Nation as Network by Victoria Bernal

Author:Victoria Bernal [Bernal, Victoria]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Computers, Internet, Social Media, History, Africa, North, Social Science, General, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, Emigration & Immigration, Sociology
ISBN: 9780226144818
Google: TC2OBAAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2014-08-19T04:05:38+00:00

CHAPTER 4

Mourning Becomes Electronic: Representing the Nation in a Virtual War Memorial

[W]e believe that a big portion of the Eritrean culture glorifies warriors. However, at the same time, the Eritrean culture considers life very precious. One indicator is the grieving process in Eritrea. In some traditions, the dead are mourned for forty days and forty nights. Even people of very modest means spare no resources to pay their respects. There has been a great deal of criticism of the “excess” of this tradition; now, however, we have reverted to an opposite extreme where we are supposed to “ululate” and celebrate the dead—but not mourn them. Each hero listed in the Martyr’s Album, each number represented in the statistics represents a loss of Eritrea—a loss that should be mourned and grieved by all of us.—The Awate team

(Awate post, January 16, 2005)

In 2005 a virtual national war memorial, called the Martyrs Album, was established on awate.com. The unauthorized memorial used leaked government records to commemorate and document the Eritrean lives lost in the 1998–2000 border war with Ethiopia. The Martyrs Album is a prime example of the ways that the internet facilitates political experimentation and makes possible the development of novel forms of political engagement that have no off-line counterpart. This online memorial represents a creative form of political protest. In this chapter I explore how Eritreans in diaspora used digital media to act on behalf of the nation as a surrogate for the state, and in so doing, seized infopolitical power from the state.

This act of commemoration by the Awate team reminds us that losses, absences, deaths, and displacement are not simply sources of human suffering, but are generative of identities, social relations, and subjectivities (Feldman 1991; Theidon 2013; Bay and Donham 2006). Eritreans are defined to a great extent by their losses and shared sacrifices. The war memorial is important because all Eritreans are essentially survivors whose lives and families have been irrevocably harmed by decades of war fought on Eritrean soil. Eritreans’ connections to the nation have been constructed through compelling narratives in which martyrs are accorded a central role. Martyrs, as I have argued, are a potent national symbol deployed by the state to exact sacrifices from Eritreans, a symbol that I argue represents the social contract of sacrificial citizenship between citizens and the Eritrean state.

From the early 1990s until today Eritreans in diaspora have used the internet not simply to discuss or observe national politics, but to actively participate. The Martyrs Album is a distinct intervention, however, because the diaspora used the internet to act like the state and carry out statelike responsibilities. In the pages of the memorial the Awate team emulates state practices, wielding the state’s own symbols, rhetoric, and national narratives as info political weapons to decenter the state. The establishment of the war memorial on Awate, thus, stands as another element of the transformations described in this book in which the Eritrean diaspora has gone from using the internet as an arm of

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