By - Imlisanen Jamir
I picked up Richard Ellmann’s biography of James Joyce again a few weeks ago. It had been sitting on my shelf for years—one of those books I borrowed from the university library during my final semester and forgot to return. Or maybe chose not to. At the time, I told myself I’d read it properly someday. I didn’t. But I kept it anyway.
Something made me pull it down recently. Maybe it was the weight of someone else’s memory pressing down on mine. About halfway through, I realized I hadn’t touched Ulysses in years. So I cracked it open again.
And there it was—the noise, the density, the sprawl of a city mapped in fragments. Joyce’s Dublin, colonized and intimate. His exile was self-imposed. Ours wasn’t. But something in that chaos—the refusal to explain oneself, the layering of identity and loss—felt familiar.
Joyce wrote to preserve what the empire ignored. We’re digging to recover what the empire stole.
There’s a certain smell to Western memory. A mix of old paper, polished wood, and self-congratulation. You’ll find it in the hushed halls of Oxford, where voices echo off stone walls and the past feels curated, not lived. In one corner, the biography of a great writer—James Joyce—is celebrated for turning his chaos into canon. In another, human bones—Naga bones—lie in storage, catalogued like artifacts, stripped of name and ritual.
One is literature. The other, anthropology. Both are about memory. But only one gets called history.
In 1959, Richard Ellmann published an 842-page biography of Joyce that became a monument. Not just to the Irish writer, but to the biographer himself. Ellmann had charm, connections, and access. He sipped tea with literary widows and turned their anecdotes into gospel. He smuggled warmth into academic prose. He embalmed Joyce in story, and in doing so, ensured that both their names would last.
Now, decades later, we have a biography of the biographer. Zachary Leader has written a book about Ellmann’s book about Joyce. It’s a neat little trinity of institutional memory. A hall of mirrors, reflecting prestige and footnotes, looping back on itself.
Meanwhile, halfway across the world, a different kind of remembering is taking place.
In June, a delegation from Nagaland—elders, scholars, and community leaders—stood inside the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. They weren’t there to study. They weren’t there to write. They were there to bring their dead home.
The museum, a colonial trophy cabinet, holds at least 41 Naga human remains. Taken during the British Raj, labeled and logged, these remains have been treated not as ancestors, but as curiosities. Skin, hair, skull. Bits of people boxed and forgotten.
The RRaD team—Recover, Restore, and Decolonise—didn’t come tweed jackets. They came with grief. They came with prayers. They came to reclaim stories stolen by empire and stored in silence.
And it struck me—this absurd symmetry. On one side of the museum, the West rehearses its greatness through books, panels, and polished voices. On the other, the colonized try to reassemble their past from bones.
Ellmann turned a man into a myth. The RRaD team is trying to turn dehumanized remains back into people.
There’s no ceremony for our dead unless we fight for it. No biography unless we beg for access. No canon unless someone lets us in. Legacy in the West is an inheritance. For the rest of us, it’s a negotiation.
In gift shops, you can buy a tote bag with Joyce’s face on it. His legacy, printed and sold. But in the archives, wrapped in plastic and silence, are skulls that haven’t seen home in over a century.
This is what we mean when we talk about decolonization. Not theory. Not academic conferences. Just the right to hold our dead without asking for permission.
Comments can be sent to imlisanenjamir@gmail.com
