Make It Scream, Make It Burn, page 10
People like me—which is to say, people who’ve had the privilege to travel, and to think of traveling as a part of their identity—often like to travel where others like themselves haven’t already gone, often like to think of this travel as more “authentic” and less “touristic.” But in Jaffna, being away from other tourists didn’t make me feel less like a tourist. Just the opposite. I was looked at, sussed out, wondered about, and rightly so, because what was I doing there, anyway? I felt my own lack of use.
In my room, there was a can of Pringles on the mini-fridge and three mangoes in a basket on the desk. Nathan, the de facto concierge, was eager to manage my experience. He kept calling the phone in my room: You have had dinner? You have had lunch? You are going where today? Nathan showed me pictures of his daughters. He said his Hindu family no longer spoke to him, because he’d converted to Christianity for his wife.
Walking through the buildings east of the old fort, I saw where the war damage was thickest: crumbling walls, empty chambers full of shrubs and climbing tendrils. Pink walls with strips of peeling paint enclosed stairs leading straight to the sky. A little boy chased a kitten into the damage. The roads by the water were a tight grid full of fishermen’s shacks with blue mesh nets flung over their fences. A man squatted in the dusty road, mending one of them with twine. Baby goats were suckling outside the fuchsia doors of a tiny hospital. I tried to walk with purpose but clearly didn’t have one. I ended up at the end of a cul-de-sac where a rainbow-colored house was pulsing noise from some interior boom box. I turned around, still trying to look purposeful, still failing. A round of firecrackers startled me—not because of what it was but because of what it wasn’t. Men said hello hi how are you, asked where was I from, was I lost, what did I want, what did my arm say, pointing at my tattoo.
I skirted the barbed-wire edges of an army enclosure, long barracks with flung-open windows showing bare cots and racks of well-ironed uniforms. A man holding a machine gun watched me scrape bird shit off my shoe with a waxy green leaf. His smile said what he wasn’t saying: Where was I from, was I lost, what did I want? In the courtyard behind him, another soldier was throwing big stones at a little dog. She held her ground. He kept throwing. The other soldier kept holding his gun. Birds kept shitting, above me and everywhere. I bent down again to keep wiping. After a few more minutes, the dog skulked away beneath the barbed wire.
I’d begun to feel increasingly frustrated by the nature of my own assignment. There’s a notion that spontaneity permits authenticity, liberating us from the freight and tangle of too much context, too much research, too much intention. But this kind of spontaneity didn’t seem to permit anything but ignorance. Looking at this place without knowing its history wasn’t any kind of vision at all. Seeing the Jaffna library—its regal white spires, its security guard so proud to show me the second floor—would have been hollow without knowing it was rebuilt from the ruins of its predecessor, burned in 1981 by an anti-Tamil mob. It had been one of the largest libraries in Asia. Manuscripts were destroyed in that fire that existed nowhere else, that the world will never have again. The ghost of that destruction haunted the white spires I saw. What kind of authenticity comes from looking at a library and knowing nothing about the wreckage it emerged from? That’s nothing but deficit. At least I knew enough to know how little I knew.
I had started reading about the war on my flight to Dubai, and kept reading as we touched down in Colombo—as I fell asleep on hotel beds, as I ate my breakfast of egg hoppers, their quivering yolks cupped by thin pancakes of fermented rice, as I described this “local specialty” in my notes before returning to descriptions of field-hospital amputations during the war. Was I blocking the place out when I read my book instead of walking through town? Or was I blocking it out when I walked through town without having read the book? The first was what I’d been trained to believe, but the second was starting to seem more like the truth.
On the overnight bus back to Colombo, I sat perfectly still while the elderly woman beside me arranged her orange sari carefully around her seated body. The bus was supposed to leave at 7:30. We got out of Jaffna around 10:00. We stopped to pick people up; we stopped to drop people off; we stopped to let someone purchase a television; we stopped so our driver could walk into a roadside Hindu shrine, place his palms together, and bow in worship. He came back clutching two fistfuls of flower petals. I wondered if he’d been praying for our journey, and I hoped so, because we kept screeching to avoid hitting things—a tractor piled high with rusty machinery, a van creaking along, turtle-slow and determined. As we finally rolled out of town, we passed one last soldier standing with his machine gun silhouetted against the clouds, and then a graveyard full of headstones catching the moonlight on their broad faces.
Around three in the morning we stopped for half an hour in the middle of the road while our conductor ran his flashlight over one side of the bus. Who knows what was getting fixed, or wasn’t. We kept moving through the dark until it was finally dawn. We left the north behind: the hero and his orchids, the lagoon and its skeletons. What good had it done, in the end, that I’d seen anything at all? I was still an outsider to the damage.
True statement: Sri Lanka is paradise. Also true: every paradise is made possible by blindness.
