Image: Screenshot from 연합뉴스TV — plush toys fill the stadiums in South Korea
Hey Y’all,
Here I am writing, trying to live inside the heater. What a depths-of-Winter week! Hope you’ve kept warm or stayed cool if you’re currently in Summer.
During the pandemic I’ve casually wondered how we’re going to remember these times and imagined looking back in one, two, ten years from now. “Oh, that’s right, we haven’t had a Olympics for eight years”; “Remember when we used to find wearing masks in public strange?”; “And we thought 2020 was the worst year!”
The coincidence of the year evoking ‘20/20 vision’ has been joked about — things aren’t very clear, are they?! HAHA — but I think the last few years of ‘fake news’ and multiple voices jostling for attention/recognition are actually giving us a better insight into how history has always been at the mercy of an unreliable narrator.
I’ve been musing on this for a few years now: how frustrating it is to have a brain wired to a biased view of history. How our understanding of the past is determined solely by the syllabus at our school and the media we consume. I remember the friend I had in high school who didn’t know anything about Hitler, or the English majors I knew at university who’d never heard of Don Quixote.
I think back to my basic understanding of world history after high school and it’s full of ‘Western’ civil wars and revolutions. America, Russia, France, and the World Wars. Australia was inhabited by a nomadic people who were definitely not put into slavery nor systemically wiped out.
We learn about the Holocaust, but nothing of Armenia, Cambodia, Rwanda. We learn about the Romans, but nothing of the Inca, the Polynesians, the Maurya. This myopia is mostly determined by the quantity of remnants we have access to and how it’s easier to teach lessons based on more than just conjecture. But why don’t we learn an overview? Why don’t we learn about the destructive forces of conquest and colonialism? Are there just too many stories to tell?
Image: the ‘recreation’ of a hot air ballon that some believe the Incas could have built from material known to them to assist the drawing of the Nazca Lines.
When I go down this rabbit hole, realising the extent of my world history knowledge, I then turn my frustration towards the commodification inherent in industries that should be telling us these stories. The reason we have so many books/tv shows/movies on the Roman Empire and Georgian/Victorian England and so little on anywhere not ‘Western’ is entirely dependent on the premise that known commodities are more likely to earn back investment. They make another film adaptation of a Jane Austen novel not for posterity, but to get butts on seats. Ever wonder why Disney has never touched Indian mythology in their 80+ year run at animated movies? Hollywood rarely makes big bucks at the box office there.
While it might seem glib to accuse Disney of not educating us on world history with authentic texts, media for ‘all ages’ are such an important starting point for awareness of the stories and cultures that make up the world. I wouldn’t know anything about Ancient Rome if it weren’t for Asterix. To take the ‘representation matters’ rhetoric further, there needs to be more depictions of not just minorities, but under-represented histories on the screen, too.
Personally, I’d love to see a mini-series set in pre-Columbian Mexico. Or maybe a mini-series set on Madagascar during the reign of Queen Ranavalona I, known as one of most anti-colonial, most bloodthirsty monarchs in history. Or the Islamic Golden Age. Or, and don’t tell anyone about this because it’s MY idea, a mini-series set during the Māori arrival to New Zealand. Moa! Man-eating eagles!
We might not have to wait long to see our first interpretations of Life During The Time of COVID-19, however. It was reported in May that director Michael Bay is already in pre-production with a thriller set during the pandemic. Not only does it seem too soon to create a narrative with any real perspective, but also because it seems like we’re only seeing the beginning of the destructive power of the virus in countries unable to control its spread.
Maybe in five years we’ll be ready? Maybe we will want to forget the damage? Maybe the virus won’t be contained at all yet? I guess we’ll have to wait and see. I read somewhere that it would be a good idea to start a journal during lockdown. You never know, it might be the most useful artefact for archeologists trying to understand the year 2020 five hundred years from now.
Some things that caught my eye this week:
The Baroque instrument, the long-necked theorbo
Medieval instrument cover of Shakira’s ‘Hips Don’t Lie’
worth it for the top comment alone:
In reaction to the cakes that are made to look like realistic everyday objects, there have been very funny memes, including this tweet:
and this thoughtful essay on why a not-so-recent phenomenon (of the cakes) has suddenly hit the zeitgeist
Another Op-Ed on Sarah Hegazy’s death, this time from the violinist of the band
Thanks for reading.
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Until next week! xxx