The Slave Lodge is a
sturdy building raised by the Dutch East India Company in 1660 that housed slaves
especially during the British occupation. The active and proud voice
accompanying the exhibits throughout was striking. I don’t remember what was
written. But this is what I remembered about what was felt: In this space,
there is no excuse for ignorance or forgetting. In this space, we honor the
pain, the trauma, the complex stories. In this space, we share the voices
preserved from grandparent to grandchild and on down because no one wrote them
into the historical record, and because stories bring to life the abstracted
and the silenced.
Everywhere alongside horrific stories was a towering dignity—in pictures and in the words of descendants proud of their names however awful their provenance, proud, because their families wore them and passed them on, turned them to love, and strong, because their surnames remind them why they might still be struggling now, still waking up at three in the morning for a job. Knowing the past taught them and teaches us how to organize and resist and build for the future. The trauma and brutality was there in that museum, but with no trace of defeat or despair.
A couple months ago I read How the Word is Passed, by Clint Smith, a powerful, wise book about how history is actively remembered or forgotten. He discussed places like the Slave Lodge through the Door of No Return on Gorée Island in Senegal and the importance of such “sites of remembrance”: here we can gather history around us, in stone, plaster, lintels, and the very air and ground beneath our feet, and we can invoke a past with both horror and reverence: it was here, it was here, I can’t imagine, and I can’t imagine because I am finally imagining.
We can read a book and scan a Wikipedia article, or we can go and make ourselves ache to really understand something in the very moment we have started to understand.
We returned to Isilimela to drum together in quaking, electric unison, every face a light.
Everywhere alongside horrific stories was a towering dignity—in pictures and in the words of descendants proud of their names however awful their provenance, proud, because their families wore them and passed them on, turned them to love, and strong, because their surnames remind them why they might still be struggling now, still waking up at three in the morning for a job. Knowing the past taught them and teaches us how to organize and resist and build for the future. The trauma and brutality was there in that museum, but with no trace of defeat or despair.
A couple months ago I read How the Word is Passed, by Clint Smith, a powerful, wise book about how history is actively remembered or forgotten. He discussed places like the Slave Lodge through the Door of No Return on Gorée Island in Senegal and the importance of such “sites of remembrance”: here we can gather history around us, in stone, plaster, lintels, and the very air and ground beneath our feet, and we can invoke a past with both horror and reverence: it was here, it was here, I can’t imagine, and I can’t imagine because I am finally imagining.
We can read a book and scan a Wikipedia article, or we can go and make ourselves ache to really understand something in the very moment we have started to understand.
We returned to Isilimela to drum together in quaking, electric unison, every face a light.
No comments:
Post a Comment