of walking using the unique Lugbara Okuza experience of the East African revival movement. Also, there is variety in the rhythm of human body movement. This measured motion in Liturgical theology of walking is intimately connected to speech and gestures, like in the Protestant understanding of Sacraments. It thus is always a rational activity where repetition like putting a step after another is the law that guides the rhythm of human gesture. It operates within any given sociocultural area so as to become human through repeating the individual and group’s gestures. While it is likely in Africa to have motions of the body unaccompanied by speech, it is less likely to speak without body movement. That is why the Lugbara people view gesture as a mode of communication between the body and the heart. For example, when using the Lugbara chorus: Ama tuwalu, ama tuwalu, yesu ma alia (Literally translated as, we are one in Christ Jesus), the people in worship (all tribes and nations present), hold each other’s shoulders as they swing, dance and sing affirming their physical presence as well as their diverse nature of bodies joining together in common worship. In considering the interplay between scripture, liturgy, walking, worship and disability, liturgical theology of walking demonstrates how to overcome barriers by emphasizing community, as being demonstrated in the Tongilo model. Tongilo, which emerges from the Acholi words Tong – spear and ilo – powder that itches, frame a unique security device. When these words are combined, they would literally mean ‘the spear is itching the enemy.’ As such, the men who climbed the Tongilo tree had to give daily report to the community about their safety. Such is the rigor expected within any enacted liturgy, for better livelihood. This seasoned tree served and later became the symbol for protection against all the enemies coming to the Namokora community of Kitgum District of Uganda. Like Schechtman (2005: 18) a man is always a teller of stories, he lives

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surrounded by his own stories and those of other people; he sees everything that happens to him in terms of these stories and he tries to live his life as if he were recounting it (Lindemann 2011: 387-416). In so doing, conceptualizing people’s stories of safety remain an unavoidable tenet in liturgical theology of walking. Apart from the Tongilo (tamarind) tree being a watch tower and providing safety, it was given a special attention to discuss community issues, progress, and development; a characteristic which is largely missed in most enacted liturgies. In its shed, settling of emerging disputes that threatened the harmony among people was given hearing. Thus in the shared space, especially under the Tongilo tree, elders talked about the welfare of the place and people, a formidable thing for any liturgy. Once any pending issues and dilemmas were identified, the people would gather, sit, discuss and resolve on strategies for redress. However, during the celebrations unity as a pillar is symbolized by the Tongilo for better security. At the ceremony, elders are tasked with the responsibility of counselling, settling disputes, teaching and bridging the gap between the young and old, as well as victims and offenders through stories, riddles, songs and dances. Such discourse remains the best approach of wisdom for reconciliation, especially where all the people affected are given space to engage with history, experience, wisdom and truth. And liturgy that does not enable dialogue with people’s realities after war frustrates community. Such nonviolent approach confronts all selfish interests that propagate war and any other kind of violence. This approach also presupposes that non violent thought and action like dialogue is hugely the product of a religious, cultural and historical development (Yoder 2010: 39-48). In the Tongilo inclusive justice system; a typical liturgical necessity, the victim’s responsibility remained to prove the offense. On the other side would be the recipients of historical wrongs. They, too, play a role in reckoning with history through expressions of forgiveness, mercy and punishment as illustrated in the translated Acholi chant; In ma cwiny rac, ma imito kelo peko ki gin marac ikon lwak me Namokora, kabedo ma Luganda/Rubanga omiya bot kwari-wa pi kwo iye, tin nan nalamo dog-wa ni, in ma imito kelo peko ikom-wa wang ceng oter ci ter. (Acholi) You with a bad heart/intention; and you who want to bring problems and misfortune to the community of Namokora, this is our Land that God gave to our ancestors to live in; today we present our case (prayers) against you, who wishes to bring curses against us that the sun sets with you… And the people respond: the sun set with you…set with you. (Literal English translation of Personal Interview 28 March 2012)

