M95 Pélagie Gbaguidi

Manifesto Against The ‘Black Code’ edict of Louis XIV, 1685 (2008)

In 1685 King Louis XIV of France issued an edict formalizing the legal framework that underpinned the system of slavery in the French colonies of the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico. Known as The Black Code (Le Code noir), it regulated how black slaves should be treated, from insisting on their baptism as Catholics to specifying that fugitives should be branded with a fleur-de-lis and have their ears cut off. The Black Code went on to serve as a blueprint for slave laws in the former French colonies in the United States and governed the lives of millions of African Americans until slavery was abolished.

In 2004, while on a residency in France, the Beninese artist Pélagie Gbaguidi (b. 1965) encountered a copy of the code at a book fair in Nantes. Embarking on a series of drawings and paintings entitled Le Code noir, Gbaguidi sought to make sense of the violence represented by the text through distorted, screaming faces and withered bodies. She later extended the theme to address the state violence of Nazism when she realized that the first chapter of The Black Code also concerned the treatment of the Jewish people.

Gbaguidi’s impassioned response to The Black Code culminated in the embroidered ‘Manifeste Contre du “Code Noir” de Louis XIV, 1685’, which she presented at the Dakar Biennale in Senegal in May–June 2008. The work challenges readers to acknowledge the brutal stain of African slavery on history and ‘accept the notion of collective trauma’.

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Manifesto
Against
The ‘Black Code’ edict of Louis XIV, 1685

Memory is a birthright

We are each free to honour the death of our forebears, male and female

The sites of our Memories are undeniable

Beware a return to domestication as the number of dogs only increases

For 400 years displaced men and women dreamed of freedom. Thus the Legislator spread the infectious spores of racism

Racism is a virus transmitted from one man to another – it did not spring from Mars

Ask yourself what became of the descendants of those severed ears and noses and of those who committed those acts?

Does the memory of the slaves hover, an errant remembrance without a tomb?

Ask yourself what were THEIR legacies or whether THEIR words have gone unheeded?

We each carry with us part of the collective trauma

Trauma is a sorrow that never disappears

Memory is a spirit everlasting

We can only envisage war through the victories, the medals, and the reparations

We must devote ourselves to understanding the Testimonies, the psychological and spiritual repercussions wreaked on humanity

Are we capable and finally ready

To accept the notion of collective trauma?

Is the monster yet living?