History? Who needs it?
We all do, of course, more than we imagine. And certainly the American right spoke out loudly and bitterly during the late unlamented era of our “culture wars” over the “loss,” as they saw it, of our own history. Just check out our present VP’s angry wife and former head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Lynne Cheney, on the subject. (“A system of education that fails to nurture memory of the past denies its students a great deal: the satisfactions of mature thought, an attachment to abiding concerns, a perspective on human existence.”) But that’s our history of course, not theirs.
It’s not that the destruction of “their” history was unexpected. As much as anything in the future can be known, the looting of Iraq’s patrimony with this war’s end was, it turns out, known to the experts (and warnings issued to this administration on the subject). Take a look, for example, at a piece (US accused of plans to loot Iraq antiques) in a discussion forum of the European Journal of International Law, posted on April 7, from their art correspondent. It begins:
“Fears that Iraq’s heritage will face widespread looting at the end of the Gulf War have been heightened after a group of wealthy art dealers secured a high-level meeting with the US administration.
It has emerged that a coalition of antiquities collectors and arts lawyers, calling itself the American Council for Cultural Policy (ACCP), met with US defence and state department officials prior to the start of military action to offer its assistance in preserving the country’s invaluable archaeological collections.“The group is known to consist of a number of influential dealers who favour a relaxation of Iraq’s tight restrictions on the ownership and export of antiquities. Its treasurer, William Pearlstein, has described Iraq’s laws as ‘retentionist’ and has said he would support a post-war government that would make it easier to have antiquities dispersed to the US”
There was occupation planning, of course. Given all those months of leaked reports to the press on the future occupation of Iraq and the endless administration reading lists of histories of World War II (that’s where they like to think they are anyway) and the postwar occupations of Japan and Germany, there had to be. And the taking and guarding of the oil part of Iraq’s patrimony seems to have been reasonably well thought out. The rest of the occupation was evidently supposed to take care of itself. All those months of “planning” and more or less the full infrastructure of Baghdad (right down to supplies of vaccines for children in a country that was in a health crisis before the war began) has either been stolen away or thoroughly trashed.
But history does have its uses. And its loss — or the loss of the objects that embody everything we’ve been through as a sentient, self-conscious, history-writing, tale-telling species — is bound to be a kind of wound. So let me offer a little Saturday history lesson of my own, three different historical commentaries on, and perspectives on our last weeks of war and conquest, on the kind of American “innocence” that no longer has the right to pass for innocence anywhere on this earth.
“The group is known to consist of a number of influential dealers who favour a relaxation of Iraq’s tight restrictions on the ownership and export of antiquities. Its treasurer, William Pearlstein, has described Iraq’s laws as ‘retentionist’ and has said he would support a post-war government that would make it easier to have antiquities dispersed to the US”
There was occupation planning, of course. Given all those months of leaked reports to the press on the future occupation of Iraq and the endless administration reading lists of histories of World War II (that’s where they like to think they are anyway) and the postwar occupations of Japan and Germany, there had to be. And the taking and guarding of the oil part of Iraq’s patrimony seems to have been reasonably well thought out. The rest of the occupation was evidently supposed to take care of itself. All those months of “planning” and more or less the full infrastructure of Baghdad (right down to supplies of vaccines for children in a country that was in a health crisis before the war began) has either been stolen away or thoroughly trashed.
But history does have its uses. And its loss — or the loss of the objects that embody everything we’ve been through as a sentient, self-conscious, history-writing, tale-telling species — is bound to be a kind of wound. So let me offer a little Saturday history lesson of my own, three different historical commentaries on, and perspectives on our last weeks of war and conquest, on the kind of American “innocence” that no longer has the right to pass for innocence anywhere on this earth.
Let me start with a thoughtful private email I received from Karen Greene, who was kind enough to give me permission to reproduce it:
“I am the librarian for Ancient & Medieval History and Religion at Columbia University. If you let that sink in for a moment, I’m sure you’ll understand the trauma that I — and my colleagues here — have suffered in the wake of the news of the destruction of the Antiquities Museum and, especially, the National Library in Baghdad.
“I agree with you, while human life has been lost in inexcusable numbers, there is something, somehow, more deeply tragic about the loss of material that has survived for centuries, or millennia. Lives long past are renewed when future generations may hold their creations. I will never forget standing in the Rare Book vault at Durham Cathedral, holding a 9th-century Cassiodorus commentary in my hands, seeing the pin pricks in the parchment where the scribe had marked off the rulings for his script. That scribe lived again for me.
“A good librarian friend of mine and I have talked at length about the Bush administration’s neglect of these tragedies, of their preferred focus on the commercial rather than the cultural preservation of Iraq, and we have come to the sad conclusion that the best chronicler of the American response to the cultural suicide in Baghdad would have been Rudyard Kipling. Surely he would have some choice observations to make on the imperial response to colonial culture — after all, why should we care about it? It’s just the remains of a bunch of wogs, right?
“I think what makes this administration even more callous to the tragedy in Baghdad is its Christian fundamentalist bent — you and I may see the broken artifacts as the destruction of the history of civilization, but men like Bush & Ashcroft and their ilk probably don’t recognize these items as reflecting their civilization.”
I believe she’s quite right. We underestimate the influence of Christian fundamentalist thinking, connected to that most historically flammable of areas, the Biblical Middle East. As those of you who have been reading these dispatches know, I think this administration actively took on the role of the vengeful, angry God of the Old Testament in order to lay low “idolatrous” creations of Saddam Hussein. In this way, the Bush men don’t mind seeing that alien world laid low and humiliated. In their dreams, I suspect, some of the neocons, at least, imagine themselves recreating (like so many gods) a new world in Iraq, which they can name and claim.