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When any disputes are brought for hearing under this over 100 year old tree, these words would be pronounced and the redress, blessing as well as curse pronounced would immediately take effect. Like the closing prayers in most liturgies that emphasize going into the world to love and serve, the plural form of response is maintained as in the Tongilo. Indeed such emphatic corporate movement or walking of people sharing common identity and purpose is commanded by the law of worship to establish the law of belief among a people. When contextualized, the Church often expresses what it believes through its worship even before those beliefs are studied and analysed. Also, embodiment in this sense would include what God’s reign of justice and peace are; and calls the Church to a more intentional commitment aimed at stronger ties between worship and human society. Indeed our common worship is a great teacher; it is there that we learn about how to be in relationship with God and with one another-both locally and universally. We learn about the demands that our liturgical participation places upon us and the vocation to become the body of Christ in the world (Pecklers 2003: 163). Such reality of liturgy makes dialogue most meaningful while in worship as it recounts the special place human beings have in communicating to God and with one another. The human response however may come as a word to God in the confession of faith, and in prayers of thanksgiving, petition, and intercession. Even as oral and aural means of dialogue predominate, reconciliation remains the goal for every liturgy (Wainwright & Westerfield 2006: 10). Aware of this, it’s clear that forgiveness originates with those who have been wronged. As such, reconciliation becomes complicated when injuries lie deep in the past where no one is alive to offer forgiveness (Weyeneth 2001: 9-38). Like the concern of the elders during a Tongilo session, Daly & Sarkin (2007: 39-40) argue that reconciliation must recognize and respond to the needs of the displaced, wounded and betrayed people, whose lives invariably have been traumatized by the conflict. With liturgical theology of walking having capacity to structure time, provide basic framework for shared experience, manifest community as the context of experience and action; coordinate the varied dimensions of individual, domestic, social and cosmic experience; and provide shared paradigms for all meaningful action, it becomes authoritative enough to generate and legitimatize forms (Experience/Tradition) for innovation and modification (Eliade 1987: 583) in moving toward reconciliation. And as Tongilo exhibits the practice of truth telling, accountability, reparation, repentance and forgiveness among the people of Namokora, it nonetheless continues to remain a virtue for examining community life and healing after conflict. Also, its values in arguing for peace through non-violence

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remain the baseline for reconciliation (Dower 2009: 110-36). Such repertoire of resource remains useful within liturgical theology of walking to guarantee the wellbeing of persons after war.

Conclusion Movements are unavoidable common practice in Liturgy. The Church can no longer march, celebrate and administer sacraments that contradict the theology of walking. Even when National armies and rebel groups continue with walking to assert their claims and legitimacy, the obvious logic to embrace is that, the world at large still remains a walking community. This paper has demonstrated that no liturgy progresses without actual walking. That liturgy receives life when people walk. For it’s a reminder that lives are ordered, step by step. With the image of walking in the Bible, the centrality of the body while in worship, emergence from war; a fusion of embodied demands echoing reconciliation frame sporadic opportunities for reviewing enacted liturgies to foster peace initiatives between individuals, communities and state. In using the relational conceptual framework with primary and secondary resources, the paper has discussed, both the importance and the place of liturgy after conflict using historical clues from the Uganda Martyrs, political walk protests and stories of those who were estranged from belonging. With Tongilo – wisdom for reconciliation before and after conflict among the Acholi weaving dance and elderly rhetoric within liturgy, an unavoidable responsibility dawns. And while rationalizing the concept of a theology of walking, reconciliation, mediation, community and liturgy will continue to demand embodiment as a key resource within worship and any post conflict reality.

References Bakare, S. (1997) Jubilee in an African Context: The Drumbeat, Geneva: WCC Publications. Best, T.F. & Heller, D. (eds) (2004) Worship Today: Understanding Practice, Ecumenical Implications, Geneva: WCC publication. Bell, I (2007) ‘The Ascetics and their bodies’, The Way, 46 (3): 29–45. Campbell, S., Meynell, L. & Sherwin, S. (eds) (2009) Embodiment and Agency, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University. Carlyle, A.J. (2007) The influence of Christianity upon social and political ideas, London: A. R. Mowbray press.

