Theater of War: Din und Drang in The Head & the Load HOMI K. BHABHA
“Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat Kaboom, Kaboom, Kaboom” The Head & the Load
“The black man is a toy in the hands of the white man. So in order to break the vicious circle, he explodes. I can’t go to the movies without encountering myself. I wait for myself. Just before the film starts, I wait for myself.” Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks1
“They were called legs or grunts. To carry something was to hump it, as when Lieutenant Jimmy Cross humped his love for Martha up the hills and through the swamps. In its intransitive form, to hump meant to walk, or to march, but it implied burdens far beyond the intransitive. . . . They carried diseases, among them malaria and dysentery. . . . They carried the land itself—Vietnam, the place, the soil—a powdery orange-red dust that covered their boots and fatigues and faces. They carried the sky. . . . Just humping, one step and then the next and then another, but no volition, no will, because it was automatic, it was anatomy, and the war was entirely a matter of posture and carriage, the hump was everything, a kind of inertia, a kind of emptiness, a dullness of desire and intellect and conscience and hope and human sensibility. Their principles were in their feet. Their calculations were biological.” Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried 2
Muscular action
tifiso nje tebulahlakanipni” (Muscular actions must substitute themselves for concepts): Mncedisi’s declamatory opening to the Prologue of The Head & the Load [HL], spoken in siSwati, cannot sustain its swagger for longer than a few breaths.3 Hard on his rhetorical mastery, Mncedisi assumes a reflective voice as he acknowledges the limits of edicts and epiphanies in plain English:
“TIPHANGA NETIKHWEPHA KUBA
I do not come with timeless truths. My consciousness is not illuminated with ultimate radiances. But there are too many idiots in the world. I think it would be good if certain things were said. [HL]
As doubt gathers—no timeless truths, no ultimate radiances—a shadow falls between the declarative mode and the reflective mood. The shadow-lines that emerge in this area of uncertainty intensify the urgency of utterance: the need to speak up, or speak out, becomes ever more pressing in the absence of illumination. “I think it would be good if certain things were said,” Mncedisi insists, but in these ambiguous conditions of discourse how do we know what these “certain things” are? What would be the good of saying them, and to whom? And in which language anyway? When confronted by such questions, Kentridge does not resort to the pedagogical methods of historical realism. “By that I mean to not start with a series of facts and knowledge that the makers of the piece have, which they give to an audience who they assume knows less than them, in the way that a teacher would give a lecture to a student.”4 At the Design Indaba in Johannesburg, Kentridge once gave a talk on peripheral thinking which he acknowledged was a “simplified history lesson.”5 Like a pedagogue who is really a poet, Kentridge presented his audience with a cascade of questions. When hope flies in the face of failure, how do we distinguish between history’s aspirations and its vanities? Do we call up the ghosts of China, Paris, old French colonialism, new French colonialism? Or do we revive utopian memories of Patrice Lumumba or Nyerere’s Ujamaa socialism?
1.
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 119. 2.
Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried (Boston, New York: Mariner Books/ Houghton Mifflin, 1990), 4–15. 3.
Mncedisi Shabangu, a lead performer in The Head & the Load, is an actor, writer, and director in South African theater. 4.
William Kentridge, citation p. 291. 5.
William Kentridge, “Peripheral Thinking” (lecture, Design Indaba, Johannesburg, June 3, 2015).
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HOMI K. BHABHA 6.
Ibid. 7.
Homi K. Bhabha, “Processional Ethics: William Kentridge’s More Sweetly Play the Dance”, Artforum International 55, no. 2 (October 2016): 230–37, 292, 10. 8.
Hamilton Dlamini, a lead actor in The Head & the Load, is an awardwinning South African film and stage actor, playwright, director, and producer. 9.
Fanon, Black Skin, 90.
While we nervously pace the corridors of history, the work of art must go on, the deed must be done. Finally, Kentridge delivered his coup de grâce: “What are the operas to be made? The hullabaloo is what there is in the center. Two sparrows [of hope and failure] flying through the din of pots and pans of all the edicts and theories and private histories. Thank you for listening to this simplified history lesson.”6 There is more to history’s hullabaloo, and the parable of the sparrows, than a shout-out to contingency and indeterminacy while spinning the wheels of hope and failure. Kentridge contests the time-worn agents of universal progress— movers and shakers, heroes and villains, central committee contortionists, white paper wizards, blue-print bureaucrats, and ideologues of the leading idea. He disrupts the grandiose reach of the Great Leap Forward because he is on the side of those for whom progress is measured, step by step, by “foot-power.” Kentridge has long led the procession of “anonymous carriers”—African army carriers in this instance—who are taken for granted, “walking through the streets of Johannes burg, through the streets of so many cities of the world. They’re the peasants, the proletariat, the unemployed, people at the margins of society.”7 Mncedisi’s prologue expresses Kentridge’s skepticism of the parade of progress while affirming, again, the agency of the anonymous:
abandoned—is the grave hullabaloo at the heart of HL. One could argue that choosing “to not start with a series of facts and knowledge,” in this instance, is something of a provocation. To retrieve the lost narratives of African carriers’ tales from the amnesiac annals of World War I is an archival project that demands something of a history lesson. The shadows cast by the Empire’s official functionaries to obscure the historical record of their military malpractice and human rights abuses in Africa, must surely be brought to light without ambiguity, with facts and figures. African soldiers (askari) and porters were in no doubt whatsoever that the price they paid as loyal subjects fighting for King and Empire was nothing less than a loss of face, family, and freedom. Without names and numbers, they were ciphers in the army records and gaps in the memory of the Great War. Hamilton,8 a conscripted porter in HL, speaks of himself and his carrier kin, in the alien address of the “third person”: They are not men, because they have no name. They are not soldiers, because they have no number. You do not call them, you count them. [HL]
Hamilton’s use of the third person to describe the lot of those who bear the weight of the head and the load, recalls Frantz Fanon’s account of the weight of the colonizer’s gaze Without struggle, there is nothing. as it falls on the shoulders of the colonialized: Without the knowledge of the “And then we were given the occasion to confront practicalities of action, there is the white gaze. An unusual weight descended on nothing except fancy dress parades, us. . . . In the white world, the man of color encounthe blare of trumpets, flag waving. ters difficulties in elaborating his body schema. At the bottom the poor man is The image of one’s body is solely negating. It’s an endlessly marking time image in the third person.”9 Ngaphandle lekucondzisa tidzingo, It is, indeed, because they are men withkubete lutfo nga – out names, soldiers without numbers, and subKubatingubo takanokusho jects excised from speech, that African carriers Kutlebhela kwemacilongo belong to Kentridge’s long history of the assembly Nekubhebhetseka kwemi bhelebhele. of the anonymous. And it is because the history Ekugcineni labampofu nalabaphuyile of African carriers has been lost in the shadows bahambisa sikhatsi loko kusakaza of the records of the Great War, that Kentridge umombo. [HL] draws out their spirits in the shadow-play of The betrayal by European colonial powers projections. Carriers, in HL, are now dramatic of their own African soldiers and carriers in the agents performing their own predicaments; they Great War—forcibly conscripted and routinely are graphic ghosts who stain the Imperial record. 302
