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Title: Statues & Reclaiming Space-Time Author: Monadists Date: May 27, 2021 Language: en Topics: George Floyd uprising, Richmond, Virginia, Marcus-David Peters, Confederacy, Statues Source: https://monadists.medium.com/statues-and-reclaiming-space-time-a-focus-on-one-aspect-of-the-revolt-in-richmond-d3165a623484
This is a question many activists in the south have grappled with in
recent years. Some argue that statues don’t affect people’s lives
directly; they just represent something symbolic and that getting rid of
statues doesn’t have a concrete, material gain for individuals.
This would probably be true if statues were stand-alone, if they didn’t
come coupled with the labor and time stolen and put into them, with the
histories they invoke (and erase) as well as the histories they help
create themselves, and with the surrounding cities that work in tandem
with them to achieve certain ideological objectives.
Instead, statues claim both space and time, in their physical
construction and in the histories they occupy. They serve as time
capsules, haunted by the past, bringing it forth to spectators in the
present.
How might we break the clicking clock in Lee’s coat pocket and free the
past for reclamation?
...
The Daughters of the Confederacy was founded squarely with the principle
that, in fact, monuments did matter. They mattered for constructing a
mythologized history of the Confederacy, and in doing so, perpetuating
the “Lost Cause” myth: that the south never had a fighting chance, that
they were vastly overpowered by a Northern invading army while just
trying to preserve their sovereignty and property rights (for whites to
own Blacks), and so they were martyred for their ideals.
This myth also perpetuated the lie that slaves in the American south had
been happy with slavery, that slavery was benign, and that slavery had
been the best possible thing for a people who were considered by whites
to be docile, savage, and immoral. They believed that the ideas from the
bourgeois revolutions of the century past about human equality and
self-determination did not apply to Black people; that Black people
could not and would not participate in such revolutions without outside
influence, because their humanity was lesser, and therefore void of the
same notions of “rights.” This conception of southernness and whiteness,
which views the dead of the Confederacy as martyrs to white southerners
alongside the idea that Black people in the United States are too docile
and therefore incapable of having their own revolution without outside
influence, is a set of ideas that continue to live till this day thanks
in part to the memorializing of the Daughters of the Confederacy.
The Daughters of the Confederacy was established twenty-nine years after
the end of the Civil War, in 1894, and spent the decades after funding
the erection of Confederate monuments all over the country, particularly
in the south. To perpetuate their conception of southernness and
whiteness, they materialized a revisionist history in the form of
monuments so that they could create cultural icons around figures of the
Confederacy.
When a victor wins a war, they construct statues to their icons, and the
loser typically does not. But the Daughters of the Confederacy
understood that their war would extend well into the future, and so
their iconography must as well. Not only did their iconography last many
decades, but in recent years, they gained more attention (and in some
cases active support) than ever before.
...
But while the Daughters of the Confederacy were convinced of their
mission and the importance of monuments, we still have to ask ourselves
how and why do they really matter today?
The Lee Statue at Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia (the former
capital of the Confederacy) preceded the Daughters of the Confederacy,
and the idea for the statue preceded the idea for Monument Avenue
itself. Funding for a Lee statue began being raised in 1870 after Lee’s
death, and the city began plans for the avenue in 1887, erecting it in
1890. The unveiling drew in one hundred thousand people and marked
Monument Avenue as a place of pilgrimage for those that saw themselves
connected to the legacy of the Confederacy. The Daughters of the
Confederacy headquarters would eventually be established a few blocks
from the end of the avenue, and they helped raise funds for other
statues to be erected on the avenue while simultaneously erecting
similar statues across the country.
In Richmond, Virginia, Monument Avenue was constructed into empty fields
past the ends of the existing urban area at the time, on land donated by
a land speculator, Otway Allen. This area designated in the middle of
nothing, where these monuments were to be constructed, would become one
of the most central streets in an urbanized area in the 20^(th) century.
Looking at Monument Avenue this way, it becomes apparent how the myths
of the past became integrally intertwined with the daily lives of
southerners and their urbanizing environments throughout the 20^(th)
century, especially in the case of Richmonders.
