Creativity, fecundity and the magical: Zina celebrates the women from the Niger Delta.

Barely back from Lagos I turn around and fly to Houston not too thrilled about being on a plane again but very much looking forward to attending Zina Saro-Wiwa’s Mangrove Banquet at the Blaffer Museum where she is having her first solo show in the US. As she eloquently tells us “ this banquet is in honor of her father Ken Saro -Wiwa, in honor of Ogoniland in the Niger Delta and especially in honor of all the undervalued labor women of the Niger Delta put into farming the land.” “ This banquet celebrates the bounty of the Niger Delta, the other bounty that is not petroleum. It affirms fertility, female farm labor, and celebrates creativity, fecundity and the magical.”

I was soon to be immersed in the scents and flavors of the foods from the Niger Delta.

It was my first time at the Blaffer Museum and only my second time in Houston. In fact the last time I had been in Houston was to see the exhibition The Progress of Love at the De Mesnil Collection where Zina was showing her video Eaten By The Heart.

I walked in not knowing anyone beside Zina but after a few sips of her magic potion or Bespoke cocktail – Lumene Lemongrass Fizz (Rhum Agricole with Pineapple and Lemongrass Syrup topped with Soda) Kuru’s Cure All – I was ready to work the room as one says!

Tables had been laid out in the back garden. Pineapples dipped in gold paint  standing as symbols of welcome decorated the table and napkins designed by Zina and printed by Pamela Cyri-Edgware from Port Harcourt added some bright color to an overall white and gold scheme. Zina loves Pamela’s fabrics and is an enthusiastic supporter and buyer of her work. I discovered all of this on Instagram by the way.

With the help of Benjy Mason’s great cooking team she brought the flavors, scents, and ingredients from West Africa to our table. Zina had spend weeks planning this from afar and had brought back in her suitcase scent leaf syrup and curry leaf oil that she had made in Port Harcourt. At her arrival in Houston she had joined Benjy’s team and scoured the local West African supermarkets on the Southwest side of Houston, which in fact carry African produce grown by people from Congo in the Gulf!

She was thrilled to find scent leaves, which she used as garnish. Furthermore “ they added a herby quality to the hibiscus broth! “ she said.

Every dish was a discovery: All the guests were soon engrossed in the novelty of the ingredients, and the myriad of flavors Zina had put together for us.

APPETIZER

Egusi Deviled Egg (I never say no to a deviled egg even if it is bad for my cholesterol!)

STARTER

Cold-Smoked Snapped cured and smoked in Zina’s Invisible Man Tree Bark, served with carrot Ribbons and Curry Leaf Aioli. (It all sounded mysterious especially this Invisible Man Tree Bark)

SOUP

Hibiscus broth (I loved the texture of the slightly chewy things that were floating in the broth. She called them periwinkles and that really confused me because in my book periwinkle is a flower. I soon found out how ignorant I was: Periwinkle is also a small edible sea snail. It was delicious!)

ENTREMETS

Palm wine and Alomo bitters Granita

Hand-washing in warm water and shea butter soap (I did not have to wash my hands since I had yet to loose my inhibitions and eat with my fingers)

ENTRÉE (to be eaten by hand!)

Wood-Roasted Red Snapper stuffed with mustard leaf dressed in palm oil. Crayfish and coconut dressing, served with pounded Avocado and Roasted Sweet Plantain. (It took me awhile before I got over internal voices telling me I should not use my hands and reached out and grabbed the side of the fish with my fingers and stuffed it into my mouth!)

DESSERT

Poached Guava with Scent Leaf Syrup

Alligator Pepper Ice Cream

Crushed and Toasted Chin Chin.

Through out the meal Tyres Donnett’s masked performance with a mortar and pestle from Nigeria reminded us of the women of the Niger Delta who work the land and bring and prepare food for their families.

A transformative force in the Niger Delta: Through the art of performance Zina Saro-Wiwa highlights the importance of the people’s emotional and spiritual relationship to the environment.