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“To make not a tragedy, which is always constructed around one person, perhaps not even a comedy,”10 is Kentridge’s aesthetic choice and his ethical decision. The walking-working procession of “anonymous carriers,” moves its “foot-power” to the count of the dance of death: HAMILTON
I sleep very late. I commit suicide at 65 percent. My life is very cheap. But it is only 30 percent of life for me. My life is only 30 percent life. [HL]
Thangata: 30 percent life, 30 percent light
Why is shadow-projection the dominant graphic style of Kentridge’s processions? What makes the silhouette, flat and two-dimensional, such a vital visual signature of his “anonymous carriers”? A carrier’s “30 percent life” bears an uncanny likeness to the (roughly) 30 percent light that allows the silhouette to stand out, and stand up, to its dark life. To grasp the graphic life of HL, it is necessary to decipher a mode of projection that creates the shadow-world of the carriers’ tale. Our common understanding of projection is propulsion, a forward movement, which is the most basic step that constitutes the foot-power of anonymous carriers in procession. Projection as forward movement—whether it consists of marching, drilling, or transporting a load on the head as the problem of the neck—is the force that drives chain-gangs in the economy of war: 26,000 carriers. 176 miles to the front. 25 miles a day. Wastage rate – 3 percent per day. Food wastage, 17 percent. Desertion, 16 percent. Times 16 percent per day wastage. Ah, let’s start again. [HL]
“They were recruited by force,” said the gun carrier Okech Atonga. “At least every house had to produce one young man. Their mothers were crying as they went.” Leah Karuga gave the women’s point of view: “The son of a man who
was hated was taken. The son of a man who was respected was hidden by Kinyanjui wa Gathirimu. Ropes were put through their ears and tied together,” a method often used by tribal retainers.11 In the wake of the forward march of war economics and statistics come regulatory and ethical issues that pit the well-being of lines of transport against the “30 percent” chances of the carriers’ survival. “We are the porters who carry the food, of the porters who carry the food, of the porters who carry the food”12 is the refrain of a marching song that was popular amongst the Baganda carriers of Uganda in 1916. The repetitive refrain—“carry the food . . . of the porters . . . of the porters . . . of the porters” is more than a time-keeping strain common to marching songs. The cyclical musical line is, in fact, a political vicious circle. Geoffrey Hodges, an authority on East African carriers in Uganda, sees the marching song as “showing the crux of the Military Labour Boards problem.”13 The title, HL, inspired by a Ghanaian proverb—“The head and the load are the troubles of the neck”—draws on diverse meanings that can be mined from the metaphoric phrase, head and load. The load of history, the head-load of carrier labor, the burden of the war, the psychic load of colonial humiliation, racism, and indignity—these are the loads that have to be carried by the head, and in the mind, when there is a noose around your neck. Projected silhouettes give presence and profile to these diverse tropes that figure iteratively in the design of HL. Shadow-play, is a way of turning history-lessons into tableaux vivants. Kentridge writes, “shadows cast on the wall, shadows both of the performers but also of cut-out shapes they carried—of faces, of objects, of historical moments— literal loads and metaphoric loads.”14 Putting HL in the context of the arithmetic of human endurance reveals the careful calculation involved in the banality of bureaucratic evil. Suddenly the metaphor built into the title turns into a macabre reality when I discover that the carrier’s route is marked by “heads,” the name given to depots, between which he carries a load of 50 or 60 lbs. A carrier’s utility and viability is measured by his capacity to carry loads between depots, and his profitability depends on the margin between the food he consumes and the load he carries. Hodges provides a frame of reference for Kentridge’s title.
10.
William Kentridge, citation p. 291. 11.
Geoffrey Hodges, The Carrier Corps. Military Labor in the East African Campaign, 1914-1918 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 100. 12.
Ibid, 143. This account is deeply indebted to Hodges’ indispensable scholarly contributions to the African Carrier story. Hodges notes that this Ugandan marching song was “devised by Dr. G. H. Hale Carpenter who . . . had accompanied the force to Tabora.” See “The Life and Work of the Carriers,” 163. 13.
Ibid. 14.
William Kentridge, citation p. 294.
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HOMI K. BHABHA 15.
Hodges, Carrier Corps, 143.
16.
William Kentridge, citation p. 293. 17.
Hodges, Carrier Corps, 123.
18.
Melvin E. Page, “The War of Thangata: Nyasaland and The East African Campaign, 1914-1918,” The Journal of African History 19, no. 1, World War I and Africa (1978): 87. 19.
Ibid. 20.
Ibid. 21.
Hodges, Carrier Corps, 129.
22.
Ibid., 119.
23.
See Hodges, Carrier Corps, 121: “Bananas were wasteful to transport as only half their weight was edible, and they only lasted four days after picking; the same applied to sweet potatoes, but they and matoke could both be made into flour.”
A porter eats his own load in 25 days. His official load was 50 lb. and he needed 2 lb. of food a day. If he carried his own food and restocked at “Head”— the end of a line of communication—only half of his load would be available for other goods. If there was no food at “Head,” his load would consist only of his own food, and he might as well not be sent, unless he could restock en route. Under good conditions porters could do twelve miles a day, taking fifteen days to reach “Head” on an average line 180 miles in length. But on the 600-mile line from the Rhodesian railway to the German border (Namibia), porters were expected to carry 60 lb. for fifteen miles a day, on an unvaried diet of 2 lb. of meal a day.15 The human cost of relentless forward movement, the projection or propulsion of the carriers’ march, bears more than a metaphoric or semantic resemblance to the shadow-art of silhouettes and cut-outs. In the process of making HL, Kentridge and his team were in search of broad strokes and big pictures, but often, Kentridge reveals, “the elliptical and enigmatic concision of lines from a song could show the way.”16 The Ugandan carriers’ marching song—“We are the porters who carry the food . . . of the porters . . . who carry the food”— tells not only of the exhaustion of repetitive labor and the exploitation of line-labor. It also speaks of food, the fuel of life and labor, as nothing less than a diet of death for carriers. One of the most telling paradoxes of the Great War in Africa (“the subsidiary theater of war” as the Germans called it) was to be found in policies regulating the relation of diet and disease on the road. It would not be an overstatement to say that African carriers were fed to die, not intentionally, of course, but not without warnings and complaints made to the military labor board by colonial officers associated with the Carrier Corps. Carriers are reduced to shadows of themselves as they drift into the domain of bare life. Dysentery was rampant among carriers; intestinal diseases were responsible for over half the carrier fatalities. Kasoga, a porter of Chief Kimbuya of Kisonga, died on H.M.S. Nyanza bringing five hundred carriers from Karungu in South Nyanza. “A rag of barkcloth was apparently his only personal effect. The body was in a state of extreme emaciation, the whole alimentary tract empty, the intestines and visceral peritoneum acutely inflamed,
