3.7
Art, Identity, and Autobiography
SENZENI MARASELA AND LALLA ESSAYDI
Christa Clarke
Abstract: Senzeni Marasela (from South Africa) and Lalla Essaydi (from Morocco) are two internationally renowned African artists whose artistic practice draws upon autobiography. The nuanced personal narratives explored in their work challenge essentialist ideas about the singular identity of the “African artist.” Their stories instead illuminate how individuals embrace both the local and the global, providing insights into cultural specificity and context while connecting more universally to broader questions of lived experience.
Keywords: Senzeni Marasela, Lalla Essaydi, South Africa, apartheid, Morocco, calligraphy, harem, autobiography, global contemporary
In the twenty-first century, the voices of women artists have also joined in insisting on their multiple identities. I insist on multiple identities and demand that all of my identities be respected—be they geographic, cultural, faith-based, or artistic—since they demonstrate that I am part of a cosmopolitan world with its joyous and sorrowful aspects.
—LALLA ESSAYDI, 2006
INTRODUCTION
Globalization—the increasing interconnectedness of people, places, and cultures—has had a major impact on the contemporary art world. Over the past two decades or so, artists from Africa and its diaspora, along with others in centers all too recently considered peripheral, are increasingly visible on the world stage. But while the umbrella of the “global contemporary” may appear to be all-embracing, the inclusion of artists from Africa remains selective, often based on criteria established through Western art historical practices. Artists from this vast and complex continent are often subsumed under a monolithic and essentialized notion of “African” cultural identity, one that overlooks their rich individuality as artists. Given that the visual vocabulary and artistic concerns of its artists transcend cultural, national, or geographic boundaries and reflect personal experiences and multifaceted identities, “Africanness” is clearly not a viable lens for interpreting and understanding the contemporary arts of the continent.
Considering autobiographical practices, in which individual experience is privileged, offers an ideal antidote and an approach to artistic practice that can both engage and transcend ethnicity and nationality. This essay explores the use of autobiography in the work of two artists—Senzeni Marasela and Lalla Essaydi—considering how personal experience has informed and animated their artistic practice. While there are many artists from Africa and its diaspora who engage autobiographical content, these artists speak to the range of ways personal history can be visualized and inflected through gender. Both artists revisit and reframe childhood memories, processing those experiences in different ways to seek transformation and empowerment. They both adopt media and techniques—such as sewing and henna—and engage subject matter associated with the domain of women while at the same time subverting such associations. Using distinct visual languages, they speak of their own sense of displacement, familial and geographic, and explore the interface between the public and domestic spheres.
SENZENI MARASELA
Senzeni Marasela’s artistic practice engages autobiography as a means to investigate and reclaim gaps in her personal history and as a lens through which to consider the larger cultural and political history of South Africa. She was born in 1977 in Boksburg, South Africa, an industrial and mining center just east of Johannesburg. Her father served on the police force during apartheid, an unwilling enforcer of the policies of a racist government. Her mother was a domestic worker who suffered from schizophrenia and was periodically institutionalized. She was largely absent during Marasela’s childhood, both physically away from home as a migrant laborer and psychologically distant due to illness. Marasela’s sense of alienation as a child was compounded by her Catholic school education in a white Afrikaans suburb, where she was sent because policemen’s homes were targets for attacks. This move effectively shielded her from the atrocities of apartheid and, as she describes, also deprived her of a sense of identity as a black South African.
In 1996, Marasela was a student in fine arts at the University of Witswatersrand, during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings that followed the dismantling of apartheid two years before. At the hearings, which were often publicly broadcast, victims of and witnesses to human rights violations (along with their perpetrators) shared their recollections of apartheid-era atrocities. The memories of pain, loss, and trauma emerging from these testimonies led Marasela to grapple with her personal history and the compromises of her upbringing outside the townships, unaware of the struggles of other blacks in South Africa. Driven by a desire to reclaim her history and identity, Marasela did so through her artistic practice, which may be seen within this larger national context.
