Colonizing & Museums

 Back in prison, I started writing a series of short stories based on stories I told people out East. Their interest surprised me. When I was younger, I had gotten quite attached to William Faulkner, and his stories about Mississippi, and I had had ambitions. Thing was, I had no idea what was the story of Indiana - we were not wrecked by the Civil War and Emancipation, as had been Faulkner's Mississippi. Joyce Carol Oates's When We were the Mulvaney's showed me what could be done with a Northern setting and history. One thing that came to my attention from the reaction of Easterner's was how much the Midwest had been a colony. Some of this had in my head since last school and my International Law course - how much GM's treatment of Indiana resembled transnational corporations' treatment of Third World Countries. We brought Eastern ideas west, for all we are called the heartland. We were exploited by outside mercantile and financial institutions.

All this brought me to The Colonizer and The Ghost by Lesley Jenike. These passages stuck out for me:

Museums are filled with ghosts, if ghost is just another word for longing. Their collections typify our desire for possession, which, as poet and essayist Mary Ruefle would argue, is a “sickness”—the “world’s greatest sickness on earth,” in fact. It’s a sickness she grapples with while “playing hooky” from school as a sixteen-year-old student in Brussels. She “took a tram to the outskirts of the city and wandered through that marble mausoleum commonly called the Congo Museum,” a monument to Belgium’s colonial exploits in Africa during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, going there so often, she tells us, “I could enter the museum blindfolded and turn exactly the right corners, one after the another” in order to reach what becomes the metaphorical heart of Ruefle’s 2016 collection My Private Property, or, rather, the head of it—a shrunken head she describes as “as close to a real doll as one could ever come.”

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While Ruefle describes herself as “deliriously happy to be free, wandering under the hanging canoes, staring at the stuffed elephants and peering into the eyeholes of masks, with which I felt I had a special relationship,” she comes to see that the freedom she felt as a teenager was predicated on someone else’s confinement, someone else’s pain. Yes, she’s temporarily free of a school that “did not teach what [she] now know[s] to be true,” but is educated on empire by virtue of the museum itself, which itself is built on freedom’s absence for the purpose of educating children like Ruefle. And foremost in the museum’s curriculum is Belgium’s brutal colonization efforts in Africa, its plunder of cultural and natural resources, and its self-perpetuating narrative of superiority, articulated in the language of benefaction and learning. As Tim Barringer writes in his essay “Victorian Culture and the Museum,” “Housed within splendid Victorian buildings, [museums] stand in complex and sometimes tormented relation to the Victorian epistemologies which produced them. These museums, so omnipresent as to have become naturalized into our cultural landscape, have framed the ways in which we view the world through its material remains.” The “naturalization” Barringer describes refers not only to museums’ architectural ubiquity, but to their foundational role in childhood education. Museums are often portrayed as places of adventure and transformation for children that promote scientific inquiry as well as longstanding assumptions about Western cultural dominance, and Ruefle’s experience is no different. It’s in the Congo Museum that she simultaneously discovers her own autonomy and others’ lack of it, arriving there at a moment of transition, when, as a sixteen-year-old, she begins to experience nostalgia, longing. She sees a resemblance between the head and the man to whom the head once belonged, and even admits to a merging that happens between the head and herself: “We stood facing each other the way, when you come upon a deer unexpectedly, you both freeze for a moment, mutually startled, and in that exchange there seems to be but one glance, as if you and the other are sharing the same pair of eyes.”

What do our museums celebrate? Something more for me to research. 

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