Abstract
The following interviews emerge from a research project entitled Representing Postcolonial Disaster: Conflict, Consumption, Reconstruction, which is funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (UK). Specifically, the interviews formed part of a conference and series of activities on the theme of Reframing Disaster, which took place in Leeds in November–December 2014 and commemorated a series of significant anniversaries in 2014, including the 10th anniversary of the South Asian Tsunami, the 20th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, and the 30th anniversary of the Bhopal gas disaster. The aim of the Reframing Disaster activities was to open up new perspectives on how we understand global disasters in time and space; to analyse how different disasters — social and natural — are portrayed, compared, and memorialized across a range of media; and to explore especially how writers, artists, filmmakers, and photographers have gone about the task of reframing our understanding of disaster.
Technocratic definitions of disaster, such as the one used by the UN, tend to place a strong emphasis on social “impacts” by framing disaster, for instance, as a “serious disruption of the functioning of a community or a society” (The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, 2009). By contrast, historical and anthropological commentators tend to conceive of disaster more as a process that combines natural and social factors, in particular socially constructed forms of vulnerability, and which transforms and evolves in complex ways over time at the interface of environment and society (Hewitt, 1998). This latter approach is much more in tune with how we have found postcolonial writers, photographers, and artists respond to disasters, not least through their sensitivity to the long aftermaths of catastrophes and the difficulties of achieving sustainable “recovery” — a term that is often evoked in disaster research without enough attention to the issues that arise from the idea of restoring the previous social order in the wake of transformative events. The notion of “recovery” does not sit easily, for example, in many postcolonial contexts where the “norm” has been produced by colonial violence, military invasion, or systemic underdevelopment, and this is something that writers and artists draw attention to in representing disaster (see Carrigan, 2014, 2015), and which features in the interviews collected here. Our interviewees also align well with the focus of this special issue as in each case they are deeply attentive to how ecological issues are always conditioned by longer-term historical processes, highlighting the inextricability of the social and the environmental in postcolonial contexts marked by disaster.
This series of interviews brings together creative perspectives on some very different disasters. They are all contextualized by an initial personal awakening to complex catastrophe, which urged our interviewees to examine the histories prior to and following on from disaster in order to inform their creative work. Thus, the novelist Minoli Salgado reflects on the challenges of representing the South Asian Tsunami in the aftermath of civil war; photographer John Howard discusses his work on the little-known nuclear weapons disaster in Palomares, Spain in 1966; and to keeping its continuing effects in the public eye. All of these creative practitioners are united by a focus on questions of justice, and their works emphasize — and in some cases bring to light — the many ongoing injustices in the way disasters are dealt with, whether by the state or international actors. They are also keenly focused on how such issues unfold over time, whether in the case of corporate crime in Bhopal (The Bhopal Medical Appeal, 2012), US military-imperialist violence in southern Spain (Howard, 2011), or through compound disaster in South Asia. Together, the interviews show how artistic creativity can produce subtle critiques of disaster management while giving testimony to the ongoing aspects of postcolonial disasters that are all too frequently expunged from global memory. As our interviewees make clear, artistic texts can be seen as forms of activism and resistance against mismanagement, which provide conceptual and emotional resources that enhance the resilience of affected communities.
Q: What initially inspired you to write A Little Dust on the Eyes?
MS: Well, it would have been difficult for me not to write this book. It really began in 1987 when I was a student, and I hadn’t been back to the country for several years, partly because of the political unrest. When I went back the war had started — what people know as the Sri Lankan Civil War, between the LTTE [Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam] and the state. But in ’87 another hidden war was breaking out: an unofficial war in the south, between the state and a Marxist group called the JVP, made up largely of rural youth. This unofficial war lasted for about three years — a period during which I returned to the country a number of times, visiting ancestral homes on the south coast, where the novel is set. It was a period of terrible political violence which resulted in over 30,000 disappearances in the south — the exact figure is unknown. The sheer scale of this and the magnitude of silence about it, especially given the media focus on the larger war that was taking over the north and east, really unsettled me. In the final stages of writing the novel I was trying to get the exact figure for the disappearances in the south, and contacted a friend who works in human rights. I asked him: “What is the figure that you’re working to?” and he wrote back and said, “We can’t say, nobody counted”. It struck me then how true that was. “Nobody counted”: not only in relation to getting the figures on the number of dead and disappeared, but in relation to public recognition.
Q: The novel also represents the Boxing Day Tsunami, but your first published work on that was a prose piece that you later rewrote as a poem, “The waves”, which is dated 1 January 2005. These different literary responses are also divided by time. What did the different forms offer?
