Let us layout a large map made of concrete or granite somewhere in the country. It must be to scale with all its mountains and valleys, rivers and reservoirs, forests and cites. Let it be, say, 500 metres in length or more. Let us mark on this map the place of every violent event that took place within its shores from the April 5, 1971 to the May 19, 2009. It cannot be comprehensive of course, but it can be representative, no ‘sides,’ but in the sense of a random statistical sample. Identify survivors of these selected events. Record what they remember, not about politics, not about violence, nor about who did what to whom, but about their loved ones died in that place. That’s all, a narrative of their love and attachment, which will also be a narrative of loss, pain and grief. Let us take these recordings made in the language the survivor chooses, and translate them also in to the other two languages of our country.
The idea is to place these recordings on the map of our country so that any one, especially, our children can listen to them. This map then will be filled with markers, of stone also, simple and yet distinct from the terrain it represents of death.

Violent death
Let us walk on this map– it is a large map, remember, and we can walk on it; respectfully of course — as we walk our country, and we can visit and revisit, in some small way, at each place someone died.
As we walk this map, then, with simple portable playback device with pre-recorded disk, yes, like a iPod, and a pair of supplied head phones, which we obtain from the administrator of the site as one does in some museums now, we should be able to listen at each place that is marked, by selecting number, like k324 on the device to a narrative of a survivor that pertains to that place.
Listen, take it in, and perhaps move on to another spot. It will take hours, of course, perhaps days, to traverse this map.

I do not offer panaceas; nor can I foretell the future. But I do think this may be a better way for us Sri Lankans to reconcile ourselves to our violent past.

This is 26 Ramses Street, Cairo, location of Telecom Egypt. The state-run communications company houses the main internet portals that connect Egyptians with the outside world. On Jan 28, 2011 Telecom Egypt shut down those portals in an attempt to derail to sustained anti-government protests. For five days, internet access was severely restricted, making basic communications extremely difficult, and costing the country billions of dollars.

Mikhail from New York (who appears to be a competent network engineer) has some great technical advice if you’re planning a revolution:

Lesson learned: if you’re planning a revolution, consider preparing a home-grown line-of-sight WiFi mesh that can be deployed quickly – perhaps using community-based volunteers to host individual nodes. Be sure to operate your own routing infrastructure independently, and be prepared for saboteurs. Also, remember to host your own communications and coordination software, encrypt everything, and take a minimalist, low-bandwidth application design approach.

It’s hardly a very resilient revolution if you’re dependent on data centers and ISPs in foreign countries for your core mobilization tools.

Beirut Outtakes (2007), by Peggy Ahwesh

This beautiful film is cut from pieces of film found in an abandoned movie theater in Beirut. The film clips appear to show segments of newsreels, advertisements and trailers for films that one might have seen a Beirut theater in the 1950s, 60′s and 70′s.

What is eerie about Ahwesh’s video is not only the glimpse we get at life in Beirut before years of constant war, but also the strange combination of violence (American westerns), Orientalist sexuality (gyrating belly dancers), and feminine domesticity (women shopping for home appliances). This cocktail of violence, sexuality and domesticity seems so painfully modern, so appropriate for a forward-looking city, ‘the Paris of the Middle East.’ Ahwesh’s film is a cloudy mirror, a surface which shows us the reversed, distorted, but absolutely accurate image of what we are (not) now.

It is July 2006, and Israel is at war again with Lebanon. Terrible waves of shelling sweep over densely populated south Beirut and the Israeli army enters southern Lebanon. Small mines, shaped and colored like toys rain from Israeli planes into farmer’s fields, making a deadly harvest. Each day, missiles assail the northern Israeli towns closest to the border. There is little protection for Arab Israelis. Their communities are hit hard. An overwhelming silence about Lebanese casualties engulfs the country—a wall of support-our-troops-bomb-them-into-the-next-century rises up into the air. On Israeli television a few heartfelt cries to please stop the bombing come from Arab Israelis standing in the ruins of their neighborhood, places forgotten long before the war.

I am in Tel Aviv, “Israel’s urban bubble,” where there are no demonstrations. (This is not to say that there are never any protest for peace in Israel. Here’s one from the other day. They’re just hard to find during wartime). At Hagada Smalit, the Left Bank, a cultural center, art gallery and the headquarters of Hadash, Israel’s communist party, a few painted placards lean against the wall in the corner behind the stairwell. Another kind of commentary is emerging on the city’s surfaces—quietly covering the walls and boulevards of particular neighborhoods, and entering into the everyday experiences of walking, riding and driving in the city. Commentary like this:

Am Israel hai: The people of Israel live

Am Israel hai?: The people of Israel live?

Am Israel hai al kharbo: The people of Israel live by the sword

Am Israel hai al heshbon mi?: The people of Israel live, [but] at whose expense?

Tel Aviv is indeed a surprising, confounding place to be during war-time. Despite the city’s absorption of refugees from the besieged north into its homes and hotels, and the signs at restaurants, bars and other shops offering free food and merchandise to refugees, everyday life in the “city that never sleeps” does not appear altered in any significant way. A stroll along the lively boulevards of the city reveal musicians playing at street cafes or sun-darkened French, American and Israeli children building in the sandy surf of the Mediterranean. At dusk lounging on one of the city’s many rooftops, with the darkened water shimmering just beyond the palm-tree line boulevards, and throughout the night, the sounds of construction on the any one of the city’s many new high rises are all that disturbs the peace. There is no great increase in the ubiquitous armed military or police personnel; there is no announcement by authorities for citizens to ready themselves for attack. In the apartment building in which I stay, residents remove their bicycles from the basement bomb shelter (which doubles as a music studio from time to time), and someone brings in two water containers. Within a few days, the bicycles are back and the water jugs removed. Tel Aviv, geographically and psychically, remains in experience a few kilometers outside of the war zone. For this reason, the events and inscriptions that refer to the war, directly or otherwise, are most striking and most difficult to easily categorize or explain.

