Full Metal Frieze

Before it fades into the cluttered background of bronze and marble furniture in Washington DC, let’s lend a moment to Sabin Howard’s new relief sculpture honoring our World War I veterans in Pershing Park. 

It scarcely demands note that there’s been a move away from what might be called a “legacy” style of representational public art in DC. Maya Lin’s 1982 Vietnam War memorial, which is now widely embraced despite traditionalist misgivings, is perhaps the most notable example. But a raft of other designs, from the classicizing abstraction of the WW2 Memorial, to Lei Yixin’s strangely pharaonic MLK stele, to various “gumball” Einsteins and Kennedys around the capital, also suggest an unease with how history is traditionally portrayed in the nation’s literally most official spaces. 

Howard’s high-relief frieze, unfolding over fifty-eight dramatic feet of naturalistic figures, looks like it was parachuted into Pershing Park from a different era. Unapologetically rooted in ancient and Renaissance canons of figural art, it not only looks backward for inspiration, but presents a clear, linear story from one end to the other. Entitled A Soldier’s Journey, it depicts an archetypal American doughboy leaving his family, marching out, facing the ordeal of battle, and emerging on the other side simultaneously damaged and enduring. As he presents his upturned helmet to his daughter at the end, she regards it like an ancient Greek acolyte gazing into the bowl of prophecy to see—what? The horror she, like us, can only experience by reflection? Or the immediate future of still more sacrifice to come in the coming decades? 

The work is not much different in form from any number of classical monuments, from armored Athenas contemplating fallen soldiers in Athenian tomb markers to Roman legions marching into battle on Trajan’s Column. Though it would not have been physically out of place on the Acropolis in Athens, its utter lack of triumphalism would arguably have placed it farther down its slopes, where Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides presented scenes very much like it in the Theater of Dionysus. But the point remains: the story and the treatment would not have been lost on an actual ancient Greek. 

The most elementary modernism objects to the empty stylistic conventions of warmed-over classicism. Conventions almost demand to be broken, and there is impact in doing just that. But at this late date, is there any doubt that Howard’s approach is not reflexively “conventional” at all, but fully mindful, both of what he’s evoking and how he does it? Paradoxically, it is the fall of any kind of official style that brings renewed authenticity to the old forms, an almost insurgent power. Indeed, is it a bad thing to represent profound national sacrifice in terms that the viewer and the people honored in the memorial would both recognize, and share? It’s a question that arguably goes to the heart of what a war memorial is and what it should accomplish, ideally.

In museums and galleries, the stakes of breaking with artistic tradition rise only to a certain level. If Van Gogh opts to represent his local postman in a way that says more about Van Gogh’s state of mind than the postman’s, that’s not only not a problem, it’s positively interesting. When we speak of memorials, however, the question of subject never fully disappears, because it’s as much about them as about us. Or at least it should be, if we aspire to public art that is anything more than a kind of socialized solipsism.

The act of memorialization both honors the dead and reaffirms the conviction that what they fought for is worth defending. This double function—and I mean the word function both in the sense of “use” and of “event”—is something that connects us with every society with a degree of self-awareness. If we have any rituals left to honor our casualties of war, they are more associated with photo ops than commemoration. The days we set aside for it, Memorial Day and Veterans Day, have become more about shopping, barbecuing and sports. The act of reflection, which was so important to ancient societies, has been relegated to art. That puts a weight on those bronze and marble sculptures that not even their ancient counterparts had to sustain.

The action in Howard’s frieze is not only specific in detail, it is archetypal enough to connect it to others across the millennia. Pericles could have declaimed his Funeral speech in front of it. Lincoln could have read something like his remarks at Gettysburg there too, with no loss in power. In a time of profound disjunction, of division from other people of our own time, and of anxiety for the future, there’s something deeply reassuring about that potential. This is still us. We can still do these deeply human things. We are still here. 

Nicholas Nicastro’s next book, Fulcrum: The Life and Science of Archimedes, is out this fall from Reaktion Press.

© 2024 Nicholas Nicastro

American Stay Home?

