Landscape, War, the Body and Representation I

My aim in this paper is to reflect on ways in which the body is used in war as a communicative tool and ways in which war traumas are dealt with in the realm of representation and art. First I will draw a comparison between the treatment of the body in warring colonial Africa and the treatment of the body in Medieval Europe as seen from the viewpoint of profanation and sacralization. After that I will compare three approaches to representations of the traumatized body as exemplified by colonial British-South African painting, Dada and Andy Warhol, finally I will produce a note on panopticism and self-representation.

Nelson Alvarez is a Cuban-American artist who lives in the Bronx with his wife and two children. Between 1985 and 1986 Nelson served in Angola as part of the Cuban military personal. As a 22 years old sub-lieutenant in charge of a supply column Nelson personally witnessed and participated in some horror war stories that still remain as traumatic events in his life. One of those stories occurred while stationed in the city of Malanche. His superior sent him to pick up an enemy prisoner in the hands of FAPLA soldiers --the native Angolan troops that were allies to the Cubans. Somehow the situation got out of hand and he got to witness a case of torture he was not supposed to see. Nelson saw two prisoners tied unto a chair, one of them with a wire tourniquet around his head, bleeding under the increasing pressure of the tourniquet being turned around by a soldier holding a wooden bar tied to the wire. Looking at the fate that was awaiting him, the prisoner Nelson was suppose to pick up was crying and asking to be deliver from there.

Fresh from this experience, Nelson went to a nearby unit to pick up fuel for his truck. Then he saw the FAPLA unit boss -- who also was a tribal boss-- about to cut the hands of a soldier caught stealing fuel. Experiencing a moral breakdown Nelson grabbed his gun and told the FAPLA boss that “if you cut the hands of the prisoner he –Nelson- was going to shot him”. The FAPLA boss answered that he had no right to intervene since he was a foreign soldier who didn’t understand the rules of his land.

This is only one case among the countless cases of mutilation during Angola’s war. A war that had as one of its signature stamp the use of mutilated bodies as instrument of communication between the warring sides. A practice that dates back to the colonial wars of the European empires. Regarding the colonial war in 19th C. South Africa, David Bunn says that ““By mid-century … a violent contact zone had been established in which the body itself, torn apart, limbs sundered or mutilated, has become a significant means of communication between the warring sides” (Bunn 42, r. col.). Not much has changed since, mutilation and profanation of the body is still a mundane communicative tool in warring Africa. Many of the Cuban soldiers coming from Angola used to talk about corpses lying on the ground, limbs and genitals, having been cut and showing from inside the mouth of the deceased, a deadly reminiscence of the colonial South African wars in the nineteen century, where “it appears that violence to the body, and specially acts of significant mutilation, became important as a brutal means of communication between sides” (Ibid 40, l. col.).

Man of Sorrows

Whereas in colonial South Africa --and Angola during the 1980’s-- the body was the locus of practice of profanations and demarcation of power and territoriality, in the European religious visual culture of the Middle Ages the body is a sign of moral stature and religious qualifications. Wounds and stigmas are the external signs of purity and inner divinity, “portrayals of the wounds in pictures reminded the common man of the Passion and the wounds of Christ himself” (Groebner 97).

The body is perishable and the instincts pull us down to the animal level. We have to shed our bodies like a snake shed the skin in order to become spirit and be one with God. But the spirit needs to be purified of sin through suffering and expiation, that is why pain and torture are welcomed as instruments of purification. In torture what counts is not so much the reality -or fantasy- of the confession but the process of torture itself which is a mean of production in an economy of truth, “trough the confession, the accused himself took part in the ritual of producing penal truth” (Foucault 38). For the Inquisitor the willingness of the victim to go through pain is the proof that God is in the side of the victim. “The eternal game has already begun, the torture of the execution anticipates the punishments of the beyond, it shows what they are; it is the theater of hell, the cries of the condemned man, his struggles… But the pains here below may also be counted as penitence and so alleviate the punishments of the beyond: God will not fail to take such martyrdom into account, providing it is borne with resignation. The cruelty of the earthly punishment will be deducted from the punishment to come: in it is glimpsed the promise of forgiveness” (Ibid 46).

The ones that didn’t engage in criminal behavior and therefore could not be put under penal torture procedures could have a substitution of physical pain by the contemplation of the Man of Sorrows, “reproductions, published in large editions, of images of the (allegedly life-size) wounds in Christ side, were popular: kissing them was to gain one seven years’ remission of purgatorial punishment and protection from sudden death” (Groebner 95). For the great public the process of torture of the condemned man -and its ultimate salvation- was made a spectacle, commodified in “late- medieval dramatizations of pain and physical suffering in Passion pictures, plays and theological tracts (with)…such a “’brutal pleasure in depicting cruelty’” (Groebner 96).

