What Does it Mean to be Fearless? Three Reflections on Nirbhaya

by Julia A. Walker

This paper was included in Panel 4:The Architecture of Memory, Gender & Intersectionality, which took place on Friday, April 23, 2021 as part of the international symposium Monument|Anti-Monument organized by CEL Centre for Architecture + Design St Louis, moderated by Rick Bell and hosted by CEL’s director Jasmin Aber. Composed of 6 panels, the symposium was inspired by the work of Polish artist Monika Weiss and her forthcoming public project Nirbhaya. Panel 4 included Weronika Elertowska, Eulalia Domanowska, Vanessa Gravenor, Kamala Sankaram, Julia A. Walker, and the artist.

Part I—

What did she feel when she began to be harassed by the men on the bus?  When their jeers and taunts threatened to become physical—as they soon would—and even the fact of her male companion wasn’t enough to arrest the attack at the level of mere words?  Was she “fearless” then, as women the world over protest they are now in her name?

What does it mean to be “fearless”?

Jyoti Sigh was studying to be a physical therapist, so she knew about the physiology of the human body.  She knew that fear is a visceral response—the heart pumping, the blood-oxygen level in the amygdala increasing to stimulate the body’s neurological alert system, preparing it to fight, flee, or freeze.  The bloodless discourse of clinical science tells us that the fear response is triggered in one of two ways: by conditioned or unconditioned stimuli. That is, by known threats that are signaled via memory or reflex response, or by unexpected sources that oversaturate the senses, inhibiting our ability to process the source.  There is a kind of feedback loop within our body’s neurological network that tacks between sense receptors and the cerebral cortex which this kind of overwhelming stimulation interrupts.  And when the trigger is repeated, it self-conditions a response that induces a temporal gap in the body’s ability to respond which manifests as trauma.  When such trauma is experienced by an entire class of human beings, does it become a conditioned response?

Nociceptors are those sensory intakes that specifically respond to pain.  Unlike other sense receptors, their role in the feedback loop is not simply to communicate a perceived threat from an extremity to the brain, but also to direct the body’s homeostatic resources to the extremity to assist in a healing response.

The body is an important element in all of Monika Weiss’s work—not only as a representation, figured in the images of lamenting women, curling around their pain in bodies that twist and morph in projections that fill the watery crypt at the center of this monument/anti-monument, but also those of the spectators who stand before it.  As one such witness of Monika Weiss’s work, I am often struck by the movement in the work as it works to move me.  Much like those nociceptors, the image of the lamenting woman expresses both information about the source of the pain and seeks to promote healing—as in Weiss’s presentation of Sustenazo (Lament IV) in 2012, marking the 10th anniversary of the International Criminal Court and its precedent-setting designation of “crimes against humanity.”

With Nirbhaya, Monika asks us to acknowledge—and perhaps heal—the trauma endured by women who, as women, are dominated by men through sexual assault.  But if we are to extend my metaphor to become “cultural nociceptors,” we will first have to heal the mind-body split.

Part II—

What does it mean to be “fearless”?

Military monuments—such as India Gate, the triumphal arch honoring those who died in World War I, protecting the rule of the British Raj—memorialize the heroism of soldiers who died in war.  Their stolid upright form attests to the erect spine of an extraordinary self-discipline and determination that refuses to flinch or yield ground in the midst of bloody conflict.  The archway’s negative space has a doubled significance, figuring both the historical passage of time from the event memorialized into a future secured by that victory and the symbolic passage to another world for those whose lives were necessarily lost in sacrifice to that cause.  The cool marble or limestone of the monument’s materiality figures the sangfroid required of such heroism, when an individual overcomes that visceral fear response just described to act on behalf of a greater good, the collective body of the nation.  The ancient Romans may have given us the triumphal arch by which to commemorate such heroes, but the ancient Greeks apostrophized them in their rhetoric, inspiring listeners to imagine the soldiers’ actions as their own, to valorize their self-sacrifice, and to model themselves on their lives.  Marking the effect of this rhetoric, Longinus designated it the “sublime.”

Is that what we feel when we gaze on such monuments?  Are we inspired to sacrifice ourselves for a collective good by memorializing fallen soldiers so?  In gazing upon the massive scale of these sculptures and reflecting on their symbolic scope, do we become fearless, too?

In Nirbhaya, Monika Weiss reorients the arch, denying the verticality of its symbolic ambitions by laying it flat on a horizontal plane.  It is as if she negates the public rhetoric of such acts of commemoration, altering our relationship to both their claims of grandiosity and the singularity of the events they memorialize.  The death she commemorates occurs multiple times, every day, the world over.  In doubling the shape of the triumphal arch, Monika Weiss effectively forms a crypt, marking not the passage into a celebrated realm of honor so much as forming a sarcophagus into which to inter a dominant and dominating model of self.  Jyoti Sigh’s death was a sacrifice, yes, but it was not necessary, and so not heroic except insofar as it has been reclaimed as such on behalf of a greater collective and a greater good.  But if Nirbhaya inspires the fullness of our imaginations, it is not because we want to model ourselves on the abject condition of a woman who was assaulted on a bus.

Part III—

It was the moderns—Boileau, Dennis, Burke, and Kant—who recuperated the term “sublime,” applying Longinus’s critical perception about the power of rhetoric to swell the imagination to the power of the image, and of nature, to inspire a similar kind of visceral response.  The grandiosity of the Alps and the terror of an avalanche, the awesome power of a cataract and the destructive force of its plumes reframed the ambitions of taxonomic man, cautioning him to remember the limits of reason in a world without fate, if not yet God.  The Enlightenment subject was a man, of course, even if woman was no longer quite the slave of her passions that the ancient Greeks had insisted she was.  Yet, by acknowledging the senses as a source of knowledge, these aesthetic theorists reintroduced the body as the locus of thought, bringing us closer to healing the mind-body split.

What does it mean to be “fearless”?

If we think of it in Burke’s terms, it is that paradoxical state in which we feel the terror of our precarity at the same time that we recognize the beauty of our existence in the here and now.  If we are without fear, it is because we are not in immediate danger and can contemplate a world that art brings into semblance to make difficult truths known.

Monika Weiss’sNirbhayainvites us to have such an encounter at the virgule of her monument/anti-monument: to feel a sense of pity and fear while reflecting at the same time on the conditions that made a Daphne out of Jyoti. In Monika Weiss’s vision, her spirit is not imprisoned in a wood—nor in limestone, nor in marble—but suffuses a choric space in which the fluidity of our imaginations can take the healing shape of water. There, as participants, our senses may engage the image, sound, touch, smell, and even taste of water droplets in the air to dissolve a patriarchal model of agency long premised on domination and allow a new semblance of self to emerge. 

Julia Walker is Chair of the Performing Arts Department and Professor of English and Drama at Washington University in St. Louis. In her first book, Expressionism and Modernism in the American Theatre: Bodies, Voices, Words (Cambridge University Press, 2005), Julia A. Walker offered a new account of American expressionist drama, challenging the traditional critical narrative of German origins by situating it within the context of late-19th century American culture. Her second book is entitled Performance & Modernity: Enacting Change on the Globalizing Stage (Cambridge University Press, 2022). In it, she argues that theatre is where ideas come alive, taking shape not only in narrative but also in embodied forms of movement.  Exploring the social meanings of performance form, this book demonstrates how, on a stage both literal and metaphorical, actors helped audiences adapt to the profound economic, technological, political, social, and psychological changes of a modernizing world.