Foreign travel was once a difficult, tedious process. As recently as a few decades ago it was simply too expensive for most people. When my grandmother first went to Italy in 1953, she spent two weeks on a ship, and returned as the first unaccompanied woman in our family to venture beyond these shores. Today—notwithstanding small inconveniences and indignities—international travel is quicker, cheaper, and more accessible than ever. Even in the midst of a post-pandemic lull, the numbers are astronomical: the UN World Tourism Organization estimates that 960 million people crossed international borders for leisure in 2022. This summer, the number of Americans outbound to Europe is projected to exceed 2019 figures for the first time. 

But is this “democratization” of travel really spreading its benefits, or just trivializing them? Is a world of mass tourism really a better one?

Mark Twain declared, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness.” Concurred Gustave Flaubert, “Travel makes one modest – you see what a tiny place you occupy…”. These writers were speaking of the kind of edifying travel once restricted to well-off gentlemen and ladies taking the Grand Tour of Europe, finishing their academic educations by visiting the physical places they had studied. Twain and Flaubert didn’t envision three-day port calls at Disney’s Castaway Cay, or nipping to Vegas or Macau to pull slots. Still, there is a certain appeal to this quaint truism. When we speak of a certain kind of thoughtful person, doing certain kinds of exploration, travel indisputably can broaden the mind.

Trouble is, most of us are not thoughtful, and the travel "products" we are sold aren’t meant to enhance our modesty. A literal world of destinations means we approach the world like a Chinese menu, opting for the parts we already know we will like. The trillion-dollar tourism industry is only too happy to help us reinforce our tastes. To fulfill the educational premise of Twain and Flaubert, it makes more sense to travel where we never thought of going. Instead of the faubourgs of Paris, we might learn more from the favelas of Brazil. Instead of being just another warm body at St. Moritz, we might watch glaciers die in Greenland. Obviously, very few would contemplate investing their time and money this way. Notwithstanding the “broadening” of minds, the vast majority of modern travelers seek good times, not a profound ones. 

Let’s not fool ourselves: even with a world of edifying opportunities at our feet, there seems very little actual education going on. Anyone who has witnessed a swarm of cruise passengers descend on Venice knows that few come to admire the Tintorettos. More customary activities include storming the Rialto bridge, taking selfies. (A recent Instagram Reel of a “Disney” guy dismissing Venice, saying “we have all this at Epcot’, racked up more than eight million views.) Nor do we photograph that eel sticking its head out of a crevice in the Great Barrier Reef to learn anything from it. The eel—and the Rialto—are just elements of backdrop for the curated “lives” we create for social media. The young man who felt free to deface the Colosseum because he “didn’t know it was ancient” was not a rare bad apple. He’s typical produce from his particular orchard. 

“No matter where you go”, the old saying goes, “there you are.” To put it another way, while virtually anyone can travel to a place, leaving our biases and preconceptions behind is a great deal harder. Will that conservative retiree from Waxahachie experiencing the benefits of European train travel for the first time (“Jiminy, this sure is nice!”) revise his opinion on subsidized public infrastructure when he gets home? Will a visit to an urgent-care clinic that doesn’t first demand his credit card really change his views on “socialized medicine”? Positive as those experiences might be, as instructive of alternate ways of organizing things, is he not more likely to make excuses than reverse his core beliefs? Not all souls are cut out for epiphanies.

Venice, the Galapagos Islands, Easter Island and other unique places are delicate, in very real danger of being touristed to death. And for what, fundamentally? How many Instagram posts are worth the loss of a reef trampled by thousands of rented flippers? The French government closed Lascaux Cave in 1963 because the breath of millions of visitors was destroying rock art that had survived for 19,000 years. Visitors today see a replica, with very few aware of the difference. For most, authenticity as such was not the goal as much as sticking pins in a conquest map.

In cuisine, the word “locavore” is used a badge of honor. Maybe it’s time for something similar when it comes to travel. Instead of burning tons of jet fuel to tan in the Seychelles, we can roast ourselves on the many fine sandy beaches on the US. Instead of castles on the Rhine, we can discover the under-appreciated manses of the Hudson. 

In centuries past, simply to reach a foreign destination, let alone to snag a refrigerator magnet there, amounted to a life accomplishment. Its very difficulty lent the experience a significance that almost demanded travelers to transform. Making the process more convenient, more ordinary, has paradoxically made us less likely to derive the same benefits. In a wide open world, maybe the most radical itinerary shouldn’t require an airport at all.

