The Falcon Cannot Hear the Falconer. Photo: Magdalene Odundo.
Ceramics at Houghton Hall
By Magdalene Odundo
Our response to history is so often a matter of identifying with the bits we like and leaving behind the bits we don’t. Visiting a stately home is a chance to reflect on that.
I recently visited Houghton Hall in Norfolk, a house built for lavish entertainment by then prime minister, Robert Walpole.
This summer at Houghton, while moving through rooms of ridiculous opulence, with riches sucked in from all corners of the globe, the visitor could start to be beguiled by objects with much simpler shapes, ceramics in glossy black and tan. Magdalene Odundo’s ceramics immediately begin to make you question (if you weren’t already) what the rest of the world was doing to enable all this extravagance And then you come into the Marble Parlour. Here you are confronted with an astonishing structure standing on the table. Titled The Falcon Cannot Hear the Falconer, it is made of jasperware, with black forms and figures superimposed in the way that classical Wedgwood designs have delicate white nymphs and foliage. But here, the images are of manacles and other instruments of control and torture, the bodies of slaves lined up below decks in ships, and scenes of labour and the carrying of heavy burdens. Curved blades, which could be palm leaves but look menacing, hang from the tiers.
‘The work we have to do can never be left behind.’
This work developed when Odundo was exploring the work of Josiah Wedgwood, the ardent abolitionist. Near the top of the structure is a relief portrait of Wedgwood, alongside one of the formerly enslaved Olaudah Equiano, with whom Wedgwood corresponded.
The reparations work Quakers in Britain have committed ourselves to involves confronting these uncomfortable aspects of the past, facing up to the participation of our own community, and then trying to find a response. But what compensation can possibly be adequate? It is possible to work towards answers by listening to those whose communities and futures were harmed. But making reparations can never give us a clean new beginning. We cannot let that be a way of making us comfortable again.
At the very top of Odundo’s centrepiece is a Kenyan woman railing against recent injustice. If that allows us to feel that it’s far away, not really our business, the title pulls us back. It is taken from Yeats’ poem ‘The Second Coming’. The ‘widening gyre’ in that poem, together with its menacing tone, warn that the spiral of injustice and disconnection whirls ever wider, and sweeps us with it. The work we have to do can never be left behind. Peace work doesn’t just mean solving particular conflicts but involves recognising how people make enemies of each other.
So does reparations work include becoming aware of all the ways we are entangled in that widening gyre? It is difficult, but it may be an essential part of our spiritual work to see what we can do to extricate ourselves.
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