The primary weapon used by Hutu militias in the 1994 Rwandan genocide was the machete. But a machete is not only a weapon, or a tool for hacking through rainforests and reaping crops. In Portuguese, a machete is also a small and delicate stringed instrument; it was brought to Hawaii in the late 19th-century, and developed there into the ukulele.
This same word, unsettlingly: both an implement of brutal violence and of exquisite beauty. But in her newest book, Exhibitions: Essays on Art and Atrocity, the prolific poet and non-fiction writer Jehanne Dubrow suggests that violence and beauty coexist in all art — because beauty itself contains a threat. Dubrow watches as the tourists who visit great museums wield their phones like shields, taking pictures in order to neutralize the destabilizing power of the art before them. Beauty “takes a seat inside us and, in the process nudges us … beyond our own comfort,” she writes. Beauty is the guest who “stays too long, so that we end up saying to the visitor, I’m just going out for a short walk, in order to find a moment of quiet again. The tourists … don’t want to invite the guest of beauty inside.”
Can they be blamed for their desire to keep beauty at bay? In her wide-ranging essays, which combine criticism with memoir and lyric experimentation, Dubrow explores the intersections of art and trauma, both personal and collective, and forces her readers to consider the ways that making and experiencing art might render them vulnerable to, or complicit in, the suffering to which that art responds. “Watch out,” she writes. “Beauty is a sharpened thing.”
When she comments on the film version of the Polish artist Tadeusz Kantor’s theater piece The Dead Class, Dubrow notes that “the camera does something that the eye cannot.” This is a technical claim about cinematography, but it is also an aesthetic claim, and for Dubrow aesthetics have moral stakes. She has a rare ability, on display throughout Exhibitions, to make explicit the usually hidden ethical concerns in works as diverse as Kantor’s self-portraits, selfies, tattoos, the architecture of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the medium of tintype photography, Jewish ritual objects, Viennese cakes, designer dresses, French glassware, and more.
These ethical concerns include not just the content of the art Dubrow discusses, but its form and provenance as well. Even seemingly mundane articles of clothing are imbued, in Dubrow’s reading, with the highest moral stakes. As a child, Dubrow thought that clothing could be “a dream made real and wearable,” but in adulthood, she understands that “clothing could be something else as well: a thing that damages bodies and soil and air. It could be the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York … It could be other blazes in Lahore and Karachi. It could be the collapse of the Rana Plaza building in Dhaka. And what about the hands that snipped loose threads from the collar of my store-bought blouse? … [A] part of the maker is sewn into every seam, the soreness of her fingers, the blurred exhaustion of her eyes.”
It is relatively easy to see, given the obvious inequities of globalized consumer capitalism, how a store-bought shirt might have these consequences and connections. But this passage exemplifies how Dubrow understands every work of art she discusses: made objects intimately link their viewers and their owners to global systems and structures, to the events of the past, and to the individual lives, in all their depth and idiosyncrasy, of everyone whose labor contributed to the object’s making.
Dubrow’s parents served as diplomats for the United States; she was raised across countries and continents, a perspective that gives her artistic interests a cosmopolitan breadth uncommon among contemporary American writers. Even when she turns her attention to the relatively domestic, as in “Lost Vessels,” an essay about her cousin’s death from an opioid overdose, and about the Sackler family’s simultaneous responsibility for America’s addiction crisis and patronage of the arts, Dubrow’s writing joins that story of domestic grief to a story of art and suffering that reaches through space and history.
Looking at a Qing dynasty opium pipe bowl on the website of the National Museum of Asian Art, she “consider[s] the history of heroin, the fields of poppies, their seedpods scored and oozing sap, the smoky dens, the wars between nations.” The opium pipe bowl is tiny and seemingly frail, and Dubrow imagines with wonder all the rough, indelicate handling this object must have undergone, and somehow survived. “Hard to believe something so small can cause so much death,” she writes. “For a moment, the thought stops my fingers’ movement across the keyboard of my computer.”
This turn toward Dubrow’s relationship to her own writing recurs throughout Exhibitions, a powerful gesture with which she makes palpable the complicated questions she raises of art’s relationship to human suffering. Sometimes, as in this passage, the magnitude of the suffering the artist witnesses forces them to pause from their work. But elsewhere, the work can be a way of keeping that suffering at bay, as in Dubrow’s mother’s diplomatic efforts in Zagreb, in the 1990s, interviewing Bosnian women who had survived war crimes. Although Dubrow’s mother spoke Serbo-Croatian comfortably, she insisted on working with a translator, because “she wanted to construct a small, artificial barrier of language” between her and the experiences she was documenting.
Art can be “that small, artificial barrier” between the artist and the atrocity before them, but it can also be a means of shattering the barrier and entering into the atrocity itself. In the essay “The Resonator,” Dubrow describes her time writing poems on a fellowship at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “‘I’m writing about intergenerational trauma,’” Dubrow told the Museum’s other fellows; it would be more accurate to say that she was writing not about intergenerational trauma, but from within its experience. The poems she drafted at the Museum were less written than channeled: they were in the voice of an imagined Polish-Jewish woman named Ida Lewin, who lived and died between the two World Wars, and saw the Holocaust as “visions, nightmares from which she woke soaked with sweat.” (Dubrow’s Ida Lewin poems are published in her 2009 collection From the Fever-World.)
“When I sat at the computer, I could hear Ida talking,” Dubrow remembers. “After a few days, Ida began to whisper in other parts of the Museum, the corridors that led from one display to the next, the stairs with their dark ascents …” And elsewhere, “I coughed or cleared my throat and could feel Ida’s speech like a rough cube of sugar dissolving on my tongue.”
This channeling of an invented Polish-Jewish poet involves a complicated interplay of artistry, empathy, and imagination in response to catastrophe. Here the paradoxes of art after atrocity are on full display: Dubrow’s Ida Lewin poems are simultaneously a “small, artificial barrier” separating her from the enormity of the suffering which is her subject, and a means of accessing that suffering and expressing it through language. Like sunglasses that both distance the eyes from the sun’s power and, through that distancing, enable the eyes to experience the sun, Dubrow presents and practices an art that protects against the reality of atrocities and their attendant suffering, even as it makes that reality palpable.
This simultaneous distance and proximity of art, and of the artist, to atrocity entails a fraught moral stance from which Dubrow does not shy away. She describes the “five strategies” she has used to write “not just a good but an ethical” Holocaust poem, but even these guidelines are no guaranteed safeguard. “Was I atrocious for writing poems in a place that commemorates atrocity?” Dubrow asks. “Or was I simply making the beautiful in a building I saw as beautiful?”
The power of Exhibitions lies in Dubrow’s refusal to reconcile these questions into a simple, single-faceted answer. She writes: “Here is one of the problems with the beautiful. It exists, even adjacent to horror.” And not just adjacent to horror, but within it. This demands a deep moral and aesthetic ambivalence in anyone who cares about the ethical consequences of art, and the artistic consequences of an ethical response to suffering.
The ambivalence of art, that “rough cube of sugar dissolving on my tongue,” both coarse and sweet at once. Like the ambivalence of the machete: its violence and its music, its anguish and its melody. It is fortunate, and necessary, that artists like Dubrow are able to find beauty even in the tensions this ambivalence contains.
[Published by the University of New Mexico Press on September 1, 2023, 147 pages, $19.95US paperback]