MS: I happened to arrive on the morning of the tsunami, and what you have in “The waves” in terms of describing the effects of the aftermath of the disaster was very much taken first-hand. We arrived in the early morning, six hours before it struck. “The waves” was written five days after the tsunami, and a day after I had been at some refugee camps. The sense of urgency was palpable. Everybody was doing something. You had to get involved. Writing “The waves” was my way of making sense of the whole experience. Looking back, I realize it’s a snapshot of that particular moment. With a novel, written so much later, I was trying to embrace many issues, not just the tsunami, but the tsunami and the enforced disappearances, and the impact these had on people from different classes and communities. There’s a sort of epic reach in the novel — it’s what the novel as a form invites. “The waves” has a stronger sense of a personal voice, and, when I rewrote it, it became a poem of voices, built around the voices I heard in the camps. I have to say that on rereading it later I wasn’t completely comfortable with it. This is partly because I am conscious of the extent of the changes that came later. I don’t feel completely comfortable with the representation of people as victims, because there was such a massive resilience amongst the people I met as well. This is only something that became obvious with hindsight. I kept in touch with a family that is mentioned in the poem, and they’ve moved on: they’ve done really well, and the kids are going to school, despite being relocated, as so many people were post-tsunami. People were physically affected in all sorts of long-lasting ways, but they fought back. So much has happened since that morning in December, a lot of reconstruction, especially in relation to infrastructure: roads, railways, and so on. But the picture remains very, very mixed in terms of the actual assistance given. Billions of dollars of aid came in but the distribution of aid was controlled by the government and there were many claims of corruption. What actually got through to the people who needed it most was very limited.
What I captured in “The waves”, I think, was the sense of utter, utter loss. It encapsulates a specific moment in time. The beauty of the form of a short prose piece and poem is that it allows for that kind of sharp temporal focus. The novel form is much more expansive and allows you to capture the broad sweep of history and link disparate events together in ways that compel you to read for cause and effect. It compels you to make sense of why something happened as well as how.
Q: What artistic challenges did you face in portraying the environmental dimensions and social trauma of disaster in the book? Does the immediacy of the tsunami become a medium for narrating other forms of devastation?
There are many challenges, not only aesthetic ones but ethical and cultural ones, too. The aesthetic ones are probably the most immediate: how do you find a language for disasters which are — almost by definition — un-narratable, but which are nevertheless over-narrated by the press and media, often in predictable ways: the same things get said again and again, the same footage gets played and replayed, so that language almost becomes meaningless. The word “devastation” has been used so much that it is beginning to lose currency. In relation to the tsunami, one of the things that I tried to do was find a language that might accommodate the sheer scale of it and at the same time convey the way it resists narration and show how it has been over-narrated. I did this by invoking different kinds of discursive register — the mythic, the journalistic, the scientific. I brought them all together as a kind of clash and excess of discourses to convey both the epic scale of the tragedy, its urgent need to be narrated, and the fact that what had happened exceeded, was beyond, narration. No one voice or mode can possibly register and accommodate what happened. What was needed was this excess that spilled over and into the personal stories of the people who were caught up by the waves. It is one of the most self-reflexive passages in the book, drawing attention to the way we make meaning of events and to the way that the meaning depends partly on the discursive register we choose to use.
As for the environment, it is important to remember that the novel represents two different disasters: war and the tsunami. The war impacted in one very obvious way. As a result of militarization, there was the territorialization of the country: boundary marking; security points; check points; no-go areas; and safe and forbidden zones. This is very clearly demarcated in the text. What the tsunami did, of course, was deterritorialize all of that. It just wiped away those boundaries. And what got imposed in the end was the kind of reterritorialization that comes about when people are displaced and the state tries to take control again. The end of the novel takes us into a period 15 months later and looks at how boundaries get changed, and how the environment is impacted in different ways. The novel engages with territorialization on multiple levels — I wanted to show that — but I was also keen to show how this is constantly undercut by human actions such as the cousins’ game of shadow run, and the radical instability of natural forces such as the sea.
Q: How uneven has the post-tsunami and post-conflict recovery been, and was it possible to represent this?
The first part of your question is best answered by someone who has worked directly in the recovery process; I have not worked professionally in this area and my experience is limited to personal observation, discussion, and reading. Having said that, it is well known that one of the immediate effects of the tsunami was that the people who lived on the coast were moved away from the coast and forced inland. They were relocated and they’ve had to reconstruct their lives since then. So the results are uneven, and very mixed. It depends which part of the coast you’re talking about, which class of person you’re talking about — there’s no general answer. It’s been positive for the country in terms of the developments in infrastructure, but on a local level, in terms of helping people, the story is more complex and varied.