Art historian Colin Richards describes a “strong restorative impulse in Marasela’s work,” in which memories are recovered and reframed to work through feelings of loss and trauma and create a space of belonging. Her childhood experiences and self-stated “indifference” to history, as well as the constant absence of her mother, have been a sustained focus of her work since she received her BFA in 1998. Our Mother (1997), an early mixed-media work created while she was still a student, in many ways sets the stage for Marasela’s later, autobiographically based practice. (See figure 3.7.1.) An old and stained housecoat, once worn by her mother, is set against a background featuring a montage of photographs of Marasela and her siblings and friends. While the emptiness of the dress reinforces absence, the physicality of the dress itself serves as an index of her mother’s presence. Around the bodice, Marasela has clustered pins—a gesture that replaces the comfort and sustenance typically associated with a mother’s breast with the pain and trauma of absence. The needles also provide a suggestion of violence, reinforced by the presence of her father’s police baton below. Together, the dress and police baton—emblems of her parents—contrast sharply with the photographic images of smiling young faces, emphasizing, as Annie Coombes has suggested, the “tension between the lived experience of two generations.” The contrast also speaks to the artist’s self-described obliviousness to South Africa’s turbulent history as a child who grew up in an environment away from the violence of political struggle.
FIG. 3.7.1. Senzeni Marasela, Our Mother, 1997. Mixed media, 60 x 40 x 6 in. Axis Gallery.
Marasela’s experience of maternal absence and desire to reembody personal history also informs a photographic triptych produced in 2000, similarly titled Our Mother. (See figures 3.7.2a, 3.7.2b, and 3.7.2c.) In these works, she moves away from the use of appropriated images and constructs her own, with her mother as subject. In this case, it is an indirect representation: the photographs capture the shadow of Marasela’s mother, who is shown sweeping a yard as she carries on her back her grandson, the artist’s young son, Ikwezi. The mother is represented by absence, her corporeal presence only suggested by the shadow she casts, which shifts in size and perspective, and—in two of the photographs—by the broom she holds. The inclusion of Marasela’s own son in these images, snuggly tucked on the back of her mother, provides an alternate reading of childhood memories, one that seeks to replace feelings of neglect with a sense of comfort the artist long sought after as a child.
FIG. 3.7.2a. (left) Senzeni Marasela, Our Mother, 2000. Photographic triptych. Axis Gallery.
FIG. 3.7.2.b. (center) Senzeni Marasela, Our Mother, 2000. Photographic triptych. Axis Gallery.
FIG. 3.7.2.c. (right) Senzeni Marasela, Our Mother, 2000. Photographic triptych. Axis Gallery.
The staged nature of these photographs is inherently performative, and in 2004, Marasela began to incorporate performance more directly into her practice. The performances, which have been done in both local and international settings, always feature the artist as the protagonist, accompanied by a professional photographer whom she hires as a “witness” to the performance. These performances are documented or represented in other media, most directly in photography, but also in linocut prints and, more recently, embroidered textiles. In many of these performances, the artist takes on the persona of Theodorah, who is created in the image of her mother. An ongoing series, Theodorah Comes to Johannesburg, begun in 2004, features Marasela performing in the guise of her mother. Wearing one of her mother’s cast-off dresses, she enacts the confusion and alienation that her mother felt coming into the city from the rural eastern Cape as a migrant domestic worker. The photographic series based on these performances tracks Theodora, often depicted with her back to the camera, as she retraces her way through contemporary Johannesburg—a lone figure navigating the urban landscape. The various locations of her journey include the Apartheid Museum, where she contemplates a memorial to Hector Pieterson (a thirteen-year-old boy killed by police during the 1976 student uprising in Soweto), the now-abandoned site of one of Soweto’s exclusively black shopping centers, a sidewalk outside a suburban home, and finally, a well-known store, frequented by diviners and their clients, that sells materials used in ritual and healing contexts. Marasela explains, “It was my way of inserting my own mother into the ever-changing landscape of Johannesburg.” At the same time, in revisiting her mother’s history by embodying lived experience, Marasela is also able to better understand and come to terms with the absence and neglect of her personal history.