Getting from New York to Dubai to Colombo had taken twenty hours, and getting from northern Sri Lanka to its southernmost point took seventeen: an overnight bus and then a coastal train past the Galle Fort—beside the pulsing green hills of the interior, not just green but greens, lime and mint and deep sage darkening into brown—and then a tuk-tuk ride to the town of Mirissa, where the bright blue sea flashed into view between wooden stands piled with glistening stacks of silvery fish.
Mirissa was where I did the things my magazine wanted in my article, exotic experiences to string like miniature anecdotes on a charm bracelet: swimming in a teal pool on a stone terrace, smelling roti sizzling on a griddle in the shadows, watching monkeys chase each other around the edges of ponds full of floating lotus blossoms. Mirissa was where I whale-watched in the rain, or whale-sought in the rain, while our boat hit waves as tall as houses and their spray left me storm-drenched and salt-soaked and blinking against the sting, sitting in the prow beside a woman who clenched the railing with one hand and a plastic baggie of her own vomit with the other. Mirissa was where I found the Sri Lanka you see in guidebooks, with white sand beaches and palms swaying in the rain, sweet lime water by candlelight and vanilla ice cream drizzled with treacle from the trees, passion fruits sliced open to show their bright pink flesh. Mirissa was where I ate dal so good I wanted to travel back in time and tell prior versions of myself, versions of myself that thought I’d eaten dal, that I’d never eaten dal at all. Not really.
The war was nowhere to be seen. But it was everywhere. The dead were everywhere.
What else can I tell you about the south? On the train, I sat next to a boy who was headed home to Matara. He seemed fifteen, maybe sixteen. He wanted to know about the phrase on my arm, what did it say? Nothing human is alien to me, I would have told him, except I couldn’t, because some things are alien to me, like the Sinhalese language. He offered me his spicy peanuts and wanted to know if maybe I had a local mobile-phone number, which was amusing to me because I felt old enough to be his mother. He wanted to switch seats with me because maybe I wanted the window? He could tell I was hungry for beauty, that this was my role in the landscape—to consume it, to admire the plural greens. His smile was so big it showed his gums. I asked if he was a student somewhere.
He shook his head. “I am a soldier,” he told me. “Up in Jaffna.”
Then he showed me his tiny military portrait—no gums in sight. Just his green fatigues. I smiled, thumbs-up, and gave it back to him.
No, he said. He wanted me to keep it.
No Tongue Can Tell
On October 20, 1862, a year and a half into the Civil War, the New York Times reviewed the first public display of photography from the conflict: an exhibit of Mathew Brady’s prints documenting the carnage at Antietam. “Mr. Brady has done something to bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war,” the Times reported. “If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our dooryards and along the streets, he has done something very like it.” This praise implies a faith in photography’s ability to offer immediate access, but it’s an anxious faith, haunted by the persistent gap between actuality and representation: something very like it. The loss can be brought closer, but never close enough to touch. As Emerson once wrote about the death of his son: “I cannot get it nearer to me.”
“No tongue can tell, no mind conceive, no pen portray the horrible sights I witnessed,” a Union captain named John Taggart wrote to his brother after Antietam. His assertion of futility isn’t the refusal of expression so much as its fiercest realization: insisting that it’s impossible to describe war becomes the best way of describing it. The bodies can never arrive in the dooryards, Taggart suggests, at least not by the old means of expressive transport: text, language, tongue.
When a massive exhibition of Civil War photography opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art a century and a half later in 2013, it was bracketed by these two sentiments: the Times’s assertion that Brady’s photography had managed to evoke the “terrible reality and earnestness of war,” and Taggart’s denial that any mind could conceive of it. One voice insisted on the potential of representation, the other on its limits. By marking the beginning and the conclusion of the exhibit, they worked like conceptual bookends, making explicit the questions lurking behind portraits of rouge-cheeked soldiers and vistas of bloody battlefields: Can photographs offer what other forms of expression cannot manage? Can they offer what the mind can’t fully hold? Are there certain kinds of horror that cannot ever be fully known?
America’s war with itself marked a singular intersection of aesthetic experimentation and national trauma: a new art was being deployed to document an unprecedented tragedy. The Civil War changed the history of photography by giving it an unimaginable task, and photography, in turn, changed our very notion of war by giving it a previously inconceivable level of representation.
The rooms of the Met’s exhibit, Photography and the American Civil War, held photos showing the brick skeletons of ravaged Southern factories and the outlined ribs of starving soldiers. They showed the lush grassy ravines of deep Virginia valleys, and “the scourged backs” of runaway slaves, another kind of landscape, where the whip had created its own lines and furrows. These juxtapositions suggested unspoken, unbearable stories: a group of young recruits eating dinner at camp, holding their forks high around a campfire, and then the bloated bellies of bodies on a battlefield. One could feel how quickly the boys became the corpses, how easily their bodies slid from one photograph to the next. Soldiers posing proudly with their weapons for studio portraits became the faceless amputees in clinical medical shots two rooms away. Private Robert Fryer, a teenager recently returned from battle, is shown holding his hand over his chest, with three fingers missing; it looks eerily like the way a younger boy might turn his hand into a make-believe gun, two longest fingers as barrel, to play at war.