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Daly, E. and Sarkin-Hughes, J. (2007) Reconciliation in Divided Societies: Finding Common Ground, Pennsylvania: The University of Pennsylvania Press. Dawson, D (1996) ‘The Origins of War: Biological and Anthropological Theories’, History and Theory, 35(1): 1-28. Dower, N. (2009) The Ethics of War and Peace, Cambridge: Polity Press. Eiesland, N.L. and Saliers, D.E. (eds) (1998) Human disability and the service of God: Reassessing Religious Practice, Nashville: Abingdon Press. Eliade, M. (ed) (1987) The Encyclopaedia of Religion, Vol. 8, New York: Macmillan Publishing Company. Goldie, P. (2012) The Mess Inside: Narrative, Emotion and the Mind, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Galtung, J. (1996) Peace by Peaceful Means: Peace and Conflict, Development and Civilization, Oslo: Sage Publication. Howard, D.M. 1993, Editorial Activity in the Psalter: A state-of-the- field survey, in J. Clinton McCann. Inge, J. (2003) A Christian Theology of Place, Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing House. Kasuke, K. (1979) Three Mile an Hour God, SCM Press LTD, London. Lindemann, S. (2011) ‘Just another change of guard? Broad based politics and civil war in Museveni’s Uganda’, African Affairs: The Journal of the Royal African Society, 110(440): 387 – 416, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Millard, M. (1994) Die Komposition des Psalter: Em Formgschitlicher Ansatz, FAT9, Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck. Moerlin, F.C.E. (2012) Witnesses from The Pearl of Africa, http://www.traces-cl.com/nov05/witnesses.html, (accessed 20 October 2012). Novak, V E. (2012) The Anglican Rite in Historical, Theological and Ecumenical Perspective, http://www.virtueonline.org/portal/modules/news/article.php?storyid= 16371 (accessed 1 August 2012). O’Donovan, O. (1996) The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pecklers, K.S.J. (2003) Worship: New Century Theology, Continuum: London. Prokes, M.T. (1996) Toward a Theology of the Body, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.Searle, M. (2004) ‘Private Religion, Individualistic Society and Common Worship’, in

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Ann Y. Koester and Barbara Searle (eds) Vision: The Scholarly Contribution of Mark Searle to Liturgical Renewal, Collegeville, Minnesota: Liturgical Press. Seligman, A B. (2004) Modest Claims: Dialogues and essays on tolerance and tradition, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press. Smith, M. (2007) The interesting thoughts of Edward Monkton, http://www.edwardmonkton.com (accessed 7 October 2012). Shuriye, A.O. (2011) ‘The Failed Assumptions of Some Social Scientists on the Role of Religion in International Relations’, International Journal of Humanities and Social Science 1(3), International Islamic University, Malaysia. Uzukwu, E.E. (1997) Worship as Body Language; Introduction to Christian Worship: An African Orientation, Collegeville, Minnesota: The Liturgical Press. Wainwright, G. and Westerfield, T.K.B. (eds) (2006) The Oxford History of Christian Worship, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ward, K. (2006) A History of Global Anglicanism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ward, K. & Wild-Wood, E. (eds) (2012) The East African Revival: Histories and Legacies, Leeds: Ashgate. Ward, S.L.G.B. (2005) In Company with Christ, London: SPCK. Wendel, E.M. (1994) I am my Body: New ways of Embodiment, London: SCM Press. Wendt, A. (1999) Social Theory of International Politics, Cambridge University Press, Weyeneth, R.R. (2001) ‘The Power of Apology and the Process of Historical Reconciliation’, The Public Historian, 23(3): 9-38. Whitehead & Whitehead (1995) Method in Ministry: Theological reflection and Ministry, New York: The Seabury Press. Whybray, N. (1996) The Psalms as a Book, Sheffield: Sheffield University Press. Yoder, J.H. (2010) Nonviolence: A brief History, the Warsaw lectures, Texas: Baylor University Press.

