What do we do about history? We march through time, leaving behind the bits of thepast we don’t like, holding on to the bits we do
A recent visit to Houghton Hall was a chance to reflect on that process. Houghton was a house built for lavish entertainment and the assertion of political power by the prime minister, Robert Walpole. This year, moving through rooms of ridiculous opulence with riches sucked in from all corners of the globe, the visitor could be beguiled by some much simpler shapes, ceramics in glossy black and tan that speak of Africa. Magdalene Odundo’s ceramics, in that context, start to provoke questions about what the rest of the world was doing to enable the extravagance of the lifestyle the house demonstrates. And then you come into the Marble Parlour to be confronted with an astonishing structure like a particularly tall and opulent wedding cake. Titled “The Falcon Cannot Hear the Falconer”, it is made of jasperware, fudgy brown ceramic with black forms and figures superimposed in the way that the classical Wedgewood designs have delicate white nymphs and foliage. But here the images are of manacles and instruments of control and torture, the bodies of slaves lined up below decks in ships, and scenes of labour and the carrying of heavy burdens. Curved blades, that could be palm leaves but look menacing, hang from the tiers.
This work developed during a year when Magdalene Odundo explored the work of Josiah Wedgewood, the ardent abolitionist.
Reparations for slavery are proving a difficult topic for Christian churches. It is natural to kick against guilty feelings, to make a distance between ourselves and wrong-doing. And in any case, how can we make good the damage that was done? Who can we pay? What compensation can possibly be adequate or appropriately directed?
These questions are complex; it is possible to work towards answers by listening to those whose communities and futures were harmed. But making reparations to heal the past can never give us a clean new beginning, a past we can leave safely behind.
At the very top of Odundo’s centrepiece is the figure of a Kenyan woman railing against economic injustice in 2024. And if that still allows us to feel “That’s far away, it’s not really my business”, the title Odundo has given the work pulls us back in again. The title refers to Yeats’s poem The Second Coming; the “widening gyre” in the first line and the menacing tone of the poem warn that the spiral of injustice and ethical loosening whirls ever wider, and sweeps us with it. The work we have to do can never be left behind. Just as peace work has to be a process not of solving particular conflicts but of recognising all the parts of the processes by which individuals, groups and nations generate division and make enemies of each other, so reparations work needs to include a process of recognising the ways in which exploitation takes place, in the continuous flow of economic activity from which it is very difficult to separate ourselves.
Lucy Faulkner-Gawlinski
King’s Lynn Quakers