Taking Possession: Symbols of Empire and Nationhood

Taking Possession

The 1969 planting of the flag of the United States of America on the moon, made symbolic with Aldrin's invocation of a Christian God presuming a universal appeal as a message of peace, ¹ is in one sense similar to Christopher Columbus's voyage across the Atlantic five hundred years earlier ² (see figure 1). Both journeys signaled the discovery of a new world and initiated the transportation of ideologies and practices of known lands into new terrain. Separated by centuries, these landings are only superficially different, the one terrain unpopulated, the other not so. Columbus came in peace, [Begin Page 33] bearing the flag of his patrons, proffering shiny gifts, and intending to convert and civilize pagan populations. He and the Spanish crown would have viewed the New World peoples as idolaters—people who had not yet been the beneficiaries of God's word. This religious classification coincided with the state's juridical schema, allowing Columbus a "discover and gain clause," a divine justification for taking an earthly possession. ³

Sylvia Wynter examines the parallel constructions of religious superiority and the conceit of Western thought. The European attitude to the religions of the Amerindian peoples encountered in the Americas was fairly similar to Europe's conception of the religious and cultural practices of Africans and other groups, including Asians, who were colonized in the East and transported to the West. All religions other than Christianity were considered to be the work of the devil, and this derivative "evil" had to be cast out from such peoples if they were to be humanized. ⁴ What was it that made the Roman Catholic God a superior one? The practice of human sacrifice among the Indians, the close association between dance and religion in African culture (art, culture and religion being indivisible), and the capacity of African religions and of Hinduism to incorporate other gods into their pantheon, diminished the integrity of these religions in the eyes of the Christian monotheistic believer. For the Indians of the Americas and the peoples of the African continent, there was also another reason why their religions were not construed as born of the divine. These cultures were perceived as largely oral, and for European civilization, "culture and humanity resided in writing. Without writing there was a void." ⁵ Indeed, there were other methods by which different peoples recorded their own conquests and genealogies (and it is condescending to depict conquered peoples as unlettered, passive victims), but these were not typically comprehended as legitimate forms, and perhaps they still are not. In Haiti the veve and the voodoo flags combine both the practice of religion and the pictorializing and social mythologizing of history carried over in the nonscribal part of African culture to the Caribbean. ⁶ Such religious practices syncretically embraced Christianity on the new terrain (see figure 2).

A mythologizing of history and culture has also taken place in scribal cultures, with obvious examples being the history of the Greeks, which is rendered through a cosmology of gods and goddesses, and the history of the Indus region, which is embodied in the Ramayana and Mahabharata, documents that would become the Hindu scriptures. Such cultural and symbolic texts have remained largely submerged in the writing of traditional histories because they typically do not satisfy the criteria for a historiography, criteria that are indebted to a Western scriptocentric tradition. Michel-Rolph Trouillot describes the submersion as a "silencing of the past" and argues for a retrieval of these subtexts. He states, "Silences . . . show the limits of strategies that imply a more accurate reconstitution of the past, and therefore the production of a "better history," simply by an enlargement of the empirical base." ⁷ How the history and culture of different societies have been skewed in Western interpretations does not become apparent until long after the events, when some silences are broken.It took nearly five centuries before what was described as...