On 13 July 2023 I was invited to take part in a Histories at Risk conference held in Manchester Central Library. I had been asked to share my poem, Where is my History?, and facilitate a workshop around its themes to aid the academics, activists and artists in the room make connections between their work.
The morning began with Maya Sharma from the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah RACE Centre sharing findings of their report into how the Heritage sector engages with EDI and decolonising agendas: If Nothing Changes, Nothing Changes. Unsurprisingly it made for a damning indictment of the sector and demonstrated largely tokenistic engagement with communities deemed ‘marginalised’ from the sector.
The subsequent conversation that ensued between the conference participants was of great interest to me. There was a surprising tension between those who felt that the work that was being done should be encouraged and that change takes time; and then those who took a view more similar to my own: that the work being done largely stems from a fear-response to pre-empt loss of cultural currency at a political moment when “EDI” and the likes are deemed to hold the moral upper-ground. Whilst some views articulated in the room therefore made me uncomfortable about the sense of complacency that can exist amongst those in this sector, it provided a good context for my intervention.
The poem which my provocation came out of was commissioned by the We Don’t Settle project in Birmingham that looked at how local histories are narrated. Their prompt was the question: where is my past? And as I mulled on this question to write the poem, I began to address it in three major parts.
The first “where” I found myself grappling with was that of the location of “my past” in the subject called History. Often, the events and experiences that make up my past have slipped between the cracks of formal institutional histories. For example, when studying my BA in History at Cambridge University, I felt this quite palpably when the 20th Century History module provided a topic on both histories of migration, and the history of women, and yet the voices, experiences, and pasts of immigrant women were present in neither. I recognised immigrant women as my past – biologically but also narratively – so what did it mean for the histories that explained their presence in Britain to be side-lined and their experiences to be mere footnotes to the topics of “women” and “migration”?
The second “where” I addressed in the poem was the material question of whereabouts the artefacts and objects of “my past” are. There are obvious questions that arise from this line of enquiry – such as what it means for British and European museums and archives to house artefacts from their former colonies. Within this we should also ask why it is the insides of those museums that are deemed to hold the artefacts instead of the buildings themselves which are often monuments built by wealth extracted from enslaved people’s labour and colonial pillaging. Such physical geographies are rarely deemed historical locations of “the past” but arguably should be, and what possibilities would open if they were?
In this aspect of “where” there are also questions to consider around what parts of “my past” would even qualify as an artefact, and what parts have historically been overlooked by archivists, collectors and curators as mere junk, or as not being valuable for remembering. Such decisions are not usually recorded as part of the practice of history-making, and yet they are significant shapers of our understanding of the past. Further, when we know of the reality of enterprises like the British government’s Operation Legacy which was the order to destroy records of colonial occupation as the Empire fought for independence; the question of “where” becomes a very literal one of asking which oceans the records of my past are buried in and which granules of dust hold the ashes of the documents burnt because they detailed “my” brutalisation…
Finally, the question of “where” my past was also became an epistemological one. Often, that which is a historical record relating to people of diasporic or migrant backgrounds (even such terms are methods of relegating and Othering), is not categorised as History, but as “religion”, or “supplementary”. You might find it in the additional reading section, not the core; or you may find it in “alternative” medical knowledges, not the ones considered “real”. Such valuation of knowledge and what constitutes knowledge is an essential part of understanding the devaluation and marginalisation of “my history”. Even in efforts to diversify or decolonise History these power dynamics persist because the conversation often builds on a premise of “inclusion” which implies that the real, dominant and central subject of History is still white Europeanness. As even the language I find myself forced to use in this blog post attests to – it is difficult to resist Othering ones own past.
Presenting the above ideas and questions to the Histories at Risk conference was a way to situate my poem, which I then performed, and on the back of that I asked the group how they relate to the question of “where” in their own work. This brought up fascinating lines of thought with some talking about finding their past in their own family and the lives of those they love. Others spoke about the fallacy of “DNA” as housing our histories, as the narratives we apply to the body can often obscure the actual complexities of the past. Further themes included locating history in languages, unspoken memories, and outside linear subject areas.
I later asked how these locations might relate to histories being “at risk” – the title of the conference and the network of activists and academics. Here I was thinking about how physical, categorical and epistemological locations of histories can risk their value, risk the ways we understand them, or risk our futures due to loss of practices, experiences and knowledges that ought to contribute to the world. I was thinking about recent experiences of my own when I raised this question. One experience is that of working closely with a local elder activist and learning of the history of local organising which feels crucial to remember in order for us to continue to resist state oppression. The other experience is in the archive, coming across a Quran and thinking about how the curatorial relation to it as an “object” removed and failed to recognise its spiritual significance and metaphysical reality as it relates to someone like me who deems the Quran as so much more than an “object”. How then does this risk how that Quran is understood?
The conference participants chose to raise a set of key questions off the back of my provocation. These included the very existential but pertinent question of why we preserve history in the first place. Participants acknowledged we must want and need history, but why, and should the drive for preservation apply to everything? The second major question raised was how “real evidence” can ever be protected from co-option and denial – e.g. what happens when historical evidence tells a narrative of oppression but the state implicated simply denies it? Can history simply be done away with this lightly? And on the converse, what do we do to protect it from being weaponised?
The final question raised was about how space can be created for community-led practice and for historical resources, practices and know-how to be redistributed for people to locate, narrate and tell their own histories which might organically resist some of the institutional and epistemological faults highlighted throughout the day.
I found myself deeply engaged by these questions and as I left the conference, whilst I did not agree with all that was said, nor could I see eye to eye with everybody present; I was more certain than ever that everybody deserves to author History, to contest what it is constituted of, and to explore it on their own terms, without gatekeeping.
Histories At Risk 