and the mucous membrane covered with ulcers. In my opinion death was caused by acute dysentery and lack of treatment.”17 A significant source of this Gordian knot of diet, disease, and death is to be found in a simple phrase in Hodges’ account that cuts to the chase: fifteen miles a day, on an unvaried diet of 2 lb. of meal a day. An unvaried diet of 2 lb. of mealie meal a day, is the start of the unravelling of the carrier’s tale. The narrative begins with the march from “head” to “head,” 180 miles apart from each other, and makes its weary way to the physical and affective experiences related to conscription and recruitment—dysentery, malaria, displacement, homesickness, and the loss of the will to live. Beer, for instance, became a panacea for thangata, a Chichewa word adapted in the colonial situation to refer to demands made, as Melvin Page explains, by “new European landlords, for labor in exchange for ‘rent’ and for taxes.”18 Page cites a Malawian who writes that, “‘Thangata’ is ‘work which was done without any real benefit’.”19 The corrupt practices of conscription inflicted on African carriers and askari made them acutely aware of their exploitation and they re-named the Great War, the “war of thangata.”20 Beer, like mealie meal, becomes a way of heedlessly implementing the burden of the head and the load at the cost of the African mind and body. Some medical officers prescribed beer not only for those convalescing from scurvy but as an essential food item, and breweries were established “to combat the depression and nostalgia to which the sick native so readily yields, dying without a struggle because he can summon up no interest in a life in which he feels he will never be well enough to get home.” 21 I can give only a patchy account of the carrier’s fate of being “fed to die,” as I have called it, but if we are in search of broad strokes conveyed by surprising thoughts and turns of phrase in the style of Kentridge, then this Luganda proverb speaks directly to the link between food and fate: “A talukugendere akusibidde etanda y ’amanvu (He who will not accompany you on the journey has provided ripe bananas [as these will soon become inedible, he does not care how you will fare]).”22 Bananas were a waste of time and labor on the carrier trail because they lasted only four days after they were picked.23 And the proverb 304
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that follows speaks to my larger concern with conscription as the destruction of the carrier lifeworld. The further the carrier is driven from home by the onward march of the head and the load, the more unbearable the loss of his cultural ecosystem, and the affective burden of thangata locks in: “Your feet are set on strange paths; they travel away from the knowledge that has been handed from our ancestors.”24 Mealie meal and the measure of life
Food-ways are rooted in the carrier’s wandering body like the landscape is marked by customs of cultivation, or the food of one’s homestead never loses its taste. The memory of food is as lifesupporting as food itself is life-sustaining. The army standardized African food habits in order to administer carrier corps economically and with efficiency. This was done despite the enlightened advice of its best officers, and it resulted in destructive, short-sighted polices. The diversity of African regional diets, established by tradition and terroir, were homogenized into a standardized diet consisting largely of mealie meal: “Mealie meal soon became standard, but any meal would cause intestinal irritation, if dirty, gritty or undercooked; the coarser the meal, the longer it took to cook. In the field, with the enemy about, fires and lights had to be out about 6.30 p.m. with the onset of tropical darkness. Men were likely to eat a half-raw, indigestible mass of porridge, when they were exhausted by the day’s march, and probably had too little water, firewood, and time to cook properly.”25
The projected numbers—180 miles from Head to Head, a load of 50 lb. per carrier walking 15 miles a day on 2 lb. of indigestible mealie meal—factor into the diminishing utility of the carrier. And the diminishing factor is disease and death. An army marches on its stomach; the carrier crawls on his. In the performance of HL, Mncedisi recites his “carrier math” to Hindemith’s repetitive dissonance accompanied by Jo’s highpitched, atonal listing of carrier loads—1,600 pairs of leather gloves, 600 hymn and prayer books, 111 song books, 12 union jacks. In time to Jo’s iterative squawk, the porters’ shadow projections grow in size as they diminish in strength, stumbling, rising, saluting, flailing. “Let’s start again,” is the grim repeat in Mncedisi’s counting-song of exploitation and extinction. Starting again also signposts a fork in the road, a break in the propulsion of progress. The carrier’s death-march starts again the next day, “We are the porters . . .” Carriers chant as they set out again on their journey, fed to death. The stopstart movement of the carrier’s song, laid over Mncedisi’s mathematics, echoes the time-signature of Kentridge’s shadow processions—iterative and interrupted. Kentridge’s shadow carriers, projected across the screen in HL, More Sweetly Plays the Dance, and other processional works, always miss a beat and disappear for a split-second into the defiles of exhaustion, extinction, or a belated coming. A shadow dies, but its semblance remains. The procession moves forward; its propulsion falters. Mncedisi makes the right calculation:
24.
lrumu to his sons, in Hodges, Carrier Corps, 7. 25.
Hodges, Carrier Corps, 121.
But when a man dies – a man remains. A man’s back is fitted for the burden. [HL]
Lt.-Col. Watkins, the founder of the Carrier Corps for the East Africa Protectorate governMNCEDISI ment, was sensitive to the carriers’ cause, and Advanced Arithmetic. yet constrained by norms, regulations, and orders The diminishing utility of the carrier that were negligent and hostile to their welfare. . . . . Watkins deals with his ambivalence by projecting Let’s start again. a derogatory image onto the cultural persona of One man dies from a bullet. the carrier to justify the decision to standardize 31 are out of action from disease. the carrier diet: “In cooking, feeding, cleanliness, 40 percent of those with dysentery die. sanitation, and general habits we have to fight Others die from sleeping sickness, custom and superstition, breaking down cherished malaria, exhaustion . . . . tribal distinctions to one level of reluctant obediAh, let’s start again. [HL] ence.” Another medical officer, contemporary with
305
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HOMI K. BHABHA 26.
Hodges, Carrier Corps, 121
27.
William Kentridge, citation p. 293. 28.
Hodges, Carrier Corps, 121.
29.
Albert Grundlingh, Fighting Their Own War: South African Blacks and the First World War (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1987), 86–87. 30.
Myron Echenberg, Colonial Conscripts: The Tirailleurs Sénégalais in French West Africa, 1857-1960 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann and London: James Currey, 1991), 29 [author’s bracketed insertion]. Echenberg is quoting Charles Mangin, “Caractères physiques et moraux du soldat nègre,” La Revue anthropologique 10 (1911): 10.
Watkins, condemns “the inhumanity and folly” of the view that porters needed only mealie meal.26 To reduce the carrier’s customary universe and cultural eco-systems “to one level of reluctant obedience,” colonial governance has to produce a native subject who can justifiably be disciplined and punished. “Reluctant obedience” is as paradoxical a form of colonial power as Kentridge is likely to find in his search for “contradictions and paradoxes inside the colonial situation.”27 The colonizer legitimizes his command for “reluctant obedience” by attributing the carrier’s reluctance to the inherent inferiority of his cultural disposition. Native custom and superstition must be overcome by modern medical practices and statistical intelligence. “Reluctant obedience,” however, has little to do with the conflict between science and superstition, or the contradictory values of African custom and Western civilization. At issue is the humble matter of an undercooked mess of mealie meal. It is a strategic construction of colonial dietary power aimed toward standardizing the carrier diet which is then justified by spurious claims based on race-science and amateur anthropology. The army’s demand for obedience on the part of carriers is nothing less than a violation of African ecologies of nourishment and nurture. Conscription, not culture, is the motor behind reducing the carrier’s customary habits “to one level”; and it is largely in the interests of the army’s “advanced arithmetic” not the advancement of “native peoples.” The carriers’ reluctance is their rational opposition, in dire circumstances, to their experience of the “normalization” of biopolitical power, parading as food-science and regulatory reason. The carriers’ resistance to a hegemony of hygiene, attributed to allegedly “squalid” African habits, is a problem of the Army’s own making. The Army imposed sanitary and health regulations in circumstances in which “it was impossible to enforce sanitation, or prevent the pollution of streams; dust and flies further spread infection.”28 Foucault in Africa in the Great War? You better believe it.
