What
do we owe to the dead?
I’ve
been asking myself this question again and again for the past week. It’s not
something I normally consider, if I’m honest. I have little concept of an afterlife,
and I might be charitably called unsentimental when it comes to family
heirlooms or grave markers. I’ve always thought that the way we ritualize death
is for the benefit of the living, not the dead.
And
yet, standing in the Museum of London, staring into the empty eye sockets of a
woman who lived nearly two thousand years ago, I was asked—thanks to a conversation
with Hannah and Lo—to consider whether she would have wanted this. How she
would have felt about her skull being displayed for museum-goers who have little
or no concept of who she was or how she lived, who are here among groups of
bored schoolchildren and dead-eyed tourists trying to stave off jetlag. This
woman was buried, likely by people who cared about her. She died, but before
that she lived. And while she lived, she probably had some idea of how she’d
like her body treated when she was gone.
I
had to ask myself, then, whether I would want my own such wishes respected. There
wasn’t an easy answer, but it kept me coming back to the realization that
people two thousand years ago were, in fact, people. It shouldn’t have been an unnerving thought. It shouldn’t
even have been a realization, and yet there was a difference for me between knowing
intellectually that people in the past thought and experienced their world in
much the same way that I do, and actually considering the reality of those
lives. These people told jokes. Good ones, bad ones, probably even the
proverbial “Dad jokes.” They cooked and cleaned. They argued over silly things
and important things. They complained about the weather. Maybe the woman whose
skull I stared at once nearly cried because she saw a cute dog, the way that I almost
did yesterday. Maybe she liked men, maybe she liked women, maybe she didn’t
like anyone at all. I can’t tell any of these things from looking at her skull,
and so I am forced to wonder just how much we can truly learn from digging up
her grave and displaying her bones. I am forced to wonder if that limited
knowledge is worth it.
Ultimately,
I think that Bernadine Evaristo offers a way to bridge that gap between the skull
and the onlooker. She begins her book with a quote from Oscar Wilde: “The one duty
we owe to history is to rewrite it.” Wilde himself was an Irishman writing at
the same time that Yeats and his compatriots began their work of Irish
mythmaking, so he cannot have been unaware of how reframing history can be about
reclaiming history. This is what
Evaristo does. By rewriting the history of Roman Britain in terms we can understand
today—be it through modern slang or pop culture or geography—she offers us a
kinship with Zuleika that we might never feel if this story were framed in the
mode of “the canon.” She creates something that chooses emotional accuracy over historical
accuracy, helping her reader to put flesh back onto the bones of the dead.
It
was with this feeling of kinship to the past that I walked into the British
Museum this morning, and it is this feeling that I now find slipping away. I’m
sitting in a library full of stolen goods, past the gift shop and on the
opposite end of the museum from the looted marbles of the Parthenon, staring at
a statue that is fundamentally a lie. “Rondanini Faun,” the plaque reads, “Roman,
2nd century AD.”
And
yet it goes on to admit, in the slyest terms, that the only portion of this figure
that actually dates to that period is the torso. The rest was “restored” by an
artist by the name of Duquesnoy fourteen centuries later. And you can see it,
if you look closely at this faun. Though his core is smooth and alabaster, the
marble of his extremities is veined with grey, varicose and mottled, carved
into delicately arched foot and perfect toenails, corded tendons and curled
fingers. I cannot read the face his Baroque maestro gave him, but I see it
staring skyward, perhaps to hide the faun’s clumsy features, or perhaps to give
an air of reverence to an irreverent and priapic pastoral god. Priapic, and yet
not, for he is shaftless, impotent, unthreatening. They rebuilt all the rest of
his parts, remade him in their image, so why not this one? Did it offend the
sensibilities of the men who wanted to put him on display? Is this what Nagra
meant when he asked “who decided our taste?” These men did not balk at a statue
that is more forgery than original, but a penis, it would seem, was too much
for them. The museum tolerated only the faintest seems at throat…
And knee…
And
hip…
But they left the ugly scar where
he was neutered. If Evaristo—and by extent, perhaps, Wilde—works to tell us
something true about the past through anachronism, then this collection tells
us lies that masquerade as historical accuracy. As “restoration.”
Is
this what we, as Empire, do to all our history? Lop off the bits we cannot
tolerate, construct the bits we tell ourselves ought to be there but aren’t,
and sand down all the edges until we can scarcely tell the difference?
And
if it is, if this is how we present
our history—sanitized, beautified, with barely-there acknowledgements of just how
false the tale we’re telling is—is it a retelling, or a palimpsest?
Are
we rewriting, or overwriting?
And
don’t we owe more than that, to both the living and the dead?
(End note: I think it is particularly important to consider that this is an artifact from a culture that England feels a kinship to. If this is what we do to history we think of as our own, how much worse must be our offenses against the history of others? I don't want to know, but I think I need to.)
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