Imagine IC series
on theory and practice
of intangible cultural heritage
co–organized with the Reinwardt Academy and funded by the Mondriaan Fund
Event #1: Spoken Slavery, 20 June 2013
‘While we do not have to be on
the same page, it’s essential
we are in the same book.’
The series on intangible cultural heritage, organized by Imagine IC in cooperation with the Reinwardt
Academy for Museology, involves the research of intangible heritage concepts and methodology from
the perspective of super–diverse, urban society. Event # 1 was entitled Spoken Slavery and themed
the stories that old and new traditions of slavery remembrance incorporate and search for. We
discussed the notions that commemorating the history of slavery is a sensuous, embodied experience
in the present, whereas, at the same time, it may feel much less ‘natural’ for those who are new to its
performances and practices. Conceptual and methodological implications of such ‘findings’ will be
further discussed in the rest of the series. Events are held twice a year. This report presents minutes of
event #1.
The event took place in the year in which the Netherlands commemorated the 150th anniversary of
the abolition of slavery. Keynote speaker was Saidiya Hartman, Professor of English and Comparative
Literature at Columbia University (NY). Her research interests include African American and American
literature and cultural history, slavery, the relationship between law and literature, and performance
studies. In such influential books as Scenes of Subjection and Lose Your Mother, she seeks out the
tales of the enslaved that have but very scantly been included in archives. How can untold, even
unspeakable, stories complement the history that is presented by archives and museums? And can
they be shared with just anyone?
Professor Hartman was invited to speak in reaction to three traditions for remembering slavery in the
Netherlands: Mercedes Zandwijken introduced ‘her’ Keti Koti Tafels (‘breaking–the–chains tables’);
Dr Esther Captain presented the trail, or walking tour, that she researched and that follows traces
of slavery in the streets of the city of Utrecht; and jazz singer Denise Jannah, who performed at the
unveiling of the Dutch National Slavery Monument in 2002, responded to the question ‘which songs
for you entail a meaningful remembrance of slavery?’ by singing some songs.
The afternoon was chaired by Joseph Jordan, independent scholar with degrees in Postcolonial and
African–American studies. He invited ethnologist Dr Hester Dibbits (lecturer in Cultural Heritage at
the Reinwardt Academy) and anthropologist Markus Balkenhol (Meertens Institute) to annotate the
presented commemoration practices. Their responses to the (new) commemorative traditions presented
a first set of questions to Saidiya Hartman.
A second set of questions and comments came from the audience: a mix of 85 scholars, professionals
and students of (intangible) heritage and other fields, and many (local) people with a profound
interest in the subject of slavery history. The event also included the opening of the Spoken Slavery
exhibition at Imagine IC. Youngsters of the Bindelmeer College in Amsterdam Southeast – where
Imagine IC is also based – commented, in raps, on ten documents from the slavery history collections
of the Amsterdam City Archives.
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1. Introductions
In her word of welcome, Marlous Willemsen, Director of Imagine IC, notes that Imagine IC has
been commissioned by its main funder, the city of Amsterdam, to disseminate and produce topical
insights into intangible cultural heritage work. This task was set against the background of the Dutch
ratification in 2012 of the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage.
This treaty requests that ratifying countries produce an inventory of intangible heritage. In various
countries, heritage born out of the history of slavery and slave trade has been entered onto the lists
and has also become part of the UNESCO list of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. One
of them is the Samba de Roda of Bahia, Brazil. What exactly happens, or should happen, when
such traditions are framed as intangible cultural heritage? This and many more questions are to be
investigated.
Chair Joseph Jordan continued: ‘I think that it means something to discuss intangible cultural heritage
and slavery, especially, here, in Amsterdam Southeast. And I think you will agree with me that it is up
to us to figure out what that something is, and how we are going to make it meaningful to ourselves
and those we encounter in our daily lives. While we don’t have to be on the same page when it comes
to these issues, I think it is essential that we’re in the same book’.
‘So today, Imagine IC facilitates an exploration of intangible cultural heritage and slavery. Like
all good explorers – mind you, not of the colonial variety – we need a firm dose of curiosity and
honesty to travel the road not yet taken. And since we are travelling together, we must feel free to
ask each other questions about this road, about our companions, and about why we are travelling
the particular directions that we’re heading in.’ The Chair introduced the three ‘practitioners’ of
commemoration of slavery.
2. First case: the Keti Koti Tables
Mercedes Zandwijken is an initiator of the think tanks for social cohesion in Amsterdam, a community
organizer and cultural activist. She initiated the Keti Koti Tables five years ago, trying to make an
important point as much as trying to improve the situation it entails, viz. the relationship between
black and white populations in the Netherlands. In her opinion, a common idiom to talk about issues
connected with (the commemoration of) slavery needed urgently to be developed.
