Posted on September 16, 2010
I'll never be able to look a museum object in the face again without worrying, and wondering. Last week the boss opens his emails and starts thumping the desk and shouting 'yes ... yes' as if the end of the world's come and he's off to heaven by personal invitation. I don't say anything, just watch. 'My time to shine', he says. I still don't get it, so he loses patience and starts jabbing the screen. Seems DAC's called for 'experts' to draft a national museums policy framework, and guess who thinks he'll fit the bill! So off he goes. Marching around the office, waving his arms like a preacher, or a politician shouting about 'apartheid conspiracies' and 'multiple voices'.
Then he slumps into his chair. 'Problem is,' he says, 'I'm an organic intellectual, I know what needs to be done but I don't have all the right words to blow them away.' I feel sorry for him. 'Tell you what' he says, 'you go off to one of those seminars with your smart friends and come back with some stuff I can throw around'. Lucky I'm well connected! I call in a few favours from my contacts and there I am, a few days later, sitting in a room full of people talking about museums and such things, and nodding their heads, though I'm wondering why they make it all sound so complicated.
Soon I'm listening hard, with all my ears, because the speaker is talking about 'traditional objects' and 'material culture' in museums and I start to worry. Why? Because he's not trying to explain what the objects are, or what they're used for, or how to display them, he's talking about what's done to them. How they get collected and labelled, categorised and classified, sorted and stored. He shows lots of pictures of the labels some use the 'k word' on them, others just saying 'zulu' or even 'zoeloe'. Then he's using violent language. He says the objects have been silenced and they've been displaced, disrupted, neglected, consigned, suppressed, disavowed and sequestered. Makes them sound like an unruly bunch. I imagine them toyi-toying noisily in their boxes, or maybe just huddling in the corner like a homeless man on a doorstep. Displaced, like the victims of forced removals? Suppressed like an unpleasant memory or dangerous information? Disavowed like an unwanted child? Sequestered like prisoners in isolation and locked up, out of sight?
I start worrying about these objects, like the necklaces that once saw the light of day, or maybe even danced around a fire, swinging happily around someone's neck. Now they're locked up in the dark. Forgotten till they get taken out and then what? Who knows what to make of them with those labels? ho eve knows where they really came from? He doesn't use the word misunderstood, but that's how these objects must feel - if they could. He doesn't use the word dumb either, because it's clear that these objects have stories to tell. He does mention interpretation a few times, but then says that some that people talk about just 'letting the objects speak for themselves. I don't know about that. If they do it's a foreign language that I, for one, don't understand. I really worry when he starts talking about 'interrogating' things and think about the way in which objects are analysed and dissected - I think he means poked and prodded - so that someone can extract information from them. But can they? Hey, surely there's more to these objects that the material they're made and of the way they're put together?
Anyway I write down lots more stuff for the boss to throw around. Words like 'construe', which puzzles me for a moment till I realise he's talking about how things can be interpreted differently, and I begin to think there's some hope for those objects. Well maybe only if people do all the other things he mentions like, 're-imagine', 're-think', 're-frame', 're-convene', maybe even 'dismantle' the way they think about things. Seems anything goes as long as the mistakes of the past aren't repeated.
Lunch is good and afterwards my mind's just beginning to wander slowly down some other sleepy road when I start to worry all over again. This time the speaker's talking about how objects get collected and the people who collect them and bundle them together, or separate them into different piles, and take them off to museums.
I've never thought of this before. Somehow, I just always imagined that those objects were in a museum because someone, one of the so-called 'experts' spotted them somewhere in the world, decided that they were important,and carted them to their museum. Or maybe someone who owned an object decided to give it to a museum where everyone in the country could see it. Fat chance when it's locked up in a store room!
Anyway this speaker makes me wonder about how the objects get to be in those glass cases.She talks about how they were collected and shows some photographs of some old white dudes who gave the stiff to the museum.I start to get it! Maybe some of them were just picking up things that caught their eye. 'I'll have the pretty red beads, thank you, not those dirty brown ones,' and, ' that nice carved stick', and 'the bowl in the middle of that set, just one, not the other, 'oh yes, and your blanket too'.
Then I imagine them going back to their campsites or wherever they're spending the night and bundling their 'loot' into boxes. When they get back to their museums they take everything out and divide it into piles. Maybe they put all the beads in one place and all the pots in another. Maybe they say let's put all the Zulu stuff here, and all the Xhosa stiff there. Then they end up not knowing what to call something. is everything from KZN Zulu? So they just call it a 'traditional object'. (Funny word that, I bet they don't call their own watches and leather belts "traditional objects"?) Those objects really get messed about once they hit the store-rooms! Some poor old man gave up his stick and his beads and his pot. They're taken off to museums, like refugees, separated from their families and sent off to different camps, never to meet again in this life. No one will ever know that they once belonged together because they're now just 'beadwork' and 'textiles', and the owner's just some anonymous "Zulu".
Shame! Like I said in the beginning, I don't think I'll ever be able to look a museum object in the eye again without worrying about the journey it's taken to get from where it started from,to that glass case, and all the things its been subjected to along the way.
Mak (from Makhado)
