Something Different than Survivor's Guilt

I am writing a longer article on the Unembedded exhibition of photojournalism from Iraq (which I previously blogged about here) and I'm looking for resources to help me to describe and analyze some of the things I felt while viewing the photos. Guilt is not something that I feel often, and I'm not sure if it is entirely accurate descriptor of what I mean (or maybe it's exactly accurate). And of course anger, sadness and outrage. I am looking for resources, be they scholarly works or personal accounts, on viewing images like these--of transgressions against one's people--from the position of survivor, 2nd+ generation, and perpatrator (whether original or 2nd+ generation). So far I have been researching imagery of lynching, slavery, the Holocaust and the Vietnam War, and I would appreciate any recommendations within or beyond these topics.

Viewing the experiences represented in the exhibition certainly put the discrimination that I experience as an Arab American in context real quick. I thought of last summer when my aunt described all these wars by saying, "This is the life of the Arabs," and then I thought when other family members say that I am not Arab because I am American, maybe it is true because I get to be safe from the wars. I had deep feelings of guilt then because of how unfair it is that I get to have all these basic priveleges that are denied to people who are the same as me. I look for ways that I benefit from the wars overseas so that I may examine my complicity in them, but I can't find them. I know who my allegience is to. I have no (familial or otherwise) connections to Iraq, but four years ago while I was working in the mall, someone's grandmother told me in Arabic that we are all Arabs now, and I still find that to be true. Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon; Even if you aren't my people, you're still my people. Looking at the photos of Iraq felt the same as looking at the photos of Lebanon last summer, even as I viewed the photos from Lebanon with Lebanese family members who had fled their home, felt the same as looking at photos of Palestine even as I imagine my grandfather's house and remember the stories my aunties told me when I was little.

Unembedded, Shirin Neshat and Botero

There are three topics in art that I am particularly interested in right now. The first is the exhibition and book, "Unembedded," which features the work of four independant photojournalists (two American, one Canadian, and one Iraqi). I was fortunate enough to have an oppurtunity to see the exhibition at my school at the Elaine Jacobs Gallery (who is showing Emily Jacir's Where We Come From in March). Because my favorite professor, Dora Apel, helped to bring the exhibition and two of the photographers (Kael Alford and Thorne Anderson) to my school, I was fortunate enough to be present for two lectures by them in one day, the first in my Contemporary Art Theory and Criticism class and the second in the lecture hall next to the gallery. You can read my thoughts on the exhibition in greater detail in the article I wrote for the Metro Times (one of our "weekly freebies" here in Detroit).

The second area of interest is the work of Shirin Neshat. Because I have never been fortunate enough to see any of her videos (other than this clip on YouTube), so my primary interest is her photography, specifically the "Women of Allah" series. I recently did TONS research on her work, representations of the veil, Western representations of Muslim women, and colonialist history in the Middle East and North Africa for a research paper I wrote on her work, which I am still editing and updating. Neshat is an Iranian immigrant to the US who's early photographic series "Unveiling" and "Women of Allah" deal with her reaquaintance to the new Iran after spening the years leading up to, during, and following the Islamic Revolution. She grew up in a secular Iran, and was shocked on her return because of the heavy idealogical basis of the Islamic Republic. In writing about "Women of Allah," I concluded that those images, which are almost exclusively shown in the Western world because that is where Neshat lives and works and because the Iranian government has exiled Neshat, draw upon a visual lexicon that can't be understood without sufficient knowledge of both Islamic culture and Western ideas about Muslim women, making this work multicultural without submitting to all the pitfalls immigrant artists in the West are often succeptible to, namely attempting to draw parallels between their two worlds and recycling visual motifs of both worlds in their work.

The third point of interest is Botero's new series, "Abu Ghraib," which are about the soldier photography we saw back in 2004. My mom was sweet enough to give the book to my boyfriend as a Christmas gift, so of course I consider it half mine. If you have a passing familiarity with Botero's work, you might find this an odd topic for him, like I did. But in the foreward of the Abu Ghraib book there are several examples of other politically motivated artworks of his, most often related to South American struggles. His style of rendering figures as heavy, voluptouos and massive is somehow able to feminize the torture victims while simultaneously making the aggressors hyper-masculine. I just began looking at these images last night, and I am sure I will have a lot more to say once I've more thoroughly reviewed them. As with the other two topics in this post, I will continue to write and think about them, and am very interested in other's opinions.