Goodbye Colston: The Absence of Recognition
In a book I once spilled ketchup on in a Buddhist centre, missing Bristol, Iver B. Neumann relates how monuments are ‘a materialisation of a community celebrating itself,’ a proclamation of that community’s worth as self-evident. Every exaltation of that Self constructs an Other that must be negated and frozen in time. The most basic way this is achieved, as demonstrated, for Neumann, by Stonehenge, is to make the Other into an absence, ‘that which refuses to be drawn in.’ One side’s supremacy is proclaimed forever; the other’s negation is implied forever – a monument is as much about who we choose to remember as who we let be forgotten.
And in no type of monument is that more pronounced than statues. Statues are predicated on the implication of absence: the absence of the breathing subject from the bumpy piece of bronze erected in their honour; the absence of dissenting voices to that honour; the absence of nuance, of critique, of play and the absent-minded people that walk past, ignoring the statue each day. As Gary Younge writes, they are ‘the most conservative form of commemoration.’ They seek to calcify power eternally, but are fated to spectate that power’s inevitable tendency towards an Ozymandian zilch. In this final sense, even their illusion of presence, their artifice of eternity, becomes as fragile as it once was powerful.
Look at the racist face of Edward Colston, now slaked by the dirty tide of Bristol harbour, the cross-pollination of his name from roads, to pubs, to gross sounding buns and schools a ten-minute walk away from the Malcolm X Community Centre and think about what his inescapable presence in Bristol’s topography precludes from our cultural memory and what that means. Neumann writes of monumentalisation as a ‘constitutive social act’ – it creates community as well as celebrating it. That is not to say that walking past a statue makes you more likely to be a slave trader, but that there is an absence reproduced in Colston’s statue, which is concomitant with the larger absence of black people in the way we teach our history and that those absences are constitutive of social norms. In the case of Colston specifically, the absent Other is the 80,000 people that Colston kidnapped and shipped across the Middle Passage, with disease, suicide or murder claiming between ten and twenty percent of them. At its most fundamental level this is an absence of recognition, a designation of certain bodies as ‘disqualified nonbeings,’ as George Ciccariello-Maher puts it, in Decolonizing Dialectics, and a cementing of that disqualification.
We might not do slavery any more (except when we continuously launder it through other countries; except in the process of that laundering; except when we force prisoners into unprotected labour; and except when we pay compensation to the descendants of slave owners, a category that includes David Cameron, who consequently disavows reparations), but this ontological disqualification remains. It was dispassionately iterated by Derek Chauvin on the body of George Floyd and it is institutionally iterated through red-lining, over-policing and the neo-colonial poverty of our education systems, absenting black people of the means of struggle, the means of recognition and the means of breath.
The French West-Indian political philosopher Frantz Fanon wrote that ‘since the other was reluctant to recognize me there remained only one solution: to make myself known.' And so just as a calf demands milk, a statue of a slaver demands to be toppled or graffitied or scrawled on by the hands of those it (and more importantly the legacy it represents) makes an absence of. Because antithetical to a singular, inanimate statue is a moving, breathing city. A city is a million presences, a shout in the street, a hand on an escalator, a face in a window. And a protest is a coagulation of those presences to a single purpose, since it is in its purest form an occupation of space, a declaration of presence, a making oneself known.
If then Colston’s statue’s inscription constructed an absent consent by referencing the ‘citizens of Bristol,’ then the presence of cheers, the presence of ropes around Colston’s neck withdrew it. This withdrawal is, of course, as much a part of history as the crimes the statue commemorates. The cultural closure that the monumentalising view of history necessitates has been shattered by an act of cultural disclosure. This act and the protests more generally are an unfreezing of the once frozen Other – how many people are now talking about the ways we remember our racist past (and present) that weren’t before?
Of course, politicians, as politicians do, did this: this ‘is disorderly and lawless behaviour,’ which of course yes, it is and of course yes, that’s the point, but to mobilise the law in defence of some racistly shaped metal, whilst refusing to acknowledge the unaccompanied children and vulnerable adult refugees who have been legally accepted into this country, again prompts the question of who qualifies as a being and where the borders are. A refugee camp on the periphery which is both lawless and illegal, per international law, gets no condemnation, while the Bristol protestors who use lawless routes after lawful ones have been exhausted ‘will face justice.’
Justice is itself a monument. Every invocation is haunted by those absent from its implementation. We might think how Grenfell victims, Windrush deportees and the Burmese slaves of the tobacco company Priti Patel lobbied for, earning £15 an month, while she earned £125 an hour, fall outside of our monumentalisation of justice. In our specific case, we might also think about how a tory councillor acts of lawlessness could be justified to preserve the static, othering view of Colston’s legacy.
In the final analysis, as shallow opinion bemoans, the toppling of Colston is primarily an act of signification, for monuments are instruments for the signification of power and values. What denotes a truly radical act, rather than the exchange of a sign for a sign, as adding a second plaque would have been, is the exchange of a sign for the real. This act of signification, the boshing of Colston in the sea, quite viscerally evoking what his company did to the dead bodies of slaves, has quite quickly become a crucible for the debates about the BLM protests in the UK. If, in the starkness of its signifying, it can foment a more critical approach to our cultural memory, and what it absents, and thus constitute community in a more racially egalitarian way, as more material progress is achieved, then how can it be pointless?
After I wiped the offending ketchup off the book, the rusty stain still lingering to this day, and left the Buddhist centre for a secondhand shop, I overheard a bit of racism. Not major racism, just the quiet, familiar kind that seems to cling to British society, like the smell of cigarette smoke on felt curtains. It was the day after the 2019 Election had been called and a man was at the counter talking to the shopkeeper. What he said was: ‘we need someone who will control the borders. Stop the animals getting in.’ What I said was: nothing.
Now, if there is a final, gaping absence to contend with, it is this nothing: that in a time 62 years after the abolition of slavery seemingly no white voice was raised to oppose the erecting of a statue in honour of one of the most heinous slavetraders, that 187 years after slavery there are still those who are ‘more devoted to "order" than to justice,’ in this case and more broadly in every case of slavery happening now. White voices should not be absent again, they should be supportive, reflective and demonstrative. They should ‘speak to (rather than listen to or speak for)’ and not co-opt nor undermine, but do what they can to sustain this renewed impetus to overturn white supremacy and de-colonise society for good.
Title Photo - © Keir Gravil 2020
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Ciccariello-Maher, George, Decolonizing Dialectics (London: Duke University Press, 2017)
Fanon, Frantz, trans. Constance Farrington, The Wretched of the Earth (London: Penguin, 2001)
Neumann, Iver B., ‘Frozen Moments: Visualising the Polity in Times of Overheating’ in Identity Destabilised, ed. Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Elisabeth Schober (London: Pluto, 2016)
Written by Tom Goodyer
An English graduate from Bristol University, Tom's interests include Donda West trivia and pointing at the camera every single time. Here's a super crazy fact about me: I will never get a LinkedIn page