January 2011

Left: Exhibition poster, "Human Zoos: The Invention of the Savage" at the musée du quai Branly 2011. Right: "Guillermo Antonio Farini with his Earthmen", London studio photograph (for the exhibition of Earthmen at the Royal Aquarium), 1884.

An ancient Greek legend tells the story of Pandora who, at a time when the world was young and blissful, was given a box of gifts from the gods, and told never to open it. After a time, her curiosity got the better of her; she lifted the lid, and out flew all the ills - pain, sorrow, disease, envy, anger, etc. - that plague us today. Hurriedly she slammed the lid back, leaving just one thing inside. Then she heard a small voice pleading to be released, offering to help and heal. She lifted the lid carefully, releasing hope into the world…

Sometimes the archive feels a bit like a “Pandora’s box” doesn’t it; especially when it holds fragments of a difficult past that have the power to re-open old wounds, confront readers with information that dashes expectations, exposes uncomfortable truths, reveals hurtful secrets – and offers the hope for a more just future.

In her paper, “Archives of Sorrow: An Exploration of Australia’s Stolen Generations and their Journey into the Past” published in History and Anthropology 22 (4), Fiona Murphy engages with the ways in which Australia’s Stolen Generation has attempted to come to terms with past trauma by returning to the archives in search of what was taken from them under the government’s “removals policy” – people, places and worlds. Describing the archive as “a place which bespeaks the presence of absence” and “a place where secrets, lies and truth are enshrined in the record” it was, she says,  a deeply painful experience. But, it has also brought a degree of healing, leading many to try to rediscover their origins and reconnect with their families, an often ‘tortuous’ journey.

“Human Zoos: The Invention of the Savage” currently on exhibition at the musée du quai Branly in Paris, confronts viewers with an altogether different, but equally painful archive. Drawing on a vast range of paintings and sculptures, dioramas, photographs, film, posters, flyers, postcards, programmes and other ephemera, the exhibition explores the history of ‘human zoos’ that put people on display in circus, theatre or cabaret performances, zoos, parades, reconstructed villages and international or colonial fairs, to tell a story about the construction of otherness. It’s visually exhilarating absorbing and profoundly moving. While viewers may be inclined to feel like voyeurs, the curators of this exhibition have put archival material on display not to titillate but to teach; to shed light on ways in which ‘the other’ has been construed over centuries, and to ‘measure the extent to which racism, segregation, and eugenist ideas were able to penetrate public opinions”. This archive is being called into service as a resource on which we can draw to make sense of the past and the present and imagine a more just future. It really is something of a ‘Pandora’s Box’, isn’t; it?

In January Germans commemorated 20 years’ access to the archives of the Stasi– the secret police of the German Democratic Republic. In a terrifyingly efficient project , the Stasi gathered information from about 90,000 staff members and 200,000 informal collaborators – friends, neighbours, spouses and others - about anyone who criticised the state through their words or deeds. They also implemented an extensive mis-information campaign, manufacturing records to bring people into disrepute. As the regime collapsed, Stasi officials burnt and shredded thousands of records. Berliners seeing smoke billowing from the chimneys in 1990 protested, building a symbolic wall of bricks and stone around the archive until eventually, the doors were opened and the destruction halted. In her gripping 2005 book, Stasiland: Stories from behind the Berlin Wall, Anna Funder says that for a time, “debate raged hot in Germany as to what to do with the Stasi files. Should they be opened or burnt? Should they be locked away for fifty years and then opened, when the people in them would be dead, or possibly forgiven? What were the dangers of knowing? Or the dangers of ignoring the past and doing it all again?” As with the archives of the “Stolen Generation”, the Stasi archive reveals secrets, lies, and difficult truths. At the heart of many of the interviews that informed Funder’s book is fear: fear of what the Stasi might have uncovered, manufactured or misconstrued and how it may have been, or might still be used. But several of those who have seen their records have had their suspicions about people they thought were informers laid to rest. Sometimes uncertainty carries the weight of impending doom, but knowledge brings the lightness of hope.

The records of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa is still under wraps, despite the concerted efforts of civil society organisations such as the South African History Archive. Could it be that those with the power to open it fear that it too could unleash more secrets, lies and truths than our fragile democracy can bear. Maybe it’s time we confronted the demons of the past that lie in wait in the archive of our difficult past. Maybe then we will have some hope of healing.

This is an abbreviated version of the Archival Platform opinion piece, Opening Pandora’a box: archives as sites of hurt and hope