Our Curriculum of Connections (C& Eos), Part 3: Bodies and Whispers

How can we hold onto the tragedy of Soweto? The sacrifice of these children who carry an ideal for us?

So asks Dakar-born Beninese artist Pélagie Gbaguidi in her interview for the special education issue of the magazine Contemporary And (C&) titled: “If you’re running from history, it will eventually catch up with you”.

She is referring to her work at documenta 14, The Missing Link. Dicolonisation Education by Mrs Smiling Stone (2017), which was installed both in Athens (at the Athens Conservatoire – Odeion) and Kassel (at the Neue Galerie). The work, which she describes as being part of an ongoing project about ‘the visibility of trauma in visual art’ comprises school desks on which photographs depicting the violence of apartheid are placed amid strips of hanging paper filled with colorful drawings of figures roughly sketched on them. In the same interview, Gbaguidi describes the origins of the project as follows: 

My project was conceived in South Africa. The encounter with this country was an emotional and spiritual breakthrough…It has taken root around the collision between the Cradle of Humankind near Johannesburg, different sources of documentation on apartheid, and my visits to memorial sites. My encounter with the archives of Soweto, especially the Hector Pieterson Memorial and Museum, triggered a radical awareness of the involution of mentalities on the chessboard of the world: the increased racial discrimination, sexual discrimination, xenophobia, and dehumanization by economic superpowers.

The empty desks and the drawings (which, at least for the Kassel iteration below, were made by local school children) of the artist’s installation painfully represent the absent bodies of children who were shot by apartheid police in the Soweto protests of 1976, while protesting the atrociously low-level of education taught in black schools in South Africa. (In the same issue of C& Khwezi Gule writes about the legacies of the Soweto rebellion in terms of a current student movement in South Africa – you can read the full issue here). Earlier in the same interview, Gbaguidi describes herself as a ‘contemporary griot’, the traditional storyteller found across West Africa. In adopting this role, the artist describes how she aims to absorb ‘the words of the ancients and modeling them like a ball of fat that they place in the stomach of each passerby with the ingredients of the day. In the practical sense, they break the commonplace rhythm by inserting subtle incidents integrating their part of eternity.’

This vividly materialist image of the ball of fat, enacts a form of discursive embodiment of the past in the present. At the same time it performs the subtle voice of the griot who does not deny past traumas and oppression, but learns from them and communicates lessons in a sustaining and enriching form (i.e. art). This is precisely how the tragedy of Soweto can be ‘held onto’ without being overwhelmed by its trauma.

Speaking of an earlier body of work in her presentation for the session of the documenta 14 public programs The Parliament of Bodies called ‘Black Athena Reloaded 2: A Trial of the Code Noir‘ (we will turn to part one tomorrow), Gbaguidi explains her series of 120 drawings made in response to what could be the most monstrous legal document of modern times, the Code Noir, passed by Louis XIV in 1685 in Versailles to define the conditions of slavery in the French colonial empire. Thinking back to her first encounter with this document of systematic racist brutality, Gbaguidi notes how it had stuck there, ‘buried in my memory’, but, as she writes on the biography page her website, by making the work (after 6 months of ‘immersion’ in the book), she could transform the trauma into a ‘the body of work’ comprised of a ‘gigantic fresco to perceive the totality of these signs that appeared to me like visions.’

This could be described as Gbaguidi’s ‘canvas of dissent’, Daphne Brooks’ phrase used by Classicist Sarah Derbew in the abstract of her paper ‘Bodies off Dissent’ for the upcoming Eos workshop Theorizing Africana Receptions (for more information on the workshop, go here). Focusing on the early 19th century South African woman, Sara Baartman, known as the Hottentot Venus, Derbew proposes to examine the performativity of black women against the overdetermined representation of the ancient Greek and Roman divinity Aphrodite/Venus. Derbew explores how works of contemporary literature return to Baartman’s story to offer a restorative, ‘re-membering’ of her body and agency as a powerful mode of dissent against racist violence. I cannot claim to know the full extent and nuance of the body of Derbew’s paper here, as I have only read the abstract. Nor, more significantly, as a white man can I claim to be anything but complicit in the centuries of colonial, misogynistic and racist brutality that not only inflicted such trauma on Baartman and her sisters through the ages, but also established the reductive patriarchal framework for the worship of a love goddess (read the fragment on Venus from Ennius’ Euhemerus for a case in point). At the same time, even from my limited and compromised perspective, it seems that Derbew’s timely and critical work aligns with and supplements that of Gbaguidi in articulating the need to express dissent about the violence against bodies (on account of race and gender, whether for the children of Soweto or Sara Baartman and her sisters through the ages) is entangled with the creative process of the remembrance of those bodies, their suffering and their defiant dissent.

This art of remembrance can take on many forms and voices, but it is the figure of the whisper, in both its intimacy and its potential for devious insurrection, that I keep hearing running through Gbiguidi’s work, her interviews and her public presentation, as well as resonating in Derbew’s abstract. Indeed this may be the whisper of another documenta 14 artist, Pope. L, an African American trickster griot and conceptualist radical, with his momentous Whispering Campaign that he describes in this brief video for the Material Matters Library (and which you can see, if not hear, in the cover image of this post).

So, if you will, allow me to whisper my question to the Eos workshop panelists here, in this online hole of a blog: do we need to articulate the historical and contemporary traumas inflicted in the name of the discipline of Classics (I will leave it to you as professional Classicists to enumerate them together, but I’m thinking of its colonialist, white, authoritarian manifestations etc) in order to dissent from them in the form of this workshop on creative Africana receptions? And for C& readers: what stands in for ‘Classics’ for you that needs to be survived yet dissented from? And, one more time for all of us: does it matter into which hole we whisper our dissent for it to be effective? See you all tomorrow for our next installment and a continuation of Our Curriculum of Connections.