by Jessica Lynne, in conversation with Myron Beasley
On July 1, 1912, the residents of Malaga Island were evicted from their homes. A small fishing community of black, white, and mixed-race residents, the forty-seven inhabitants were forced off the island by then governor, Frederick Plaisted, in an act of racism and economic motivation. On July 12, 2018, scholar, curator, and performance artist Myron M. Beasley will stage Repast, a performative dinner to be held as memorial to those who once inhabited the island. Beasley describes the project as “a site-specific memorial to be held on Malaga Island. As an intervention in the form of a performative dinner, Repast will engage the public-at-large to remember the people of Malaga who were evicted from their homes. … The performance will be a collaborative event including dancers, a printmaker, a sound architect, a chef, and painter/cartographer. Repast is a memorial to the dead and the living.”
Jessica Lynne, writer and co-founder of ARTS.BLACK, spoke with Beasley about the Repast. The following text serves as a call and response, a statement on the nature of mourning, commemoration, and grief. Beasley’s statements appear in italics; Lynne’s responses and reflections follow.
It was 11 years ago this past August when I arrived in Maine. I spent my first night in a hotel as it would be a couple of days before movers would arrive at my new home. That first evening, in the hotel, the Maine Public television station aired “Maine Experience 103,” a short documentary on the topic of Malaga Island. The riveting story continues to haunt me.
Here, I ask: what does it mean to tend to our haints?
In a 2014 interview with the Toronto Review of Books, poet and essayist M. Nourbese Philip, in discussing her book Zong!, reminds us that all of modernity is haunted by its histories of murder and genocide and war and death. And that what is simultaneously equally true is the presence of an amnesia which attempts to lure us away from looking at and reckoning with these traumas.
To tend to our haints is to close the gap between these sites. Performance as the method of such attendance strikes me as a particular mode of analysis, a distinct manner of telling and un-telling, in the words of Phillip.
The past is never dead. It’s not even the past. Strangely this quote by William Faulkner, which introduces the syllabus of my American Studies course, is a prescient statement. The story of Malaga converges at a moment in our history when current events remind us that discourses of the eugenics movement were and continue to be an undercurrent in the United States. There are many Malagas, hidden narratives, some erased, many stifled.
It seems to me that the process of remembering and the process of excavation are processes of heartwork. That is to say, we come to these endeavors with an intellectual inquiry looming above us, and yet, the process of rendering public the un-telling — a remembrance — is steadied by reasons of love. I have come to believe that in these instances, time collapses (indeed, is time even linear to begin with?) and we must hold, in our present realities, our pasts and futures simultaneously. They should always be in conversation. To unveil a past is necessary for the now and perhaps only further enables us to name that which we are moving toward.
I study material culture, the study of things. I like to think of it as the story of things and how objects are performed in particular settings. Food occupies a distinct space in any culture. I thought it would be fitting to stage a performative meal as a memorial, as a Repast. How people of African and Native American traditions attend to death is unique. The repast would be the most apropos setting as to honor, to counter, the narrative of the yellow journalism and myths that surround the island of Malaga.
In the Repast, I am reminded that as we mourn, we create a new space of communion for ourselves and for those who have transitioned. In the Repast, there can be rest. We can call forth the names of those ancestors whose presences have always been here. In the Repast, the meal is both sustenance and an offering. For this reason, the Repast can also be a means by which we reconstitute truths.
Because of the archeological study performed by the stellar faculty at the University of Southern Maine, the objects — the material culture — reveal a counternarrative. Though the church, the school house, and even the graves were exhumed, pieces of the ceramic china, old pipes, fish and fowl bones, and even buttons provide a more intimate story of the residents of the island. The button gave so many clues to where Eliza Griffin’s house was — and her life. She worked with textiles, garments for folks on the mainland and the island. Buttons are person objects: the residences left archival traces through objects.
The archive is not static. The archive, too, is invention.
The crimes against the forty-seven Malaga Island residents are corporeal and they are also archival. I mean, they betray the lived experiences of all who lived there. They narrate a story of deficiency, of a supposed wrongness.
The archive then — comprised of objects and documents and other ephemera — should never be assumed neutral, especially when constructed within the boundaries of a white supremacist political apparatus. When we re-enter this archive and look closely, we discover that which is absent. Loud absences. Haunting absences.
In the Repast, are we not also gathering in hopes of an awakening? To see anew these histories and lineages?
Repast is a performative dinner on Malaga Island. It is a public memorial to the lives of those who inhabited the island before they were evicted in July 1912. Collaborative in nature, this creative endeavor includes artists from a variety of genres such as sound, printmaking, painting, dance, and culinary arts. The one-time event will occur on July 12, 2018. To protect the environmental integrity of the island, a limited number of guests will be able to witness the performance on Malaga. The performance will be streamed live on various social media platforms. Further information will be available on the website as the event approaches.
Repast was awarded a Kindling Fund grant, administered by SPACE Gallery as part of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts Regional Regranting Program, as well as support from the Davis Family Foundation and Creative Portland.
Myron M. Beasley, Ph.D. is Associate Professor in the areas of Cultural Studies, African American Studies, and Women and Gender studies at Bates College, USA. His ethnographic research include exploring the intersection of cultural politics and art and social change. The Andy Warhol Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities the Reed Foundation (The Ruth Landes Award), and the Kindling Fund have awarded him fellowships and grants for his ethnographic writing about art and cultural engagement. His artists writing has appeared in journals including The Journal of Poverty (which he served as guest editor for a special issue on the topic of Art and Social Policy), Text and Performance Quarterly, Museum & Social Issues, The Journal of Curatorial Studies, Gastronomica, Liminalities: The journal of performance studies (served as editor), ELSE and Performance Research. He is also an international curator.
Jessica Lynne is co-founder and editor of ARTS.BLACK, a journal of art criticism from Black perspectives. She received her B.A. in Africana Studies from NYU and has been awarded residencies and fellowships from Art21 and The Cue Foundation, Callaloo, and The Center for Book Arts. Her writing has appeared in publications such as Aperture, Art in America, BOMB Magazine, and The Brooklyn Rail.