Promissory: Some Thoughts on Nya Lewis Williams’ Commit Us to Memory
Vancouver Art Gallery, 2020
From the perspective of the colonized, the colonial tragedy may be best described as several centuries of violence justified through the mythos of white civilization coupled with historical and other forms of erasure and institutional prejudice. It is from this standpoint that Black artists, intellectuals, and others seek to humanize or, more accurately, rehumanize their experiences, bodies, and histories. Similarly, Nanyamka (Nya) Lewis Williams’ Commit Us to Memory — the introductory piece in the Vancouver Art Gallery’s exhibition Where Do We Go From Here? — considers the position of Black Canadians in national narratives and the hypervisibility of Black bodies in Vancouver in particular. Through nuanced poetics and the juxtaposition of neoclassical architecture with Black thought, Commit Us to Memory trespasses upon the legacy of Canadian colonialism and impels viewers to “CALL MORAL IMPERIALISM BY NAME.”
Commit Us to Memory features several poetic texts presented in vinyl around the Vancouver Art Gallery’s third-floor rotunda, directly beneath its historic dome. In addition to Lewis Williams’ careful writing, her transgressive approach, and her radical incorporation of the VAG’s architecture, she uses typography and negative space in ways that give the work a sense of multivocality and tension, thereby giving readers the space to question who is speaking and to whom. Above the poems, on the lintels of each of the rotunda’s entrances, read the words, “THE MYTH OF THE BLACK CANADIAN” and “THE PROMISE TO THE BLACK CANADIAN.” These phrases act as different lenses through which viewers are invited to process the artist’s vinyl installation — the proverbial “writing on the walls.” The installation does not simply challenge the ambiguous, intangible idea that is Canada, it also challenges the very legacy of the institution in which the work is located.
On first impression, Commit Us to Memory is stunning, awe-inspiring, and difficult to reconcile. Lines such as, “AFTER PURPOSEFUL ERADICATION THE ONLY REASONABLE RESPONSE IS/PROMISSORY/NOTES OF LOVE,” lay bare the harrowing truths embodied by Black-freedom struggles and the foundational principles of non-violent protest. As an African-Canadian born in Montreal, raised in Vancouver, and educated in the Maritimes, I have grown accustomed to a particular historical and cultural invisibility, which manifests itself in the hypervisibility of my body in the country of my birth. Commit Us to Memory is as much a challenge to the normalcy of white, patriarchal, colonial rule as it is a reminder to Black Canadians that they come from profoundly devastating and beautiful histories, histories that beg us to consider what reconciliation — after colonialism, after slavery, after mass-murder and the apocalypse, for some — really looks like.
— Noah Lubendo, 2021
