Emerging Artists

On the way to Dublin I read a magazine put out by the Financial Times about emerging artists in such diverse places as Indonesia, Turkey, Egypt, and South Africa. Each was working within a system that was hostile or indifferent to their work. The introductory essay had a passage that caught my eye. It pointed out that, 71 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Prime Minister Theresa May said she was willing to use nuclear bombs. Kamila Shamsie, author of Burnt Shadows, continued:

“What business do we have pretending there is any threshold of horror that humanity is not willing to cross more than once? Here is another way of looking at the question. What is the cost of continued silence? How do you measure the crime of failing to acknowledge those who resisted, those who were lost, those who still live with the wounds? You write or paint or sing their stories in order to give those people voices again, to give them back a place in a history that wants them erased. That is where you start--and in doing that you might discover something easily forgotten in the midst of history’s terrible repetitions and the gathering clamour of hate-filled voices: grace.

"Because, there are always those who resist, those who remember, those who believe the world could be better and whose bravery shames us for giving in to the apathy of pessimism. When we bear witness to horror we also bear witness to resistance. We give the lie to those who claim no one can be held responsible for certain attitudes or actions because they are universal. Sometimes, shattering the myth that “everyone" is complicit is the start of a conversation about the ways of complicity, the cost of resistance, the path to justice and the nature of humanity itself.”

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