'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Cultural notes, from Boston

I've had a great weekend in Boston with my son Tarek, who works here. I/we had a number of interesting cultural experiences. Here are some I ended up writing about:
Gauguin as porno-sadist?
The Fog of War
Syrian music ensemble at M.I.T.
Inspiration at the Mapparium
What I've been reading

Gauguin as porno-sadist?

My friend Hilda had urged me to see the exhibition "Gauguin in Tahiti" at the Boston Museum of Fine Art. I went with Tar, Sunday afternoon. It truly is a blockbuster. There must be some 50 or so of Gauguin's paintings on Tahitian and other Polynesian themes, in adition to a dozen or more of his wood-carvings and some cultural-context-type artefacts like tikis (stone-carvings of anthropomorphc figures) from Tahiti and elsewhere. There are also some cultural-context items (photos, mainly) that Gauguin himself had owned: these some background on his fascination with Polynesian culture, which had antedated, and indeed helped to motivate, his decision to move there.

It is probably the greatest number of his Polynesian-themed paintings ever gathered together in one place since he sold them to collectors in the first place. Or perhaps, ever. Paintings had been borrowed for this exhibition from collections all over the world, including a goodly number from the Hermitage in St. Petersburg and other collections in Russia.

I think Tarek and I both agreed that the later paintings shown seemed much "better" than the earlier ones, which seemed crude and flat. Quite possibly, intentionally so. I just didn't happen to like the effect very much.

What I wanted to write about here, however, was an aspect of one particular painting that bothered me at the time, and has continued to bother me since.

The exhibitors had done a good job of providing informational signage on many aspects of the paintings, and of the decisions Gauguin had made in his life that resulted in him painting them. So we learned that when he decided to "follow his muse" to French-ruled Tahiti, he left behind him in Paris his Danish-born wife and their children... We also learned that when he got to Tahiti he took as a mistress a 13-year-old Tahitian girl called Tehamana. (We have also been told along the way that the indigenous Tahitians had already, by the time Gauguin got there, been ravaged for some time by diseases brought by the French and other Europeans who dominated things on the islands. Yes, those diseases included sexually transmitted diseases.)

I think I recall three or so paintings of Tehamana in the show. In all except one, as I recall, she is clothed in a way that respects western norms of "decency". In one painting however she is depicted quite naked, lying on her stomach on a bed in a night-time scene. Various quasi-ancestral "spirit" figures are dancing around her. Her naked skin gleams with blues and occasional streaks of gold.

So here's the thing. Right next to this painting is an excerpt from the text of a letter Gauguin had written to a friend about the evening he painted the picture. He said he had come home late to Tehamana and found her lying on the bed crying with grief. That, he wrote, had moved him to start imagining all the "ancestral" spirits and things that were bothering her. And thus, he painted the scene.

What bothers me about this? The fact that the European "explorer/conqueror" had come into this gril's community and--taking advantage of the effective immunity that Frenchmen enjoyed in Tahiti from any effective sanction for such behavior--had taken her as a mistress at such a young age? Yes, that's part of it. The fact that he painted the naked body of this child and put it up for public display (and the ogling continues today, at the MFA)? That's part of my disquiet, too. The fact that, when he saw his young paramour in a state of apparently great distress, instead of comforting her, he pulled out his paintbrushes and started painting? Well, I guess it would be too much--in view of the two aspects of the affair previously mentioned--to expect any actual tenderness from him towards her.

So where does that all leave me? Yes, deeply disturbed. I think the picture is quite plainly pornographic. It depicts, in the manner of a trophy, a girl who has been sexually defiled by the painter. It depicts her at an intimate moment of evident pain in her life and seems lasciviously to dwell on, explore, and reveal the dimensions of her pain.

Just how is this different from porno-sadistic images depicting or celebrating the defilement of children for which lonely or twisted old men these days get serious prison sentences? Don't talk to me about "artistic merit". Is "art" something that can be plucked from, or grafted onto, such a situation of human defilement and tragedy?