In British colonial Africa, the body is profaned rather than divinized through purification ,”to profane means to open the possibility of special form of negligence, which ignores separation, or, rather, puts it to a particular use” (Agamben 75).The aim here is to desecrate the body in order to preclude the soul from going into that sacred sphere were individuals -of almost every culture- go after they die. The opposite of a religious practice that “can be defined as that which removes things, places, animals or people from common use and transfer them to a separate sphere…The apparatus that effects and regulates that separation is sacrifice” (Ibid 74). The body of European religiosity is tortured, mutilated and sacrificed in order to remove it from the ordinary, profane sphere, and liberate its spirit to the sacred sphere. The British colonialist invader tortured and mutilated the body of the vanquished in order to mark the conquered terrain, and in order to impede that the spirit of the native warrior would become divine or its profanity contaminate the sacred sphere. “Defacement thus did not merely mean producing a bloody and disfigured non-face… Instead, it means inscribing a complex story of sin and sanction onto the body of someone defenseless” (Groebner 87). The mutilated body would remain un-earthed, lay bare and naked, lacking all the due rituals of burial and respect in order to prevent God to have mercy on the beauty that He cannot see or that He would no look at, the beauty of the corrupted flesh. In the other hand, Xhosa warriors and the like will profane the dead body of the white soldier mainly in order to mark their land and send out the message that their colonizers were unwelcomed, “ripping un-shriven corpses out of the ground, denying rest or dignity, turning them into stinking signs of the offensive presence of colonialism became a macabre form of symbolic resistance” (Bunn 44 r. col.).

There is a whole system of desecration and mutilation on colonial warring South Africa, on both sides of the war. Even until this day if the genitals of the deceased native are cut and put in his mouth is in order to humiliate and rob him of his strength and virility. On the other hand, if the genitals of the white man are cut, is in order to desiccate and wear them as symbol of triumph and a receptacle of power. Cannibalism is also practiced as a way to acquire the powers of the enemy. Parts of the body such as fingers, hair, eyes, ears, etc, are kept as trophies of war “as though a Pre-Enlightenment logic of fetishism and similitude has returned” (Bunn 43 l. col.).



How the theatricality of unburied mutilated bodies made its way to landscape painting in colonial South Africa? “How is it possible that landscape, in the conventional sense, managed to avoid representing this catastrophic violence and painted out the horror that was literally embodied in bones and rotting corpses strewn about in plain view? (Bunn 3n. r. col.) The attitude of the British artists in general --as implied by Bunn in the former quote-- was one of denial. The question of art as an instrument of denunciation is here out of the picture. Though in a later part in his article Bun says that “in South Africa, violence insinuates itself into the entire system of representation, posing a significant threat to ideas of aesthetic order or convention” (Ibid 43. r. col.). There is “a sort of fetishistic understanding” (ibid 43) in every representation of the elements of the landscape: Heights are seen not as depository of the sublime but as strategic points of offense and defense, a locust is seen by a burgher as a creature working for the enemy.

Two genres of painting, landscape and historical painting, concerned itself either about not corrupting the spiritual beauty of the African landscape or about making an idealized, sentimental portray of historical events, as in Thomas Bowler’s “the Boma Pass” (Bunn 47 l. col.) and Thomas Baynes’ “The Death of Colonel Fordyce” (Ibid 45). Other forms of representation are reductionist portrayal of natives engaged in their daily and ritual activities against the landscape, as in Thomas Baynes’ Kaffir War Dance in the Amatolas” (Ibid 40). “Semi-nakedness, and dark skin, is offset against the backdrop of the snowy peaks, an unusual sight generally in temperate South Africa, and therefore reminiscent of perhaps also of “whiteness” as an imported, context-determining category” (Bunn 40, r. col.). The sinful powers of the flesh are represented in the vertical relation between earth and the sky: the level of earth, the ground, reserved for the excesses of the body and instincts; while high above, in the sky plane, lay the superiority of the spirit represented in the white peaks of the mountains. “Kaffir War Dance”, by Thomas Baynes, can be read as an allegory of the Christian conception of the spirit and the flesh in eternal fight for salvation; God and the Devil doing battle in the lands of the Amatolas, thus the logical need and justification of invasion: God sent the white man to Africa in order to save the souls of the natives, a thought that is replicated in the other side of the Atlantic under the doctrine of “Manifest destiny”.

For the next part of this paper I will talk about camouflage, travesty and intimidation.

Imago Pietatis (Image of Sorrows). Sarajevo Church of the Holy Archangels. 15th C.
Thomas Baynes, “The Brittish settlers of 1820 landing on Algoa Bay”, 1853.
Thomas Baynes ,“Native”, 1856.

(c)Renelio Marin