The Postcolony as a Cold War Ruin: Toward a New Historiography

When we contemplate ruins, we contemplate our own future.

Christopher Woodward, In Ruins: A Journey Through History, Art and Literature

A young Mozambican woman sits in a hospital examination room speaking directly into the camera. Her arm has been blown off by a bomb, the wound a raw, gruesome pink. Soon, her tiny baby comes into view; the baby's leg has been blown off, too, and the pulpy remnants are a dull yellow, the color of bile.¹ Both mother and child are calm and patient as the footage eventually moves to show the now bandaged mother breastfeeding her child. This woman, seen in the archival footage of Göran Hugo Olsson's 2014 documentary, Concerning Violence: Nine Scenes from the Anti-Imperialistic Self-Defense, has been described by Gayatri Spivak as a black version of Venus de Milo, the armless statue of a Greek goddess that immediately evokes an archetypal ruin. The significance is doubled: here are a woman's and child's ruined, debilitated bodies now placed in a relationship with the dignified but ironically lifeless statue they resemble.

Walking around the grounds of the Asmara Expo Park in Eritrea a couple of years ago, I came across an abandoned aircraft. It had no business being there, surrounded as we were by restaurants and sporadic arts and crafts stalls. The aircraft is riddled with bullet holes, its door fallen off, the wheels so sunken they aren't visible. In some places, its metal sheets were curling after years of exposure to sun and rain. It is a surprising ruin, made majestic by its peaceful and unexpected posture. The aircraft is fenced in by tall weeds, tufts of uneven grass, and an array of random stones that look like they had been hurled at the plane many years ago. This aircraft is one of several you stumble on in the park grounds; these monstrous, misshapen, and now muzzled objects are witness to the thirty-year war that raged between Eritrea and Ethiopia and that heavily involved the US and the USSR.

In Nuruddin Farah's Links (2003) and Etel Adnan's Sitt Marie Rose (1982), Mogadishu and Beirut have been respectively destroyed by terribly long civil wars, both marked by Cold War connivances. But in these cities, war allows for palimpsests to emerge from the ruins. The wars play an antithetical role; on the one hand, the multilayered space has been destroyed, but on the other hand, it brings all the buried histories to the fore, laying bare the site where the old and faded coexists with the new and the fresh. Somalia's violent history, with its range of cultural influences, is evoked:

As one of the most ancient cities in Africa south of the Sahara, Mogadiscio had known centuries of attrition: one army leaving death and destruction in its wake, to be replaced by another and another and yet another, all equally destructive: then the Arabs arrived and got some purchase on the peninsula, and after they pushed their commerce and along with it the Islamic faith, they were replaced by Italians, then the Russians, and more recently the Americans, nervous, trigger-happy, shooting before they were shot at. The city became awash with guns, and the presence of the gun-crazy Americans escalated the conflict to greater heights.

(Farah 15)

When Farah's protagonist, Jeebleh, returns to a city once a colonial ruin, now a war ruin, the narrative of Links starts to function as one lengthy palimpsest. Carefully regarding the geography, peeling and unpeeling, seeing and interpreting the space as if it were an old, weary, yet historically loaded parchment soon becomes Jeebleh's prerogative. War digs up and uncovers material evidence of different layers—in the debris, in the spaces of refuge, in the hotel, on the streets, and in Jeebleh's dreams—enabling the narrator to do the work of reinscription and re-historicization.

Similarly, in Sitt Marie Rose, Adnan's Beirut is a living, breathing being, but has been humiliated by war and has vomited out its complex, hybrid past: "She (Beirut) gathered the manners...