Day 21 Friday June 12th 2009 The Dancing Chicken

by Conor Kelly, 12 Jun 2009

A great difficulty in articulating the argument for a memorial to Roger Casement remains his partisan political usefulness. It is key that the memory of Casement and any imagery associated with him service a public beyond such times when it can be manipulated for mere political gain. Like the unfortunate dancing chicken in Stroszek, Werner Herzog’s 1976 study of the search for new beginnings, Casement’s memory suffers the fate of being peddled out to strut its stuff when certain needs be. He becomes nothing more than a spectacle, His memory could serve as a touchstone for the reading of the post-colonial issue, not only in Western Europe but also in Africa, South America and other regions only too aware of the fallout and hangover of the colonial project.