(A Game from Anthony Redmond)
“Too many Captain Cooks”
-Rembarrnga man, Paddy Wainburrangga
In 2020, as colonial Australia commemorates its founding myth on the 250th anniversary of the arrival of Capt. James Cook’s death ships along the eastern seaboard of Australia and New Zealand, a global revolt is erupting against state violence in settler colonies. The magnificent insurrection against police killings of Black people in the USA has inspired Indigenous and enslaved peoples in many other former British colonies to rise up against the lethal power of the state which continues to inflict such a murderous toll on their communities.
One small form that this revolt has taken is the creative-destructive redesigning of the statues of imperial commanders and slave masters which stain their bloody trajectory across the globe. Taking inspiration from the great tradition of black humor which has served to sustain the hopes of “the wretched of the Earth” we ask you to unfurl the pirate sails of your imagination to elaborate by any means necessary on the following question:
What should we do with those too many statues of Captain Cook marking the track of imperial violence from Cook’s home port of Whitby Yorkshire, to St James Square London, the mercantile center of slave capitalism, to the Islands of Hawaii (where Cook quickly outwore his welcome), to Botany Bay New South Wales, to Cooktown north Queensland, to Victoria Square Christchurch New Zealand, to Victoria British Columbia, and so ad infinitum?
Responses
Jason Abdelhadi:
Decapitate them all simultaneously. The headless bodies can remain so long as the commemorative plaques are replaced with instructions to “Bring Your Own Head”. People around the world can bring different items for the heads like pumpkins, birthday cakes, a bowl of live worms, etc. At the end of each year a calendar will be released of photos of the choicest of these cephalic substitutions
Joël Gayraud
Pour ramener le capitaine Cook à la cuisine et à son concept :
Prendre une statue en bronze du Capitaine Cook.
La descendre de son piédestal et la remplacer par le Moaï Hakananaï’a, actuellement recélé par le British Museum.
Placer à côté de la statue du capitaine Cook située désormais au niveau du sol une cuisinière à l’ancienne, en fonte, alimentée au bois et en état de marche.
Tordre la main droite de la statue de façon à ce qu’elle tienne la poignée d’une poêle à frire placée sur la cuisinière. Allumer le feu. Mettre de l’huile dans la poêle. Faire griller une belle tranche de foie de veau. En fin de cuisson, cassez deux œufs sur la tranche et attendre une minute que le blanc prenne. Retirer la poêle du feu. Avec une spatule prendre le foie de veau et les œufs et les déposer sur la tête de la statue.
Un chœur mixte de danseurs hawaïens et phéniciens de tous sexes dansera en l’honneur de Lono et d’Astarté jusqu’à la tombée de la nuit avant d’aller banqueter sous les tamariniers.
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To bring Captain Cook back to the concept of cooking:
Take a bronze statue of Captain Cook.
Lower it from its pedestal and replace it with the Moai Hakananaia, currently appropriated by the British Museum.
Place next to the statue of Captain Cook (now located at ground level) an old-fashioned cast-iron stove, fueled by wood and in good market condition.
Twist the statue’s right hand so that it holds the handle of a frying pan placed on the stove. Light the fire. Put oil in the pan. Grill a nice slice of veal liver. When it is cooked, break two eggs on the slices and wait a minute for the egg whites to thicken. Remove the pan from the heat. With a spatula take the liver veal and eggs and lay them on the head of the statue.
A mixed choir of Hawaiian and Phoenician dancers of all sexes will dance in honor of Lono and Astarte until nightfall before having a meal under the tamarind trees.
Guy Girard
D’UN USAGE POSSIBLE DES STATUES DU CAPITAINE COOK
Ces statues du capitaine Cook, si elles sont en bronze, sont creuses. Je préconise donc de les couper toutes en deux, à parts égales, dans le sens de la hauteur. Chacune des moitiés de ces statues sera ensuite munie sur un de ses côtés de quelques charnières tandis que les autres moitiés le seront de loquets pour permettre que puissent être fermées ces belles boîtes anthropomorphes. Auparavant on aura pris soin de souder sur les parois intérieures de ces statues des pointes en acier de cinq à douze centimètres de longueur : ces statues du capitaine Cook ont donc désormais un indéniable air de famille avec la fameuse Vierge de Nuremberg. Comme celle-ci, elles seront dans les premiers temps de l’émeute universelle habitées par des hôtes qu’on ne rechignera pas à croire satisfaits d’un tel accueil : ces milliardaires que l’on sait peu claustrophobes puisqu’ils se préparent au tourisme spatial, par exemple.
