As the author of an upcoming book, Unshackling the Memory of Slavery: the Ecodialectics of Landscape and Seascape Memorials, Anny-Dominique Curtius is an expert on the powerful symbolism of toppling statues in times of political and social upheaval around the world. Her book examines memorials grounded in seascape and landscape in the US, France, the Francophone and Anglophone Caribbean, and Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. Her findings resonate in today’s world, as protesters tear down statues of figures linked to racism, slavery, and the American confederacy. Professor Curtius argues that such monuments encapsulate an entangled history, and also interrogate and challenge the traditional definition of memorials, museums, and archives. She wrote this piece for Amplify UI.
—————————————
On February 7, 1986, the day when Jean-Claude Duvalier was overthrown as President of Haiti, groups of student activists toppled a statue of Christopher Columbus in Port-au-Prince and dumped it into the Atlantic Ocean. The uprooting of Kolon (Columbus in Haitian Creole) was advocated as a symbolic punishment of Duvalier as a dictator but also as a colonialist like Columbus. Conflating Kolon, slavery, the Duvalier dictatorship, and the systematic destruction of the conditions of livability in Haiti had galvanized the protestors who reconfigured public spaces in Port-au-Prince and spontaneously created political performances resulting from the interweaving of multiple layers of collective trauma.
On September 21, 1991, the statue of Empress Joséphine was beheaded in the city of Fort-de-France, Martinique; activists claimed that she had influenced Napoleon in his decision to reinstate slavery in the French Antilles in 1802. Up until July 26th, 2020 when the statue was toppled by young activists, it had never been restored fully, and city representatives had chosen to symbolically keep it beheaded.
On May 19, 2017, the statue of Robert E. Lee was taken down from Lee Circle in New Orleans and is now kept in a warehouse until the city finds a more appropriate location. Former Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s decision to do so was strongly influenced by New Orleans-born jazz musician, Wynton Marsalis.
On December 12, 2018, the statue of Mahatma Gandhi was removed on the campus of the University of Ghana in Accra. Students and professors claimed that Gandhi was racist.
On May 22, 2020, on the day of the commemoration of the abolition of slavery in Martinique, two statues of French politician Victor Schœlcher were toppled. Activists argued that while Schœlcher decreed the abolition of slavery in the French colonies in 1848, he was racist and supported financial compensation for former slaveowners.
On June 7, 2020, the toppling of a statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol, and throwing it into the River Avon, triggered a domino effect throughout the UK where the Rhodes Must Fall Movement (that emerged at the University of Cape Town in South Africa in 2015), had already prompted a larger debate for the decolonization of universities; as a matter of fact, Oxford recently voted to remove the controversial statue of Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College in England.
And again this year, in 2020, advocating for a “pedagogy of diversity in all French institutions” Jean-Marc Ayrault, France’s former prime minister, now President of the Foundation for the Memory of Slavery, infuriated French politicians for proposing to rename rooms and buildings honoring Colbert, King Louis XIV’s minister of finances, and author of the dreadful 1685 Code Noir [Black Code].
Protesters and political regimes have always taken down or reconfigured statues glorifying historical figures of a past that is no longer attuned to new social and political climates. Widening the reflection beyond the scale of slavery and colonialism, one could weigh up how vital it was for protesters during the 2014 Ukrainian Revolution to massively behead, pull down or repurpose Lenin monuments.
In the Unites States, the list of defacements and toppling of imposing bronzed statues embodying the confederacy and segregation, sacralizing an iconography of slavery and colonial times or associated with alleged racism is extensive, and this list continues to expand, as protesters keep on occupying the public arena to stage symbolic actions with strong political and social ramifications.
By demanding the removal of these monuments, protesters seek to disrupt the toning down of history and highlight general discontent with institutional systems that glorify controversial heroes and perpetuate the invisibility and disenfranchisement of people of color.
However, removing these monuments also means blocking from consciousness the traumas of history that some refuse to see exhibited in the public arena.
Because this entangled situation cannot be reduced to a political game, how does one draw the line between trauma, guilt, nostalgia of slavery and colonialism, accountability, reparations, education, conversation and reconciliation?
If these monuments are kept on location, they must be recontextualized, new wording must appear on the commemorative plaques that need to enter into an incisive dialogue with other memorials that celebrate the legacy of those who fought against slavery and colonialism.
This new memory dialogue would then detoxify public spaces and educate people about the urgent necessity to display a mosaic of narratives.
Nevertheless, for those who rightfully give specific meanings to the idea of reparation and social justice, this dialogue among a plurality of statues and memorials in the public ground may certainly not be the perfect approach to healing communities. Likewise, future generations will judge our initiatives and reject as inadequate what we envision now as the most insightful paths toward reconciliation and justice.
On the other hand, if these monuments are ultimately removed, they should not be hidden in warehouses. History cannot be locked down but must be constantly interrogated, however painful it may be.
As a cultural and literary critic who has been writing and teaching for some time on new memory museums as well as the toppling and defacement of the iconography of slavery and colonization in public spaces, I choose to focus in my book in progress, on the meaning of choreographies of bodies congregating and galvanizing strengths to reclaim and reshape public squares and spontaneously create embodied performances resulting from the interweaving of multiple layers of collective memory.
Drawing from Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s observation that we are all “amateur historians”, and that “theories of history… grossly underestimate the size, the relevance and the complexity of the overlapping sites where history is produced, notably outside of academia” (Silencing the Past), I contend that statues honoring controversial historical figures never completely die. They are sentenced to historical awareness and a resurgence of memory traces, and this is exactly what protesters across the globe have been doing since the unbearable death of George Floyd on Memorial Day, May 25, 2020. Without fear of a dreadful pandemic, cohabiting, interweaving shared conditions of precarity and empathy, adopting astute or unpolished speech acts, banking on inaccurate historical shortcuts going viral on social media, bodies take to the streets to excavate trauma and re-interrogate oppression and social justice through the bruises of history. These multilayered corporealities not only compose new senses of identity, they also become political body-archives.
Since a bruising history cannot be sentenced to historical obscurity, I envision the new museums and memorials of the 21st century, bolstered with a pioneering healing and “social justice” architecture, as the ideal spaces where the statues of controversial historical figures would be relocated alongside embodied performances and new monuments in order to generate reconciliation between present and past. This is where subjectivities will be impacted, tested, and challenged through transformative experiences.
Anny-Dominique Curtius
Associate Professor of Francophone Studies
Department of French and Italian