HISTORY IS AN ATROCITY
Stop-motion collage 12/2019
History is an atrocity is based on the novel Open City by Teju Cole (2011). Open City tells the story of Julius, a German-Nigerian psychiatrist in New York. As a way to counter his busy days at the hospital he goes on long walks, losing himself in the city. These walks both yield aesthetic experiences as well as encounters with interlocuters. These interlocuters tell Julius stories about their experiences. Most of the interlocuters have a migrant background. Their stories recount cases of trauma, violence and exploitation. The aesthetic experiences as well as stories are every now and then interjected by resurfacing memories of Julius’ past and that of his family. What is created in this way, is a connection between Julius and the interlocuters subsequently. However, there exists a debate on how to interpret this connection. Is this the celebration or rather the interrogation of cosmopolitanism? Vermeulen argues the latter. He argues that Open City questions the possibility of creating intercultural understanding by means of aesthetic forms such as literature (2013, p. 42). Interestingly, Vermeulen argues that the book has a different purpose; that of presenting the city as a palimpsest. I have taken this stance as the starting point for the stop motion collage. Firstly, Vermeulen’s argument will be expanded upon. After which, the video will be discussed as well as how it is related to Vermeulen’s argument.
A palimpsest is a surface used for repeated writing. The writing is erased when it has outlived its usefulness. The support, the manuscript page itself, has not outlived its usefulness. That is since the backing is expensive and labour some to create. While you can certainly clean the palimpsest, the old writing is never fully erased. While the current writing is legible, over time different earlier writings compete to come back to the surface of the palimpsest (Cole 2012, 22;20). The past writings still inform the makeup of the palimpsest.
Open Citythus sets out to render the illegible legible (Vermeulen 2013, p. 52). It is in this way that it can be said the book functions as a recording device. Solely recording the past, making it legible so it can be taken up by a possible future cosmopolitanism (ibid). The past rendered legible mostly concerns cases of violence, human rights abuse as well as exploitation. The city is built on a totalizing history of atrocity.
The point in the book where this becomes the clearest, is when Julius walks past the Ground Zero Memorial. The passage in the book critically engages with the way in which Ground Zero has become a sacred space. Julius says that 9/11 “was not the first erasure of the site” (58). Julius goes on explaining that the construction of the twin towers caused the displacement of Middle Eastern communities and the destruction of their former neighbourhoods. These former neighbourhoods were in turn built on again different remnants. This also explains the fact that Julius discusses the work of V, one of his patients, She has worked on the reconstruction of the genocide against Native Americans. The violence and trauma experienced by Native Americans is part and parcel with the construction of the American ‘empire’.
It becomes clear how the city and the city scape, is not limited to that which is visible. The city stretched beyond the visible, back to the ground and beyond that. The city covers up the past both in literal and figurative ways. The city scape is the result of a constant process of writing, erasing and rewriting. The erasure has historically speaking often taken place in rather violent ways. What would we see when we see through and past the city? And see the fundaments it is built on? The following excerpt of the book is well connected to this:
“I was saddled with strange mental transpositions: that the plane was a coffin, that the city below was a vast graveyard with white marble and stone blocks of various heights and sizes” (Cole 2011, p. 150). In this passage of the book, Julius flies back home from his trip to Brussels. I thought the passage was relevant since it fits extremely well with the tagline of the first half of the book: Death is a perfection of the eye. To see the history on which society is built, is to see the atrocities that have taken place in the process of constructing it.
It has been precisely this which has formed the starting point for my video collage. The collage sets out to illustrate the construction of an imaginary city and with that demonstrating the way in which while literal as well as figurative makeup of the city is stained with blood. But the blood is rendered illegible over time. That is since people forget the past both intentionally as well as unintentionally. However, spaces retain a memory of what has happened in them. The first half of the video is focussed on history while the second part of the video focusses on the process of forgetting this history in order to give rise to ‘the empire’, the historical connotation of that word intended. But the process of forgetting is self-consuming, in turn problematizing the search for self and identity of a city and the people living therein.
Bibliography
Cole, T. (2011). Open city. New York: Faber and Faber
The city as a palimpsest - Teju Cole. (2012, November 18). Harvard GSD. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOq2HWveVok&fbclid=IwAR1-ahIFPDLgg84G_dWl1NMq5zgGMRnrVPpkpTZoYyPGXbKldvcPfNzYBss.
Vermeulen, P. (2013). Flights of Memory: Teju Cole's Open City and the Limits of Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism. jml: Journal of Modern Literature, 37(1), 40-57