INDEX

Abraham 8, 34, 151, 160-1, 167-9 abuse 8, 56, 138, 264, 285, 352, 355-7, 361 abuse crisis 352, 355-6, 358-9, 362 abuse of power 257-9 activities, musical 1, 10, 265 actor 17, 219, 293, 369-70, 373-4 social 250-2, 255, 257, 260 aesthetic of peace 246, 248, 250, 252, 254, 256, 258, 260, 262, 264 aesthetic perspective 99-100, 102, 104, 106, 108, 110, 112, 114, 118, 120 aesthetic self-reconciliation 102, 105 aesthetics 7-8, 48, 72-3, 99-101, 111, 113, 150-1, 218, 366, 372 areas, post-conflict 265-6 Aristotle 59, 71, 375, 381-2 armed conflicts 10, 317, 330, 335, 351 art 4, 6-9, 29-37, 57-73, 75-8, 91-3, 112-14, 150-2, 154-7, 163-8, 209-12, 214-20, 222-4, 226-8, 380-3 peace and the 212, 228 role of 2-4, 58-9, 62, 65, 75-6 street 172, 175, 182, 185, 188-9 true 153-5 art forms 155-6, 234, 368, 380, 395 art of healing 352, 354, 356, 358, 360, 362, 364 artist-mediator 181-2, 185 artist-peacebuilder 392 artistic contributions 99, 101 artists 6-8, 19, 29-35, 38, 67-8, 75, 100-3, 105-6, 111-13, 133-4,

151-2, 155-6, 163-4, 181-3, 185-6 artwork 102, 105, 136, 166, 169, 182-3, 185, 226 audiences 47, 50, 239, 282, 284-6, 289-90, 295-6, 298, 329, 331, 339-42, 367, 369-76, 378-81, 385-6 global 340-1, 344 local 342, 344 authority 35, 39, 68, 107, 128, 133, 139-41, 215, 307, 309, 358, 404 battle 82, 85, 245, 261, 387-90, 394-6, 404 beauty 81, 93, 100, 111, 113, 155, 164-6, 219-20, 256, 288, 331, 373, 386, 389, 392 Bethlehem 273-4, 321, 326, 329, 333 Bible 11, 30, 33, 75, 92, 151-2, 160-1, 168-9, 234, 289, 402, 415 bodies 11, 16, 18-20, 26-7, 57, 61, 77, 104-5, 234, 241-2, 354, 357-9, 406, 410-12, 415-17 dead 104, 132 human 19, 195, 198, 369, 406 individual 357-8 naked 19-21 body movement 250, 412 broadcast 236, 239, 271, 302, 316, 322, 328, 332 brothers 35, 107-8, 110, 165, 292, 312, 390 building peace environmental 319-20 liberal 318, 332

Mediating Peace campaigns 38, 128, 130, 239, 335, 337-40, 343-5 international 336, 338, 340 camps 7, 40-1, 45-6, 88, 239-40, 269, 402 summer 266, 274-6 cartoons 150, 290-1 Catholic 4, 131, 138, 287, 291-2, 295, 306, 358, 360, 364, 392-3 Catholic Church 287, 299, 303, 357-8, 364 Christ 21, 59, 68, 81, 89, 133, 141, 180, 209, 231, 305, 312, 393-4, 403, 406 Christian 8-9, 61, 81, 90, 92, 100, 111-12, 132, 155, 167, 184, 216, 220, 228, 306 Christianity 60, 71, 75, 111-12, 138, 143, 203, 205, 216, 228, 235, 272, 301, 305-6, 313-15 Christians 59, 110, 125-6, 130-1, 135, 138, 211, 273, 291, 305 church 11, 59-60, 100, 110-11, 130-1, 135, 166, 172-3, 175-6, 231, 306-7, 313-14, 352-8, 360-1, 414-15 early 59 church conflict 351-2, 354, 356, 358, 360, 362, 364 cinema 10, 282, 287-91, 298-9, 335-6, 340, 368 citizens 48, 132-3, 138, 214-15, 223-4, 258-9 civilians 68, 108, 132-3, 138 clergy 356-7, 362-3 collage 172, 175-6, 181-2, 185 comedy 221, 289-90 communities 2-3, 7-9, 11-12, 49-51, 157, 182, 185, 216-17, 224, 231, 236-7, 239, 266-7, 405-8, 410-12 enslaved 254 human 83, 154, 156, 248 intellectual 127 peaceful 397

