Laura Gascoigne
September/October 2020
Six weeks ago, a Hampstead neighbour left a book on our doorstep. We have got used to acts of kindness from strangers; at the start of lockdown another neighbour posted a book of poetry through our door to cheer us up. My husband read it, and it did. But this book was different, as was its intention. It was a copy of Reni Eddo-Lodge’s bestseller Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race, with an unsigned post-it note attached. “I’m sure you are good people,” was the gist of its message, “but every time I go up and down the street the lamps in your 301 Moved Permanently
window make me uncomfortable”. I can’t quote it word for word as it was thrown away. The book wasn’t thrown away; my husband read it. To me it smacked too much of re-education, and I disliked the passive-aggressive anonymity of the
nginx
note.
The lamps have been in my family as long as I remember. They travelled with us from Cairo, where my father had opened the first English language bookshop after the war, to Belgium where he managed the Brussels branch of W H Smith and on to Cambridge, where he ran a university bookshop. The black figures supporting the lampshades – both dressed in Persian trousers, the man wearing a plumed turban and the woman a tasselled tarboosh – are not a legacy of the transatlantic slave trade: they represent Nubians in the service of an Egyptian Pasha.
The lamps, in other words, are Orientalist, part of that fantasy of the exotic East that swept through Europe in the 19th century, catching the imaginations not only of the sorts of sleazy Salon painters of slave markets and harems that now make us uncomfortable, but of Delacroix and later Picasso – a fantasy that made Arabian
Laura Gascoigne: Uncomfortable Truths – September 2020
Laura Gascoigne
September/October 2020
Six weeks ago, a Hampstead neighbour left a book on our doorstep. We have got used to acts of kindness from strangers; at the start of lockdown another neighbour posted a book of poetry through our door to cheer us up. My husband read it, and it did. But this book was different, as was its intention. It was a copy of Reni Eddo-Lodge’s bestseller Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race, with an unsigned post-it note attached. “I’m sure you are good people,” was the gist of its message, “but every time I go up and down the street the lamps in your301 Moved Permanently
window make me uncomfortable”. I can’t quote it word for word as it was thrown away. The book wasn’t thrown away; my husband read it. To me it smacked too much of re-education, and I disliked the passive-aggressive anonymity of the
nginx
note.
The lamps have been in my family as long as I remember. They travelled with us from Cairo, where my father had opened the first English language bookshop after the war, to Belgium where he managed the Brussels branch of W H Smith and on to Cambridge, where he ran a university bookshop. The black figures supporting the lampshades – both dressed in Persian trousers, the man wearing a plumed turban and the woman a tasselled tarboosh – are not a legacy of the transatlantic slave trade: they represent Nubians in the service of an Egyptian Pasha.
The lamps, in other words, are Orientalist, part of that fantasy of the exotic East that swept through Europe in the 19th century, catching the imaginations not only of the sorts of sleazy Salon painters of slave markets and harems that now make us uncomfortable, but of Delacroix and later Picasso – a fantasy that made Arabian