The Keti Koti Tables are an attempt at creating a new public tradition which brings people together
around the topic of the history of slavery. The Tables are inspired by the Jewish Seder table, at
which Jewish families commemorate the release from slavery 3,000 years ago. Further inspiration
comes from the Moroccan community in the Netherlands, which, after the murder of Theo van Gogh
in 2004, came out with public iftar gatherings during the month of Ramadan. Non–Muslims were
explicitly invited to these events. In no time, the breaking of the fast accommodated dialogues between
Muslim and Christian communities.
The Keti Koti Tables consist of nine ‘windows’, or rituals. The first, e.g., is the ancestor prayer, which
was included because Christian missionaries tried to ban the African religions of the enslaved. All
grass–root organizations that Zandwijken consulted thought this prayer was essential. The third: the
placing of an extra plate with cutlery on each table as a symbol of the hospitality of the Surinamese
community.
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Fourth window: the handing out of the guidelines of the Tables. They can only be given, not just taken.
Fifth: the taking of kwasibita. All participants in the event at Imagine IC are given a piece. It is a bitter
wood from the bush that helps combat malaria. It symbolizes the bitterness of the past. Sixth: while all
are tasting the kwasibita, they are given a drop of coconut oil to rub each other’s hands and arms to
help diminish the pain of slavery. At the eight window soup is served, followed by the main dish. This
is a reconstruction of a meal often eaten by the enslaved. Dialogue is started during the meal, which is
concluded by a sweet dessert.
The Keti Koti Tables seek to involve major and institutional – largely ‘white’ – parties, in order to
provide an opportunity for the black community to express their pain and anger in the main arenas
of public space, and in order for the white community to feel the pain too. Thus a joint discourse and
an idiom on these issues is developed in mixed groups of both black and white communities. And
to make the Tables prosper and take further root, the philosophy is: take part in one, organize one
yourself, and thus encourage your participants to do one too!
3. Second case: traces of slavery in the streets
Dr Captain works as a senior researcher, advisor and project leader at the National Committee for
Remembrance of the Second World War. In her talk, she investigated the dynamics between heritage
and the past, and between tangible and intangible heritage, focusing on the implications of framing
old and new traditions as heritage. This afternoon, she presented two cases: the annual street parade
‘bigi spikri’ and the walking tour in the city of Utrecht that she researched and to which she wrote a
guide.
‘Heritage’ and ‘past’ are not one and the same thing. Heritage can be understood as the past with
a certain message. It is not self–evident. And sometimes it is even threatened. Heritage institutions
such as museums and libraries (and their collections) secure the cultural memory of a nation, of
people, of minorities, by preserving and protecting objects. There are a hundred museums and
3,500 monuments/memorials in the Netherlands dedicated to the history of the Second World War.
Not a single museum is completely dedicated to the commemoration of slavery. Slavery is included
in the permanent narrative of some four museums, and about five monuments have been erected to
commemorate slavery (in Amsterdam, Middelburg and Rotterdam).
Heritage also exists in the shape of traditions, rituals and stories. These may also face the threat
of disappearance. For this reason, immaterial/intangible heritage is sometimes collected in oral
history databases. As regards the safeguarding of intangible cultural heritage, it is very important
to see it supported by a community. The UNESCO Convention states that heritage is closely related
to the process of (intergenerational) transfer and meaning. Intangible heritage is not a product. It is
‘living’ and changing knowledge and experience. Communities, groups and individuals define the
importance of heritage: heritage is ‘carried’ by the people.
The annual bigi spikri parade on 1 July is a performance in the public domain. The streets are its
stage, or a temporary exhibition space, if you like. Dressed in traditional Surinamese/Caribbean
wear, the participants make a procession. It is modelled after the parade that took place on the island
of Aruba ten years after abolition. This parade later became a great event in Surinam, when it was
performed to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the abolition, in 1888. The tradition is of growing
importance in the Netherlands as well, specifically in Rotterdam and Amsterdam.
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The Dutch streets are also permanent carriers of the history of enslavement. New city walks such as in
Utrecht introduce the mansions of the owners of plantations and slaves, the houses of abolitionists and
the addresses where enslaved people were known to work. But you have to know in order to ‘see’.
Captain presents the example of the story of the girl Sitie from Makassar, who lived and worked in
the household of the Dutch East Indies merchant Loten at the Utrecht address Drift 27. From letters by
Loten, historians and tourists can get a glimpse of Sitie’s life.