Nicholas Nicastro’s next book, Fulcrum: The Life and Science of Archimedes, is out next spring from Reaktion Press. 

© 2023 Nicholas Nicastro

Trump Tower of Babel

Times are long past when most of us sought insight in a Sunday Bible sermon. But these are not ordinary times, with many of us struggling to understand what “one nation, under Donald Trump” really means. Why do so many conservative Americans support a leader determined to turn his back on what were once bedrock American values? In 2016, evangelicals' support for Trump, a man whose history, acts, and temperament should make him radioactive to them, was 81 percent. It has not signficantly dropped since.

To understand why, let the congregation open their Bibles to Genesis 11, v. 1-9—the story of the Tower of Babel. Here, humanity is at the stage of reclaiming an earth newly redeemed after the Flood. In one place, on a plain called Shinar, the people decide to “build a city and tower, whose top may reach unto heaven…” The rationale for building the tower seems to be nothing more than post-diluvian showing-off, “to make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.” (The implication that a tower as high as heaven would keep people safe and dry from future floods is only implicit, but interesting.)

We all know what happened: “And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower…and said, ‘Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do; and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.’” This being the jealous Old Testament God, such an affront cannot stand. “Let us go down,”, He says, “and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech…and so the Lord scattered them abroad…and they left off to build the city.”

This is usually taken to be a just-so story about how human beings came to be divided by language. And indeed, it is framed that way in Scripture. But it is striking that the impetus for God’s intervention isn’t to help humanity, but to hobble it. God doesn’t want people to attain above their station, and in fact dreads them accomplishing “[anything] which they have imagined to do.” As such, the Babel story isn’t only about where languages came from. It’s also about how the Lord deals with mortal presumption.

Such anti-humanistic sentiment rings through into early Christianity. In Corinthians, the apostle Paul pours scorn on the “experts” of his time, declaring “For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent…”. Instead of placing faith in human authorities, better to take our chances with fools, “because the foolishness of God is wiser than [that of] men.” In his Prescription Against Heretics, Tertullian agreed, “We have no need of curiosity after Jesus Christ, nor of research after the gospel. When we believe, we desire to believe nothing more.”

These are the lenses through which many evangelicals today see science, progress, and the liberal project. To progressives, the achievements of technical civilization, from the eradication of disease to the physical comforts we take for granted, are concrete proof of what we can achieve when we put our minds to constructive ends. When Barack Obama tweeted “There’s nothing we can’t do” in 2013, he probably intended nothing more than to be casually supportive. But in his phrasing, so uncannily close to the Babel story, he reflects the rationalist vision to remake the world in our image.

In other ears, such optimism only affirms what the Lord feared when He saw the tower rising, of humans threatening to achieve “which they have imagined.” Today, the vanity lies not in some physical structure, but in the “tower” of privileges and entitlements progressives want to build, a human attempt to rival God. To them, the real threats aren’t disease or hunger or war, but the arrogance of trying to fashion a kind of “Heaven without God”. They look at dreams of a just, equitable, prosperous and peaceful world, where people are free to love who they choose, where alliances keep the world from chaos, where everyone enjoys basic rights to good health and a living wage, and where humans work to protect the planet—and shudder. 

They want no part of your technocratic utopia. If we are meant to enjoy such boons, they are for God alone to bestow. God will take care of your preexisting condition. God will decide whether the planet burns. If God wants the world plunged into war, there will be war. The only true “vaccine” against measles is God. He will decide when and how you suffer. Not Nancy Pelosi, nor scientists, nor career diplomats at the State Department.

From a certain point of view, there’s a logic to it. After all, what’s the point of devoting one’s entire life to a faith whose ultimate reward, its afterlife, is only marginally better than modern Sweden? Better to “burn it all down” than face the prospect of God made irrelevant. By these lights, the agenda of expansive, activist government is begging for shoving-over, a good Biblical scattering. Crass and corrupt as he is, Trump “the chosen one” is doing the Lord’s work, laying low the slender Jenga tower of rationality. Just as the Lord Himself did on the plains of Shinar, the last time human beings dared dream of reaching Heaven on their own. 

