A Cold Wind From The Mountains
Two summers ago I dreamt of a man in a felt mask. The mask was made of small patches of brown carpet under-felt, sewn together. It was a vivid and violent dream: the message from my unconscious was strong, but not clear. I was reminded of another vivid dream of nearly 40 years earlier, just as I left Exeter College of Art - of a boy in a green jumper, which had had a similarly powerful impact.
In the dream I was also told to build a wall to protect me from the cold wind from the mountains.
In 2014 I travelled to Sarajevo. I went there to see where Franz Ferdinand had been assassinated, the event that precipitated the start of WW1 and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Crossing the bridge at Mostar, I left the Austro-Hungarian Empire and entered the land of the Ottomans. Sarajevo itself was bullet ridden. I was told that during the Balkan war, snipers had sat in the surrounding hills and picked off residents if they tried to leave their homes. That summer it was cold and wet; the river ran manically, a weird yellow colour. I saw on television that parliament had approved air strikes against IS. That summer I recognised the link between Sarajevo, the Ottoman Empire and the airstrikes on Iraq.
I don’t know how I first heard of Gertrude Bell. The Ottoman Empire had fallen after WW1 and the nations of Europe were picking over its corpse. Gertrude had spent many years exploring the Arabian desert on horseback and had come to know well its tribes and Sheiks. It was she who brokered the installation of King Faisal as Sharif. Gertrude Bell in Arabia, a white woman in a land far from her own, assumed colonial authority over people of a different colour. One hundred years on, I begin to see colonialism in terms of object and disowned shadow, shadow and disowned object.
In Mission Church a red-faced man in a pith helmet is lying in a churchyard. Beneath him is the shadow/figure of a black woman. It could be a picture of rape. He’s watched by a man in uniform, an African in colonial pay. The world they inhabit is swirling and unsettled; all the fears the colonials have of Africa and the unknown are ready to erupt. There is a black sun and a white moon. Black and white, shadow and object are confused.
Huey Newton, the Black Panther, said “The European started to be sick when he denied his sexual nature”.[2] This is also what Freud said.
The body and its workings is the exiled shadow.
In Chinua Achebe’s 1958 novel Things Fall Apart , the tribesman, Obierika, says
The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan no longer acts like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.
At The Treaty of Berlin in 1885 seven European powers agreed to invade a whole continent. Though my family historically were working class people, as a European, this is a shameful part of my history.
EM 2017- from A Cold Wind From The Mountains