CONTEMPORARY EURASIA VOLUME VI (1) Contemporary-Eurasia-VI-1-engl | Page 60

SUBRAMANIAN KRISHNAN MANI
War. 13,300 servicemen’s names, including some soldiers and officers
from the United Kingdom, are inscribed on the gate.
Why, then, given that I find it moving, will I say that it “does not
speak”? In what way do I believe that a monument should speak, and
to what purposes? How are monuments supposed to represent our
ideals? What if our ideals are contested? What sort of thinking should
our monuments engender? Why, according to me, and for what
purposes might monuments be superior to words?
On my visit to the memorial, walking that slow descent into the
earth along the face of the wall, I was deeply lost in my own museum.
It was indeed the names, the names beyond counting. As I walked,
and stood, and moved on again, I passed and was passed by the people
who had come that day to find the names of friends or kin, or simply
to see this memorial to the war that had touched us all in some way or
another. Those of us who had come to see simply stood and ran our
eyes over the length and height of the wall. But those who had come
to find-they had a more pointed mission. They could be seen kneeling
or standing before one particular spot in the wall, staring long at one
name out of the thousands, their eyes welling with tears. We others
allowed a circle of distance around each of these solitary mourners
lost in their thoughts, keeping our own shared thoughts to a quiet
murmur.
And we realized, in that pondering, how the monument spoke to
the memories of the private grievers. This wall of names arranged by
date of death encompassed the private reality, and not the corporate
enterprise, of war. That reality, for those kneeling in thought, must
have been one of sequential loss, of one particular friend taken at one
particular moment, over and again until the circle closed and all who
had been sent away were gathered in again. Even those of us who
sought no particular death found ourselves reading individual names
and, unbidden, imagining the places and the circumstances of their
deaths.
What monuments have traditionally done is embody an idea
important to those who erected them. That is what Jefferson did with
his idea of an ideal academic society, and what the builders of the
Virginia War Memorial did for their ideas of war and sacrifice. But a
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