Let’s put it plainly for once. I want the statue, the clock, the monument of national pride to wither and die. Putrefy, spoil, fester. I want its innards, a rotting black mass, to spill through the streets, one great thick flood, devouring building after building, washing away entire sections of the body politic, changing the nature of soil, leaving inside it, traces of this great disaster for new generations to find. In this image, I and by extension, black subjects, emerge the victors. I know my dreams of destruction have a pedagogical function. I know they exalt my consciousness. This, this is the right kind of destruction, I just know it. How? I just do. I look at the statue, the clock, the monument of national pride and I am confused by the nuances claimed by certain fighting factions. I think I know a theory or historical event well enough, I think I have mastered thinking through contradiction, I think I have survived in the entrails of this constitutional monarchy long enough to form critical opinion, I think I have read enough surveys, answered enough questionnaires and requests for comment, scrolled through enough vox pops, devoured enough grainy video footage of sinking effigies, become astute as digesting ‘cultural conversation’ to understand the problem. I have grasped the colonial aftermath of depravity with both hands but all I have to do is look up, then to my left and to my right and there the ‘blackamoor’ (young boy? young black boy? child? slave? negation? subject?) is – persisting. There are no forgotten towns or cities, no more innocent than the country that birthed them. There are no ‘backward’ people unable to grasp historical rupture. They understood the move from feudalism to industrial capitalism, they understood the move from the house to the street, they understood the closure of the factory, they understood the seizure of land. They understand the boy. Empire's enduring promise: sustained and devastating pressure which gives way to erosion, a thousand cuts, a thousand little deaths. In the Empty Alcove, time stops. Noise is temperate. ‘Contested histories’ / ‘Institutional self-reflection’ / ‘Accountability’ / ‘International Art English’ are banished. They are the wrong kind of information, no longer admitted into public record. No more quarreling about representations of violence, let us finally enact some. Let us begin to condone. We can change the course of History, we simply remove the object which causes pain, cut it off at the source. We release the pain by destroying the object. This act is a salve, not atonement, not redemption, nor restitution, rediscovery, nor reconciliation. It is a duty. An ethical responsibility. Others have shown more mercy, think of those revolutionary subjects who spared lives they could so easily have taken. Think of the restraint. Think of anyone who believes in life as motion, as process, as flux. When C.L.R. James writes of the mercy shown during slave revolts from those who had known nothing but ‘rape, torture, degradation and at the slightest provocation, death’¹1. C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins (New York: Vintage Books, 1963), 88., he redefines the function of destruction. Yes, destruction is permissible. He permits ‘the destruction of what they knew was the cause of their sufferings; and if they destroyed much it was because they had suffered much’²2. C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins (New York: Vintage Books, 1963), 88.. Do you see, it is because we have suffered much that we are permitted to destroy. It is because I can go to the museum and touch the remains of human beings that I want to scorch the earth. How does the statue, the clock, the monument of national pride stand a chance against such logic? It becomes easy to dispose of, consigned to the dustbin of history, alongside the spiked heads of colonial slave masters. Perhaps the action is easier to perform if we remember that stone, wood, cast iron are nothing like flesh. The taste of national monuments is the taste of death! Strategies for bureaucratic evasion include: extended consultation, poorly advertised community town halls, referendums, task forces, reports, interviews, open letters, and public statements. Participation in the spectacle renders one mute. We long to cut right down the middle, to rummage inside, locate the heart of the matter. Well, this requires the destruction of the world, friends. In the meantime, the artist evades evasion by creating another timeline which challenges the hegemony of the clock, the order of continuity that defines both the time of his life and the time of the ‘blackamoor’ (young boy? young black boy? child? slave? negation? subject?). What of the time of ours? Reorganising the experience of human duration requires detailed attention, a repetition with a difference. It embraces the circle, spiral, the rhizome, over the certainty of the straight line. One refuses to become a historian of injury. Nothing like passing the statue, the clock, the monument of national pride, glancing at it briefly and then averting one’s gaze, feeling no shame about this routine. Nothing like an overidentification with street names, signs, buildings, objects, fantasies, which drives you into the streets frothing at the mouth, ready to expel the black surplus. Judiciousness where none exists. Let’s put it plainly for once, what to do with a history that should not exist? What to do with a counter-history that won’t satisfy your thirst for vengeance? What to do when representations of an ideal past smother public discourse, obscuring the physical matter beneath? What to do when stone, wood, and cast iron mean more than the living? The statue, the clock, the monument of national pride could be anywhere, it could be tucked away on a street called ‘BLACK BOY LANE’, it could be encapsulated in a radical social movement called ‘RHODES MUST FALL’, it explains the events of half the world and feels always, eerily familiar. The echo is sensed. To create another timeline is to save what cannot be saved from the domain of reason, and enter it into the domain of feeling. To build a new infrastructure for encountering and understanding recurrence. If this place cannot be the ideal society that one wishes for, it must at least carry out a ritualistic expulsion of violence, it must at least become cognisant of all the pain and suffering that has not not been attended to. It must at least, it must at least, it must at least. Enough. Destruction will bring us closer to what we are owed. Destruction will be our inventory. It does sound sweet, it does sound possible.