419

community painting(s) 9, 172, 174, 176, 178, 180, 182-4, 186, 188 confessions 143, 361, 366, 414 conflict 10, 38, 47, 152-4, 163-6, 209, 246-52, 259-60, 265-7, 270-3, 304-6, 329-30, 351-9, 361-4, 414-16 ethnic 198-9 historical 47, 352 human 153, 163, 166, 199 music in 194 new 47, 267, 270, 273 protracted 330-1 resolving 230, 238, 249 transform 252, 329-30 transforming 218, 246, 251, 363 understanding of 166, 353 violent sectarian 352 conflict areas 6, 9-10, 265-70, 272, 274, 276, 278, 280 conflict managers 5 conflict resolution 1-2, 5, 12, 57, 72, 139, 141, 247, 261, 264, 351 conflict situations 1-2, 5, 7, 330, 381 conflict studies 13, 212, 228, 261 conflict transformation 9-10, 194, 207-8, 218, 225-6, 245-51, 253-5, 259-64, 329-30, 351 key instruments of 245, 259 conscientization 62, 127-8, 219 contemplation 31, 33, 35, 154, 172, 376 context historical 131, 253, 303, 305, 309-10 societal 39 creation 31-2, 38, 79, 83-4, 153-4, 156, 160-1, 178, 181, 196, 286, 290, 371, 373, 404 creation theology 152-3, 156 creative arts 75, 246, 248-9, 252-3, 256, 259, 351 creativity 3, 12, 72, 86, 125, 152, 164, 172, 175, 207, 211-12, 217-18, 247-8, 259, 277

420 crisis 246, 256, 295, 301, 352-3, 358-9, 364 culture 23-4, 65-8, 72-3, 91-2, 153-4, 156, 196-8, 222, 227, 242-3, 253-4, 265-8, 271-4, 279-80, 286 western 195-6 dance 9, 196, 212, 215, 219, 224, 226, 230, 232, 234-42, 244, 268, 275, 412-13 ritual 237 dancers 11, 238, 354-5, 357, 360, 362 dehumanizing 255-6, 258 democracy 10, 132, 134-5, 141-2, 150, 211-17, 223-4, 226-9, 317, 319 deep 214, 223, 225 fugitive 212, 229 democratic 9, 213-14, 223-4 democratisation 9, 134-5, 137, 139 democratization 103, 131, 212-13, 215, 223-6 destruction 3, 23-4, 41, 61, 77-8, 82-3, 87, 167-8, 238, 293, 318, 330, 368 development 13, 72, 91, 100, 136, 142-3, 178, 180, 184-5, 242, 262, 286, 316, 332, 342-3 dialogue 1, 6, 8, 31, 75, 99, 112, 137, 157, 181, 183-6, 251-2, 254-6, 290-1, 413-14 visual 181, 183, 185 dignity, human 104, 246, 253, 256, 258-9 dimensions, environmental 317 disciplines 194, 217-19 divine 8, 65, 92, 151, 153, 156-61 divine Images 151, 386 documentaries 271, 290-1, 301-3, 305, 307, 309-10, 312-13, 316 environmental 321, 325-6, 331 documentary film 10, 222, 298, 301-2, 304, 306, 308, 310, 312, 314, 320

