Fluid Memories, Static Monument
An image showing the toppled statue of slave trader Edward Colston by Black Lives Matter protestors in Bristol, 7 June 2020. (image: KSAG photography)
It is a long, hot summer night in June. A red night that recalls the racial violence of 1919 and the uprisings of 1967, except this night is now. In the North End of Boston, protesters who have taken to the street to proclaim that Black Lives Matter also decapitate a statue of Christopher Columbus in the city’s Christopher Columbus Waterfront Park. This headless figure joins the many other statues that have been toppled or defaced across the globe. Yet, why did Columbus find himself the victim of such a public beheading?
It may seem unnecessary to point out that statues are not identical with the figures they represent. That Christopher Columbus’s many atrocities –including the enslavement, genocidal abuse, and murder of Indigenous people – are not usually represented in the symbol of Columbus, should be apparent. Symbols magnify the meaning of what they represent, even if they often achieve this, paradoxically, by means of reduction and omission. However, when one deals with the messiness of symbolic renderings of history, especially public history, then by necessity one deals in ambiguity. Columbus can be both a hero for Italian-Americans and a central character in the “Doctrine of discovery”. In this way, cultural celebrations can all too easily play their part in legitimatising colonialism.
Christopher Columbus Waterfront Park was established in 1967 by the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal organisation, in a primarily Italian-American neighbourhood of Boston. The aforementioned statue was erected by the Friends of Christopher Columbus Committee in 1979. While these historical details may be irrefutable, what cannot be established is the objective significance of the monument – or, at least, an objective view upon which all observers could definitively agree. Although the statue has now been placed in storage while the city reconsiders its “historic meaning”, its eventual decision will doubtlessly still be considered controversial and divisive. When you are dealing in histories, how could this not be the case?
This is exactly what we must interrogate: monuments have a propensity for dealing – and, indeed double-dealing – in histories. One can spend days, weeks, and months speculating on what Boston should or must do with this statue while still misunderstanding the lack of fidelity between memorials and the histories that they represent. Nevertheless, we persist. We ask: why was Columbus allowed to stand for so long undisturbed and which narratives about him were allowed to dominate public perceptions? The fact that people have complicated lives, in which they often do as much bad as good, means that their histories will equally be unbalanced.
It may be easy to say that both supporters and detractors of Columbus have judged the man through a reductive lens: the left hand fails to appreciate his accomplishments, while the right hand fails to measure his slaughter. Yet the fact remains that even though a person cannot be so easily summed up, it does not follow that when the scales of justice are measured, the balance will come out neutral. When people get together, they must not only evaluate history but also assess their criteria for making judgments. Even with these difficulties, we are still obligated to judge the wounds of colonialism. Khalid Warsame conveys the issue well in his essay ‘This Vast Conspiracy of Memory’ when he writes: “Imagine inflicting a wound and then rearranging the very fabric of a society solemnly to preserve its memory while pretending it doesn’t exist; it is a grotesque and criminal synecdoche.” Some crimes are too significant to be understood in the context of a balance sheet. This is where our capacity for judgment is crucial. We must judge which monuments belong in public, and such judgment demands more than an arithmetical accounting. Such judgement requires, first of all, that we understand how monuments function.
In their paper ‘Monuments, Memory and Marginalisation in Adelaide’s Prince Henry Gardens’, geographers Iain Hay, Andrew Hughes and Mark Tutton argue that “Memorials and monuments are political constructions, recalling and representing histories selectively, drawing popular attention to specific events and people and obliterating or obscuring others.” The act of lifting up a narrative means that representations of history are always partial, although this need not be due to any nefarious reasons. Placing a person or event in concrete form requires being selective. However, because public monuments are approved and maintained by governments, the histories involved are typically selected because they serve political purposes. In a study conducted by the Southern Poverty Law Center, for instance, two of the largest explosions of confederate monuments erected in the US were found to have occurred during periods of Black disenfranchisement (1900-10s) and advancement (1960s), when white supremacists deemed their vision in need of concrete support. And because history is always broader than the set of events and agents that are selected by governments for commemoration, this act of selection inevitably also functions as an act of obliteration and obfuscation.