Glimpsed from outside, this yearning to “burn it all down” looks deeply perverse. Such is our state of Babel-like mutual incomprehension, where the deeply-held faith of some seems like a nihilistic death-cult to others. For us, “You have to go through Hell to get to Heaven” is just something people say. To the forever-Trumpers, it is a promise. And it looks like we still have a lot of Hell to go through. 

Nicholas Nicastro is a PhD in psychology, novelist and critic. His latest novel, Ella Maud, is available now from Endeavour Media UK. 

© 2019 Nicholas Nicastro

Naples: Hot Mess

Spaccanapoli at dawn

Italy is one of the most visited nations on earth. But when it comes to Naples, the country’s third largest city by population, even seasoned travelers go wobbly. “It’s noisy. It’s dirty. And it’s full of crime,” declare the Neapolitanophobes. Even my dear departed grandmother, who sailed to Europe solo before women did such things, who regularly faced the challenges of Palermo, and who joked about rubbing shoulders with capos in Corleone, drew the line at Naples. 

The city’s heritage of endemic corruption is one reason for the bad taste. Another, undoubtedly, is its position as Italy’s major seaport. Many migrants from other parts of the country in the late 19th and early 20th centuries either embarked from or transferred to trans-Atlantic vessels at Naples. To men and women from rural areas, the place must have typified all the dangers associated with waterfronts: sin, crime (organized and otherwise), godlessness, tumult. Many of these transient rubes may well have been preyed upon, cementing the city’s legacy in oral tradition. “By all means,” they advised later, “see Rome, Florence, Venice. But stay the hell out of Naples.” And their children and grandchildren passed on the wisdom.

Part of my motivation to finally spend a chunk of time there was borne out of sheer contrariness. No place with such a sun-kissed setting, with close to three millennia of history and a deep patrimony of culture and art, could be entirely without interest. Anyplace so strenuously avoided simply had to be investigated. 

In fact, my interest was piqued first during a one-day glimpse I had of the city in 1994. There, walking down a street whose name I can’t recall, I saw a woman use a rope to lower a basket from her window to the street. There, a peddler took her money and filled the basket with groceries. Then she hauled her purchases back up to the fourth floor. The transaction was quick, silent, and routine as we use an ATM. This was exactly what my grandmother had described as once common on the streets of New York’s Lower East Side. In other words, things you’d need a time machine to see in New York now, they still do in Naples. To someone who has made a career of portraying the past, this was irresistible stuff —I need to go to there stuff.

I went there, dragooning an old friend for company. He’s a classical historian who knows Italy well but has always skirted Naples in favor of Pompeii and Herculaneum. (“A dangerous shithole,” he called it). His preconceptions were not dispelled by the neighborhood I picked for our stay: right in the center of the Centro Storico, the bustling core of the old Greek city of Neapolis. The buildings there seem to hunker together, rubbing grimy shoulders. The streets are like paved corridors, crowded with a mix of merchants, tourists, and university students. The cobbled strip of Naples’ most infamous byway, the Spaccanapoli (“Naples splitter”) runs through it. Nothing seems to be given its proper space here, neither the churches (of which there are many lovely examples) nor the vehicles, nor the businesses. Everything is thrown together and expected to find a way. Indeed, in this old, unpicked knot of humanity I felt what it must have been like to walk an ancient city, far more than in the relatively broad esplanades of modern Rome, or the preserved carcass of Pompeii.

There is a much-debated word that describes this Naples: authentic. I use it not in the sense that everything there has been passed down intact from the past, or untouched by tourism. It is authentic in the sense of not pretending to be anything it is not. Is it dirty, graffitied, and a touch overwhelming? Maybe so. But it is also full of casual beauty, of baroque edifices that bestride the streets like misplaced pieces of bedroom furniture. Of sweet and savory smells wafting from overwhelmingly Mom & Pop businesses (no Starbuck’s here, and the closest McDonald’s is miles away). Of faces that you’ve seen before, in some Dino Risi or Antonioni movie from your college days. And reclining in the center is a marble personification of the Nile, now fashionably bearded, seeing it all unfold since the 2nd century AD…with a sphinx for a pillow.

