August 2001

With this issue of The Magazine, we unveil the first installment of our Cultural Supplement. Our mission to cover war crimes and crimes against humanity would not be complete unless we also examined the creative response to such brutality from artists, writers, and performers.

The individuals caught up in violent conflict suffer unspeakable harm. Through the many languages of art, these deeply-embedded, often hidden injuries may find articulation.

Great works are often prescient, alerting us to gathering dangers. Art humanizes events that might seem alien and abstract; provokes a visceral response so we are mobilized through the sheer force of empathy. Poems and novels, paintings and films, music and dance all expand our reality, bring the far corners of the world to the inner chambers of the heart. A repository of testimony and evidence, art is crucial in the battle against impunity.

Violent conflict rends the culture on numerous levels, notably that of expression. Disaster—and the memory and dread of disaster--affects our relationship to language, to narrative form, the making of images, the rhetorical framing of theatre. The effects of atrocity inhere in the culture for generations.

We inaugurate the Cultural Supplement with the following offerings:

• An interview with Doris Salcedo, Colombia’s most important contemporary artist. Based on the testimony of survivors, her installations have given the war in Colombia international cultural resonance. Normally hesitant to give interviews, Salcedo talked at length about her use of materials, configuration of space, and extremely demanding manual labor. "Absolute situations are very complex, and it is precisely within that complexity that we find what it is to be human. In bearing witness to inhumanity, we learn to recognize humanity."
  
  
• In Harold Pinter’s Mountain Language, a community’s native idiom is forbidden by the powers-that-be. Director Carey Perloff gave this play its U.S. premiere and, in a shining essay, takes us back to her rehearsal process with the playwright and actors. "If language is associated with breath and breath with life, then to forbid someone to speak is to forbid them to live in some deep sense," she writes. "If language is a tool of oppression, silence can be unspeakably intimate and … hugely liberating…The play asks enormous questions: What kind of world is it in which parents are taken from their children, in which the most basic family relations are ruptured? And in a world in which routinely happens, how do those ruptures ever get repaired?"
  
  
• Distinguished theatre critic James Leverett delves into the creation of Continuum: Beyond the Killing Fields, in which three classicial dancers and a master puppeteer who survived Khmer Rouge labor camps tell their stories. "In Cambodia, who controlled the dance controlled the nation. Pol Pot wanted to destroy that historical link to power." This work—which brings together ancient classical forms and multi-media experimentation—has begun a movement to recreate traditions deliberately ravaged by the Khmer Rouge.
  
  
• In Pinochet’s Chile, popular music was a code of resistance, a force for international solidarity: "The only way we [had] of communicating was through music…. The terror was so great that gathering around a guitar to sing Gracias a la vida by Violeta Parra [was] a fierce act of dissidence," recalled one journalist. Joanne Pottlitzer shares excerpts from her interviews with Chilean musicans who played key roles in the combative New Chilean Song movement and the later Canto Nuevo, including Joan Jara, Angel Parra, members of Illapu, and Barroco Andino. Pottlitzer’s work will be posted in two separate installments.

For the present, The Cultural Supplement will appear on an ad hoc schedule. We welcome queries from potential contributors of original literary, visual, and aural texts. We are also interested in interviews, essays, and translations. Please write to: [email protected]