Forgetfulness of these dynamics entails that the multiple meanings, interpretations, and histories that are accounted by monuments become partial and static. Monuments become immobile and resistant to change or alteration because these structures have a penchant for lifting up a particular narrative or generalising history at the expense of other readings. This static nature, of course, makes sense – the very act of memorialising through constructing tangible objects in stone, glass, or steel is meant to convey permanence. Yet staticity is a produced phenomenon. The fact that this perspective seems common-sense or represents a dominant view does not eliminate the fluid process of remembering. We can always remember otherwise.
This brings us again to the North End’s Columbus. Considered aesthetically, one would be hard-pressed to describe the austere, plain marble statue as beautiful or a work of art. By contrast, the force and creativity it took to decapitate the statue in the dead of night is rather impressive. As a direct engagement with history, the protesters were able to proffer differing interpretations of Columbus. The voyager who “discovered” the “New World” and helped justify the dispossession of Indigenous land is instead recontextualised as a mass murderer, and the Christopher Columbus Waterfront Park becomes seen as a black mark. As Mahtowin Munro of the United American Indians of New England stated: “It’s a park dedicated to white supremacy; it’s a park dedicated to Indigenous genocide.”
The United States is, however, more reticent when it comes to naked celebrations of Indigenous enslavement, genocide and dispossession – colonial history, even in New England, is often tempered to favour claims of multiculturalism and diversity. If this is the case, then why is Columbus still so celebrated in certain circles? One suggestion is that insofar as the US is a nation founded on and maintained through settler colonialism, Columbus functions as an introduction to a national narrative of discovery. As the American justice Joseph Story once remarked, the “Doctrine of Discovery” granted Europeans “an absolute dominion over the whole territories afterwards occupied by them, not in virtue of any conquest of, or cession by, the Indian natives, but as a right acquired by discovery.” Columbus represents this uncomfortable legal precedence, whether or not his defenders choose to overlook his role in settler colonialism. Moreover, in order to maintain the “official” view of Columbus and the nation, any alternative meanings that could account for such grievous wrongs are frequently stunted or erased. This is why Francis Mazzaglia, chairman of the board of the Italian American Alliance, can so easily ask: “Who else has discovered America because of Columbus?” Instead of representing what was lost and murdered through discovery, Columbus becomes a preamble to the story of immigration.
Or, more insidiously, politicians try to neutralise the controversy of monuments by claiming that they can represent multiple stories. This sentiment can be seen when Lydia Edwards, a Boston City councillor, argues that “We need to acknowledge that certain symbols can cause pain” and also that “We need to honor Italian heritage” in reference to Columbus. This ideological position seeks to resolve political disagreements between Italian-Americans and Indigenous people by allowing for both of their histories to be represented and acknowledged. In this way, a monument becomes “neutral” – neither side takes precedence or is forgotten.
But can a monument neutrally represent white supremacy? In a conversation I recently had with the philosopher Nir Eisikovits, we spokeabout what it would mean for the decapitated Columbus statue to remain on the waterfront. How would viewers confront the ambiguity of this headless figure? What histories or narratives would they tell their children? Could we actually have an honest conversation about colonialism and Indigenous sovereignty – let alone racism, given that that Columbus was beheaded during the Black Lives Matter protests?
Much would be possible if this transformed statue were to remain on the waterfront. Even if its presence led to renewed engagement, however, it need not mean that the Columbus has a “neutral” representation. Historical neutrality is too often thought of as being capable of representing history – even conflicting meanings – in monuments without also offering endorsement. Neutrality is framed as offering not judgment, but rather unbiased representation. Yet the act of beheading is a call for judgment. Decapitation is meant to convey to the public that this statue is not simply meant to be viewed, but also must be evaluated. Viewers must decide whether the beliefs and actions of Columbus require condemnation, or even amputation from our public life.
The plain fact is that accepting a “neutral” representation of white supremacy undermines and degrades our capacity for judgment. For non-white people to adopt such a view requires conceding that their judgments are subordinate and irrelevant, and for whites to read white supremacy in such a manner is at best a logical paradox, since they would have to “neutrally” entertain a doctrine that asserts that white judgments, histories and lives are, by necessity, superior. Human judgment can only function rigorously where it examines white supremacy critically. Perhaps it is through this play with decapitation that the staticity of monuments could become more fluid and the critical skills demanded by adequate judgment could be sharpened. This would require, however, that we become more prone to examine the backside of the embroidery, the knots and tangles that form our historical views. Yet, as James Baldwin writes in Nothing Personal, it is “in the very nature of a myth that those who are its victims and, at the same time, its perpetrators, should, by virtue of these two facts, be rendered unable to examine the myth, or even to suspect, much less recognize, that it is a myth which controls and blasts their lives.”