There’s a proximity here between the elegant and the ghastly that is reminiscent of Mexico City. This is apparent in places like Cappella Sansevero, an architectural gem that was founded in the late 16th century, but reached its final form in the late 18th under the direction of Prince Raimondo di Sangro, polymath and mystic. The baroque sculptures in his chapel, including a veiled Christ rendered in marble, are magisterial, exquisite—the kind of masterpieces that generate lines in Rome or Florence. On this level, di Sangro belongs to that particular intellectual species, the Enlightenment gentleman-scientist, typified by Jefferson or Franklin.  

But in a chamber below the art is displayed something else entirely: di Sangro’s so-called “anatomical machines”. These are life-size figures of a man and a woman with every detail of internal anatomy laid bare, down to the capillaries. For centuries it was suspected these were actual preserved bodies, “plastinated” by some secret process of di Sangro’s invention—perhaps not entirely with the subjects’ informed consent. There was once even an infant “machine”, since disappeared. 

Recent microscopic examination has proven that the figures are not preserved tissue at all, but made of fabric and wire. Still, the Chapel’s combination of beauty and creepiness, and the esoteric symbolism that run through the place, makes it feel uniquely Naples. These eerie, skinless “machines” are just a few yards off the Spaccanapoli, where you get your gelato and tea-towels. 

Plastinated capital

The other Naples—the plastinated remainders of its time as capital of “The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies”— isn’t hard to find. On the the heights of Capodimonte, for instance, with its splendid palazzo, now art museum. From the royal gardens, views extend to the double hump of Vesuvius, the apron of development spread to the Bay, and the distinctive profile of Capri beyond. Or in the monumentality of the Piazza del Plebiscito, embraced by the grandiloquently named Basilica Reale Pontificia San Francesco da Paola, otherwise discernible as Naples’ answer to the Pantheon in Rome, with maybe a little Vatican too. Posh, “official” Naples is there, yet it still has the feel of overripe grandeur, of a dusty library of books long since digitized, but with the finger-smudges and pressed blossoms of books that were used and cherished by human beings.

For the descendants of those who shipped out of here, the legacy is more bittersweet. These green hills, this mountain that disgorged such fertility, once seemed to reject whole generations. To them, the bay was not a simmering picturesque, but a way to sluice away the trash. The view I climbed the Capodimonte to see was the same one my ancestors turned their backs on. And as they slid by the yachts and villas and playgrounds of emperors on Capri, they wondered if they would survive the voyage ahead. For some, that anxiety went on clear over an ocean and a half, until perhaps they saw the low hills of Staten Island, where no emperors ever played. 

Now the trash washes back. Not with any sense of vindication, but with trepidation. After five days in Naples my friend and I went to the Piazza Bellini. A relatively calm, leafy space, prowled by cats who eye the pigeons who eye our crumbs, the piazza is a good place to nurse a prosecco in view of Naples' full profile, from the exposed walls of the Greek polis to the tarted-up townhouses around it. After we’d drunk a little, I asked if our visit had changed his opinion of the city. He thought for a moment, taking in the swath of time around us, the contained physical chaos, and said, “A beguiling shithole.”

© 2019 Nicholas Nicastro

The Republic of Entropy

Modern Havana is an egalitarian dream trapped in a faded, peeling gentility. Whole quarters are lined with colonnades of every style and color, most teetering on the edge of catastrophe. There is dust everywhere as a thousand renovation projects unfold. And yet a hundred thousand more beckon, maybe hopelessly. 

Posted on every third building are hand-scrawled notices of work permits. But there is hardly ever anybody actually working. Just vans standing open, wheelbarrows idle in gardens of dust, full rubbish bins waiting to be carted—as if the contractors just stepped away for breaks that never end.

The place it reminds me most of is Palermo. The Sicilian capital and Havana share a similar island climate, geography, a baroque distress that add up to what writer Mark Kurlansky calls a “subtropical delirium”. In both cities, the marble scat of recently extinct oligarchs. It’s easy to imagine an aged Burt Lancaster strolling out of sight behind some peeling facade in Vedado, as Luchino Visconti envisioned the end of aristocracy in The Leopard. 

Except here, the economic war never ended. No EU money— nor Mafia money, for that matter—pours in. But the pride is similar, whether it be in the shattered grandeur of a capital city, or in the way the locals never accept a tip unless it is subtly given, with no air of implied inferiority.