In 2006, Marasela developed a new body of work using a group of old domestic uniforms once worn and given to the artist by her mother, along with her psychiatric records. In Our Mother III, as in earlier works, maternal absence is suggested by a disembodied dress. (See figure 3.7.3.) The artist implicates herself within her mother’s history by adorning the dress with beadwork, tulle ribbon flowers, and a lace collar as well as embroidered images that reconstruct her mother’s history, both real and imagined. The disturbing scenes, which include a lynching, express feelings of persecution and fear and are drawn from thoughts and memories recorded in her mother’s therapy sessions. For the artist, the process of hand-stitching evokes remembrances of her mother obsessively sewing and mending clothes. The repetitious and labor-intensive nature of the stitches is also therapeutic for Marasela, helping her reconcile with her difficult past. “Sewing, I believe, is a form of meditation. For me it offers redemption for the disruptive anger I felt towards my mother as a young woman.”
FIG. 3.7.3. Senzeni Marasela, Our Mother III, 2006. Worn uniform, lace, tulle, beads, embroidery, 46 ½ x 37 in. Collection of the Newark Museum, Purchase 2006 Helen McMahon Brady Cutting Fund 2006.49a-f. By permission of the Newark Museum, NJ.
It is through the lens of redemption that we might see Marasela’s Confessions for Another Day, created the same year and in many ways a companion work to Our Mother III. (See figure 3.7.4.) Here, Marasela uses the dress of her young daughter, Nikelwa, as a canvas for an embroidered narrative of the artist’s own childhood memories. Stitched in light gold thread, the text appears merely decorative from a distance, reinforcing the sense of fragility conveyed by the small girl’s dress and contrasting with its message of shame and isolation. It reads:
I wonder if she knew anything about my suffering. The lost dreams I hated going to school because they would all talk about their mothers talk about their mischievous revelry frolicking freeing in shopping malls purchasing their fantasies. They wished for futures filled with fortune where their currency was happiness and they used that to buy into some future while we were shell-shocked hiding behind veils of lies and shame and anger and fear I could not converse about my mother in girlish giggles nor be engulfed in giddy feelings in anticipation of our weekends I was afraid they would find out about her and laugh at us and wonder if when we made mistakes it would be a confirmation that our mother was mad.
FIG. 3.7.4. Senzeni Marasela, Confessions for Another Day, 2006. Textile, thread, beads, tulle, lace, 11 ½ x 14 in. Collection of the Newark Museum, Purchase 2006 Helen McMahon Brady Cutting Fund 2007.3. By permission of the Newark Museum, NJ.
Through this poignant narrative, the artist revisits the anguish of her personal history as a daughter, coming to terms with the memories in a restorative attempt to stop the cycle of pain and trauma passed down from generation to generation.
LALLA ESSAYDI
Like Marasela, Lalla Essaydi in her work also draws upon childhood experiences, which she returns to with a similar sense of being an outsider, and with the intention of creating a sense of belonging. Essaydi is nearly a generation older than Marasela, having focused on her artistic practice largely in the last decade, after raising two children. Born in 1956 in Tamesloht, a town outside of Marrakech, Essaydi was raised in Morocco and moved to Saudi Arabia in her early twenties. More recently, she has lived in the United States—first in Boston, where she received her MFA in 2003 from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, and now in New York. Essaydi describes herself as being shaped by two cultures—East and West—and by the multiple dimensions of her identity as an African, as an Arab, and as a Muslim, as well as as a woman and a mother. These multiple identities—or “converging territories,” as she phrases it—have informed her photographic practice as an artist. According to Essaydi, her work creates and provides a space and sense of belonging not found elsewhere.
