Over the past year, the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ campaign has prompted a public argument that has often felt belated and outdated. As efforts to bring down statues and other images of Cecil Rhodes gathered momentum – first in South Africa and later in Britain – it was particularly startling, then troubling, then depressing to hear the phrase ‘a man of his time’ used so often. Both the defensive and dismissive deployments of this phrase indicate the conservative tendency within media and online discussions of Britain's imperial and colonial past. To declare a man ‘of his time’ is an insidious move; it pretends political neutrality as it attempts to foreclose debate. It may be soothing to allow a man to be ‘of his time’, but it is inimical to ethically alert historiography, if you believe that telling-history is an ethic that must not – at the very least – discourage a current public from re-imagining itself, in its own time. Desacralising icons of history can give clearer space and precious energy to such processes of re-imagination. To suggest, as some have, that taking-down Rhodes bears comparison to the destruction of religious and cultural heritage is to haze the distinction between a careful dismantling and a violent desecration. This may sometimes be a fine line, and an affect of care can hide more important continuities of violent intent. But this is not the case with the Rhodes statuary, where un-curated images of the man avert us from seeing so many other forms, figures and epochs of history — for of course his image has an over-determining force precisely because he was not merely ‘a man of his time’. Although recognising that Cecil Rhodes was either more or less than such a man is not in itself to exceed the arcane preclusions of the phrase. To acknowledge that he was a particularly fervent racist and outstandingly pernicious colonialist can too easily give room to excuse all those regularly less noxious men and women of their time. This kind of relativism makes queasy historiography. It diminishes discussion on the material forms of public history, it diverts us from recognising the many ways in which the present is a landing of the past and it obfuscates real debate on the inheritance of responsibility.
It has been less startling, but also troubling and then depressing to hear the student protesters leading the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ campaign dismissed as morally tyrannical and to hear them baffled into a corner of personally inherited trauma. History tells us – continuously – that signs and symbols can effect a slow violence and that this is not limited to the disenfranchised or to their descendants. The damage of imperial and colonial pasts is not exclusive; such intimacies of shame are not so easily separated into oppressed and oppressor. Which generation, what part of a community, doesn't need the redemptions that might be seeded when old iconographies are dug out? The taking-down of the Confederate Flag from the State House of South Carolina in July last year was heralded in terms of healing and reconciliation. It was a complex and incomplete moment; it spoke to a present still in the racialised thrall of centuries of deprivation and depravity, so was a symbolic putting aside of a past that is clearly not past. But that is why it was meaningful. Dismantling the flag begins to make room for a public to re-imagine the future. New Zealand's decision in April to retain the Union Jack on its flag makes a perplexing comparison here. For some, the continuities between the Confederate Flag and the Union Jack are ineluctable: they are both about the violent and inextricable connections of slavery and capitalism. For others, these flags signify sufficiently distinct and local histories of pride or guilt, nostalgia or hegemony; because history also tells us – continuously – that signs and symbols can accrue different meanings, different tractions, across geographies and time.
This issue of Wasafiri turns around statuary, flags and other abiding signs of empire and symbols of postcolonial memorialisation. The opening story, Kiare Ladner's ‘Mission to Mars’, portrays a man who we might be tempted to describe as ‘of his time’. But the story is captivating precisely because he is more fully narrated as a man out of his time. A brief gesture to the Jan Smuts memorial does not exactly signify his nostalgia for the past, nor does it exactly speak of the continuation of old forms of power in post-apartheid South Africa. Rather, the bare mention of this statue brings into relief the protagonist's desire to move further out of time (even to Mars), rather than back in time. Kiare's writing tempers moral judgement with empathy, humour and pathos; and so bypasses the idea of ‘a man of his time’ towards a more supple form of engagement with men, their past and the present.
Similarly, a combination of wry perspective and critical pathos shapes Liz Solms's ‘December 21rst, 2012, Jamaica’. This poem offers us the simple and vast ironies of a cricket pitch named Uprising. Again, the power of the piece is in the juxtaposition of a public symbol of empire with a personal history, as the pitch is most fully realised as the site of painful memories of a lost brother. A troubling contrast of the public and the personal is also achieved in Steve Blythe's poems. ‘Eclipse’ describes a gentle moment preparing for an ambivalent love within the ritual of watching an eclipse, whilst ‘Captain Miller’s Statue’ imagines the visceral moment of a suicide bomber's taut preparation.
