Treatment of statues merits full evaluation
THE Black Lives Matter protests in the United States, following the murder of George Floyd and the killing of other African Americans by white police, have triggered similar protests in many parts of the world, including
Dunedin and other New Zealand cities. They’ve also stimulated renewed interest, sometimes destructive, in the statues of prominent people erected, mainly in the 19th and early 20th centuries, in public spaces.
In Dunedin Queen Victoria, in Queen’s Gardens, once daubed with paint to protest against colonisation, has been garlanded with potatoes in memory of the Irish famines.
Robbie Burns, in the Octagon, commonly described, until the closure of the Oban hotel on the corner of the Octagon and Lower Stuart St, as sitting with his back to the kirk (St Paul’s Cathedral) and his face to the pub, has attracted placards reading ‘‘Rapist’’ and ‘‘Complicit in slavery’’ (‘‘Seducer’’ and ‘‘Almost complicit in slavery’’ might have been more accurate).
In 1786 (when profiting from slavery was widespread in Britain, including Scotland, and the antislavery movement was just beginning) Burns was in desperate financial straits; marriage to the woman who was carrying his twins was opposed by her father, who was pursuing him with a warrant for arrest; and he was condemned, and being formally humiliated, as a fornicator, by the kirk. He planned to escape (with another woman) to Jamaica and work as ‘‘book keeper’’ on a slaveowning sugar estate.
But he didn’t: the success of the ‘‘Kilmarnock volume’’ Poems,
Chiefly in the Scottish dialect brought fame and some cash, and he went to Edinburgh instead. Six years later he denounced slavery in The Slave’s Lament. That evolution in thinking (repentance, perhaps?), consistent with his rejection of class distinction (Is There for Honest Poverty, better known as ‘A Man’s a Man for a’ That, published in 1795) and his sympathy for the American and French revolutions, should be celebrated.
It would be a pity (and not just because an image of it heads this column) if Burns’ statue were to be damaged, or his work blacklisted. What he did must trump what he considered doing.
Though Burns’ plan to work for a slaveholding business sparks dismay, as should his libertine and exploitative attitude to women, those aspects of his life shouldn’t prevent New Year celebrators from singing
Auld Lang Syne, participants in Burns’ Suppers knifing a haggis to his Address, or those in loving relationships from experiencing a fellowfeeling on hearing O my
Luve’s like a red, red rose, even in Dunedin, where, though a few of Civis’s roses were still flowering in June, they were far from ‘‘newly sprung’’.
Every human is a complex being: a mixture of good and bad. Honesty about that’s important, but, as Charles Brasch wrote in a letter to the ODT on March 21, 1972, responding to a reviewer who downgraded a writer’s work because of aspects of his lifestyle, ‘‘art is long, life short, it is art, the writer’s work, which continues to interest us; the life is irrelevant to it.’’
The Dunedin Symphony Orchestra’s 2020 programme has been cancelled as a result of Covid19. Its daytoday expenses haven’t, though, so many of its subscribers have changed their ticket subscription fees to donations. To thank them the DSO staged a nocharge chamber music concert at Hanover Hall on Saturday evening, which became available on YouTube at 7pm on Sunday.
With increasing age, Civis and spouse avoid evening concerts (the DSO’s matinees are appreciated), but sitting in bed with the laptop perched on a cushion was a relaxing way to enjoy just over an hour (a sensible concert length) of works by Schubert (quartet), Mozart (trio), and JC Bach (quintet plus continuo), and arrangements by Neil Mueller for two trumpets, with closeups of the performers from a variety of angles, before dousing the light and sleeping soundly.
Thank you, DSO musicians, for an enjoyable performance (it’s still available on YouTube).