In an early body of work from 2003, entitled Silences of Thought, Essaydi literally returns to a particular space of personal history and memory—the interior of a house in which women and girls from her family were placed in isolation, sometimes for weeks, for transgressing the rules of Islam. Photographed within the actual interior of the artist’s childhood home, the women in Essaydi’s images are covered with Arabic calligraphy. The text, written by the artist using pigment derived from henna, praises the owner of the house for its beauty. A literal reading of the text emphasizes the decorative role of the women, equating them with their material surroundings and evoking conservative Moroccan views that women are objects to be owned and controlled by men. Essaydi obliquely critiques this perspective through her use of calligraphy, co-opting an exclusively male art form used primarily for writing religious texts and transforming it into a statement of female empowerment. The feminist critic Fatema Mernissi associates Essaydi’s use of Arabic calligraphy with the ninth-century Islamic tradition of washi, in which “women wrote electrifying messages on their clothing in order to destabilize” religious authorities. The use of henna as a medium in the calligraphy reinforces its subversive message with its female associations: henna was traditionally used by Berber and Arab women in northern Africa to inscribe symbolic motifs upon their bodies during significant stages of their lives: puberty, marriage, conception, and the birth of a child.
Essaydi’s 2004 series of photographs, Converging Territories, is similarly set within the interior of this house of her childhood, but here, the specificity of place—as evidenced through the architecture of the rooms and their decor—is erased. Instead, calligraphy attains prominence, and the act of writing itself becomes the subject of many of the photographs. (See figure 3.7.5.) The text transforms Essaydi’s childhood home from a literal space—a space of confinement and isolation—to a psychological and cultural space, in which women can speak to one another freely. “I am writing. I am writing on me, I am writing on her. The story began to be written the moment the present began. I am asking, how can I be simultaneously inside and outside? I didn’t even know this world existed, I thought it existed only in my head, in my dreams. And now here I am, an open book: Inside the book cover, chapters are chaotic and confusing.” Through her writing on every imaginable surface, the artist implicates herself—her thoughts and experiences—in her work and links her personal history to that of the women who are represented in the photographs. Essaydi’s fluid and poetic words reveal an internal narrative that suggests the complexity of her identity and presents identity itself as a work in progress, constantly revisited and renegotiated.
FIG. 3.7.5. Lalla Essaydi, Converging Territories #9, 2003. Chromogenic print, 48 x 58 ½ inches. Collection of the Newark Museum, Purchase 2011 Helen McMahon Brady Cutting Fund 2011.7.2. By permission of the Newark Museum, NJ.
As with Marasela, the staging of these photographs is performative and the process of creating them labor-intensive. The women who participate in her photographic scenes are often family acquaintances, women who have had a similar relationship to the physical space of confinement as the artist. She describes them as “willing participants in the emancipation of Moroccan women and their freedom to revise, edit, and rewrite the complex narratives of their own Arab/African identities after generations of translations.” Essaydi (who was initially trained as a painter) painstakingly applies the henna, a process that can take as long as nine hours and must be uninterrupted. To facilitate the process, she creates an atmosphere of conviviality, with food and drink, the playing of music and the telling of stories. For Essaydi, this process is an essential part of the work itself, and the photographs ultimately embody the shared experiences of their creation, the literal enactment of memories. The artist’s past is thus reworked, as a place of isolation and silence becomes a space of empowerment for the renegotiation and revision of complex identities.
Essaydi’s 2007 series of photographs, Les Femmes du Maroc, extends from previous explorations of personal history, revisiting the concept of private space through the lens of history by borrowing and subverting Orientalist conventions of representation. The staging is based on specific nineteenth-century American and European paintings that depict, or—more accurately—imagine, the interior world of the North African harem with its objectified and sexualized women. As a student, Essaydi found herself drawn to the exquisite beauty seen in works by artists such as Eugène Delacroix, Jean-Léon Gerôme, and John Singer Sargent, but also disturbed by the racialized and sexualized depictions of women in their paintings. For her series, Essaydi staged the images in her Boston studio, working with Moroccan women who live in the West but also identify as Arab or Islamic. The images confront and deflect the Western lens, replacing the nudity of the antecedent compositions with subjects whose bodies are concealed and covered, and eliminating the social stratification and seductive settings. The calligraphy similarly disrupts the gaze, painted in a deliberately expressive manner that cannot be easily interpreted by Arabic readers—thus preserving the deeply personal nature of the text itself.