Or in the cars. Visitors talk about the American Fairlanes, Bel Airs, Champions and Roadmasters, circa 1950-1961. And they are remarkable—painted like tropical birds, dagmars engorged, V-8s rumbling, they process down the avenues like plus-size runaway models, ribbons fluttering from antennae, drivers giving each other knowing nods. It must have been much the same, this street-pride, when the smart vehicles of colonial Havana were horse-drawn volantes with man-sized wheels. For most tourists arriving in the city, these are the first things they notice.

But it’s not all ancient Americans or charmless Russian Ladas. Havana is a car-spotters paradise, with old Triumphs, Mercedes, Peugeots, Fiats, Jeeps, VWs, Volvos—whatever happened to be on the island the day Batista fled. All of them are kept on the road with ingenuity and determination, jerry-rigged with custom parts, spit, and love. There seems no reason that ‘55 Ford Victoria with the two-tone paint and whitewalls can’t be around in twenty years. Yet we all know it has to end sometime. Even steel has its limits. 

Stone and steel break down, but people don’t. For all their material distress, the Cubans themselves are a constantly renewable resource. To us, visitors from a land long hostile, they offered nothing but friendliness, kindness, familiarity. Cubans may lie off the mainstream, but the mainstream isn’t everything. As evidence of their fundamental civilization, of their rationality and decency, I need only submit one fact: their children are safe to play in the streets. 

Yes, their buildings may be falling down, their cars nursed and cajoled into another year of life. Their future is untold. Yet the Cubans do not grow up afraid.

© 2018 Nicholas Nicastro

The March That Was Left Behind

As a resident of northern Virginia, I've had the opportunity to watch DC's latest museum, the Smithsonian National Museum of African-American History and Culture (NMAAHC) take shape on the National Mall. Witnessing the long construction phase has been like seeing a thought form in the mind of the nation--a collective utterance that promises much, yet is still fraught with ambivalence. 

Upon visiting the finished Museum, I can say that while the thought is still not settled, the promise is fulfilled. The African-American experience is represented over galleries that spiral up from the gloom of the lowest level, from displays on the onset of race-based chattel slavery in the 15th century, into the comparative light of 2017. The history is presented mostly as text, illustrated by carefully selected objects, like Nat Turner's personal Bible, Harriet Tubman's shawl, and an airplane flown by the Tuskegee airmen. The cumulative effect is dignified and powerful. If the greatness of a nation is like individual genius--able to entertain two incompatible ideas at the same time--then the NMAAHC (and its sister institution, the National Museum of the American Indian) provide essential counter-narratives to the white marble monuments that surround them.

And yet, it wasn't the Bible or the plane that stuck in my mind when I left. Instead, it was a simple placard that describes the human toll of the slave trade: out of every 100 people enslaved in Africa, 39 died on the march from the interior to the coast, 4 or 5 died in detention, and another 9 during the voyage to America. The exhibit leaves implicit what is broadly understood, that the genocide of African people began when native potentates with business ties to Europeans brought their captives to slave trading stations on the coasts. The point is arguably left too implicit: NMAAHC never comes out and says "Both European-descended whites AND African blacks were implicated in the crime of slavery." Yet based on the Museum’s own information, that is manifestly true.

Interestingly, the forced Long March was far more deadly than the other, more popularly known part of the journey, the Middle Passage across the Atlantic. The fatality rate at sea was horrific, but still less than half as large, both in absolute terms and as a percentage of the total loss of life, as on land. So why are we all taught about the journey by slave ship, but not about the March? Why is the European slave ship, stuffed with its human "cargo", emblematic of the horror of the slavery, but not the more deadly trip that preceded it? 

Part of this can probably be blamed on the surviving evidence. Period posters advertising the human contents of slave ships are relatively easy to find. Woodcuts of slaves chained in ships' holds are in every US history textbook ever published. Slave ships physically presented themselves at American ports, and some famous Americans, such as John Paul Jones, actually worked on them.  Records of captive deaths during the passage were not necessarily complete, but they exist. According to the best known estimates, some 10-15% of African captives died at sea.

