Blog Post #76: Interview with Heba Abd el Gawad of Egypt’s Dispersed Heritage Project

Our blogs posts in February and March feature public scholars working across various media who are pushing for creative, inclusive, and ethical means of representing the ancient world. All of these individuals will be presenting at our upcoming colloquium, “Presenting the Past: Responsible Engagement and Ancient Mediterranean History”. This colloquium asks how we as educators inside and outside the academy can more effectively participate in public discourse about the ancient Mediterranean. How do we engage in responsible public scholarship that is more inclusive of past diversity and modern audiences? We’re excited to feature the work of several public scholars who are creating innovative and compassionate answers to this question.

Through the project, I have learnt how privilege is invisible for the privileged. Foreign museums and their publics take for granted their privileged access to Egyptian heritage. They do not realise how this very same access is denied to Egyptians. While publics around the world can physically and intellectually handle Egyptian material, contemporary Egyptians are denied these opportunities in and outside Egypt. Equally, museums seem unaware of the impacts the disenfranchisement and orphaning of ancient Egypt from its contemporary community have on the daily lives of Egyptians today. From socio-political stigmas and stereotypes to absolute invisibility of a whole population, the after effect of how Egypt is represented and displayed in museums is drastic on us, Egyptians. A price we are paying daily. Egyptian galleries in foreign and domestic museums are, thus, violent spaces of discrimination and displacement for ancient and contemporary Egyptians. All this makes colonialism for us alive and kicking. Museums’ tendency to refer to colonialism as a thing of the past in its current alleged “decolonial turn” is abusive.

What impacts do you hope this research and its findings will have on the ways in which museums themselves address their roles in these stolen pasts? What outcomes do you aim for?

I hope museums recognise they are not solely curating objects, they should be curating relationships between local communities and their heritage. Community involvement in collections should not be a side “engagement” activity to fulfill a moral obligation as is the case today. It has to be integrated in the organisational, curatorial, and managerial structure within museums. Museums, today, are looking for quick fixes to a traumatising past. They need to recognise how this is a long negotiation process which will continue to change as communities and circumstances change. No one size or shape of community involvement can fit all collections or all communities. Only through a case by case long term community centred and serving dialogue, museums can initiate the reparation and reconciliation process they owe communities. 

How can we (the viewing public) think critically about what we’re seeing when we view Egyptian objects in foreign museums?

I think once you step into an Egyptian gallery you need to ask yourself two questions: how did all of these human remains and their belongings end up being here and how would you feel if this was you or a member of your family body or belongings? Only then, you can see the ancient and contemporary Egyptians as human beings who were forced to lose their right to consent through past and continuing colonialism. You should not lose your right to consent once you die. Wishes of the dead should be respected even if they died thousands of years ago. Asking yourselves these questions might help you empathise with us and see us as people not exotic beings and their things.