From desecration to consecration – The story of a lintel

ART

By ANDREW MOUTU
THE photograph above shows a part of the lintel that once appeared as part of the artistic embellishments that adorn the entrance into the National Parliament.
It was cut into three pieces and removed from its’ place as soon the Parliament passed a historic national budget and rose up for the year on that night of the 26th of November 2013.
The pieces of the desecrated lintel have since been taken into custody and are now preserved at the National Museum and Art Gallery of which a piece of it is currently on display inside the Bernard Mullu Narokobi Gallery.
The reason why the lintel was chopped into pieces and removed was because of a puritanist agenda, initiated by the then Speaker, Sir Theo Zurenuoc, to reform and modernize the Parliament.
Sir Theo and a cohort of religious zealots in the Parliament and a handful of advisors, who were inspired by a theology of prosperity, saw that cultural and artistic decorations inside the Parliament were part of an ancient and pagan tradition of religious beliefs and practices which have now been superseded by our Christian faith through the Word of God.
Those carved images on the lintel were believed to have an occult origin and a causal link to the bad state of political and economic affairs of the country which deflate us with a recursive spell.
The theology of prosperity is premised not only on ideas of purity as with the belief in ‘immanentizing the eschaton’, to rain down heaven on earth, precipitating with both showers of blessing and prosperity. To change and purify, modernise and reform the Parliament, it was believed that those kinds of art work ought to be removed and replaced with symbolisms of the modern, the biblical and the progressive.
The remnants of an arcane and archaic pagan tradition derailed the ideas of purity, modern and the progressive. Destroying and severing the link and association with a dark pagan past was promoted as the means to change the world of parliamentary leadership and governance in Papua New Guinea.
But all was not lost to the keepers of history. The Speaker and the Clerk of the Parliament were advised (four months in advance) by the National Museum andArt Gallery that the plan to remove and vanish the artistic decorations were illegal and unconstitutional and as heinous as an act of sacrilege that attacks our sense of national identity.
The then Governor of East Sepik, the late Grand Chief Sir Michael Somare, and the Director of the National Museum and Art Gallery, Dr.Andrew Moutu, challenged this puritanist move by the Speaker and took the matter to Court for legal interpretation and sanction.
After two years of litigation, the Court finally ruled, through Justice David Cannings, that the destruction and removal of the art works were both illegal and unconstitutional. It was illegal in the sense that it went against the principles of national cultural patrimony stipulated in the National Cultural Property (Preservation) Act and enforced by the National Museum & Art Gallery. It was unconstitutional by going against the freedom of conscience, thought and religion enshrined in Section 45 of the Constitution of Papua New Guinea.
The court ordered for the artistic decorations to be re-installed. However, this has not happened since to date. But the question remains: have we changed the world? And if not, how can we change the world? What kind of insights can we take from the lintel that has been destroyed and pulled down from the Parliament?
A lintel is a horizontal beam that runs across doors and windows in a house or a building. Sometimes it has a structural function of carrying the weight of the wall above it and if it is pulled down carelessly, this could also cause some damage to the house. At other times, the lintel graces the houses with an ornamental function, it shrouds it with an aura and veneration.
The inspiration to this architectural design is drawn locally from the Abelam areas of the Sepik where lintels lie across horizontally above the entrances to the ‘spirit house’. The carved lintel is locally known as ngwal ndu or ‘grandfather man’, a pantheon of apical ancestors who are represented as totemic figures. Apart from inspiring awe and reverence, the totemic motifs represent and identify the social and the organic composition of the ‘spirit house’. It comes in between ancestors and progenies. It identifies and re-present the clan groups that compose its membership who conduct their ceremonial affairs inside and outside of the ‘spirit house’.
The lintel that was destroyed on the night of 26th November 2013 had 19 images carved onto it to represent the view that the people of the 19 provinces of Papua New Guinea (including Hela and Jiwaka) are the constituents of this great house of assembly we call the National Parliament.
Composition and decomposition
The lintel appears to have something to do with our composition as much as to our decomposition but much less to the quest for purification and reformation through destruction and purgation. As an horizontal beam in front of the lower end or base of the facade it carries a subtle yet a profound message. In its composition it speaks about matters of content and quality, integrity and purpose, power and privilege that preside over and define a community, a village or a nation. It is saying, so to speak, we are the people of this house!
Identity and representation find a lintel to sleep on as a pillow while the membership of the house cultivate and nurture the yam gardens to feed the young and novices of tomorrow. Gardens are grown on land where the lintels are composed of and the clan groups are yams appearing in a human form. In Abelam an initiation complex is a yam choreographed as a dancing spectacle. The lintels are never destroyed or purged.
After a ‘spirit house’ has lived its life, as an ephemeral art form, it is left to disintegrate through a slow gradual process of decomposition. The lintel and other ceremonial objects are pulled out and left in some isolated parts of the village to decompose.
The belief is that decomposition nourishes the soil for the next garden of yams. To cut, destroy and burn a lintel is to light up the fires that burn a garden of yams. For the yams are different kind of people and the people are kind of yams appearing in a permutation of form, a play in the theater of analogical reasoning.
The lintel is identical with and representative of its people and the symbolic image of the garden that has been and is yet to be cultivated. The lintel is located in a time between the past and the future and so it is always in the making, propagating and speciating anew.
So how can we change the world from the perspective of the lintel? We might want to take a view from the component units of the carved lintel where ideas of personal identity and representation are anchored, where land anchors and touches the soles of our feet. Where gardens, rivers and creeks give us food and nourishment to our health and strength.
How can we change the world by keeping in tune with the wisdom of our ancestors? How can we imagine the lintel as a badge of identity? It once hung across in front of the façade of the National Parliament. Imagine the lintel as carrier of identity and of representation. How can we change the world? How can we change the quality of leadership that make up the social composition of the National Parliament?
If composition gives us the social numbers and decomposition gives us the nourishment to cultivate the soils of the future, then what is the connection between number and identity? Just as a ‘spirit house’ is composed of several clans, numbers are also made up of other numbers. When they come together somewhere, numbers become the exegesis of the political while a quorum that it creates sets a procedure into motion.
As procedure becomes numerical, numbers take on the power of a mandate. In computational logic numbers and procedures combine in a sequential pattern to form an algorithm. In the spirit of the Parliament, we find that while both numbers and procedures are often manipulated, number comes with a might, speed and a fidelity, while procedures on the other hand, work to keep the peace while consecrating the house of decision making with legitimacy and sacra.
Rather than a parochial image of naïve occultism, which should be destroyed and removed, we draw inspiration from the story of the lintel as it passes out of a historical moment of desecration to a future of promise and consecration.
We propose a way in which the National Identity card system is imagined as a lintelpiece. Every Papua New Guinean must be given or compulsorily acquire a NID card to vote in the leaders that would represent them in the National Parliament.
The lintelpiece defines itself by composition and decomposition while the fluidity of these processes over time is consecrated by a single integer only. In its composition, it is only one lintel but as you decompose it into it is divided into the 21 provinces of Papua New Guinea.
Therefore, composition can be seen as the sum and decomposition as the parts of this greater sum of inclusion and participation, uniqueness and integrity.
Only through an effective, legitimate and verifiable identity system can we improve, alter or change the world and quality of parliamentary representation in Papua New Guinea. One NID card per person will improve and change a defective electoral system.
The lintelpiece has been there all along telling us about who we are and where we came from. We can draw from the wisdom and hindsight of such a lintelpiece for an integer and an algorithm that can help change the quality of leadership in Papua New Guinea.

• Dr Andrew Moutu is the Director of the National Museum and Art Gallery