Grada Kilomba Plantation Memories- Episodes of Everyday Racism

Chapter 1- The Mask
Colonialism, Memory, Trauma and Decolonization

THE MASK¹

There is a mask of which I heard many times during my childhood. It was the mask Escrava Anastacia was made to wear. The many recounts and the detailed descriptions seemed to warn me that they were not simple facts of the past, but living memories buried in our psyche, ready to be told. Today, I was to re-tell them. I want to speak about that brutal mask of speechlessness.

This mask was a very concrete piece, a real instrument, which became a part of the European colonial project for more than three hundred years. It was composed of a but placed inside the mouth of the Black subject, clamped between the tongue and the jaw, and fixed behind the head with two strings, one surrounding the chin and the other surrounding the nose and forehead. Formally, the mask was used by white masters to prevent enslaved Africans from eating sugar cane or cocoa beans while working on the plantations, but its primary function was to implement a sense of speechlessness and fear, inasmuch as the mouth was a place of both muteness and torture.

In this sense, the mask represents colonialism as a whole. It symbolizes the sadistic politics of conquest and its cruel regimes of silencing the so-called ‘Other:’ Who can speak? What happens when we speak? And what can we speak about?

THE MOUTH

The mouth is a very special organ, it symbolizes speech and enunciation. Within racism, it becomes the organ of oppression par excellence; it represents the organ whites want — and need — to control.

In this particular scenario, the mouth is also a metaphor for possession. It is fantasized that the Black subject wants to possess something that belongs to the white master, the fruits: the sugar cane and the cocoa beans. She or he wants to eat them, devour them, dispossessing the master of its goods. Although the plantation and its fruits do ‘morally’ belong to the colonized, the colonizer interprets it perversely, reading it as a sign of robbery. “We are taking what is Theirs” becomes “They are taking what is Ours.”

We are dealing here with a process of denial, for the master denies its project of colonization and asserts it onto the colonized. It is this moment of asserting onto the other what the subject refuses to recognize in her/himself that characterizes the ego defense mechanism.

In racism, denial is used to maintain and legitimate violent structures of racial exclusion: “They want to take what is Ours and therefore They have to be controlled.” The first and original information — “We are taking what is Theirs” — is denied and projected onto the ‘Other’ — “They are taking what is Ours” — who becomes what the white subject does not want to be acquainted
with. While the Black subject turns into the intrusive enemy, who has to be controlled; the white subject becomes the sympathetic victim, who is forced to control. In other words, the oppressor becomes the oppressed, and the oppressed, the tyrant.

This is based upon processes in which split off parts of the psyche are projected outside, always creating the so-called ‘Other’ as an antagonist to the ‘self.’ This splitting evokes the fact that the white subject is somehow divided within her/himself, for she/he develops two attitudes towards external reality: only one part of the ego — the ‘good,’ accepting and benevolent — experience as ‘self;’ the rest — the ‘bad,’ rejecting and malevolent — is projected onto the ‘Other’ and experienced as external. The Black subject becomes then a screen of projection for what the whites subject fears to acknowledge about her/himself: in this case, the violent thief, the indolent and malicious robber.

Such dishonorable aspects, whose intensity causes too much anxiety, guilt or shame, are projected outside as a means of escaping them. In psychoanalytic terms, this allows positive feelings towards oneself to remain intact — whiteness as the ‘good’ self — while manifestations of the ‘bad’ self are projected onto the outside and seen as external ‘bad’ objects. In the white conceptual world, the Black subject is identified as the ‘bad’ object, embodying those aspects that white society has repressed and made taboo, that is, aggression and sexuality. We therefore come to coincide with the threatening, the dangerous, the violent, the thrilling, the exciting and also the dirty, but desirable, allowing whiteness to look at itself as morally ideal, decent, civilized and majestically generous, in complete control, and free of anxiety its historicity causes.

1)Escrava Anastacia

This is a portrait of the Escrava Anastacia ( Slave Anastacia). The penetrant image encounters the viewer with the horrors of slavery endured by generations of enslaved Africans. With no official history, some claim Anastacia was the daughter of a Kimbundo royal family, born in Angola, taken to Bahia (Brazil) and enslaved by a Portuguese Family. Upon the family’s return to Portugal, she was sold to the owner of a sugar plantation. Others claim she was born a Nago/Yoruba princess before being captured by Europeans slavers and brought to Brazil, while others point to Bahia as her place of birth. Her African name is unknown; Anastacia was the name given to her during her enslavement. By all accounts she was forced to wear a heavy iron collar and a facemask that prevented her from speaking. The reasons given for this punishment vary: some report her political activism aiding in the escape of other slaves; others claim she resisted the amorous advances of her white master; and yet another version places the blame on a mistress jealous of her beauty. She is often purported to have possessed tremendous healing powers and to have performed miracles, and was seen as a saint among the enslaved Africans. After a prolonged period of suffering, Anastacia died from tetanus from the collar around her neck. Anastacia’s drawing was created by the 27-year-old Frenchman Jacques Arago who joined a French scientific expedition to Brazil as its draftsman between December 1817 and January 1818. There are other drawings of the masks covering entire face with two holes for the eyes; these were used to prevent dirt eating, a practice among enslaved Africans to commit suicide. In the latter half of the 20th century the figure of Anastacia began to be the symbol of slavery brutality and its continuing legacy of racism. Anastacia became an important political and religious figure all over the African and African Diasporic world, representing heroic resistance. The first wide-scale veneration began in 1967 when the curators of Rio’s Museu do Negro (Black Museum) erected an exhibition to honor the 80th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in Brazil. She is commonly seen as a saint of the Pretos Velhos (Old Black Slaves), directly related to the Orixa Oxala or Obatala — the God of peace, serenity, creation and wisdom — and is an object of devotion in the Candomble and Umbanda religions (Handler & Hayes 2009).