No Rylands without us – Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan

If you don’t see yourself reflected in the archive, does that mean your history, culture and identity aren’t important? In the summer of 2023 the Library commissioned poet Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan to write a new poem for the Library archive, that reflects on these questions from her position as a young, Muslim woman. Suhaiymah is a poet and educator whose work confronts assumptions about history, race, violence and knowledge. Her poetry has been viewed millions of times online. She is co-founder of the Nejma Collective, a group of Muslims working in solidarity with people in UK prisons.

Suhaiymah writes:

When the Rylands library first emailed me it did not ring a bell. It took until my first visit for me to realise that I had walked past the building on numerous occasions always assuming it was some sort of cathedral. In my opening tour I was told that this was by design – Enriqueta Rylands had wanted a ‘Cathedral for books’.

Walking through the grand interior of the library I felt that I had entered a hogwarts-esque reality. I felt small gazing up at the arched ceiling and walking under the stained glass walls. I had been invited to write a poem for an upcoming exhibition called, ‘We were always here’. The title and surrounding provocation had intrigued me. Had I, too, ‘always been here’ in a building I had so rarely considered of relevance to me?

Looking back I find it unlikely that I would have entered the Rylands even as a tourist had I not been invited by staff there. Inviting is not exactly the first word that comes to mind. And yet, if I had known the extent of the manuscripts, texts, engravings, fragments and more that the library contained I think I would have been much more excited to visit.

Browsing both the online and physical archive in relation to the question of whether someone like me – the grandchild of immigrants from a former British colony, a visibly Muslim woman from the north of England, someone who holds their faith in great esteem – would find myself here. What even counts as ‘oneself’ in such a context is not straightforward, but I was interested in histories of colonised people, histories of Islam, and histories of resistance. In many ways I found all of these things and in other ways I didn’t.

For example, I could leaf through the letters written by colonial colonel, Samuel Bagshaw, when he was part of the East India Company; but to find the voices of the people being colonised and brutalised was much harder. I could browse digitised collections of Quran’s, Persian scripts, Rumi’s original Masnavi, and more; but the secular lens through which such manuscripts were narrated or curated meant I felt I was missing the reality of those scripts, the hearts of the worshippers who calligraphed and wrote them. And when I searched for resistance, I often had to infer it due to the reality that archives inevitably privilege textual records that were deemed valuable and worth collecting at some point in history by someone who had such authority.

Over the weeks and months of my researching, thinking, and visiting the library, I found that the matter that intrigued me more than simply whether or not I was ‘here’ in the archive, or the library; was the question of who the ‘we’ in We have always been here, was. I felt clear that some voices have been marginal in the archive, and then others have simply been excluded. But there was a presence in the library that I felt unable to shake. It had not been overtly named, perhaps a passing mention, but it clung to the bannisters, felt present in the lamplight, reverberating through the stone pillars… the voices of those who made this building and its collections possible.

When I began to research John Rylands and Enriqueta I was surprised by the loud silence that existed around the source of their money. Rylands was lauded as a ‘merchant prince’, Manchester’s first millionaire, and he and Enriqueta were well known for their philanthropy – their names adorning and adorned. And yet a garment manufacturer during the industrial revolution had only one source for his raw materials… As I began to find out, Rylands was one of England’s biggest raw cotton importers. And that cotton did not simply sail across the ocean from nowhere. Enslaved people’s hands picked every piece of cotton that was the foundation of the garment industry. How many people’s lives were upturned and violated for the garments that came out of Rylands factories in Manchester? How many lives were lost just crossing the Atlantic to fill the demand?

I began to hear their voices. The stone cold walls were not silent. The library was haunted by the unshakeable presence of who knows how many. If this building was a monument to anybody it was not Rylands, not even Enriqueta or Basil Champneys, it was to those whose labour was extracted through violence and without any right. The hundreds of thousands spent on the library, the hundreds of thousands spent on buying the Crawford and Spencer collections, they did not come from mere ‘business’.

I could not shake the reality. The Rylands library was not a possibility without the enslavement of millions. It cannot be disentangled from the slave trade, cotton plantations, dehumanisation and commodification of human beings. And yet their voices felt so absent. What I could find of slavery in the archive was only of English abolitionists voices. No mention of the slave revolts, the maroons who escaped slavery and formed their own communities. No reference to the fact that Crawford’s own grandfather was the governor of Jamaica in the late 1700s and famous for his brutal hunting of people fleeing slavery and violence against maroons.

The collections themselves also do not escape entanglement with Britain’s golden age of slavery and colonisation (the underbelly of its age of industrial revolution and enlightenment). How Crawford came to own the collection which he sold to Rylands is intriguing to ponder. A collection spanning 50 languages is not simply amassed by casual perusal of the world. Whilst not every item can be claimed to be a product of theft or dispossession, there are those that can. And moreover, there is still something deeply uncanny about the desire to own such a large collection of manuscripts that one could never truly understand. At what point does such collecting simply become a performance? Simply a display of exotic objects? Colonial curiosities?

Every time I walk past the marble statues of Rylands or Enriqueta I wonder if this is how they would view me, too. A special object. A curiosity. People like me were never the intended users of this library. And yet ‘we’ in the broadest sense, have always been here. ‘We’ as histories of languages, epistemologies and knowledges that colonial lenses could not force to become intelligible. ‘We’ as the enslaved hands, the working-class factory hands, the immigrant hands, the crafting hands, the calligraphing hands, the commissioned hands, all the hands that made a library like this possible.

But perhaps what is more important than the fact that ‘we’ have always been here, is that here – the John Rylands library – would not be without us. There is no Rylands without slavery and plantation; and there is no Crawford collection without colonisation. So perhaps the onus is not on us to declare our marginalised presence; perhaps instead the responsibility must now fall to the Rylands to declare whose invisible labour, extorted wealth, and extracted knowledges has made it one of the most unique and leading libraries in the world.