"Planetary Indisposures":
The World Press Photo Exhibit in Colombo
-- V.O. C. De Puta, IRC
(Boosa)
I will not be seeing the photographic exhibition at Barefoot
Gallery, Colombo 3. They call it, the "World Press Photo Exhibit,"
but its more precise moniker would be ‘White Supremacist PP Exhibit,’ or even
better ‘Imperialist PP Exhibit,’ or even sweeter, ‘Honky Peek-A-Boo!’
Let me explain. I have quickly glanced at two full-blown photos
multiplied million-fold in the 'national' news advertising this show,
co-sponsored by our old imperialist buddies, the Dutch Embassy – who in 2008
will celebrate, with local assistance, their arrival two hundred and fifty
years before to help f*** up this country (remember 1658? I don't want to
either, but clearly I must).
One WPP award-winner shows an African-American Mother and Son, in
rather intimate sprawl on a bed, smoking crack cocaine. Another shows Yasser
Arafat, the leader of the Palestinian resistance, stunted in a car window,
driving a fancy car while his blurred bodyguards / supporters jog beside him.
This one took the WPP's ice cake of a top award.
Now let's take the first photo. It's clearly an 'arranged'
glimpse. Do we really need to gaze on
another pix of darker drug addicts (albeit with oedipal tints). This is a
hackneyed stereotypical great-grandf***er of all cliches. African-Americans
neither own cocaine plantations (you better ask Coca Cola, who does!!) nor own
the planes that transport it. Nor are they more mother-f***ers than us
mau-bima-denying Sri Lankans.
Wouldn't it be better to snap the members of the US or European
ruling class, (corpulent father and daughter sprawled naked on a yacht in the
Caribbean sea) collaborating with the growth, refinement and distribution of
Andean C17H21NO4 (or, in the Arabian Sea with the CIA/MI5's movement of
Himalayan C17H17NO(C2H3O2)2 out of Afghanistan and through here from the
1980s). None of these so-called lily-eyed paparazzi would dare show that.
In these planetary 'exposures,' their metallic irises clench tighter
than their puritanic anuses.
For surely, this aperturing of the agony of Black people could
better cast a silvery glance on that hallowed US Constitution's 12th Amendment
– which still upholds legal slavery, in prison, (so you thought they abolished that
huh?, Why yuh tink suh many black people in dem universities of iron 2day,
chile?) Then again, that is beyond the image-nation, body language and
bottomline of the corporate wheezers of this photochemical vapor, as well as
these ancestral sponsors, let alone their Barefoot Gallery exhibit.
Now. Let's take the next photo advertised. Here Mr. Arafat, who in
the last two years has had everything bombed about him by Zionist Israel except
his chair, is framed stooped, perhaps in flight, his nose almost guiding the
steering wheel, peering into a dusty windscreen that doesn’t show much of the
future to which he's dragging his people, alongside his sleek limousine.
OK.
Arafat's leadership has been well criticised by his own people, and they
will deal with him. Still, need we multiply another set of 'beady-eyed
hook-nosed semite' stereopixels or insinuations of blind worship added to that
daily archive of aspersion against the Palestinians? Don't CNN AP AFP Reuter
BBC do that smoggy day in smug day out, minute minit upon digital minit. Why
not a collage of Arafat squeezing a sequence of US Presidents' sweaty hands, or
giving his olive cheeks to their pink proboscises?
I would help carry the Palestinians on my bare back if I could,
but not the Barefoot – which I have now renamed Barepook, for its openness
towards foreign violation – for one expects this of those corporate choir boys,
but not from those who claim to know better. Why barekick a defiant people and
a long-standing movement? At least from those Bamba-lapitiya mont blanc peaks
of unrelenting bare-assed privilege.
Well. I don't expect much from these 'framers' of haute-art here
either. But my pickling friends do, for their sometimes free booze, which also
enables them to enunciate their tuition-ed Windy Wantmore School of
Electrocution accents. This capital's other commercial galleries, and uppish
clubs too – Clancy's (supposedly Irish, yet sells the fascist Orangeman's
Guinness) and recently the geriatrically-named 80 Club (maybe 80 refers to 1980
when they job-killed 50,000 workers and hastened 1983) – also back-buzz a
resonance which resurrect the old Dixie-whistling slave minstrelsy and a honky
nonsensi rock, not the voodoo sonics which heal, as our own Yakaa traditions
do, or wail for that imperialist citadel called the United Slaves of Amnesia
(USA) and its outforts, to crumble and crash down, as they surely will.
