In Part Two of his Uncomfortable Histories blog piece, Visiting Research Fellow, Dr Richard White offers a sketch of his recent Heritage Open Days walk at Bath Spa University’s Newton Park campus
Dr Richard White is a former Senior Lecturer in Media Practice at Bath Spa University and is currently a Visiting Research Fellow. For the past 10 years he has been hosting walks creatively exploring hidden, obscured and often uncomfortable histories, legacies of slave-ownership and colonialism. In July the book he contributed to and co-edited, Breaking the Dead Silence: Engaging with the Legacies of Empire and Slave-Ownership in Bath and Bristol’s Memoryscapes was published by Liverpool University Press and is available as a free PDF download.
Part two: Reluctant Sites of Memory (and Cream Teas)
Inspired by the work of Sara Ahmed (2010) and others it is my view that to be part of the constructed amnesia and the forgetting of injustice is to become complicit in its persistence. Racism and its inverse, white supremacism, became structural through the transatlantic trade and European colonialism; my view, as a white man, is that without reaching back to and owning that past we remain shackled to it. Making a way, walking and asking questions, I attend to complicity and white privilege; I seek to become more alert. This non-confrontational somatic approach is my way of sharing that becoming.
Together in those reluctant sites of memory, listening, sensing, asking questions with our whole bodies, we find ways of hearing the unheard, of discovering and renewing the telling of forgotten stories. Our conversations often turn to the long lasting legacies of enslavement and colonial extraction and its fundamental impact on how we make sense of ourselves and the world. Walkers disseminate this even if only as questions, for these individuals and for many others that includes urgent questions on offering, or demanding, an apology.
The University has much to consider. At Newton Park, standing on the shoulders of other labourers in the archive, I hosted a walk for Heritage Open Days in September. We were promised a cream tea at the end and although I had to up sell it, the potential juxtaposition was pregnant with possibilities for a delicious closing provocation.
We thought about what the tree represented, we felt its rugged bark and looked up into the cathedral of its branches.
I opened the walk with David Dabydeen’s comment (2008) that there is an inextricable link between the English Country Estate and the Caribbean Plantation. We followed entangled threads to touch the stone of Main House, the lawn grass and the field grass. We looked for the ghost of the monkey puzzle tree and came as close as we could, over electric fences and pink picnic blankets, to the great spreading Cedar of Lebanon. On the brink of a war rooted in European colonialism and remote map making, we thought about what the tree represented, we felt its rugged bark and looked up into the cathedral of its branches.
Walking to the lake in silence down through wet woods towards the distant proud mournfulness of Paul Robeson singing, I dropped in the stories of the three intermarried enslaver white dynasties – the Gores, the Langtons and the multibarreled Temples – who once owned the estate, taking us back to Bristol’s Society of Merchant Venturers and the founding of the Royal Africa Company. Both institutions actively engaged in the trade in captured and enslaved African people.
On our return, beside the lake and enjoying the picturesque, a final question as we stood before a tree planted in memory of the struggle for women's right to vote. Once, on the other side of Bath, a hundred years ago, there was an arboretum, each tree planted by a suffragette recovering from forced feeding and hunger strike; today that park at the rear of Eagle House is a housing estate. Once, at Newton Park, not so long ago, by the lake, this tree was planted to remember that erasure and commemorate the struggle. Today there is no orientation, no bench upon which to sit, to reflect on a social justice story and remember the price paid for the vote. I hope the group of walkers left with that story mnemonically linked to the tree by the lake, that they retell it and keep asking questions.
Remembering through our senses, becoming story carriers I hope those walkers continue walking on emboldened to ask ever more difficult questions.
Out of cognitive dissonance on that short afternoon’s walk, quiet acknowledgements of the atrocities obscured by the picturesque emerged. Remembering through our senses, becoming story carriers I hope those walkers continue walking on emboldened to ask ever more difficult questions. We offered respect to the memory of flesh, blood and water in Dabydeen’s inextricable link. The question of apology offered and demanded was in the air along with the hope and desire for repair. We ended with a brisk climb up from the lake on time and hungry for the promised cream tea, ready to ask questions on the origins of the fruit, sugar and cream. It was four o’clock, tea time!
But the cream teas were done for the day.
Two ghostly white men in white wigs and frock coats drifted past.
And it was left to me to make the apologies.
Image: Courtesy of Victoria Waters