... Interestingly, elsewhere in the exhibit, we are told that when Gauguin got back to Europe after that first, two-year-long visit to Tahiti, he found his estranged "wife" in very difficult circumstances, and lamenting the recent death of their daughter, Aline.

They don't tell us how old Aline was when she died. I wonder whether her father ever for a moment imagined that his own daughter might have been put in the same position as his concubine, Tehamana: taken from her home community by a male representative of a foreign conquering race; forced into concubinage with him; and even her pain exploited by him for the furtherance of his career?

(back to top)

The Fog of War

I did finally get to see Erroll Morris's Oscar-winning documentary featuring the "Eleven lessons of Bob McNamara". I wasn't as totally blown away by Bob's alleged prescience and wisdom on matters strategic as some of my friends apparently have been. I think the movie shows him as still extremely conflicted about many, many aspects of the war-culture to which he belonged. He made some good points in the flick, sure: about the need for extreme caution in thinking about nuclear warfare; about the devastating nature of the non-nuclear attacks the US had waged against Japan prior to Hiroshima; about the fact that, as with the 'domino theory' adduced by himself and others during the US-Vietnam war, people can get the analysis horribly wrong, with devastating consequences...

But at the end of the day, his performance in the movie is not a complete, clear-headed mea culpa regarding Vietnam. (It's true: he was not the only culpo in those days; but he sure was one of 'em.) And that perhaps also helps to explain why his thinking on Washington's present overseas military adventure has been so sluggish and unsatisfactory.

But he has guts, I'll give him that. He agreed to do the movie, and stuck with it even when it involved Erroll Morris doing some pretty harsh off-camera questioning of him, as happened on two or three occasions there.

I came across Bob a little back in the early 1990s, when he was on the advisory board of a conflict-resolution organization--or, as it turned out to be, an internal-conflict-generation organization--that I worked with for a couple of years back then. I went to a few meetings that he took part in. Then, and in his earlier work at the World Bank, he struck me as someone working very, very hard to try to "make up for" unexplained (but easily imaginable) past misdeeds. No, he is not a "bad" man, at all. Probably, one of the most decently behaved ex-Secretaries of Defense that the U.S./ has ever known. But limited in his capacity for sympathetic and holistic imagination? Yes, indeed.

(back to top)

Syrian music ensemble at M.I.T.

By a very happy chance, Tarek and I were last night able to get to a performance by a Syrian music ensemble called "Dialogue/Hewar". There were five musicians. (Another two or three who had planned to come never got visas to the U.S.) The music was truly extraordinary. It was mainly Arabic-style music, but some of the musicians are also trained in Western classical music. One of them, Kinan Abou-Afach, was playing the cello. Another, Kinan Azmeh, played the clarinet.

Arabic music on the clarinet! Wow! This guy is a genius.

Issam Rafee was playing the oud; Omar al-Musfi played hand-drums and a tamourine; and the incredible sorpano Dima Orsho did vocalizations.

We got there a little late, and only caught six of the eight pieces played. Luckily we didn't miss the oud solo or the clarinet solo. I think there was a cello solo,too. The rest were all ensemble pieces. Orsho's vocalizations were non-verbal: she was using her fabulous, rich-toned voice purely as an instrument. In the ensemble pieces, the players were very evidently having huge fun playing together, taking turns showcasing each other's virtuosity in finest jazz ensemble style.

We just found out about the performance by lucky chance. The group is, I had read somewhere earlier, touring the US as part of an intiative by the new Syrian Ambassador in DC to expand the dimensions of the Syrian-US relationship.

Dialogue/Hewar seems like an excellent way to spearhead this campaign. If any of you gets the chance to go hear them, rush right along.