4. Third case: songs to remember
Denise Jannah moved some of the audience to tears with her performance. She took hold of the topic
of the intangible cultural heritage of slavery and its abolition, and made it very tangible. The audience
experienced moments of goose bumps. For them, it was an ‘embodied, sensuous experience in the
present’, as Markus Balkenhol would later describe the ‘matter of slavery’ (see below). By her fusion
of Wan Aisa with the jazz classic ‘Strange Fruit’, Denise Jannah not only responded to the organizers’
request of choosing songs that present a memory of slavery and its abolition. She also expanded the
understanding of this memory into an afterlife of the history of slavery that lasts.
Wan Aisa may be considered part of the intangible cultural heritage of Afro–Surinamese
communities. Ma Aisa, the big mother, is honoured. Earth’s inhabitants, the little children, ask for her
protection. While they are asking, water is being sprinkled from a calabash. Captive Africans shipped
to the Americas took with them this ritual, which offered strength to survive the terror of slavery.
‘Strange Fruit’ tells of the violence against blacks in the Southern USA. The tangible reality of black
men hanging from a tree is part of the memory of slavery, a scene of subjection and hatred.
In Jannah’s performance, the worldwide heritage of slavery came to the fore: blues, jazz and also hip
hop were created by the African diaspora. The musical forms may sometimes be new – the stories are
transmitted from generation to generation. The song ‘Mal Wega’, a poem written by Elis Juliana in
Papiamentu, portrays an old man on the island of Curaçao, telling his grandchildren about the cost
of freedom for his generation. The devil’s bread we have eaten, he says, for you to be free today. Or
not? Denise Jannah presents an impressive version of Maya Angelou’s ‘Still I Rise’ – slavery is not
over.
5. First set of annotations
The Chair invited Hester Dibbits to comment on the commemorative traditions that had been
introduced earlier. She focused on ‘tradition’ as a topos of intangible cultural heritage. She premised
that we tend to believe that traditions are something ‘natural’, something automatically embodied, a
habitus with a pattern that ‘we’ know and self–evidently transmit to next generations. And now there
are new traditions in which we are invited to take part! Do we? Why? How?
Traditions are always subject to translation and appropriation. They develop while being transmitted.
Traditions are thus constantly being invented. Each of the three presented performances uses a
combination of older and newer elements as their own particular set of conventions and vocabulary.
They therewith aim towards shifting perspectives on the history of slavery among new audiences.
Moreover, they are designed towards this, towards involving ‘others’ rather than just ‘us’. So their
‘newness’, Dibbits proposes, is rather sudden.
Some of the new participants may feel uncomfortable with the specific practices and references. How
do they tune into, or contribute equally to this ‘same book’ that Joseph Jordan was talking about?
Invitees to the Keti Koti Tables may stumble over words like ‘slave’ – where ‘enslaved’ would be a
more appropriate term. Or they may wonder whether they are considered ‘white’ because they are
just ‘not black’. People may need explanations, instructions, context.
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Creating new traditions, towards new common narratives, is not easy, and the outcome can be
different from expected. How precisely will the new practices and narratives that we have been
presented with today be appropriated by broader audiences, in order to be transmitted to next
generations? What effects will they have? Will the Utrecht walking tour, a new repertoire of stories,
become a new ‘experience’ that new audiences of its narratives will embrace, cherish and pass on?
Will the Keti Koti Tables become such an experience? They seem more guided than the guided tour.
The rules of behaviour are handed out, the windows are clear–cut, the mixed audience is intentionally
designed. But is it enough? Will black and non–black take on and transmit the Tables’ complex
scenario towards a mutual understanding and joint commemoration of the history of slavery?
When it comes to the politics of Intangible Cultural Heritage, Hester Dibbits is convinced that we need
to invest in explaining and contextualizing (which is the hard work of new traditions!), even though we
may sometimes seem to get away without it. Denise Jannah’s performance, for example, seemed to
‘naturally’ address us. We listened, enjoyed the singing, were touched by the lyrics. But all of us, and
all in equal measure? And should we? Can we?
6. Second set of annotations
Markus Balkenhol continued the exploration of emotions and investigated the question how to make
slavery ‘matter’. He recognized a certain paradox in focusing on the ‘intangible’ in the case of slavery
remembrance. Many efforts have been made towards making slavery matter. The powerful ways
of keeping it an intangible, silent memory are part of the ‘living traditions’ that UNESCO refers to
as intangible cultural heritage. The Middle Passage Monument has been one way to make slavery’s
legacy tangible. It rests on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, 140 miles off the coast of New York. It
is evidently a physical object. But it is beyond reach, and in this sense intangible. So what kind of
tangibility is sought here?
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The monument is perhaps one of the most poignant reminders of the ambiguous presence of slavery –
the simultaneous necessity and impossibility to adequately represent its terror. Given the complexity of
slavery and its legacies, the fiercest struggles have erupted about the question of how to give physical
expression to them. Should we, for example, portray the victims, thereby risking victimization?
