Wangechi Mutu, Untitled 2003, mixed media on mylar 90 x 61 cm
http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/wangechi_mutu.htm
Wangechi Mutu uses collage as a means of both physically
and conceptually bringing layered depth to her work.
Using images cut from fashion magazines,
National Geographic, and books about African art,
Mutu pieces together figures which are both elegant and perverse.
Individual body parts comprised of found 'objects'
are made to seem like odd prosthetics glued over torsos and limbs drawn in ink.
In Untitled, Mutu's surface uses these conflicting textures
to draw a wide range of connotations:
from glamour models, to dyed fabrics,
diseased skin, and science fiction special effects.
Her goddess-like figure becomes an
embodiment of the disjointed facets of modern Africa,
caught in the flux of Western preconception,
internal turmoil, ancient tradition, and blossoming future.
Hi people, this is my first venture into the world of blogging.
I am blessed.
Over the past few years, it has been my pleasure to meet people who are using words and pictures to shape this continent of ours - and at the best of times, when I sit in my bed, it feels like somebody has their hands in wet clay, and is building us a world.
For these priceless people, give me grace
.It is a strange thing, to me, that my hometown, which I love so much, is so vague and foggy in my imagination, where there is so much texture and truth to the New Jersey of the Sopranos.
If there is a reason I write that is it, so I, and mine do not become living ghosts to ourselves.
So here, I will try to share some of their work with you all.
I want to start, by sharing with you some thoughts and extracts from what is, to my mind, the finest novel written by an African.
Over the past year, I have read Kojo Laing's Search Sweet country five times. It is a hard novel to describe, one better experienced. And it is, sadly, out of print.
There are passages in this book that leave me in tears...
She took her own certainty along by stooping under everything: stooping under her own history of the heart, stooping under the stares inMamprobi, and stooping under her own lowering world.
Laing's mission in this astonishing novel is to build a living map of Accra - where the city is the main character - and the characters, all surreal and almost magical "types", represent different of the city, and different types of characters who are part of the the citybody - they are the voice and limbs of flavours, moods, of metaphysical ideas, of markets and duties, eyes from all angles that make up the city. Watch how he moves from high to low, in phrase, in a line - from concrete to mirrored pools and whisps of thoughts; from economics and lost dreams to smelly markets and the metaphysics of market crowds; and crowding "African Time" coming at you from several directions. Muilti-sense echos. Soft trails, from small talk, can strike, sharp and true and sudden at the heart of his new nation, can find and show you the dizzying, breathing centre of things, which is often in the place furthest from where you expect.
Bawdy and geography can all jostle for space in a phrase. How many sounds compete for attention: smell, taste and history can become one idea; how the voice of it seems just right, an Accra - if you have been there - just like the one you wanted to know, but could not know, because you had not read Search Sweet Country.
Kojo.Kojo.Kojo Laing. Wow.
Argh... let me stop talking, and let you taste it:
Here is Laing, on the passive, dreamy Kofi Louw, walking through Makla market in Accra, Ghana (and one of the contient's) largest markets. As some of you know, these markets are heirs to a very old trading culture, and old trade routes of ideas and goods...
The cries of goats steadied the concrete in a bank building, and pushed Kofi Loww in no particular direction but certainly towards his own sense of being. The glass of the new office block was trying desperately to throw off its reflection of the horror of gutters ...and twin buildings near Opera cinema reflected two completely different images of Loww; but for a few seconds these two crushed images, cheap in the glass, defined him completely. He was a sleeping snail, a man of quiet trance, so that both his legs were exactly in the middle of his walking.. ...He carried his head gently this morning for he had goals in it, he had restless in it...
As he walked he seemed to be binding parts of the city together with his clumsy broad feet; the old iron sheets of Nima shouted their rust back to the Ringway, where the cars pulled and stretched the yawn of the old dual roads between two exhausted Circles, Liberation and Redemption...the rust was a gift from rain, a gift from the neglect of politics...The invisible binding string of Loww's feet now tripped into Ridge where streets lined up against each other like giant squares of a draughtsboard, neat and painted.