Index drama 33, 114, 128, 156, 220, 226, 231, 285, 295, 313, 363, 367, 370-1, 380, 382 ecological peace building 316-19, 321, 326, 330-2 education 10, 54, 60, 75-7, 85, 87, 92-3, 155, 180, 186, 232, 282-3, 335-6, 342 embodiment 65-6, 214, 258-9, 318, 403, 410, 414-15, 417 emotions 3, 34, 57, 71, 76-7, 208, 211, 246, 250, 253, 255, 283-4, 369-71, 376-7, 410 conflicting 151-2 empathy -, 3, 6, 10, 16-18, 20, 22, 24-8, 153, 207, 245-6, 248-53, 256, 259-61, 264 kinaesthetic 249-50, 264 Empower African Children (EAC) 277 empowerment 282 enacted liturgies 11, 402, 404, 412, 415 entertainment 164, 195, 286, 342, 366, 376-7, 381 environment 10, 49, 77, 91, 156, 176, 266-7, 290, 306, 317, 319, 325-6, 329-30, 332, 358 environmental filmmaking 316-17, 330-1 equality 126, 135, 137, 213-14, 216 ethics 8, 12-13, 74, 99-101, 111, 113, 142-3, 151, 203, 206-7, 209, 228, 260, 366, 378-9 evil 7, 9, 19, 58, 60-1, 63-4, 71, 82, 84, 109, 111, 113, 204, 254, 286-8 facilitator 181, 185, 267, 393 faith 33-4, 59, 66, 72, 88-9, 131, 139, 155, 157, 166, 168-9, 261-2, 364, 405, 407 families 29, 69, 106-9, 114, 165-6, 173, 176-7, 186, 269, 274, 290, 295, 297, 307-9, 407-8

Mediating Peace farmers 112, 126, 129, 134, 293, 318, 325-6, 367-8, 371 film, educational 340, 344 flourishing, human 12, 77, 86, 88 forgive 10, 209, 301-2, 304-5, 307, 309-11, 313, 411 forgiveness 10, 101, 105, 158, 164, 225, 230-1, 239, 245-6, 259-60, 301-3, 307-14, 361, 413-14 freedom 30, 37, 50, 101, 132, 135, 138, 150, 155, 164-5, 169, 211-12, 216-17, 253, 267 genocide 7, 9, 24, 47, 58, 71, 74, 230, 232-3, 236-41, 263, 303-6, 308-10, 314 ground, common 6, 241, 317-18, 330-1, 333, 410 group members, process of 182, 186 groups cultural 157, 199 defined 182, 185-6 ethnic 60, 230, 232 focus 177, 182, 191 guilt 8, 99, 107-8, 110, 116, 124, 167, 307, 309, 357-8, 361 guilt and reconciliation 100, 102, 104, 106, 108, 110, 112, 114, 118, 120, 122 harmonies 207-8, 262, 264 harmonies and dissonances in geopolitics 207-8, 262 harmony, musical 195-6, 203, 205 Holocaust 7, 31, 37, 39-51, 55-6, 61, 64, 75, 83, 88-9, 296 Holocaust art 38-9, 41, 88-9 Holocaust Memorial Day 47-8 Holocaust memorials 37, 39, 41-4, 46, 49-50 human rights 5-6, 8-9, 13, 35, 131, 135, 138-9, 143, 258 human rights abuses 125-6, 131, 239, 262 humanity, common 245-8, 250-2, 256, 259-60, 293, 296

421

images broken 4, 66-7 collective 24 existing 176, 181, 183, 185 important function of 69-70 moving 283, 288, 342 images and peace 152, 154, 156, 158, 160, 162 imagination, dialogic 173, 183-4, 186-7 improvisation 211, 220-1, 277 era of nonviolent 220-1 injustice 3, 6, 18, 24, 65, 78, 80, 104, 125-6, 128-9, 141, 220-1, 224-5, 251, 255-7 instrument 156, 211, 229, 235, 237, 248-9 Israeli occupation 329-30 Israeli-Palestinian conflict 7, 47, 75, 326 justice labour 127 priority of 4 justice and peace 139-40, 143, 401 priority of 137 just peace 211, 229 liberation 45-7, 62, 72, 112, 134-5, 139, 152-4, 157, 167, 237, 242, 253 liberation theologies 153 literature 29, 101, 151, 179, 181-2, 185-6, 188, 199, 206, 248, 256, 281, 359, 400 liturgical theology 11, 402, 404, 406, 408, 410, 412-16 liturgical worship 405, 409-10 liturgy 34, 308, 361, 403-4, 406, 409, 411-15 mass media 100, 368, 377-8 material, musical 273, 276 media 1, 21, 23, 25, 50, 100, 291, 314, 324, 352, 384