These monuments grew alongside the growing urbanism of the American
south, including as more Black people began to move into them after the
end of slavery and throughout the Great Migrations, as cities got
blacker and blacker while these monuments remained. Over time, the city
of Richmond’s civic identity became largely defined by Monument Avenue,
and by relation, the “Lost Cause” myth. Otway Allen, the land speculator
who donated the land for the Lee statue, would become a Virginia
delegate and would be seminal in helping pass a constitutional amendment
that disenfranchised poor and working-class Black Virginians after
Reconstruction. This newly strengthened sector of “Lost Cause” civic
society was, in part, a reaction against the modest foothold that a
coalition of working-class Black people had gained in Richmond city
government in the 1880s, during Reconstruction, of whom city council
members opposed a Lee unveiling ceremony “to get up a big parade to
benefit only a certain class of people.”
But the statues remained well-protected, in part because as Richmond
urbanized throughout the 20^(th) century, old white money moved in where
it felt it rightly belonged, along Monument Avenue. Otway Allen changed
his occupation in the city directory from “farmer” to “capitalist” two
years after the construction of the Lee statue, representative of the
capitalist class’s shift from plantations and slavery to alliances
within manufacturing in the American south, and also representative of
the shifting gentry who moved into Monument Avenue as it developed. This
gentry was set on creating an enclave of old white money on Monument
Avenue as the city of Richmond grew. From its beginning in 1890, every
deed on Monument Avenue forbade the sale or lease of any property to
Black people. By 1910, 85% of households on Monument Avenue had live-in
servants, the vast majority of whom were Black women.
...
To think that these statues stood alone, disconnected from the
experience of daily life in the city of Richmond, would be incorrect.
There is an idea from the Situationists called unitary urbanism: that
there is a combined effect from the aggregated material forms that
urbanism has on those that experience it. That every section of an urban
area has a unique unified experience on those who pass through it
because different modes of urbanism work in conjunction: everything from
the masonry of a building, to how streets are laid out, to the width of
the street, to the sign that stops you at the end of the street, to the
passing guard that discriminately arrests you when you cross the street
illegally. All these things taken together have a unified effect on the
person going through urban space.
Likewise, Confederate statues grew into the unified urban effect of the
American south as its cities developed, and existed in conjunction with
new and developing modes of urban control on Black populations in these
cities, particularly policing, redlining, and Jim Crow. Looking at it
this way, the point of Monument Avenue wasn’t just to communicate a
message from the past. The point of Monument Avenue was to become one
with the city of Richmond, and to have the city of Richmond, itself, be
that message from the past.
This delivers home the point of the Daughters of the Confederacy in
speaking from the past: white protectors of slavery have a right to be
lifted up and praised in places like Richmond, while Black rebellions
from Virginia’s past are notably missing from Monument Avenue. There are
no statues there to Nat Turner, nor those who rebelled at Chatham Manor,
nor to abolitionists in revolt such as John Brown (in former Virginia,
now West Virginia.) There is no statue on Monument Avenue to Gabriel,
who organized enslaved people from 10 counties in Virginia to attack
plantations in the Richmond area and then take the Governor of Virginia
hostage to negotiate their freedom. Nor are there statues on Monument
Avenue to the countless other unnamed rebellions of the enslaved that
happened regularly over 300 years. Instead, much of that history has
been erased by the same gentry that call for “preservation” on Monument
Avenue.
At the same time, these statues to defenders of slavery on Monument
Avenue are lifted high and praised, in some cases lifted so far above
the observer that they are utterly untouchable, the Lee statue on
Monument Avenue being 60 feet tall, the base of which is 46 feet. They
were placed on those pedestals with the notion that there is a reason
why they should be so far from the ground, because of how the future
might change the perception of them. These individuals who are lifted up
are the same whose armies burnt down the city of Richmond in 1865 in
their retreat, no longer finding Richmond useful and hoping for the city
to die with the Confederacy. When we view the statues in this way, it
becomes clear that these are hostile objects to those who have to view
them, both in their physical construction and in the histories they
invoke. The goal of the Daughters of the Confederacy was to preserve
these people indefinitely, not for southerners, but in spite of them.
...
I grew up in Richmond, and I remember conversations about the statues
from a very early age. Monument Avenue was one of the most notable
features to outsiders visiting Richmond. But it was always something
shameful to many of us.
