My Name is Cain

Haim Maor

 

In the interest of full disclosure, I’d like to start by stating that Portraits of Cain: Representations of Others in Israeli Contemporary Art group exhibition is dedicated to a subject matter that has preoccupied me as an artist for many years. Moreover, now as I revisit this theme as a teacher and a curator, my interest in it as an artist is only growing stronger.[1] The person of Cain, his transformations and stigmas, as well as gazes directed at the “Other,” have been significant themes in my artistic pursuits for many years now. Following my first one-person exhibition, The Mark of Cain,[2] the late artist, curator and art researcher Michael Sgan Cohen offered an original and fascinating interpretation of the artist as a wandering Cain.[3] In his own painting, Sgan Cohen dealt with the theme by representing his own body and face as models for the biblical figure. A few years later, I became acquainted with the pioneering studies of the late Prof. Dan Bar-On about the “Others” within and beside us. His writings deepened and expanded my interest in and preoccupation with Cain and the “Other.” The present exhibition and the concomitant catalogue and conference are an extension, or updated expressions, of all these interests. The memory of both these dear departed people accompanied me during the period of researching and curating the exhibition.

In addition, I was accompanied by a persistent feeling that artists and scholars of various academic disciplines are greatly intrigued by the person of Cain and the nature of the mark of Cain. The current academic, philosophical, literary and artistic interest in the biblical story and its exegeses is by no means accidental. It is contingent on and responds to universal and Israeli social, political, religious and legal conditions. Thinkers, researchers and artists look at the “Others,” and react, each in his or her way, to society’s various modes of “marking” people, animals and even instruments and objects. The act of marking is a preliminary means of excluding, ostracizing, banning, humiliating and consequently also expelling and eliminating the “marked” Others.

The list of motivations, reasons, or pretexts for acts of marking is both long and creative: spanning from social, political, cultural, religio-theological motivations to horror of the foreign and strange, Xenophobia, envy, retribution and violence. Exclusion, harassment and verbal and physical abuse of the Others, whoever they might be, were the very practices from which the divine mark inscribed on Cain’s forehead right after he had murdered his brother Abel was meant to protect him. In Genesis Rabbah, Rabbi Nechemiah explains that God promised to protect Cain from would-be avengers because, as the first-ever killer who knew no better, one should not judge him like a murderer.[4] Evidently, knowing the recesses of the mind of the people He had created, God anticipates their future reactions towards the “Other,” be it Cain or Abel.

Advertiser Shmuel Warshawski says: “‘Signal’ is a distinctive mark, a meaningful mark, that shortens communication [lines] between people.”[5]

The mark inscribed on Cain’s forehead transmits an ambivalent signal. On the one hand, it is identifying mark of an assailant/murderer that betrays his infamy; and on the other hand, it serves as a means of protection provided by God to someone who might have, otherwise, been targeted by vengeful killers, albeit with allegedly justifiable reasons.

As a concept, the Mark of Cain is the archetypal mark of disgrace or shame stamped or inscribed on one’s forearm, forehead, back of the neck, chest, or back; attached to body parts, or cloths of the marked “Other” – an identifying textual or numeral sign, a gyve, an armband, a typical hat, specifically colored clothing (i.e., orange prison uniform in Israel, or red uniform of prisoners condemned to death in Mandatory Palestine), a printed or embroidered logo (the letter “P” for a prisoner). The media has established practices that are meant to prevent the identification of either assailant or a victim. However these very practices have become identifying marks in themselves: a black stripe hiding the eyes of a photographed person, deliberate blurring, pixelation, or cropping his or her photographed face.

The “Mark of Cain” is associated with a number of sociological and criminological concepts: stereotype, stigma, social deviance, labeling, prejudice, racism, and above all – the “Other.” In all these concepts, the “Mark of Cain” signifies a ban, banishment, objectification, repression and nullification by robbing the marked subject of his or her status of a human being with inalienable rights, and transforming him or her into a deviant and “Other.”

