by Sandra Ngenge Dusabe, exhibition curator
Emerging into an unadulterated state of consciousness can be described as an unraveling of one’s sense of self—attempting to grasp the essence of humanness is a challenge that artists, whether aware of it or not, endeavor to achieve. Like many other species, decoration and art-making continues to be an integral part of the sentient beings. Images, symbols, and artifacts of antiquity indicate an artistic spirit that many philosophers, anthropologists, historians, and several others use as reference to better understand the world. Values, morals, and the intangible in-between have been communicated through art, and the effects of seminal works also reaffirms not only the aesthetics of the subjects, but of the underlying ideological paradigms that the Global North uphold with unrelenting vigor and vim.
Invisibility is a characteristic that many Black Canadians have echoed for decades; primary sources, anecdotes and historical records indicate the end of the Underground Railroad was not the ‘promised land’ that contemporary minds romanticize. A cruel trick is played on those who allow themselves to believe that countries like so-called Canada are somehow uniquely indifferent to the issue of race. Despite its relatively short colonial history, Canada has made exceptional efforts to maintain its diplomatic image by mystifying its reputation of impunity against its non-European constituencies. Quiet as it’s kept, Canada, a colony of the British Empire, owes its prosperity to the Transatlantic Slave Trade, and cemented a legacy of racial segregation and xenophobia, keeping pace with many of its colonial counterparts. Through this suppression of human agency, liberty and dignity, malformations on the concept of Blackness proliferated within Canadian society, despite the country’s relative diversity. However, despite a culture that rejects and excludes those who do not assimilate into the coveted image of ‘whiteness’, the inevitable progression of race relations on this land has acted as a catalyst for intersecting issues which touch on gender and sexuality.
In Elusive Illusion: A Study of the African Nude, Zineb Allaoui and LuCille Giwa-Amu contend with both racial and gendered values and morals placed upon them as African artists in Canada. Zineb’s collection, entitled Black Lines White Canvas, confronts these confusions and transforms the feminine form as a character. Bold black lines interconnect and interact with each other, and are only visible to those who peer past the surface. The graphic nature of these stylized figures harkens back to African art that was popularized in the early 20th century, which has been famously co-opted and then reclaimed by African artists throughout the diaspora. Following that same thread, LuCille’s body of work entitled Nüd, Naked and Bare touches on the vulnerability required to depict the Black nude, which they describe as being ‘pulled and prodded at, analyzed and sexualized, disrespected and yet worshipped.' A contrast to Zineb’s respected palette, LuCille uses vibrant colors to showcase the dark representation of the subjects within their paintings.
In order to gather a clearer image of this exhibit, we must first extract ourselves from the current framework that colonization was imposed as the ‘nature’ of men and women. Studies and academic assessments made by researchers who interfaced more holistically with this data reveal the misconceptions of womanhood within Africa. Boris Bertolt (2018) reminds us that through the force of Christian imperialists, the (1) binarization of gender identities was standardized within parts of the continent, (2) a reduction of women from their varied societal behaviors was adopted, and (3) a rejection of homosexuals through the institutionalization of heterosexuality were normalized. Effectively, these invasions from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries have had ample time to nearly erase and demonize the diversity of these Indigenous peoples. Colonizers informed their stance on gender dynamics through the alienation, animalization, infantilization and fetishization of African peoples.
According to Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí (Bertolt, 2018 p. 13), the category of ‘woman’ is a colonial invention. The first contact with the Yoruba were assessed from a European tradition of bioessentialism assigned via genitalia and sex, without respect to these societies traditions, language or history. Mohammed Elnaiem (2021) expands on this point by indicating that maleness and manhood, or femaleness and womanhood, were not inseparable concepts in parts of West Africa. Particularly, many women within this region’s people groups held ‘conspicuous’ positions within their communities, meaning they were not limited to the now considered ‘traditional’ spaces women in the west inhabited.
Sylvia Tamale’s contribution on this topic 10 years ago still rings true today. Marginalized people in places like Uganda are attacked and used by both the west and their countrymen, in order to maintain regimes of intense patriarchy and white supremacy. The Anti-Homosexuality Bill, which was passed into law in 2023, was first introduced in 2009 (Tamale, 2013 p. 33) and ushered a wave of condescending critique from the west, despite the several humans rights violations decried from activists on the ground that had been ignored by aforementioned western mainstream outlets. These reactive sanctions acted as proof of the claims that conservatives in Uganda made against gays, citing that they were given special and conspiratorial preference from foreign governments, further polarizing and propagating the narrative of gay rights as a un-African concept (p. 41).
Niara Sudarkasa’s focused piece on the shortcomings of western interpretations of precolonial African women reveals that they were invaluable assets to economic, political, and public affairs. Either parallel or independent of each other, a woman’s place within these societies were not determinable through a fixed set of favorable conditions in relation to the men of their lives. Sudarkasa (1986) also highlights the incessant obsession that some western scholars have with condensing the familiar structures to the nuclear model (p. 96), which a majority of African compounds housing extended family, and additional domestic aid. Women in African societies have always been active participants in the multiplicity of precolonial Africa, and similarly in today’s world.
Revisionist and ahistorical depictions of women, gender-nonconforming people and 2SLGBTQIA+ has led to incomplete images of the world that we currently navigate. Black representation should not simply be an aesthetic option–the deliberate exclusion of African and Black histories, culture and self-determination has led to the normalization of their invisibility in Canadian society. It is through investigation of not only the data, but also of challenging the status quo through careful curation, an intimate care for the works being exhibited, is indispensable in cases like these. Elusive Illusion invites you to venture into the unknown, guided by the light of a world that was, is, and will always be part of the mosaic of the human experience.
References
Bertolt, B. (2018). Thinking otherwise: theorizing the colonial/modern gender system in Africa. African Sociological Review / Revue Africaine de Sociologie, 22(1), 2–17. http://www.jstor.org/stable/90023843
Elnaiem, M. (2021). “The “Deviant” African Genders That Colonialism Condemned” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, April 29, 2021. JSTOR Daily, https://daily.jstor.org/the-deviant-african-genders-that-colonialism-condemned/
Sudarkasa, N. (1986). “The Status of Women” in Indigenous African Societies. Feminist Studies, 12(1), 91–103. https://doi.org/10.2307/3177985
Tamale, S. (2013). Confronting the Politics of Nonconforming Sexualities in Africa. African Studies Review, 56(2), 31–45. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43904926