Ijele: Art eJournal of the African World (2002) ISSN: 1525-447X Transgressions: Redressing Tradition

Rekha Menon

I am stuck in the middle of the journey

A highway without human activity

A text without visible structure

Life on this side of the border

On your side . . ..

I no longer know who I am but I like it

"The Border Is . . . (A Manifesto)"¹

 

In our post-colonial context, translation is interpretation and becomes a site, a space that creates a mode of self-interpretation in favor of the logic of globalization. The latter comprises a process of abolishing all that is local, traditional, and imposes homogeneity. Indeed, we are compelled to acquire a new subject - with a uniform, global look and thinking, in place of our old selves. The new is something that we must construct bodily on top of our traditional self: it must be exercised, painted, behaviorally proper, and uniformly predictable. All other forms of being a subject - the local - are to be relegated to the bin of primitivism, exoticism, inadequacy, and out of historical flow. In this context my paper will investigate the contemporary Other/Otherness, some aspects of African art which was termed as primitive by the West, located in the local-historical Space, the immigrant Space, a local-Global Africa attempting to catch up with the Western Space. After all, third world, me being from the third world, must catch up to the "world history" since our history is not part of the world. We are the Third Space, the Third World; we are attempting to be global and yet compelled to be local third. We are compelled to become subjects and objects of technical power and prowess, and yet we still cling to our traditional self.

Nevertheless this catching up, stripping and reclothing, redressing constitutes a double transgression: first, the colonial requirements transgress all bodily practices and expressive gestures and attires; second the very imposition of the "proper" is transgressed by the indigenous bodies who are deemed "immoral but exotic and alluring" to be gazed at with eyes of desire. Given this context, the contemporary Other, African art/artists are struggling with both transgressions by attempting to strip the colonial moral garb from African bodies without, at times succeeding to present the African embodied gestures and practices values and meanings. This is to say an effort is made to redress African bodies with transgressive gestures and present them as African, to repossess them as embodiments of a suppressed tradition and not as exotica for tourist gaze. Colonization is a practice of theft, including the theft of bodies. Can the once colonized reclaim their traditional bodies, to acquire ownership of them, to redress them in their once dynamic, erotic attire? The body is a highly contested site of knowledge and power, a property to be possessed and utilized. The politics played out during the colonial period in Africa has carved imprints on African bodies by disrobing and degrading their cultural values and practices. The aesthetics of African art and culture were colonially modified and transgressed. Colonial powers stripped African local populations of their traditions, their discursive practices and regarded their values as primitive, barbaric, shameless, disgusting and naked. The question is can a tradition be reclaimed? Can we recloth the texture of our skin, or shall we wear it with the marks inscribed by the Other?

As Trinh T. Min-ha states, “The West is painfully made to realize the existence of a Third World in the First World, and vice versa.² The Thirding as Othering. A third Space filled with the perils and possibilities that create and suck in marginalities. The third world grates against the first and bleeds. As Anzaldua writes, “before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country – a border culture.³ Yet the border culture seems to be regarded as an interface of superior and inferior such that the globalizing superior tends to subject the inferior Other by lending a marginal space to it. In this sense, African Space, the Third space, can be judged in three ways: as subjective invention; as inadequate with respect to globalising needs; as something to be reduced to attract gaping tourists. In all cases, the Thirding as Othering will be judged either as primitive, savage with respect to the globalising morality, or as uncreative with respect to other phases of the global logics of subjective inventiveness. We are all the time catching up, we are the underdeveloped, poverty ridden, victims trying to be enlightened and emancipated by the Global logic. Our stuff is not good enough the western stuff is . . .. Thus we are asked to dress ourselves in the rhetorical garb of the globalizing west. The inadequacies of the African Third Space and catching up can be traced back to the time when Africa was colonized, especially when the space was dubbed, stereotyped as naked savage, dark and ominous, with bones in his nose and pierced earlobes, and strange figures incised into his skin.

