by Jenny Davis
So here I am, poised on the edge, not ready in the least, wavering and quivering. It's just as well I took this project on without giving it too much advance thought. There was definitely bliss in this Ignorance. Before I had time to reconsider and to let those Gremlins sitting on my laptop, before they had a chance to get me by the throat with those forever taunts. You may not write...ever again. And if you do ..it will stink of shit...and everyone will smell it in the room...and they will know who the culprit is...If there was a conjured (injured) image of my writing self, at present it resembles a broken down bike, like the one rusting in my garden, symbolic in its neglect, weather beaten. The writing hand creaks, fluency is cumbersome. I blame this on TV, both writing and watching it. Obviously far too much Googleboxing, formulaic writing and not enough prose. Even the Gremlins are more articulate than me. They wait then ambush me with a lexicon I wish I could gainfully employ in the writing itself. Oh the Devil has the best tunes...
So once trepidation was duly and politely shared in the room and placed on the table, I felt that palpable relief, like you do when you furtively unzip that top button on your trousers, under the table, and your stomach flops out in all its thankful glory. Gratitude for that moment when you realize your Gremlins sound pretty much the same as everyone else's. So I made a decision to be there, take myself out of the equation, which means paradoxically being myself. Self consciousness and insecurities wrapped in a taut toxic ball and flung out the window.
So this was as much about learning and deciphering Archaeology speak. We were immersed into a world of isotophes, the significance of muscular bone markings, and dental caries. Interdisciplinary was used at one point, a room of Archeologists and writers and the discourse which emerges from that process. It feels as if the space in which the Archeologist and the Artist converges is a space of transmutation, interlocking two modes of thinking, a fusion of dialect. Because something else has to happen when the facts rub up against the parameters of its own confines. There are only gaps and the spaces in between, and that's where imagination takes over.
I realized that no matter how far the reaches of fact, the solidity of a fossilized bone, there is still subjectivity, there are spaces where fact cannot reach. Catriona and Emma, described what they offered as crumbs when it was as overwhelming as a tsunami.
Finca Clavijo the cemetery close to a sugar plantation and Newton Plantation Barbados; the former was a slow burn surprise but the latter was like an ensuing tidal wave, realizing the connections due to its proximity.
The Archeologists couldn't possibly know when they share information about bone sample and what we learn from human remains is that the soil that buried them, is the same earth that buried our grandparents,the same earth they trod, dug, toiled on.
A plantation in Barbados is touching distance.
And then it gave rise to other questions, what is the proximity, in terms of time, when human remains, the excavated dug up bones are simple pure bone, yielding itself up for analysis, a microscope, objective scientific enquiry? When is it simply two milligrams of bone, and when is it ancestor? Is time simply the measure here? or does memory determine this? As long as there is someone to pave a grave with flowers and a stone, to commemorate anniversaries, then that person/ body in the ground is sacred, is still a human being kept alive in one's mind and heart. Because to be remembered is to be seen.
So at one point, my concentration was muddling, as facts unfurled about the next numbered individual, as information became routinized, formulaic and sequential as we moved from the Demographic to the DNA, Dental and bones.
I asked Emma, about this who shared (with refreshing honesty) that as Archaeologists, reports were in danger of being reiteration; case studies were indeed pretty much the same, routine, standardized information, a formulaic format and the only thing that differs is an inserted conclusion. Archaeology by copy and paste.
I had to remind myself that a milligram of bone is a body, a he or a she; not an 'it'. A matter of re- imbuing those remains with meaning, the flesh on the bones, breathe, breathe, breathe. And a name. That's the other slight thing.
The Slave trade and Colonialism taught us that for the enterprise to work, one first must dehumanize and objectify the subject. Of course that's why the sciences at the time were hell bent hand in glove with church to prove that the African man was inferior, sub human, had a smaller skull. Shrinkage and scripture. It had to be proved of course that one was not enslaving another human being, otherwise how could you sit in the pew of St Mary Redcliffe, bible on lap and listen to the Christian sermon? You turn the page rapidly and bless for whom the Redcliffe bells toll.
Until he can quote the Lord's Prayer, the savage in the chain has no name. Well not one you could pronounce.
What is the proximity of an ancestor again?
As Artists and Archeologists we are on this journey of transmutation, we are alchemists of a sort sifting through tooth and bone to create meaning. Make meaning, out of memory, and imagination and from a place of reverence.
The colonizer desecrated lands and left people bereft of names, family, freedom and agency. They left unmarked graves, and cemeteries that were outside the church yard. They left graves that were forgotten, with people buried with their heads turned to Mecca. They left a cemetery forgotten until a road runneth through it.
If we as artists get to re invoke their humanity, by the power of imagination, then maybe this project is far larger an honor and responsibility than I so far envisaged.
I suspect Emma and Catriona hadn't realized either, they thought they were giving us crumbs. Little did they know.