As a writer, one of the things that interests me of course is language and the way the state scripts the narrative of the nation. In this case, the Sri Lankan state came up with its own official language and story for the tsunami. The word “reconstruction” got over-used, and politicians who had vested interests in presenting themselves as humanitarians were always speaking of reconstruction. The practicalities matter of course — the material necessities that help keep body and soul together — but we should also step back and ask what kind of reconstruction is possible after a large-scale catastrophe of the kind we’re talking about. In this sense, literature can compel us to rethink what we might mean by clunky terms such as reconstruction, and ask what the human basis for such a reconstruction might be.
And I guess one way to register the unevenness of the process of recovery from different kinds of disaster is to try and reflect a small cross-section of a community, and stay true to the experience of these characters. The novel focuses on the experiences of different members of an affluent family, but reaches into the lives of those who slip off the official record. It was important for me that we are left uncertain about Bradley’s fate and whereabouts at the end of the novel, and that we are confronted with the figure of an unnamed, homeless man, who is being photographed by a westerner eager to capture and contain the post-tsunami narrative. These subaltern characters — one a victim of war and the other of the tsunami — need to be recognized as both marginalized and central. The way they get configured in the story, not just as agents or victims of history but as embattled representations in the process of the readers’ witnessing of history, matters.
Q: Water is always on the horizon in your novel: the concerns and tensions of characters are mediated through water imagery, and even the British city in which it begins is by the sea. Can you say more about this?
In terms of beginning with Brighton, by the sea, I always wanted the novel to begin and end with the sea — it just kind of worked as a narrative frame. There’s a move from one narrative perspective to another in the text, from Savi to Renu, and there’s the movement of the sun across to the west, bringing the novel full circle to the beginning. I love novels that are loose but give a sense of wholeness through a narrative frame. It felt very natural for me to have that beginning and then end with the sea. As you say, there’s a lot of water imagery and I actually ended up cutting back on it because I felt it had too much emphasis. But it was necessary and also utterly natural for me to use it because if you go to the south coast of Sri Lanka, the sound of the sea dominates. It’s a crashing sound, it’s overwhelming, you cannot forget that you’re by the sea. We have these rip tides and huge waves — the sound is with you all the time. Beginning with Brighton allowed an entry point into a narrative which was going to move across continents and be overwhelmed by the sea.
Q: Do you consider there to be an activist component to your literary and academic work?
I’m very conscious of my role as someone who is both inside and outside Sri Lanka, of my role as a cultural mediator. You are going to be positioned as a cultural representative whether you like it or not, so you might as well use it to make a positive difference. I’m aware of the problems and ethics of this, and have tried to address it in Writing Sri Lanka (Salgado, 2007) by making links between resident and diasporic writing, and in the novel by integrating it into the narrative. It’s a way of challenging polarizing, binarist thinking, and is there in the connections between the cousins and in Renu’s story, when she reflects upon her own position as she writes a journal about the disappeared. Enforced disappearances lie at the heart of this novel: I was fascinated by the whole business of how you actually address a loss which is incomplete, and will almost certainly remain incomplete.
I have engaged with these issues in my teaching and academic writing, but I am most energized when I try and tackle them in literary practice. Academic analysis can be helpful, particularly in getting you to understand the struggles that other writers have had in exploring ideas that you care about, but at the end of the day such analysis keeps you at a critical distance from things. As for my work having an activist element, I am not sure quite what this means. Surely all socially grounded writing — whether academic or literary — is in the business of intervening in cultural debates, otherwise why write?
Q: What provoked your interest in Palomares, and what does it mean to you, having lived there? Would you characterize it as a postcolonial disaster?
My initial interest was provoked by acute shame at not knowing about the Palomares disaster, both as an American citizen by birth and as an American historian by training. As I’ve discovered, that ignorance is widespread and wilful, resulting from the censorship, lies, and distortions of the Franco dictatorship and of US military officials, diplomats, journalists, mapmakers, filmmakers, and photographers.
Though I first went to Andalucía for a Delfina Foundation writer’s residency in 1993, I didn’t learn about the Palomares disaster until a Fundación Valparaíso artist’s residency in 2010. Shame, outrage, then critical analysis propelled my research, and I made several more trips to Palomares, Vera Playa, and relevant archives. It wasn’t until I lived on the street that memorializes the disaster in its very name, 17 January 1966 Crossing, during the winter of 2011–2012, that I began to comprehend the great range of local opinion and the varied investments in remembering or forgetting.
The American “empire” is history’s mightiest and one of the nastiest, from Native American genocide to the 21st-century imperial war complex of domestic and overseas bases. According to conservative estimates excluding Afghanistan and Iraq, around 200,000 US troops and 100,000 civilian employees are stationed in 1000 overseas military facilities in 40 nations, with staggering budgets, armaments, toxic wastes, and crime rates, including frequent attacks on local men, and sexual assaults on women and girls.