Or focus on the resistance, at the risk of engendering other kinds of silencing? The efforts to make
slavery palpable, and open its past to our embodied, sensuous experience in the present, have been
exhausting. So, again, why would we preoccupy ourselves with a focus on intangibility?
Moreover, why preoccupy ourselves with slavery’s intangible heritage when its afterlife is so very
tangible? As Saidiya Hartman put it: ‘If slavery persists as an issue in the political life of black
America [and Europe, MB], it is not because of an antiquarian obsession with bygone days or the
burden of a too–long memory, but because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial
calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery
– skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and
impoverishment. I, too, am the afterlife of slavery.’ As we all are.
Then what is the relation between the matter of slavery and its intangible cultural heritage? Can it
be sensation? Emotions and feelings may be exactly at the threshold between the tangible and the
intangible. They are embodied and can be physically felt as goose bumps, tears, pain. And all these
physical signs can be caused by both suffering and joy. Indeed, the invention of traditions – the rituals
and practices that we are referring to as intangible cultural heritage – is geared precisely at evoking
emotional and sensory experiences, and shifts. Octavia Butler, for example, said in 2004 (talking
about her famous book Kindred): ‘I was trying to get people to feel slavery. I was trying to get across
the kind of emotional and psychological stones that slavery threw at people.’
The new traditions that have been presented aim for an affective presence of slavery. They seek to
touch the past of slavery, and let us be touched by it. Each of us, and in equal measure. Whether
black or white. They seek to create, reproduce or indeed change feelings and the structures that
inspire them. For emotions are not automatisms: they are historically specific, culturally informed, and
embedded in particular power relations. So what feelings are we prepared to grant admission into
our emotional household before we begin to fear the loss of our sense of self? Or before someone
starts accusing us of losing it, literally and figuratively?
7. Keynote: Lose Your Mother
Chair Joseph Jordan then introduced Professor Saidiya Hartman: ‘To say that her first book (Scenes
of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self–Making in Nineteenth–Century America [1997]) is important
is an understatement. The book is widely referred to as just Scenes, and marks a paradigm shift
in intellectual work on race and American culture. Like Lose Your Mother, Scenes is a book that
invites us to sit down together and talk. I will give an example of how this happens by prefacing
her presentation with a few notes on how Hartman’s work might inform a deeper understanding of
community – a key concept in the study of intangible cultural heritage.’
‘Empathy is generally understood as an individual’s capacity to put herself in another’s shoes to
better understand him. Empathy implies an ability to connect with others and therefore, it is usually
considered a good foundation for community. In the context of slavery, white abolitionists used
empathic identification to imagine themselves in the position of the enslaved. And therein lies the
rub for Hartman: what if, in placing themselves in the position of the slave, white abolitionists
didn’t really feel for the enslaved but really felt for themselves? And if their empathy required black
bodies held captive, does this then not show that it is racial slavery which made possible this kind of
identification?’
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‘Furthermore, what does it mean to empathize with the enslaved from our present, something that
many people say is necessary for building community today? Are we – whoever we are – then not
using the enslaved in the same way as white abolitionists did with their good intentions? I would argue
that Saidiya Hartman rubs through her poetics of questioning. A questioning not simply in opposition
to the dominant account, but a questioning that tears at the assumptions shared between the dominant
and the dominated. This kind of critical thinking is a mere fraction of Hartman’s body of work. But by
now I am sure that you are as eager as I am to hear her speak on her work herself.’
Saidiya Hartman: ‘In many respects, my work exists in the conjunction between the material and the
intangible. There is a structural legacy of slavery and also an affective one. In Scenes of Subjection,
I was thinking about the historical and legal dimensions of slavery. Another way of approaching the
tangible is to understand blackness and racialization as slavery’s embodied heritage, as in the work
of Frantz Fanon.’
‘In Lose Your Mother, I asked myself: as a person of the African diaspora, I feel I have a memory of
slavery, but I have no firsthand experience. What does it mean to be haunted by such a past? What
emotions does it entail? To tell and show, I would now like to read parts of Lose Your Mother to you.
The book is based upon a year I spent in Ghana.’
From: ‘Prologue: The Path of Strangers’ (p. 6):
I HAD COME TO GHANA in search of strangers. The first time for a few weeks in the summer of
1996 as a tourist interested in the slave forts hunkered along the coast and the second time for a year
beginning in the fall of 1997 as a Fulbright Scholar affiliated with the National Museum of Ghana.
Ghana was as likely a place as any to begin my journey, because I wasn’t seeking the ancestral
village but the barracoon. As both a professor conducting research on slavery and a descendant
of the enslaved, I was desperate to reclaim the dead, that is, to reckon with the lives undone and
obliterated in the making of human commodities.