I remember when I was young, they unveiled an Abraham Lincoln statue
down at the waterfront. At the time, it was probably the only
Union-related statue in the city. I went with my family to see the
unveiling of the statue and I remember seeing the first protest I had
ever seen there, people holding up cardboard signs shaped like pennies
that read, “Lincoln wasn’t worth a cent.” Someone flew a plane over the
event with a banner that read “Sic Semper Tyrannis,” the words that John
Wilkes Booth yelled as he shot Lincoln.
I remember being surprised at how passionate they were about protesting
a president who had died over a century earlier. But they weren’t there
to protest Lincoln, but instead to protest the idea of emancipation that
they had equated him with (while in actuality, the emancipation of the
enslaved was far more due to their own efforts, with frequent and
immense attacks on plantation society.)
But instead, they were there to protest on behalf of the mythology of
southernness and whiteness that the Daughters of the Confederacy worked
so hard to preserve in their own statues.
That was one of my earliest political memories.
...
It was long an accepted fact that the statues on Monument Avenue and the
city of Richmond were so intertwined in their legacy that they weren’t
ever going away, despite being shameful to many. Around five years ago,
that rhetoric started to shift slightly as areas in the periphery to
Richmond and Richmond, to a lesser extent, had attention paid to
Confederate statue removal.
There was the battle in North Carolina over the Silent Sam statue, which
protesters eventually tore down in 2018. And of course, in
Charlottesville, discussions within the city council about taking their
Lee statue down ultimately escalated to the Unite the Right rally in
2017.
But while these events were playing out in Richmond’s orbit, Richmond
remained an untouchable place. “You could take down all the statues in
the world, but they aren’t going to come down in Richmond,” was a
familiar type of refrain from Richmonders. But if they did come down in
Richmond, then surely everything else would start to fall with it.
In the wake of the Unite the Right rally, the city of Richmond invited
public comments on what to do with the Monument Avenue statues through
the Monument Avenue Commission. Despite strong sentiment for removal
from many Richmonders, the commission resulted in more
shoulder-shrugging from local politicians who pointed out various legal
protections established by “Lost Cause” politicians of the past, which
prevented their removal.
Throughout all the efforts for removal, wealthy property owners on
Monument Avenue continued to argue that their properties’ value was
integrally intertwined with the “tourism” and value that the Confederate
statues brought to the area. The gentry of Monument Avenue continue to
have powerful friends in high places in the city of Richmond and were
therefore reasonably successful at obstructing the many political
efforts to get the statues taken down.
So Richmonders, seeing their city not reflecting them, did little things
to change it. Throughout the years, Richmonders began attacks on the
monuments, throwing paint and engaging in repeated vandalism against
them. These attacks cost the city of Richmond thousands of dollars to
polish off the statues, to maintain this materialized “Lost Cause”
mythology. The monuments also served as a flashpoint to highlight events
elsewhere. After the United the Right rally, a banner was dropped at the
Lee statue in ode to Heather Heyer, killed by fascists in
Charlottesville days prior.
...
But then one night everything changed.
On the second night of the George Floyd uprising in Richmond on May
30^(th), 2020, 130 years and one day after the Lee statue had been
unveiled, Richmonders descended upon Monument Avenue in a fury. People
who had been told for years they were powerless to change anything about
their lives or the city they lived in were all of a sudden encumbered
with Herculean strength. They flooded west on Monument Avenue, first
approaching the J. E. B. Stuart monument, where people tore away at the
iron rebar surrounding it with their bare hands, it as if it were made
of cardboard, totally destroying the fencing, and vandalizing the statue
in the act.
Police fled in terror as Richmonders stormed westward towards the Lee
statue. One police car got caught going eastbound against the
Richmonders and, to evade them, sped at nearly 60 miles per hour in
their direction as people jumped out of the way. In response, a
Richmonder picked up an entire stop sign, pole and sign in all, and
one-hand lunged it like an Olympic javelin thrower directly into the
front of the police car, perfectly spearing through the front window.
The police car continued at full speed with the sign hanging out of the
front of the car.
