A Dance of Assassins: Performing Early Colonial Hegemony in the Congo

7. Art Évo on the Chaussée d’Ixelles

157 7 · ArtÉvoontheChausséed’Ixelles Africa doesn’t exist. I know. I’ve been there. —After Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past Storms took Lusinga with him to Europe in another way. When his men brought him the chief’s head, they also brought Bwana Boma a most remarkable wooden figure embodying Swift-of-Foot’s dynastic title and matrilineage .1 Storms carried this and other trophies back to Belgium with him, and a series of photographs taken in 1929 show the figure in the drawing room of his maison de maître (row house) at 146 Chaussée d’Ixelles in Brussels (fig. 7.1).Thereitstandsamonggeometricallyarrayedweaponsandcarefullycomposed displays of souvenirs from Lubanda and the other African locales visited by the lieutenant. Thediscussion to followisbasedupon the assumption thatthesalonand another room, also photographed in 1929, were still arranged as Storms knew them before his death in 1918. No documentation proves or disproves this assertion,and inthe late nineteenthand early twentieth centuries it was common for mourning rooms to be preserved as they had been enjoyed by deceased loved ones in “an implied narrative of melancholy.”2 Indeed, a velvet rope can be seen to transect the salon in one of the pictures, as though setting portions of the room off-limits to visitors and underscoring the likelihood Figure 7.1. Storms’s drawing room with “Lusinga” on the mantel in 1929. Photo by G. Hotz, RMCA HP.1930.653.1, collection RMCA Tervuren; photo G. Hotz, s.d., with permission. Art Évo on the Chaussée d’Ixelles · 159 that the Widow Storms kept the room as her husband had last known it. That the couple had no children reinforces the possibility that the rooms were left as shared by the couple in their later years. Furthermore, one of the photos showsadeskinthecornerofthedrawingroom.Papersarecarefullyarranged to one side of a blotter, and a lamp has a shade with an image of African womenbearingloadsontheirheads.Onecanimaginethatitwaswhileseated here that Bwana Boma lost himself in reverie and letters, surrounded by vestiges of his brief moment of glory in the Congo. TheStormsresidencenolongerexistsinrecognizableform.Theproperty was rezoned as commercial space in 1955 and transformed into a paint store. Since 1992 it has been occupied by a Japanese travel agency, with an upperfloor rental apartment and the proprietor’s residence behind the house, elegantlyremodeledfromwhathadbeentheStormses ’carriagehouse.3 Nearby, much of what used to be the staid streets of Ixelles has become Matonge, the vibrant Congolese inner-cité of Brussels now filled with boisterous restaurants and boîtes de nuit and named for an equally exuberant neighborhood of Kinshasa that is “the fast-beating heart” of that sprawling city’s night life and hypnoticmusic.4 It is hard to imagine what Bwana Boma would have thought of either place as they exist nowadays. Phantasmagorias of the Intérieur The nineteenthwas “thecentury ofthe intérieur . . . developed asa protected, private space in opposition to the public sphere of social life and the world of work. It indicated a division of life into areas which, historically novel, was a characteristic of bourgeois-capitalist culture.” These tendencies became increasingly evident in the last decades of the century, when, through such an aesthetic tactic, “individuals respond[ed] to the abstraction of social life outsidebyconstructingacompletecomplementaryworldinside .”5 Here we shall reflect upon Storms’s motivations for and methods of displaying his collections , recalling that “we must consider the intersection between the ways we see them literally and the metaphorical vision our culture has of them”—or, that is, that Storms’s temporally defined visual culture had. As Susan Vogel explains of museum exhibitions and decorative displays more generally, “Most visitors are unaware of the degree to which their experience of any art . . . is conditioned by the way it is installed.”6 A sense of Storms’s understanding of his Congolese adventures would be lost if one were to ignore how 160 · Remembering the Dismembered he presented and, indeed, relived them in his later years back in Belgium through his creative manipulation of both Congolese and Belgian material culture. The figure of “Lusinga” was given pride of place in the general’s parlor on a mantelpiece before a large and ornately framed mirror.7 Along with other objects,thesculpturemusthavestoodas“tangibleproofoftheexploitsofthe master of the house and national hero” and signaled “a symbolic apotheosis of the project of conquest,” as Jean-Bernard Ouédraogo holds with regard to moregeneralcontextsofcolonialism.8 Yetjustascertainly,“Lusinga”participated in Bwana Boma’s own phantasms of African...