Artists’ acts of remembrance about destruction and violence defy the dominant narratives of heroism and sacrifice
The way stories are told about wars really matters. It is a point powerfully made by the classical scholar Alice König who, in her work on ancient and modern warfare, points out that the way war is depicted and narrativised feeds into the way wars are actually conducted. Creating and absorbing a story (whether that is told in prose or poetry, or offered by an artwork or memorial) is more than packaging or reflecting on the past; it is about generating images and expectations, and about envisioning the future. Stories, she argues, influence real-world behaviours.
The war correspondent Christina Lamb has also made this connection in relation to sexual violence in conflict: depictions of war from Homer onwards show that women have always been trafficked and raped, used as bargaining chips and spolia, their bodies made battlefields. But stories told for centuries, for millennia, have taken this violence for granted, looking blindly past the experience of women. Rape was recognised as an independent war crime and a tool of genocide only in 1998. And so it goes. Rape becomes a brutal and cheap weapon in every new war.
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