War photography acknowledged death and protested it at once. Studio portraits of departing soldiers were meant to grant them several kinds of immortality: as talismans, they might prevent them from dying; as relics, they could preserve their memory once they were dead. Other images were plucked from the middle of the fray: photographers set up shop on battlefields still fuming with smoke or studded with rotting bodies. The forward march of technology—the desire to utilize new techniques and new effects, to make everything as real as possible, even realer than real—meant that some photos verged into various shades of the surreal. Soldiers wore the garish blush of hand-tinted color on their cheeks; stereoscopes created the crude 3-D effect of corpses emerging from rubble. These effects feel less like realism and more like the performances of actors trying too hard, their effortful urgency like a plea: here, please, look at this dead man—another body almost delivered to the dooryard, limbs pressed close to a pair of eyes pressed close to the stereoscopic viewer.
In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag articulates the shame of finding beauty in horror:
That a gory battlescape could be beautiful—in the sublime or awesome or tragic register of the beautiful—is a commonplace about images of war made by artists. The idea does not sit well when applied to images taken by cameras: to find beauty in war photographs seems heartless. But the landscape of devastation is still a landscape. There is beauty in ruins.
There is certainly beauty in the ruins of these Civil War photographs—ruined industry and ruined woods and ruined bodies, crumbling factories against Georgia skies, fog lifting off corpse-riddled fields—but it’s a dangerous beauty if it distracts us from the brute fact of all that death, and the long-standing structural brutality that gave rise to it: the institution of slavery itself.
The beauty of these photographs is more ethically productive as a kind of Trojan horse. It seduces us with awe, then lodges inside us as enduring horror. It also reminds us that the photo was once framed by someone. The ghost of the photographer looms. We are seeing everything through his eyes.
That sense of being haunted is part of what accounts for the appeal of what Sontag calls “anti-art” photography: “For the photography of atrocity, people want the weight of witnessing without the taint of artistry, which is equated with insincerity or mere contrivance.” They want the weight of witnessing without the ghost of the witness, without his fingerprints obscuring their view.
That desire for witnessing without artistry was part of why people felt betrayed when they learned that certain photos from the Civil War had been staged: props placed, bodies moved, limbs arranged. Alexander Gardner’s Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter, Gettysburg—which shows a Confederate corpse tucked into his ironic “home” between boulders—became the most famous object of this ire, after it came to light that Gardner most likely moved the corpse away from the battlefield and into the more “scenic” framing of this rocky ravine. As Sontag notes, the “odd” thing isn’t that this photograph may have been staged, “it is that we are surprised to learn [it has] been staged,” and not only surprised, but “disappointed.” Our desire for the absolutely unaltered photograph testifies to a collective delusion that the unmoved body would somehow offer an unmediated vision of reality.
Conspicuous forms of distortion, however, only force us to confront the truth that all photos are inevitably mediated, inevitably constructed, inevitably distancing. Once the bodies arrive in the dooryard, they aren’t bodies anymore: they’ve been run through chemical solutions; they’ve been flattened, framed, and fitted.
If the taint of artistry is all over these photographs of the war, this taint is also the residue of something deeply authentic—the longing to glorify, to immortalize, to preserve. There’s a way to look at the so-called taints of mediation and artistry not as traces of deception—the body wasn’t really there, the soldier didn’t really use that gun—but as truthful records of a ferocious desire to convey the courage and horror of war as powerfully as possible. It’s the honesty of exaggeration, the truth of whatever desire—to command awe or indignation or sympathy—made us exaggerate in the first place. Perhaps the part of us that feels betrayed by prop guns and relocated bodies is continuous with, rather than betrayed by, the desire to move those bodies at all. Both rearrangement and its indignant backlash grow from a shared anxiety about the limits of representation. There is no way to photograph the soldier’s body—moved or unmoved—that will communicate the whole truth of his life, and of his death.
Once you have peeled away the fantasy of photography as unconstructed truth, you can start to explore the fascinating story of its construction. “The camera is the eye of history,” Mathew Brady once said, but behind the eye of the camera there was always the eye of a man (often Brady himself), and behind the man there was usually a team, and behind the team there was always some funding. Civil War photography was spurred and nourished by the marketplace: competing galleries funded photographers in the field, eager for the best shots, and profit-driven studios sold portraits to ordinary civilians. Emancipated slave Sojourner Truth sold her own portrait to raise money for other freed slaves. As she put it: “I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance.” For Truth, photography inverted the terms of ownership she had always suffered under. She “used to be sold for other people’s benefit,” she wrote; now she sold herself, for her own.
At the Met, guards kept saying “No photographs” inside hallways full of photographs, but people kept trying anyway, slyly lifting their cell phones, Instagramming all those captured corpses. The same hungers that made people take the photographs in the first place now made other people—strangers living a century and a half later—want to photograph them all over again: the desire to preserve and to possess, to carry forth, to hold close.