When the protesters reached the Lee statue, they tore the spotlights out
of the ground with their hands and applied the first layer of spray
paint of what would become many hundred layers. Richmonders continued to
the headquarters of the Daughters of the Confederacy, where the building
was attacked and set ablaze. Jefferson Davis’s personal Confederate flag
was destroyed in the fire there.
A few days later, on June 6^(th), Richmonders tore down the statue of
Williams Carter Wickham, and in doing so tapped into a primal urge in
the hearts of Richmonders: to reinvent the city in their vision. From
this point on, the attacks on statues were ordinary and ritualistic, as
though gravity were knocking them over itself.
On June 9^(th), at a protest for the indigenous of Richmond, Richmonders
toppled a Christopher Columbus statue. Richmonders took the statue,
which appeared to weigh several tons, and rolled it playfully like a
child’s bouncy ball down a hill, depositing it in a lake. This was
similar to how a slave trader statue in Bristol, of Edward Colston, had
been toppled and drowned a few days earlier.
Then the Jefferson Davis Memorial was partially toppled by Richmonders
on June 10^(th), then the Howitzer Monument on June 16^(th), then the
First Regiment of Virginia Infantry on June 19^(th). Over an eerie
police head statue at the Richmond Police Headquarters, someone
spray-painted a giant “ACAB.”
Richmonders had done it. They had proven that they could change the city
that would never change with their own bare hands. Politicians were
helpless and out of sight, booed at every public appearance, hiding like
cowards in the shadows from the inhabitants of Richmond. Richmonders had
unleashed a wolf within them, bent on Black liberation and Black
autonomy.
So the city government politicians, out of their personal fears and in
the hope of preventing damage to the rest of the statues, magically
figured out how to take down the rest of the statues. They filed an
emergency injunction, declaring the statues a public safety hazard
because the statues would be taken down by protesters if the city
didn’t. This is the most literal example of forcing someone’s hand by
Richmonders. Because the injunction, triggered by the actions of
Richmonders alone, overruled any legal protections the statues had.
The city of Richmond first removed the Richmond Police Memorial on June
11^(th), the Stonewall Jackson statue on July 1^(st), two Confederate
cannons on July 2^(nd), then Matthew Fontaine Maury on July 2^(nd), then
J. E. B. Stuart on July 7^(th), the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors
Monument on July 8^(th), the Fitzhugh Lee Cross on July 9^(th), the
statue of Joseph Bryan on July 9^(th), at the Virginia State Capitol, a
smaller statue of Robert E. Lee, busts of Fitzhugh Lee, J. E. B. Stuart,
Stonewall Jackson, Joseph E. Johnston, Jefferson Davis, and Alexander
Stephens, a plaque for Thomas Bocock on July 24^(th). This doesn’t
include the various plaques, statues, and busts removed by multiple
private institutions throughout Richmond in this period.
Out of anywhere in the world during this uprising, Richmond easily had
the most removal of iconography of anywhere. It was a period of
well-justified and well overdue iconoclasm by Richmonders, a period of
ruthlessly stripping away the iconography of the old world which had
long haunted them.
In addition to the statue removal, the crowds battled police for months,
taking the fight to their headquarters and all over the city, elsewhere.
Property was attacked and looted continuously. Two police chiefs
resigned in the process.
The crowds were disproportionately Black people while other races also
participated in the militant actions, including white people.
...
But the reinvention of the city didn’t end there. The Lee statue, once a
place of shame, became a meeting place for protesters. It became a base
camp where people hosted events, slept overnight, played music and
sports. The statue looked nothing like it once had. It was now drenched
in the paint of Black autonomous action, drenched so deep that it would
be impossible to restore it to its former state.
Every week the paint deepened, making its state the previous week appear
bare. Skateboarders poured concrete and laid wood boards at the base of
the J. E. B. Stuart statue so it could be used as a ramp. People set up
a basketball court on the lawn at the Lee statue. They played jazz. They
projected Billie Holiday on the statue. They set up orchestras.
Sometimes they played solo. They established community gardens. And
perhaps most importantly, they surrounded the base of the statue with
memorials for Black people killed by the police...
…and they renamed the area Marcus-David Peters Circle, named after
Marcus-David Peters, who was killed by Richmond Police.