Though the western Space, western artists in all fields, from painting, sculpture, music, dance, fashion, have called the African Space the savage primitive but the West has learned a great deal from the so called primitive. Today practices like henna, tattoo, scarification, the barbaric clothing, practice of body arts which were deemed primitive have been transgressed into an exotic, or even trendy, or even being cool, they have been redressed into fashionable forms of appropriation, reinterpretation or even misinterpretation, have gained currency and has in fact offered and inspired creative innovations. Decorating, scarification and altering the body, traditionally was a part of every human society. “After all the body is a medium through which we most directly project ourselves in social life, our use and presentation of it say precise things about the society in which we live, the degree of our integration within that society and the controls which society exerts.⁴

Body decoration serves to set people apart from one another, it was done to enhance the beauty of the body, to strengthen the healthy look. “In Africa body art takes elaborate form, the body can be adorned in ways that range from permanent alterations such as tattooing, scarification and to more temporary forms, such as henna and other forms of body painting, hair styling, clothing, and jewelry.⁵ In many African and Asian societies body decoration is an integral part of the celebration of different rites of passage or a new status in life, such as birth, marriage or death. In many parts of Africa, permanent body alterations such as scarifications were often done to emphasize membership, body decoration served as a public marker of ethnicity, identity and personal allegiance to a particular group.⁶

This body art which played a crucial role in the life of African, Indian societies was judged primitive, immoral by the colonizers, but today with recent shift in the art market and the new focus on exotica, and exoticism, the genre of artistic practice and scholarship has changed. In respect to the globalizing morality or with respect to other phases of the global logics of subjective inventiveness, the traditional African aesthetics that were regarded as primitive, savage became regarded as subjective, interest laden expressions or social promotions of traditional African power holders. This subjectivation of the African primitive later was drawn into the globalizing process as exotic material to be sold for a price, to be consumed as touristically exotic. In this context I want to portray the example of henna mania: body painting, which was so called a primitive, savage act as a fashion, exotic statement today.

Henna art has been part of my growing up in the world I hail from. As an Indian, I grew up seeing intricate, elaborate designs on many women, children around me done on festive occasions. It is an art practiced by mothers, aunts and sisters, traditionally passed on from one generation of women to another from mother to daughter. A predominantly feminine art, done by women, especially in India henna painting was done on the occasion which we call as the ‘making of the bride,’ it is often an elaborate celebration. In fact the designs and their placements on the body distinguished the married from the unmarried. “Henna decorations worked as a social marker along with other variables as hairstyle, jewelry, costume, make-up and perfume, henna was a part of an entire aesthetic system that includes the olfactory and tactile as necessary elements.⁷

Henna, one of the most ancient cosmetic known to human society is a paste made of dried and pulverized leaves of Lawsonia inerm, a small shrub found in Africa, Asia and Australia. Henna derives its name from Persia and has been found that ancient Egyptians used henna. Henna results in aesthetically pleasing designs ranging in color from red to dark brown or black, sometimes ointments and incense are used to create this effect. The exact shade depends on the length of time the paste is left to dry on the skin and on the extra ingredients which are added to it. Preference for henna colors ranges from reddish brown in India and Morocco to dark brown or black in Sudan. Unlike tattooing or scarification, the process is painless and leaves no permanent trace, a major factor in its appeal to westerners. Henna is popular in parts of East Africa, coastal regions of Tanzania and Kenya or West Africa places like Senegal, Mali and Nigeria.⁸

The skin is treated like a canvas for brightly colored designs. Henna body painting is so popular in the West and has become such an exotic trend that one can walk into a retail store or a trendy body shop and buy a henna kit with step by step instruction and readymade designs which one traces on to the body with the henna paste. Originality and individuality are highly appreciated, though henna art is a communally oriented art form. Henna not only beautifies the skin but it also conditions the skin, it has medicinal and healing qualities. According to the mythology of ancient Hinduism, Judaism and Islam, henna painting was done before an auspicious event mainly to protect its wearer from the evil eye, as it is believed that decorating the body with henna had magical qualities to protect its wearer. In Sudan, Morocco, Pakistan, Oman, Bangladesh and India, the tradition has been elevated to a serious art form with its own class of full-time professional artists who paint elaborate, intricate designs and they are specially hired during weddings and other auspicious occasions. Today, with henna gone global and it being an exotic trend several artists from these countries have begun to enjoy the patronage of the rich and famous in Europe and North America.⁹