Barepook, an 'exemplar' of the local handicraft industry, is
supposed to be better than their rag-trading counterparts Ohel! or House of
Fascism, who also billboard the moist fantasies of our local whitewashed (or
should I say Rinso-ed) Sinhala Tamil Muslim Indian, feudal merchant class and
their wannabes, who also foster this 'karaa kreole' of a trader kulture.
Barepook does show dravidously dark people sometimes but only as
occasional 'native exotics' offsetting some sudu-er badu! (We will not discuss
here the absence of even a child's doll in hues other than high pinks. Nor will
we survey the other hawkers of the 'figures of beauty' like the local
advertesticals, the image-ego wrappers, who promise every minute to turn us
fusty dusty musty tea cocoa coffee with an appliqué of the Fair and Lovely
paleface acid-cream of the Anglo-Dutch Mr. Unilever - who actually runs things
around here – or the recent 'world'
cricket tourney in South Africa, when TV ads here kept transposing a dark Sri
Lankan face with a wildebeest animal snout. Ooooh! I bet the Laager-louts loved
that!)
You would think these 'creotives' ('creoles + creatives') could
squirt in our eye a more flushed world with all the money these fabulists and
fabricists take in selling diabetically-daubed clothing to winter-bleached
melaninically-challenged exotics, and their local greyer 'aryan' cheerleaders,
who believe that the closer you are to the bland folk pixel-wise the cooler
coolie you are. But, no.
It seems, each of our communities must surely not be allowed to
look at the truth of ourselves, let alone face the features of these five
centuries of protracted war, or the contours of a gathered-together day after
tomorrow. And by replacing scientific history with rear-view fantasizing,
merely mirror our mutual repugnance (which has existed way back from our
primordial swamp-origins, as Reuters etal insist).
Instead, what I detect of a still-contested 'commonsense' view of
the world, from the working-class Burgher branch of my family, is that a class
of VOC Burghers, who were privileged under the whites – yes, along with the
post-1848 born-again feudals and traders – hollered when Black people here
tried to take over, and in exchange for entombment by the arctic and the
antarctic, yet bashfully put up and shut up about ill-concealed white-supremacy
in Australia or Canada, both of which remain colonies even today, reginally ruled
by an inbred constipated genetically-modified Hun (Yes, that was once our very
own Hanoverian Hussy Queen Beti!).
One wonders why the professori and other wankers have not narrated
the experience of Burghers post-despatch and their present relationship to
their present 'relatives': the blancos of Australia and Canada etc. Or, for
that matter, their historical relationship to the 'Coloureds' of South Africa
and the 'Eurasians' in Indonesia (Batavia - which along with Colombo and
Capetown formed the east-west colonial nether-triangle - they were always fleeing from one place to
another, under local and imperial 'pressures.').
Why not also carefully examine the faces and bodies of our people
who are an older dialectic of this vibrant Yakaa mound of earth and the other
blacks, yellows and reds of Africa, our North Wests, India, our South Easts,
and China. Instead, we have this going on, with no sense of class, of the
particular creativity of the 'mix' of the Burgher fragment:
I will not deal here with the oriental-ized eyes of Lionel Wendt
who is currently being feted (or his contemporary mimics -- the occidental
Ondaatjes with their kameras.). And one British eulogy of the recently
deconstructed 'world-renowned Burgher' (I don't think they said, 'Sri Lankan')
architort Geo. Bawa, proclaimed he "brought
a sense of beauty to the island." Really?
Through the port, under the fort?
Bawa, it has been pointed out, contrived to soothe the eyes and
tailbones of the united upper classes of Planet Dearth.
Did Bawa have any interest in even imagining the re-sheltering of
a besieged peasantry continuously being pauperized even today? None of his
eulogists or hagiographers write about that.
(And niether can these award-winning shutterbugs slow-frame this process
of a fast underdeveloping island - a
process begun by the VOC, the Lisboans before that, and other famous demolition
experts who came to add stolen jewels to a Brutish crown that could only roof
square unventilated heads.)
With all this celebrated creotivity, one wonders why there has not
been, for instance, in fiction, a Burgher female or male like Jean Rhys,
herself of the misruling 'creole' fragment of the enslaved economies of the
'West Indies', who beautifully wrote "Wide Sargasso Sea" as a counter
to the canonical "Jane Eyre," as a womyn seeing thru the duplicitous
masks – bookish and other – of the English impenitent, of an imperial Europe
that has devastated the Caribbean, that crucible of merchant capitalism.
