SimonMary Asese Aihiokhai, Ph.D.
I had the fortune of attending a virtual presentation today, January 28, 2024, at the McMullen Museum at Boston College. The presenter focused their presentation on the erasure of women from the memorialization of art in Cuba during the 1950s by calling attention to the untold story of the creativity of Cuban artists who are women and whose artistic works are currently in display at the museum. So, if you want to see them, I say drive there and enjoy the feeding of your eyes and mind.
The focus of this short reflection is to continue the dialogue playing out in my head on this topic. As I pointed to the presenter, we see the erasure of women artists in the retelling of Africa’s creative heritage and the phalicization of artistic creativity for the sole purpose of legitimizing the patriarchal bias for socio-political leadership during the times of the struggle for independence in Africa. The same is the case in Cuba as she noted as well. Something that needs to be mentioned that can help foster the reclaiming of the female agency in artistic production is the fact that women are at the center of art as a motif for resistance. In the African context, this is clearly the case. Two examples are worth exploring here. African women’s bodies are the locus of artist ritualization. Among the Tiv people of Nigeria, a woman’s body is an akambo, which is a type of embodied cosmos. The woman’s body that is scarified (tattooed) serves as a political, religious, cultural, and ethical statement invoking and evoking for the community the need to live in a manner that is aligned with divine harmony. Failure to do this brings violence against the woman’s body which is itself a direct assault against the broader cosmic harmony that eventually brings upon the community the wrath of God.
A second example has to do with how African women ritualize political resistance in the face of unjust violence of social praxis of exclusion and erasures. When society is faced with a political despot, African women strip themselves naked and use their nakedness to serve as a sacramentalized form of resistance to the established norm. Their nakedness serves as a type of aesthetic disruption to allow for new imaginations to be embraced. Their nakedness becomes a type of erasure of the aridity of imagination that has brought about the current system. This way, their bodies call attention to a turn to new beginnings where saturated imagination can be embraced while the community discern together how to go forward while creating a more just social system. The popular Aba Women’s Riot of 1929 against the unjust taxation introduced by the British Colonial Administration in what is today Eastern Nigeria supports this claim. The women stripped themselves naked and used their nakedness to demand the suppression of the tax laws. Refusing to comply to the commands of the British Colonial Administration, their demands were met accordingly. Recently, the same was the case in certain parts of Nigeria to protest the unjust killings being carried out by Fulani Herdsmen who refused to follow the federal and state governments guidelines on where to pasture their cattle. This approach of art as resistance is linked to the understanding that the body is part of the highest form of aesthetic expressions. Women’s bodies stand at the apogee on the list of what can be used as artistic expressions because they are sacramnetalized icons of divine fecundity. This point is worth keeping in mind because art, even if its for the expression of mundane aesthetics, always has the ability to mediate abundance just as the deity next to the supreme deity, who is always a female deity, serves as the custodian of abundant life. Women in Africa are the direct embodied epiphanies of that deity.
Now, I think there is also a third point worth considering. Unlike the West, where artistic works and the creative genius is celebrated through the spotlighting of the artist itself, in the African cultural world, creativity, though instantiated through the individual, is mediated through the collective. In this case, it is the community. This is because art had both the aesthetic focus on beauty and the collective sacramentality that the community embraces to bridge the communicative and existential gap that exists between humans and the spiritual world. Consequently, when a work of art is produced, the work becomes the collective property of the community. The embrace of the work by the community is both a source of appreciation for the creative genius of the individual who produced it and the creative genius embodied by the community itself that nurtures, validates, and affirms the space where the artist is able to capture their vision of the artwork.
Even with this third point articulated above, one has to call attention to the aridity of aesthetics currently playing out in our world. The history of art is the history of the dominate of the phallus. It is as though art has been reduced to a false notion that creativity is instantiated by having a phallus. Look at the celebrated artists in collective human history, it has been too much a male issue. This is most depressing because in Africa, creative expressions were mostly nurtured, expressed, and preserved my African women. I argue that the erasure of women in the discourse on art has led to an inability to embrace and celebrate the fecundous nature of life that art helps to ritualize. Art is by its nature prophetic in mediating life for all. It serves as both the means for expressing beauty and a tool for reclaiming beauty when it is lost to the unjust and arid ways of being in the world that are sometimes given validity through the unjust use of power in society. It allows for the shattering of imagination in a manner that disruption in modes of seeing and understanding is introduced into the psyche of the one who encounters the artistic work. I am aware of the idolization of this process where art is used to manipulate. It is because of the power of art to hold the human mind captive and to birth-forth new ways of being in the world that benefits those previously erased that dictators tend to hijack art for their agenda to control and manipulate their victims.
The reclaiming of the agency of women in the retelling the history of art in our world ought to be done in a manner that allows for the queering of the process itself. This is because art is trans-gendered by nature. This transgendered turn in art is what makes it authentically disruptive in the way it allows for new meanings and new discourses to be produced through encounters with an art work. I am convinced that the queering of the retrieval of the silenced and erased voices in the history of art can become the tool for fostering new ways of communal interactions in our world. Where the phallucization of art produces unhealthy power dynamics, the queering of the process allows for power to be seen as a tool intended to mediate the common good. One may ask me where and how can the queering of art history be done? In response, I say we should go back and retrieve the ancient approaches and meaning making processes in art production by indigenous communities in our world. There is so much wisdom to gain from them. Modernity, if its to be true to itself must take seriously a turn to the indigenous where rich tapestries of wisdom are found in a saturated manner.
Reflection – January 28, 2024
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