Arts & International Affairs: Volume 2, Issue 1 | Page 25

it reveals. �� It not only renders possible analysis of the inter-relationship
between these two dimensions, but also complicates our understanding
of victims and perpetrators; perpetrators can, to some extent, be victims,
too, “transformed … into people we weren’t before, that we’d never been,
into poor cornered animals filled with evil and terror. In the depths of our
yellow eyes wailed a panicked childhood fear, a mute timid panic clouded by
hesitation and shame” (Antunes ����:���). The reduction to two opposing
subject positions—victim versus perpetrator—in such dynamic, ambivalent,
chaotic, and complex social interactions as independence wars offers only
limited satisfaction. As noted in many contexts, a strict dichotomy perpetrator
versus victim is analytically insufficient. Rothberg (����:��), for example,
notes “the permeable relation, in cultural texts as well as in history, between
enemies ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of empire as well as between ‘perpetrators’
and ‘victims’ and ‘enemies’ and ‘friends.’” �� Fujii, in her micro-study on the
���� genocide in Rwanda, shows how pre-conceived notions of “survivor”
and “perpetrator” can collapse when scrutinized thoroughly in light of
empirical evidence (����:��–��). It is in this context that art can assume an
eminently political character—not by taking sides and simplifying but by
complicating and showing the complexities of human interactions. Indeed,
Camões (����:��), writing in ����, was aware of these complexities when he
included in Os Lusíadas (The Lusíads)—the famous epic critically celebrating
the Portuguese overseas expansion—the voice of the Old Man of Belém who
warned against the fallacies underlying the politics of expansion:
O pride of power! O futile lust
For that vanity known as fame!
That hollow conceit which puffs itself up
And which popular cant calls honour!
What punishment, what poetic justice,
You exact on souls that pursue you!
To what deaths, what miseries you condemn
Your heroes! What pains you inflict on them!
You wreck all peace of soul and body,
You promote separation and adultery;
Subtly, manifestly, you consume
The wealth of kingdoms and empires!
They call distinction, they call honour
What deserves ridicule and contempt;
They talk of glory and eternal fame,
And men are driven frantic by a name!
��
See also Agamben (����:��–��) and Levi (����:��–��).p. ��) in selected anticolonial discourses.
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