Zanzibar: Memory of Slaves. missy//flickr.cc(by)
Archaeology is digging things up and making inferences about the lives and cultures of the people who left or used the discovered objects. Literary archaeology is metaphorically ‘digging up’ the writings on and of long-gone people and cultures and making inferences about their lives and cultures from the writings. But for this project we are going one step further. We are archaeologising memory. So where are these memories to be found? Can we dig them up? Find them? Re-imagine the life of the enslaved? How to construct this, when memory is itself a constructed narrative, both on the individual level as well as shared?
These particular memories exist as bones scattered in a cemetery in Gran Canaria. Can the bones speak? No. Can the scientists speak for them? Well, the scientists say, “3: Female 20–25 Right lateral SW-NE – Possible earring/glass beads”, or “Individual: 1 δ18OVPDB – 4.2 δ13Ccarb – 10.7”. This is a kind of poetry in itself, the poetry of which we are made, the poetry of our basic building blocks; the poetry of life which expresses itself in any way it can, given the circumstances it finds itself in.