(back to top)

Inspiration at the Mapparium

This was yet another of those entirely serendiptious things that happened. My editor at the CSM, Clara Germani, had suggested I go to see the Mary Baker Eddy Library for the Betterment of Humanity, which is a new feature of the Christian Science Center there in the heart of Boston. The library's research director, Jonathan Eder, showed me around. I think they have done a great job making explicit and highlighting the importance of spiritual quests in the story of human history. I wish that more Quakers--myself included--could do a better job of talking openly about the spiritual roots of what we do...

Jonathan had kindly picked some books out of the research library that he thought might be of interest to my present project on Africa. As indeed most them were (though I'd already read a number of them.) A little later, he took me on the tour of the "Mapparium" that has been a feature of the C.S. Center since the 1930s. I honestly can't remember whether I'd seen it on a previous visit to the Center, or not. It truly is the most amazing creation: a three-story-high, painted glass globe inside of which one walks suspended on a glass walkway.

At one level I found it unsatisfyingly "unreal". I mean, if one were standing at the core of the earth, everything would be dark, right? And hot! Also, if one were standing at the core of the earth, then looking out at the landmass of the United States from that vantage-point the dangly-down bit of Flordia would hang off the left-hand view of the continent; and the whole rest of the world's mapping would also be mirror-imaged... Right?

But actually, I rapidly got drawn into the very well-done little audio-visual presentation they put on in there. They used different kinds of lights, projected from outside the globe, to highlight different things, including the changing nature of national boundaries since 1934, and the worldwide spread of democracy. I was really kind of inspired by the experience.

They ended up with a nice quote from--you guessed it!-- Mary Baker E herself. One I've heard elsewhere about the point of her work being to be "a torch for all humanity". I actually had a minor sort of spiritual/intellectual epiphany at that point, one that goodness knows I should have been able to have a long time ago. But I've been puzzling in my mind for more than five years now over the fact that in Bantu African cultures they have this concept ubuntu which (as Desmond Tutu has said many times) means something like the fact that "a person is a person by virtue of the relations s/he has with other people". (I'm thinking that's probably etymologically linked to the word bantu, anyway.) But, in western culture, I had thought, we don't really have that same sort of embedded definition of personhood as being inherently linked to the idea of relationships... Well, especially not since the days of the En"light"enment.

But here's the thing. It's true that maybe we don't have that same exact concept of ubuntu. (But no harm in borrowing it from our African sisters and brothers, eh?) But what we do have, embedded deep into our language, is this interesting dualism regarding the meaning of the word "humanity". For it really does mean both "humanity as the sum total of people on earth" and "humanity as an ideal of humane treatment of each other". As in, the whole concept of "international humanitarian law", or "humanitarianism", in general.

So our western culture does have something of a communitarian, inter-personal nature to add to that broader global discussion of "What is it that makes us specifically human?" after all.

(back to top)

What I've been reading

This is something I picked up in Ben-Gurion airport, on my way out of Israel a couple of weeks ago. It's a book called, Destructive Emotions, and How we can overcome them: A dialogue with the Dalai Lama, that is described as "narrated by" Daniel Goleman.

I must admit my reading has been a little episodic. I wish I had the time to just sit down and concentrate properly on the whole text. It's an account of a meeting at the DL's place in Dharamsala, India, between a number of western (mainly US) neuro-scientists and psychologists, on the one hand, and the DL and a handful of other Buddhist thinkers, on the other.

The discussions there are quite engrossing and sometimes fairly complex. Here is one thing I want to really take out of what I've read so far, to use. It's something said by Matthieu Ricard, a Buddhist monk at Shechen Monastery in Kathmandu, and a Frech-language interpreter for the DL. It's in the chapter on "Cultivating emotional balance". Matthieu and other Buddhist participants have been talking about the value of cultivating practices that can strengthen the mind's ability to withstand destructive emotions. "We speak of four things to cultivate: love, equanimity, compassion, and rejoicing," he said (p.163)

There's a lot more in the book, obviously. But that little fragment is a great one, I think.

(back to top)