Turning a blind eye
Power is not blind; it turns a blind eye. Never more frequently does power turn a blind eye to those whom it claims to “know” in the cause of power—scientifically, paternalistically, culturally—than when it justifies its violence against its victims in the name of “universal truths” and “ultimate radiances.” The colonial rhetoric of science and sensibility brushes away the advice offered by officers on the ground so long as their “objects” of power and knowledge—the carrier subjects—can be reduced “to one level.” Commanding officers, who lose their capacity for Kentridge’s peripheral thinking, turn a blind eye and end up failing to see anything outside their regulated vision. Turn a blind eye in South Africa and the carrier workforce fails to be recognized at all. Albert Grundlingh writes: “The work-force, after all, was taken for granted unless it caused problems; if it performed satisfactorily it could be ignored. And there was, of course, also the possibility that official praise might raise unwanted expectations. Therefore, as Sol Plaatje explained, ‘lest their behaviour merit recognition, their deeds and acts must, on account of their colour, not be recorded.’”29 HAMILTON
They are placed in formation by the force of a stick. You put a cargo on their heads. And that is it. [HL]
They are not men, because they have no name
Turn a blind eye to the Senegalese tirailleurs and instead of courage and character you see a black man’s arrested nervous system. Myron Echenberg writes: “But more importantly, [the French claimed that] Africans were possessed of a nervous system sufficiently less developed than that of the whites so as to make them far less sensitive A man’s back is fitted for the burden. to pain. Mangin stated: ‘The nervous system of the He eats his grain with a thorn. black man is much less developed than that of the The hand never loses its way to the mouth. white. All surgeons have observed how impassive Darkness has eaten her own child. [HL] the black is under the knife.’”30 306
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A German officer enforces the French image The raven’s screech makes a mimicry of the of the African’s arrested development. “At 7.15 absurdly elongated vowels of the Imperial French in the morning the French attacked. The black mission civilisatrice: Senegal negroes, France’s cattle for the shamSpeak French. A Frenchman’s French. bles . . . Strong, wild fellows, their log-like, fat, black French of France French. French. skulls wrapped in pieces of dirty rags. Showing AAAAAAAA. For the sake of the great their grinning teeth like panthers, with their belOOOOOOOOO uuuuuuuuuu AAAAAAAA lies drawn in and their necks stretched forward. . . . noble eeeeeeeeeeeee. [HL] 31 Monsters all, in their confused hatred.” In the midst of weaponized vowels and the babel of bird cries, Mncedisi introduces a measure of muscular action: They are not soldiers, because they have no number MNCEDISI
Turn a blind eye, start again, and the long the shadow of death becomes visible. Grundlingh writes: “Self-help and self-respect almost disappeared. Men lay down to die rather than combat the difficulties in the field. Clearly, the human dimension behind the statistics is one of profound misery. ‘The suffering of these men defies description,’ the commanding officer, Major T.E. Liefeldt recalled later.”32
Singakubalekeli kuhlaba kwemavi Ngiko kujula kwenkuloumo loko. Let us not avoid the bit of a word The vertigo of a question mark. [HL]
Kaboom: Din und Drang
As head-loads of broken hopes and diseased bodies begin to weigh on this essay, Mncedisi punctures the ruling idea of Progress, and puts You do not call them, a question-mark after the Fact and the Statistic. you count them Hamilton goes a step further and delivers a blow: History’s hullabaloo is caught in the confused kaboom. Kaboom is the sound of an explosion, flight of the sparrows of hope and failure; they a graphic comic-book onomatopoeic blow, or a upset the pots and pans of edicts and statistics, blowout. More Dada than dogma: and land on a bowl of uncooked mealie meal. The HAMILTON hullabaloo mires the mission of empire: “A conI shout: victed criminal was better off than an honest man Think, think, think. sent as a carrier; justice and the work of political The fact. The fact. The fact. officers became impossible.”33 As they fly through Kaboom. Kaboom. Kaboom. HL, the sparrows have changed into ravens, birds This is a fair idea of progress. [HL] of fear and foreboding, mediators between life and death.34 The raven’s eerie cry makes a mockery The drawn vowels of, imperial arrogance— Aaaaaa, Oooooo—are exposed, and exploded, in the of the Imperial German eagle of war: carrier’s “Kabooooooom.” Kaboom is the tumult Von jenseits der See that follows the colonial army’s standardization Ferr of African life-worlds to “one level” while com(raven sounds) manding their “reluctant obedience.” According Aat am Vater vaaaaaa to Hamilton there are several kabooms: “The artTer lande ist’s kaboom, the dancer’s kaboom.” The kaboom Darum auf! zu Waffen! quatrain is the epigraph to Kentridge’s essay in Verant wortung und Kraaaaaa this volume. What does kaboom have to do with - ft. [HL] the hullabaloo of HL?
31.
Melvin E. Page, “Introduction: Black Men in a White Men’s War,” in Africa and the First World War (Macmillan Press, 1987), 8. Page is quoting Rheinhold Eichacker’s “The Blacks Attack!” Current History Magazine, 6 (1917): 110. 32.
Grundlingh, Fighting Their Own War, 88. 33.
Hodges, Carrier Corps, 108. 34.
Private correspondence between Homi K. Bhabha and Joanna Dudley, a featured vocalist and performer in The Head & the Load. Joanna Dudley works internationally as a director, performer, and singer, creating music, theater, choreography, and installation.
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HOMI K. BHABHA 35.
Nhlanhla Mahlangu, a lead actor in The Head & the Load, is a multiskilled performer, teacher, director, and composer, who also directs his own company, Song and Dance Works. 36.
Hodges, Carrier Corps, 172.
Let me explain why kaboom is the moment when the carriers’ “reluctant obedience” in the Great War is restaged as “resistant obedience” in HL. Kaboom is a way of snatching a fragment of dignity, a shard of self-respect, on the road to perdition. MNCEDISI, HAMILTON, NHLANHLA 35
Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat Kaboom, kaboom, kaboom (repeated)
The artist’s kaboom: This is a fair idea of progress
The barbarity of the Great War. A charcoal drawing in the Kaboom series. A landscape of scrub and shadows, tufts of grass, perhaps sand. Land and sky, streaked and smudged; the light veiled, yet strangely empty. An archetypal Johannesburg terrain? Perhaps. Or it could be Ypres—five battles between October 1914 and 1918. Dominating the top right quadrant of the drawing is a death-head, off-scale, spanning sky and battle-field. A dead soldier’s head modelled on Géricault’s Severed Heads, preparatory sketches for The Raft of the Medusa. One of Géricault’s contemporaries wrote that Géricault’s drawings of decapitated heads were works without “a subject.” Is this the link with Kentridge’s subject-less processions of “anonymity?” Is this what he calls the “muchness” of the marginal? Their individuality is disavowed; their humanity is denied; yet their labor unfailingly called upon and counted. They are not men, because they have no name. They are not soldiers, because they have no number. You do not call them, you count them. [HL]
There has been an explosion—kaboom—in the depths of Kentridge’s drawing, and strewn before us is the detritus of war. All in a day’s work. Yesterday. Tomorrow. Kaboom! A decapitated head, a dented helmet, and the burnt, barren field. The surface of the drawing is covered with shards of splattered words and phrases: “I shout. . . . Think . . . Think . . . The fact . . . The fact . . . Kaboom”[HL]
Fragments, like severed limbs, blown apart from a sentence across the surface of the drawing. It makes no sense; it makes perfect sense. Under the thrown helmet, the legend: This is a fair idea of Progress. Kentridge’s charcoal dust drawing raises the ghost of the two-foot cloud of red dust through which the carriers march through Tanzania: “This picture of the Handeni Road, Tanga, Tanzania, with its dust of death and empty wells. . . . Hunger is a trifle, but no water is death.”36 MNCEDISI
Ash ash ash ash ash ash Kaiser Jött Ash ash ash fehër Kêt Magyar testör Dust JO
Sweet red wine Ash Red youth red Dust [HL]
The singer’s kaboom: Eric Satie on the Handeni Road
Running men. A grotesquely large shadow of a carrier is projected on the screen. Running from Head to Head on the Handeni Road, covered in red dust, advancing and receding, in your face at one moment and out of sight at another. Running to the front line; running out of time. Red sweat red Dust The line of carriers grows; the running men thin out. Advanced Arithmetic . . . . 40 percent of those with dysentery die. Others die from sleeping sickness, malaria, exhaustion . . . . Ah, let’s start again. [HL]
The running man is breathless. The singer takes a full, deep breath and Satie’s gorgeous “Je te veux” rises like a love-bird from the stage accompanied by the heart-strings of the violin. The screeching German Eagle-Raven of War whistles melodiously to the tune; the dominant vowels of the French civilizing mission—oooo, aaaa, eeee—are soothed by the song. The sparrows’ hullabaloo of hope and fear is tamed by the tune. 308
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An ornithologist’s sketch-book of bird drawings descends gently on the screen—sparrows, eagles, ravens, crows, carrier-pigeons. Love is in the air. Then, Kaboom! The birds explode, their images torn to ribbons. The viperous raven reappears, guttural and high-pitched, crazed with shrieks and spittle. You have to fire a little bit ahead of an animal, otherwise it will slip past your bullet. It is the same for a running man. [HL]
“HULLABALLO is what there is in the center. . . , two sparrows flying through the din of pots and pans of all the edicts and theories and private histories.”37 (This is a fair idea of Progress. . . . “with a bang not a whimper”38). Kaboom… The poet’s kaboom: After such knowledge, what forgiveness, think now . . .
