by Angelina Osborne

"Some time ago, I went to an exhibition on slavery at the Liverpool Maritime Museum, called Against Human Dignity. As part of the exhibition they had a globe about four feet in diameter with points of light to illustrate the triangular slave trade. Someone had scratched out the country of Guyana, which I interpreted as an attempt to scratch out history, of scratching slavery out of history. This affected me very deeply. I felt however, that my moment of catharsis existed in a vacuum, because the exhibition had no space set aside for catharsis. I now think this lack of space to reflect upon the past of slavery reflects the fact that there appears to be a continuing governmental and institutional reluctance to deal with the issue of slavery in a meaningful and open manner".

It is Paul Hope's strong belief that African British people should take control of how their history is displayed and portrayed in museums and galleries, which has always been dictated by curators and museum professionals, people who work in an environment where they have little or no direct involvement with black people, or their understanding or interpretation of the pieces they hold. For this reason, he has been campaigning to have his own work displayed in museums and institutions, to inject a black perspective on a period in history that many would prefer to forget. He has come up against some resistance, but Paul strikes me as a pretty tenacious person. To that end, his work Jam Packed Berth Place - a Final Passage will be exhibited at the Mole Valley Arts Festival in October. Paul's work represents many powerful issues - his dual heritage, slavery, collusion, complacency, racism, propaganda and optimism and legacy. His ideas on facilitating black involvement in the decision making process within museums are quite clear; more community outreach and black people employed in more senior positions in the museums sector.
He also asserts that African British people make their own monument to slavery, to look in depth at the things we turn away from.

When I met Paul on a chilly February afternoon, I realised that I had seen him before; he was in the audience at a workshop I had presented during Black History Month in Haringey, about black representation throughout history. We both realised this when he came to pick me up from the station with his wife, Linda. While having afternoon tea, he showed me photographs of his Guyanese grandfather posing with his co workers at the logging site where he worked before coming to Britain, and of his English grandfather, and the medals he had been awarded for his bravery in WW1. Paul's Guyanese and British heritage features heavily in his work, and celebrate the benefits of belonging to more than one culture.

We now live in a time when the various heritages of mixed race people are valued and celebrated, a hope that W.E.B. DuBois expressed 100 years ago in The Souls of Black Folk. Paul grew up listening to the Guyanese accent of his father and grandmother. His father recorded some of these conversations in 1963. Paul showed me a photo of his mother's family, possibly taken just after WW1; the men sporting the fashionable at the time handlebar moustaches. The symbolising of his mixed heritage indicates that Paul has the best of both worlds.

Paul told me that history is all around us - in our memories, our photographs, and the stories told of the quirks and foibles of our aunts and uncles, cousins and grandparents. We can easily capture these stories by talking to our parents and grandparents, record their stories, recreate the images through paintings, analysing old photos. 'Black people have to look at their history unconventionally', he told me. 'I've looked at family photographs, read them for who's in them; read them for what the relationships are from how people are positioned. So even if you don't know who all the people are, you can learn about the conventions of the time - like my granny's photograph against a backdrop wearing clothes that were probably provided by the studio. You make the most of what you have, filling in the spaces with your imagination'.

Paul has created much of his work, and his past using these methods. Furthermore, he has commissioned Ron Savory, a Guyanese artist, to paint two paintings that depict the experiences of his father and grandfather bringing his history to life, giving a real authenticity to his experiences of working in Guyana's interior. In this way, he has taken a more creative approach in looking at his history.

His fascination with the power of images renders his work, Jam Packed Berth Place a beautiful, thought provoking piece. Inspired by a cruise ship journey to the West Indies, it commemorates the Middle Passage, the journey taken by captured Africans from their homelands to the new world, where they were sold as slaves. It looks at how anonymity and dehumanisation can help justify the most heinous acts.

