THE INTANGIBLE STORIES OF WAR CARPETS: WAR, MEDIA, AND MEDIATION
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to the unguided aerial bombing that damages every part of an area11 and has been frequently used by the United States since the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.12 Also, museum exhibitions entitled “The Weaving of War” in various parts of the United States, including New York and Miami, are part of the aestheticization of war carpets. Furthermore, most collectors of war carpets are part of the Canadian or American military or armed forces. In the exhibitions, the war rugs are exoticized and constructed as coming from a faraway land. As noted by Canadian cultural critique Susan Cahill, “Exhibiting the rugs as crafts from a distant land neglects the current realities of a Canadian military presence in Afghanistan, for example, as well as of Afghan diaspora in the Middle East and around the world” (2009, 231). In this context, the carpet as a material object becomes an image that itself conceals the materiality and spatiality of who makes it and under what circumstances—an image depicting fetishized weapons with magical powers, the power to rule the world. Indeed, military culture and mass culture are tightly woven together in a way that defines our historical moment. Also, as some feminist scholars have argued, commodities have mediated between the private and the public in colonial modernity, and they continue to bring together “the empire of merchandise” in Barthes’s terms with “the empire of the home” in Anne McClintock’s terms. Under neoliberal governmentality, selling and buying have increasingly been extended to new media spaces, furthering the blurring of public and private while strengthening the aesthetic and sensorial attachment to the notions of them and us, primitive and civilized, violent and peaceful, and so on. Beyond museums and collectors’ collections, war carpets are used as home decoration. Beatriz Colomina argues that: “This militarization of the house is consistent with Fuller’s idea of the house as a ‘shelter.’ She repeatedly refers to the etymological meaning of the word as that which covers or shields from exposure or danger; a lace of safety, refuge or retreat” (Colomina 2007, 73). Colomina refers to a 1942 article in Life, “Gardens for the U.S. at War,” that says: “War glares at you from the morning newspapers on your doorsteps. It crowds into the bus with you as you rush for the 8:15. It strikes at you from the grocer’s shelves. But there’s one place war can’t touch you—your garden” (Gate 1943, cited by Colomina 2007, 117). If the house is a site of military defense, as it has been depicted in war literature in the United States, the Oriental carpet is a permanent reminder of gardens not touched by war. However, war carpets have changed this equation by making the home both a site of defense and a place of offense. In both cases, consumers are pushed into withdrawal and separation. While the labor in the war zone is trapped in the war zone or refugee
