Edward Colston Statue, Bristol |
Life under "Lockdown" - A London Diary #4
“May you live in interesting times”
– so says the ‘Chinese’ proverb. Although many people don’t realise it, this
isn’t a Chinese proverb at all. It sounds rather like some wise old Confucian
adage, used most effectively as a faintly damning form of adieu – a subtle reversal of “mind how you go.” But like so many
things nowadays, it’s actually ‘fake news.’ It’s thought the phrase was first coined
in an American comic book circa the 1950s, used by some stereotypically racist Fu
Manchu-like baddie. But fake news or not, we really do live in interesting
times right now.
I shall keep this as short as I can
– because there are far better qualified folk than me commenting on all this in
every newspaper and media channel right now, but I just wanted to pen a few
words about the present wave of radical action which has followed in the wake
of recent Police brutality in the USA, and the #BlackLivesMatter protests which
have been triggered by the killing of George Floyd. The sense of injustice
suddenly seems intolerable, not just in America but elsewhere too. These
incidents, which seem to have burst out from our collective unconscious, remind
us that racial and social inequality is essentially systemic. It is inherently built
into our modern societies and its roots are deep. All right minded people are
morally outraged, naturally, but ‘thoughts and prayers’ are no longer enough.
Right now such oft repeated hollow words and gestures are quite simply another
negation, an apathy that attempts to whitewash over the cracks in our social
fabric. Especially here in Britain, where our current Prime Minister has openly
used overtly racist and xenophobic epithets on numerous occasions. Small wonder
then, the deracinated state we’re now in. We live in a world filled with
divisions. Angry people seem to be constantly barking at us to ‘stay in our
lanes.’ Don’t buck the norms, while the social elites seem to be cynically
bolstering the ramparts of their own hegemony. ‘Twas ever thus, but the wedge
between ‘those who have’ and ‘those who have not’ is now visibly being driven
ever deeper, widening the gap between our two camps. It’s little wonder then
that some people are very pissed off. And right now they’ve quite rightly had
enough.
One of the outcomes of this wider
unrest is the focus on civic symbols of commemoration, namely statues standing
in our shared public spaces. Over the last few days angry groups of people have
come together to lasso ropes around the necks of some of these statues and pull
them down from their plinths. These effigies, most commonly cast in illustrious
bronze, have stood for varying lengths of time depending on who they
commemorate and when the decision was made and the funds raised or allocated to
commemorate them. They are usually described on the accompanying plaques on
their plinths in eulogistic terms as souls suitably ennobled due to the civic
benefactions they have bestowed upon our communities, either locally or
nationally. But people have begun to take issue with some of these monuments,
questioning why they so often tell a story from one particular angle only. Any
decent historian or archaeologist will be the first to affirm that all
monuments, the same as all public edifices, are consciously put up to serve
political ends. They are meant to make a statement, to convey a particular message,
and often – unlike, say, abstract art – they are specifically designed and social
engineered to underline a particular rhetorical point. These statues may well
look static, but they each embody a cognitive dynamism which is meant to speak
to us down the ages.
In the UK the most notable of these
recent direct actions has been the toppling of the statue of Edward Colston in
Bristol. A local civic grandee from the eighteenth century, whose good deeds
included the founding and funding of schools and alms-houses for the poor, etc.,
as indeed the plaque on his monument duly attests. But so too, as the
protestors have pointed out, what that plaque neglects to mention is that much
of the personal wealth which enabled Colston to fund all these seemingly ‘selfless’
yet self-aggrandising gestures was derived from the profits of the slave trade
and his use of enslaved people and their enforced labour in his plantations in
the West Indies. As I understand it, the toppling of Colston’s statue wasn’t a
spontaneous happening. It may have been spurred by the #BlackLivesMatter movement,
but it was already a contested local issue which had long been simmering away, left
unresolved amidst bureaucratic inertia. Moves had been taken via the ‘proper
channels’ to debate whether the statue should be removed, or if the plaques on
its plinth could be revised to give a more balanced accounting of Colston’s
life, the source of his wealth, and the morally precarious balance between his
good deeds and his bad ones. But, as a wry Bristolian take on the issue
explains it – “We didn’t get anywhere
pursuing things through the proper channels, so we took it upon ourselves to
chuck him into the proper channel instead.”