Paul has been interested in researching his family history since he was a boy, the secondary school he attended could possibly in part been responsible for this. He was a pupil at Tulse Hill School in the 70s, and during that time two teachers there, Chris Power and Nigel File wrote a book that they felt would help meet the needs of the black pupils. Called Black Settlers in Britain: 1555-1958, it was dedicated to the pupils of Tulse Hill, and particularly to those born in 1958, Paul's birth year. Tulse Hill School, by the way, had a history of producing some of today's artist and leaders - Ken Livingstone and Linton Kwesi Johnson were pupils there, and in the 70s they had a black headmaster, Ken Noble. One of it governors was Paul Stephenson, who had been involved in the Bristol Bus Boycott in the early sixties, who invited former world heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali to visit the school, and during his tour engaged in a play fight with the head boy at the time, Tony Sibley.
Unfortunately, the 80s witnessed a decline in the fortunes of Tulse Hill and it was closed down and demolished in the early 90s.

'Society isn't ready for the tears'

In 1999, the late Bernie Grant requested in Parliament that the government issue an apology for slavery. The prime minister responded by acknowledging the suffering and hardship experienced by African people past and present, and commented on the contributions that they have made to British society. This is close to an apology as you will get; to apologise is to admit a wrong has been committed, opening the gate to litigation So we find ourselves in a kind of limbo, where it is clear that the ramifications and legacy of slavery still reverberate, and no one wishes to fully claim responsibility for what happened. There is a need to look inward, both black and white people, to be brave enough to lead an open debate on slavery and its legacies.

The black and white perspective of slavery differs widely. To have those whose ancestors once enslaved become keepers of the history of the black experience is difficult for many to reconcile. What is also extraordinary is that there are very few, if any African British people that are steering how the history of slavery is presented to the wider community. Paul feels very strongly about this, believing as many others do that black history doesn't receive the same sensitivity as other histories, which is why he has decided to study for an M.A. in Museum Studies to understand how the museums sector works, and to encourage a change in current practices. 'I've had a few run-ins with institutions that I have approached about exhibiting my work. I realised that they were holding information on black people, but had no black perspective. The question is whether black people's analysis of black heritage is fundamentally different from other analyses.'

Researching Caribbean family history has its own unique challenges; Paul found that the records in Guyana were difficult to trace, and was shocked at how he himself wasn't that far removed from slavery. 'My grandfather was born in 1892, so his grandfather would have been a slave, and if you realise the point that people were worked to death in the West Indies there would have been the potential that you could have been very close to having come from Africa. Before Guy Grannum's book Tracing your West Indian Ancestors and Paul Crooks' Ancestors there was hardly any books to show you how to get started. Another challenge is that you may find out things that you aren't prepared for - the deeper you go into your research the more potentially traumatic it can be'.
I asked Paul if he had any advice for those who were beginning their research.
'The important thing', he told me, 'is that lots of people in the family have lots of pieces of information, so talk to family members, because when people die and estates are broken up people take hold of things and you won't know who has things or where they are kept. My cousin Ruth, for example keeps all dates of births and deaths - my point is, before you go and check any records talk to the family first. You also have to ask yourself how far back you want to go, what satisfies your need; I went no further back than my grandfather, because that's how far back I wanted to go, but I know that it can be quite a compulsive thing. I think there needs to be a more creative approach to looking at our history, not feeling that you have to be stuck in a linear form. I remember things by sound - the sound of my grandparents and my father, you realise that as you go back in time they tell you something. I have this book called Random remarks on Creolese, about the Guyanese language, and it's full of phrases and sayings - which is history, our history. Is it folklore, is it from Africa? By just thinking about what my parents said, what my grandma said, they're links. Don't be constrained by how it's done in England as to how you construct your family tree - the collage of the past doesn't have to be a genealogist's tree. We don't have to take what is a convention to be a norm that we've got to follow.'

Like anyone who embarks on the journey of tracing one's history, Paul has legacy on his mind, what he can leave his children. 'I wanted my children not to have to search very far for their heritage, and having children of mixed race I wanted them to know about their black heritage. The process of doing this work and writing these things has done what I wanted to do. Children generally don't want to know what their parents have got to say, and it's about leaving that story there for when they do want to know, or if they want to ignore it, because that's their choice as well. I want my work to ground my children, so that when someone asks them where your dad came from they'll be able to point to the work I have done and say that's our history.'

 

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