I remember the first time I encountered the craze for henna body painting, I was walking down the streets of New York City and came across a sign, I paused in front of the sign board, it read; ‘Look authentic, traditional, exotic get hennaed,’ and in small letters it also mentions ‘Hennaing is painless, a temporary tattoo,’ and ‘Mehndi (as we call it in India), is a timeless exotic art from the orient exotic lands of Africa and Asia.’ The signboard was of a body shop, where piercing and tattooing were done. Of course I was curious to check it out and so I enter the shop; the interior of the shop I distinctly remember smelled of leather, chains, rings, hand-cuffs and in the midst was a poster authenticating the exoticism of henna painting, the poster portrayed Madonna with her hands hennaed (fig. 1). Looking at this: am I to be angry or happy that henna painting has become so hip . . . what was my feeling? I thought it is a very good marketable strategy, what a capitalist world . . . initially henna/body painting, it was a brutal savage uncivilized act today when a white skin appropriates it than it becomes a fashion statement. I thought to myself, ME exotic bitch, use it, why should I be angry. The irony is though I say I am not angry, but what crossed my thoughts was where and when henna was done in India it was always a festive event, colorful, smell of flowers and the atmosphere was of celebration but here I smelled perspiration, bikes, chains contrasting isn’t it. Henna body painting has become the latest craze in the US and UK, especially among many icons of western pop culture. Henna painting which often was done on the hands and feet (fig. 2 & 3), with intricate designs, now with the craze one notices not just hands but backs, belly, thighs, neck and God knows what else, some unimaginable parts were painted with words and these were fashionable, popular as they graced the smooth, silky skin of the super models and Hollywood stars.

The craze of hennaing has been elevated to such a sublime dedicational level that the British singer Sting and his wife, both have known to have Zen Mehndi evenings, not to miss the Zen part of it. The Zen meditation of body painting was considered as relaxing, just imagine the heightened elevation from barbaric, savage to the spiritual. They hired an artist to decorate their guests with henna. The popular icons Prince (fig. 4), and Madonna have often appeared in several of recent concerts with their hands adorned. Demi Moore the Hollywood star and the super model Naomi Campbell, who have reported how they bared henna decorations on a regular basis. The rage is not just for super models and Hollywood stars but also fashionable elite women of London and New York City who have their hands and feet and other body parts decorated with henna, of course the scenario here is not a body shop with the smell of leather and chains but it is a parlor where the rich elite is catered to manicure and pedicure. The artists are often Sudanese and Indians, they work for an “entrepreneur, who advertises the Sudanese and Indian national origin of the artists, and by extension her closeness to the tradition of henna, coming from the ancient land and so as getting the authentic thing!¹⁰

The craze for it is gone so far, there are television shows which demonstrate henna painting, the healthy, medicinal value of it, there are number of books published on henna art, manuals on Do-it-Yourself, and not to mention the endless exoticism of it even in the virtual space. Today cyber space lists the specialized features of henna painting and also there are websites dedicated to the art of henna. One wonders why the craze for a local tradition of Africa and Asia? Once which was considered primitive, savage, it now products the exotic fascination - which contrasts sharply with the West’s traditional contempt for non-western people, and the mixture of desire and fear towards them. The primitive is now a current fad, an exotica. In fact henna artist market themselves as wedding consultants or as consultants for different ceremonies, they are known for their expertise in traditional body care, like vapor bath and the burning of incense to perfume the body and many other rituals of body care. For example Setona, an international henna artist, who has become so successful, portrays the henna craze of the West, she markets herself as the ‘Black Magic Woman,’ the labeling plays to the West and their capitalization of the exotic, the magical and the primitive.¹¹ The mania is popular in the West as solace for their looming sense of something missing from their worldly oriented and materialistic life, “hence the appropriation of spiritual items from remote and unfamiliar places evokes a longing at the same time that it provides a justification for multiculturalism.¹² Is it justification or validification of non-western cultural products or a demand of exoticism or is it a White Man’s guilt.