...
Richmonders exorcised the spirit of the Confederacy that haunted their
streets for over a century in the form of monuments. But in doing so,
they also started to imagine what they truly wanted their city to look
like, a place that fosters community and mutual aid, that values
anti-racism and solidarity, that chooses Black liberation, Black
autonomy, collective joy, and revolutionary play instead of monuments to
racists.
These spaces on Monument Avenue that had long haunted Richmonders were
no longer places of a shameful history. Instead, they were a history of
the present rebellion, a history that was changing every day. They were
a place of pride, a place of rage and passion, and also joy and elation.
They attracted far more foot traffic than they had ever before,
including from tourists from all over.
At the same time, these were spaces of trauma for protesters, as the
Richmond Police Department, Virginia State Police, and the office of
Mayor Stoney declared war against them for taking their statues. From
the beginning, there were continual attacks on protesters, oftentimes at
the statues themselves. Protesters were notably teargassed on June
1^(st) at the base of the Lee statue in broad daylight in front of news
cameras, for no apparent reason, a few days after protesters first laid
claim to the statues. But that was just one of several dozen attacks and
teargassing events that would follow in the area. In another instance, a
Richmond police officer drove his vehicle through a crowd of protesters
at the Lee statue. For months to follow, Richmonders stayed long nights
at Marcus-David Peters Circle to prevent eviction by police and faced
brutal and relentless attacks.
At one point, a police brutality tracker listed Richmond as second place
for the most instances of police brutality per capita within the
uprisings from the 2020 summer.
One night included over 200 curfew arrests (about 1 out of every 1000
people in the city of Richmond), with police searching with rifles under
cars and in alleyways for protesters. Richmond Police reported using
force on 94 separate incidents throughout the uprising, many of which
involved the deployment of dozens of tear gas canisters and flashbangs
at each instance.
...
As politicians and police worked their hardest to repress and
appropriate the struggles for Black liberation in the city of Richmond
(of which the statues were only one small part), I can’t help but think
of the foresight the Daughters of the Confederacy and those that helped
perpetuate the “Lost Cause” myth must have had in conceptualizing their
purpose for their successors.
They knew how long the statues would last. They knew to construct them
so high and heavy that many of them would be impossible to pull down
with rope and hands.
I also think about how the legend that a cornerstone of the Lee statue
contains a time capsule with one of the only existing photos of Lincoln
on his deathbed, which Mary Todd had wished to be destroyed. They knew
they were speaking to the future. In building these statues and passing
legislation that would preserve them forever, they were playing with the
nature of time, making all of Monument Avenue a giant time capsule
itself, which would defy their own deaths and survive long after them.
...
The spirit is something that is immaterial that continues to exist in
the material world, something that defies time by projecting the past
into the future.
Similarly, dead-labor or dead-time is the labor that occupies the
capital and commodities that are created by it. Labor that was once
alienated from those who produced it but remains still in the commodity
form. America as a project, as a colony, is one massive pile of
dead-time, the base of which is almost exclusively from African slaves.
The three-hundred-year-old bricks at the base of some streets in
Richmond are not simply bricks; they are also the weeks, days, years,
lifetimes stolen from Black people. It is also everything that time
represents to a living being. It is self-determination, autonomy,
freedom, agency. Slavery and the systems of labor that followed stole
all those things and embodied them in material forms.
But this dead-time, this labor continues to exist today and is
foundational to this colony. Sometimes this labor is just a brick;
sometimes it is bought and sold many times over for many centuries and
no longer resembles its original form.
The statues on Monument Avenue, the city of Richmond, and the colony of
America are not just made up of the inanimate, but instead of dead-time.
The labor stolen, at the expense of Black’s people self-determination
and agency, continues to live in these objects. These statues reanimate
this dead-time, but instead of being reanimated for Black people, they
are reanimated to serve the agency of white property owners who
weaponize these statues against the Black descendants whose ancestors’
labor they stole.
But in certain moments, this paradigm bursts at its seams. Sometimes
Black people in Black revolt declare themselves as the proper owners of
that which has been stolen from them. In acts of looting and
destruction, poor and working-class Black people are not just engaging
in what white media refers to as senseless nihilism, but instead are
engaging in acts that are spiritual and rooted in liberation: by taking
back the autonomy stored as dead-time in the commodity-form, and in
choosing to use or destroy it, they are truly embracing that autonomy.
