Impermanent memorials
Thinking about who and how we remember
In June 2023, I was invited to a workshop in Paris that brought together academics, artists, activists and more (me = ‘and more’) to explore statues, public space and colonialism. It was part of a broader project about these issues after several colonial statues worldwide were toppled, dismantled or the site of interventions — some of which I had written about as a journalist.
I was, and still am, grateful for the conversations and connections I made during the workshop. But this trip is perhaps more memorable to me for its more disconcerting elements. This is probably why I have not written or spoken much about it before now.
The Monument du Marechal Gallieni was the focal point of our workshop. It was sculpted in 1926 as a monument to General Joseph Gallieni, who was responsible for brutal colonial military repression in Madagascar, Sudan, Martinique and Vietnam. Gallieni has been celebrated in France as a hero of the First World War, although the statue in his honour that stands in Paris’ 7th Arrondissement was the site of protests in 2020.
It’s a grotesque sculpture. Gallieni’s figure is held up, stacked literally and metaphorically on top of the figures of four women moulded as nameless, unidentified avatars for different parts of France’s empire. Their arms are raised, their dignity is stripped, the hierarchy is clear. Viewing it from all angles as the late afternoon light hit the pale weathered stone, I thought about this statue not as mere commemoration, but as a brazen celebration of French colonialism. It brought to mind Frantz Fanon’s writing on violence: the statue made visible an “aesthetic expression of respect for the established order”. At the same time, it created an atmosphere of submission and of inhibition around the exploited women who stood at its base, propping up their oppressor.
In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon writes that such an atmosphere “lightens the task of policing considerably”. In this context, it was then a cruel serendipity that this particular statue was the example that our group discussed and visited. To me, it was totally inextricable from what happened outside the workshop that same week: on 27 June in a town west of Paris, police shot and killed 17 year old Nahel Merzouk, a French teenager of Algerian and Moroccan heritage who enjoyed playing rugby and was training to be an electrician. Speaking to the media at the time, his mother believed the police officer who shot him “saw an Arab face, a little kid, and wanted to take his life”.
My mother came to meet me in Paris, and we stayed for an additional two days after the workshop. As we walked around the city and I processed my observations from the previous days, the police presence was forceful, intimidating, lingering. I noticed several tags sprayed on walls, written on bus stops, slicks of black, hurried, handmade fonts calling out ‘justice pour Nahel’. They had sprung up overnight, precursors to the protests that spread across France that summer; an eruption of years of latent anger against police brutality and racism.
Unlike the Gallieni statue, these forms of memorialisation are unlikely to be culturally revered in the same way, nor studied in an academic workshop for that matter. It was more likely that the messages would be washed away the following day, deemed an eyesore for a city in high tourist season, an annoyance for shopkeepers and cleaners, an inconvenient reminder of a human life snatched away by state violence. Perhaps the impermanence and spontaneity of these messages was what made them all the more powerful: an anonymous protest that was defiant, unexpected and unignorable.
I have since thought a lot about who we remember, and how we remember them. “How can we recall the past in a way that does justice to the forgotten, the excluded, the oppressed, the dead, the ghosts?” asks Viet Thanh Nguyen, who was born in Vietnam and raised in America. His words are worth quoting in full below, particularly today on the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, and in the context of so many ongoing conflicts in Palestine, Sudan, the Congo:
“I was interested in the possibilities of resistance against forgetting or being forgotten, with the assumption that being forgotten, or forgetting others, was unjust, particularly if we are talking about a historical conflict in which it is in the interests of one side to suppress the memories of and about others.”
This insistence on not forgetting is a powerful form of resistance, particularly in an environment that does everything it can to enforce the act of forgetting. A profound example of this challenge comes from INQUEST, which has worked for 40 years to ensure that victims of state violence in the UK are not forgotten. As part of a broader project looking into INQUEST’s archives, I have been working with the charity since January alongside people bereaved by deaths involving the state, activists, experts and more. Together, we are exploring new ways to remember those who have died at the hands of the state, which will culminate at the end of the year in a plan for a permanent memorial.
It is a huge and moving task. And again, I find myself in the ‘and more’ category within the group. But I hope that in my own ways, I am bringing a perspective maybe otherwise not seen — and by the same token, I know that I am being nourished by the experiences of others.
Through this project, I have seen so many different forms of remembering that are equally as affecting. On a recent visit to the incredible Museum of Homelessness, we were shown around different parts of the community garden that symbolised different aspects of homelessness experiences. Members of the Grenfell Tower Memorial Commission also shared their ways of memorialising with us. Both groups emphasised how important naming is within their memorialisation processes — each person who has died within these communities had an identity, and should not be remembered as merely a number. This insistence made me recall those calligraphed cries for Nahel scattered across the streets of Paris.
Before that trip two years ago, I had thought of memorialisation or commemoration as requiring the characteristics of a statue: solemn, static, grand. But over time, my idea of what it means to remember, both in the broader political sense and in the more intimate personal sense, has expanded to include rituals, gardening, and performance. Recently, I sat on a park bench and noticed fresh roses in half-cut plastic bottles filled with water, tied to either metal arm. I turned around to look at the small dedication plaque behind me. ‘For my sister, Martha,’ it read. I wondered how often the flowers were changed, and whether it was a different type each time.
All of these seemingly disparate encounters I share above came to a head last week, on the 25th anniversary of my brother Jonathan’s death. I didn’t mark the day by doing anything particularly significant or different to usual. The possibility of forgetting is not an option: through doing this kind of work, through writing these words to you now, I remember, every day.
Suyin Haynes is the co-founder of fragments and the founder of Ginkgo Leaves. She is a London-based freelance journalist and lecturer interested in storytelling at the intersections of identity, culture and underrepresented communities.