For a state to play with monuments, it would have to concede the power to politically construct histories. It would require a different way of engaging with monuments, both in terms of how they are constructed and experienced. This would mean that communities could themselves begin to construct and deconstruct monuments outside of the constraints required by state approval. However, it is far more likely that governments will instead continue to establish formal commissions and committees to review the “meaning” of monuments. Think of the Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm in London or the committee to assess Chicago’s public art collection, both of which have been newly established in the midst of protest. For Boston’s North End, this means that a decision about the future status of Columbus will most likely be made by a committee. Speculation is always imperfect – there are futures in which Columbus is fully restored to his pedestal and futures in which the entire park is remade – yet what remains static are the systems by which people can engage with monuments.
The fact that this particular Columbus statue was also painted in 2004 with the word “murderer”, decapitated in 2006, and marked with the phrase “Black Lives Matter” in 2015, shows just how sluggish city and state governments can be in dealing with historical confrontations. Instead of addressing the reasons why Columbus had been targeted or what histories his presence served to erase, each time the monument was restored to its original condition. One could, of course, contact the Boston Art Commission (BAC) or one’s elected officials to lodge a complaint, but the bureaucratic process involved renders all disagreements into the format of a formal review, whereby political actions are only acceptable if legible through the government. Moreover, preservationists do not typically engage in acts of removal. Until the BAC established a deaccession policy which allowed for the removal of artwork in 2017, its primary roles were curation and restoration.
Altogether, this seems an impoverished way of engaging with monuments. Commissions, at their best, can allow individuals to engage in democratic debate or enter into decision-making processes that are respectful to all parties. Yet they also result in quagmires in which middle grounds are created where there should be none. Or they allow for direct action to be stymied in favour of deliberation. The result is not only that the public loses interest, but also that “official” processes become reified as the only proper way of engaging with history. This is why a static engagement with monuments is often thought to be a solution. For instance, the historian David Blight recently argued in The New York Times that a national “task force or commission” needs to be established to “comparatively study the issues of ‘repair,’ monuments and memorialization, and promoting a richly pluralistic version of American history to the largest possible public.” This commission would thus focus on shaping a “new” national memorial landscape rather than prescribing actions to local governments and groups. But even so, one would be hardpressed to believe that this task force would have decapitation listed as a best practice. In this way, government commissions still limit the ways in which the public can enter into debates or modify memorials. The reduction of acceptable political actions – whether it be the renunciation of direct action or protest – only serves bureaucratic assemblies. It is once again the state asserting control over which narratives and histories will be represented publicly. But commissions are not a solution to history.
This brings us back to the idea of fluidity and ambiguity. If we can recognise that monuments are multidimensional, ambiguous and fluid, does that also commit us to leaving Columbus standing tall? Does he deserve a chance for public engagement? So long as the ways in which people engage with monuments – and the ways in which cities deal with these issues – are static, we may be better served keeping Columbus in storage. Monuments cannot be treated in isolation. Until we are ready to deal honestly with the past and the present, we cannot actually use monuments fluidly. Moreover, until we also erect monuments and memorials to Massachusetts figures who have been less celebrated in public – we might think of Weetamoo and Metacomet, Elizabeth Freeman, Crispus Attucks, David Walker, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, W.E.B. Du Bois, or Melnea Cass – we will continue to replicate historical injustices. A balanced perspective cannot be given if we will still have an unequal number of white or European representations. The toppling of problematic figures must include erecting new monuments.
Even then, this would only be a partial reckoning. In truth, most of us are ignorant of our cities, neighbourhoods and memorials which dot the landscape. Our geographies are limited to the practical and mundane. We live in the static. But it would be a mistake to think that monuments – these concrete histories – are themselves only practical or fixed. While our relation to the built environment all too often reveals a natural attitude that treats objects in public as ordinary and rightfully belonging, we can think otherwise. Instead of uncritically absorbing or consuming these public objects, we are more than capable of interrogating our histories as well as our relationship with these monumental practices. We are capable of confronting, even decapitating, the myths and wounds that form the fabric of our social lives. And it is this capacity for meaning making that I find beautiful.
Words Dana Francisco Miranda
This article was originally published in Disegno #27. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.
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