This idea that Black revolt can engage in this time-hacking and reclaim
the primitive accumulation that was stolen from their predecessors is
the absolute kryptonite to the American colony.
...
As Walter Benjamin awaited what he saw as inevitable Nazi capture in
1940, before fleeing to Spain and committing suicide, he wrote one final
piece, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” where he lamented the
almost religious aspect of Marxists’ historical materialism, which seeks
to keep its adherents waiting for the proper moment for change, or
rupture, which will happen when the material circumstances are perfect.
For someone awaiting certain doom by Nazi capture, this was a hopeless
vision, as it is a hopeless vision for the millions of people who have
perished and anguished due to systems built on white supremacy and
colonialism. The idea that “progress is on the way, you just have to be
patient and calm down” continues to be invoked in various liberal and
leftist iterations.
Benjamin goes further with his critique and says the problem of
historical materialists is viewing the past as something that remains
linear after each moment passes by, and in doing so, they view the past
as a series of events which continue to improve the conditions of
humanity: a history of progress. Instead, Benjamin invokes the painting
Angelus Novus by Paul Klee as a metaphor to explain how history should
actually be viewed. The painting features an angel facing the viewer and
seemingly drifting backwards.
A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though
he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His
eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how
one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past.
Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe
which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel
would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been
smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in
his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them.
The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is
turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is
what we call progress.
Benjamin suggests that the fault of historical materialists is that
their conception of a history of progress is from a warped perspective,
in that history is defined by victors, in a series of successions from
the last. While we should view history like the angel drifting
backwards, seeing the piles of rubble stack on top of one another in the
distance as time passes, with those who did not reach redemption in
their lifetimes lost in the wake. Benjamin suggests that our true
mission in the present is to redeem the past.
There is no inevitable progress of history, it is an optical illusion,
and instead, the present is what you make of it.
Rather than waiting for a revolutionary future to save us, we instead
have to engage in revolutionary action which saves this past in our
present, and therefore the perfect time for action is now!
When we do this, we change our whole view of history from our angle. In
doing so, we are engaging in an odd sort of time travel, in which time
itself ruptures and stops, and the past leaps forward into the present
and is redeemed. This is a reclaiming of the past. It is a messianic
time and a rupture in our way of understanding space-time.
This is precisely what happens when a statue commemorating those who
fought for slavery, built by the wealth stolen through slavery, is
transformed into a space of community and joy by the descendants of the
enslaved in a single night. In the moments of destruction and
appropriation of these monuments, every moment of despair and anguish as
those Black Richmonders in the past have looked upon those statues, is
called forth instantly, to be redeemed in the present.
...
In January 2021, the State of Virginia reclaimed the statue, building
large heavy-duty fences around it to prevent people from forming
community there and, rumor has it, to protect the time capsule in the
cornerstone. They said it was to prepare to take down the statue, but
that was six months ago.
As the state attempts to take back reclaimed space, it is no coincidence
that politicians attempt to take back reclaimed history as well.
Mayor Stoney recently published a New York Times article in which he
wrote an utterly false tale about how he led efforts to take down the
statues and how the police violence was an accident along the way. That
may be the only New York Times article profiling the timeline of events
in Richmond that exists, and so Stoney’s revisionist history will likely
shape how outsiders understand what happened in Richmond in the summer
of 2020.
I wrote this so that a history of these protesters and their uprising
may be preserved. This is not a comprehensive history of what happened
but just one part of it. My goal was to illustrate the agency of the
protesters in the events that unfolded, not the agency of politicians
and powerful men, as history is typically written. This was an
unprecedented revolt for Black liberation and Black autonomy. It was one
of the most significant periods of revolt in Richmond’s history since
the Confederacy burned down the city in their retreat in 1865.
No politician aided it.
The efforts of politicians to take back this history while police take
back physical space shows how they view this reclaimed space-time as a
threat to their very existence. Unfortunately, they currently continue
to lay claim to these.
Yet still…
The present remains unwritten