Story Water

Anna Cole was a Visiting Lecturer with the Literature Team at Brighton University, 2012-2014.  She taught Postcolonial Literature, Travel Writing, and New English Writings and Voices.  The following is an account of her recent trip to Paris as part of her ongoing research.

At the end of the teaching term, Summer 2014 I was lucky enough to spend a fortnight in Paris on the first half of a Research Fellowship at the Centre de Recherches Interculturelles sur les Domains Anglophones et Francophones at Paris University, 13.  I was invited by the Centre to their inter-disciplinary research ‘lab’ – a lab in the French tradition – combining innovative teaching practice in the humanities and social sciences, with researchers from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds including literature, history, sociology, and English and Australian studies. Before heading to Paris for the Fellowship I’d recently collaborated with Vanessa Castejon, an Associate Professor in the lab, and with Oliver Haag from the Austrian Centre for Transcultural Studies on a book called Ngapartji Ngapartji.  Ego-histoire and Indigenous Australia (Australian National University Press, forthcoming, November, 2014).  Ngapartji is a book of life-writing by leading and emerging Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars reflecting on the relationship as Pierre Nora (Foucault’s publisher and renowned French historian) wrote: ‘between the history that you made and the history that made you.’  Building on this collaboration my recent time in Paris forms part of the development phase for a potential collaborative bid for an EU grant, potentially part of ‘Horizon 2020’.

Each of the three principle researchers for this project, Vanessa, Oliver and myself, work in former colonial world powers that now hold often dispersed but rich ethnographic collections of material culture from Britain, France and Germany.  Objects with ritual, religious, social and cultural significance for communities from once colonised countries, including Australia, Africa and the Pacific found their way en masse to European centres during and after the high period of colonialism.  Our large grant proposal seeks to bring together a team that includes academic researchers from comparative literature, historical anthropology and political science with writers, artists and practitioners active in creative cultural heritage such as Shazea Quraishi, Alinah Azedah and Rosanna Raymond.  In essence the project intends to reconnect the makers, the takers, the traders and the holders of the ethnographic objects from around the world to the stories that bring them alive today.

At the heart of the project is story: ‘A story is like water/that you heat for your bath/it takes messages between the fire and your skin.  It lets them meet/and it cleans you!/very few can sit down/in the middle of the fire itself/like a salamander or Abraham/we need intermediaries’(Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi, c .1270). Sayantani DasGupta who teaches on the Masters programme in Narrative Medicine at Colombia University says she often reminds students that stories were the first medicine.  Storytelling is the way our families and communities weave threads of interconnection, the way societies and cultures ask the big questions and begin to make meaning from life’s mysteries including death, suffering, illness, birth and historical legacies. The baths that holds the water for our project are the ethnographic museum holdings of the former colonial empires of Britain, France and Germany.

During my trip to Paris I visited the relatively new Cite Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration (National Museum of the History of Immigration) in the Palais de la Porte Doree, formerly the home of the Musee National des Arts d’Afrique et d’Oceanie and built initially for the first International Colonial Exposition of 1931. A building thus redolent with colonial and ‘post-colonial’ history. Mr Sarkozy, then President, guaranteed the new Immigration museum would make headlines when he conspicuously didn’t show up for its inauguration. The museum has something of ‘the slightly ramshackle, melancholy air of a temporary installation’ as Michael Kimmelman who reviewed the new museum for the New York Times when it first opened put it: ‘it shares an old building with an aquarium that occupies the basement.  Most visitors, when I looked, headed down’ (New York Times, Oct. 17, 2004).

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‘Road to Exile, 2008.  Barthelemy Toguo

Entrance to the Cite National de l’Histoire de l’Immigration

I wanted to explore the newest exhibition at the Museum, the ‘Gallery of Gifts’, a new and growing collection of objects and photographs, many passed down from generation to generation, given to the gallery as donations.  Members of the French public are invited to give the museum an object with an accompanying narrative that represents something of their personal history of immigration. ‘Objects that were the keeper only of family memories, or personal identity, such as identity papers, an employment contract expired, swell the ranks of object ‘witnesses’ to immigration history’ (http://www.histoire-immigration.fr/musee/la-galerie-des-dons, 17/6/14).  While the permanent exhibition ‘Landmarks’ presents a national or collective history of immigration, the ‘Gallery of Gifts’, foregrounds the personal in the creation of national stories.

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Iranian silk scarf, donation, ‘Gallery of Gifts’,Cite National de l’Histoire de l’Immigration

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Path to the entrance of Musee du quai Branly

The slightly ramshackle, empty feeling of this museum couldn’t differ more from the second site of my research trip:  The Musee du quai Branly, which opened in 2006.  Built in a state of the art, architecturally innovative building on some of the most expensive real-estate in Paris a block away from the base of the Eiffel Tower, the Musee was the love child of former President Jacques Chirac and art collector Jacques Kerchache.  This museum is a seriously impressive piece of state expenditure, with a lavish gift shop, a roof top restaurant and café with panoramic views up to the Eiffel Tower.  It is a huge site, designed, as the visitor brochure describes it, ‘as a vast territory for visitors to discover’. Chirac and Kerchache envisioned the museum on the quai Branly as the culmination of their long-term dream to attribute non-western cultures their ‘due place’ as the brochure explains, within the National Museum structure in France.  Visiting the museum it seems this ‘due place’ is to be looked down upon by the throngs of tourists who climb the Eiffel Tower and gaze down at the pointillism painted on the roof of the museum by Indigenous Australian artist Lena Nyadbi.  The almost overwhelming collection of ethnographic objects in the Quai Branly is shrouded in high-end art gallery style behind slabs of thick silent glass.  These objects were ‘collected’ in large part from the now Museum for Immigration’s former incarnation – the Museum for African and Oceanic arts.  Divorced from their context and stories, ritual and cultural objects take on an exotic, distancing aura of ‘the other’ and the museum seems to reinforce a disorienting sense of the intransigence of cultural difference of former colonised communities.

My short initial research trip, juxstaposing both museums, points at an intriguing set of directions and questions to be explored as our work progresses.  I’m going to conclude these reflections here with one of those serendipitous research moments from my time in Paris that often uncannily enrich our work.  Tired from hours walking the shrouded circular paths of the Musee du quai Branly I searched for the ‘Kerchache reading room’, a research resource attached to the museum.  As I walked into its hushed interior, a book caught my eye from across the room: Lanterns on the Prairies. The Blackfeet Photographs of Walter McClintock (Western Legacies series, published in co-operatoin with the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, 2009).  Darrel Robes Kipp a descendant of the Blackfeet tribe had written an introductory essay ‘Completing the Circle’ and it discussed some of the exploitations involved in the collection of photographs but also the significant reciprocal exchange in this historical collection.  He wrote ‘it is my hope that museums and archive curators will seriously consider disseminating to tribal communities information on collections that originated with those communities…today with a resurgence among tribal members of tribal knowledge, descendants of the original subjects are a ready audience for much of the chroniclers work…McClintock’s study, once it makes the full circle back to the Blackfeet tribe, may in fact serve its greatest purpose (p.100).  Making this kind of full circle, restoring and listening to the stories of these objects and returning them in creative and contemporary ways to the communities in which they originated seems a vital role for research today:

‘water, stories, the body/all the things we do, are mediums/that hide and show what’s hidden/study them/and enjoy this being washed/with a secret we sometimes know/and then not’ (Storywater, Rumi)

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Standing in Charles Sandison’s river of words, Musee du quai Branly

 

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