Two years at the university as a diploma student had increased his need to graze in the quieter savannas of the mind. Thus he could bite the pasture hard here, without professors returning the bite. He cut up his life into little pieces, and did not quite know which piece to pick up first: if he did not re-enter university, the sun would only shine through opaque glass and through his father's tears and worry; if he continued to drift through the streets finding aimless hours so healing, so full of herbs, then they would not understand that even in this city there were quiet men - sometimes even noisy ones - who did not make money or status as an obsession; if he thought he would not marry Adwoa then the unborn generations would talk with the most accusing innocence. They were not yet born these children, yet the were defending, through their kind mother, their right to exist....
But now, Kofi Loww walked on, past all the uncovered food for sale, past the jolly kaklo, the gari, the fish, the tomatos, the cooked rice and stew, past all the flies that few sellers covered anything from. He stopped, thinking: the flies, the gutters, and the latrines had become a symbol far more powerful than all the excuses, including poverty, made from them. He caught, with impudent ease, a fly on the smoked fish he was about to buy. "Owula," laughed the seller, "I hope you don't want a reduction for catching the fly...after all it's extra meat!"
He dragged their sound on with his slow feet: he could never understand a people who bathed so often, yet were so actively indifferent to dust and flies on their market food, so careless about spit and latrines. But of course you did not have your European plagues here! At comparable stages, Ghanaians had been far more fastidious than most people, he thought,with their villages constantly swept with fast brooms but slow history. He shouted suddenly without thinking, "Why don't you all bath your streets and buildings as often as you bath your bodies!"
Some thought he was one of the usual street-corner preachers, others thought he was drunk; yet most walked on with that passing tolerance for those they thought less fortunate than themselves...
Rows of smoked tuna fish touched head and tail, head and tail, above two Mammy mouths speaking extremely fast, so fat they drove their word straight out of tune, straight out of Loww's mind...which was empty but filling up irresistibly with Makola ginger; five hundred kenkeys rolled up the one-way street faster than Loww, and with their sheer number - without even moving; and the large trays for this endless variety of wares, could teach them all how to carry the north, the south and the west of Ghana, for they held whole worlds. Over there where the shea-butter oiled his mind, Loww blocked a world of onions with his back, blocked out the purple mourning of the skins, the tears of sharp flesh; and as he blocked and unblocked the thousandth world of other things, others did the same, at greater speed; there were sparks as he witnessed the infinite clash of different goals, different flesh, different speeds, different directions. And colours moved and crossed to such an extent, in so many patterns, that they were equal to distance, the solidified distance; somebody's fate hung above the spread of koobi, somebody's love was sealed in banku (a corn food staple, shaped like a white ball) forever, after one hundred white-ball disappointments. At the four corners of Makola (market) number one, four safety-pins failed to hold down the profits, failed to stop the rise of steam from kenkey, boiled rice, Hausa koko, and waakyi...and slowest of all, the smoke from quietly burning lives.
..His mind was dazed by this tremendous concentration of energy, as if he had left parts of himself at each tray he passed; so that he felt a curious lightness, so that things invaded him. This table of yoyi was the beginning of one journey, the assorted powder was the end of another. The fresh handkerchiefs wrapped the secret heads of thousands of women, thousands of unseen ancestors.
The fat woman by the thin woman wishes to sell only so much of her fat...the rest of her fat was part of the foundation of the market, was part of the centre of this country. And there was more laughter than smiling, as Loww picked his way through the cynical sounds which ate at his heart with the innocence of things remembered years back yet far beyond nostalgia. Makola (market) was a vast and kaleidoscopic kente, soiled, trodden, torn to bits and whole at the same time. And the colours of its dirt should have formed the national flag...
...The ground rolled with economics. Would this be solid market flesh he was breathing? When she died - the seller suddenly joked to him - she should be buried in a tin of sardines, so that she could be profitable, even in death... He stood still caught in perfect African time - time that existed in any dimension- and blocking the paths of the other sellers that brought ancestors to the market, that touched the eyes of sellers and buyers now, that moved beyond those yet to be born. "Agoooo!" came the impatient voices, their hands finally pushing him out of the way. He moved yet retained this perfect time stubbornly. dragging it to buy tangerines slowly..the stillness was in the buying: he saw all sorts of dead faces moving among the living: she that seller of shea-butter, who finally died of grief because she could not have children; she that ginger seller whose mouth outchattered all others and who died of overeating and secret drinking; look at Ama come back, and wearing the borrowed nose of her long-featured senior sister still living, as if even eternity could be borrowed freeeee.
"These ground nuts are fifty years old!" someone shouted from the disgust of the past.