Instead we are a set for more Manhattan-Hollyharvard history. I
understand that our mercantile 'karaa kreole' aristocracy and their ROCKY FORD
IMF WB UN USAIDS OXFAM CIDA NOVIB etc.-funded intellectuals are hard at work
with a post-crusade CIL-coated Buddha Rama Mohammed Yesus in tow (and for the
back-page onanist: Britney Sleazy Marichcha Cari Leonardo Dick Capo)
sanforizing history to resell Burghers – this 'specially endowed' fragment – as
the lost 13th tribe (or is it 14th) of Israel, cos we understand the Zionists
need to genetically magnify some allies for themselves out in the heathen (or
is it ‘ethnic’ or 'hybrid"?) East.
But let's not go THERE yet…
So despite this 'whorled' press, how about an airbrushed glossy of
a US ANGLO DUTCH agent provoking 'ethnic clashes' in their old colony Indonesia
(like the Eurasian 'Pangemanann', in Pramoedya Ananta Toer's classic House of
Glass which was refused a Nobel/Bofors prize), or some Boer (yes, that's where
the apt Sinhala word Buuruwa -donkey-
gets its emphasis from!) settler sjamboking a Zulu peasant.
Or how about a suited-and tied Burgher flotsam in Australia or
Canada renamed Alwetz Perez Onna-Duchiya or Van Lan Bugger (who once played
rugger), beige nethers bellying out, whelping about the "white English
criminals who control Oztrailia or Kiyanna-aday!" tears streaming,
nostalgically crooning 'Arapiya Luciya Dorai' (Open, Lucy! Your/The Door!),
wanting to come home to his ageless "abo(t)" in Curneygall (i.e.
Kurunegala).
OK. So we know the camera lies. We also know the eye can lie too.
(As the I and I can as well!) What you see may be what you get, but once you
got it, it may not seem to be what it was. That's Kapital! Go ahead, take off
the bright wrapping, and SEE what I MEAN?
The printing press, the camera, the radio, the movie etc may be over a
hundred years old, but it is still a toy, not a weapon or a tool, in most of
the working hands of this country, or the world for that matter.
For now, these are in more powerful hands weapons to be everyday
used to mislead, oppress and exploit us. Yet one fine day these lies will be
held firmly, again, to tell the truth.
For as we approach the dawn of 2005 (Remember Lourenco, 1505?), as
we join that exclusive 500 CLUB OF THE REAL, we can choose what type of
memories and fictions and photographs and hooniyam will be gathered together to
overcome and to exorcise the truth of our fragile bodies – and, yes, what will
be cast off.
So, NO! I ain't gonna go to that Exhibit. Don't need no diabetes,
or piles, or to be fairy and wowla, or have our black pupils widened by the
white phantoms of wannabeness. I will remain my sweet dark self nurturing my
venom between my betel-red teeth like a common garden cobra waiting for my
15-nanosec punday andy warhol moment in the world pr***.
Here aforesaid, then, is the small sample of the spit you ordered.
There's more where this comes from.
Please use the order number on the left. All proceeds to the
"Reparations First - Seminars Later" movement…
_______________________________________________________________
v.o. c. de puta is a back up syncer in
the swingy yakaa air band, Ziggy Dicky Haramitiage and the Mega Nah-Yakaas whose hit song goes: "We gonna chase
those crazy…chase those crazy bal'heads…chase those a.c. bumpheads outa our
yard…." It is also the pseudo(suddho)nym of the moment of a
transcolonial reject-writer who sweats and sighs in a small room in a small
place in a small town in a small islet, off-off-slave island , just south of
THE FORT, with three rats and a trilingual cockroach…
The nym was
chosen cos it has aural syncs with the Sinhala 'son of a ho' (tho puta means ho
in portuguese and spanish; while in Sinhala, 'putha' means son, and 'vesi'
means ho, while the VOC is the Dutch East India Company) and all together adds
up to 'the ho of all hos' (which is wannabe man, aka homo velendho capitalis
ceylonensis). S/he says the suddhonym does require 'exegesis': after all people
rudely do refer to burghers' as the original 'children of hos,' tho it is more
correct to call us: 'history's children of rape.'
So! Dis den
is de archi-anthro-gene-foq-all-ogy of a writer who is all-black, half-pseudo
and fully-yakaa…
