In the summer of 1985 statues moved in Ireland. The statue of Mary, the virgin mother of Jesus, in a grotto at Ballinspittle on the road between Cork and Kinsale, became the most renowned. Crowds flocked to the scene to express their devotion.
Various learned opinions described the occurrences as optical illusions, a consequence of existential angst or the outworking of childhood traumas amplified by religious piety. The experts said they were grounded in human and material causes. The Roman Catholic Church authorities were reticent and sceptical. One Bishop took the illusion line. No religious authority endorsed them.
When statues move, authorities become uncomfortable.
Statues are moving again. Not statues of virgin mothers, but of wealthy merchants, traders, benefactors, governors and military generals. They are not moving spontaneously – perhaps only religious ones can manage that feat – but with the agency of local people or local authorities in places like the southern states of the USA and the English cities of Bristol and London. These statues are being moved because of anger at the slave trade and its legacies. They are moved by informal efforts of citizens or by formal efforts of city councils and other bodies in power.
The legacies of the human slave trade persist long after manifestations of the trade cease. The principal legacy is the human slave trade thriving today, in overt forms such as sex-worker trafficking or in the de-facto indentured labour of construction workers building stadia for the FIFA World Cup in Qatar. Other legacies are institutional and inter-personal discriminations against Black and other people of colour in the world and the virulent racism that underpin them.
The current impetus that has set the statues moving arises from the horror of the murder of George Floyd by a police officer who choked him by kneeling on his neck for nine minutes, while other police officers ignored Mr. Floyd’s appeals to be allowed to breathe, all in the full glare of mobile phone camera coverage, which circulated globally following his death.
Efforts to formally move the statues occurred long before George Floyd’s murder, but were not successful. The informal efforts that occurred recently arise from the anger that his murder uncovered, anger that has been held within by Black and many other people. Repressed anger is a legacy of the direct and indirect violences of human slavery and racism. Such violences always lead to expressions of anger, some of which may themselves be directly violent. That such violence occurs ought to surprise no one.
And so the story of these occurrences and the debates that follow them spread in the public and media spheres.
In the 1948 film, The Miracle of the Bells, the story of another moving statue, this time in an immigrant community of coal miners in the USA, is told by Hollywood stars Frank Sinatra, as the priest and Fred MacMurray, as a film company press agent. A statue moves and draws hard-pressed miners and their families to religious devotions. Though it emerges that earthly and economic causes moved the statue, how that story is told, is critically important.
The press agent has a telling lesson for the adamant priest.
God doesn't need a press agent.
I'm not so sure, once upon a time if I remember rightly, he had 12 very good press agents. Top men.
My my, I never thought of the apostles as press agents.
Well, what else were they? They sold the biggest story that ever happened to the whole world and without the benefit of newspapers and radio. Terrific job.
Both characters, the priest and the press agent, are story-makers. The priest operates in the religious and spiritual world. The press agent plies a trade in material and commercial concerns. Their voices and those of many other interests and forces are present in the stories and debates that range across the world today. Legacy matters are always current affairs, not least in regards to racism. They demand current attention and story making.
Tossing a statue into a harbour is one story. Using a local council hoist to remove a statue is another. The first is perhaps a necessary spark to illuminate the need for the latter and to ignite the action to bring it about.
Attempts to story these statues as educational or historic are vain. They are in the here and now and their purpose is glorification. The phrase ‘on a pedestal’ is telling. Which statues are moved is a matter of political and social choice, best served by a form of consensus not readily achieved in racist and colonialist instances. Wider and deeper stories need to made, well beyond statues, from the legacies of racist and colonial histories, which run from the past right up to the present day. White privilege is not a story of the past. It is a story of the present.
Not all statues are vulnerable to movement. There is a statue of the nurse Mary Seacole, a Black woman, outside a London hospital. It is stable. It is not on a pedestal, but on a modest platform, that maintains a human scale.
Will the story of the service of nurses, cleaners, porters, care-workers, doctors and other health and social welfare workers be told by statues at the end of the current pandemic? Or by medals, honours or scholarships? Or will it be a story of fair pay, fair treatment, decent working conditions, respect and equality? A fitting legacy. No vain glory. No pedestal. Simply respect and justice.
Statue of Mary Seacole:
The Miracle of the Bells (film, 1948):
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