Women in Dark Times (34 page)

Yael Bartana is, we could say, the artist who pushes the argument of this book to its outermost edge: that women know how to invoke – in some sense to make their home – the subterranean layers in which history is embedded and which it most urgently tries to deny, and then return to tell the tale. Most simply, I suggest, this is because women have less reason to be duped by the world’s spurious – in fact brittle – equipoise. One woman, Rifke, moves from one end to another of the trilogy. She is a Polish-Jewish escapee who, in the final film,
Assassination
, returns to Poland, carrying the burden of her history on behalf of everyone. She has come to exhort the crowd who have gathered to grieve over the assassinated Sierakowski – hence the title of this final film (the ceremony to commemorate him is the film’s grief-stricken and grandiose focus). ‘I am the ghost of return,’ she states, ‘the return returning to herself’ – returning to herself, but also, we might say, to us as viewers since she is facing straight into the camera when she speaks. Mercilessly, she lays out the psychological stakes: ‘I am here to weave the torture of identity from the threads of forgetfulness.’
9
For those who have eyes to see, she is familiar to everyone: ‘I can be found everywhere.’ Without any need of introduction, Sierakowski invokes her right at the start of the first film in the opening words of his speech: ‘Do you think’, he begins, ‘the old woman who still sleeps under Rifke’s quilt doesn’t want to see you? Has forgotten about you? You’re wrong. She dreams about you every night. Dreams and trembles with fear.’
10
It is worth pausing at this image – Poles sleeping under the discarded night covers of their own exiled and murdered Jews, in bed with them as one might say.

Yael Bartana is creating a new language of intimacy, in which people discover that they need – more than anything – the people they have tried hardest, physically and mentally, to reject. That is why her work feels so unacceptable and so urgent. This is not some polite, civil appeal for healing or reconciliation based on the need to recognise the other, which after all keeps the appropriate distances more or less intact. As we saw in relation to Charlotte Salomon’s paintings, the psychic drag of such a process is far more visceral, gut-wrenching, acute. Flouting all boundaries of nationality, all racial and ethnic distinctions, Bartana is asking enemies to pick up their belongings, change continents and move in together, to touch, feel and smell the object of their hatreds, to get inside each other’s skin. ‘Today we know that we cannot live alone,’ Sierakowski declares. ‘We need the other, and there’s no closer other for us than you!’
11
‘Closer other’ is of course something of a contradiction in terms (the other being precisely the one to whom you are not, and do not wish to be, close). In the context of Polish-Jewish history such a proposition is all the more noteworthy. ‘The gap that still divides the two communities,’ writes Eva Hoffman at the end of her study of Polish-Jewish relations in the
shtetl
, ‘is the most persistent fact of their common history.’
12
It is not clear whether these two peoples have ever fully
seen
each other. From the beginning, she observes, the two groups ‘existed below the level of meaningfulness to each other’.
13
They did not admit each other into what she calls the ‘sphere of true moral life . . . They did not share a world’.
14

We might look back to Esther Shalev-Gerz for an artistic gesture that combs a similarly intimate mental and political space. Her 2004 artwork
First Generation
, a permanent installation at the multicultural centre in Botkyrka, south of Stockholm, projects close-up fragments of human faces on display inside the building on to its exterior glass façade – so close that you can see every mark and shadow, the pores of the skin, but never a complete view of the face, and no one can be identified. These close-ups are a form of distortion, people as the shreds of themselves, as if you can only really be in this together by giving up bits and pieces of yourself. These unsettling images – eyelashes, furrowed brows, the hollows of cheeks – at once solid and translucent, tangible and liquefied, bring you closer to people you don’t know than you are ever likely to get. The participants were, the museum director Lief Magnusson explains, residents ‘who had moved there from anywhere else’.
15
Strangers, by definition. As with so much of her work, Shalev-Gerz asks them for their story, posing the same run of questions to each of her thirty-five participants: ‘What did you lose? What did you find? What did you get? What did you give?’
16
Again, the visual traces, however haunting or repellent, are given voice (their words are mounted on screens inside the exhibition space). According to Magnusson, the work has contributed greatly to the centre’s mission: ‘to spread awareness that facilitates self-comprehension and insight, which can in turn help us understand other people’s frame of reference’.
17
What – in their different ways Shalev-Gerz and Bartana ask us to consider – might be the appropriate artistic redress for the stranger whom we reject, expel, kill, or simply fail to notice and turn away from on the street?