After World War II, the US either installed or propped up numerous Latin American and southern European totalitarian regimes. After Franco’s allies Hitler and Mussolini were defeated, the UN [United Nations], IMF [International Monetary Fund], EC [European Community], and NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] shunned the dictatorship. The US embraced it, building bases, shoring up industry, and putting its vast cultural apparatus to work legitimizing authoritarian rule. After all, Franco shared America’s rabid Christian anti-communism. In many ways, Spain was a US Cold War client state.
The Palomares disaster would not have happened but for US bases in Spain, established in part to refuel B-52 hydrogen bombers flying to and from the periphery of the Soviet Union: classic Cold War aggression and provocation. Despite this 1966 nuclear air disaster, the US to this day operates an immensely problematic nuclear naval station in Cádiz, subject to regular protests.
Q: Could you say more about the importance and challenges of combining landscape and portraiture photography in the collection?
Ethical challenges arise from portraiture’s notorious contest of wills, the differing objectives of portraitist and so-called sitter or subject, compounded by power imbalances between the two. However, since the people of Palomares have been consistently marginalized in dominant narratives, they have to figure in my project front and centre. Viewers must recognize and sympathize with the gross injustices of their circumstances. The project’s principal purpose revolves around these people and their predicament.
That said, it seems most respectful to keep a certain distance unless and until invited into intimacy: conversation, regular meetings, friendship. So beyond the landscapes — with all their traces of human handiwork — you see a combination of imagery. On the one hand, in most photos of people, anonymity is maintained by blurring or by depicting from behind, at an angle, or at considerable distance, all the while faithfully articulating specificities of identity and locality. “Mother and daughter”, for example, are fully legible as such. Walking across a field of alfalfa, they are situated in an agrarian economy. Their religious and ethnic affiliations — and local religious and ethnic diversity — are suggested by the head-scarf. Sadly demonstrating regional racism and Islamophobia, Palomares is sometimes derided as “Palo-Moros”, suggesting that historical battles between Moors and Christians somehow could shorthand complex racialized struggles, such that a perceived present-day non-white excess in Palomares (with peoples of East, West, and North African descent) is subsumed within Moros. For centuries, of course, Spain has been a crossroads of Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, and thus the major patriarchal monotheisms: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. On the other hand, there are traditional frontal portraits of friends, neighbours, and acquaintances. None are studio portraits. Individuals are encountered and depicted in situ, maybe posed but never staged.
“Mother & Daughter” Courtesy of John Howard and Southern Spaces
Q: Your work documents the rise of new sexual economies and cultures in a disaster landscape: what effect does the knowledge of radioactivity bring to the way the space is imagined?
Aside from the daily psychic numbing necessary to live in such a place — a certain strategy of anxiety management — entrepreneurs are invested in minimizing fear so as to maximize clientele. Similarly, large landowners have incentive to downplay if not deny concerns about radioactivity to generate faith in their produce, to keep wholesale markets buoyant, and to ensure a steady supply of cheap migrant labourers — North and West Africans mostly, who work in fields laden with plutonium. So ascertaining levels of knowingness, silences, omissions, and half-truths is a fraught and tangled process.
Throughout the world, LGBTI [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex] people lead lives of increased risk: hate crimes, employment discrimination, suicidal thoughts, homophobic and transphobic violence (Gupta, 2008). These facts colour every aspect of existence: the risk thresholds are necessarily different. Queer scholars track how, despite this, or to remedy this, gender and sexual outcasts often adopt liminal spaces, turning “dangerous” criminalized “inner cities”, for example, into lively nighttime gathering places and cultural centres. Devalued, unloved, underappreciated spaces are transformed into relative safe havens with critical mass and political potential (Delany, 1999; Howard, 1999).
“Planting” Courtesy of John Howard and Southern Spaces
But as best I can tell, what is happening around Palomares is unprecedented. Where African American servicemen, in another egregious example of environmental racism, once were made to shift 5000 barrels of radioactive contaminants for shipment and burial in the United States, there are now naturist hostels and residential communities, a nudist beach with gay cruising ground, and a commercial strip with eateries, drag venues, gay bars, and heterosexual swingers clubs. Street art captured in my photo “Vanitas” — reagents dabbed onto a rusty utility cover, producing a skull — suggests some folks fully appreciate the mortal dangers.
Q: How does photography function as environmental activism?
It sometimes does, quite effectively. Too often, corporate profiteers and military warmongers poison our environment and choose not to clean up — “externalizing” those enormous costs, making all of us pay, with our health, with our taxes, with decades-long efforts to force accountability. Lax cleanup can lead to cover-up, as in this case. Cancers emerge slowly, often long after: insidious slow violence that’s difficult to depict, difficult to attribute. But even in the case of invisible subatomic particles, photographic imagery can document — and denounce — threats to communities, dangers to life, social injustice.
