Performing Tituba
Written by Sophie Marx
Barefoot and with silver makeup illuminating her face, Dorothée Munyaneza slowly walked into the room, every step filled with purpose. As she looked into the audience sitting on the floor in front of her with authority and depth, everyone quieted down, exhilarated by the question of what we would experience by the time she reached the demarcated square before us.
Munyaneza’s walk through the gallery space in Le Palais de Tokyo in Paris, in front of a wall-hung collage of almost sixty metres in length, not only marked the start of her performance piece but brought the illustrated counter-history of the establishment of the modern world to life.
In Malala Andrialavidrazana’s collage Figures, the artist set out to retrace the movement of our world through its archives. To highlight the fact that dominant ideologies today are based on the exploitation and extraction of human and natural resources, she used maps, fragments from banknotes, postage stamps, and record sleeves from the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries to confront the paradoxes of modernity.
In the light rod-filled square, Munyaneza was to perform the story of one enslaved Native American woman from the late 1600s by the name of Tituba. Performed to the background of Andrialavidrazana’s Figures, the story of one individual woman was visually related back to the history underlying her fate. One person’s story is never just their own, as the performance name “Toi, moi, Tituba” Munyaneza chose reflects. While she carries historic importance in her own right, the collage which shows many often-overlooked fragments of the past puts her into a wider historical context, as she was but one person of colour exploited and confined into the archives of colonial history and history in general. Platforming individuals and groups of people whose stories continue to be given less attention than their white counterparts, the group exhibition shed light on a different side of history.
Not much is known about Tituba’s life before 1692 or after 1693, yet the repercussions of that one year transformed her into a larger-than-life personality whose anonymity continues to be substituted with a variety of made-up scenarios that provided her infamy. Tituba was living and working in the home of the minister of Salem Village, Reverend Samuel Parris. After a mysterious illness suddenly befell his daughter and niece, which the doctor feared might be credited to witchcraft, the two girls subsequently accused Tituba of witchcraft after she had been tasked with making a magical antidote. The woman denied the claims fervently, but after weeks of torture instructed by Parris, she confessed, and at her trial with two other women, Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne, she claimed that the devil had personally asked her to join him and to sign the devil’s book, which already contained the signatures of the other two women. After that, as she recounted to the court, the witches forced her to hurt the reverend’s daughter and niece. It was her testament that pushed the community to believe that a larger conspiracy of witches was at large in their hometown of Salem, leading to a witch-hunt.
The quiet of the room was gradually being infiltrated by sounds—from animal noises, unidentifiable objects falling into another unknown, and echoes reverberating through the sound systems. Munyaneza once more looked around in wonder. Then she stood still. Her movements afterwards were slow and deliberate, her steps long as she was walking by the illuminated light rods, and with every change of foot her arms were stretched out, piercing through the air. All except for one rod spread out around the square were white. The last one was in a glowing purple.
Almost unnoticeably, the background sounds increased with her harsh, abrupt movements. Pounding, breaking, gaining more in volume, getting louder and louder, violating me to my core. A change occurred in her movements. Her pace increased, and with the change in rhythm, her movements began to flow out of their previous harshness into a rhythmic dance. The breaking sounds morphed into ones of urgency and emotion as she finished her turn around the square, coming to a halt in front of the microphone.
“Do you remember? Do you know my name?”
She screamed at the audience, but the words were not just meant for us. Her suffering exceeded the gallery, questioning a society that chooses not to remember, not to learn the names of those it enslaved and exploited.
Her chants bore down into my soul, vibrating forcefully as her pain spread over the room. Did we know her name? I, for one, had not known it before the performance. While I knew the history of the Salem witch trials, I didn’t know Tituba’s name or her story of how she had been beaten for weeks to confess to a crime she was not guilty of—a crime that had not even taken place. Nevertheless, her testimony unleashed a chain reaction.
Tituba herself spent the year following the accusation in jail, as no one was willing or able to pay her bail. In that year, 144 people were accused of witchcraft, out of which fifty-four confessed. The testimonies of those who confessed were, as it had been done with Tituba, used against other accused. Tituba herself was brought in to take the stand in the trials of people who were then convicted and executed. Twenty of the convicted were executed, while three others died in prison. After her release in 1693, Tituba was sold to another English settler, and no more is known about her life after.
One after another, Munyaneza laid down the light rods. As she placed the last one horizontally on the ground, the music stopped, and she stared forcefully into the audience. It felt as if she was looking right at me. Right into me would probably be the better way of describing it, as if to remind us that this was more than a performance. It was the commemoration of the life of an innocent woman who, due to the colour of her skin and status in society, was enslaved, tortured, falsely convicted, and sold to be forgotten.
Despite the light having gone out as the rods were placed on the ground, mirroring eternal rest, with care and a hint of despair, she leaned over them as if trying to listen, maybe for a heartbeat or a message from beyond, or trying to discover something she hadn’t seen before. She briefly covered one with the silk of her dress, casting it under a black veil. Then she got back to work, reorganising them in a frenzy, her movements showing a stark contrast to the previous melancholy and pain. With optimism, she again stepped up to the microphone, shouting for radical love.
“Radical love,” repeating and engulfing the words with further chants, she conveyed courage, freedom, and hope, which she underlined through dance. Spinning her body in a circle, the music stopped; her movements, however, did not. She kept on spinning, only slowing down gradually to the renewed silence, until she came to a halt naturally. Looking back at the people sitting in front of her, her emotions were visibly overcoming her. Tears were grazing her eyes as she bowed to the audience.