Although the JRMiP is a movement (‘Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland’), Bartana knows that what she is calling for may or may not be possible. In August 1943, an official of the Polish underground wrote to the government-in-exile, in what we can fairly call the worst moment of Jewish history, that ‘the return of the Jews to their jobs and workshops is completely out of the question’, even if the numbers were to be ‘greatly reduced’, as the ‘non-Jewish part of the population’ has filled their places, a change, he writes, that is ‘
fundamental, final
in character’.
18
‘The return of masses of Jews’, he continues, ‘would be experienced by the population not as restitution but as an invasion, against which they would defend themselves, even with physical means.’
19
This fear has not diminished with time. In 1992, an old peasant woman interviewed by Poland’s Jewish Historical Institute (ŻIH) observed: ‘In Międzyrzec many houses were Jewish, but no one today comes [for them]. People have settled in these houses and live there. How will it be in the future, we still don’t know; maybe they’ll still ask for them back.’
20

Polish-Jewish relations did not ease, far from it, with the end of the Second World War. Memory is defensive, recalcitrant. Bartana is pulling against the grain. The attempt to rebuild memory in Poland in relation to the Holocaust more or less repeated all the forms of antagonism, of competing and hostile narratives, that had characterised the relations of Jews and Poles before. It is now known that on at least one occasion during the Second World War, in the town of Jedwabne, Jews were massacred by their own neighbours. In response to that revelation, which struck like lightning when it was exposed by the historian Jan Gross, in 2000, some insisted that Polish victimisation by the Nazis was equivalent to that of the Jews, that many – and this is true – risked their lives to save individual Jews.
21
At its (almost) worst, the exposure of the story was viewed as another chapter in what has often been seen in Poland as a long history of the Jewish oppression of Poles. At its very worst, and in a macabre twist, the Holocaust was represented as a German-Jewish conspiracy against, and thus repeating, the historic martyrdom of the Polish people who – again it is true – have been a nation torn to shreds by its occupying powers.
22
This is of course where Polish nationalism, from which Rosa Luxemburg so intensely dissociated her political vision, begins. Bartana is bringing us full circle while tracing the story of Poland as a nation into its tragic later phase. ‘If the Nazis had eradicated Jewish life in view of
stunned
and traumatised (rather than mostly indifferent and partly complicitous) Polish neighbours,’ writes historian of Poland Michel Steinlauf, ‘post war anti-Semitic violence would have been a practical and psychological impossibility.’
23
His vocabulary echoes uncannily the project of Bartana’s trilogy 
. . . And Europe Will Be Stunned.
As if to be floored by history is the only way, paradoxically, to be fully cognisant of its horrors. Bartana is another woman who is asking for something unthinkable to be thought.

‘I remember two things,’ writes Halina Bortnowska in ‘The Evil Shadow of the Wall’, an essay published on the eve of the sixtieth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943:

Not from books or recounted stories, but the way one remembers a recurring bad dream. Spring, sunlight, April clouds; dark, imposing, and swirling black snow is falling, flakes of soot. ‘It’s from the ghetto,’ says my mother, wiping this black snow from the windowsill, from the face, from the eyes. Of course one could hear during the day, and especially at night, explosions and distant shooting. It was not very unusual in Warsaw at that time, but it always brought fear. ‘It’s nothing. It’s in the ghetto.’
24