The last verse of “Je te veux” is lost in mistranslation. Satie’s lyric is waylaid by the carrier’s On June 17, 1917, T. S. Eliot forwarded to The ballad. Nation a letter he had received from a nineteenyear-old army officer who served in the trenches ANN in France. Responding to H. M. Tomlinson’s essay, J’AI COMPRIS TA DÉTRESSE “On Leave”,39 the young officer’s letter to Eliot was CHER AMOUREUX published in The Nation published on June 23, 1917. Our former kingdoms It is hideously exasperating to hear people ET JE CÈDE À TES VŒUX talking the glib commonplaces about the war Our former hopes and distributing cheap sympathy to its victims. FAIS DE MOI TA MAÎTRESSE Perhaps you are tempted to give them a picture Our former lives of a leprous earth, scattered with the swollen and LOIN DE NOUS LA SAGESSE blackening corpses of hundreds of young men. It’s not true / It’s not true The appalling stench of rotting carrion mingled PLUS DE TRISTESSE with the sickening smell of exploded lyddite and Always tired ammonal. Mud like porridge, trenches like shallow J’ASPIRE À L’INSTANT PRÉCIEUX and sloping cracks in the porridge—porridge that The dreams that did not come true stinks in the sun. Swarms of flies and bluebottles OÙ NOUS SERONS HEUREUX clustering on pits of offal.40 The poems that were not our own What would happen, if he uncovered, in a JE TE VEUX sunny breakfast-room, the horror he knows?41 The prizes we did not receive Tomlinson and the nineteen-year-old offiThe medals that were not ours [HL] cer follows Mncedisi’s example. They place “the vertigo of the question mark” firmly on the table. What would happen if offal porridge, stinking The critic’s kaboom: To not start with a series of facts and knowledge in the sun, were offered up in the sunlit breakfast rooms of Britain? What if weevil-ridden, The History lesson begins. undercooked mealie meal was offered up in The Master raises his voice to drown the the sunlit breakfast rooms of England, France, kerfuffle of sparrows noisily crashing into the pots Germany? Kaboom. and pans of History’s Din und Drang. T. S. Eliot is famously distant and fastidious; THINK THINK THINK! he never had a stomach for raw horror. Three years The pedagogue and the pragmatist hold fast later, in “Gerontion” (1920), Eliot makes an urgent, to the inflated craft of THE FACT… THE FACT… if measured, response to the terror of the war and THE FACT provides his view of the hullabaloo as it squeezes Kaboom! Facts fly in your face; knowledge past history’s contrived corridors to land up in the runs aground. sunlit breakfast room in Europe.
37.
Kentridge, “Peripheral Thinking.” 38.
H. M. Tomlinson, “On Leave,” The Nation (June 2, 1917). Cited by George Simmers in “T. S. Eliot’s Letter to ‘The Nation,’” Great War Fiction, updated September 21, 2006, https:// greatwarfiction.wordpress. com/tseliots-letterto-the-nation/. 39.
Ibid. 40.
Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton, eds., The Letters of T. S. Eliot: Volume 1: 1898-1922, Revised Edition (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011), 204–5. The officer who authored the letter is believed to be Eliot’s young brother-in-law, Maurice Haigh-Wood. See Simmers, “T. S. Eliot’s Letter to ‘The Nation’.” 41.
Tomlinson, “On Leave.”
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English translation of the Chinyanja marching song, “King’s African Rifles,” as quoted in Page, Africa and the First World War, 15. 43.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2007), 16.
Helter-skelter! Helter-skelter! Helter-skelter! Helter-skelter! What have you done, Sir? Germany has completely finished off our young men, Germany has completely finished off our young men, Have you waged [your] war, Major, Sir? Eee ... ay! Eee ... aye! Germany has finished off our young men completely.42 Mncedisi joins forces with Frantz Fanon’s insight into the agency of the colonized who, Wait and watch: relegated to the wings of history, have an advanReluctant obedience, resistant obedience tage in being able to read between the lines of Let’s start again. Think now—think, think, think— punitive power. think through history’s cunning passages and the If asked for a definition of myself, poem’s whispers. Beware of the call of vanity’s I would say I am one who waits. ambitions—the Imperial raven’s screech, or the I investigate my surrounds, vertiginous flights of France’s civilized speech. I interpret everything in terms In each instant of kaboom, there is a subtle of what I discover. [HL] turning-point visible through history’s supple confusions. It is a moment when the colonial They wait and watch. And when carriers army’s “reluctant obedience” turns into the car- appear on the historical stage they are not armed rier’s “resistant obedience.” This moment is not with edicts of timeless truths or “fair ideas of marked by a revolutionary change in the direc- Progress” because they have seen the dark side, tion of history; the burden of the war doesn’t kaboom. Carriers interpret the world, even when suddenly shift from the carriers’ backs to the they know they cannot change it. Fanon’s essay colonialists’ shoulders. It is nonetheless a shift On Violence exercises a profound influence on in the psychic energy and the political potency the text of HL, particularly in its portrayal of the of the carriers as historical agents. The carriers’ turning force of carrier agency from reluctance to protest cannot fly in the face of history, but their resistance within the military orders of obedience. resistance grows while colonialist power turns Finding himself at the heart of the hullabaloo, the carrier is able to investigate and interpret the world a blind eye. Kentridge’s procession-members may because he is dominated but not domesticated. He is made to feel inferior, but is by no belong to the cadres of the anonymous but they are in no way devoid of creative agency and polit- means convinced of his inferiority. He patiently ical craft. The anonymous are endowed with an waits for the colonist to let down his guard and “ironic tenacity” that James Baldwin attributes then jumps on him. The muscles of the colonized to the historical adversity of American blacks are always tensed. The symbols of society such as who live in close proximity to death—mortal and the police force, bugle calls in the barracks, milsocial. Carriers are underfed, overloaded, treated itary parades and the flag flying aloft, serve not as beasts of burden without names and numbers, only as inhibitors but also stimulants. They do mocked by their kin for carrying head-loads in not signify: “Stay where you are.” But rather “Get a manner associated with women, extinct from ready to do the right thing.”43 the lists even before they die. And despite these MNCEDISI (overlapping) hardships and humiliations, carriers still manage Siyagqitshwa to dance to their own tune, not without a measure Kodwa asivumi of ironic tenacity: After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions, Guides us by vanities. Think now She gives when our attention is distracted And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions
