Nepal's “Culture Shock” With Post-Earthquake Aircraft

It is post-earthquake Nepal, and unfamiliar planes have been flying overhead constantly...These aircraft are a necessity now, true, but they happen to be objects without proper cultural context and cultural reference points in Nepali society. And these aircraft are part of a wider problem: that the Nepali cultural production to deal with this crisis will be interrupted by drastically foreign objects/aid, particularly those signs of foreignness without a well-established significance and meaning in our society. A cultural imperialism is taking place in Nepal: the very loud sound of the unfamiliar aircraft reminds one of the stories heard of loud and disturbing music played to natives or prisoners in western wars as a way of muting and shocking those populations into instant defeat. But as this particular imperialism has the face of benevolent foreign aid, there will not even be many critical stories/legends about it. When there is no reference point to a foreign object, there is not even a properly 'visible' adversary one can identify, rather, something defeats one without even registering as an “enemy” or “adversary/opponent.”

The foreignness to the intervention found in this earthquake is in contrast to the previous earthquake: there were unique stories about and explanations to the previous big earthquake, for instance. But in today's context the issue is more about directly being involved as an aid worker, or a doctor, or a scientist, while the identity of the producer of cultural signs and symbols to address the earthquake has been ignored. The question is: where is the old man/woman to tell us the stories about previous disasters? Where is the platform for the old man/woman who has been a keen observer of this earthquake and the sensations and feelings it produced? This person is needed now, not at a later date when the shock of the earthquake has declined and when a comfortable/romantic remembering is underway. 

The post-earthquake moment could be taken up to deny cultural production with the reasoning that cultural production is associated with “superstition” and “non-scientific knowledge.” And any elaborate and imaginative cultural production, such as a long story, or a figurative image, or a tragic poem, is taken as a sign of emotional trauma and subsequently suppressed or provided with an insipid environment where it can be kept away. Today children are not traumatized the most, but they are most easy to label as traumatized by the earthquake because they most quickly route their experience of trauma into cultural objects, and the many other identities who are also traumatized will only surface later, when these identities are influenced by the children and begin to deal with the trauma with their own cultural production. The earthquake has shown that cultural production is inspired by the work of children, and demanding children to do imitative art based on well established cultural signs and symbols is not properly inspirational to them.

More important than restoring destroyed temples is to allow children to inspire others with their art, and we must be ready to accept a drastic re-imagining of the cultural object on display. However, “superstition” may well be a part of this cultural production, and so we may indeed find a genuine and original (re)-emergence of temples in some form as children build them. We await a commemorative monument made by children, and we await a reaction/response which takes this commemorative monument as the singular influence and inspiration to a very productive, enduring and transnational artistic movement and practice. Nepal has been too isolated, and many foreign gestures cause too much disturbance. We are at risk of perpetuating this isolation if outsiders don't act because they feel intrusive. The gaze of this inactive outside world will translate into productive action when outsiders can see and feel how we are relating to the trauma and thereafter create something for audiences of their own choosing. The disaster is not just “natural” or “domestic,” but even the gesture to help out causes some harm: Nepal cannot be touched without disturbance, there is no neutral or observer position. Artists will enter Nepal next after foreign aid workers and will look to curb the disturbances caused by foreign aid itself.