The facts were these: a wrong had been done, concerning an object, following which to a certain extent matters had been taken in hand and retribution meted out, quite violently too. But the broken object itself had been hidden and it was therefore unrestored. The record therefore might say that it was broken beyond recovery.
About History :
….. And breaking up in the sun.
The sun whispers into a microphone under the ice.
There’s a seething and burbling. Far out it sounds like a sheet being snapped.
And the whole thing is like History: our present. We are lowered into it, we listen.
Tomas Transtromer wrote this whole poem about it. I’d recommend it.
The object in one instance was a watch, an old-fashioned watch and chain, one of the old wind-up ones with a chain that could be fastened through a waistcoat button hole, and the watch slipped into the waistcoat pocket, and then periodically examined in the palm of the hand. An ancestral time-piece, it was the kind of watch that was traditionally handed on, father to son, although after the last war they were mostly being replaced by the wrist watch, and the custom was dying out. Nevertheless, for a 12 year old boy to steal it from a friend’s house was a serious matter, and then later on walking in the street to show it to his friend with a sly look, swinging the father’s watch on its chain in front of the son’s face, was asking for trouble. The conversion that made menace visible, what happened next remains locked in the CONFIDENTIAL files. – "Somehow one had to live alongside the shame" ak recently wrote in his post on some aspects of his Family History the other day.
The object in another instance is much bigger, the Mediterranean Sea. AboutTHIS sea, I was reading – ‘… Barbary appalled because its corsairs converted the sea from an emblem of commerce, freedom, power and proud British identity, into a source of menace and potential slavery’. [Captives, Britain, Empire and the World 1600-1850, Linda Colley, London 2002]. The conversion that made menace visible, ships that stole ‘our boys and girls’ (it was mostly boys, but a few girls were also take), from both within the Mediterranean Sea itself and abroad as far as the coastal villages of the West of England and Ireland, over a two hundred year period, and a retribution that began in 1816 when the British Navy undertook a sustained bombardment of the city of Algiers from the sea. What happened next remains locked in THIS sea, distinct from the wider oceans of the minds and myths of empire makers, and the histories, ancient and modern, of Slavery and of Islam: aboutTHIS sea – "Somehow one had to live alongside the shame".
The conversion that made a menace visible. Or the changes, (as I quoted in an earlier post) when it is asked – ‘ What does it mean to say that a place underwent a change from being pagan to being Christian, or from being Christian to being Muslim?’. AboutTHIS sea, and Istanbul.
Here on the streets of Istanbul. I desperately wanted to speak to ak’s Uncle Walter again. Because my inclination was to side with those who undertook instant retribution, and I was confident that he would know exactly what to do about these wrongs that were in South London speak – "Definitely out of order". Uncle Walter would know what to do; neither the choice of swords, as the South London gangster Kreay brothers had used in the 1950′s in London; nor the level of atrocities undertaken by Balkan Nationalists, the echoes of Serbian violence that we had seen – We are lowered into it, we listen - a few day’s earlier in Belgrade; but a ship stoker’s wisdom, full of muscularity and coal fires, super-charged.
Imagine my surprise when, here on the streets of Istanbul, this is what I saw next:
