The Toni Morrison Solution

Britain is full of statues to Victorian men
who in their time became figureheads
for the vulture venture capital of Empire
that at the time had no known downside
to report of. The losers were robbed
of the words and the publishing means
to speak their truth with, and were often
forbidden to learn to read and write.

Britain has that many of these statues
where the plinth is effectively made
from the industrial slavery that the figures
above it made their wealth and fame on,
that it is only with the bicentenary
of the partial end of the slave based economy
that we became aware of how much the powerful
relied on slavery being taboo, kept hidden
For their reputation to be left unexamined.

Long after slavery ended the real truth
of how that economy worked would disgust
the modern public, who were previously
'sheltered' from all knowledge of it.

The question of how we repent for what
our predecessors did has become rather hot.
Do we pull the statues down? Relabel them
and leave them where they are? Put them
in museums and get those institutions
to re-explain the deeds that inspired the statue
to be made in the first place? The choices are many.....

The solution I would prefer is that these statues
should all be relabelled so as to follow the example
in the writings of Toni Morrison where she makes personal
the pain of slavery, the young black men casually killed,
the rapes of young girls, the broken and reconstructed families,
the non-existent health care, and the absolute poverty.

But where she writes about the pain she writes even more with love,
to acknowledge her love for, and bring to life, those who suffered
under the unreasoned detachment through which the laws
by which industrial slavery was organised,
not forgetting the Jim Crow laws that followed after.