Toppling Edward Colston Statue, Bristol - June 2020 (Washington Post)
During the lockdown I’ve watched as the mercury of
my social media channels has incrementally risen up into a daily barrage of
discontent and outright rage. Everyone seems to be angry about something – the Government’s
handling of the Coronavirus; Dominic Cummings being Dominic Cummings; the on-going
riots and repression in Hong Kong; Rio Tinto destroying unique sites of ancient
Palaeolithic and indigenous cultural importance in Australia – the list seems
as unfathomable as it is endless. I’m seeing fewer and fewer cute and fluffy
cat videos on my time line. But, with my historian’s monocle wedged firmly in
place, it has been interesting to see how the toppling and defacing of these public
statues has really sparked a bigger debate about history, its purpose, its ways
of interpretation and presentation. From statues of Colston to Columbus,
Winston Churchill, Robert Baden-Powell, and, closest to where I live, Robert
Milligan (another eighteenth century slave owner), the situation has clearly
moved on from simply ‘Rhodes Must Fall’, but this is a massive issue to tackle
given how culturally embedded these figures are within our civic environments –
street names, place names, the names of schools, theatres, museums, houses, gardens, etc.
History isn’t simply the past, history is what has created and defined our
present. The future though is the one thing which we can define in thinking
about how we deal collectively with our present times, and how we act now.
In Britain in particular over the
last few years there have been growing calls for us as a nation to get to grips
with our colonial past, to engage with the lingering influences of that
heritage, to think more openly about how it consciously and unconsciously
informs our present – from museums and public spaces to school curriculums and
the way in which Government archives are managed and administrated, embargoed
or destroyed. However, I recently saw one rather disappointing comment on one
of the social media platforms I use which people have begun posting as a kind
of quick and easy virtue-signalling meme; and on first reading it seems
laudable enough, but pausing a moment before scrolling by I felt that it
actually missed the point by a country mile. To paraphrase, it went something
like this:
“Historian
here. We NEVER use STATUES to teach history. We use BOOKS to do that, and our
young students have put what they’ve learnt to use. That’s why tearing down
statues IS history.”
So, here’s my take on this one in
particular. Yes, tearing down these statues is
history. What could be more symbolic that tying up the legs of the bronze
statue of a white slave owner and chucking it into the sea – exactly as the
white slavers used to do to enslaved persons who got sick whilst in transit
on-board their slave ships in the mid-Atlantic? – I have no argument there, but
I take issue with not using statues to teach history. This is something museums
do every day as part of their core function, as one of my retired archaeologist
colleagues pointed out in the comments below one of these posts using this
meme. You only have to look at the example of the Meroe Head in the British
Museum to see that this phenomenon is far from new or recent.
I’ve written about the efficacy of
studying and interpreting statues on this blog a number of times before, as
well as pondering the radical actions of destroying or tearing them down. From
statues of Lenin and Stalin to those of Saddam Hussein or the unfortunate
Bamiyan Buddhas, as well as various other examples in Syria and Iraq under ISIS.
This phenomenon is rooted in history, but the point is our shared histories are
constantly being revised, reinterpreted, and rewritten anew. Such direct
actions are no less important in past instances than they are now, or will
continue to be in the future. But mentioning museums raises another couple of contentious
points too, which shouldn’t be skated over.
"Garden of the Generalissimos" - Chihu Park & CKS Mausoleum, Taiwan |
I’ve seen many people on social
media channels and newspaper comment sections urging a kind of compromise or
literal middle-ground between those who are outraged these statues have been
let to stand so long, and those who are outraged they have been so swiftly
felled by mob intervention – and that’s those people who are saying that these
old statues should be moved to museums and archives, or put in dead sculpture parks,
like the one in Taiwan filled with rows of defunct statues of Chiang Kai-shek.
In response to these suggestions I saw one archivist shout angrily back at
these people saying: “Don’t dump your f**king
toxic statues on my institution’s doorstep!” – They then quickly followed
up this emphatic statement by pointing out that most public museums and
archives lack the space, the funding, and the resources to adequately deal with
what should be their core functions as it is. Flooding them with nuisance
sculptures isn’t necessarily the logical panacea it might at first glance seem to be,
indeed solving this contentious civic conundrum needs properly thinking through. Plus,
many people feel our museums are largely institutions with their own culturally
problematic colonial baggage to deal with as it is. Nothing positive can happen
in either of these two regards without a calm and coherent discussion, nor
without long term planning and proper funding of the heritage sector.
Hence all of this ultimately circles
back to the same fundamental issue, and that is how we choose collectively to
face our shared heritage; how we choose to frame our different histories; how
we preserve these monuments, and the way we choose to memorialise the past. It
is definitely a debate which needs to take place. And clearly now is the time
to have that debate. Watch this space, as they say – or rather, watch those
plinths, empty or otherwise, because we are ‘living in interesting times’ for
sure.
Also on 'Waymarks'
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments do not appear immediately as they are read & reviewed to prevent spam.