Writing
Provenance
I watch the last dried flower petal drop
into the stale glass of water on the bedside table
Small hand still clutching mine
wrinkled like paper written on by a fine ink
Loosely now
Stories you shared held in my head
Your wild days will live on in me
survive me
But who holds your spirit now, Oma?
Will someone come to tame her?
Your fonds sits on their shelf
Calmly now
Series
File
Item
I cannot see the scratched oak desk decorated with water rings
papers scattered atop
Where is the drawer filled with dog eared photographs?
your vision through the camera drawing me into your world
on the day you walked the streets at Carnaval
on the day you met my mother
on the day you met me
Provenance:
My hand remembers yours
better than any finding aid ever could
Not the careful hands of strangers
but the way I am wild like you
The soil is an archive of buried toxicities
‘Estefania Mompean Botias discusses how community archives are open, responsive, inclusive, collaborative, and generative places where the community actively constructs and archives history. She discusses the soil as an archive of buried toxicities and how it can be mobilized to narrate the stories of historically racialized communities that have faced ecological marginalization.’ (Bertschi, Denise., Carboni, Julien Lafontaine., and Bathla, Nitin. 2023. Unearthing Traces. First. EPFL Press, 16)
I felt the ground today; felt the warm earth under my bare feet. Cradling them, pulling them down. A sense of belonging brought me to the soil, bent down I touched it with my hand, running my fingers through the varying textures, feeling the moisture. Worms live in this soil, I know. Life breathes through it. My finger brushes a piece of bark, moves along the surface of the soil and hits something. What is that exactly? Something is buried here; it caused a shiver to run down my spine. My hand keeps moving, touching the discomfort, over and over. This soil has not been touched; it longs for it – living in toxicity as it waits. I stand up, soil under my feet still and know, I don’t want to ignore the soil any longer, I want to speak to it. I want it to speak back. A community soil garden, re dug and re discovered. Yes, then we can be a witness, be witnessed. Then, we can be at home here.
Why are they here?
This piece is essentially a diary entry of an experience I had visiting the Wereldmuseum last June. Let Us Not Erase Black Activism When Remembering the Dutch Colonial Past (De Abreu, Britto, and Esajas 2024, 188) evoked a memory of this visit in me, reminding me that we can have bodily reactions to spaces even when there has been some attempt at cultural “memory” by an institution and importantly, just because an attempt has happened does not make the work complete.
Red paint splattered across the doorframe. Traces, but unmistakable ones. I stood at the reverse of the Wereldmuseum, looking at this inconspicuous back door, I had only seen by walking past on the street. There had been a clear, desperate attempt to clean the paint away, but we saw it, we knew it was there. And so was the first seed of discomfort, planted in my stomach.
We continued into the front entrance of the museum, and upon entry I recognised something like relief on the face of the woman sat behind the front desk. She ushered us in enthusiastically, asking questions, offering explanations and growing the discomfort in me like mould. As we travelled up the stairs and into the cavernous space it was clear why: the museum was virtually empty. We passed one or two visitors – each with the same look of unease on their faces – and then I stood in the middle of the cavernous space, looking upwards to the highest floors. The magnitude of the room sat heavy on me and unease embedded itself at my core. My body followed the trail from the red paint to the exhibition space and told me that this was not a safe nor a neutral space. I silently acknowledged that there is no way this place could ever be “just a museum”. The spiritual violence of the Wereldmuseum would live on.
The exhibition “Our Colonial Inheritance”, filled with artworks, objects, held statically against their will. Properly credited now but still, why are they here? They should not be here. You may shift the attitude of a museum to one of solemn recognition, but violence endures each second that they sit as static “objects”, still stolen, still contextless. No descriptive plaque can ever bring context to something that was not supposed to be there in the first place. My body knew this before I did.