War and Heavy Boots; Put the Kettle On

I have spent the last few days thinking about death and war. And it gives me heavy boots, as Oskar from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close would say.

The National War Museum in Ottawa is the worst museum I’ve ever been to (ooh, don’t hold back, Sonjel!). When, back in blustering March we trekked out to Ottawa to check out their museum scene I thought that maybe I didn’t like it because it was cold. And I was tired. And I hadn’t eaten all day. This weekend I visited the Imperial War Museum and I spent more time there than in any of the other museums I have visited to date. And I didn’t see even get to the special exhibit about James Bond! With what’s-his-face’s “bloodied” shirt from the last 007 movie!

Under the guise of being overwhelming, traumatic, and confusing, like war, Ottawa’s museum bombards you with text, images, artefacts and interactives. In their defense everything they said in one official language, they had to repeat in the other BUT I think that in their urgency to their visitor everything all at once, they left me wanting to read/watch/listen to nothing. And to just get out. And never, ever come back.

The Imperial War Museum is also overwhelming and traumatic but the interpretation is simple, slim and digestible. And I (who am probably the world’s worst museum visitor because I hate reading text panels) read. A lot. Through the use of lighting and colour, massive blown up photographs, age restricted exhibits, and few words, they say little and in doing so, say a lot. Perhaps most striking were the black rooms describing the Holocaust and the sudden appearance of a bight room and a large model of Auschwitz that was completely, blazzingly white. My heart was wrenched.

My theory is that maybe if war had occurred on Canadian soil, then perhaps our war museum would be more effective. Every year when Remembrance Day rolls around there are countless editorials and news stories about why we need to remember, and how we are going to remember, the Canadians who have died. Our artefacts of the first and second world wars are an absence, a loss, a hole. To paraphrase Michael Ondaatje’s words, Canada has been “wounded without the pleasure of a scar”. And so the wars, especially the Great War, are distant, the material of history textbooks, and barely relevant to our lives and we spend out time sidestepping the subject in order to be politically correct and inoffensive.

Britain has a scar. Mrs Andrews, my landlady, distinguishes her anecdotes with what was before the war, during the war, and after the war. And maybe it’s because I just watched Atonement and I can’t get it out of my head that I think war has affected this country more, and is therefore in greater need of telling that story effectively. Am I being ignorant and arrogant?

All the really well-done exhibits I’ve seen recently are about dying. At the British Museum is a fabulous patchwork exhibit called “Living and Dying”. In one big room they display themes such as “sustaining each other”, “coping with death”, and “diving the future” by placing artefacts from all over the world in juxtaposition of each other. At the Wellcome Collection (which was the most bizarre museum I have ever been to, take a look http://www.wellcomecollection.org/) I saw an exhibit of large black and white photographs of terminally ill patients. Side by side are a photograph taken shortly before the moment of death and taken shortly afterwards. No one said a word. We all had heavy boots.

“I’ll put the kettle on”, the Brits would say, as their cure for every malady. Mrs. Andrews checks on me constantly, “are you alright? are you lonely?”, she asks. I keep busy, I tell her. And I drink a lot of tea.