I wanted to engage the past, knowing that its perils and dangers still threatened and that even now
lives hung in the balance. Slavery had established a measure of man and a ranking of life and worth
that has yet to be undone. If slavery persists as an issue in the political life of black America, it is not
because of an antiquarian obsession with bygone days or the burden of a too–long memory, but
because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that
were entrenched centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery—skewed life chances, limited access to
health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment. I, too, am the afterlife of
slavery.
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(pp. 7–8):
I chose Ghana because it possessed more dungeons, prisons, and slave pens than any other country
in West Africa – tight dark cells buried underground, barred cavernous cells, narrow cylindrical
cells, dank cells, makeshift cells. In the rush for gold and slaves that began at the end of the fifteenth
century, the Portuguese English, Dutch, French, Danes, Swedes, and Brandenburgers (Germans) built
fifty permanent outposts, forts, and castles designed to ensure their place in the Africa trade. In these
dungeons, storerooms, and holding cells, slaves were imprisoned until transported across the Atlantic.
Neither blood nor belonging accounted for my presence in Ghana, only the path of strangers
impelled toward the sea. There were no survivors of my lineage or far–flung relatives of whom I had
come in search, no places and people before slavery that I could trace. My family trail disappeared in
the second decade of the nineteenth century.
Unlike Alex Haley, who embraced the sprawling clans of Juffure as his own, grafted his family into the
community’s genealogy and was feted as the lost son returned, I traveled to Ghana in search of the
expendable and the defeated. I had not come to marvel at the wonders of African civilization or to be
made proud by the royal court of Asante, or to admire the great States that harvested captives and
sold them as slaves. I was not wistful for aristocratic origins. Instead I would seek the commoners, the
unwilling and coerced migrants who created a new culture in the hostile world of the Americas and
who fashioned themselves again, making possibility out of dispossession.
By the time the captives arrived on the coast, often after trekking hundreds of miles, passed through
the hands of African and European traders, and boarded the slaver, they were strangers. In Ghana,
it is said that a stranger is like water running over the ground after a rainstorm: it soon dries up and
leaves behind no traces. When the children of Elmina christened me a stranger, they called me by my
ancestors’ name.
‘STRANGER’ IS THE X that stands in for a proper name. It is the placeholder for the missing, the mark
of the passage, the scar between native and citizen. It is both an end and a beginning. It announces
the disappearance of the known world and the antipathy of the new one. And the longing and the loss
redolent in the label were as much my inheritance as they were that of the enslaved.
From: ‘The Family Romance’ (chapter 3, pp. 76–77):
THE WHITE MEN WHO OWNED and sired the family line were phantasmal, as if we had conjured
them up and they threatened to vanish under the pressure of scrutiny. We uttered their names
reluctantly, never forgetting that their names were also our names, but as if still fearing the punishment
of thirty–nine lashes or the auction block for disclosing the identity of the father.
Every now and then my aunt Laura would share a story about ‘a German from Bonaire’ or one of
our other shadowy progenitors. Unlike my aunt Beatrice, who believed it was best to leave the past
in the past and who was tight–lipped, especially when it concerned matters like indifferent fathers,
troublesome origins, or other revelations that could only leave you shamefaced, my aunt Laura was
willing to tell. She relished the perverse details, liberating the skeletons from the closet and dutifully
recounting the scandals that comprised our family history. Nothing fazed her, so whenever I wanted to
find out some piece of information about the family that others considered taboo, she was the one to
whom I turned.
Aunt Laura never shared any anecdotes about the ones who crossed the Atlantic from Africa. There
were no anecdotes. ‘Genealogical trees don’t flourish among slaves,’ as Frederick Douglass remarked.
In my family, too, the past was a mystery. The story boiled down to remote white men, missing black
fathers, lies and secrets about paternity and wayward lines of descent. From time to time, my aunt
Laura shared a name, Wilhelm Hartman or Rainer Hermann, or an attribute, ‘Hermann Was a stingy
SOB. That was all Mama ever said about him.’ Our genealogy added up to little more than a random
assortment of details about alcoholics, prosperous merchants, and dispassionate benefactors. Given
this paucity of information all talk of our forebears was sketchy. No matter how much we embellished
and dressed things up, the truth couldn’t be avoided. Slaves did not possess lineages. The ‘rope of
captivity’ tethered you to an owner rather than a father and made you offspring rather than an heir.
(p. 79)
FOR TRACKING PURPOSES the officials of the Dutch West India Company branded slaves twice.
When captives arrived at Elmina Castle, Arabic numerals and/or the letters of the alphabet were
seared onto their breasts. When they arrived in Curaçao, which was the way station for the slaves
sold by the Dutch West India Company to the Spanish Americas they were again branded with a red–
hot iron. The scars identified the slaves at sales, at criminal Proceedings and in death affidavits without
which company officials were unable to able say little more than, ‘It is the honest truth that on the first
of March this year a certain purchased woman slave died, giving as the evidence of our knowledge
that we saw the body after she died.