Cultural appropriation, misappropriation, interpretation, misinterpretation speaks and echoes the power of the dominant West, their control of media, education and norms of acceptability and portrays their prime right to legitimize, authenticate. It is true as Sherry Chopra notes, an Indian writer, Canadian based in the Ottawa Citizen editorial: “the fact that aspects of a minority culture must be first legitimized by a white person to be accepted is an example of racism. The bindhi, which for years has been ridiculed as a paki dot is now at the height of fashion, and worn by white girls and women. It is acceptable because it has been made to by white celebrities.” As bell hooks criticize in her essay entitled ‘Madonna, Plantation Mistress or Soul Sister,’ she characterizes stars like Madonna, the White woman, who show their interest in appropriating black culture as ‘another sign of their radical chic.’ I agree as she notes Madonna and her likes speak of their envy, desire and fascination of blackness because the good white girls should stay away from such barbaric appropriations. This is where I have mixed feelings of henna painting or any other form of appropriation being made popular because ideally, the concept is still uncivilized, primitive and only because of its initial marking it is being exoticized today where the ‘proper’ white girls stay away from. Thus this kind of ‘intimacy with nasty blackness,¹³ the White fascination which they flaunt in turn destroys, redresses, consumes, commodifies, disrupts the traditional Other, disrobing the black culture.

Disruption of Traditional Other

Traditions carry habitually established aesthetic styles, deemed to be appealing and beautiful, of high permanent value. They present stability and are recognized by scholars, critics, and members of the public by their permanent features. In many cases they acquire the reverent designation "classical." Arts that are accepted as western classical styles in painting, music, dance shows specific features that appear to be invariant, such as containment in a "frame." In addition, such styles are deemed to be creations of the geniuses of a "race," e.g. European. Such classical styles are also posited as true standards of artistic creations. These standards are/were used to judge the Other in order to point out its inferiority, its being less than, and perhaps not even art.

Given a civilization that maintains its own artistic stability, the appearance of an alien style is judged in many negative ways: demonized, denigrated, assaulted, and touristically exoticized, even classicized (belonging to "lowest classes"). This is obvious from the judgments visited upon henna painting, body art, scarification, tattooing and even the appearance of jazz, which was regarded as demonic, total destruction of civilization, frameless, an intrusion from the dark and chaotic recesses of the black soul. I call this intersection by the art of the racial other as permanence disruption. This is to say, the African, and African American arts do not follow "proper structural frames," stylistic stabilities and parameters, and hence are a threat to "real classical" art. The music has no central key, the dances are wild, the masks are distortions of "true" human form. Indeed, the arts of the "Other race" and the race itself, are regarded as parts of the natural landscape, while "we" are the humans who create something above nature. I show that this denigration of the "Other race" is an effort to maintain the permanence of one's own invented superior position. But to maintain this position, one engages in hermeneutics of suppression. The latter does not claim to exclude the arts of the Other, but by usurping the privilege of aesthetic criticism recontextualizes, renames, repositions, and finally, abolishes the sense of art of a given tradition. This is to say, in most cases the art works are not subjected to physical destruction; they are rearticulated in ways that make them into monsters, demonic images, expressions of immoral and indeed lesser beings. I would even state that this fate might be worse than that of complete destruction, since in the latter there are no images to show, but in the hermeneutics of suppression, the images, stories, texts and dances, are paraded in their reinterpreted fashion and thus located as the arts of the Other that have only negative designation: they are to be paraded in this reinterpreted manner as disruptions of “permanent human values,” creative geniuses, and high aesthetic standards. These very arts which were disrupted as inferior Other today are of course a fad, an exotica, still an art of the Other. Not an inferior, savage Other but an Exotic Other as noted in terms of the henna, body art.

