Should buried bones be excavated, studied, then displayed for the sake of “education,” “science,” or “history”? This question has bothered me since I asked Christy this last Monday at the London Museum. However, both the London Museum and the Docklands Museum suggest by their extensive collection of human remains that the answer is yes.
The exhibit at the London Museum featured the earliest stages of London’s history through bones and found artifacts. The coinciding plaques for these object speculated generalizations on what the objects told us about Londinium. Although I somewhat recognized that the bones featured in this exhibit were a human being, they felt abstract and conceptual because of the way the plaques failed to address the individual to which they had belonged. Who are they? What were their names? What are their stories?
Similarly, the exhibit “Roman Dead” at the second Docklands Museum featured almost exclusively remnants of human bones, buried possessions, and burial containers that resulted from the influence Rome had on Londinium. However, this exhibit felt more personal and intimate as the plaques addressed the burial practices which the bones had undergone. By focusing on how the bones were buried, my attention refocused on what motivated my question to Christy: these were at one point human beings with lives, desires, and opinions— including an opinion on how they wanted to be buried.
Unlike the first museum, many of the bones in the “Roman Dead” exhibit were displayed with personal possessions which were significant in life— whether sentimental or utilitarian— and not just random found artifacts scattered nearby. These possessions were buried with as much intention and purpose as their owner. They were not randomly selected, but chosen. As I questioned why an ancient civilization would bury possessions with so much attention, I consequently addressed why do we culturally subject so much of our attention to how we lament our dead?
I can’t imagine this extensive amount of effort— financially, physically, and emotionally— went into burying these individuals to simply dispose of the dead. Instead, the focus was on the individual. Consequently, if all this attention was expensed to bury the dead, should they be unburied at all? I found the Roman-influenced practices for burying the dead in Londinium not unlike our own. I concluded that these individuals, similar to why we bury our dead today, were buried in order to memorialize.
However, many of the skeletons displayed at the museums have lost their identities. We have no means to know who they were, how they were, who buried them, or why they were buried in the manner which they were. Even without absolute answers, I tend to imagine these individuals with cultural mentalities and desires similar to our fictional character from Londinium, Zuleika.
If these bones belonged to the Zuleika from The Emperor’s Babe, would she want to be displayed in the London Museum? The closest we come to an answer is in her last request from Alba, when Zee becomes aware that her husband has been poisoning her with “arsenicum hidden in spicy sauces” (Evaristo 243). She realizes she is dying. When consumed, even in small doses, arsenic poisons the body’s organs until they begin to fail, ultimately resulting in death. Zuleika recognizing her end takes up the existential question: what will become of me, my physical body and my story?
Although we are denied her process to answer this question, we understand Zuleika’s conclusion that it is “too late” to avoid death (Evaristo 249). Instead, she plans what will happen to her body. She asks Alba to bury her dressed “in [her] violet damask” on a bay-leaf scented pillow in a coffin with a “scallop-shell design on the lid” (Evaristo 249). Her requests are specific to how she desires to be memorialized. However, the request is not a product of sentimentality, but a practical step to avoid being forgotten. Her husband would traditionally handle the memorial, but angry at the affair, Zuleika fears he would “chuck [her] out as carrion,” without honoring her memory (Evaristo 248).
If the goal of Zuleika’s request is simply to be memorialized, then perhaps being displayed in a museum for eternity would be the ultimate memorial. Perhaps she would want this fate.
However, the specifications she gives Alba regarding her tombstone suggests her goal is not just memorial, but individual importance. She explicitly tells Alba to inscribe her tombstone: “to the spirits of the departed/ and the memory of our pal Zuleika,/ who in her final summer/ lived a life fuller than any other” (Evaristo 249). The sentence does not summarize her life, or her contribution, but encapsulates where she found fulfillment. There is equal weight in the identity she dies with (her name and role as a friend)and where she found fulfillment (the affair she had in her “final summer”). This is her story. This is what she wants to be memorialized for future generations, when no-one remembers what she wore into the dirt or what container she lays in.
Zulieka would not have had any idea that she might be displayed in a museum, and therefore never offered an explicit answer. However, the attention to specific detail, the crafting of her own written memory suggests she would not want to be just another set of bones to be seen. Although she would be important, her identity would not. Her tombstone inscription marries her to her affair and her name, leaving a reminder of herself for future generations who could not know her.
Similarly, I know that a museum exhibit is a possible fate for my bones, but would I give future generations consent to display my excavated remains?
I imagine like Zuleika the specific details of how I wish to be memorialized. Like her, I imagine what I want to wear, in what container, perhaps what my family might write on my tombstone, who will speak at my funeral. However, in two thousand years my memory will be forgotten, my identity with it. I plan what will happen to my body in hopes that it may stay in that state. To rest there, as I was laid, in peace. Although this is my wish, there is no way for me to know if my body will be found by some future generation, or way to communicate for them to leave it where it was found even in absence of identity.
I believe to display bones in a museum is to deny empathy to the human who was once very much like yourself, like me, like Zuleika. A human who had an intimate relationship with the life they lived, and the memory they left in death. A human who in life carefully imagined their memory, and in death planned how they would memorialize their life.
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