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(pp. 80–81)
PARTUS SEQUITUR VENTREM—the child follows in the condition of the mother. The bill of sale
includes ‘future increase,’ so that even the unborn were fettered. ‘Mothers could only weep and
mourn over their children,’ according to the ex–slave Mary Prince, ‘they could not save them.’ The
stamp of the commodity haunts the maternal line and is transferred from one generation to the next.
The daughter, Sethe, will carry the burden of her mother’s dispossession and inherit her dishonored
condition, and she will have her own mark soon enough, as will her daughter Beloved.
The mother’s mark, not the father’s name, determined your fate. No amount of talk about fathers could
suture the wound of kinship or skirt the brute facts. The patronymic was an empty category, ‘a blank
parbody’, a fiction that masters could be fathers and wayward lovers more than the ‘begetters of
children’; it was as well the place holder of banished black fathers.
My grandmother had been a Van Eiker, as had her mother and her mother before her. I was a
descendant of a long line of fearless and strong willed women—Leonora Van Eiker, Maria Julia Van
Eiker, Elisabeth Juliana Van Eiker—who were denied marriage or eschewed it. Four generations were
born with a blank space where a father’s name should be. In its place was the stroke of a bureaucrat’s
pen, which had left a line less dramatic than an X and which suggested nothing as harsh as erasure
but simply ‘not applicable.’ My aunts Laura and Beatrice were proud to be Van Eikers; the other
path, the dishonor that was the bastard’s inheritance as well as the slave ‘s, was too dangerous. The
lessons they imparted tried to affirm this maternal inheritance and to make of it something other than
monstrosity. The stories my aunts shared were offered as an antidote to shame and they esteemed a
web of intimacy and filiation outside the law of paternal sanction.
From: ‘Come, Go Back, Child’ (chapter 4, pp. 98–99):
BY THE TIME SLAVERY was abolished in 1863, in all likelihood my family in Curaçao had turned their
back to the Old World. When my grandfather regaled me with tales of Africa, which he had visited
several times as a merchant seaman, he never mentioned any ancestral connection or bond between
that place and us. The stories he told me of people who elongated their lips with plates, because this
was what they found beautiful, or who prayed five times a day, or of lovely women who adorned
the length of their necks with beaded rings, which if removed would cause their death, filled me with
wonder. But they were tales of a faraway place that had nothing to do with me.
My grandfather never said Africa was our home because he didn’t need it to be. As a polyglot and a
sailor, he thought of the world as his home. It was hard to mention a spot on the globe for which he
didn’t have a story. To him, I imagine, one place was as good as the next. Maybe it was that he had
no desire to put down roots or to reclaim them. He had embraced errantry or taking to the sea as the
closest thing to freedom he would experience.
He was a fugitive, not from justice but from the confines of a four cornered world. Even in his later
years, when Manhattan was as far away from Brooklyn as he ‘d ever get, he traveled the world each
night listening to foreign news broadcast from Europe and Latin America on his short–wave radio.
My grandfather had discovered years back that the only home he would ever know was the imagined
country, the promised land of the heart, the territory of dreams. He accepted the peril and promise of
being without a country. It explained why, as much as he spoke of Africa, he never imagined it as his
natal land. The route he charted back and forth across the Atlantic, as a young sea man aboard a
merchant ship, was an adventure, a detour not a return. Though I can’t believe that as he listened to
the rumble of the ocean he was unmindful of that other crossing.
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Saidiya Hartman read pages 110–114 from ‘So Many Dungeons’ (chapter 6). She then continued with
‘The Dead Book’ (chapter 7, pp. 136–138):
IT IS SAID that if you look at the sea long enough, scenes from the past come back to life. It is said
that ‘the sea is history.’ And ‘the sea has nothing to give but a well excavated grave.’ Looking at the
Atlantic, I thought of the girl. There were countless others buried at the bottom of the ocean, but she
was the one I had my eyes set on. If I concentrated hard enough I could see it all happening again.
The billow of the ship’s sail shuddered in the rush of air. The canvas awning occluded the sky. It could
have been dawn or noon or dusk. Time had stopped. The Recovery was a world all its own. Three
sailors, the captain, and the girl were the only ones visible on the ship. What happened next, no one
could agree on, except, of course, that the girl ended up dead.