All popular images of the event are fascinated with that bright blue sky:  The innocuousness of the clear late-summer day, the passenger plane familiar over a city skyline, the rectangular skyscrapers. The event described in these images has its own story, its own trajectory.  Like a video game it suggests a user control, it can be paused, re-played, re-figured as if the outcome might be different next time, maybe the person with the controls will turn the plane just before—

Brualitat in Stein [Brutality in Stone] (1961), a collaboration between Alexander Kluge (writer, filmmaker) and Peter Schamoni (filmmaker)
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W.G. Sebald, in his essay “Between History and Natural History: On the literary description of total destruction,” considers the work of West German writer, Alexander Kluge. Kluge’s book, New Stories. Nos 1-18 (1977) takes on the prodigious task of examining the aftermath of the destruction of German cities during World War II. Although it makes use of personal recollections of air attack, interviews with military officials and primary source documents, the book is neither a history in the traditional sense, nor is it a traditional novel. Sebald pays attention to Kluge’s method of presenting this diverse material, arguing that confronting catastrophic experience in writing requires the author to challenge and “break out” of the structure and form of the novel, which “owes its allegiance to bourgeois concepts.”

Here is what Sebald has to say about Kluge’s attempt to account for the experience of living in ruined cities:

Kluge’s way of providing his documentary material with vectors through his presentation of it transfers what he quotes into the context of our own present. Kluge does not allow the data to merely stand as an account of a past catastrophe… the most unmediated document… loses its unmediated character via the processes of reflection the text sets up. History is no longer the past but also the present in which the reader must act. The information Kluge’s style thus imparts to readers about the concrete circumstances of their present existence, and possible prospects for the future, marks him out as an author who, on the perimeter of a civilization to all appearances intent on its own end, is working to revive the collective memory of his contemporaries who “with the obviously inborn desire for narrative, have lost the psychological power to remember even within the destroyed city itself.”

Escaping her disgust with herself, she walks out into the night to haunt a familiar tea room—to meet a familiar stranger. An encounter with the stranger, her lover, who asks her to stay here in Hiroshima is the beginning of a slow walk through the empty streets of the night city.

He’s going to kiss me. He’s going to kiss me and I’ll be lost.

She walks on, passing two strolling guitarists, lovers embracing in back seat of a parked car, another car slowing, almost stopping as it passes her, a lone lady in the night. The flickering of Japanese neon is cut with day-lit memories of the sober street signs marking the corner walls of her small French village. Her thoughts drift between both places she must eventually leave, between doomed love affairs. The filmmakers create these flashes of memory through cuts which link tracking shots that seem to keep the camera at the same up-turned angle, creating for the viewer the experience of walking the streets in two different places simultaneously, eyes turned slightly upward to read the signs.

I met you. (Hiroshima)
I remember you. (French village)
This city was tailor-made for love. (Hiroshima)

The walk through post-Nuclear-holocaust Hiroshima at night is full of memories of war-time France. A neon Eiffel Tower flashes on and off like a beacon atop a Japanese bar. One place often bleeds into another—this sort of time travel is possible at night on an aimless stroll, away from oneself.  Both places are bound by war. This walk is evidence of the inevitability and impossibility of love across cultures.

Terror!

In filmic imagination, the end of the world is really associated with the end of the city. World War II saw the full destruction of great cities by radiation and fire. The massive loss of life in the powerful haze of giant mushroom clouds and the slower deaths, memorialized in films like Gojira (1954) and Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) became a real threat for urban dwellers caught in the Cold War. Walking through city streets after seeing this film, how could we not imagine the hot nuclear breath of Godzilla?

Watch the development of the case against Julian Assange very carefully. It’s pretty bizzare: sexual assault? espionage? Some are coming to his defense. As my friend Barbara says, one likely result of this drama will be greater restrictions on the way we are able to access, use and create various media archives. CBS News predicts a future of never-ending cyberwar. Never forget: sorting through these sorts of archives or databases is the political practice of our time, made even more so by sheer ubiquity. And the creation of digital archives themselves? What sort of politics is that?

One New Republic editorial questions Julian Assange’s/Wikileaks’ status as beacons of serious journalism, governmental transparency and democracy due to their commitment to collect data, without organization and argument. The article cites one of my fave media theorists, Lev Manovich:

The media theorist Lev Manovich has said that the definitive informational metaphor of our epoch is the database. The database is not just a metaphor, in fact—it’s a certification of what knowledge looks like and how it is to be gained. A metaphor is a carrier, a condensation of meaning. A database is a heap.

It is this “heap-ish” quality that makes databases like dumpsters. And I guess the creation of databases is kind of like garbage collection, except the goal isn’t disposal. There is no real possibility of (information) disposal as the existence of Wikileaks clearly proves. Does this mean that political action, and the creation of knowledge itself depends upon dumpster diving? Garbage collection and dumpster diving? Really?

YES! I think so. And I am kind of excited by this new political reality. I’m not the only one.

–Simon Wiesenthal (1908 – 2005), architect, survivor of death camps across Europe, documenter of Nazi war crimes, and intrepid and dedicated hunter of war criminals.