On statues and collective memory

Two days ago, I wrote a thread on Twitter on the subject of statues and collective memory, as a response to the removal of a statue of the slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol. Since tweets can often be difficult to find after a time, I decided to reiterate my point in this blogpost, because the discussion about whether or not we should remove statues of historical individuals who committed atrocities is a discussion that has surfaced before and will surface again.

Whenever we talk about statues, it is important to keep in mind their main function. Statues serve as vehicles for the perpetuation of a community's collective memory. This community might be a village, a city, a region, a country, or any other entity, but the function remains the same. Moreover, statues usually serve a celebratory function, they are raised so that whichever part of the community's history is represented by the statue, that is a part of its history that the community wishes to preserve in the collective memory. Here it must be emphasised that collective memory is always selective, and this means that a community decides which parts to remember and how to remember them. By erecting a statue of a historical individual or an event, that individual or event is almost always by default remembered in a positive way. This goes even for statues commemorating tragedies: By erecting statues, a tragedy is expressly deemed worthy of remembering.

Collective memory, however, is not a fixed entity, and it does not come fully form, it is something that is always in flux, and always subject to the changes of the community itself. Collective memory is a kind of spiritual property that belongs to the community, and as that community changes, so do the views, the priorities and the collective memory of the community. This, in turn, means that any community at any given point in time is completely in its own right to change what is being celebrated through its collective memory. A community is not beholden to the hero-worship or the tastes of past generations. When the community and its collective memory changes, this means that things that once were remembered in a positive way are no longer remembered in that way. The positive remembrance is changed or removed. This also means that if a community decides to remove the statue of an individual, the community is completely in its right to do so. The statue is not a fixed, unalterable fact of the community's landscape or memorial topography, it is part of the community's flux. There was a time when the statue did not exist, and it is no problem if there comes a time when the statue no longer exists. This is part of the evolution of collective memory.

One complaint that often is raised whenever there is talk of removing statues is that the removal of statues entails the removing of history from the collective memory. This is utter nonsense. Collective memory is not dependent on statues alone, but is maintained through a wide range of different media, including the individual recollections of each individual of that community. And as the historian David Olusoga pointed out in a recent article, the removal of a statue adds to the history and collective memory of the community in question, something which is proved by a poem by Vanessa Kisuule, Bristol City Poet of 2018-20, which commemorates the statue's removal and thus adds to the collective memory of Bristol. The often raised counterpoint of removing statues being equated to removing history comes, therefore, from an understanding of history that is both inexplicably static and rooted in a particular bias, believing that bias or that preference to be an almost natural law. History, however, does not work that way.

Furthermore, while the removal of a statue does not mean that history is removed, it is important to keep in mind that statues often do obscure an important part of history. Since statues are almost always by default celebratory, a statue of an individual who committed atrocities facilitates an erasure of the dark aspects of that person's past. It is a way of glossing over the crimes and sins of that individual, and this is in turn a useful reminder that collective memory also often entails collective forgetting, or a collective amnesia. A statue of a slave trader might not have been intended first and foremost to celebrate the slave trading, but by celebrating the slave trader the statue facilitates a collective forgetting of the slave trading, directing the attention instead to other aspects of that person's life. Memory and oblivion are not separate entities, they are parts of the same mechanism. If people truly are worried about the erasure of history, a good idea is to not put up statues of slave traders, warriors, abusers, corrupt individuals and so on.

Collective memory belongs to the community, and therefore the community is its steward. Statues that impose the celebration of atrocities - explicitly or implicitly - need not be part of the collective memory. To do away with such statues is therefore not a removal of history, it is a correction of memory.

Personally, I think it is a good thing to remove statues of individuals who committed atrocities, be they enslavers, warriors, or enablers of violence of any kind. Such statues are a form of hero-worship, and hero-worship is corrosive to society, especially when directed at those who have committed terrible, heinous, inhuman acts. It is therefore very heartwarming to see the footage of the statue in Bristol being tossed into the harbour, and it is heartwarming to see that calls for the removal of statues of King Leopold II of Belgium - the man who brought about unfathomable suffering in Belgian Congo - are now spreading across the country. This is how the collective memory is corrected, as a community has a reckoning with its past, and its part priorities.