The harem itself as a physical and psychological space is the subject of a recent series begun in 2009, entitled Harem, which shifts from a staged setting to an actual harem. (See figure 3.7.6.) Essaydi based the series inside the harem rooms of an opulent palace near Marrakesh that once belonged to Pasha Thami El Glaoui. The palace was a place Essaydi found herself repeatedly drawn to as an adult, eventually finding out from family members that she had a direct and personal connection to it. The pasha had become her grandmother’s guardian after the death of her grandmother’s father and brought the grandmother (whom he divorced from her husband) and her young son (the artist’s father) to live in the palace. “She was like a prisoner,” Essaydi notes, “no matter how luxurious the surroundings are, and it became something direct to me.”
FIG. 3.7.6. Lalla Essaydi, Harem #1, 2009. Chromongenic prints (triptych), 40 x 30 in. each. Collection of the Newark Museum, Purchase 2011 Helen McMahon Brady Cutting Fund 2011.7.1A-C. By permission of the Newark Museum, NJ.
In the photographs, the women are almost undistinguishable from the background, dressed in clothing with the same patterns as those of the surrounding tiles. As with her previous work, the process of producing the photographs was long and meticulous, including photographing the tiles, printing the designs on fabric, and then stitching dresses made from the fabric. The resulting images speak, on one hand, of confinement and the role of women within the interior rooms of the harem, where they are literally identified with their surroundings. As Essaydi asks, “How do we separate the beauty of the rooms, fabrics, and so forth, from that of the women themselves, so seemingly passive and receptive, rather like the furniture or the welcoming spaces.” At the same time, although objects of the gaze, the women suggest resistance in their direct stare back, offering a knowing and somewhat mocking gaze. Their faces are inscribed with the artist’s thoughts and poetry written with henna—an artistic medium that Essaydi has consistently used as a statement of female empowerment.
CONCLUSION
The art historian and artist Olu Oguibe has argued that the Western world is primarily interested in constructing the African “essence” of the contemporary artist. He states, “Autonomy. Self-articulation. Autography. These are contested territories where the contemporary African artist is locked in a struggle for survival, a struggle against displacement by the numerous strategies of regulation and surveillance that characterize Western attitudes toward African art today.” Autobiography may offer an ideal framework for considering artists beyond an essential identity of African, one that embraces both the local and the global, allowing personal experience to guide insights into cultural specificity and context while connecting more universally to broader questions of lived experience. The different strategies of self-representation in the work of Senzeni Marasela and Lalla Essaydi resist any monolithic notions of African identity, demonstrating instead the complexities of personal identity while suggesting the interconnectedness of individual experience to larger national, and world, histories.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
Bedford, Emma, ed. A Decade of Democracy: South African Art, 1994–2004. Cape Town: South African National Gallery, 2004.
Carlson, Amanda. “Leaving One’s Mark.” In Converging Territories, by Lalla Essaydi and Amanda Carlson. New York: Powerhouse Books, 2005
Coombes, Annie. “On Secrets and Lies: Embodying the Past/Envisioning the Future.” In A Decade of Democracy: South African Art, 1994–2004, edited by Emma Bedford. Cape Town: South African National Gallery, 2004.
Mernissi, Fatema. Les Femmes du Maroc. New York: Powerhouse Books, 2009.
Oguibe, Olu. The Culture Game. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.
Richards, Colin. “Senzeni Marasela.” In 10 Years/100 Artists: Art in a Democratic South Africa, edited by Sophie Perryer. Cape Town: Bell-Roberts Publishing, 2004.
Thompson, Barbara. Black Womanhood: Images, Icons and Ideologies of the African Body. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008
Waterhouse, Ray. “Lalla Essaydi: An Interview.” Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art 24, no. 1: (2009): 144–49.
• • •
CHRISTA CLARKE, a specialist in historic and contemporary African art, is Senior Curator, Arts of Global Africa, at the Newark Museum. Clarke’s publications include Representing Africa in American Art Museums: A Century of Collecting and Display (University of Washington Press, 2010), which examines the impact of museum practice on the formation of meaning and public perception of African art. Her recent book African Art in the Barnes Foundation (Barnes Foundation, 2015), received the James A. Porter and David C. Driskell Book Award for African American Art History and an Award for Excellence from the Association of Art Museum Curators in 2016.