³3. To paraphrase Dionne Brand in ‘Phyllis’. Dione Brand, ‘Phyllis’, in No Language Is Neutral (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1990), 11. Life is still defined by a series of quandaries. How do states manage the productive and unproductive labour that powers industrial and finance capital? By culling. What are those modes of internal difference that are core to capitalism’s function? The dark underbelly. What is the historical cause of the development of hierarchies of human difference? The eternal mystery. Where several complex questions remain, clouding judgement, instilling hesitation, fear and doubt in the actor, sometimes an action provides the answer. A hammer to a window, a police officer knocked from his horse, rolling the statue into a nearby river can all quickly clarify what is at stake. When I dream about shattering the glass of the museum display, what am I dreaming of? When I try to forge a connection between myself and the ‘blackamoor’ (young boy? young black boy? child? slave? negation? subject?), what am I doing? Providing an answer that might cure me of the agony of not knowing. Reminding myself I am alive. Signalling that I will not be crushed without a fight. The destruction, disappearance, forced loss of an object is not a one-time event. Its aftermath will drench the world in a new colour. Presently, we can only see the tether around the figure’s neck, the big red lips of the statue, the clock, the monument of national pride. When the object’s weight is capable of destroying any surface it touches, it cannot be rehomed. Think of how its rot will give way to mould, spreading like the living organism it is. It should not move from one counter of display to another; it should be allowed to disintegrate, to go in search of a new form, one which could finally restore dignity to those its history has brutalised. After its destruction, this red colour, a pigment so wrapped up in shame, that red toothy grin on black skin will take its place amongst the green and red visions of time to come, it will infuse itself with particles in the air, returning to the world, a gleam, an eternal ray of sunshine that touches everything. This presupposes a bond. We make the mistake of imagining that destruction offers nothing but ashes and broken remnants. The Empty Alcove is a threat, a warning. Only those who take memory seriously can look at what is dead and conjure, as if by magic, another mode of human organisation where representations cease, where the repeated patterns animating a society are so self-evident that there is no longer a need to imbue them in objects. We will climb out of the pit, answering the questions that remain with more questions. Destruction is a beautiful end, an end to the practice of narrative, event, and story as conduits for understanding life on earth. Puncturing a narrow road, the beginning of an open intellectual tradition that repurposes the otherwise unbearable, the uninhabitable, making it operative and then beautiful. The only rehearsal necessary is practicing our goodbyes to the statue, the clock, the monument of national pride. That you are reading this indicates it will not be easy. Making freedom the object of history⁴4. Ruth Gilmore Wilson, Abolition Geography: Essays Toward Liberation (Verso: London, 2022) will require a myriad of destructive acts. It will require us to witness the fire started by a riotous crowd and do nothing to extinguish it. Do not fear, in amongst the commotion, the targets will become clear, nobody who does not already deserve it will be subject to wrath. Repeat after me: what should not exist should not exist. Contrary to popular belief, to reckon with history is not only to remember but to internalise the imperative that remembering must result in the development of a strategy which renders violence impossible. Let's put it plainly for once, there are certain public discourses that shame us. Before we begin to formulate certain questions for public consumption, 'What in your opinion do you think should happen to the Blackboy Clock Statue? / 'Do you think the building of Blackboy House should be renamed?’ / 'Please choose three words that best describe how the statue makes you feel?’ the words should collect in our mouths and obstruct our airways, choking us before they can become speech acts. We should be brought to our knees, gasping for air. Why aren’t we? Certain attachments drag us asunder. Certain defences of the nation state should bring with them a mortification that alerts us to the unwavering nature of moral clarity in others. Only those who imagine freedom freely given play the game of persuasion. Those who have spent their lives correcting the record should not be afraid to appear didactic. On the contrary, didacticism revives us! We should be unafraid of arguments, treatise, polemics, we should not compromise, we should be bullish in our attempts to rediscover what it is that separates us from the sadistic impulse that drives capital’s circulation, we should encourage people to kill those parts of themselves which require another’s subjugation. We should not tire as it becomes evident that many are unwilling or unable to. Severing the representative bond, murdering the statue, the clock, the monument of national pride will alter the path, enact a break, it will collapse the obligation to accept stasis, it will pierce the sky (if only momentarily) and inaugurate emancipatory aesthetic traditions once maligned. Ruination! It can tell us what to do with our bodies, how to rescue time from its captors, it can provide an affective charge that reorientates us. All this begins with striking the object and watching it rot.