Everything else depends upon how you look at things or where you were standing when her body was
suspended from the slaver’s mast. No one saw the same girl; she was outfitted in a different guise for
each who dared look. She appeared as a tortured virgin, a pregnant woman, a syphilitic tart, and a
budding saint. And the explanation of how she came to hang in the air, flailing like a tattered banner,
was no less fanciful: The girl declined to dance naked with the captain on the deck. The girl snubbed
the captain and refused his bed. The girl had the pox and the captain flogged her as a cure for the
venereal disease.
The captain, the surgeon, and the abolitionist all disagreed about what happened on the deck of the
Recovery, yet they all insisted they were trying to save the girl’s life. In this respect, I am as guilty as
the rest. I too am trying to save the girl, not from death or sickness or a tyrant but from oblivion. Yet I
am unsure if it is possible to salvage an existence from a handful of words: the supposed murder of a
Negro girl Hers is a life impossible to reconstruct, not even her name survived . I suppose I could have
called her Phibba or Theresa or Sally or Belinda. With a name she might have been more difficult to
forget. A name would have afforded the illusion of knowing her and made less painful the fact that
the girl ‘never will have any existence outside precarious domicile of words’ that allowed her to be
murdered.
A few lines from a musty trial transcript are the entire story of a girl’s life. Barring this, she would have
been extinguished without a trace. These words are the only defense of her existence, the only barrier
against her disappearance; and these words killed her a second time and consigned her to the bottom
of the Atlantic.
Of the twenty–one slaves who died aboard the Recovery, and the million and more tossed into the
Atlantic, one girl comes into view. Exceptional circumstances prevented her from simply vanishing into
the heap of obscure lives scattered along the ocean’s floor: a captain was tried for her murder.
The Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade first brought the case to the attention of the public.
On April 2, 1792, William Wilberforce immortalized the girl in a speech delivered before the House
of Commons and the world lent its attention, at least for a few days. When the trial ended, so did any
interest in the girl. No one has thought of her for at least two centuries, but her life still casts a shadow.
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THE CAPTAIN TIED a gun tackle around her wrist, fastened it to the mizzen stay, and suspended the
naked girl above the deck. Her skin was covered with pustules, the ribs jutted out of her slight torso,
and one of her legs was misshapen. The captain held the tackle while one of the cabin boys pulled
and jerked her limbs as her body hung in the air. She swung for five minutes before the captain
released the tackle and the girl fell to the deck. Then the captain suspended her by the other wrist. He
watched the body writhe and then let her drop to the deck. He strung her up by her right leg, then he
repeated the ritual with the left leg. Gravity emptied her upper half of blood. Her appendages turned
gray, then blue from the lack of oxygen. The pressure of the rope made bloody cuffs around her wrists
and ankles and caused her limbs to swell. The color in her face drained. Her insides gave way. Her
wrist and elbow were dislocated from bearing the weight of her body.
The captain then tied the tackle around both wrists and pulled her into the air. He reached for his whip
and he beat the girl on her back, buttocks, behind her knees, then slashed her with his whip across
her arms, her ribs, the sides of her abdomen, her hips, and then across her breasts, torso, and the
front of her legs. Her body twisted and turned as the rawhide struck her. The whip tore and blistered
her flesh, covering her with welts.
The captain let go the rope and the girl crashed onto the deck. She didn’t budge. She was still
breathing, but she didn’t move. She collapsed on the deck, with her head drooping toward her knees.
The captain lifted her head, slapped her face, and said, ‘The bitch is sulky.’ Watching the girl crawl
on hands and knees back to the ship’s hold, the third mate asked the captain if he should help the girl
down. The captain cursed her again and said, ‘She may find her own way.’
The girl crept to the hatchway and tumbled down the steps of the ladder. The ship’s surgeon retrieved
the girl from the hold the next day. She had fouled herself so he washed her and attempted to revive
her by rubbing alcohol on her temples, her nose, and her back. He spooned water into her mouth
but she would not swallow. For three days she refused all sustenance. As the girl lay on the deck,
she racked with convulsions. Fluids escaped her body and formed a puddle beneath her. The open
wounds and the smell of decay attracted vermin. When a sailor discovered that she was dead, he
noticed the captain and then threw her overboard.
To conclude her reading, Saidiya Hartman read pages 151–153 from the same chapter.
8. Discussion
The discussion following Saidiya Hartman’s reading focused on two key issues: that of the
representation of different perspectives in the history and commemoration of slavery, and that of the
understanding of what can be an act of commemoration.
Q1: ‘We heard about the horrors of the slavery past. However, I am curious to hear about the person
behind the so–called criminal: what about the captain? What kind of person was he, more than the
criminal?’
