Friday, March 14, 2003

The Representations of Violence

Art of the Sierra Leonean Civil War exhibition is not good for your digestion. Or your temper. You want to be able to do something, but you can't.

The origins of the horrors depicted are clear enough: a country established by fiat over disparate tribes and refugees; corrupt governments that squandered all social capital and left a legacy of dishonesty and lack of control; easily mined and smuggled diamonds; and encouragement to anarchic warlordism from Liberia. Charles Taylor's specialty is using warrior corps drugged, armed, and encouraged to prey on civilians (apparently of all tribes) with little direct control. The small groups do their own recruiting, often of children, and force them to commit crimes so horrible that the children have to cling to their fellow-soldiers as the only people who would ever accept them. The RUF adopted that model and exceeded even cannibal-Taylor in brutality.

ECOMOG was pretty useless, and the UN peacekeepers were ill-equipped and often helpless. It took British paratroopers to put the fear of God into the factions. Sierra Leone didn't really have much you could call a government. Even now the RUF still holds slaves working diamond pits, even though they are supposedly "part of the political process." Sankoh is standing trial now, but most of the gangsters will never see a judge.

And picture after picture after fabric painting showed drugged children shooting, hacking off limbs, raping, burning alive--and dogs eating corpses in the street. I'd seen reporter's pictures, but its a rare reporter who can bring a sense of history or family to a picture.

I have to find some way of easing the grimness of these observations. So--compare this exhibit of the work of modestly trained but honest Leoneans with the nearby faculty art exhibit. I concluded that you have to train for many years to to obliterate the ability to create art with a recognizable subject, or which anyone will care about.

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