Today she feels ashamed of the distance, viewing it as ‘the evil shadow of the wall cast over one’s soul . . . It’s as if the perpetrators of Warsaw’s Holocaust managed to remove the Jews from the realm of human solidarity.’
25
What did she feel, she asks herself, when the black snow fell over her face, her eyes? ‘Nothing. Nothing, really? [
Czy naprawd
ę
nic
?]’
26

Bortnowska’s story gives flesh and blood to the nightmare of the old woman hiding under the quilt in the opening lines of
Mary Koszmary
. This is the nightmare – the recurring bad dream – that the Movement for Jewish Renaissance in Poland wants to bring to an end. ‘Do you think the old woman who sleeps under Rifke’s quilt doesn’t want to see you? Has forgotten about you? You are wrong. She dreams about you every night. Dreams and trembles with fear.’ Only the Jews – 3,300,000 of them returning to Poland – can chase the nightmares of 40,000,000 Poles away. Bartana’s wager is intense. She is opening the gates of hell: ‘I could feel the place [. . .] I [. . .] wanted to open all the wounds.’

*

In 2010, Bartana won the prestigious Wales International Art Prize from Artes Mundi for artists who, as they put it on their website, ‘engage with the human condition’.
27
Although the reference to Hannah Arendt’s
The Human Condition
may not be intentional, the link is nonetheless a strong one. Again like Shalev-Gerz, Bartana is creating as a central strand of her work an artistic language for the homeless, the stateless and the refugee. One entry in the
Cookbook
has the title ‘Guided Imagination’. ‘Imagine a regime’, the authors invite us, ‘that has neutralised the lethal meaning of categories such as “refugees”, “illegal aliens”, “migrant (or foreign) workers”, and strives to uproot them from its political lexicon’ (the authors are Israeli photographer and writer Ariella Azoulay and writer Adi Ophir, dissidents both).
28
Such a regime would, they continue, be adopting the rudiments of Arendt’s philosophy, since its organising principle would be a concern for ‘the common universe of all the governed’.
29
Throughout this book Arendt has been our companion. In 1943, by which time the worst had emerged, in a little known text, ‘We Refugees’, she made this dramatic plea: ‘If we should start telling the truth that we are nothing but Jews, it would mean that we expose ourselves to the fate of human beings who, unprotected by any specific law or political convention, are nothing but human beings. I can hardly imagine an attitude more dangerous.’
30
When Juli Carson, art director and writer, cites these lines in her contribution to the
Cookbook
, she suggests that Arendt is asking a question: ‘What was the responsibility of the individual to tell the truth of this condition?’ (Arendt is something of a presiding spirit over the
Cookbook
, a little as she is over these pages.)
31
Something at once flagrant and hidden is in need of being spoken. The Jews were murdered, we can read Arendt as saying, because they exposed the truth: ‘I can hardly imagine an attitude more dangerous.’ Refugees are hated because they expose the human condition in its rawest state. But for that very reason, as they were driven from their country, they represented, she believed, the vanguard of their peoples. Orphans of the world, the Jews embodied a truth which – as it was in the process of being hideously confirmed – the world was not yet ready to hear. They could not always hear it themselves. ‘We were told to forget; and we forgot quicker than anyone could imagine,’ Arendt observes. ‘After so much bad luck we want a course as sure as a gun.’
32
We should not of course be surprised that Jews can be as capable of denial as anyone else: ‘We don’t call ourselves stateless,’ she continues, ‘because the majority of stateless in the world are Jews.’
33
And then she adds, as if in anticipation of Bartana’s project to come, ‘I don’t know, which memories and which thoughts nightly dwell in our dreams.’
34
Re-joining the tragic pre-Auschwitz family story of Charlotte Salomon, ushering it into the darkest future, Arendt spends a lot of time in this essay describing how the seemingly elated, assimilated Jews of the new American dispensation – she was theoretically one such herself – were prone to suicide.