If shown ominous green fencing with warning signs — contrary to US Ambassador Duke’s claim that “no trace whatsoever of radioactivity has ever been found” — then public confidence in these secretive organizations, blind faith in state or corporate regulators, can be eroded. If then shown farmers cultivating land immediately adjacent to beehives, pets, and children, then people of conscience may be compelled to sit up, take notice, and hopefully take action. If with a subtle postscript, viewers are told — in spineless bureaucratese — about military whitewashing of radioactive homes, homes where people still live, plutonium just painted into the walls, then surely we can mobilize people of good will around remediation and reparations. Otherwise, any meaningful reconciliation is impossible.
Q: What might photography contribute to the resilience of survivors?
Photography has extraordinary evidentiary properties. Despite the advances of postmodernity, our hard-earned scepticism toward metanarratives, our savvy around artificing and Photoshopping, photography’s verisimilitude and exactitude yields a realism that can’t be wished away. Sorry to quote Barthes, but that has been. Similarly: We are here. We endure. Despite all the problems with documentary’s truth claims, the genre’s sometimes manipulative reality effects, people in Palomares can look at the bold British and Spanish documentary films produced 20 and 40-plus years after the bombs and say, Look at all we’ve achieved, in spite of everything. The survivors will hopefully look at my photobook and be reminded: We work, we memorialize, we struggle, we continue to fight for justice.
Q: How do you see the disaster mutating over time, and how is its “whitewashing” being resisted?
As expected and as proven, plutonium in and around Palomares is decaying into americium, another radioactive carcinogen. CIEMAT, the successor institution of Franco’s JEN — the Nuclear Energy Board — seeks to minimize concerns. Activists, authors, artists, and independent scientists dispute their findings.
Since the earliest days, anniversaries have renewed efforts for justice. A first anniversary protest mobilized 1000 marchers, whom US newspapers undercounted as 40! Franco jailed the organizers, including Isabel Álvarez. Israeli feminist Dina Hecht directed an extraordinary Channel 4 documentary aired in Britain on the 20th anniversary, but it never has been broadcast in the United States. Spanish documentary efforts increased after the transition to democracy and around the 40th anniversary.
If some small business owners and large landholders have great incentive to keep quiet, organizers and officials in Palomares promise openness and honesty. As former mayor Antonia Flores puts it, “Since no one cares a damn about us, we won’t forget”. Effective strategies of memorialization include street-naming. Two streets and their street signs memorialize the date: 17 January 1966.
Music also enables resistant remembrance, a defiant laughing in the face of adversity. Los Wikingos (aka Los Iberos) penned “La Bomba Ye-Ye”, which satirizes, among other things, the late ’60s exodus out of Palomares. Local gallows humour is implied in my Palomares Square concert photo “After Encore (‘La Bomba’)”. Since ’66, you see, Richie Valens’ 1958 hit “La Bamba” has been sung in Palomares as “La Bomba”.
Q: There is much connecting Palomares and Bhopal, but they have also unfolded in quite different cultural contexts. What was your reaction to seeing your own Palomares and Raghu Rai’s Bhopal photographs 1 together?
It was heartbreaking; many of Rai’s images are horrifying. But it was also energizing to be reminded of local resilience and Rai’s consistent activist commitments. He’s done so much to bring Bhopalis to the attention of an often indifferent world. The photographs highlight the burials and mass cremations, the recovery and reconstruction, as well as efforts to extradite Warren Anderson and hold Union Carbide and Dow accountable.
But the disasters, for all their similarities, are also vastly different. In Bhopal, many thousands died the most gruesome deaths within minutes, hours, days. Hundreds of thousands more suffered injuries and life-long illnesses. Around Palomares, the official US death toll is seven airmen, 15 if they deign to count the eight more killed in a Palomares supply plane crash. The total population of Palomares and Villaricos combined has never exceeded 3000.
Awful to have to make these comparisons, but of course, foot-dragging bureaucrats tend to insist upon a “sense of proportion” — another agonizing aspect of “slow violence” (Nixon, 2011). Beyond the many Spanish injuries, fatalities, and miscarriages attributed to the disaster at the time, 3000 or so locals and countless thousands of visitors have been exposed to deadly radiation throughout the decades. (It begs mention: 3000 American lives lost results in perpetual warfare for much of the earth.)
The US military didn’t even attempt to clean up the plutonium that settled on the Almagrera mountainsides downwind of Palomares since, compared to the flat fields, they were deemed too rugged, too onerous, to decontaminate. So each fresh wind continues to blow plutonium and now americium over the mountains and into Villaricos. Even Franco’s scientists admitted this.
The American cover-up and whitewash were both figurative and literal. In addition to the 5000 barrels of contaminants shipped away, the US left behind and buried two massive unlined trenches full of hazardous materials, only discovered in 2008 — the literal cover-up. Similarly, when high-pressure water-hosing failed to decontaminate local homes, servicemen whitewashed them, simply painting the plutonium into the sides of houses. So the whitewash too was literal.
