All the tea towels and mugs and postcards in the Gallery shop have been colonized by prints of Marilyn Monroe and Diana Princess of Wales, apart from an exclusive collection of leather objects bearing Queen Elizabeth I’s coronation portrait. I’ve already decided on a handful of pencils and when my friend joins me I’m fingering a wallet from that collection. I’ve been thinking about reparations since the Mau Mau case, and since 15 Caribbean nations (CARICOM) announced their intention to sue the British government. After Benedict Cumberbatch’s mother encouraged him to go in fear of descendants of slaves who might lay claim to his family’s fortune, I looked up my mother’s maiden name on a database which catalogs the reparations paid by the British government to British slave owners who “lost property” when the trade was abolished. A man called Herbert Newton Jarrett V was awarded £13,591 in compensation for the 695 people he enslaved in the Orange Valley Estate in Trelawny, Jamaica. As it turns out, my mother’s maiden name carries this other meaning. It also turns out Herbert attended the same college I did. It seems right, then, that Elizabeth’s face should sit in my hand. She would not have anticipated my using her her face as an object to stuff money into. Six months later I pull out my wallet in a health shop in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn and the Russian-American girl behind the counter asks “Is that a Queen Elizabeth I wallet? I’m so jealous!” I ask her why she’s such a fan of Elizabeth and she says “I mean, 45 years of peace and prosperity! Who can argue with that?” In the moment, faced with her elation it feels utterly futile to insist on the human cost of 40 years of peace and prosperity, to say, as I usually would “on whose back?” to insist on my presence in that old narrative. I pay for my tincture and gothenewinquiry/essays/face-me-i-face-you/
Posted on: Tue, 17 Jun 2014 20:06:53 +0000
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