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We can be dominated, But not domesticated. [HL]
Being dominated, but not domesticated, is everywhere audible and visible in the performance of HL, in the sound-systems of colonial power relations. The difference between them is not a binary, or polarizing opposition; it is a disorientating overlap, a productive overdetermination, a confusing confrontation, the motivated effect of non-sense. The best way to understand Fanon’s distinction, as it informs HL, is to return to the state of play between “reluctant obedience” and “resistant obedience” as the double-agency of the carrier condition. The overlapping states of domination/not-domestication, or reluctance and resistance, are “mixed impulses” that shape the movement of bodies, ideas, sounds, and signs that constitute the “spasm” of the work. Kentridge writes of, “the mixed impulses of whether to follow a command or resist it; to want and not want to be part of the colonial army. The spasm was primary; what we saw in [the carrier’s] body, what we saw in the movements and resistance to movements.”44 These mixed impulses—to be dominated/not domesticated; to want and to not want; reluctance/resistance—is the carriers’ spasmodic response to colonialist conscription. The muscles of the colonized are always tensed. In a state of reluctant obedience, the carrier concedes to having his diverse lifeworld and manifold history reduced to “one level” of mealie meal; when his “foot-power” is required to conform “to the regulation length of step at 30 inches,” the carrier waits impatiently for the colonizer to turn a blind eye and let his guard down. Reluctant disobedience, like the refusal to be domesticated, is not erasure of discipline, it is in excess of disciplinary order. Sometimes, this excess is signified in the performance of HL as large-scale spectral shadows on the screen that dwarf the life on stage; at other times, excess unburdens itself in burlesque and Dionysian dancing; and, there are times when the vertiginous excesses of language, sound signifying nothing, are articulated as if they are purposive, propositional statements: This is what we are here to decide. dll rrrrr beeeee bö
I think we are in agreement here dll rrrrr beeeee bö fümms bö, more than that, we are delighted to be here, rrrrr beeeee bö fümms bö wö, [Kurt Schwitters Ursonate/William Kentridge HL]
44.
William Kentridge, citation p. 293. 45.
William Kentridge, citation p. 296. 46.
Hodges, Carrier Corps, 155.
Then the hullabaloo of “resistant obedience” begins. You hear it in the moment in which the vowels of the French civilizing mission—ooooooo, aaaaaa, Corneille!, Racine!!—are appropriated in the carrier’s explosive vowels of war: “Simemo sabo impi. Ta ta tatta tatta tatta taa, Kaboom” [HL] . This is more than transliteration from French to siSwati; it is a translation that works the sounds of colonial domination into the signs of the carriers’ discourse of resistant obedience. You can experience the hullabaloo in the mimicry of the Scottish Reel as it is translated in the Pedi dance sequence where, as Kentridge writes, “The dance itself would not change, but the meaning would.”45 The hullabaloo comes eerily to life when the kilted dancers are seen performing, perhaps on the Handeni Road, at the end of a day’s march, each step at 30 inches. “It is certain,” writes a medical officer, “that many must have shown the debonair courage of Lance-Corporal Sowera, DCM, 2/2nd (Nvasa) KAR, who fired all day with his Lewis gun from a tree, and then danced an ngoma to hearten his men.”46 You can hear the hullabaloo in the Pedi dance music accompanied by stomping and whirling, which is soon followed by the rousing voices of victory, “God Save our King.” Then, the anthem goes kaboom. “God save the King” is voiced-over by a commanding siSwati praise-song that demands to know, with ironic tenacity, “Who is the king? Who is the king?” Once more, in the waning moments of Satie’s “Je te veux,” reluctant obedience triggers the refusal to be domesticated and the hullabaloo ensues. At this point there is no transliteration, no translation; what we have is an occupation of the romantic lyric with the grim prose of protest: J’ASPIRE À L’INSTANT PRÉCIEUX The dreams that did not come true OÙ NOUS SERONS HEUREUX The poems that were not our own
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HOMI K. BHABHA 47.
Fred Khumalo, Dancing the Death Drill (Johnannesburg: Penguin Random House South Africa, 2017). 48.
Nyasaland is today part of Malawi. 49.
Page, Africa and the First World War, 7. 50.
Hodges, Carrier Corps, 98. See also Hodges, chapter 1, no. 10.
River, below Tumutumu Hill. Thence he came out like the hyenas to seek his food and scurry back.”52 Chilembwe, however, stands his ground. The two sparrows of hope and failure fly through his letter And then, finally, there comes a moment in the HL of protest; and the raven casts its shadow on the when, even the tension of “resistant obedience” Empire’s “ultimate radiances” of military honor is too much to bear—kaboom—and an instinct for paraded gaudily before African recruits: something close to “civil disobedience” rents the NHLANHLA air: “Today I am dancing the death drill, I’m tellEmpa re ka se se liri seo. ing my story. Whether I die or not does not matter HAMILTON anymore. No one can deny me my own dance I must have been born a pure coward. of death . . . white man be damned!”47 JE TE VEUX The prizes we did not receive The medals that were not ours. [HL]
NHLANHLA
Re ya boela metsing.
51.
Page, Africa and the First World War, 7. 52.
Hodges, Carrier Corps, 103. Hodges is citing from, H. R. A. Philp, God and the African in Kenya (London: Marshall, Morgan and Scott, 1935), 131.