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Saidiya Hartman: ‘I will say very explicitly, I was not trying to recover the story of the captain,
because virtually, the entire history of the Atlantic slave trade is the story about captains and their
journals, their logs and their letters. I think we have had experience of them in all its complexity, in the
historical records and in representations of fiction. So I don’t know which particular question you have
about the captain. What is interesting about this case is that it is one of the few cases where a captain
is actually tried for the murder of an enslaved person. That was due to the effort of abolitionists in
ending the slave trade. He does figure here as a criminal. I think it is actually important to underscore
the crime of slavery, to think about the terror of the institution, because it is something we tend not to
want to do. Certain kinds of liberal and sentimental predominance of the institutions predominate.
What aspects of the trade were you thinking of, what came into view for you?’
Q1 continued: ‘What I am missing is to try to see it in its context. The context of the time, the context
of the whole history of slavery.’
Saidiya Hartman: ‘I have been reading from an entire book of hundreds of pages. I selected the parts
that I presented, because when we think of the millions of lives of enslaved Africans that were shipped
across the Atlantic, there are less than five extended narratives of them. The particular pressure of my
work is to bring those stories and lives into view. Not the business of the slave trade, not the heroic
endeavours of the European or white American abolitionists. It is a counter–history. You felt annoyed,
uncomfortable, troubled, that is part of the provocation of the book.’
From the audience: ‘I would like to take a step back and comment on the kind of question that is being
posed as the first here today. It is actually instructive to see what we are up against. The first question
that comes forward is from a position of defensiveness. Joseph Jordan started today’s programme
asking us to open ourselves up to listen, to what slavery might have meant. To ask new questions
about this history.’
Saidiya Hartman: ‘The slave ship was the world of the enslaved. That was their context. Counter–
history balances the uneven history. The historiography of the slave trade is a historiography of
commerce. There is a huge archival absence of enslaved persons. We can try to make a narrative
by thinking about embodiment. Not by reproducing the scenes and adding to the spectacle of cruelty
like the ‘anti–slavery pornography’ did. But it is hard not to reproduce the scenes. The way we write
history nowadays is already shaped. By putting a focus on one person, people can comprehend the
cruelties.’
Mercedes Zandwijken shared a story that was told at a Keti Koti Table. An old lady had kept quiet
for more than fifty years about her aunt showing her shackles in the attic, which were once used
on enslaved family members. The story went on to say that a bucket that was also still there had
been used as a toilet. The lady still owned one of the cuffs. When she told the story, everyone at the
Table fell quiet. The story was very painful to all present. How to follow up on such a story, such an
intervention?
From the audience, the following question was added: ‘How do you prepare your students to move
forward?’
Saidiya Hartman: ‘The language of humanism has created a large pile of bodies. In the USA, the
memory of slavery hangs over the head of every black person. The afterlife of slavery is poverty,
dispossession. The question of freedom is open–ended. Is Barack Obama the answer to the 1963
dream? The answer to the Civil Rights Movement? What are the black futures? How do we address
that?’
Jennifer Tosch of Black Heritage Tours commented from the audience: she grew up in the USA, with
a Surinamese mother. She feels that in the Netherlands, the past of enslavement is not so much a ‘felt
reality’. There was never a movement like the Civil Rights Movement here. But anti–black racism is just
as pernicious. We need a common language. We need our own research.
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Saidiya Hartman: ‘Yes, and we do not need a common language. These deconstructing points in time
do not flow over to other countries. What does the 150th anniversary of the abolition mean? It does
not have the same meaning, like it has in the US. The patterns do not match.’
Q2: ‘Is your book and was your reading an act of commemoration? Or is it about repossession? How
do you think about old and new traditions of commemoration, such as have been presented today?’
Saidiya Hartman: ‘We are all shaped by this history. And we are all shaped by its historical practice.
The history and practice of slavery shaped the whole modern world. Commemoration makes a
distinction between past and present which is not so meaningful to me. The end of slavery has yet to
happen. The time of slavery and its disbalances is not yet gone. Commemoration of the abolition of
slavery represents a narrow notion.’
From the audience and Markus Balkenhol: ‘How then do you think the (new) traditions of
commemoration of slavery (not of its abolition per se) can address the afterlife of slavery? What other
forms of addressing are necessary?’
Saidiya Hartman: ‘Structural and everyday racism is a legacy of slavery. We have to remind, and be
reminded, of the NOT YET of freedom. About the afterlife of slavery, about poverty and dispossession.
The end of slavery has yet to happen. Abolition was a reconstruction of power relations that still
need a structural transformation. The global order of power and possession, of have and have–nots,
needs to change. We need to remake democracy, as W.E.B. Du Bois said. There are three interesting
movements: walking together, making music together, and making a movement.’
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Report, photos and film recordings © Imagine IC
Report produced by Dineke Stam (project leader for the event), with many thanks to Jennifer Tosch
for her support, and to Machteld Jurriaans for her notes of the Q&A.
English–language editing Medea
Photography Jeremy Paesch
Film recording Devante Notopawiro