Shame and Rage: International Relations and the World School of Colonialism

Abstract

Afriend emails me photographs from Abu Ghraib. I had already seen some of them. These I hadn’t. The brief glimpse of the new ones roils my stomach. Disturbed, I shut down the computer. I want to erase those images from my computer; unpool their film from my eyes. I feel debased and complicit merely by looking. I want to retreat, run, from the implication in those pictures. I am possessed, simultaneously, by a desire to prove them false. They must have been staged, must be untrue, I think. images closely to comfort myself in that confirmation. But I don’t find the courage to look again. Then I wonder if the “truth” of these images was really the issue here. These photographs were alive and moving. They had already traveled from the Middle East to the Northeast. And it was the Bush administration that had charged these pictures with plausibility even as it had electrocuted the lives of many others.

I Splayed objects of your worldly gaze Captive loves of your studies abroad Slaves, sepoys, spices Animal specimens, software-species Unequally sold Civilly exchanged Off-shored, shackled, tortured Out-sourced In otherwise humane designs Are we burning, freezing, coding, bleeding Disappearing in History As you hum-vee and bull-doze The Wadi al-Uyouns ²of our Life.