Jonathan C. Lewis
Author and Artist
Memories
A fictional travelogue; four minutes to read.
On a bench on Museum Island in Berlin, near the spires of the cathedral Berliner Dom, while boats float by on the Spree River, I’m committing to memory some of the world’s treasured antiquities. Remembering the past is what history teachers do.
Pergamon Museum exhibits Greek, Roman, Islamic and Near Eastern artistic triumphs. As I used to remind my students, the collections are a consequence of German archaeological expeditions—some say colonial imperialism, some say outright theft.
Museums are the PR departments for ancient civilizations. They bring moldering memories into my time and, until the day I was pressured to stop teaching, through me to my students. At a display case of ceramic pottery, some of the pieces chipped and cracked, my eyes were too watery to read the descriptive labels.
At the other end of my bench, two women are seated together. They’re separated by perhaps three decades. The younger woman is a dark beauty in a short cotton dress. The older woman is in slacks and a tailored jacket. They share perky noses, close-cropped sandy hair, full lips—a mother and daughter.
“Hello, are you American?” the younger woman asks, then adds, “My mother doesn’t speak English, but I like to practice mine.”
“Mother noticed you in the museum looking at the Ishtar Gate.” I wince, wondering if she also noticed the dark circles under my eyes. My unruly hair. My chewed fingernails.
“Aren’t the blue, green and gold glazed bricks wonderful?”
Nodding agreement, I ask, “Do you come here often?”
“Oh yes. This is our tradition. Mother started bringing me here when I was a little girl. She jokes that she’s as old as the artifacts.”
The daughter rises, hugs her mother’s arm closely, and says, “This is how I want to remember her. That’s what a museum is for, don’t you think?”
I say nothing. I don’t tell her that I’m trying to forget the day I assigned my students an essay requiring them to argue for or against museum labels with input from diverse ethnicities, races, nationalities. To draw my students out of their lazy thinking, I provoked a class discussion.
“Does including ignored voices on museum captions create meaningful change? Or are they merely a placebo, a way to pacify complaining constituencies, another form of othering?”
“Are museums succumbing to the tyranny of the ignorant mob? To cite a famous example, should passengers vote on how to fly the airplane?”
I pushed harder. “The Nazis eliminated their politically incorrect museum labels by banning ‘degenerate’ art. Instead of complicated museums labels, why not remove offensive art entirely?”
Before I even finished my point, a student of German descent stormed out, slamming the door. A blitzkrieg of student activism, parent anger and censorious school board meetings exploded. Pickets and petitions erupted like an ugly case of teenage acne. I was accused of student shaming. One colleague called me a micro-aggressor.
Ready to forget the past, for days I hovered over my laptop writing a museum label for my career. Still the history teacher, my resignation letter quoted an 1862 African Methodist Episcopal Church publication. "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” I didn’t mean it.
Intolerance masquerading as tolerance crippled me. Even fractured fifth century pottery reminds me of me.
