“Battleground: War Rugs from Afghanistan” at the Confederation Centre of the Arts in Charlottetown. I stop by the Centre every time I get out to the Island and am never disappointed. The stark modern bunker of the Centre stands in polar contrast with the soft, sleepy provincial image of Green Gables and The Gentle Island – the moment you walk up to the entrance, it’s already promising exhibits and shows you’d never expect to see.
That there’s an exhibit of such timely ripped-from-the-headlines importance is itself impressive – galleries elsewhere across the country put on huge shows all the time, and the wannabe creative in me eats it up whenever the opportunity presents itself, but then the emerg doc in me asks the same questions I put to patients in the Treatment Room: Why are you bringing this up to me right now? Why is this important today? (Could/should it wait for an appointment later?)
The title pretty much sums it up: rugs from Afghanistan that depict the ongoing conflict. The gallery frontispiece tells the story
Modern warfare came to Afghanistan with the Soviet invasion of 1979. After the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, a decade of civil war piled disaster on top of catastrophe. Now the global war on terrorism continues to fill the land and sky of Afghanistan with the machinery of war.
As always, Afghans depict on their rugs what they see and what matters most to them. And so over three decades of chaos, the customary flowers on rugs have turned into bullets, or landmines, or hand grenades. Birds have turned in[to] helicopters and fighter jets. Landscapes have filled up with field guns and troop carriers. Sheep and horses have turned into tanks.
There have never been rugs like this before.
There’s a shock value to seeing rugs like this. I imagine it might be sort of the same shock to “mainstream” visual art with the arrival of any of the “revolutionary” genres. In their own time, styles like impressionism, pop art, etc all threw the conventions of the medium to the wind. Viewers approach with a preconceived image of “normal” art, come across the new, and ask, “What were they thinking?!” Rugs like this, to audiences accustomed to woven flowers, birds and landscapes, do the same. What is going on over there?
The exhibition asks rhetorically, “Are War Rugs pro-war or anti-war?” The weavers are anonymous and the stories behind them unknown, so it’s impossible to glean what the intentions are. Figures are shown wielding AK-47s (loomed in perfect detail) at each other and locked in conflict – depicting the Russian weapon is clearly an indictment of Soviet intrusion; then again, AK-47s are ubiquitous, found in the hands of both the invader and invaded – perhaps it glorifies the struggle to liberate. The rugs are as complex as the conflict itself.
In medicine, art can be a useful way to enable patients to tell their stories and better understand them, especially when more “conventional” mediums fail. Traumatised children depict scenes of horrible injury and pain when they don’t yet have the vocabulary to express themselves – that was the first thing I thought of when I saw some of the rugs. Exaggerated, cartoon-like caricatures to tell a story for which they lack the words.
Later I felt bad – pretty condescending to think of the scenes as something a child would draw. But maybe it’s not so un-apt an association. Childlike, in its innocence: before intrusions by foreign powers – from the Mongols to the Soviets to today, Afghanistan was a fiercely independent society, perfectly content to have been left to its own devices since forever. A society with no aspirations of empire or imposition over its neighbours, until corrupted by outside manipulation.
Other rugs are more subtle – you have to look a bit more closely, and have a sense of what you’re looking for, to pick out the underlying shapes and instruments of terror. In a way it’s more distressing to see – the realisation that what seems like familiar patterns of colour and nature, that you think would make a pretty addition to the living room, hides something so sinister and destructive.
Maybe as this trauma settles, peaceful imagery will make a comeback, the same way how survivors of childhood abuse gradually incorporate positive themes into their art as they recover. The techniques of how these themes will be represented, however, may be radically different from the traditional frame-border-field format of the Afghan rug. After a generation of Western intrusion you see echoes of modern media making it into the loom today: 3D birds-eye (?helicopter) perspective
and even CNN-style news ticker and split-screens
However the art of rug-weaving turns out, I like to think that the unsettling sight of those War Rugs of helicopters, hand grenades and tanks rolling over Afghan landscapes in place of birds, trees and sheep, will make us better appreciate those birds, trees and sheep – the signs of peace – when they make a long-overdue comeback to rugs from Afghanistan. There’s a spot in my living room that just can’t wait for a Peace Rug like that.
