The haunting trauma of buried history

Easter evening after the explosion, I spoke to a friend in Kaduna. He said, “We have become Iraq.” Any day we step out of our houses, we could be caught in crossfire, blown up by a bomb. Money that could be used to repair roads, provide electricity, offer jobs to young people is diverted into […]

Easter evening after the explosion, I spoke to a friend in Kaduna. He said, “We have become Iraq.” Any day we step out of our houses, we could be caught in crossfire, blown up by a bomb. Money that could be used to repair roads, provide electricity, offer jobs to young people is diverted into security. I think of those young men trying to eke out a living on achabas or selling petrol on the street, who were engulfed by flame last Sunday at the busy intersection where the suicide bomber detonated himself. Boko Haram declares a war against government and Christians yet kills people on the street, mostly Muslim, the poorest of the poor.  It makes me think of societies ruled by Mafias—of drug-lords in Mexico—a terrorized populace ruled by thugs and outlaws.

We live in a state of mass trauma. A society where a robber elite steals from the poor and the poor kill each other. I think of Nigerian-American author Teju Cole’s novel Open City, which excavates layers of trauma in New York City, the global repercussions of a history of exploitation. Though the United States does not currently face the level of violence we experience in northern Nigeria (and forgive me for straying from Nigeria’s suffering to grasp at global connections), it too trembles to the vibrations of this history of injustice. On 26 February 2012 in the state of Florida, a self-appointed neighborhood vigilante George Zimmerman followed and shot a 17-year-old unarmed black man Trayvon Martin, who had walked to a shop to buy a snack. When the police arrived, Zimmerman, who is Hispanic, claimed self-defense and was initially released without being investigated. Finally after a month and a half of widespread protests across America, Zimmerman was Wednesday taken into custody and charged with second-degree murder. Teju Cole, whose most recent project is a series of “small fates”—brief ironic summaries of news stories—on Twitter about New York City from newspapers of one hundred years ago, recently discovered a story that was eerily similar to the one playing out in the media today. Cole writes: “Since Carter, the man he shot dead on 34th Street and 5th Avenue, was a negro, Plitt was at first not held. But he is now in custody.” In his next tweet, Cole notes the ironic repetition of the same injustice a century apart, “That’s from April 2 1912. History’s laughing so hard at us, its sides hurt.”

Cole’s novel Open City, set in the years following the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Centre, is filled with stories of buried histories haunting the present. A Native American historian is haunted by her research on a long forgotten massacre perpetrated by early Dutch settlers against the original inhabitants of the land on which New York City is built. “It’s a difficult thing to live in a country that has erased your past,” she tells the protagonist Julius, a Nigerian-German psychiatrist-in-training. Musing over the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud, Julius remarks that “In mourning that does not proceed normally […] The dead occupy only a part of the one who has survived; they are sectioned off, hidden in a crypt, and from this place of encryption they haunt the living.” Later, wandering across the city, Julius comes across an archaeological excavation of an ancient African grave yard, former slaves, long forgotten under some of Manhattan’s most valuable real estate. The trauma of injustice lingers in the air. The abused become abusers. Julius is beaten and robbed by young men from his neighborhood. Later, he is reminded of a brutal act he had committed in his youth, the memory of which he had long suppressed.

I was reminded of Open City last week when a dear friend, my flat mate for two years following university in New York, sent me a distraught email. A beautiful historic mural painted on the wall of a local business in her largely Caribbean neighborhood of Crown Heights, Brooklyn, had been painted over by the new owners of the building. The mural had been commissioned years ago by then owner of the building, local businessman Syl Williamson, to promote knowledge of African-American history. The mural featured the faces of singers Stevie Wonder and Ella Fitzgerald; Civil rights heroes: Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Jesse Jackson; earlier figures like the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie beloved of Rastafarians, and Toussaint L’ouverture leader of the 18th century Haitian revolution. Portraits of the famous were mixed with faces from the community. One of my favourite details in the mural was a self-portrait of the artist himself. He smiles out at the neighborhood, paintbrush in hand. Close by are children engrossed in books.  Around the corner is the artist’s romantic rendering of the mythic “Holy City of On, 25,000 BC, Congo”.

Though peeling and neglected, the faces in the mural reminded me of Roman occupation period Egyptian Mummy portraits I had seen exhibited years ago in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Indeed, the mural seemed to perform much the same function the funeral portraits had two millennia ago. Urban folklorist Joseph Sciorra is quoted in a book on Four Decades of Community Murals in New York City, saying that the Crown Heights murals honour people “in a public way for a death that was in most cases also public.”  Yet, this rehabilitated public history meant for the local community apparently does not have the protection of institutions. A petition started three years ago to have the mural designated a historic site went unanswered. While the unearthed Mummy Portraits are protected by security guards and millions of dollars worth of insurance, this piece of community history was one morning without warning covered over with an ugly sheet of green paint, a memorial bound to be forgotten like the African graveyard in Open City.

In the larger scheme of things, after at least thirty-eight people were killed in Kaduna last week, it may seem frivolous to focus my attention on a lost painting in one of the world’s richest cities. Although Crown Heights is marginal to the wealth of Manhattan, the people there have access to light, water, and transportation. Only a wall has been destroyed, not a human being. Yet, the two events feel linked in my mind, as if the covering over of the stories on that wall was in a way also a covering over of the stories of those young lives in Kaduna. As if that flat green paint that hides the memorial to courage, to laughter, and the human spirit enacts a larger trauma of burying the lives and voices of the poor—multiple histories of injustice that are covered over and forgotten. I worry too that those who disrespect human life and the lessons of history, are bound to re-enact its most horrible atrocities. On a small scale in Brooklyn, the new owners of the building repeat arrogant colonial style erasure of local history. On a large scale in northern Nigeria, Boko Haram, in covering over human feeling with emotionless ideology, perpetrate tragedies that will haunt us for years to come.