The mirror and the tomb: Africa, museums, and memory

African Arts, Autumn, 2001 by Francoise Lionnet

Gaston Bachelard, on the other hand, makes a distinction between "resonance" and "reverberation," or what he calls the "resonance-reverberation doublet" (1969:xix) in his phenomenological analysis of the poetic image. For him "resonances are dispersed on the different planes of our life in the world," and they are linked to "the outpourings of the mind" toward broad contexts. Resonance suggests the possibility of understanding and making connections with other feelings and echoes; by contrast "reverberations bring about a change in being" (p. xviii) that is effected through a transformation of consciousness and of the deepest aspects of our being. The end result of resonance and reverberation is that together they produce an identification with the image and thus are the means by which a subversion of the subject-object duality occurs. As Bachelard puts it: "At the level of the poetic image, the duality of subject and object is iridescent, shimmering, unceasingly active in its inversions" (p. xv).

For Patrick Houtinan (1991) it is Bachelard who allows us to understand the confusion of roles and the reversals that can occur between visitor and object, as is the Case in certain Native American museums of the Northwest in which exhibitions have been designed and controlled by those whose culture is on display. Thus, he argues, at the U'mista Cultural Centre in British Columbia it is the objects that appear to be observing the spectators, who become objectified by the masks whose eyes seem to be following their movements. There, the subject-position of visitors is threatened as they walk through a hall in which their presence is a form of intrusion. This experience is radically different from that elicited by the traditional ethnographic museum like the one in the Sahara, where the viewer's status as a full subject is reinforced. I noted earlier that in Tournier's narrative a blurring also occurs when the tourists are encouraged to act out the behavior of the oasis dwellers. But in that case, the blurring is only a necessary and fleeting moment of identification of the spectator with the "native." Once the moment is transcended, this temporary blurring ultimately serves to reinstate and reinforce the prevailing hierarchies and the existing relations of power.

For Idris, however, the experience of depersonalization that can accompany the first stage of spectatorship is a radically new one, and he never recovers from it. He experiences resonance because these objects are familiar and he is able to contextualize them immediately. He is also full of wonder at the way the objects are showcased: they become, like Bachelard's poetic images, a means for him to feel defamiliarization and disidentification. Idris sees his world in a new light, but rather than being transformed and eventually reassured by his passage through this moment of catharsis, he feels lost and numb. The unity of his being is never recovered. It is within himself that the split between subject and object, viewer and viewed, happens; he becomes a presence-absence, in Tournier's words, an "evanescent presence." In fact, in the museum, Idris is invisible to all the tourists--transparent, as it were. Whereas the displays serve to buttress the identity of these tourists, they steal Idris's. For the French visitors, the museum is a way to remember the beginnings or prehistory of civilization, and what has since been gained for them; but it forces Idris to remember his village, his mother's cooking, and What he is now in the process of losing forever: his culture and identity as an oasis dweller. In Tournier's novel the young man is set on a course from which there will be no return, and the museum becomes an unusual point of intersection of two axes: the axis of recovery of what is perceived as past (for the tourists looking at this past) and the axis of loss of that so-called past (for Idris looking for absent meaning).