Liberate the Archives

[Vasundhara Mathur] So our first speaker is Aleema Gray. Aleema is a Jamaican-born curator, researcher and public historian based in London. She was awarded the Yesu Persaud Scholarship for her PhD entitled ‘Bun Babylon: A Community Engaged History of Rastafari in Britain’. Aleema’s work focuses on documenting Black history in Britain through the perspective of lived experiences. Her practice is driven by a concern for more historically contingent ways of understanding the present, especially in relation to notions of belonging, memory and contested heritage. She is the lead curator for Beyond the Bassline, which everyone should go see. Beyond the Bassline: 500 Years of Black British Music at the British Library. And the founder of House of Dread, an interdisciplinary heritage studio.

[Aleema Gray] Hello. Greetings, everyone. How are you feeling? I’m feeling cold. It’s freezing in here. I see what you was talking about! I’m like, excuse me if I might be shaking. It’s not because I’m nervous, it’s because it’s cold. Which I think is interesting, what it means, as we was reasoning earlier, about when we enter these spaces, in these kind of spaces and the kind of feelings that they produce.

But thank you, it’s really great to be here. My name is Dr Aleema Gray. I want to give a special thanks Vasundhara for bringing us all together to gather, to talk, to reason, to break bread. It’s a bit of a strange one for me to think about where to start with when I was invited to speak about the archive. So I’m a public historian, and what that means is that I look at history as a doing, as a practice, as a conversation. And so it’s kind of like, what do I draw on? Where do I start with talking about my own relationship with the archive and how I’ve responded to that archive?

So this presentation is a journey. This presentation is more of the things that I’ve been thinking about, is the things that I have been reflecting on, particularly on my work. I’m not sure if anybody’s been to the British Library. We opened our exhibition Beyond the Bassline, tracing five hundred years of Black British music. Definitely check it out. So this, the kind of things that I’ve been thinking about within this presentation has kind of emerged from some of the work that I’ve been doing, working with British Library collections, kind of taking about ‘access’, talking about doing history and talking about, I guess, liberating the archive and what it means.

Okay. Next one. So where do I start? I start with the beginning. Anybody that’s ever been to any of my presentations, I always start with the starting point. I like to start with in this lived realm, which I don’t think is something that, particularly those of us situated within the academy, is comfortable with talking about who we are, where we come from, how we’re situated within this work. And so this is a picture of me in the place that I’m from, Jamaica. Portland, Jamaica, the sweetest, which is the sweetest place in the whole of the island. Have you heard of Blue Mountain Coffee? The champagne of coffee. This is where I’m from. So this picture is of me the day that I left Jamaica, sadly left Jamaica. And as you can see in the background is a little place. There’s a little house. I’m very much from a rural background. My parents are farmers and I’m from a Rastafari tradition. So part of that tradition is all about, as you know, is thinking about heritage, is thinking about history, and is thinking about liberating aspects of the past, particularly for those of us who are from, you know, been displaced, I guess, within these histories.

And so this picture, I start with this picture because it’s very much something that my work is constantly in conversation with. You know, who I am, the coming here, the being here, entering Babylon, entering Britain, going to school here, you know, and some of the ways in which my geographies of moving from a rural setting, you know, by the riverside and coming into the city, the dirty city of London, growing up in South London, and, you know, just being kind of like your identity putting forward, you got locks, what does that mean? You know, you’re Rasta. What does that mean? You’re eating Ital food, what does that mean? So I found that throughout my histories and throughout my journey, there was always this disconnect about how I see myself and how others see, you know, how others see me. And that kind of struggle of that representational field of struggle.

Anyway, I can talk a lot about this lived realm, but I’m not, I know that we’re conscious of time, so I’m going to keep it moving. But I bring this up because it’s important for me because we, we feel our histories, you know, and I think this is something that not a lot of us, once again, you know, I’m kind of thrashing the academy here a little bit, you know, even though I am a Doctor. But we’re not really comfortable talking about emotion, with affect, with these things is real. It’s not a research, it’s a life search, it’s something that, you know, is intangible. There’s elements, we were speaking about that sensory element early in the panel, you know? It’s not something that’s just my job as a curator. It’s actually my life.

So you know, these things, particularly for those of us from, you know, speaking from the realm of the African and Caribbean, you know, community, we’ve unfortunately come to a place where we cannot trust history. So those are those issues around trust and care and some of those relationships. So I think it’s very, very important for me to say that this is something that we feeling and we touching and it’s something that for those of us who are not, who look like me, cannot really get, you can’t really get it. So it’s hard to work within the archive and kind of capturing those kind of elements.

And a lot of the work that I do is, you know, as an oral historian recording a lot of people’s stories, gathering these archives, gathering these living histories. And so I say this quote here because one of the things that an elder said to me when I was recording his story, he told me, ‘We have been plundered. Our memories have been plundered. Things have been taken that need to be reclaimed. We must repossess what has been taken from us in every way, so that we can be reclothed in the dignity that we deserve.’ So this idea of our, you know, memory and being plundered and what is really the price of memory, these are the questions and the things that I’ve been thinking about.

So we definitely feel our histories. And this means that the practice that I like to put forward is one that thinks about how we can help, as opposed to hurt, is one that thinks about a careful practice. But then sometimes is also reckoning that care can also become violence. You know, I mean, so this is something that particularly working within, we were speaking earlier in the panel about institution and the things that come with working within these places, and how sometimes we’re conscripted into these colonial projects that even when we have good intentions, we can still reinforce the same isms and schisms that we’re trying to move beyond. And this is something that I’m very, very vocal in speaking about. You know, as much as I’m saying, you know, my PhD was titled ‘Bun Babylon’ so I take that kind of methodology everywhere I go.

