Gabrielle Goliath

Elegy - for two ancestors
a reflective text by Zoé Samudzi

I.

In one set of photo albums, there are two women. The nature of the archive almost doesn’t matter because the violence of colonialism is so banal and ubiquitous as to be repetitively boring. Out of a fear of unduly romanticising Black women’s navigations of genocidal violence, the images of these two women stand out because their self-possession, even in the face of existential threat, defies the degrading visual frame imposed upon them. While one woman has an identifier – she is the wife of a !Kharakhoen (Fransman Nama) chief – the other is altogether unnamed. Their absented identities comprise an archive in themselves, part of a near-endless repository of gendered violation.

The textual descriptions of these two women – photographic annotations – are written in a harshly descriptive German that reduces them to colonial specimen. It makes invisible and flattens the specific nature of gendered and sexual violence by collapsing it into the same rote grammars of colonial classifications of plants, animals, landscapes. The first woman, a young woman, is seated in a beautiful but modest dress in a field of flowers and shrubs. We see two-thirds of her face as she looks down and at the ground, away from whomever insisted upon her posing for his camera. “Daffodil blossom in Herero country,” the first part of the label reads. She’s finally referenced in the second part: “Hottentot girl at Porkjusdraai.” Then and now, her only identification is racial derogation. The second photograph is faded sepia-toned, a group of headwrap-wearing women on cattle. The label tells us they are prisoners-of-war, and in front is Kaptein Simon Kooper’s wife on a big-horned steed: desert sun in her eyes, she squints directly at the camera after her capture.

Neither of these women consented to sit and be captured; it is befitting of the violence of photography that the same verb is used to describe both acquisition by force and the act of producing an image. But, again and again, we must return to all that is evinced by their gazes: we can refuse to allow their namelessness to be the definitive last word. We can lean in close to look at their faces, we can imagine the meaning residing in their expressions. The look askance (demure, ashamed, defiant, or otherwise) and the posture of a more set resolve are difficult to see both in the archive and in our memory-imaginations, but they are each nevertheless assertions of personhood, defiant micro-postures against murderous imperial German forces, and wordless articulations of sovereignties of indigenous African womanhood that burst apart the border of the carceral photograph.

Think of these two women together: undoubtedly unknown to one another, but bound together as a part of our ancestral constellation. Their identification is part of our task of mourning: an affirmative recuperation of these ancestors in the face of colonial negation. The precious labour of mourning offers us an opportunity to reconstitute our lifeworlds – an intercession within ongoing cycles of coloniality, reiterating ancestral pasts into our present.

II.

This sacred task

We die three deaths, some say. Our first death comes when the last breath is expelled from our lungs and our bodies cease to function. The second death is in our bodies’ return to the ground – but with this death, with the interment into the earth that materialises our existence, we remain eternal as ancestors. This second death, in a way, is another life made immaterial but no less present than the life we lived in our physical forms. We begin to die the day we were born, but as each day marches us towards a physical death, we navigate the material world as future ancestors. The third and final death, however, is the most existentially devastating: it’s the future death when our name disappears from the lips of our descendants and is never spoken again.

Sacredness is a totemic materialisation, the distillation of the moral-metaphysical into a historical event, a practice, an object. Genocides are simultaneously profane and sacred: the binary can be collapsed into itself. Where the aftermath and afterlives of genocide calls for the recovery of ancestors from the political calculus of imperial [non-]life that necessitates mass death, the work becomes urgently sacred. And it is this sacred task, our responsibility towards our dead, that is necessarily profane, where the profane is a quotidian grammar – we [must] attend to our dead every day. Dispossession excises and alienates us: from the bonds between ourselves and the lands around us, from matrices of black planetary entanglements. Fortifying the connections between ourselves and our ancestors grounds us in critical collectivities. We do not have to cry alone when we mourn in a chorus. It is from this posture of self-protection, recovery, celebration, weeping and endeavouring to learn that our precious commemorations proceed.

We have many ancestors, but upon their discovery in archives and stories, we realize they are nameless. We might see them in images, in our dreams and nightmares, we might make a place for them on our altars, they might appear to us in divinations – but what do we call these once but no longer named ancestors of ours? How do we call out to them? How do we disalienate ourselves and call in kin we refuse to allow to be disappeared into the void of imperial and genocidal history?

Can we remain tethered to ourselves and one another without these names?

Genocide is a violence that forcibly renders namelessness. More than it is part of the catastrophe of modernity, in which masses of peoples are killed, maimed, displaced and dispossessed, genocide is the production of worldlessness. It destroys the very material and spiritual mechanisms through which people are able to be in the world. Custodians of land, keepers of language and poetry, conjurers of spirit, bearers of ritual, stewards of history and memory, rememberers of names – the existence of a past and possibility of a future annihilated through processes and structures of violent foreclosure.

And it is this sacred task, this responsibility towards the dead, our ancestors, that is necessarily a profanity, where the profane is a quotidian grammar that structures our everyday because we attend to our dead every day. This sacred truth, a possibly unknowable truth, haunts us. As it must.

Elegy - for two ancestors, 2024, La Biennale di Venezia, Sale d’Armi, Venice, photos by James Macdonald

Performance I
14:00, 21 November 2024, Sale d’Armi, Venice
Performers: Rachel Duckett, Claudia Graziadei, Makeda Monnet, Isabella Moore, Roberta Philip, Patrícia Silveira, Roxanne Tataeii

Performance II
14:00, 22 November 2024, Sale d’Armi, Venice
Performers: Leila Alexander, Rachel Duckett, Makeda Monnet, Isabella Moore, Roberta Philip, Patrícia Silveira, Roxanne Tataeii

In acknowledgement of those displaced, starved, interned and killed in the Ovaherero and Nama Genocide (1904-1908); and to the continued struggle of Nama and Herero communities fighting for reparation and repair on their own terms.

Special thanks to Adriano Pedrosa, Prof Deborah Thomas, Dr Zoé Samudzi, and the Center for Experimental Ethnography, University of Pennsylvania.

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