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.

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.

Listen well: African women are talking about their hair.

I just finished Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche’s novel, Americanah, and was totally taken by her wonderful vivid description of a hair-braiding salon in Trenton New Jersey. I never realized it took six hours to have one’s hair braided and that it hurt so much! Being a person who hates going to the hairdresser – I don’t like getting my hair pulled- and who rarely styles her hair I also found myself quite amazed by the time, effort and even health risk that are involved in achieving the alternative soft wavy look many black women favor.

J.D. Okhai Ojeikere photographs of Nigerian women hairstyles have fascinated me recently.  They do feel abstract and impersonal however. While that is part of their appeal I loved getting Adiche’s insights into women’s daily lives and hairstyle practices. Suddenly, something that had felt distant and looked like an abstract art form came to life.

To give you an idea of how intricate, sculptural and varied these hairdos can be, here are wonderful photographs taken by J. D Okhai Ojeikere who sadly past away very recently.

These images come from his series Hairstyles. In the street, at the office, at parties, he photographed women’s hairdos from behind and highlighted their sculptural qualities and the play of forms. Beyond their aesthetic qualities his series offer a mix of ethnographic and anthropological insight into Nigerian culture.

I am a woman and I assure you hair matters very early on the life of a little girl. I remember trying different hairstyles as a child: braids, ponytails, with lots of colorful bows. It was about vanity but also identity and pleasure. However, in African culture and tradition cornrow braiding has much greater and deeper significance. It is much more than an expression of personal vanity. It has communicative power and traditionally speaks of religion, kinship, status, age and ethnicity. When a black woman chooses to braid her hair she is embracing and honoring her cultural heritage.

Adiche, born in Nigeria but now living both in Nigeria and in the US brings her personal Nigerian perspective to the discussion of race in the United States. In Adiche’s third novel, Ifemelu the outspoken Nigerian heroine is returning to Nigeria. In preparation of her return, she wants to have her hair braided. With no braiding hair salon in upper class Princeton where she was on a research fellowship she goes to Trenton to have her hair braided.

Ifemelu has all the characteristics of what Adiche calls an Americanah: After 14 years in the US she has given up some of her old habits and adopted American ways.  Sitting in a hair salon having her hair braided for six hours by ladies from French speaking West Africa she munches carrots and granola bars while they are eating spicy and greasy food. She reads an American novel while they stare in rapture at Nigerian Nollywood movies, which she dislikes.

Adiche weaves through out the novel the theme of Ifemelu’s black kinky hair and its care, here an index of Ifemelu’s race and gender. The evocative  hair braiding episode  followed subsequently by the many references to hair become a metaphor for Ifemulu’s struggles in the US as an African immigrant.   A Nigerian African contending for the first time with her blackness in a predominantly white society, Ifemelu gradually emerges as an independent and authentic woman.

Ifemelu is a blogger in the story. She is not afraid to speak her mind about issues of race and has the refreshing perspective of the outsider on America’s political correctness that looks so foreign to people that come from abroad. I loved the frankness and outspoken nature of her posts and it made me realize that my own posts could be spunkier.

All simplistic notions of race and identity particular to the western perspective and America’s “ tribal” approach to difference are challenged: People from Nigeria are different from people from Senegal, or Kenya or Mali, even though Americans would prefer to bunch them all under the term “Africans”. African-Americans are different from what Adiche calls American- Africans and there are many shades of “blackness”. She defies easy categorization, highlights differentiation while not minimizing prevailing deeply rooted racial prejudices.

Lets get back to the subject of hair.

“Can you imagine Michele Obama wearing her hair natural?” says Ifemelu.

Michele Obama has to have her hair relaxed and has to risk burning and scarring her scalp to achieve a look that voters are all comfortable with. The question begs to be asked. Would Obama have been elected if Michele wore her hair natural and short? Kind of crazy to think that we, voters, would have taken her hairdo into consideration. Yet, I think many would have.  So before any of you start thinking it is ridiculous to be spending so much time on ones hair, lets remember the magnitude of the consequences. Thank you Chimamanda Adiche for pointing it out! I take so much for granted and I really appreciate when I get a new awareness.   Hair is no joke in this country! It has huge symbolism though that is not the case everywhere in Africa. Trust me in the middle of the bush in Kenya it is a subject far from a woman’s mind.  However it does matter to the young male warriors!

According to Zina Saro-Wiwa, another Nigerian artist who has just returned to Nigeria after years abroad, one needs to pay attention to how black women in America are dealing with their hair these days. In spring of 2012 she made Transition a documentary video for the New York Times about the new natural look that many black women in America are adopting. She calls them “transitioning” women and points to a quiet revolution that is taking place.  I met her just as she had shaved off her hair and was keeping it short and natural. She was at the same time dealing with the long overdue grieving process over the violent death of her father Ken Saro-Wiwa. Determined to embrace her history, and in a courageous act of self-acceptance and honesty she included in a video recording of performances around the idea of “Grief” one scene where she allows herself to show her grief unabashedly and without any visual adornment. Her hair is cut very short and all the emphasis is on her expression.

She highlights the significance of this movement and its potential impact.

“[But] black hair and the black body generally have long been a site of political contest in American history and in the American imagination. Against this backdrop, the transition movement has a political dimension – whether transitioners themselves believe or not. Demonstration this level of self-acceptance represents a powerful evolution in black political expression. If racial politics has led to an internalization of self-loathing, then true transformation will come internally, too. It will not be a performative act. Saying it loud: “I’m black and I’m proud” is one thing. Believing it quietly is another. So the transition movement is much more profound and much more powerful – and I believe it offers lessons in self-acceptance for people of all hues and all genders.”

Zina is now in Nigeria working on  commissions for a couple of US museums and opening a pop up contemporary art gallery in her father’s old offices focusing on life and its struggles in the Niger Delta.

I find both Zina and Ifemelu’s determination, courage and self –acceptance deeply moving and inspiring. I thrive to be true to who I am and that includes cultural heritage and personal experience. I have learned from an early age that most people are attracted to you for the parts of you that are like them and not for what makes you different and separate.  With that in mind, choosing to honor difference, like Ifemulu or Zina are doing, can seem a risky proposition at times and yet I think it holds an abundance of richness. Holding at once what makes us similar and what makes us separate is the key to a rich and peaceful life and world.

From this point of departure – the hair salon – we follow the trials and tribulations of the two main protagonists Ifemelu and Obinze, who are lovers in high school in Nigeria then part ways as they try to improve on their choices in life. Obinze, a soft spoken young man with a passion for the US, cannot get a visa and ends up in London scrubbing toilets. He is deported back to Nigeria after he has been found to be working with false papers. He finds material success in Lagos. Ifemelu goes to university in the US where she struggles terribly to make ends meet. Her perseverance pays off and she becomes a very successful blogger. Despite her success she feels something deeply lacking in her life and returns to Lagos where she eventually reunites with Obinze.

The overriding narrative of boy /girl in love, going their separate ways and finding each other again is a time worn structure. More interesting are the insights into the life of Ifemelu when she was a young girl in Nigeria, highlighting the gradual disappointments and frustration with the way things were going in a country trying to find its way after independence.

Most of all, I love how Adiche highlights difference and creates a rich tapestry of colorful and unique experiences which are a powerful antidote to the toxic dangers of prejudice.