Sweet Oblivion

One day he was looking for the small anvil that he used for laminating metals and he could not remember its name. His father told him: ‘Stake’. Aureliano wrote the name on a piece of paper that he pasted to the base of the small anvil: stake. In that way he was sure of not forgetting it in the future. It did not occur to him that this was the first manifestation of a loss of memory, because the object had a difficult name to remember. But a few days later he discovered that he had trouble remembering almost every object in the laboratory. Then he marked them with their respective names so that all he had to do was read the inscription in order to identify them. When his father told him about his alarm at having forgotten even the most impressive happenings of his childhood, Aureliano explained his method to him, and Jos. Arcadia Buend.a put it into practice all through the house and later imposed it on the whole village. With an inked brush he marked everything with its name: table, chair, clock, door, wall, bed, pan. He went to the corral and marked the animals and plants: cow, goat, pig, hen, cassava, caladium, banana. Little by little, studying the infinite possibilities of a loss of memory, he realized that the day might come when things would be recognized by their inscriptions, but no one would remember their use.

Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude.

We wander through our city centres, weaving a path through the A to Z of street names and the tourist trail of ceremonial buildings and statues whose significance we as city-dwellers have long forgotten. Beyond the magical realism of García Marquez’s fiction, in the here and now of the real world, the day has already come when we recognize places and monuments by their inscriptions but no longer recall their original function. The source of street names like ‘Black Boy Hill’ and ‘Whiteladies Road’ in the heart of Bristol has become obscured by the clinical banality of a street index. Placed in alphabetical order, assigned a page and grid reference and consigned to the back page of a city map, these semantic traces of the city’s past are now no more than geographical markers, evacuated of historical meaning.

A ‘white blanket of forgetfulness’, as one writer elegantly put it, has been drawn across the material remains of slavery and empire in Britain’s once glorious cities like Bristol and Liverpool. Just like granules of sugar dissolving without trace in a sea of tea leaves, the legacy of Britain’s imperial history has all but disappeared from popular consciousness. We would rather succumb to the lure of sweet oblivion than linger over bitter remembrance of things past and now forgotten.

Forgetting has become the condition of contemporary life in the metropolitan centres of Europe’s former imperial nations. Everything depends upon it. Journalists and politicians rely upon our forgetfulness to promote their own versions of the past which invariably go unchallenged in the public arena. What Noam Chomsky has christened ‘political incorrectness’ in a witty but strategic inversion of the now familiar term is precisely this revision of history whereby we put history under wraps or else eliminate the ‘discordant notes from past and present history’. In the late twentieth century, it has become a matter of political necessity to forget the uncomfortable and disturbing elements of our past in public life. And, of course, forgetting in no way precludes nostalgia. On the contrary, we persist – as we have for so long – in nostalgic revisitations of idyllic, often invented versions of our history.

Nostalgia is itself a kind of forgetting. It substitutes a rose-tinted version of times gone by for the reality of lived experience to the extent that we come to draw on a common pool of shared memories irrespective of whether we lived that particular past or not. Through a veil of nostalgia, we come to designate as history those fictional and invented narratives which are reconstructed and played out on our film and television screens. We indulge in fond recollections for the heat and dust of an imperial lifestyle that belonged to someone else – if it existed at all. Indeed, what we mistake for historical continuity and age-old tradition, as Hobsbawn, Ranger and others have shown, is often nothing more than an invention of the nineteenth-century created to lend renewed power and legitimacy not only to European ruling elites in decline but also to the rule of empire.

Against this background, Trophies of Empire can be seen in political terms as a project about forgetting and remembering. Collecting and re-collecting the discordant notes from past and present history, artists retrace the historical lines of slavery and empire in the fabric of contemporary life. The word ‘trophy’ itself invokes these two essential and Janus-like aspects of memory: forgetting and remembering, absence and presence. For ‘trophy’ not only refers to the existence of a material object in the here and now (the very object whose function it is to be an aide-memoire or trigger to memory), but also to the absence of the event or happening for which the trophy is a symbolic trace.

First published in the exhibition catalogue Trophies of Empire, Bluecoat Gallery and John Moores University School of Art and Visual Arts, Liverpool, in collaboration with Arnolfini, Bristol, and Hull Time Based Arts, 1994. The exhibition Trophies of Empire was conceived by the artist Keith Piper with the Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool, and a number of collaborating arts organizations in the UK. It opened simultaneously at galleries in three maritime cities across Britain in the autumn of 1992 to coincide with the Columbus Quincentenary: Bluecoat Gallery (10 October–14 November 1992), Ferens Art Gallery, Hull (17 October–15 November 1992), and Arnolfini, Bristol (21 November 1992–10 January 1993). The participating artists were: Paul Clarkson, Carole Drake, Nina Edge, Edwina Fitzpatrick, Sunil Gupta, Banele Iyapo, Rita Keegan, Juginder Lamba, Shaheen Merali, Keith Piper, Donald Rodney, South Atlantic Souvenirs, Veena Stephenson, Verbal Images and Visual Stress.

1 Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solicitude, London: Picador, 1978, pp. 45–6. 2 Bernard Smith cited in Ian McLean, ‘White Aborigines: Cultural Imperatives of Australian Colonialism’, Third Text, Spring 1993: 21. 3 See Noam Chomsky, Year 501: The Conquest Continues, London: Verso, 1993. 4 Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. © Gilane Tawadros, 1994.

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