“When men die, they enter into history. When statues die, they enter into art. This botany of death is what we call culture. That is because the society of statues is mortal. One day, their faces of stone crumble and fall to earth.”
These are the opening lines of Alain Resnais and Chris Marker’s 1953 essay film Les Statues Muerent Aussi (Statues Also Die). The film, which focuses on African sculpture, was banned in France due to its sharp critique of the devastating cultural erasure carried out by French colonisers in Africa.
The film was prescient. Today, as part of the Black Lives Matter protests, statues of racists – colonisers and slave traders – are being toppled and torn down around the world. Winston Churchill was defaced. Edward Colston sank to the bottom of the river. King Leopold II has red paint and graffiti splattered all over him. #RhodesMustFall made a comeback. Christopher Columbus was decapitated. Even the statue of Mahatma Gandhi, harbinger of non-violence, was vandalised in Washington DC.
Pictures and videos of these events went viral, with splintered reactions from the public. Some are overjoyed at the dismantling of these figures of oppression; other condemn it, calling it property damage.
While the argument of property damage is slippery by itself, the specific context of historical statues complicates the subject entirely. The tearing down of statues begs the question of why we erect them in the first place. What makes this society of statues so sacred and, paradoxically, mortal?
Statues are monuments. The word “monument” gets its root from the Latin monere, to remind. So, statues exist for the historical purpose of reminding a place and its people of their past, and what helped create the world in which they live today. Except it is not that simple. The act of erecting statues is deliberate and discriminate: we choose who is worth remembering. It is a way for society to forge its own narrative about itself. A way to smoothen over the mess of history by creating a clean, albeit vague, past upon which we can look back with pride.
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The act of erecting statues is a self-mythologising enterprise. In other words, it is inevitably dishonest. A statue of Winston Churchill, for instance, says nothing more than that he was important and must have done something worth remembering. We do not glean any information from his statue other than the image: an individual metamorphosed into an immortal icon.
But individuals are as complicated as statues are flat. Winston Churchill may have been the hero of WWII and Britain’s fight against Nazism, but his treatment of the colonies proved him no different than any old fascist. This is the problem with national mythologies. World War II, in the minds of the people, was the epic battle of good versus evil; the Allies against the Nazis. But war is value-neutral, and truth is less grand: it was power versus power. Both the Holocaust and the Bengal Famine, for example, killed millions. Both, on some level, were a result of the politics of letting people die.
Statues erase nuance, turning people into icons, and perpetuate a lie by doing so. History is not palatable or convenient.
The act of toppling statues is therefore an act of confronting this lie. Decapitating Columbus and defacing statues of Confederate leaders are acts of dethroning them and acknowledging the blood-soaked nature of that throne.
The tension here is that the myth of both greatness and whiteness that these statues perpetuate form the foundation of today’s status quo. Modern Britain defines itself through Churchill (he is considered the greatest Briton of all time). Modern America defines itself through Columbus’ arrival. Entire populations’ identities are formed under their colonial gaze. Toppling these statues thus comes at the necessary cost of challenging the identity of entire populations. This botany of death is required.
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It is this tension that manifests itself as property damage. Why not discuss it in a “civilised” fashion and put it in a museum, as William Dalrymple would have it? But that discussion took place, and scholars at Oxford who tiresomely debated Cecil Rhodes arrived at nothing but smug indecision – as though such debate and consideration were reparations in themselves. Museums and universities are not neutral institutions; they work within the current power structure. The property being damaged here is the mythologized identity of entire peoples. The fear of damage stems from a knowledge that there is something to be guilty of – for it is actually a fear of revenge.
Statues Also Die deals with the harsh truth of colonial erasure, that entire civilisations were wiped out and their histories turned into vague art.
The toppling of statues is a destruction of the myth built on top of this wreckage of the past. It is time to bring back the radical punk slogan “kill your idols”. Because unlike the flames of conquerors, these are not acts of erasure. Far from it. This is a reckoning.
Stuti Roy is an undergraduate studying Political Science and English Literature at Victoria College, University of Toronto.
Featured image credit: Reuters