But even me, I feel sometimes, you know, part of this work that we’re doing around archives and practice is also reckoning the fact with sometimes we can be part of the problem as well as the solution. And so we have to always critically check ourselves. What are we doing? Why are we doing it? Who are we doing it for? Who is our work really in conversation with? And then particularly thinking about the exhibition that I just opened, we are building these relationships with people who are not within these spaces, you know? And so what does it mean to take this idea of collecting their stories and making that enter in a new place? How do we hold space and we care for those stories, and how can we monitor the violence that is reinforced in these kind of institutions? So if it’s a thing that I’ve been thinking about and thinking through, but then this is also a reality that we’re very much faced with, it’s a ism and it’s a schism. And it’s, you know, Babylon has this tendency to reinvent itself and so even though a lot of the work that I do is within museums and libraries and research and academy and all of this kind of stuff, there is a challenge here. And this challenge is that no matter what you do, it seems like, well, as soon as you enter these, these places, the museum just becomes this place where history dies.

So how can we make history live? How can we bring it to life? What does it mean to bring together these things that are very much real, that are very much living, that are very much, you know, part of an ongoing, and ongoing conversation across, you know, past, present and futures. And how can we mobilise that into something that is actually giving, you know, that is, that’s actually giving. So I’m smiling because I’m just looking at all of the reactions from people. So yeah, for me this is yeah, history. History is definitely a living, it’s a living thing.

So part of this work is trying to, I guess, move beyond this saviouristic element, right? I’m not going out there and I’m not saving people. I’m doing a little thing. We’re doing the preservation, we’re doing the care, and we’re trying to do something that helps. But then it’s also about thinking about affirmative methodologies. What are the stories that can affirm? Because there’s some, a challenge that I have, particularly as someone who is Black, Jamaican, African, displaced, all of that, is that when you enter, when you’re carrying these stories and you take in these stories, Blackness seems to only be showing up as a critique of whiteness. So how can we move beyond this idea that we’re always in contestation?

So when you go to Beyond the Bassline, part of the thing that I’m trying to put forward in this kind of exhibition is not just to see us as this, you know, in this kind of sexy narrative of where we somehow become a victim, even in the narratives that we’re trying to kind of affirm ourselves in. So how we, how can we kind of bring that to life? So when we talk about, I’m conscious of time, so I’m speeding through this, liberate, you know, what we mean when we say ‘liberate’. This is very much inspired by the work of Ras Seymour McLean. Ras Seymour McLean in 1981 went into British Library, Wellcome, went into SOAS university and he basically liberated books. And that is another way of saying that he, I mean, what they said. He ‘stole’. He ‘stole’ the books. So he went around and he went to SOAS and he went to British Library, you know, there’s a documentary on YouTube that you can watch. It’s called ‘The Book Liberator’. And it’s, yeah, it’s available. Please check it out. But I was kind of inspired by this idea of the agency that us as Black people to go into these places, to have access to these places and to actually take back and reclothe ourselves in our dignity. And so part of Ras Seymour’s work was seeing himself as a book liberator. So he eventually was found out and he served nine months in prison. But they made a very interesting documentary about it.

So my kind of entry point, there’s many entry points around liberating and what that means, but I guess my entry point is about setting free, to set things free. And not all of us can, you know, go to these places and thieve the books or liberate the books. But there’s other things that I guess you can do. And part of this is, I guess, recognising methodologies. I hate the word methodologies. Sound very academic. Well, I guess is the approach that we are taking, so I reference House of Dread here, which is an anti-disciplinary heritage studio. I say anti-disciplinary in a way to that we’re manifesting something new. It’s no disrespect to the multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary artists, but it’s reckoning with the fact that this doesn’t, this kind of work doesn’t really fit in a particular discipline. It’s a site of conversation. What, you know, Rastafari would say I was born in Babylon, but it’s something that is about disrupting, provoking, connecting, exciting, which is what Beyond the Bassline is also trying to do if you go to the exhibition. And it’s looking at heritage, the things that we inherit as this disputation or this contested field, you know, of trying to manifest something new.

And so part of this is looking at truth is in the telling. We talk about power is in the pen, but truth is in the telling. And so part of that is the stories that we’re telling around these collections. So liberating is also honouring these stories. You know, when we preserve, when we bring these collections in or when we’re working with these collections, these collections have to be in conversation with communities. So it’s talking about how can we liberate, how can we activate, you know, it starts with the kind of life search and with the individuals that’s outside, that’s not necessarily inside these institutions. And having these conversations and making those conversations visible.

So what we did with Beyond the Bassline is exactly that, we kind of brought out, liberated these collections that exist in the library. The library has one of the largest sound and vision collections in the world. If you’re a musician, if you’re an artist, please do go in there and liberate these archives. A part of that is actually the interpretation when you go to the exhibition, is part of those conversations that we had with practitioners, activists etc., around our histories and our stories and kind of putting forward something that is very much affirmative, something that’s very much, something that can help as opposed to hurt.

Because I’m conscious of time, the thing that I’m going to leave it on is this question that I think, is permanent to, pertinent to a lot of the questions around liberating and liberate the archives. And it’s for all of us, every one of us, you know, in this room, every one of us who, you know, is putting ourselves as a spokesperson, particularly those of us who are Black and putting ourselves, you know, in responsibility for documenting our histories and our stories is really thinking about what do we really want history to do for us. And this is something that I’m thinking about as my responsibility as a public historian, as a curator, you know, what is my responsibility? I have ‘access’ to certain things. I have access to privilege. I have access to these resources here in Babylon. So how can I redistribute these accesses and see access as a doing, as an ongoing project. And so I’ll leave it there. Thank you very much.