There is a ghost ship haunting The Carters’ filmclip for Apeshit. Although the ship is by no means the most overt theme of the video, we shouldn’t ignore its persistent presence. The ship appears explicitly in two sites: The Winged Victory of Samothrace in front of which The Carters and a troupe of dancers perform, and Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa in front of which Jay-Z performs solo. The museum’s collection is inseparable from, indeed contingent upon, colonial violence and slavery; it was the ship—the technology of European naval power—that brought much of the museum’s collection to France; it was often the very same ships that brought enslaved bodies to plantations.

This filmclip is not staged anywhere or indeed elsewhere, not in the periphery but in the very heart of the colonial French metropole. Yet the Louvre holds the elsewhere of European empire within it. Museal whiteness is not an omission of people of color, but a wholesale consumption of them, an act of swallowing up and metabolizing. The colonized world may not be visible, but it is constitutive.

Under the Seine in Paris,
where sleep, in the holdings
of ships built for slavery,
these muted bodies,
these human remains.

(Clementine Deliss, 2018)

The Louvre’s galleries extend the slave ship’s hold.

Beyoncé sits at the base of The Winged Victory of Samothrace at the top of the Daru staircase. The statue represents the Greek goddess Victory—also called Nike—alighting atop the prow of a ship. Taken from the island of Samothrace in 1863, The Winged Victory has been the subject of an as-yet unsuccessful repatriation claim. The statue commemorates a Roman naval triumph (though we don’t know exactly which one). In a way, its prominent display in the Louvre marks the ‘victory’ of the French colonial empire over its dominions, from colonies in Africa and Asia to the Caribbean sugar islands. But in The Carters’ use of it, the figure becomes a marker of something else: the victory of the oppressed, the survival and flourishing of the descendants of the enslaved.

Two minutes and six seconds into Apeshit, the music comes to a sudden halt. It isn’t silent, exactly—it resonates with the ringing of a church bell while panning over dancers, paintings and vignettes. We feel the weight of this pause. Everyone in the museum is still, as though collectively holding their breath. The camera pans across a scene of dancers laying on the Daru staircase beneath The Winged Victory. In this suspended moment, these women suddenly bear an uncanny resemblance to the infamous Stowage of the British Slave Ship ‘Brookes’ which was published in 1788 and circulated as an abolitionist image. This schematic shows enslaved Africans packed into the ship’s hold.

The steps on which they lay echo the interior of the ship’s hold, shown in cross-section on the diagram. The ship itself has a stepped quality to it, and describes how the enslaved were ‘stored’ “by means of platforms or shelves in the manner of galleries in a church.” Let’s not let the linguistic resonance escape us. The diagram demonstrated that these human beings were treated as things, but it does not capture the experience of the hold.

Imagine 200 human beings crammed into a space barely capable of containing a third of them. Imagine vomit, naked flesh, swarming lice, the dead slumped, the dying crouched. Imagine, if you can, the swirling red of mounting to the deck, the ramp they climbed, the black sun on the horizon, vertigo, this dizzying sky plastered to the waves. Over the course of more than two centuries, twenty, thirty million people deported. Worn down, in a debasement more eternal than apocalypse. But that was nothing yet.(Édouard Glissant, 1997)

To fill this gap, the film gestures toward the violence of the hold with its repeated turn to Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa. The painting represents a wreckage off the coast of modern-day Mauritania. Six life boats did not hold all 400 on board: 146 piled onto a makeshift raft that was to be towed behind the boats, but was jettisoned after only a few miles, already half submerged. Of those abandoned on the raft only 15 were rescued, and only 10 survived. The painting depicts the moment when a ship appeared in the distance, the possibility of survival animating the bodies of those reaching skyward. Three of the fifteen figures in the painting are black men. Although the painting does not depict a slave ship, it is thought that Gericault was sympathetic to the abolitionist cause. Here, this disaster at sea stands in for the disaster of deportation and enslavement—the violent rupture of the middle passage.

Laying prone beneath a stone ship’s prow, the dancers on the Daru staircase recall the inert, thingified bodies shown in the Brooke’s diagram. We might imagine them as the ghosts of ancestral slaves, those who did not make it through the middle passage to centuries of plantation slavery, the ones whom Christina Sharpe reminds are still present in the oceans in a ghostly molecular form. But they do not hold still for long; soon they begin to rise—lifting their heads, hands and feet, reaching upwards in rhythmic motions. For this is not death, though it passes through its terrain. This is a triumphal dance celebrating generational survival. In Poetics of Relation, Edouard Glissant proclaims the victory of spoken over written language, of creole, of the coming together that is enacted in the voice. Reminding us that the archives of slave societies cannot ever define the enslaved, he embraces liquid becoming and fluid black being.

For though this experience made you, original victim floating toward the sea's abysses, an exception, it became something shared and made us, the descendants, one people among others. Peoples do not live on exception. Relation is not made up of things that are foreign but of shared knowledge. This experience of the abyss can now be said to be the best element of exchange. This is why we stay with poetry. (Édouard Glissant, 1997)

Likewise, Apeshit asserts the inability of the museum to define those colonized and traded people sacrificed for its riches.

Beyoncé performs in front of several iconic images that set the benchmark of female beauty to white femininity and, as has been widely pointed out, she reclaims this space and counter-asserts the black female body as beautiful and strong. Apeshit gives us glimpses of non-white bodies scattered throughout the museum’s holdings. As Kimberly Drew, who tweets as MuseumMammy, points out in her comments on the video – Black people have always been there. I can’t believe we made it, Beyonce sings, but she can – she has been here all along. The filmclip features Benoiste’s Portrait of a Negress, a painting that is rare because it was made by a woman (one of the few who made it into the annals of art history) and because it centers a black woman. She is not a maid or a servant in the background of the painting, but its subject. About her, we know very little. She does not meet our gaze but looks over our shoulder to the middle distance. We can never know what she is looking at, what she sees. But she is joined by these beautiful black women who bend and sway in a lively, fleshly retort to the museum’s stone holdings.

This piece is profoundly celebratory. But it is celebratory in the wake, and it takes joy in the survival without forgetting what it took to survive. The film claims the space of royalty – this is clearly marked by the scenes in front of David’s Coronation of Napoleon but also in the regal affect of these two performers. As New Orleans MC Master P says at the close of Solange’s last album, “We come here as slaves, but we goin out as royalty”(Solange, 2016). While the Louvre is an instantiation of the slave ship’s hold, and The Carters’ occupation of it a triumph over the hold. This is precisely because of the painful history that it rests upon. The Carters occupy this site both because-of and inspite-of the brutality of the hold. The film says both ‘we were here all along’ and ‘I can’t believe we made it’.

In the wake, the river, and the drowning are death, disaster and possibility. These are some of the impossible possibilities faced by those Black people who appear in the door and dwell in the wake. (Christina Sharpe, 2016)

References (in order of appearance)

Clementine Deliss, Manifesto for the Rights of Access to Collections, 2018, np

Édouard Glissant, Betsy Wing (trans.) Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997) pp 5-6

Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 1997, p 8

MC Master P in Solange, A Seat at the Table (New York: Columbia Records, 2016)

Christina Sharpe, In The Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). P 105

This essay first appeared in the conference proceedings of Anywhere and Elsewhere (2019), where it appears in a truncated visual form. However, the piece was designed with a visual layout, which can be downloaded below.