Which returns me to acute shame. How could US military officials do this? How could the highest authorities in Washington countenance it? The grim history of American empire shows this is not unusual in the least. From Native American reservations to Japanese American concentration camps, US policy assigns inferior habitation to “inferior” peoples; it constructs boarding-school prisons and barbed-wire compounds for innocents, never mind due process. (Never forget Guantanamo.) American chemical and nuclear warfare permanently sullies its imperial outposts, from Vietnam’s Agent Orange to Spain’s plutonium and americium to Iraq’s depleted uranium.
As the Palomares disaster’s 50th anniversary approaches, people in Palomares and Villaricos demand plainspoken reassurances about past and present exposures and future risks. I sincerely hope the American people and the international community decide that the time has finally come, at long last, to do the right thing.
Q: Your work highlights the consequences of injustice in global contexts, with a focus on British and American imperialism. What does “reframing disaster” mean to you in your poetry?
That’s interesting; I was going to ask you a similar question — how you define that term. For me, that’s probably one of the prime motivators of my work. I’d never thought about it with that term, but it strikes me as something that’s probably quite visceral to what I do. The entire impetus for me to approach the “war on terror”, and American/British imperialism since — and before — through the prism of art has been to try and redress the imbalance, and I think the artist’s work is to reframe, especially when working within political paradigms. If we look at the initial “war on terror”, in Afghanistan and Iraq, we were being told that that disaster was happening because those countries were producing terrorists or that there were weapons of mass destruction, and for most people, but especially those who have any cultural understanding of that part of the world, it is striking as to how untrue that is. I was quite overblown, actually, by how much they were lying. For the first time I became really sensitive to the language being used in the media, the language being used by politics, and the way they were reframing that disaster. And all these other amazing phrases were coming out at the time: “axis of evil”; “operation infinite justice”! The infinite sense of it as never-ending indicates how pervasive they were about to make this issue. So my work initially was all about just standing up and saying actually it’s not that. The axis of evil doesn’t lie over there — people are lying if they say that. If we want to understand how to deal with this problem, I suppose you encapsulate that quite well in that phrase “reframing disaster”. I felt like I was in a tunnel and I needed to see the light for myself, to write this and say it out loud in front of people, so that I wasn’t darkened by the tunnel that was enveloping all of us.
Q: What does poetic form contribute to your construction of the disastrous environments represented in your work?
My poetry, I’m very aware, is bound by rhythm and rhyme, but there was no formal education there, so my primary references aren’t what might be typical for most poets. For me, my poetic references come from my home, and my culture, and what resonated for me as a child. So the Qur’an is a great cultural poetic reference for me. But then also, my father really loves Urdu poetry and Sufi poetry, so that was always in my home as I was growing up. I found myself getting really connected to reggae music and dub poetry later as a consequence. I felt as if by exploring reggae music I was continuing my journey with Urdu poetry, in a strange way, except that it was in my language, English. What really inspired me about Urdu poetry is that as well as love being a great subject matter, it’s also a very revolutionary form, as was definitely evident around the time of the British and since, with poets like Ghalib and Faiz, and Habib Jalib. These are revolutionary poets who use rhyme and rhythm, and what that evokes in a person, to maximum effect, by marrying them with the content of revolutionary activity, and social reform. And for me that makes sense because revolution is a rhyme, a return to form. Content-wise, I feel as though my strongest work comes from writing that is centred on understanding and reframing the world in socio-political terms. Through my poem “Clash” I wanted to reframe that term: “clash of civilizations”. The performance poetry is also the form, that’s why rhythm and rhyme work so well in what I do: I write for the telling, because it’s the people that I really want my work to be for, and I want to be part of that engagement. It comes back to the media, in reframing everything. If they get an audience, direct to the people, then my impetus comes from that: I also want an audience direct to the people, in which I can reframe what they frame.
Q: How do poems of yours such as “Bhopal” and “Clash” bring together the local and global? How do you understand the connections between environmental harm in Bhopal and the destructive effects of military industrialism on other global environments?
The more I write, the more I learn that it’s a basic rule of effective storytelling to encapsulate the global into the local. Because the global’s too big to relate to. All it becomes really is a lecture: an academic piece, or a journalistic piece of writing — and that’s fine, it has its place, but its place shouldn’t really be in the arts, because the arts’ function is to relate and resonate with the subject, for you to have some kind of emotional reaction, and to personalize it. It’s best done when you can localize a global issue. So of course Bhopal is just one example of a broader, globalized kind of disaster framework of military industrialism, imperialist capitalism. For me the ultimate litmus is that I’m going to be on stage saying this: I need phrases, I need an inroad through which people can understand as quickly as possible. So Bhopal is an excellent example of that. It happened in the part of the world where my family come from, broadly speaking. I feel I understand the culture and I understand the people, and I can speak about Bhopal on a personal level, and on a local perspective, even though I’m not directly from there: through cultural affinity, I can understand. So I would hope that wherever I tell that poem, people will be able to make their own connections to it through their own lives, and their own experiences, and their own environments. Unfortunately there’s nowhere really that isn’t affected by the power of the corporate elite: if they want, it’ll be India that they abuse; if they want, it’ll be the north of England.
