Okwui Enwezor, 'Reframing the Black Subject: Ideology and Fantasy in Contemporary South African Representation'
In: Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Market Place. Edited by Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwezor. London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 1999, pp. 376-399.
Despite the sincerity of the artists who have brazenly maintained a relationship in their work with the black body, there is a certain over-determination that accompanies their gestures. They seem to neglect the fact that the black form is as much a grotesque bearer of traumatised experiences as it is the abject vessel of race as a point of differentiation. More than alerting us to how the stereotype fixes its objects of desire in that freeze-frame of realism, as prior knowledge, the work of these artists exacerbates the stereotype by replaying it, perhaps unconsciously, as if it had always been factual. The problem with this kind of work is that it is so fixed on the body that it neglects to account for the more crucial psychic split that positions black and white bodies in polarities of worth and value. By seeking to merge them, albeit forcibly, and taking as licence the fact of their whiteness, they repeat that act of surrogacy that emphasises the subject's muteness and silence, while embellishing their own positions as the voices of reality, as the vocal integers of truth.
While this attention, which has grown out of the need to sate white liberal conscience in a fragile post-apartheid culture, persists, African artists have conversely adopted a contrary attitude towards the same body. There is very little usage of that figure in their work. Instead, we encounter it as a suppressed presence, abstracted and exorbitantly coded with the semiotic speech of détournement, a kind of shift of emphasis from its representational 'realness' to a metaphorical search for its lost form.
But in pointing out some of these problems, are we not fetishising identity as something that wholly belongs to and can be used only by a particular group? And am I not again reiterating that postcolonial litany of the wounded black subject, caught in the mesh of white, European displacement, who must again be either protected or spoken for? The fact that I am an African does not in itself absolve me from this quandary. Despite such dilemmas, what will be the implication of remaining silent on the matter? In proposing a re-examination of certain facts lodged in the iconographical heart of South Africa, in a delimited forum of whiteness as a nation unto itself, should we not also admit that it is the reappropriation of blackness by Africans as a nationalistic emblem, as a fantasy of the coherence of African identity, that has set up the appositional measures against the 'Rainbow Nation'?
I remain sceptical of there being a possible resolution to the problems raised by these issues. I question the wisdom of enacting any kind of representational corrective through a recourse to 'positive' images of blackness. For identity must never be turned into a copyright; an antinomy in which ethnicity through group reckoning stages its authenticities and retains exclusive user rights to its images. To do so would be to fetishise identity, to render it into a totem, a token of mythology, an ideological fantasy. Moreover, we would miss the vital lessons that inform the complex motives of usage and the reasons why we resist such use of images. The predicament into which one is thrown, then, is how to imagine identity in the present tense of South Africa's transitional reshaping and reconstitution of its reality; between authenticity and stereotype. For everything seems haunted by this paradoxical affirmation of origin and disavowal of past histories. Within all that, what needs interrogation is usage of any fixed meaning of blackness as an ideology of authenticity, or whiteness as a surplus enjoyment of superiority. Whatever the orientation, whatever the signifying strategies of usage, either to mask whiteness or to valorise falsely an atrophied and immobile black identity, we would do well to heed Aimé Césaire's refusal to fix blackness in any stable meaning. Césaire, in his seminal epic poem Cahier d'un retour au pays natal [Notebook of a Return to my Native Land], wrote in some of its most moving lines:
my negritude is neither tower nor cathedral
it takes root in the red flesh of the soil
it takes rook in the ardent flesh of the sky
What Césaire is articulating here, far from being a fantasy of blackness, is a proposition of heterogeneity, in which he casts aside all those fantasies that fetishise blackness in such a way that it loses its human dimension. 'My negritude is neither tower nor cathedral', 'Black is... black ain't': are there any more succinct ways to begin the delimitation of those fantasies that mark the black subject as abject, than to start with these two ideas of unfixed blackness, burgeoning into the expansive site of heterogeneity? I want to end with this question, because the relationship of the white or black artist to the black body is indeed paradoxical. And the less anxiously repeated the image, the better the opportunity to find an ethical ground to use its index as a form of discursive address, for radical revision, as well as to unsettle the apparatus of power that employs it as a structurally codified narrative of dysfunction.