Loaded and painful history has a funny way of leading us on roads far away from our beginnings to avoid reckoning with our past and delay our coming fully into our own. Some of us never come back home. Others have the courage to return to their place of origin, face their grief, come to terms with their past and make a new beginning.

Zina Saro-Wiwa is one of those.

A couple of years ago she returned to Port Harcourt in the Niger Delta and challenged the status quo while honoring her father’s activist legacy and her cultural heritage. Zina’s father Ken Saro-Wiwa was an activist who fought against the environmental degradation due to oil exploration in the Niger Delta and was eventually murdered. As a result the Saro -Wiwa name became associated with environmentalism and activism. In Zina’s new body of work she is proposing an alternative conversation around the idea of regeneration.

Zina engages in a process of self-determination while also acting as a transformative force. Within the context of local and cultural dynamics and of the legacy of years of corruption and environmental degradation she first makes room for herself and then puts forth her essentially positive vision for the Niger Delta. Setting aside the old narrative of the Niger Delta as a doomed place she constructs alternative narratives that highlight the Delta as “a verdant place, abundant food producer, and provider of crude oil and natural gas.”

First she opens a gallery, Boy’s Quarters, in Port Harcourt in the Niger Delta where she exhibits contemporary African art. At the same time she embarks on a new body of work that is on show in Houston at the Blaffer Museum. The exhibition is called Did You Know We Taught Them How to Dance and was conceived by Amy L. Powell, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois and co-organized with the Blaffer Art Museum.

In this body of work she is keenly aware of the physical degradation but her emphasis here is on the spiritual and the emotional, two spheres that have been deeply impacted by the oil exploration.

Indeed the focus of the local people has shifted to oil and its monetary rewards and away from an engagement with land, tradition and culture. In the exhibition she puts forth a new alternative where the emphasis is on the richness of the produce that comes from the land, on local culinary culture, religious rituals, and the century old tradition of the masquerade.

She believes that what you put your attention on is what grows. This is a process of repair.

She gets emotional. It all matters a lot. She has hope.

Zina’s engagement with her subject – the spiritual, and the social ecosystems of the Niger Delta – is deeply personal, and at times emotional. She expects the same engagement from the viewer and I found myself propelled into a world of intense emotions, hers but also mine.

The next morning after the banquet I returned to the Blaffer museum to see Zina’s exhibition located on the second floor. I climbed the stairs, and once on the landing, a series of earphones hanging from the ceiling caught my attention. I proceeded through the sound piece listening to each recording where I heard Zina’s voice repeating, “I am sorry.” Her tone shifted in each recording.   At first she sounded slightly defensive, then more sincere. The tone changed yet again. She sounded like she was making an abject apology that morphed finally into what seemed to me an act of self-flagellation. It reminded me of all the ways one says, “I am sorry” to a person who is reluctant to accept the apology and desperation rises in the voice of the apologizer. I was transported back to times in my life when my apologies sounded so similar when no forgiveness was forthcoming.

The title of the piece. Hubris room: Killer of Ancestors says it all.

She makes us witness to her internal conflict as she is torn between her attachment to tradition and history and her need to break from it to redefine herself.

I love how Zina speaks of her creative urges as if some unexplainable spiritual force is driving her.

In the next three works, she turns to cultural traditions that are deeply rooted in the Niger Delta. Zina appropriates their form to assert her reality and vision for Ogoniland while highlighting their potential for effecting change.

In her five channel digital video Karikpo Pipeline (2015) she celebrates a playful masquerade tradition  where male dancers wearing antelope masks dance around decommissioned pipelines or areas where pipelines once existed.

You see them dancing on roads that were once considered possessed because of the presence of the pipelines.

Zina filmed this video with a drone and was therefore able to capture the landscape in all its beauty and breadth. At a more conceptual level the drone makes reference to the surveillance effected by the oil companies but perhaps more importantly for Zina it stands  for invisible spiritual forces.