By contrast, contemporary depictions of the Long March are rarer. It's probably just as well, as the spectacle of men, women and children chained over journeys of hundreds of miles, whipped and starved and raped and collapsed from exhaustion, their limbs swollen and festering in their bonds, could not have been pretty. Nor is the written evidence much better. In 1839, British historian Thomas Fowell Buxton reported on a particular slave caravan: “Many of the unhappy victims, who could be no longer urged, by the whips of their drivers, to further exertions of their drivers, had their ears cut off while yet alive, and were then left to await the agonies of the last moment in the Desert.” (The severed ears were used for record-keeping.) Buxton goes on “the number of those who die, merely on the journey from the interior to the coast, [is] five-twelfths of the whole” (more than 40%; emphasis in original).

It's hard not to suspect another reason to forget the March. Just as every good story needs a hero, every good historical narrative needs a villain. And the villains of the Middle Passage are easy to point to: they were the men who owned the ships, the men who sailed them, the men who kept the death tallies, and the men who provided the market for their services. In a word, they were racist, mercantile whites. 

The Long March was more deadly than the Middle Passage, but the faces of its perpetrators offer no such clarity. In the web of relations that made the slave trade possible, it was overwhelmingly native Africans who fulfilled the demand. Without their help, rounding up millions of captives for export would have been far less practical--and far less profitable. Depicting it would present a more morally ambiguous picture, with powerful black chieftains and war profiteers among those who sold their neighbors literally down the river. 

The Museum makes a point to explain how servitude became racialized in colonial America, changing from a temporary legal condition affecting blacks and whites to a hereditary status applied to blacks alone. But it leaves unspoken how the moral onus of slavery has come to be racialized too—applied only to the "demand" side of the trade. In fact, the trade and its crimes were not just consequences of white racism, but critically dependent on African partners. This isn’t to minimize or dismiss the role of Europeans and white Americans. It is merely to acknowledge the truth: slavery was a global institution that was bigger than racism.

On its website, the NMAAC describes the “four pillars” on which it stands. Number 2 is “[helping] all Americans see how their stories, their histories, and their cultures are shaped and informed by global influences.” Insofar as the Museum underemphasizes the Long March and all it implies for slavery as an institution, it is not only failing to remember its many victims. It is also failing place to US slavery in its proper context among the globe’s other “slaveries”.

  Places like NMAAHC are powerful shapers of public perception. When the casual visitor reads something at a museum--especially one as iconic as the Smithsonian--it becomes tantamount to God's own truth, chiseled in tablets of stone. Naturally, then, how the history is packaged becomes as much a political product as a scholarly one. Forthrightly acknowledging the role of Africans in perpetuating the slave trade might, for instance, complicate the argument for reparations for the descendants of slaves, as it would pose the question: “So what reparations do native Africans owe?”

     I like to think of the NMAAHC as an ongoing project--as a still-incomplete thought in the mind of the nation. Which of its roles in our “national conversation on race” should come first? To inform? To celebrate? To atone? To challenge? The newest museum on the Mall will have a long time to sort out these priorities. Let us all hope it finds the best balance.

© 2015 Nicholas Nicastro

The New Victorians

Sarah and Gabriel Chrisman keep the fires burning.