This aspect of difference is not only in Black faith or Black culture, contemporary Black art or omnipotently present during Brits in India but still present in subtle variations in the contemporary India/neocolonial India/postcolonial or for that matter everywhere the Other is the race apart from the Eurocentric “I.” Even the colonized have incorporated the judgments of the colonizer concerning their own traditional arts. The colonized, in short, see with the borrowed gaze of the colonizer and, hence, pass judgments on the inadequacies of their own aesthetic traditions, on the inappropriateness of the subject matter and the use of sayings and images. For instance, my aunt, whenever I used to visit, would ask me if I had scrubbed myself really well so that the brown dirt (the darkness of my skin) would wash away as I am not the fairest of all. Do note the concept being fair, white is more beautiful, a superior race just as the Brits thought has rubbed on to my aunt, even though majority of Indians are dark skinned.

With reference to Indian sculpture, the figure of goddess Kali (fig. 5), was first viewed by the British travelers as diabolic, monstrous, demonic, for she is so colossal, so huge and terrible, that there is no beauty in her size and numerous arms. The Brits said Indians don't have a clue about anatomy, they don't know how to draw and render in art the real shape of things. The Brits never bothered to learn; the Indian aesthetics is replete with symbolism of cosmic conceptions and not of representations of “proper” bodies. Kali was one form of shakti, power, force, symbolism and is encompassed within the Hindu mythology and aesthetics as the all powerful saguna Brahman form. She is an image of matriarchal, maternal power, force, originator, adya shakti, the primal energy, cosmic energy world mother. Cosmic energy in its dynamic form is symbolized in the form of shakti, the world mother, who is power and energy by which the creation, preservation and destruction of the world, universe is portrayed in this all encompassing form.

Stereotyped notions of the goddess Kali haunt the European mind, as can be seen in the observations by Geoffery Moorehouse, in his book Calcutta: "The very name of Calcutta is derived from the symbol of fear and evil." He writes, "all representations of Kali are designed to frighten an illiterate and superstitious mind . . .. She appears with devilish eyes, or with tongue dripping blood with snakes entwined round her neck or with a garland of skulls.¹⁴ The form, image is completely misinterpreted not only by the British at that time, but also today in different tones of transgressions. For example the portrayal of Kali in the 1984 Hollywood movie Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, here Kali is portrayed as a demoness, grotesque, macabre, where to appease her the so called Indian priests tear out hearts of innocent children to offer to the goddess, who is depicted as a blood sucking, terrible idol. Imagine such distorted depictions, what cross-cultural understanding would the Westerners face . . .. Another example I recall is a poster that I saw in Ohio, Athens in a bar; it was a poster for a rock concert depicting a ferocious, terrible Kali as their symbol for their band. I was amused and amazed; I thought Kali is become exotic and chic.

This same colonizing and self-colonizing appears in the manner in which the Indian sculptures at Khajuraho (fig. 6), were and are viewed. These beautiful, immense sculptures, which portrayed the cosmic-kamic, love, union, were thoroughly misinterpreted and taken out of Hindu context by being called pornographic. The carved imagery is designed to articulate the kamic, erotic connection of all events, things, mythical figures without social gradations. They form, so to speak, an entire universe connected by erotic attraction. Yet, this blissful cosmic nexus is denigrated as the art of the inferior Other and, hence, located in the unspeakable and uncivilized region of immorality, sexual promiscuity, bestiality, and hence, is deemed not deserving the title of art. The colonial period, indeed, brought the question of morals, moralizing, gender, and genderising issues into art:

The British even said the sculptures at Khajuraho were extremely indecent, obscene and offensive specially to find them in the temples that professed to be erected for good purposes on account of religion; everywhere there are number of female figures who are represented dropping their clothes and thus purposely exposing their persons.¹⁵

