Cultural artifacts and our past

In a page of the British Museum’s website there is a sturdy defence of the location of the Marbles in London. The page casually enough starts “periodically, the question of where the surviving sculptures from the Parthenon should now be displayed becomes a subject of public discussion.”

It is to be noted that the typical understatement of the metropole belies the ferocity of the debate that often takes place in peripheral parts of the erstwhile empire from which countries such as many in the Caribbean can trace their lineage. Art critics have urged the restitution of ill-gotten work taken from colonies while those in possession of such artwork claim that superior conditions and more suitable locational advantages render the siting of such art better in a global capital such as London as opposed to Athens, and far less for smaller locations such as Kingston and Port-of-Spain.

Yes, that’s right Kingston and Port-of-Spain as it is to be noted that one does not need to point to Greece to reference the trove of cultural artifacts deposited in London that originated in various parts of the world. There are Jamaican Taino zemis ostensibly deposited for “safekeeping” at the British Museum which were found in the Carpenter’s Mountains in Jamaica in 1792 and that are now to be found in London.

According to the website of the Association of Caribbean Historians: “In 1803, the following notice appeared in Archaeologia (vol. 14, p. 269), the journal of the Society of Antiquaries of London: April 11, 1799. Isaac Alves Rebello, Esq. FAS exhibited to the Society Three Figures, supposed to be of Indian Deities, in wood, found in June 1792, in a natural cave near the summit of a mountain, called Spots, in Carpenter’s Mountain, in the parish of Vere, in the island of Jamaica, by a surveyor in measuring the land. They were discovered placed with their faces (one of which is that of a bird) towards the east.

One such carving is the so-called “birdman” zemi while the other has been described in the British Museum website as a “standing male idol.” According to Aarons, writing in the December 1994 edition of the Jamaica Journal, a 1939 request from the administration in Jamaica for the return of the zemis was met with the despatch by the British Museum of plaster casts of the male figure and the “birdman.” A discussion on the topic of this article with Dr David Boxer, curator emeritus of the National Gallery of Jamaica, revealed that in 1976 a request for a temporary loan of the zemis was made of the British Museum, but the conditions stipulated were so prohibitive as to render the initiative unfeasible.

In the 1994 Jamaica Journal publication there is an article by George A Aarons, “Tainos of Jamaica: The Aboukir Zemis” in which the story is recounted that exactly 200 years after the discovery of the first zemi in the Carpenter’s Mountains in the parish of Vere, the attention of the Jamaican National Heritage Trust was brought to the existence of three more zemis in a cave in Aboukir. The zemis had apparently been found as early as 1972 and then reposed in the home of an individual who subsequently placed them back in their original cave. A case of local restitution if ever there was one! The three zemis are now in the possession of the Jamaican National Heritage Trust. According to the 2003 UWI Press publication edited by Lesley-Gail Atkinson The Earliest Inhabitants: The Dynamics of the Jamaican Taino, a total of 13 wooden objects have been recovered from Jamaican caves and form an integral part of that island’s proud cultural heritage.

It is to be stressed that the situation of Jamaica is not as unique in the Caribbean as one may think. Many of the works of 19th century Trinidadian artist Jean-Michel Cazabon were discovered, as Geoffrey MacLean will tell you, in the estate house of his patron Lord Harris in Faversham, Kent and a recent publication has highlighted the works of a student of his – Margaret Mann – that were also fortuitously discovered in no less an English location than the Bodleian Library in Oxford. If one ever gets to visit the British Public Records Office in Kew Gardens, one should be unsurprised to discover the wealth of historical documents that exists there not only on Trinidad and Tobago and the Caribbean but the entire span of the British Empire, whose boast was upon which “the sun never set.” Our cultural artifacts truly are not only around us but, in more than in one sense of the word, may be “beyond” us.

Gregory O’Young is a part-time PhD candidate at the UWI,

St Augustine.