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A review of a Story of Bones

2 Comments

J. D. Edwards
July 13, 2023 at 10:30 pm

I am an American viewer of this documentary. I am about as far removed from St. Helena as one can get. I understand your frustration at seeing your community portrayed in a way that you feel distorts the story. However, this objective viewer felt the documentary did a stellar job of telling, in 95 minutes and from Nina’s point of view, her involvement with the project. The interaction of the community with your colonial governors is not made up, but caught directly on camera. The tensions at meetings, caught on camera. Contrary to your claim that the documentary did not show that there are at least 2 known “Old African Graveyards,” it did just that: the relevant artifacts are shown. I think the filmmakers took pains to be fair and accurate. That it took 14 plus years for those persons to be re-interred is a shame and a disgrace. That some were relegated to a segregated section of your cemetery, overgrown and unkempt, in a mass grave, is — in this day and age — pathetic. That the proposal for those “disturbed” at the fuel depot was not followed and that they, too, ended up piled up and buried (again) in a mass grave is testament to the second class (if that) status given to those people. Your 4x great grandparents should not have been owed by anyone and mine should not have been kidnapped, transported, raped or enslaved either. However, what I found most unsettling in your article (and by some portrayed in the film) is a willingness to accept the unacceptable, and a willingness to pretend that the fate of those poor souls — and those shipped out again under the guise, no… the deliberate lie that they were “indentured servants” to toil on British-owned slave plantations in the Caribbean– is disconnected from from 4,500 or so of you who remain on St. Helena. That is sad and wrong. The British did, in fact, re-bury the very dead and decomposed remains of King Richard II dug up in car park and it didn’t take them 14 years to do it. But when you are convinced you deserve 2nd class status, you don’t even get the crumbs of that. The filmmakers didn’t set out to make Saints look bad, and they didn’t. They just captured reality. The British government is doing that, looking bad, racist and woefully out of touch. I will wholeheartedly promote “Bones” in the hope I can encourage members of the African diaspora in America to see if they can make the trip to this forgotten spot so they can resurrect the lost history of the Middle Passage. I hope by doing so that they find not just a piece of their history — our shared history — but your history, too. I hope instead of that history being whitewashed, fictionalized and/or erased, it can be celebrated. After all, if you can celebrate the empty grave of Napoleon I (who was moved to and buried in Paris in 1840, 183 years ago) surely celebrating the stolen lives of tens of thousands of unnamed, unknown, innocent Africans –whose only sin was being born in black skin and not white — surely an ounce of compassion and (checking my notes) Anglican Christian kindness can be spared to treat them kindly and inter them gently in singular, marked and well-tended graves. They deserve better and you all will be better persons for doing so. I will end my rant here in hopes that the universality of our shared experience moves you to reconsider your negativity about this film and marvel at the impact it has made on the hundreds of thousands or millions who will view it, Google St. Helena and search for the Middle Passage and its role in this complicated epoch of history. May their souls rest in peace.

Anonymous
September 25, 2023 at 3:53 am

I just viewed ‘The Story of Bones’ and my heart aches for the untold suffering and loss. It seems nobody is able or willing to provide the funding necessary to properly memorialize and preserve Rupert’s Valley. Clearly the people of St. Helena cannot reasonably be expected to bear that burden. I wonder if the necessary funding and resources could be asked of the United Nations. Perhaps the valley could even be designated a UNESCO world heritage site. These are only my thoughts. As the film so appropriately indicated such decisions are for the people of St. Helena.

For what it is, my opinion as an atheist is that our afterlives exist only in the form of the memories and records we leave for those who come after us. The ‘story of bones’, the origins, tragedy, and fate of these people should be memorialized. We cannot know their names, but we should never forget the tragic story we know of them, including the neglectful manner in which we failed to memorialize them.

I hope everybody finds their own peace.

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