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A POSSIBLE USE FOR CAPTAIN COOK STATUES
These statues of Captain Cook, if in bronze, are hollow. I therefore recommend they all be cut in two, in equal vertical parts. Each of the halves of these statues will then be provided on one of its sides with a few hinges while the other halves with latches, in order to allow these beautiful anthropomorphic boxes to be closed. Care will have been taken beforehand to weld steel spikes five to twelve centimeters in length to the inner walls of these statues: these statues of Captain Cook now have an undeniable resemblance to the famous Virgin of Nuremberg. Like the latter, they will be in the early days of the universal uprising inhabited by guests who we will not be reluctant to believe satisfied with such a welcome: for example, those billionaires who we know are getting a little claustrophobic, preparing as they are for space tourism.
Allan Graubard:
Paint him up in gaudy colors and make up with a fabulous hat, sparkling high heels dangling from his upraised hand and the scroll become a tube for fantastical flowers from Zothique. As for the cylindrical plinth, crator it with pick axes, so that it resembles a diseased leg. Then let kids draw whatever they want on the supporting rectangular plinths below. Each year on the anniversary of the “work” surround the statue with a Rube Goldberg assortment of instruments and go to it till cock crow.
Clive Holloway:
I’ve noticed that the gravitas of the Cook statue in Whitby is almost permanently undermined by the presence of a seagull sitting on his head.
Stelli Kerk:
They ate Captain Cook in Hawaii, right? He should be a cookbook.
Rik Lina:
For me the statues of Captain Cook may stay, although he certainly was not the “discoverer” of Australia. Everybody knows now that the Indonesian Bugy-sailors were there before (and even the European Portuguese and Dutch!), but they must be placed upside-down to show Cook’s antipodal origin.
Irene Plazewska:
Make him into a seagull nesting box?
Anthony Redmond:
A modest proposal for the Captain Cook statues around the world
1. Lower all the statues of Captain Cook from their imperial plinths and place them at ground level
2. Insert a scroll into Cook’s hands.
3. On that scroll is written the following words of Cook’s unheeded secret instructions from Lord James Douglas, President of the British Royal Society, the sponsors of his voyage.
“To check the petulance of the Sailors and restrain the wanton use of Fire Arms. To have it still in view that shedding the blood of these people is a crime of the highest nature – They are human creatures, the work of the same omnipotent Author, equally under his care with the most polished European, perhaps being less offensive, more entitled to his favour. They are the natural, and in the strictest sense of the word, the legal possessors of the several Regions they inhabit. No European nation has a right to occupy any part of their country or settle among them without their voluntary consent. Conquest over such people can give no just title;
4. Install a set of mini h-fi speakers in each of Cook’s ears and have these instructions broadcast from the statues each day
5. This speech will be followed by a recitation of it in the local Indigenous language.
6. This will be followed by a recitation of the names of every Indigenous person known to have died at the hands of police and colonial violence.
7. Repeat on a continuous loop.
8. Abolish the police force.
Tony Roehrig:
Tear open the hollow entrails of each statue, releasing the miasma of carceral imperialism. Fill the hollows with the seeds and the eggs of the trampled and the extinct. Remove the arms and the legs. Remold them into sails and rudders then reattach them to the seed and egg packed shell of the new ships. Fill the head with the wonderful fresh air of the South Pacific.
The new launches will be christened Team Ecstasy and will be set to sail retracing Criminal Cook’s route, this time it will be reestablishing through the dispersal of its cargo the beautiful ecstasy of an earth unchained and its residents once again Free!
Go Team Ecstasy!