Here, then, reproduced in full with the kind permission of Ariel Dorfman (but first published at the openDemocracy website), is another kind of sortie into history — the history of names:
CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS HAS WORDS FROM THE OTHER SIDE OF DEATH FOR CAPTAIN JOHN WHYTE, WHO REBAPTIZED SADDAM INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT AS HIS TROOPS ROLLED INTO IT
By Ariel Dorfman
I know something about names, Captain.
Those who conquer must always have a name ready.
Even before the sword, before the gun.
I saw the island and called it San Salvador.
San Salvador because we had been saved.
I did not ask the natives
they were friendly, they were almost naked, they were brown
under the tropical sun
I did not ask them what they called that place themselves
I did not ask them what they called their home
And I did not tell them that they would all die
I did not tell them that nobody would ever know
what they spoke
how they spoke
the words would be swallowed
like boats are swallowed in the tempest
of a sad sea
like bodies are swallowed in a mine
Now they teach me their words and their songs
here in the dark of forever
I study what they called the moon and love and good-bye
I listen to their Carib whispers
and I purse my lips and I whistle and I soften the air
with the language no one has spoken on that island
for over five hundred years
This is my penance
And then Quechua and then Maya and then Tzotzil
and then the thousand and ten tongues that were once alive
in the lands that would not be called my name
that would be called by someone else’s name
Amerigo America
and then the learning will go on
Navajo and Guaraní and Nahuatl
and the sounds that once filled the ears
of lovely maidens
to bring forth the crops
and no one today even knows their name
learning learning
until they have taught me to pronounce each last word
how do you say friend
how do you say death
how do you say forever
how do you say penance
they will teach me how they say penance
in their thousand and ten tongues
your penance, Captain?
what awaits you?
You said you came to bring freedom
Freedom. When another can decide for himself.
You said you came to bring democracy.
Democracy. When another can control for herself.
You said you came with liberation.
Liberation. When the people who made the world
name that world and themselves.
Freedom. Democracy. Liberation.
Words.
Your words, the words of your leaders.
And then you called the airport by another name.
It is ours. We took it. We’re here.
We killed the men who called it by that other name.
We can call it now what we will.
Under a sky full of bombs another name.
Baghdad now. Not Saddam.
Saddam Airport.
Not a name I like, we like, here on the other side.
a name cursed in the cellars
where the fingers are crushed
where the head is split
where the teeth are pulled
rooted out
the roots of that name Saddam
the striker of the blow
the one who resists
the one who gives grief
the one who prohibits
all all all crying out inside that name
but not for you, Captain,
to change
not for you to decide
your penance?
they wait for you, John Whyte,
here in the glorious dust of words
they once scrolled on paper parchment stone
here in the dark light of death
they wait for you
the poets of Iraq
Aby Nawas and Sa’di
Mutanabbi and Buhturi
waiting like the rugs they used to sit on
waiting like the founts they used to drink from
all the words you did not think to use
Captain John Whyte
all the names you did not know
not even your own
white barakah
barakah related to barak blessing
you will have to learn
pronounce as I have had to pronounce
word for word
the arabic you did not care to know
like the Nahuatl I never knew
like the Cherokee I never knew
you will have to learn
starting with the hundred words
that pour forth from Allah
Rahman The Compassionate
Rahim The Merciful
Rahman International Airport
Rahim International Airport
can you hear them
even now as you advance towards Baghdad
can you hear their voices
Rahman the Compassionate
Rahim the Merciful
Rahman Rahim
and Salam
Salam
Peace
one of the attributes of God
your penance
John Whyte John Barakah
did you never think
they will treat you with mercy
on the other side
that the people of Iraq
might want to call their land
with the names of Salam
the many names of peace?
your penance
oh white one
it will take you and your leaders
forever
and forever
and forever
it will take you forever
to learn the word for peace
Ariel Dorfman’s latest books are The Burning City (Doubleday/Random House),
a novel written with his youngest son Joaquín, and Exorcising Terror: The
Incredible Ongoing Trial of General Augusto Pinochet (Seven Stories/`Pluto
Press). His website is www.adorfman.duke.edu
(This poem was first published by www.openDemocracy.net and is republished here in full with the kind permission of the author.)
Finally, from today’s Guardian, a reminder that, no matter how many of the objects of history or its records have been lost, we are not innocents occupying a blank slate of a land. Tom
Our last occupation
Gas, chemicals, bombs: Britain has used them all before in Iraq
By Jonathan Glancey
The Guardian
April 19, 2003No one, least of all the British, should be surprised at the state of anarchy in Iraq. We have been here before. We know the territory, its long and miasmic history, the all-but-impossible diplomatic balance to be struck between the cultures and ambitions of Arabs, Kurds, Shia and Sunni, of Assyrians, Turks, Americans, French, Russians and of our own desire to keep an economic and strategic presence there.
Laid waste, a chaotic post-invasion Iraq may now well be policed by old and new imperial masters promising liberty, democracy and unwanted exiled leaders, in return for oil, trade and submission. Only the last of these promises is certain. The peoples of Iraq, even those who have cheered passing troops, have every reason to mistrust foreign invaders. They have been lied to far too often, bombed and slaughtered promiscuously.
Iraq is the product of a lying empire. is the heavy hand, and sooner or later it will have to be applied”. As in 1921, so in 2003.