Long drawn out shots of sand on the ground create moments of abstraction that take on deeper meaning when Zina told me that sand was added to absorb the oils spills and leaks.

The dance is athletic and playful and the mood is at time contemplative.The dancers become playful spirits that are reclaiming Ogoni land as theirs. No longer restricted to a narrow conversation around oil, through the art of performance Zina presents Ogoni land as a site for culture, history and life. She is proposing a different solution than the AID or NGO paradigm. This is regeneration from within.

While I sat watching this video I heard the preaching and singing coming from her other video Prayer Warriors. I didn’t understand the words they were saying but I felt the intensity of the emotion. It was raw and passionate. As a result, while the masqueraders’ dance and the beauty of the landscape unfolding in front of me seduced me, I could not forget the backdrop of the human drama. Zina explained to me that female pastors come to your home to pray with you. It is their version of Christianity infused with local tradition.

Moving away from the videos I walked through the dark space towards The Invisible Man, a sculpture/mask representing Zina’s decision to immerse herself in the spiritual life of the Niger Delta. Inspired by new styles of masquerades she discovered in Ogoniland – particularly a masquerade called Ogele – Zina commissioned her own Janus-faced mask (a two faced mask) intended for masquerade performance.  In part the motivation was to help her confront ” the invisible man”, a spirit of her tragic familial past that seems to follow her around,  she says. It is  only to be worn by a woman which is a very novel idea in Ogoniland and anywhere else in West Africa. Masks and masquerades have been traditionally the sole domain of men.

The set up was dramatic and situated the sculpture within a conversation where the spiritual, the emotional and culture were at the core. Emerging out of the darkness of the exhibition space the massive two-faced mask, one side painted white and the other pink, bears the weight of the figures of Zina’s father and young brother both deceased. More than a simple sculpture, this awesome mask is imbued with personal emotion and symbolism. It is also a gesture of catharsis and cultural connection. The weight of it born by the bearer during the performance/ masquerade is meant to mirror the weight of the absence of departed loved ones.

Zina has spend years in the UK and the US but Ogoni mythology stays close to her heart. In another body of work Kuru’s Children she turns to folklore and inserts an African  feminist agenda.

Table Manners was another very effective installation that included 5 TV screens arranged on a table covered with periwinkle shells. Each video shows a person eating a meal from beginning to the end while looking directly at a stationary camera. The tableaus were carefully constructed half way between documentary and fiction and point to regional identities and personal style. The people come from all over the Niger Delta, which includes 5 kingdoms and 111 villages.

I found myself being stared at unblinkingly, at times defiantly by these men and women eating their food with their fingers and relishing their experience. It was a show of resistance. I could imagine them saying to me: “Yup, this is the way I eat and I am proud of it. I am not apologizing and I am rejecting all your western definition of proper manners.” I was laughing because I was remembering my reticence to embrace their custom the previous night at the banquet. Furthermore the sexual aspect of the performance was not lost on me.

Of equal importance was the focus on produce locally grown, on the idea of a bountiful land, of sensual pleasure and joy of cooking and living. The land is no longer seen as depleted or ravaged but as a source of life.

Zina is promoting a nuanced view of the Niger Delta. Most of the photographs I have seen of the Niger Delta have been by George Osodi and while they are stunning shots they focus on the ravaged land, struggling farmers and armed militias.

In her last video Niger Delta: A Documentary, she gives us a bucolic view of the river where a man transporting sand upriver in his boat floats by on peaceful waters. The river is now a place of leisure. A red chair sits on the beach facing the viewer. It is a sign of rebirth and fertility.

Zina is making her own mark,  not quite following in her father’s footsteps, but surely with the same spirit of courage, commitment, and love. Something about her journey catches my imagination and emotions. Her struggles with her grief, her determination to confront her past, embrace her cultural roots, and her commitment to create space for her own values while engaging in a process of repair and renewal are sentiments I can relate to.