In George Makana Clark’s ‘The Décimist’, poetry itself is understood as a form of memorialisation for the rebellious dead. Once again, gentle humour and a sharp sense of pathos are combined to moving effect as a revolutionary-veteran-butcher-poet declaims his verse to an audience of customers and market dwellers. This story is interested in the self-defeating ways in which a postcolonial history can become memorialised, an interest that also shapes Candice Pitts's essay on ‘Belize — A Nation (Still) in the Making: Erasures and Marginalisation in the Framing of the “Land of the Free”’. In this thoughtful discussion on the politics of gender in Zee Edgell's novel Beka Lamb, the iconography of Belize's postcolonial flag – two men – is scrutinised to reveal the anxious masculinities which continue to shape a national consciousness. In salutary contrast to this disconcerting flag, Aurogeeta Das's curation of Indian indigenous art offers us an arresting selection of more politically flexible and open images. As her own thoughts on the difficulties and opportunities of framing indigenous art reveals, this bold and intricate work is highly knowing, perhaps most seriously when it seems most innocent, cheeky or simply colourful. The work of this issue of Wasafiri in relation to the high signs and symbols of powerful men continues through Alexandra Strnad's ‘Christmas Biscuits’ and ‘Vyšehrad in Spring’. In these poems, a photograph, a modest grave, a rowan tree or the memory of a biscuit are the more meaningful and moving icons of the past.
The second half of this issue continues a theme of careful dismantling, taking it into other geographical and discursive spaces. In Yvonne Reddick's essay, ‘“This was a Conradian world that I was entering”: Colonial and Postcolonial River-Journeys Beyond the Black Atlantic in Caryl Phillips’s Work’, the iconography of the ocean is questioned and expanded, reminding us again that postcolonial thinking can also set up staunch ideas that bear continual interrogation. Where this article examines a genealogy of male writers, Abigail Ward's ‘Servitude and Slave Narratives: Tracing “New Slaveries” in Mende Nazer’s Slave and Zadie Smith’s “The Embassy of Cambodia”’ considers the place of women's voices in histories of slavery. This piece offers an astute reading of works of literature that importantly alerts us, not just to the legacies of slavery, but to slavery as a continuing practice.
Ruth Corkill's ‘Bullockie’ also invites us into an individuated feminine voice and perspective. Told from a girl's point of view, the story brings into relief an embattled masculinity of labour and land. The child’s eye observations frame the banal lives of her grandparents, drawing out – with a delicate poignancy – the understandings and misunderstandings that shape family lives. In contrast to the low-key tenor of this story, Scherezade Siobhan's poem ‘Colored Girls Won’t be Televised’ projects a voice that is fast and blasting and, at times, excoriating. ‘Rare’ girls – ‘100% Nabokov, 100% Tehran’ – might be ‘hurled into obelisks’, but they refuse to becomes statues/icons/images and always return to flesh. The poem gives us text as a powerful orality.
The importance and difficulty of moving between orality, textuality and formal publication is vividly articulated in Emma Scanlan's conversation with Jamaica Osorio. This interview animates the poet/storyteller as an activist, scholar and translator. It gives us the writer as a figure in the world. Similarly, Yugin Teo's conversation with Alvin Pang enlivens the poet as a reader, traveller, speaker and citizen of an island and the world. In his poem, ‘When the Barbarians Arrive’, we are invited to think about what it might mean to ‘tear down monuments./first to go are statues with arms outstretched in victory, and then anything with lions’. The shape of the verse, and the images they capture, enable us to query the losses and gains of any idea of ‘progress’.
In the conversation between Carole Burns, Rebecca Smith and Segun Afolabi, we hear of further ways in which the writer is in the world. They offer us a lively and evocative insight into the energies and synergies – as well as the snags – of balancing their lives as creative writers with their work teaching creative writing and, in the process, they provide some lucid advice on both how to write and how to teach.
This issue ends with a shock. Chee Malabar's ‘On the Outs’ is a distressingly funny explication of the lethal and devastating fury of a dispossessed man who has done time, but has never had his time. This story brings a whole other set of thoughts, feelings and histories to the idea of ‘a man of his time’.
Statues and flags, signs and symbols: this issue of Wasafiri reminds us of the power of fiction and poetry, and of scholarship and teaching, to deepen, complicate and productively baffle the given terms of public debate.