Goodnight Colston. Mourning Slavery: Death Rites and Duppy Conquering in a Circum‐Atlantic City

In the wake of the riotous procession that toppled the statue of Edward Colston, this essay sketches an ethnographic itinerary through the spectral geographies of Bristol, a circum-Atlantic city haunted by the ghosts of slavery. The paper offers a Caribbean cosmological reading of the toppling and aqueous burial as a kind of duppy conquering, a vital act of social renewal that clears ground for processes of spiritual and affective repair. The paper then explores two rituals of restoration—a remembrance ceremony for an enslaved woman and an inchoate ancestral invocation upon an empty plinth—alongside other, kindred paths of repair in the long afterlife of Atlantic slavery.

You came down easy in the end.

The righteous wrench of two ropes in a grand plie.

Briefly, you flew, corkscrewed, then met the ground

With the clang of toy guns, loose change, chains, a rain of cheers …

And who carved you?

They took such care with that stately pose and propped chin.

Wise and virtuous, the plaque assured us.

Victors wish history odourless and static.

But history is a sneaky mistress.

Moves like smoke, Colston …

I think of you lying in the harbour

With the horrors you hosted.

There is no poem more succinct than that.

But still you are permanent.

You who perfected the ratio.

Blood to sugar to money to bricks.

Each bougie building we flaunt haunted by bones.

Children learn and titans sing

Under the stubborn rust of your name.

But the air is gently throbbing with newness …

“Hollow”, Vanessa Kisuule (2020)1