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ABSTRACT
War memorials are a common and often controversial part of the commemoration of past wars. In order to better grasp their importance for the way war endures below the surface of peace, this article stages an ethnographic encounter with a Namibian monument: Heroes’ Acre. The memorial embodies the official Namibian narrative on past wars by emphasizing a nationalist and quasi-religious symbolism, a framing that has been challenged by a number of writers pointing to the need for going beyond the state discourse. This article complements and complicates the way Heroes’ Acre appears in discourse by focusing on the interstices and absences at the site. By drawing upon my own visit to the monument as well as theoretical engagements, most notably Georgio Agamben’s discussion of ‘the empty throne’, I read Heroes’ Acre as a place where political power functions through emptiness, as it allows the future of war to endure in the present. Engaging particularly with the empty graveyard at the site, I argue that its emptiness needs to be understood as a guarantee for war – not in case it occurs – but as a ready-made symbol of glory, always virtually there, waiting to be fulfilled.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and Stefan Borg, Astrid Nordin, Tom Lundborg, Susanna Melin, and Jacqueline Anwar.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. The terms ‘emptiness’ and ‘disappearance’ are used interchangeably and in an explorative sense below. It would be an interesting topic for future research to clarify their relationship, perhaps particularly so in relation to the thought of Baudrillard and Agamben. Some efforts in this regard are already underway in international relations (see for example Nordin and Öberg Citation2015; Nordin Citationforthcoming).
2. http://stories.namibiatourism.com.na/blog/bid/311247/Celebrating-the-Heroes-of-Namibia, last accessed 20 November 2015.
3. http://www.swapoparty.org/remains_of_the_gallant_fighters_laid_to_rest.html, accessed 13 February 2015.
4. http://www.namibia-travel.net/travelguide/southern-namibia/heroes-acre.html, accessed 20 November 2015.
5. This is not to say that my view is more (or less) important than the state narrative it critiques, but simply a way of heeding the call by the state discourse itself. And in so doing I take a page out of Baudrillard’s book that ‘thought always has to be a challenge. It has to preserve something of the order of the counter-gift’ (Citation2004, 77). I am in so many words a representative of the ‘target audience’ of the site, and it is this ‘feel’ that I offer up as a ‘counter-gift’ (in the Maussian sense) to the state discourse.
6. See for example the front cover of Baines and Vale (Citation2013), which consists of a picture of the bronze statue of the guerrilla soldier.
7. For a more in-depth discussion see Förster (Citation2013).
8. This draws upon the insistence that in order to challenge a state of things or a material object, ‘the real task of theory is to complicate the object’ (Baudrillard Citation2015, 64). Arguably, the main difference between drawing upon disappearance as a poetics of writing and what has been known as ‘new materialism’ is that the former attempts to integrate disappearance in writing in a way that might or might not challenge the symbolism of an object, while the latter is more interested in understanding the existing relationship between matter and discourse (see Aradau Citation2010; Connolly Citation2013).
9. This can be compared to the argument that radical thought needs to ‘inoculate nothingness’ into the objects it attempts to think and challenge (Baudrillard Citation2015, 125).
10. Agamben’s notion of ‘inoperativity’ is complex. For a detailed account of the concept and the way it relates to politics, see Prozorov (Citation2014).
11. Baudrillard’s idealization of the desert as a place for counter-culture arguably stems from a refusal to reduce the subject to a result of the alienating structures of production (see Baudrillard Citation1975). Similarly, as Prozorov argues, Agamben’s notion of inoperativity is derived to a large degree from the Italian ‘autonomist’ movement which emphasized a refusal to work (Prozorov Citation2014, 33). Such refusals are also evident in how both Agamben and Baudrillard tend to draw explicitly upon the anti-hero Bartleby, and particularly the notion ‘I would prefer not to’.
12. The poem centres on the harsh experience of being in exile as well as returning to one’s homeland. It follows directly upon the speech in 1990 by President Nujoma, himself an exile, in the official pamphlet of the inauguration.
13. Consider the story of the World War II veteran George Evans who allegedly got sacked as a speaker at Remembrance Day in England after including a poem about remembering not only friends but also enemies; see Evans (Citation2015).
14. http://www.namibiansun.com/politics/swapo-veterans-get-heroes-burial.83309, accessed 30 November 2015.
15. Barkawi and Brighton (Citation2011, 142) point to the importance of wresting the knowledge of war from the sphere of political authority as one concluding aim in their calling for a ‘critical war studies’.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Dan Öberg
Dan Öberg is Senior Lecturer of War Studies, Department of Military Science, Swedish Defense University, Stockholm, and a STINT visiting professor at Tokyo University. His current research and teaching focus on war and warfare from a critical perspective. His recent publications include research articles in Millennium Journal of International Studies, International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, and Journal of Narrative Politics.