Published: 2 July 2020
Last updated: 4 March 2024
I WAS STILL IN PRIMARY SCHOOL when I first struggled with the moral dilemma that has been exercising the minds of HBO network executives lately, as they grapple with the slaver sympathies of Gone With the Wind.
My father had given me a copy of the classic spy novel The Thirty-Nine Steps. I read it avidly but was horrified by an anti-Semitic diatribe delivered by one character.
I asked Dad if he had been aware of the anti-Semitism when he gave me the novel. At first his answer seemed a non-sequitur. “Did you like the story?” he asked. I had, very much.
That prompted a response that not only answered my question but has guided me through a lifetime of literature. “If you don’t read anything with anti-Semitism, you are going to miss out on a lot of good stories,” he said.
I’ve carried the essence of this advice through Shakespeare and Dickens, TS Eliot and Ezra Pound. It has enabled me to appreciate art while deprecating the racism, sexism or antisemitism of the artist. It has given me the gift of great works written by men and women who were products of less enlightened times, and whose insights on life, love or the human condition did not extend to the experience of Jews or Blacks or women.
But a principle acquired in primary school should not be blindly followed into middle age. In recent weeks, the resurgent movement of Black Lives Matter has addressed the monuments and cultural artefacts that honour oppressors and ignore or minimise the experience of oppression.
In the most dramatic incident, protesters literally toppled the statue of slave trader Edward Colston and dumped it in Bristol Harbour. Confederate Monuments in the American South are being more officially removed, often after some years of campaigning. Statues of John Hamilton in the eponymous city in New Zealand and King Leopold II in Antwerp are among others to go.
A monument is not simply an art work. It is a statement of public value and it is intolerable in the 21st Century to retain a monument that venerates men (almost always men) responsible for both past and present suffering: the disproportionate poverty, imprisonment and deaths of blacks in the West today has its roots in the transgenerational impact of slavery.
But – although I admit enjoying the spontaneous political theatre of the sinking of Colston – I’m not sorry the Council has retrieved the statue and is planning to put in in a museum, hopefully with extensive interpretation that acknowledges the wrongs not only of the man but of the generations who glorified him. Moving a monument from public space to a museum – as has also been proposed for the Oxford state of Cecil Rhodes – is a simple way to change the meaning of the artefact.
Even better are the creative responses some artists bring to problematic monuments. Superimposed on a massive bas-relief glorifying Mussolini’s fascist regime in the Italian town of Bolzano is a light sculpture with the words of German Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt “No one has the right to obey orders”.
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This work by artist Arnold Holzknecht and Michele Bernardi is genius. It’s impossible now to look at the original relief – without seeing Mussolini’s demand for blind obedience through the lens of Arendt’s morality.
It’s not always possible to reinterpret a monument. Before condemning the topplers, we might ask ourselves whether any interpretative content would make us comfortable with a monument to Hitler in central Berlin. But creative new work can change the meaning of a monument and enable important conversations about history.
Art is a lens through which we see our world – which is both why it is tempting to remove offensive works and why we should not do so lightly.
It’s not always possible to reinterpret a monument. But creative new work can change the meaning of a monument and enable important conversations about history.
When HBO developed a belated awareness of the offensiveness of Gone with the Wind, it initially pulled the highest grossing film of all time from its program. Last week, it reinstated the film with a four-minute introduction that describes the film as depicting “a world of grace and beauty, without acknowledging the brutalities of the system of chattel slavery upon which this world is based”.
Artistic responses, meaningful positioning, program notes, introductions and interpretative material are much better solutions than absolute removal. They make these works part of the conversation about our history, and help us understand our present.
Jews have a great deal to offer in developing a language for dealing with problematic cultural artefacts. As my first reading of a child’s spy novel suggests, we get a lot of practice.
The cycle of 2,000 years of history can be seen in a contemporary Jewish response to an ancient monument. Traditionally Jews do not walk under the Arch of Titus, the triumphal symbol of Roman conquest with its striking bas-relief of Roman soldiers carrying off the Menorah during the destruction of the Second Temple.
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But a few days after the 1947 UN resolution which created Israel, the Chief Rabbi of Rome declared the time had come for Jews to walk under the Arch of Titus – but they should do so backwards to recognise the return to Jerusalem.
A model of the Arch of Titus was also created at the Museum of the Diaspora in Jerusalem, where it serves as a gateway to the rich cultures of exile.
Reinterpretation is a rich feast. Jewish actors and dramaturgs have created remarkable and varied renditions of Shylock – none of which remove the essential problem of the play but which have been warmly embraced by audience, not least because it enables this most problematic of Shakespeare’s plays to stay in the canon.
I look forward with genuine excitement to seeing the creative work that new awareness of racism may deliver.
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Muslim Montrealer leads charge to rename metro station that honours anti-Semite (Times of Israel)
Online petition has over 18,600 signatures in favour of replacing Lionel Groulx, a Catholic priest who supported fascism and hated Jews, with Canadian jazz legend Oscar Peterson
Photo: Protesters throw statue of Edward Colston into Bristol harbour Edward Colston (Ben Birchall/PA)