Ron Sakolsky:
Mutiny is Within You
I wholeheartedly endorse the recent spate of spray painting, toppling and beheading of all of the monuments to Captain Cook and his ilk that litter the pavement of civilization. In this same anti-authoritarian spirit, I have always been especially inspired by the visceral interventions of our animal comrades in debasing and humiliating not only Cook but all of the statuesque men-on-horseback that insult our eyes on a daily basis. As I see it, it is an act of poetic justice when these pathetic memorials to pomposity that ubiquitously pollute the landscape are casually pissed upon by dogs and merrily shit upon by birds.
Channeling my own animal instincts, whenever a nauseating affront to my finely-tuned political sensibilities appears before me in the grotesque form of yet another statue of a conquistador, my immediate impulse is to vomit all over it. The underlying dynamic at play here being that a solution which is emetic can also be cathartic. Nevertheless, liberal reformists might say that the personal satisfaction of merely throwing up on a statue of Cook is not enough when it comes to addressing the tangled web of institutional racism since even excrement can be easily washed away and forgotten. After all, statues are not to be confused with statutes which can only be changed by votes at the ballot box. However, engaging in the cruel farce of electoral politics would only serve to make me sick to my stomach once again. Therefore, I would contend that in physically throwing-up on these polite vestiges of Cook’s murderous heritage, we are in turn throwing-over his manufactured mystique. By spontaneously puking on his iconic statues as symbols of empire and white supremacy, we are blatantly barfing on the simple-minded reverence for imperial heroes that pervades Eurocentric culture.
Does the poisonous broth of too many Cooks unsettle your stomach? Never fear. Nothing says “Fuck You” like direct action!
Th.D. Typaldos:
We could melt the materials from which they are made (steel, metal, marble, etc.) and create zoos where we would exhibit samples of people of the bourgeoisie. It would be the remnants of an era that would go down in history as the “era of the capitalists.” Again, we could make slingshots and bullets for them. Children would use them to target supermarkets, banks and academies. Also, a good use that they could bring to us is to create books that no one will be able to read because, quite simply, they will neither be able to keep them nor open them. Inside will be written the raids and the speeches of all those colonialists over the centuries. Thus, all the butchers who set foot on foreign shores will be completely forgotten.
Tim White:
The statue of James Cook at Botany Bay should be melted down and the metal recast into 232 bullets to symbolise the number of years of violence in the ongoing war of colonisation on this continent.
The site should be repatriated to the Gweagal and Kameygal peoples. Perhaps, with their consent, a re-education-therapy centre could be built to teach the descendants of the colonisers about white privilege and ignorance and the damage they do to the families, communities and cultures of the Indigenous owners. Perhaps there could also be special section devoted to repairing and restoring (where possible) the complex ecology of living creatures which have been devastated by colonial agricultural and hunting practices.
Perhaps it could be a place for the repatriation and apologies for unpaid wages, royalties, stolen land and items of cultural importance. There would also need to be acknowledgement for the abduction of children, the knee-jerk incarceration of Indigenous youth and the deaths, in many cases murder of persons, by police, prison wardens and state employees. Institutions and individuals which have perpetrated this violence could expect to face a people’s court with severe consequences. At the very least there would need to be an admission of their crimes and recognition of the hurt and suffering they have caused.
With appropriate guidance it may be possible for us, the descendants of the occupiers, whose arrival caused such immense suffering, dislocation and trauma, to acknowledge the damage done. This infusion of truth-speaking would do the psyche of the nation immense good, purging the lies, self-deception and misplaced sense of entitlement which we have been nurtured on and ultimately helping heal some of the wounds inflicted on Indigenous Australians.
Assuming the success of this project perhaps funds could also be found to research and build a time machine to transport this anti-colonial memorial centre back to the time of Cook’s landing. This way he, his officers and crew could be de-programmed from the cult of god, country and empire. This might also be effective strategy against subsequent invasion attempts as well. Strategies could be developed to guard against the next wave of want-to-be invaders to stop them wandering about the planet and applying their sinister legalistic mumbo-jumbo (‘terra nullius) to claim what never was, and never will be theirs.
Such a temporal intervention could see the vaunted ‘discovery’ of Australia transformed into a focal point for resistance to the British Empire, and a watershed moment where the great wave of imperialist conquest is halted before it can further blight human history.