422 memory 1, 3-4, 7, 24, 35, 38-9, 41, 43, 46, 50, 55-6, 65-7, 69, 89, 105 minjung 109, 125, 133, 135, 139 Minjung Art in Korea 126, 128, 130, 132, 134, 136, 138, 140, 142, 144, 146, 148 minjung artists 8, 125-6, 128-9, 136-7, 140-1 minjung theologians 8, 112, 125, 131, 134, 137 monument 37-8, 40-2, 44-5, 48, 53, 55 moral imagination 217-18, 227-8, 248, 263, 364, 379-80, 382, 391, 401 movies 20, 282, 286, 288-91, 298, 342 murals 126, 133-4, 136, 147, 182, 187, 397 music classical Arabic 271-3 film and 401 piece of 198, 202 power of 194, 249, 269 role of 234, 236 sound of 234, 237 teach 10, 265 traditional 267, 271 music activities 267, 270, 273, 276 music bands 240, 269 music culture 267, 270, 276, 279 isolated 271 multi-layered 273 music function 237, 249 music in peace-building 196, 198, 200, 202, 204, 206, 208 music material 267, 276 music therapist 267-8, 270, 276 music therapy 208, 268 music workshop leaders 273 music workshops 265, 268-9, 274, 278 first 266 musical culture 10, 265-8, 279-80 local 265, 279

Index new 266 musical instruments 268, 276, 279 using 234, 268 musical scores 372, 396 musicians 10, 196, 210-11, 265-9, 271, 273, 279 Muslims 22, 167, 272-3, 292, 306 myths 35, 158, 220, 284, 286-7, 297-8, 395 Negro spirituals 245, 252-4, 264 NGOs 16-17, 317, 319, 322 novel 109-10, 112, 184, 221, 387, 393-5 paintings 7, 9, 12, 17-19, 21-2, 59-62, 67-9, 81-3, 106-7, 112, 150, 163, 168-9, 171-3, 177-83 abstract 106 paintings/drawings 57, 60-1, 69 Palestine 16, 22, 25, 90, 267, 271, 278, 320, 322, 327-9, 331, 334 Palestinians 90, 266, 271, 321, 325-7, 331 peace culture of 206, 292-3 ecological 317, 329, 331 image depicts 83 lasting 139, 141 negative 4-5, 138 restore 231, 397 sustainable 6, 139-40 topic of 7, 74 peace agreement 219, 394 peace-builders 194, 196, 203, 218 peace-building 1-3, 5-6, 7, 9, 11-3, 57, 125-6, 128, 130, 138-40, 143, 187, 194-5, 197-9, 202-3, 205-7, 210-12, 214, 216-20, 222-6, 228, 331-3, 351-3, 357, 362-3, 378-9, 392-3 peace-building arts-based 351, 394 components of 225-6 ecological 329-31 environmental 330, 332