The British regarded these aesthetic images as indecent and obscene, and thus to be judged morally and not aesthetically. Once again, the significant aspect of this art, its cosmic nexus, the cosmic union, the cosmic aesthetics is excluded and thus inserted into an entirely different context. The way of looking at sexuality is perceived as something different, excessive, Other. These images are aestheticised thinghood, and the body is projected as nexus of exotic sexual fantasies about the Indian body. Approached as a textual system, the bodies point to an erotic, hypersexual aesthetic objectification of bodies as an idealized form of homogeneous type, thoroughly saturated with a totality of sexual predicates. The cosmic energies which symbolize both creative and destructive forces impinged on British imagination the wildest proclivities of India and the Indians. For the British, the Indians evidenced depravity and intimacy, the forces of darkness. Such imaginings of the cosmic energies were viewed by the British as ritualized sexuality, suggesting that Indians should be feared as subjects who had the dark forces playing as perverts, threatening to invade and seduce, rape the white world. A visitor to India during the 1930s was warned by a seasoned British woman: ‘You’ll never understand the dark and tortuous minds of the natives . . . and if you do I shan’t like you – you won’t be healthy.¹⁶ The British women found their safest course was to barricade themselves within their own community, to shield their consciousness against India’s immoral encroachment: "Hold ye the Faith – the Faith our Fathers sealed us; / Whoring not with visions – oversize and overstale" (Kipling, "A Song of the English").¹⁷ The view I would say has not changed today only the tone, instead of ‘dark forces as perverts’ now they are ‘dark forces as exotica,’ and they still desire and are threatened by the dark exotica. The desire is often portrayed as the radical chic appropriated by popular icon images from Hollywood or by super models and is sold as the exotic capitalizing and disrupting the traditional Other.

The art of the Other, just as the difference of the Other, is held to belong to the natural landscape, but not to be art. The images, just as the native naked bodies, are judged on the grounds of morality, i. e., lack of cultural elevation, and hence as belonging to mere nature. After all, the very term “native” suggests that those so designated live merely naturally. Thus, in the hermeneutics of the Other’s art and the Other, objectified as inferior, supremacy and power are given, in turn, to the phallocentric White man whose flesh becomes burdened with the task of symbolizing the transgressive fantasies and desires of the White western male subject. Thus he must float the western logic as the superior image, even for the neocolonials. As Homi Bhabha has suggested, “an important feature of colonial discourse is its dependence on the concept of fixity in the ideological constructions of otherness.¹⁸ Looking at these examples and broadening this theme, one can see that representations of the hermenuetics of the Other in western culture entail different degrees of Othering or, as it were, different practices of representations of the Othering, i.e., different positions of identification on the part of the White subject.

Appropriation, redressing can work, in another manner, to reemphasize, subvert or portray ironic self-referentiality, for example alluding to henna painting (fig. 7), Shirin Neshat, an Iranian-born New York based artist explores in her work ‘Birth Mark,’ ‘Identified’ and ‘Stories of Martyrdom,’ the poetry drawn through textual calligraphy inscribed on their faces, hands and feet in a manner reminiscent of henna decorations. She critically portrays, communicating, how a “woman’s body has been a type of battleground for various kinds of rhetoric and political ideology.” “The renewed interest in henna body art in the West offers unique opportunity to reflect on artistic practices in this age of massive mobility, dislocation and globality. It causes one to rethink traditional conceptions of art and aesthetics, perceptions of the body, the culture of sex and desire and above all fashion as a statement and public display of the self. ¹⁹

The interest is not just in henna body art but also in the primitive, savage designs, patterns. For example the leading fashion designer, John Galliano, British stylist presented his Christian Dior collection which was called the Masai-inspired clothing designs and accessories in which beads, leather and feathers were combined. Should one say tradition versus modernity or exoticism. There are also fashion designers of African origin, who emphasize traditional patterns, taken from mud wall paintings (fig. 8), and creating these designs as fashion statements (fig. 9), where they feel, they are imparting and reflecting, redressing the African tradition and sensibilities, ancestral cultural values, inventing, reinventing an identity of their own. Designers from Ethiopia and Senegal have become quite famous and they shine brightly in the West. For example Alphadi is a designer who seeks to maintain to keep alive African traditions through fashion, his creations pay homage to African woman (fig. 10). Another model/designer Katoucha, having spent her time in Mali and Senegal, she has developed a style of her own. Faithful to her origin, she integrated Africa into her complete collection (fig. 11). She has worked hard and today has many admirers after her collection ‘Sublime barbarians,’ where she transformed creations of raffia and silk reflecting African traditional patterns, motifs into sublime exotica.