Civil disobedience
The inspiration behind HL was a letter hibernating in a box in Kentridge’s studio for forty-five years, a fragment waiting to be woken to its own history. When Kentridge returns to John Chilembwe’s letter of protest, written in 1915, he is convinced that it will play a major role in the making of HL. In 1915, John Chilembwe and his comrades, who belonged to the White Tower movement in Nyasaland,48 led a rebellion against the violent and venal recruitment practices employed by the King’s African Rifles. Melvin Page’s excellent account of the pressure placed on recruits proves that no show of pomp and circumstance was spared to entice Africans to join the King’s army as askaris and carriers.49 Promises of free food, fine uniforms, and the spectacle of marching to the magnificent parade-bands were techniques of entrapment: “Many were inspired by the bands which marched around the country; they wanted to wear the uniforms, play the instruments and share the military glamour. The realities of war brought disillusionment; it was thangata, pain and effort without real benefit.”50 Once the seduction of the spectacle wore off, thangata kicked in. Conscripts would flee their home territories pursued by recruiters who chased them “as if they were chasing chickens.”51 An eye-witness report from Kenya is evidence of the self-destructive limits to which porters were driven to avoid the terrors of conscription: “After the first [conscription], Waitha fled and lived like a wild animal for the duration of the war in the inaccessible fastnesses of the banks of the Tana
HAMILTON
How nice to die without having a wife. NHLANHLA
Lefatsheng la badimo ba rona. CHORUS
KWALALABA, KWALALABA! KWALALABA, KWALALABA! MNCEDISI
In times of peace, everything for Europeans only, and instead of honor, we suffer humiliation with names contemptible. But in times of war, it is found that we are needed to share the hardships, and shed our blood in equality. HAMILTON
We demand the right to serve in the army as all French citizens do. We offer a harvest of devotion. CHORUS
Kwalalaba! Bhekale! (“look over there!”) Kwalalaba! Bhekale! (“pay attention!”) Kwalalaba! Bhekale! Kwalalaba! Bhekale! Kwalalaba! Bhekale! MNCEDISI
If this is a war for honor, government gain of riches, and so on, let the rich man, bankers, titlemen, shopkeepers, go to war and get shot. Instead the poor Africans who have nothing to own in this world, who in death leave only a long line of widows and orphans, and utter want and dire
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distress, are invited to die for a cause which is not theirs. CHORUS
KWALALABA! (KWALALA HAYI HAYI) (“no no”) [HL]
Chilembwe’s letter leads us to the heart of the African carriers’ hullabaloo as experienced by Chilembwe and his countrymen across the African continent during World War I. The letter is a clear expression of the contradictions inherent in the colonial predicament that Kentridge brings to our attention at every turn in the performance. The paradoxes of colonial power, whether acknowledged or merely experienced, do not spin off into realms of speculation that paralyze political action. On the contrary, paradoxes and contradictions have the capacity to drive “resistant obedience” to the point of rebellion; thangata puts the carrier in a double bind—dominated/not domesticated, “Stay where you are/Get ready to do the right thing.” Chilembwe’s rebellion was the sum of time spent waiting and watching. It is the paradox of “honor” in the colonialist discourse that fuels Chilembwe’s indignation and grounds his sense of indignity. In peace time, the native is deemed to be devoid of the capacity for honor and human rights because his blood is impure, his race inferior. In times of war, however, the native is conscripted precisely to fight on the side of honor, for the honor of King and country, by “shedding our blood in equality.” The humiliated and degraded must rise to the heights of heroism and “are invited to die for a cause which was not theirs.” The irony is lost on no one: blood is thicker than honor. A British Carrier Officer who was tried for speaking up on behalf of African carriers gets straight to the point: “It appears that Carriers are considered as little better than animals. May I draw your attention to the fact that carriers are human beings, and that officers in charge of carriers are responsible to their governments for their men?”53 Caught in the hullabaloo of the sparrows of hope and failure, carriers and askari voice their hopes against hope: We ask the honorable government of our country, which is known as Nyasaland, will there be any good
prospects for the Natives at the end of the war? Shall we be recognized as anyone in the best interests of civilization and Christianity after the great struggle is ended? [HL]
Kentridge places these questions halfway through the performance, and we know the answer already, as did the European powers, allies and adversaries alike. Whatever their conflicts, they were of one mind as to the necessary outcome of the war. Lieutenant-Colonel Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, who commanded the German forces on the African front, speaks for all of Imperial Europe: “I knew that the fate of the colonies would be decided only on the battlefields of Europe. The question was whether it was possible for us in our subsidiary theater of war to prevent considerable numbers of the enemy from intervening in Europe or inflict on our enemies any loss of personnel or war material worth mentioning? I answered this question in the affirmative.”54 The carriers’ tale was foretold; their hopes were hollow from the start. And yet as they marched from one “head” to the next, loaded up with the tools of the arms trade, they could be heard declaring their loyalty and proving their honor to the British Army while chanting an anti-German work-song: “Von Lettow, oh! Von Lettow, oh! Von Lettow, kwenda! (Go away!) Ah!”55 “The Head & the Load started as a project looking at Africa in the First World War,” Kentridge writes, but “developed into a project about the paradoxes of colonialism.”56 Nothing is more paradoxical than the predicament of colonial soldiers and carriers who, as oppressed colonial subjects, fought a war not their own, to expand the Empire’s suzerainty and to secure the sovereignty of Western nations for decades to come. Melvin Page puts the paradox in historical perspective: “For the people of . . . Asia, and even more for the colonial peoples of Africa, that conflict was truly a world war. More than ever before, subject peoples were called upon to defend the very institutions of their subjugation: the European empires. Such a practice, one of the chief ironies of imperialism, began in Asia and America during the Seven Years’ War of the
53.
Hodges, Carrier Corps, 159. Hodges is quoting Major W. R. Lyon, a Sierra Leone district officer serving with the Nigerian Brigade near Lindi. 54.
Ibid., 23. 55.
Ibid., 148. 56.
William Kentridge, citation p. 292.
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HOMI K. BHABHA 57.
Page, Africa and the First World War, 1. 58.
William Kentridge, citation p. 292. 59.
Interview of the author with William Kentridge.
mid-eighteenth century and by 1918 became the final defence not just of empires, but of European nations themselves.”57 Chilembwe’s letter is crucial to the progress of HL, but is it too heavy a history lesson? The carriers’ ironic tenacity lies in re-staging the colonialist codes of esprit de corps as they relate to military honor—marches, drills, loyalty, fealty, bravery—to reveal the betrayal and corruption of the Imperial promise of preferment and honor as a reward for brave action and loyal service. So much is forcefully conveyed in Mncedisi’s dramatic declamation addressed as much to the live audience in the theater, as to the ghosts who haunt the historical archives—the “long line of widows and orphans, and utter want and dire distress,” just to remind those who should know better. Arithmetic for those who should know better. Oh the great Empires. 400 million 300 million The British and French empires. Trusting in God and poison gas. From Nyasaland, 265,000 carriers. From Uganda, 190,000 carriers. [HL]
“But there was the question of how one changes this letter into a performance on stage,” Kentridge writes, “This has to do with the tone of the performance.”58 As much as the carriers’ protest is movingly registered by statements of fact and the evidence of images and numbers, even more effective is the way in which the very concept of esprit de corps—both spirit and body—is translated into a mélange of musical styles and diverse dance forms. Translation empowers the carriers’ collective body to find expression and celebration in forms of life beyond the carceral experiences of conscription. The ironic tenacity of carriers as agents, despite their agony, is the cultural innovation and political intelligence that leavens the history lesson. The tone of a performance emanates not simply from the body of history, but from the tonic movement of the body itself. Something of the muscular tension within the performer’s body—“Stay where you are/ Get ready to do the right thing”—is writ large in the tonic structure of the relation of stage to screen, and performance to projection. If the stage is a
mirror, the screen is a lens. The stage represents the action in real time, directly addressing the audience; the screen constantly changes the scale of the production, enlarging details of the diegetic narrative, interrupting real time with archival memories, juxtaposing drawing with film, and documentary with performance. The tension internal to stage and screen gives the mise-en-scène of HL a unique vitality that echoes the “mixed impulses” of obedience and resistance that Kentridge instils in each performer’s body which then generates a tension across the trajectory of the piece. The tonic relation of stage and screen creates a crucible of mixed impulses. Kentridge says as much: “The Head & the Load is something between an installation, a drawing, and a performance. Not an opera, not a theater piece, not an oratorio. So it feels completely right that it inhabits [an] indeterminate space.”59 Mixed impulses: Installation/drawing/performance
