Now, my wading into issues of race normally proceeds something along the lines of a happy child bounding gleefully into the ocean only to discover that it is made of boiling oil and there's a strong current, and I'll admit I was originally drawn in to the discussion because I was annoyed that I had actually seen the damn thing while apparently no one suggesting a boycott had. Whether it's the Daily Mail or liberal types, I get equally annoyed by anyone suggesting something cultural be stopped because it SOUNDS TERRIBLE and therefore SHOULDN'T BE ALLOWED.
Upon entering into discussions of race
This then leads to me having to defend to the hilt something that while pretty good was hardly the best thing I saw at the Fringe. On top of this, points raised about the representation of black people in the arts are generally pretty unarguable; Africans as the victims sitting there passively is hardly new to any of us and there's a ton of contemporary African art that never reaches London. By opposing the campaign I'm essentially denying a whole ton of legitimate and complex issues, and the complexity of it all tends to drag any attempted reasonable conversation down into the semantics and questions of agency and power relations familiar to anyone who talks about this stuff regularly, and it all gets rather heavy.
So I'd like to simplify it a bit, if possible. The reason I think Exhibit B should be seen is because I don't actually give a damn about the people in those exhibits. I don't really think the exhibition is about them. The title is Exhibit B and reference is made in the programme notes to evidence in a trial. Fine. In a trial setting our question should not be about the victim. It is about the perpetrator. And that is why Exhibit B is essential, because the crimes represented there are part of my heritage and my culture as a white Englishman. There is a reason that Schubert's Ave Maria contends in the exhibition hall with sung Xhosa. What we are watching is the absolute nadir of barbarism at the rotten heart of what the perpetrators considered civilised society.
I would refer you to Ta-Nehisi Coates' wonderful The Myth of Western Civilisation here, at least in the sense that barbarism never left Europe. The strongest exhibit is that of a series of decapitated heads. A black woman like Selina Thompson (who actually did see it) might react to the singing severed heads like this:
Seeing black history presented as though it began and will end with Colonialism – i.e. when white people come into the picture, is NOTHING NEW. It is not radical, it does not challenge me – actually, it doesn’t challenge anyone really, because it feeds into a cultural narrative that is all too common. One in which pain and persecution is the only way in which we can understand the experience of blackness, one in which we fetishize the black experience as abject, and I am so done. So done.
And this is perfectly true. But my response was this:
Who decapitates people?
Some years ago a Pakistani friend quite casually related to me how a second cousin had been decapitated publicly by Taliban insurgents in the Swat Valley. My response then was, I think, a human one: Who the hell decapitates people? And now, with the media in thrall to the propaganda antics of ISIS, the question comes again, who the hell decapitates people? In the dark recesses of our cultural memories, we all hold in common that sense of what taking the head means; the ancient gesture of holding up your enemy's head for all to see; total and utter domination. What terrifying, alien, medieval power do we now face in this new caliphate? Are the armies of Khalid ibn Walid poised to arise from their graves and storm across the Levant once more?
And yet there, in front of me, was the proof that Europeans barely more than a century ago had decapitated many hundreds of their subjects in a show of power. There is the answer. We decapitate people. The evidence for the prosecution is pretty clear in Exhibit B, whether in suppression of Mau Mau or that of an asylum seeker suffocated on a plane in 2010 - the white Europeans have committed atrocities. I would have committed atrocities, perhaps.
Do I feel guilty? No, as I have written before. But this is part of my history. Every effort, though, will be made to forget. Coates quotes Tony Judt:
Evil, above all evil on the scale practiced by Nazi Germany, can never be satisfactorily remembered. The very enormity of the crime renders all memorialisation incomplete. Its inherent implausibility—the sheer difficulty of conceiving of it in calm retrospect—opens the door to diminution and even denial. Impossible to remember as it truly was, it is inherently vulnerable to being remembered as it wasn’t. Against this challenge memory itself is helpless.
By presenting this memory in trial form, we cannot hide from it. It is a good way of remembering. And I am a passionate English patriot - my heritage, my culture must be remembered, all of it, especially that which we will try to forget.
Now, that doesn't invalidate the criticisms. Why use living black actors? Well, for one thing, it would be impossible and insulting to remove black people entirely from the picture. By involving them in passive form only, the onus is on the spectator to question their complicity, because this is the story of the spectator, not the spectated. Their story must be told too, it is true. Again, I want more plays like Season in the Congo to be put on. The problem is that it is impossible to be entirely fair when one culture's story touches another. One side will inevitably be taken. Are the white stories told more often? Absolutely. But they still need to be told.
Lastly, there is the question of the medium itself. The human zoo existed for a long time, and has been all but obliterated from cultural memory, understandably. But that obliteration is an act, however well-intentioned, of cultural treachery. I would draw the parallel to The Scottsboro Boys, which I write about here. There I argue that the true power of that show comes from resurrecting a cultural form, the minstrel show, so utterly horrible that merely to look at it comes with a twinge of guilt for even enjoying the choreography or the singing. I would imagine that the sentence "two rich white guys write all-black musical in the form of a minstrel show" would have had a few Twitter activists baying for blood if it had been marketed that way.
Phenomenally offensive
And yet minstrel shows happened. Human zoos happened. We can visit war memorials and death camps. We understand our place in relation to them. But how can we remember culture? Shows that people like us attended with a smile on our face? The act of remembering is wrenchingly hard. What is our position as a member of a minstrel show audience? Who are we when we walk around Exhibit B? In The History Boys, Hector is appalled that school trips visit Auschwitz, and must therefore eat packed lunches there: "Nothing is appropriate". No, nothing is appropriate when remembering barbarism. The critics of this exhibit are quite right to say it isn't appropriate. The one hope, then, is subversion: to take this human zoo and turn it into evidence for the prosecution of the culture that could have created it. It's an incredibly risky and fraught idea. Whether it works or not is really up to the viewer. Do you think it's about the people in the exhibit or the people who watch them?
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