295: Text-in-context Proposal

My text-in-context proposal stems directly from the notes I took on 3 July after seeing the Roman bodies in the Docklands museum.

“It feels very wrong to have witnessed those bodies, to have looked at those people. The science inscribed on their plates is suggestive of how they suffered – almost exclusively of how they suffered. We do not know how they lived. Who are you, Roman teenage boy buried with four-year-old infant? Who are you, infant whose bones are minuscule, who was found in a wooden box not much bigger than a shoebox? Who are you, recently-found woman whose perhaps-baby is not with her in her new glass coffin? Were you a Jew, whose dust is still not dust, whose soul is not with G-d? How long would it have taken? Are you glad to be marginally remembered by me, who reads your dental history and feels wholly moved, intensely sorry for you?”

I hereby propose an exploration of the dehumanization of the Roman dead in connection with Bernardine Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe. In the book, Zuleika gives Alba explicit instructions about her burial. She “wanted to be important,” wanted to be remembered (249). But even if Alba did as was requested, we know that Zuleika wouldn’t have been truly remembered, not really. In an exhibit like the one at the Docklands museum, she would have been bones under glass with a note about her dental hygiene. 

I am going to write about Zuleika’s final request in the context of what the Roman people actually get. It’s immoral to reduce these people – after all, they were people, not just examples of arthritis or other diseases – to the statistics that they are now lauded as. It’s immoral for the museums in London to take them from their requested resting places in the name of education, believing that because these Romans were from Londinium to London they still belong. In this paper, I’m going to tell you why.