With reference to the different artists' work, African space, one can note that, in principle, or eidetically speaking, the world of aesthetics, specially the aesthetics of contemporary African art, the African space, art of the immigrant artists, encompasses ambivalent expressivities. The colonially modified ways, the traditional dressing, are the irrepressible forces which pervade contemporary Africa, neocolonial Africans and Africans in western Cities. One can note nevertheless of the appropriation, and redressing that was constituted, the question is can a tradition be reclaimed? There is a search within, but the search gets trapped by the questions of tradition/modernity, local/global, identity/exotica. Internationally, African contemporary art is gaining in recognition, but the question is, What kind of African art? Just as the growing popularity centered on mehndi, henna, primitive, savage, the art, which is catered to, is the exotica, the exoticism of Africa. Such is the trap, the exotica of the African Space. Traversing through tradition, modernity, coming to the present contemporaneity, we ask: Where are we today? Do we know?

As Fred Pfeil notes:

For who among us, after all--white or nonwhite, western or not--is not always caught precisely in the space between 'inherited traditions' and 'modernizations projects'? And where else, how else, do 'cultural interpretations' come from--'theirs' or 'ours,' local or global, resistant or complicit, as the case may be--other than from the spaces between the two, and with the ensemble of materials they provide, or forced to provide and thus open a space that is negative.²⁰

I reflected on this quote and thought about myself, an Asian, Indian, my work, my education, and even my creative process where the loss of cultural innocence is deemed unavoidable. I cannot but assume this inescapable context that colonialism has introduced, forming the Other and therefore the Indian, and with it the Indian Third Space, just as the African Third Space leaving no choice but to remain in this Space, always striving to catch up. In turn, the colonialist, and myself as a post-colonial artist and scholar, and at present residing in the States equally, have no choice but to take the other into account: we have an interpretive context that the two belong to each other. While this context exists even for me, me being a colonial body, I have acquired an awareness of the subjugating force of my own post-colonial being and, therefore, I am in a position to open up the difference between my tradition and the colonial presence that allows me to rearticulate both. Although I cannot choose not to choose, since I now face the options and attempt to make sense of it all, I find myself constantly facing the questions, Who am I? What am I to create in order to note the difference, and the mutual otherness, between my tradition, and my post-colonial self? Can I recloth the texture of my skin, or shall I wear it with the marks inscribed by the Other?

In conclusion these are a few lines I reflect on:

Bad faith still lurks

It is always the question????

Can I choose not to choose as I face the options . . .

The fallacy exists, exists even for me

The veil is thin between Black and White

The colors do they matter

Sure they are unveiled in public

Can we see Beyond

Black is Beautiful, Exotic

Is the slogan Today

Its’ on everyone’s Lips

The feline, raw savage Beauty

Enjoy it, parade it

Redress, Recloth . . .

Let the White Desire more Blackness.

Endnotes

1. Gomez-Pena Guillermo, Warriors for Gringostroika (St Paul: Graywolf Press, 1993) 43 - 44.

2. Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989) 98.

3. Gloria Anzaldua Boderlands/La Frontera (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute Press, 1987) 3.

4. Victoria Ebin, The Body Decorated (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1979) 5.

5. Salah M Hassan, The Art of African Fashion (USA: Africa World Press, 1998) 118.

6. Hassan 118.

7. Hassan 104.

8. Hassan 110.

9. Hassan 114.

10. Hassan 106.

11. Hassan 122.

12. Jon Pareles articulates this in the New York Times of June 21, 1998.

13. Bell Hooks, Black Looks, Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992) 157.

14. Geoffrey Moorehouse, Calcutta (Harmondsworth, 1974).

15. Alexander Cunningham, Archaeological Survey of India (Report of the Year 1862 - 65), Vol. 11.

16. J. R. Ackerley, Hindoo Holiday: An Indian Journal. (1932) 23 - 24. Also mentioned by Benita Parry, Delusions and Discoveries (London , New York: Verso, 1998) 31.

17. Parry, 31.

18. Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle (New York & London: Routledge, 1994) 176. Mercer quotes Bhabha.

19 Hassan 126-127.

20. Fred Pfeil, "No Basta Teorizar: In-Difference to Solidarity in Contemporary Fiction, Theory and Practice," Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices, eds., Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994) 222 - 223.

References