From the artificiality of the concept of nature to the arbitrariness of national borders. This book explores the limits of postcolonial discourse. A recommendation.
Autor:in Sinthujan VaratharajahLilian Scarlet Löwenbrück
Every successful work of literature, wrote the American critic Vivian Gornick, needs a framework and a story. The frame means the context or circumstances. The story is the writer’s emotional experience: the realization that one has something to say. This distinction is valuable in the case of Sinthujan Varatharajah’s debut To All the Places That Lie Behind. Varatharajah presents a dense treatise that interweaves the personal and the political in a way that can only be described as breathtaking.
The amount of places one can be transported to in a single photograph is surprising. On the first few pages, Varatharajah looks at a photo of three elephants and a woman, Varatharajah’s mother, taken at a Munich zoo in the 1990s. The picture becomes the starting point of a journey that spans oceans, continents and islands. It is a journey on which borders are abolished – not only between countries, but also between living beings: things that we believe distinguish plants, animals and the “wild” from those features of civilization that are primarily claimed by humans.
The reality is different. Historically, no other living being has been as destructive as humans – more specifically, like Europeans – whether through indiscriminate clearing, targeted killing of animals, or the displacement of entire ecosystems to make room for monocultures. The presence of Europeans seems, if one believes the examples in the book, historically so closely linked to environmental destruction and species extinction as if it were a formal law of nature – as if Europeans could not help but subdue.
The artificiality of what we call “nature”.
In the opening pages as Varatharajah explores the history of photography, an insight follows: the frame is set by the initial image, but the story deals with much more: the artificiality of what people call “nature” over the hypocrisy of the modern environmental protection. About the nonsense of borders, the arbitrariness of time and space to the omnipresence of colonialism and the urgency of freedom for all living beings.
Varatharajah, a political geographer living in Berlin, is known to a follower base of more than 36,000 on Instagram, where he:deals with the mentioned topics like few others, combines them with pleasant everyday aesthetics and imparts knowledge in a way , which one looks for in vain in more formal educational institutions.
The value of this, as in the 350 pages of this book, lies not only in the creative mediation, but also in the way Varatharajah connects questions and debates. Even with well-known phenomena, new dimensions are opened up. It should be clear to most people by now that zoos were a colonial invention and are still problematic in many respects. “The question of why people go to the zoo,” writes Varatharajah, does not answer the question, “why people like us went to this zoo.” Who, why, where, why and how in the zoo gave “more information about the relationship of European man to the world than about nature that was exhibited”.
Crimes against human and non-human beings
The fate of elephants and other supposedly “exotic” creatures in zoos and botanical gardens is, for Varatharajah, incriminating evidence of a crime against non-human beings and humans that has been going on for centuries. The fact that non-Europeans were also exhibited in zoos at times – and that some African festivals are still held in zoos in this country – not only indicates insensitive continuities, but also that we are more interested in creating illusions about the alleged contribution of To maintain zoos for the preservation of nature than to deal with the fact that there is hardly any nature left in this world that escapes human intervention.
As far as the discourse on colonial continuities is concerned, “to all places that lie behind us” shows a new quality of analysis. Beyond frequently discussed cases such as the Maji-Maji War or the British Raj, one learns, for example, that the Libyan city of Ain Zara fell victim to the first air raid by an Italian air force, which was then in the process of being formed. Within a few years, aerial warfare had evolved to such an extent that the Guernica airstrike became the blueprint for the senseless killing of civilians by carpet bombing.
The fact that the Ethiopian city of Harar fell victim to an Italian air raid a few years earlier played a much smaller role in European perception. “The memory of Europeans began with Europe. It also stopped with Europe,” writes Varatharajah. Based on these examples, the role of combat aircraft in state and colonial wars is discussed. Varatharajah dedicates several pages of this book to the fact that non-Europeans can also act colonially. For example, the atrocities of Japanese colonialism or Ottoman imperialism are discussed – topics that have so far hardly found their way into post-colonial debates in this country.
However, the bulk of the book is dedicated to Eelam, from where Varatharajah’s parents once fled. This is where Varatharajah shows himself most personally, albeit without pathos. In her homeland, her life was characterized by a degree of self-determination until the ongoing anti-Tamil pogroms, which were preceded by anti-Tamil laws, culminated in Sinhalese violence. At its supposed end, thousands of Tamils were dead – and their relatives expelled.
Varatharajah was born a stateless child in an unnamed German asylum camp seven days after ex-Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s so-called Tamil Regulation, which aimed to limit the number of Tamils seeking asylum in Germany. For years, Varatharajah’s family was only tolerated in Germany and “interned” in asylum camps. When describing this topic, the German language also reaches its limits, which Varatharajah always tries to challenge. In the epilogue it says: “I was repeatedly confronted with the dilemma that my thoughts and feelings did not find a place in this grammar (…) that my sense of meaning does not correspond to the sense of this language.” Traces of this discussion are consistently present this book, from the Tamil alphabet to the consistent questioning of conventional designations.
Sinthujan Vartharajah: “To all the places that lie behind us”. hanser blue, 352 pages, 24 euros