Majicman Notes

In 1918, Brit­ish land­scape artist Paul Nash painted “We Are Mak­ing a New World”, a work that is housed at the Imper­ial War Museum in Lon­don. It was based on an ink draw­ing, “Sun­rise, Inverness Copse,” that Nash had sketched the pre­vi­ous year while he was serving on the West­ern Front. The fin­ished work shows a des­ol­ate, almost apo­ca­lyptic land­scape. Noth­ing is alive. The trees seemed to have been burnt and their mutil­ated trunks look like skeletal remains. The muddy earth is scarred by shell craters. And onto this scene of dev­ast­a­tion Nash paints a bright white orb of sun with long thin rays extend­ing in all dir­ec­tions.

One ima­gines the title is sym­bolic of Nash’s dis­il­lu­sion­ment. In a mov­ing let­ter he wrote to his wife from the front lines he said, “It is unspeak­able, god­less, hope­less. I am no longer an artist inter­ested and curi­ous, I am a mes­sen­ger who will bring back word from the men who are fight­ing to those who want the war to go on for ever. Feeble, inar­tic­u­late, will be my mes­sage, but it will have a bit­ter truth, and may it burn their lousy souls.”

I was ini­tially reluct­ant to include this paint­ing because it is so dark and depress­ing. But the jux­ta­pos­i­tion of the title and the work itself reminded me of a power­ful quote from a book I read recentl,: Sage War­rior by the con­tem­por­ary Sikh Amer­ican civil rights act­iv­ist Valarie Kaur. The book was recom­men­ded to me by a friend with Sikh roots, and it taught me much about the beau­ti­ful Sikh tra­di­tion. I found it espe­cially thought-pro­vok­ing on the sub­ject of how we approach reli­gious, eth­nic, racial and other dif­fer­ences. The quote that came to my mind while look­ing at Nash’s paint­ing is: “Not the dark­ness of the tomb. The dark­ness of the womb”. I think that the dark­ness can actu­ally be both. In her book, Kaur describes this era as “the Great Trans­ition — the con­vuls­ive birth­ing labor that pre­cedes the world that is want­ing to be born”. I believe all have a part in the labour­ing, in cre­at­ing the sort of world we desire for all.

ENUMA OKORO, FT