“A mark of Cain,” says Warshawski, “is […] an official logo that, like any other logo, is meant to seclude and separate. It is the primary logo. It is a logo that had protected the life of its bearer, but also betrayed his disgrace. It is a logo born in a terrible sin and therefore has come to represent excommunication, banishment and dishonor. In the course of generations, Cain himself became a brand name of evil. […] But how does this logo, this mark, look? The Bible does not give us any indication. Early Midrashim depict the mark of Cain as consisting of the last letter in the ancient Hebrew alphabet, which looks like an encircled X; other hypotheses – the letter K […], an inverted V, bleeding abrasion on the forehead, and so on. As a child, I myself used to envision the mark [of Cain] as a horn protruding from the center of Cain’s forehead. From time to time over the history, marks of disgrace assumed a clear form, such as the yellow patch of the Jews and the ‘scarlet letter’ of adulteresses in the seventeenth century – a red mark in the shape of the letter A (for adultery), but the mystery of the mark of Cain remained unsolved.”[6]

Many exegetes try to figure out the meaning and shape of the mark, and interpret it in various ways: some as a written letter or character,[7] as an initial of either the explicit name of God or Cain’s own name (the Hebrew letter “ק”, for example), which was inscribed by God on Cain’s face; others as a mark, sign or symbol – “made a horn grow out of him,” “caused the orb of the sun to shine on his account,” or afflicted him with leprosy upon him, gave him a dog to protect him, etc.[8]

Warshawski associates the mark of Cain with the universe of brand names. Branding or marking are meant to burn the product and its identifying brand name into our consciousness. And actually, the original meaning of the verb “to brand” or that of the noun “branding” refers to the act of marking one’s livestock with branding (burning) iron as a proof of ownership.

***

“And the Lord said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother’s keeper? And he said, What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground.” (Gen. 4:9-10)

The beauty and poignancy of the biblical text lie in its succinctness, in its minimalism. The text is an encrypted capsule of simple words that invites the reader to decipher, unfold and interpret the longer story hidden within it. A handful of biblical verses can depict a cosmic event (the Creation), normal or abnormal workings of the forces of nature (the Ten Plagues), global human dramas (the Flood, the Tower of Babel), or personal, familial, or tribal dramas. The capsule is a top secret that awaits a human exegete to fill in the missing spaces between the words and use his or her imagination to reconstruct and elicit the whole story incorporated in its inferred elements.

Seventeen verses (Gen. 4:1-17) relate the life story of two brothers, the sons of Adam and Eve. An older brother killing his younger sibling – murder case file no. 001. The biblical account is a thick, factual, practical and reticent, proper police report. The name Cain is being associated with the most horrendous crime – the taking of someone else’s life. Nevertheless, the succinct biblical narrative is replete with multi-layered secrets and enigmas that challenge the exegete to unravel their hidden meanings: What was the motive for this murder? Was it jealousy or sibling rivalry over their father/God’s attention? Was it a confrontation between the one who brought “cheap” offerings (“of the fruit of the ground”[9] – “from the leftovers”[10]) and the one who brought “reverent” offerings (“of the firstlings of his flock and the fat thereof”[11])? Was it a squabble about honor, a woman, or property?[12] The Ramban (Nachmanides) explains that Cain was a man of property (Qayin; qinyan), whereas Abel recognized property as “vanitas vanitatum” (Hevel; hevel-havalim).[13] Or maybe it was the first – and everlasting – feud between representatives of rural and pastoral cultures, between sedentary people and nomads who lead their flock to graze on the fields of others? Another major query – what was the nature of the killing instrument? Did Cain use a stone, a club, or his bare hands to strangle his brother or push him over a cliff?[14]

 

“And the Lord had respect unto Abel and to his offering. / But unto Cain and to his offering he had no respect. And Cain was very wroth, and his countenance fell. / And the Lord said unto Cain, Why art thou wroth? And why is thy countenance fallen? / If thou doest well, shall thou not be accepted? And if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him.” (Genesis, 4: 4-6)

The words of the Bible encompass a whole range of human feelings and desires, thoughts and disappointments, past reverberations of current human activities, and, in face of their ambiguity, contemporary exegetes must look for the answers within themselves. The mythical narrative serves as a mirror, in which one can see, here and now, one’s reflection and wonder what he or she would have felt and done in a similar situation? How would he or she have reacted to the words: “If thou doest well, shall thou not be accepted? And if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him”? Is this the inner struggle and the price it exacts from anyone who is torn between restraint and self-control and giving free rein to emotions and instinctive, violent, egotistic behavior that knows no boundaries? These and other motives are joined by additional ones that were to serve future murderers: impulsive-emotional, rational, ideological, political and religious motives, as well as the ones associated with desires and passions, the will to own, to control and dominate the body, the soul, the thoughts, the property, or territory of a fellow human being.

