For the royal Mr. Kurtz who farmed rubber in the Belgian Congo at the turn of the twentieth century, the punishment for workers who didn’t meet their quotas was amputation, and the amputations were documented in a photograph album. To have seen those is to undergo a reductive surgery on one’s own ability to name and mean. Once the word arm has been retextualized as a term erasable letter by letter, even the gold braid on the King of the Belgians’ sleeve is hard to see through tears of pity. You can experience the procedure yourself at
https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/father-hand-belgian-congo-1904/
But when the site of a pity changes, pity can change. See what happened, for instance, when Belgian pity retreated home during the Great War. The moment that happened, the Congolese album closed on pity’s former color scheme. In the new pity’s fashion shot, set off by decorations, blackness was only a fascinating new noun set off by a new black verb. Remember, called the black verb. Belgium, responded the black noun. Remember Belgium, the merged black predicate became. Read once more on its century-old fashion page, it is still thrilling. Because it has become an image, it dwells in your consciousness with an idol’s immortality.
In its image frame, its silhouette is the only thing with a meaning. Only its name, “Belgium,” is a worded utterance. Everything else namable in the frame — conflagration, pickelhaube, moustache over unspeaking mouth — is an alien import into meaning from a dictionary. Its lexical space is an Andrew Marvell wordscape: a poet’s garden of annihilation. Within it, Belgium is dragged toward her frontier. Soon she will cross it into the silence of non-Belgium.
But we who unzip now in her memory have been benefited by her value. That was extractive, like the Congo’s rubber, and it still bears interest. Black Congo is now only a page in an unopened album, but the value in pity of Belgium’s streaming hair remains a gold standard for pornography.
Marvell link: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44682/the-garden-56d223dec2ced