Q: Does poetry empower those who hear or read of disaster, especially a disaster like Bhopal’s ongoing effects? Do you see your poetry more as activism than commemoration?
Again, I hope all of these things happen, but I’ve got to do it for myself: I’ve got to keep out of the tunnel myself, and so that’s why I do it, and I hope that it’s activism. All I know is that I don’t want it to be commemoration. It certainly is a remembrance, so in that sense it’s a commemoration, but a remembrance keeps it alive, whereas a commemoration accepts that something’s dead. Bhopal — for example — isn’t dead. It isn’t going to die, and my poem, whatever its uses, aims to keep it alive in the consciousness of people, and in myself. I’m not doing it because I want to create a legion of political activists, although I’d love it if that happened: my primary objective is to keep myself out of the dark. I’m still very angry at the level of lies, and how acceptable that’s becoming. It’s an evil because it distorts the truth to the extent that whole cultures are lost, that a sense of self is lost for entire communities. And I hope of course that it resonates with people, and I hope it activates people, and if it does, it’s activism. But at the very least, I think it’s remembrance.
Q: Your poem “Dust” seems to subtly deploy South Asian spiritual cosmologies as a political tool in relating “haves” and “have nots”. What’s the importance of bringing different conceptual perspectives together in representing larger forces such as globalization, imperialism, violence, and disaster?
I studied chemistry, I practise the arts, and I think that, with other fascinations about the world, my view is quite holistic. I see how connected everything is. And I’m not the first person to have done that: as you say, there’s a South Asian cosmology, a literary/spiritual cosmology that extends across faiths and across the communities and cultures. So the Bhakti and Sufi movements are a great reference and a great point of inspiration, in which social ills and their reform have always been married with a spiritual development. The spiritual and socio-political have always been quite happily entwined in South Asian spiritual cosmology; if what you want to do is challenge what’s being said in the media by politicians, adopting that approach is so helpful, because it’s so universal.
Q: Could you tell us the origins of the Bhopal: Facing 30 photography project?
I went to Bhopal in 2013, recommended by a friend who, relatively speaking, lives not far from Bhopal. She didn’t know that the disaster site had never been remediated, and was completely shocked — it just wasn’t talked about. She visited and told me about some of the things that she saw. I was planning a three-month trip to India at the time — working for various different charities and organizations — and after some research found the Bhopal Medical Appeal, and the Sambhavna Trust Clinic in Bhopal. I contacted them to say I’d like to come and work for them, take some pictures for whatever projects they had, and do something of use.
Prior to the disaster, Union Carbide weren’t making a profit selling pesticides to Indian farmers. The factory was built during India’s Green Revolution, where so-called “high-yielding” seed varieties were adopted to increase food production. In actual fact the seeds required more fertilizer, pesticides, and greater irrigation, which was all too expensive for farmers, and many were driven to debt. Union Carbide failed to maintain safety systems in an attempt to save costs, and the plant eventually exploded in 1984. At that time it released 27 tonnes of methyl isocyanate gas (MIC). One drop of this chemical is enough to kill someone. In 1984, thousands lost their lives, and to date over 25,000 people have died as a result of gas exposure; 120,000 still suffer today. In 1984, Union Carbide left the site to avoid arrest and trial. They haven’t returned since; in fact, Warren Anderson, head of Union Carbide, was still wanted in India for culpable homicide until his death at the end of 2014.
I didn’t go to Bhopal with the intention of starting this project, but was drawn to the place after reading about the situation. My background is in biological photography, and my interests are in the impact of processes on people’s lives and on the environment. I was asked to photograph the Sambhavana Clinic Garden — it’s completely pesticide-free and used to treat people with Ayurvedic medicine, so that even people who are below the poverty line can afford treatment for the effects of the disaster 30 years on. While there, I visited the Union Carbide site. I quickly became fascinated by the wall that was erected to contain the disaster site. It’s supposedly creating a barrier between what is safe, and what is not. What astonished me most about the wall was the level of its degradation.