Screen and stage tug and pull at each other, expand and contract, as if they are living “joints” of a restless bodily frame. The action on stage is projected on the screen with a split-second lag that creates disruptive movements, and disorienting durations—the indeterminate is also unpredictable. On stage, performers preserve human scale; on the screen, shadow images and silhouettes are blown up to daunting sizes. Witness this transformation occur when actors enter the stage at human scale but grow dramatically in size and proportion once they are hit by light. The relationship of screen and stage, or performance and projection, is kinetic rather than mimetic. There is no backdrop to the front stage. To narrate the history of carriers in the mixed impulses of installation/drawing/performance, I would argue, is a new aesthetic technology for revealing the carriers’ hidden archive, and providing a reparative reading of the significant contribution of African foot-power to the Great War. When Kentridge takes the topic of the First World War in hand, as we have seen, the result is more Dada than doctrine: “There was a loose gathering of possibilities to see how different fragments could talk to each other. . . . We were 314
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looking both for the broad strokes . . . for particular turns of phrase, for the idiosyncratic. Looking for riddles with only half-formed answers rather than clear explications. With The Head & the Load, the test was to see whether the meaning and the understanding could be given without using either [dialogue or didacticism]. Nonetheless, we didn’t simply want random nonsense as the final meaning of the piece—though the use of nonsense was vital. The text was a collage; different texts cut up, different authors. The principal voices used in the piece were those of Frantz Fanon, Tristan Tzara, John Chilembwe, Kurt Schwitters, and Sol Plaatje. . . . These fragments all waiting to find a shape, like the shards of several shattered vases waiting to be glued together, to make a new vessel.”60 A narrative trajectory that tells the story of African carriers in the Great War in fragments seems inevitable; fragments of anecdotes, statistics, ledgers, songs, photographs, and a few personal accounts, is all we have of their hullabaloo. If not a collage or a montage, what other form could the fragments assume? Fragments are not things in themselves; they are not simply bits and pieces broken off a longer history or cutoffs from larger cultural formats. Fragments, in Dada discourse, are relational forms, attempts at assemblage. The process is one of making fragments, not simply taking fragments. To place Fanon and Tzara side by side, or on top of each other, or one behind the other, is to graft them, not merely to glue them. A grafting is an active insertion of an element, a movement or sign, from within the structure of one work implanted into another system. Fragments make a hybrid work not merely a heterogeneous one. The “cut” of the graft displaces the disposition of both entities, and along the suture created by the art of making fragments begins the work of reframing and rescaling the “topic” in question—“in this case of the relationship of World War I to colonialism, a topic itself only revealed in the process of making.”61 Fragmentation as a form of assemblage, whether its method is collage or montage, over-drawing or projection, does not merely make a new vessel. It makes a vessel marked by alterity rather than novelty. What’s the difference? Alterity, in Hannah Arendt’s view, is a kind of assemblage of the human subject caused by an active insertion
of “difference” into consciousness, that renders identity aspectival rather than authentic: “A difference is inserted into my Oneness. . . . For myself, articulating this being-conscious-of-myself, I am inevitably two-in-one. . . . Consciousness is not the same as thinking; but without [this alterity, two-inone], thinking would be impossible. What thinking actualizes in its process is the difference given in consciousness.”62 Consciously articulating the “two-in-one”—whether it is the two-in-one of the dominated /but not domesticated, or reluctant obedience/resistant obedience—makes possible the ethical repositioning of oneself in relation to the proximity of an other. This process of grafting enables you, as Hannah Arendt phrases it in Eichmann in Jerusalem, to think yourself from the standpoint of somebody else. To engage with alterity is to experience a double-edged, agonistic identification. In colonial conditions of antagonism and oppression, the “twoin-one” incites a subaltern imagination of subversion and an affective energy of resistance. Although it is rarely acknowledged as such, I believe it is alterity, at once ethical and tonic, that plays out in the fantasy of colonial revolt as Fanon describes it: “Confronted with the colonial order the colonized subject is in a permanent state of tension. The colonist’s world is a hostile world, a world which excludes yet at the same time incites envy. We have seen how the colonized always dream of taking the colonist’s place. Not of becoming a colonist, but of replacing him. This hostile, oppressive and aggressive world, bulldozing the colonized masses, represents not only the hell they would like to escape as quickly as possible but a paradise within arm’s reach guarded by ferocious watchdogs.”63 However, with alterity and ambivalence, there is always another side. They are, in Kentridge’s sense, mixed impulses. To politically activate the “two-in-one,” as Arendt proposes, is to answer an irrepressible call to relate across the chasms of conflict and confrontation. It entails a duty of protection and hospitality to those whose human rights we uphold even when we prosecute them for their human wrongs. This is not meant to be the history lesson that Kentridge wants to avoid at all costs; it is, however, a truth we learn, day by day, step by step, when we accompany Kentridge’s “anonymous carriers” as they make
60.
William Kentridge, citation p. 294. 61.
William Kentridge, citation p. 291. 62.
Hannah Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” Social Research 38, no. 3 (Fall 1971): 441–42. Emphasis in the original; author’s bracketed insertion. 63.
Fanon, The Wretched, 16.
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HOMI K. BHABHA 64.
Hodges, Carrier Corps, 171–72.
65.
Echenberg, Colonial Conscripts, 38. Echenberg is citing the memoirs of Bakary Diallo, Force-Bonté (Paris: F. Rieder, 1926), 123.
their way down the Handeni Road, covered in the “dust of death . . . a dust that made of one colour all races of men.”64 There is a moment in the face of war, in the midst of hullabaloo and kaboom and the red dust, when Bakary Diallo, a Senegalese tirailleur, sees through the fog of war to “tomorrow after the battle.” Tomorrow, he sees, there will be a thin dividing line between civility and barbarism, and our belief in the sentiment of justice will determine the stance we take. Bakary Diallo has no doubt on which side of the line he stands: “A German who had mistaken our lines for his own, was captured with his load of coffee by a Senegalese sentry. When he saw himself surrounded by tirailleurs, he began to shake. Poor man, couldn’t you have expected this possibility just as well as the gold of glory? The blacks that you took for savages captured you in war, but instead of cutting down your life, they made you prisoner. May your fear not prevent you from proclaiming in your country, tomorrow, after the battle, the sentiment of justice which will rehabilitate the name of the human race of which we are all savages.” 65
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
William Kentridge suggested that I accompany him on this journey and I thank him for the challenge of writing about a work that redefines the significance of the theater of war while transforming our rules of engagement with war as theater. This work could not have been done without the assistance of the Kentridge Studio: particular thanks to Anne McIlleron, the “artist’s whisperer,” who is also the keeper of the golden key to the archive. Joanna Dudley was generous in illuminating the Kaiser’s text and the Raven’s screech. Mary Anderson’s research assistance is simply unmatchable in its acute intelligence and editorial awareness. Olli Chanoff was patient and enthusiastic. Glenn Lowry’s insights and questions were invaluable, as always, in allowing me to see my way forward. Stephen Greenblatt, Diana Sorensen, and James Simpson read the essay with great care and I thank them for helping me to write and think better. Meg and Joseph Koerner are Kentridgean enablers of the best kind. I could not have written this essay without being incessantly interrupted by Rafael K. Bhabha, my four-year-old grandson who was entranced by the video of The Head & the Load which I played repeatedly while writing. Rafa kept asking, “Can this story be made with toys?” I dedicate this essay to him. HOMI K. BHABHA is the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. He is the author of numerous works exploring postcolonial theory, cultural change and power, contemporary art, and cosmopolitanism. His works include Nation and Narration and The Location of Culture, which was reprinted as a Routledge Classic in 2004. Bhabha has written on contemporary art for Artforum and essays on the work of William Kentridge, Anish Kapoor, Taryn Simon, and Mathew Barney, amongst others. He is a member of the Academic Committee for the Shanghai Power Station of Art, advisor on the Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (CMAP) project at the Museum of Modern Art New York, and Curator in Residence at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
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