She turns to western notions of performance art as evident in her Table Manners installation as well as African performative practices such as masquerades to highlight art’s power to shift perceptions.

Furthermore by going back to the Niger Delta and focusing in her videos on the land instead of its cities  Zina identifies it as playing an important role in the determination of a spiritual, emotional and social identity.  In other words she proposes the rural as an alternative to the urban as a fertile and relevant site for the foundation of an African identity.

Mid-august I was having dinner with the artist, Zina Saro-Wiva in New York City at the little Italian restaurant around the corner from where I live in the West Side. A few days before Zina had contacted me asking me if I could help her promote her latest photographic work on the Ogole dancers. She needed the proceeds of the sales to finance her upcoming work that is to be exhibited at the Seattle museum.

Alternating between vivacious and impassioned descriptions of her two major projects and moments of silence heavy with angst, Zina updated me on what was happening at Port Harcourt where she is running her own pop-up gallery and working with the Ogoni people on her next video.

A year or so ago Zina had decided to leave her life in Brooklyn to go back to Nigeria. A bit like the heroine of Adiche’s “Americanah”, she was feeling the need to go back to where she came from and in her case face the heavy legacy of her father,Ken Saro-Wiwa. While she was raised mostly in the UK , Zina’s father Ken Saro -Wiwa was a very vocal activist in the Niger Delta who came to an untimely death when he was hung in prison under the orders of the Nigerian government. The anniversary of his death was coming up.  History and the opportunity to shape the future were calling her. It was time on a more personal level to contend with the grief surrounding his death as well as the complicated feelings she must have towards her father who had more than one family and was away most of the time.

Her first career for many years was in the media working as a freelance researcher, producer and presenter on BBC TV and radio. In 2010 she made her debut as a video artist and filmmaker in New York City in the group show “Sharon Stone in Abuja”. She then produced several video and short films with the goal of changing the way Africa is viewed, spoken about and discussed.

She says: “ My art career started when I left my journalism background and dedicated myself to changing the way the world saw Africa. I set up the (now dormant) organization AfricaLab to this end. By immersing myself fully in this endeavour, I discovered that contemporary art practices would give me the power, license and freedom I needed. Art challenged me to be freer and deeper in my thinking. What I did no expect, however, was how focusing in on Africa has often resulted in work that transcended the ‘idea of Africa” and became deeply personal. And really it is the relationship between the personal and the political that interests me.”

She went to Port Harcourt, the capital of Rivers State, located in the Niger Delta in South Eastern Nigeria. She repossessed her father’s office, which had been kept intact since his hanging in 1995. It is now a miniature museum site hosting projected photographic and video installation works relating to Ken’s personal life and international legacy.

The rest of the space is now a pop-up gallery called the “Boys Quarters”.

“The Boys’ Quarters” is the colloquial name given to the servants’ quarters, a post-colonial hangover and an ever-present feature of modern West African life. The place where, to this day, servants and sometimes extended family members live. We believe that in order to transcend limitation and excel – a Nigerian pre-occupation – we must run towards and not away from The Boys’ Quarters. We must investigate ourselves, go inwards as a society then reflect and expand upon who we are from our core. Our true wealth is in the people at every level of society. “ ( Zina Saro-Wiwa)

With the same spirit as her father she decided to effect change by reframing the narrative surrounding the Niger Delta. The Niger Delta is rich in oil reserves that have attracted years of exploration from multinational oil corporations (Shell and others). It has suffered tremendous environment destruction. In addition ethnic communities such as the Ogoni and the Ijaw people have felt exploited. Communities were forced out by the Nigerian government to allow for exploration and very little of the wealth produced by the oil exploration has trickled down to the local communities. As a consequence various forms of resistance to the presence of the big oil companies and to the corruption of the Nigerian government have emerged since the 1990’s. Zina ‘s father, Ken Saro-Wiwa, a play-right and author is the most well known of the activists for the rights of the Ogoni people. More recently activism has taken a more violent turn with many militias operating in the Delta.

