In the second room of the Tate Modern Cezanne Exhibition, this portrait of Scipio has been calling me during both my previous visits; I had passed it by, with difficulty; its pain pulled on my body. I knew there was something deeper than my conscious intentions for the day. But now, on day three, my conscious intention is in harmony with that deeper pain, and I stand before the portrait, knowing I must shed a tear, in sorrow, in healing and in rage.
At the time of Cezanne’s portrait of Scipio, (a life model at the Art College of the Academie Suisse in Paris), ‘a photograph of an enslaved man named Gordan was broadly circulated within abolitionist networks: the image is a three-quarter view of the enslaved man’s back, criss-crossed with keloid sear tissue – irrefutable proof of a horrific whipping’. In Cezanne’s portrait, Scipio and Gordan are one.
“Our bodies have a form of knowledge that is different from our cognitive brains. This knowledge is typically experienced as a felt sense of constriction or expansion, pain or ease, energy or numbness”. Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies.
As Menakem advises, I take some time to allow my body to feel the constriction, the pain and the numbness, here in front of Cezanne’s portrait of this man. I allow my body to express its reaction; I do not judge or analyse; and, for a while, I just stay with what I feel; and with the tears.
It is the first step on the pathway to mending our hearts and bodies of the racialized trauma of the centuries of violent enslavement of black people. I am filled with such sorrow. And yet, paradoxically, so grateful, to have such a book as My Grandmother’s Hands: it helps heal me; and in doing so, helps to develop my understanding of the Cezanne portrait before me.
At the time of the rebellion of 1791, there were some half a million enslaved people living in the French colony of Haiti, who were replaced at a rate of 40,000 a year newly enslaved people stolen from Africa. ‘For more than a century, from 1825 to 1950, the price that France insisted Haiti pay for its freedom had one main consequence, namely: that the island’s economic and political development was subordinated to the indemnity. At bottom, the enslaved people of Haiti took the French Revolution’s message of emancipation more seriously than anyone else, including the French, and it cost them dearly.’ Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Ideology makes the economic case for reparations abundantly clear in his chapter on the ‘Extreme Inequality of Slave Societies’. Rage must be brought to completion through reparation.
Francisco Oller, close friend of Cezanne and an Impressionist painter born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, painted a portrait of Cezanne, painting outdoors in 1864, as they spent the day painting and in conversation, with Camille Pissarro, who was born in St Thomas. Oller would return home in 1865 and develop as an abolitionist and painter known for his depictions of decayed sugar plantations and New World class struggles.
I am grateful for Ellen Gallagher and her research; and for pointing out that Scipio wears thick cotton indigo workpants (denim), slave-produced on cotton plantations through-out the Americas; and that Scipio leans on a large bail of cotton. Picking cotton was indeed the immediate cause of the painful trauma of Menakem’s grandmother’s hands.