“A section of the Union Carbide wall that surrounds the disaster site.” © Francesca Moore
“A cross section of the Union Carbide factory’s boundary wall at J P Nagar Road, commonly known as Union Carbide Road, Bhopal, India.” © Francesca Moore
There were parts that were only knee-high, huge cavernous holes at ground level. Kids would just walk through with cricket bats — it’s an appealing grassy spot for a game of cricket. Residents’ houses are just around the outside of the wall. It’s not that residents don’t know that it’s contaminated — although they were told the opposite for many years — it’s just that it’s their home and they can’t avoid it. People graze their animals in there and dry the animal’s dung patties against the wall to make fuel, and collect building materials from inside. I was shocked that the supposed boundary was not protecting the people, and was instead providing easy access to contaminants.
I documented the entire boundary wall as it looked nearly 30 years after the disaster. My initial motivation was that more people should see this. I photographed it from the perspective of a child who cannot see the abandoned factory within, and so cannot see the dangers. Each image joins the next, to form a continuum. I wanted to give a visual experience of what it was like to walk around the outside of the wall. These images became the first part of Bhopal Facing 30. Fortunately, later that year, I was awarded Arts Council England funding to develop the project.
Q: What did portraiture offer in the compromised context of Bhopal’s ongoing disaster, and how did your creative work support the cultural life of resistance?
I wanted to juxtapose the wall images, which represent 30 years of pain and suffering, with photographs of the people who live around the wall because I found the residents surrounding the contaminated site to be resilient and optimistic. While I was photographing the wall, I was constantly being welcomed by people: “come for a cup of tea”, and “come to my house”. I wondered: have these families — mostly below the poverty line, without modern technology — ever been able to document their children growing up, or have a family portrait taken?
I didn’t just want to photograph them in “documentary” style. I wanted to reflect how I saw the people: not as victims but as survivors. They were strong, resilient, and they’d been campaigning for 30 years for justice. The formal portraits reference the traditional Indian studio portraiture usually acquired by the wealthy and higher castes. In India, a formal family portrait demonstrates wealth, accomplishment, and a sense of achievement — academic and employment certificates of middle-class Indians are displayed by their family portraits. In the same way that middle-class Indians validate their social position through family portraiture, I felt that the people of Bhopal could register their own dignity, values, and resilience through the medium of the family portrait.
I researched the traditional formal portraiture used to document Bhopal’s Mughal-appointed ruling classes: the Nawabs and Nawab Begums (male and female nobility). The images were European in influence as they were captured by the wealthy elites of the colonial era, but they were setting a precedent for documenting high society. When I returned to Bhopal, I built a studio in one of the worst affected areas, just outside the Union Carbide wall, in Sambhavna’s Nawab Clinic. The studio was nothing but a tin hut, but I wanted to turn it into something notably Bhopali. I dressed it in rich red materials — the colour of celebration in India — and had traditional Zardozi needlework made up on the background. This embroidery is typically Muslim in style and origin, which suited the inhabitants, as they are predominantly Muslim. Because of this, they are perceived to be the lower caste in society — an irony since Bhopal was formerly ruled by Muslim Begums. I also got chairs — which people informed me are known locally as “King chairs” — and an affluent looking rug.
“Bahadur Shah (m/55), Haneefa (f/50), Yunus (m/30), Firoza (f/25), Faruq (m/25, absent), Mehran (f/21), Firoj (m/22), Sahena (f/20), Nazmeen (f/17), Monees (m/8), Asifa (f/5), Alisha (f/1), Moin (m/2.5), Sahil (m/9 months)” © Francesca Moore
Every picture looks exactly the same, a typology that references the vast number of people living with the disaster and the secondary groundwater contamination that everyone there lives with. Only the family changes between each image. I could never have photographed everyone affected, but in this way I could represent them all, with dignity. In just under three weeks I photographed 208 family portraits. I invited people to come for a portrait in the three generations of their family — grandparents, parents, and children — to depict the three generations since the disaster. Every family that came was given a print to keep.
When photographing people I only asked their name, age, where they lived in 1984, where they live now, and whether they were affected by gas or by water contamination. I didn’t ask about their ailments or problems, despite knowing many people have issues with their respiratory systems, their immune systems, and their reproductive systems, as well as cancers, due to exposure to contaminants. I wanted the portraits to be empowering for people, and any other information from them was given voluntarily.
In representing the families with dignity, and as equals, I wanted to demonstrate that these people aren’t victims of their own actions, or poverty, but that they were subject to a system that allowed the economic growth of a multinational company at the expense of life and the environment. Bhopal: Facing 30 aimed to allow the people to represent themselves with dignity, and in a way I thought this could act to change peoples’ perceptions of those affected, or to allow people to see them in a different way. I had seen so many images of people perceived as victims already, and I didn’t want to add to these. Everyone can relate to a family portrait, so these images are very familiar ground, but when you realise the context of the people in the pictures, then you can see a message.
Footnotes
Funding
The interviews used in this article emerge from a research project entitled Representing Postcolonial Disaster: Conflict, Consumption, Reconstruction, which is funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (UK).