Zina is proposing an alternative platform for discussing environmental issues in the Delta, one that is peaceful and uses art as a way to offer different ways of looking and apprehending ones own context, environment and history. In this process Zina wants to highlight an emotional and spiritual dimension to the life in the Niger delta.

Zina’s idea of a contemporary gallery is not the highly commercial gallery one sees in Nigeria or Ghana for that matter. She is quite adamant about that. I knew just what she was talking about. Last fall I went to Ghana and was struck with the absence of galleries that showed anything slightly conceptual. Most of the work tended to be more traditional and a bit too decorative and commercial. A more conceptual approach to contemporary art that addresses contemporary issues was sorely lacking. This is just what Zina is doing here: Presenting an alternative, a new way of looking at one owns environment.

With help from donors, she restored her father’s office and cleaned up, painted and refurbished the other rooms. I loved what she did with the space shaping it into a haven of peace and light, a contemplative space in the middle of busy and noisy Port Harcourt.

Currently, the Niger Delta artist, Perrin Oglafa is having a show called “The Restless Grove” in the main gallery and Zina’s video “An Ogoni Heart” is set up in the back room. Zina tells me how she discovered Oglafa’s sculptures. Oglafa is known in the area for his paintings, which are quite colorful and can be found on the walls of banks, hotels and homes of foreign oil executives. While she was visiting him in his studio, she noticed what looked at first glance like a pile of ropes. Intrigued she asked him what this was. He explained that this was a private work that he had never shown because he did not think it fit the local market. He had painstakingly dissembled a raw canvas, one thread at a time creating a sculpture that looked like fishing nets. His forefathers were fishermen and in unraveling the canvas perhaps there was a mirroring of the unraveling of the lives of these fishermen as a result of the pollution in the Niger Delta. Zina responded to the expressive power of the piece, and to the fresh and novel way of addressing an aspect of Niger Delta life.

This was exactly what she was looking for! She displayed the body of work beautifully and with great simplicity in the new space highlighting its metaphorical qualities while revealing its beauty. Included were wooden pieces, which reflect Oglafa’s love of nature. Nature is a loaded subject in the Niger Delta. In addition to the issue of the damaging effect of the exploration of oil on the environment, nature has mystical powers according to pre-Christian animistic beliefs. Zina speaks of the “Restless Mangrove” as “the representation of the spirit of a fisherman of souls.”

The first time I heard of this pop up project I was very intrigued. I feel that true change in the art scene in Nigeria or other African countries happens from within. It is not enough that a few well-intentioned and generous western people collect or show African art outside of the country. It is essential that Nigerians such as Zina bring a new perspective to the arts locally and encourage local Africa collectors and artists to embrace alternative yet authentic ways of encountering their environment and life. In addition, Zina’s gesture has an inherent legitimacy because of her familial history in the Delta.

I could relate to her desire to reckon with her father’s legacy, change the way people look at her country of origin and in so doing confront her inner demons. A few years back I embarked on a project – the performance in the USA of my Bulgarian grandfather, Petko Staynov’s music – that aimed in part to honor his legacy in the Western world, to repair some of the impact of the Cold War years on my family and on the arts, and improve my relationship with my father. I can’t say I was fully successful on the family level. While my uncle from Bulgaria attended the performances which were wonderful, and helped in many ways, my father did not come.

These things need to be done and they demand a good dose of courage and they are no guarantees. In Zina’s case the bravery is multifold since Port Harcourt is not a safe place and Nigeria faces at this moment several very serious health and security challenges. Furthermore she is a woman and in doing this project and her performance work there she is confronting entrenched gender taboos.

While she is overseeing the pop-up, Zina is also working on a new body of work that centers on the Ogoni people and in particular the Ogele Masquerades. See next post.