The familial myth of Cain is, therefore, a constitutive myth of much grievous historical murderous events of a much larger scale, such as the Holocaust. Poet Dan Pagis writes about the chain of murderers and murdered and about the struggle raging between the living on the face of the earth and the dead buried below ground: “When Cain began to multiply on the face of the earth, / I began to multiply in the belly of the earth, / and my strength has long been greater than his.”[15] Pagis also deals with the complementary, symbiotic relation between victimizer and victim, with the reflections of “Others”: “On an Evening of mercy he happens upon / a convenient haystack. / He sinks in, is swallowed, rests. / Shhh, Cain is asleep. / Smiling, he dreams that he is his brother.”[16]

The punishment of Cain – a sedentary “tiller of the ground” – was a life of perpetual vagrancy and restlessness.[17] Cain became a vagabond, the first exile in history, and his wandering represented both punishment and penance for blood letting.[18] Subsequently, Christian theologians and others combined the myth of Cain and that of the Wandering Jew, the “Slayer of Christ,” who just like Cain is condemned to eternal vagrancy.[19] In this context, Abel is conceived as a precursor of the quintessential victim – Jesus Christ.

At any rate, the cursed Cain was to build the first city, Enoch, a new residential site that was not directly connected to nature and was designed as a place detached from the soil. In that vein, the Cain myth is also the “documentation of the passage from agrarian to urban society, a passage that is also based on a murderous myth – the city as the harbinger of the demise of the land.”[20] (The American sculptor and theoretician Robert Smithson [1938-1973], known for his monumental open-air earth works, said once that in a city covered with asphalt and cobblestone pavements, people tend to forget that there is earth).[21]

***

“And the Lord set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.” (Genesis, 4: 15)

Nowadays, the marking of a “branded Other” is more ambivalent and multi-layered in its implications and contexts. The identity of the marker is just as important as that of the one who is marked and his or her identifying marks. For example, a young man holding a gun and looking proudly at the camera; when the photographed young man is one of “us,” do we perceive the situation differently than when he is one of “them”?

The answer to this and other questions is complex and context-dependent: in the eyes of people from his immediate environment – his family and friends – the photographed armed man is perceived as a fortunate man of valor, a fearless hero, a freedom fighter, or a person of profound beliefs. In the eyes of others – his enemies, or opponents – he may seem as a violent person, a ruthless criminal, or wanted terrorist. In the background of both points of view, one can hear the resonating inner feelings of the photographed young man, who often see himself as a victim of the circumstances, the reality, the ideology, the faith, or the fate, which have marked him as a freedom fighter/wanted terrorist.

Looking at Miki Kratsman’s photograph, Wanted No. 1, I recognize the theatrical artificiality of the situation, the pathetic outlook and the misery of someone whose fragile self-image is in dire need of a crutch in the form of a firearm. “You call me Cain,” he would tell me, “but I am a servant of my faith, a public servant of my people, or a man of social responsibility.”[22] I recognize in his eyes his wish that I would remove from him of the label of the dehumanization to which he was subjected and his will to rejoin the human race, to be worthy of the designation “human being” and not branded as the “Other,” or as “non-human.”

In the Portraits of Cain exhibition, one can see many faces of this kind: faces of Jews and Arabs, orthodox-settlers and atheists, men and women, “wanted” men and marksmen, hunters and hunted, victims of sexual assault and victims of murder in the name of family honor, collaborators, prisoners and others. In some of the works, the stereotypic image is disrupted, broken, or transferred into other times and places. In some works, the artist presents him- or herself or their doppelgangers as “branded” with the mark of Cain, or rebel against their “branding” (“I am a Good Arab”).

“In in in nocent” is embroidered on a snow white yarmulka in a work by Ken Goldman – ironic take on the habit of criminals to wear yarmulka when they are brought to justice, as if their newly found religiosity-faith attests to their righteousness-honesty-innocence.

The growing use of branding wo/men makes our present reality disturbing and intimidating. Human history shows that branding people, men and women, is always only the first stage in a long process. It starts with trampling their honor and ends with a license to eliminate them. Exclusion of women; domestic or non-domestic abuse and maltreatment of women and children; exclusion of minority populations (Palestinians, work- and other immigrants); using derogatory language to describe soldiers and officers who serve their country and perform their missions against oppressed or oppressive populations – all these and more are symptoms of a branding society that objectifies minorities or individuals by turning them into scapegoats, cursed Cains and “non-humans,” and in which removing them from sight, both metaphorically and literally, is allowed or, even, considered a sort of religious or administrative precept.

Branding society broadcasts the fact that it is a frightened society, fearing thoughts, ideas and views different from its own. Actually this is an insecure society, for which the “Other” is like a red rag to a bull, incensing its senses and feelings and provoking its “beastly” nature to charge, kill or, at least, remove him or her.

A branding society prefers unified thinking and faith, outlook and dress. Only a society that does not flinch from the different and recognizes that every individual is unique and special; only a society courageous enough to accept the “Other” and magnanimous enough to include him or her, rather than deny their existence and threaten and harm them is a wholesome, accomplished and humanistic society.