The theme of this blog is geographical travel, not necessarily history. But my meeting this week with Sarah and Gabriel Chrisman, a remarkable couple living in Port Townsend, WA, blurs that distinction in the most interesting way.
    The Chrismans might be called “lifestyle antiquarians”. Or “anthrochronologists”. Or “practical archaeologists”—I’ve struggled with phrases to describe them exactly. They are fascinated by the latter Victorian period, and have decided not only to study it, but to live like people of reasonable means in the years 1880-1900. And so, they reside in a 128 year-old house in Port Townsend, a town with much surviving Victorian architecture. They wear Victorian clothes, and read Victorian literature (high and low) by the light of Victorian oil lamps. They sleep on a feather bed, and keep and prepare their food with Victorian appliances, using recipes gleaned from period sources. And so on.
    They make concessions to practicality. There’s an old Isuzu truck parked in front of their house; Sarah pursues her writing career with a steel-nibbed fountain pen, but is still reachable by email. They have a PayPal account. “No one understands better than us that we can’t completely recreate the past,” says Gabriel. The vast infrastructure for that—the gas works and the ice deliverymen and the parts to repair their period machines—no longer exist.
    So why do they bother? There’s been a lot of chatter about them on the interwebs, reacting to their project with varying degrees of fascination, incredulity, and scorn (e.g., see here). The word “twee” comes up a lot, as in “those twee hipsters”. As much as most people bother to process it, the Chrismans’ lifestyle is dismissed as a particularly rabid form of nostalgia—a Masterpiece Theatre obsession run amok.
    The reality is far more interesting. Sarah is trained in cultural studies, Gabriel as a historian and archivist. As they conceive it, the Victorian period was not a superseded style obliterated by progress. It was literally what novelist L.P. Hartley called the past—“a different country” where things were done differently. It was a place where real people lived, with a real culture that was not at all “twee” to them. And so, like any good pair of cultural anthropologists, the Chrismans became “participant observers” in this different community, immersing themselves far beyond the reading of monographs and the attending of scholarly conferences.
    Is their immersion complete? Of course not (see above). What they mostly have left to participate in are the processes of material culture: what’s it like to light a period oil lamp? (Answer: it’s easy, but there’s a knack to it.) What’s it like to wear a corset all day and all night? (Answer: it’s not as uncomfortable as you’d assume.) What’s it like to visit the ladies’ room in a full-length Victorian outfit? (Answer: Victorian undergarments are more hygienic, and more friendly to female anatomy, than their modern equivalents.) What’s it like to keep time with a period watch? (Answer: difficult, because the electromagnetic fields we moderns live in tend to gum up the components.) The Chrismans have, through their experiential studies, recovered knowledge of the past that is simply invisible to conventional historians, because the written sources don’t bother to discuss such mundane, everyday things.
    Alas, contemporary attitudes have become a drag on their project. Due largely to the BBC and Hollywood, most people have a vaguely pleasant sense of Victorian aesthetics, but a hostile one to its politics. The very word “Victorian” is often used as a pejorative, synonymous with classism, racism, sexism, and sexual prudery. “The past is garbage” is an attitude that can be voiced in polite society, even though, as Sarah argues, “saying that would never be OK if it was about some foreign group.” Folks who abhor ethnic stereotypes think nothing of stereotyping millions of people who lived in the past— people who, as Gabriel notes, “can’t defend themselves now.”
    Complicating the picture is the fact that Victorian times are perceived as the heyday of worldwide colonialism, genocide of American Indians, and Jim Crow. Few formerly marginalized people (and their white allies) have much nostalgia for times they view as irredeemably repressive. To them, the Chrismans’ vigorous defense of their era sounds tone-deaf.
    But this isn’t exactly fair. First, because not all Victorians supported the old sins, and in some cases pioneered resistance to them. Second, because few deserve to have their lives defined by the worst excesses of their times. Imagine a person from 2016 waking up in 2116, and immediately saddled with blame for Bangladeshi sweatshop labor and the flooding of southern Florida—despite the fact that they personally strove to buy American and drove a hybrid car. Indeed, the very notion that Victorian times were inherently more evil than modernity is at least debatable, and perhaps laughable. They may have had children working bobbin machines in 1880, but they didn’t fill the oceans with plastic or drop barrel bombs on civilians.
    It’s unthinking and unfair, but progressivist arrogance takes its toll on the Chrismans. Sarah, who is mercurial and expressive, finds she must summon up the energy to step outside her door, even in hip, liberal Port Townsend. “It’s like running a gauntlet. I don’t know what I’ll find when I go out there.” Reactions to her hand-sewn wardrobe and corseted waist range from dewy admiration to white-hot anger—as if she is personally trying to undo a century of feminism. (She has written a book, Victorian Secrets, on what she learned wearing that half-desired, half-detested garment.) Gabriel, whose day job is in a bicycle shop, comes off as the prose to Sarah’s poetry—a mechanic and rationalist. He faces less hostility for looking different, perhaps because men’s fashions haven’t changed as much.
    To a historical novelist like me, several of whose books as set in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a visit to the Chrismans is a tour of Candyland. Their restored wood-burning range, with its jet-black skin and nickel warming racks, is like a polished locomotive. Sarah’s high-wheel tricycle (alas, a reproduction) has a cleverly asymmetric design—the Millennium Falcon of bikes. When seen through the Chrismans’ eyes, Victorian times don’t seem twee or repressive as much as more immediate, a place one could actually visit and learn from. If the past is a foreign country, they are ready to be your guides. May their 19th century go on forever.

© 2016 Nicholas Nicastro