Mediating Peace post-conflict 392 peace-building literature 194-5 peace-building process 5-6 peace-building tool 9, 317 peace camps 241 peace initiatives 11, 201, 402, 415 peace murals 184, 186 international children's 182 peace negotiations 320, 362 peace process 7, 312 peace treaties 380, 388 peace work 226 peaceable world 79 peacebuilding work 217, 219 peacemaking 198, 208, 263, 318 performing arts 1-2, 10-11, 151, 281 perpetual peace 223, 228 photographs 17, 19-21, 24, 28, 69, 167, 339, 341, 377-8, 396 physical theatre 11, 366, 368, 370, 372, 374-6, 378, 380, 382, 384 pictures 8, 16-17, 19-26, 28, 32, 59, 61, 63-4, 67-70, 104-7, 111-12, 175-9, 185, 341-2, 369 coherent 181, 183, 185 final 61, 173-4, 176, 182 pictures of violence 16-17, 23, 28 pictures of war 20-1 picturing 21 poems 40, 43, 46-7, 77-80, 93, 128-9, 241, 245-6, 255-6, 260, 351, 388, 396-8 poets 32, 77, 79-80, 221, 385, 402 poetry 10, 31, 47, 78, 151, 212, 218, 226-7, 234, 245-6, 248, 259, 364, 387-8, 397 positive peace 5, 138 justice of 5 poverty 102, 112, 125-6, 129, 138, 256, 367 poverty chain 367, 369-70, 372, 376, 378, 384 power 4-5, 8-10, 22-3, 63-4, 76, 87-8, 138-40, 153, 213-16, 218-19, 228-9, 245-6, 257-60, 298, 374

423

established 70 music's 194, 197 regulative 25 prayers 35, 167, 186, 308, 354-5, 362, 392-4, 397-8, 413-14 prophecy 77, 80-1, 227 prophetic 4, 66, 70, 78, 80, 83, 86, 89-90 prophets 80, 90, 92, 212 protests, peaceful 128, 387 reconciliation 1-2, 5-9, 74, 82-3, 99-102, 135-6, 210-12, 216-18, 222-6, 230-2, 236-45, 298-301, 308-11, 411-15 cultural 335, 338 miracle of 101 reconciliation process 9, 238-9, 241, 287 reconciliation projects 183-5 reconciliation workshops 309 refugee camp 269-70, 312 restorative justice 5, 309, 313 Rockefeller Foundation 335-7, 340-1, 343, 345-6 Rwandan genocide 61, 69, 233, 249, 302, 304, 314 satire 284-5, 298, 378 screenings 316, 328-9, 339-40, 343 sculptor 38-9, 41, 50 sculpture 7, 37-51, 68, 167-8, 226, 256, 354, 392 security, national 133, 135, 137, 139 singing 198, 234, 239-41, 268-70, 278, 292, 308, 396 slavery 157, 235, 253-4 social activism 84, 154, 335-6 social change 3, 63-4, 69, 78, 112, 218, 222, 376, 380 social conflict 246-7, 251 society body of 358 civil 142, 317 solidarity camps 239-41

424 songs 128, 198, 204, 210-11, 219, 236, 238, 240-1, 245-7, 253, 259, 268, 270-3, 275-7, 298 space metaphor of 361-2 shared 362, 413 space of witness 360-1 spiritual level 65-6, 69 spirituality 3, 32-3, 65, 76-7, 92, 155, 237, 290-1, 357 storytelling 10, 284-6, 288, 298, 370, 388, 395 symbol 11, 41, 45, 82, 86-9, 105, 134, 161, 180, 287-8, 319, 366, 398, 412 theatre 58, 221, 241, 275, 368, 370-6, 379-83 tikkun olam 7, 75, 84, 87, 91-2 tolerance 239, 241, 402, 404, 408, 411-12, 417 transform violent conflicts 351 transformation 1-2, 7, 57, 71, 86, 249, 257-8, 262-3, 311, 313, 353, 362-3, 373, 382

Index ubuntu 254, 261, 263, 378-9 United Nations 233, 239, 243, 311 unjust peace 12, 142, 225, 228 unpeaceful music 249, 262 victims of injustice 245, 251, 255, 257, 259 violence abhorrence of 20 cultural 24, 28, 138 cycle of 259-60 structural 24, 259, 404-5 violent conflict 18, 23-4, 57, 75, 78, 86, 163, 222, 351, 353 visual images 6, 58, 65-6, 69, 71, 76, 150-1, 164, 175 voice of victims of injustice 251, 255 walk 269, 358, 403-6, 408-9, 415 walking 11, 78, 395, 402-10, 412-16 war memorials 38-41, 43, 47, 176 welfare 217, 339, 379, 413