The Power of a Poem
At
breakfast this morning we were talking about cats. Then Malachi started talking
about ancient Egyptian cat mummies. We
remembered how we had seen one at the Academy of Natural Sciences when we lived
in Philadelphia. Then the kids
remembered how there was a real human mummy there too. Between bites of my husband’s blueberry buttermilk pancakes my nine year old
son commented, “Isn’t that just wrong, to have someone’s body in a
museum.” I breathed. How much should I tell them? Tell them the truth. “Yup, it is and some people have worked hard and
are still working to get people’s bodies and body parts returned to their
people and given a proper burial.” I
then told them about my friend Diana Ferrus who showed my sister and me around
the Western Cape of South Africa when we visited in August 2001. Through a friend of a friend I got connected
with her and she took us under her wing to poetry readings, cultural events and
drives out in the veld to visit her friends and family. She also told us the story of Sarah Bartmann and read us the poem she wrote for
her “I’ve Come to Take You Home.” Sarah
Bartman had been sexually exploited as a “scientific curiosity” both in her
life and death. After her death in 1815 she was dissected and a plaster cast of her
body as well as her skeleton and pickled brain and genitalia had been on
display in the Paris Musee de l’Homme as evidence of the link between ape and
man. They remained on display until 1974 and in the
museum until their return and burial in 2002.
I spared my children the graphic details of her exploited life and
simply said that people viewed this Khoisan woman as a freakish animal and that
her bones and parts of her body were at the museum. Then I read them Diana’s Poem, a love poem
offering peace, comfort and gratitude to a body that had not yet been honored. Then I read them the details in Diana's book about how Sarah Bartmann's body was returned to South Africa. An 1850 law declared that all museum
artifacts belong to the French state and could not be returned. Though there had been pressure put on the
French government to return her remains to South Africa, even a plea from
Nelson Mandela, there had been no real action to change the law. A French Senator was moved to introduce a
bill to make it possible for Sarah Bartmann's remains to be returned. When he found Diana’s poem on the internet,
he decided to include it in the bill to show how the people were "emotionally and psychologically affected by her remains still being in France."
With her permission, her poem was translated into French and read before
the senate. They voted unanimously to
return her remains and included the poem in the published bill. This was the first time a poem was included in a French law. I wonder how many other laws include poems? Diana was among the South African delegates
that went to Paris to fetch Sarah’s remains and bring them home. One year after I visited her, Diana read her poem at the burial of
Sarah Bartmann.
In a rare moment of grace, the children were
listening. I pleaded, “Do you see what
one poem can do? It can bring justice! It can help change a law! It can help right a
wrong!” Malachi asked me “Is that why
you write mommy?”
Read more about Diana Ferrus and Sarah Bartmaan here:
http://dianaferrus.com/ (this website is still under construction)
http://www.southafrica.info/about/history/saartjie.htm#.URayN5Zu2b8