CREATING MEMORY: A CONVERSATION WITH CAROLE HARRIS, A DETROIT-BASED QUILT ARTIST

I'm basically a designer and all my quilts at least on the surface deal with that. I thought about it [the work] and I think it reveals a little bit about me. [The name of the quilt comes from the idea of] playing on the edge. Some would interpret it as not jumping right in, just playing around on the outside. On the other hand, I see it as pushing as far to the edge as possible, from the inside out. I tried to do that in my work. I try to push it as far as I can without disturbing the balance, without going over the edge.

What are you pushing? The quilt design, the quilt tradition, the quilt motifs, or yourself?

As far as the quilt will take me. Really, serious! I usually start out with something in mind, a sketch or an idea. The way I work is very intuitive, very spontaneous. I do let the work take over and take me where it wants to go. But I still think that I do have a great deal of control; part of it is being free to let it go, where it wants to go. I have learned the name that people give to the style I work in is improvisation. This goes along with what I said earlier, I have the theme or idea in mind as I play, or as I work, other ideas and other things want to be interpreted, or want to be included. I think the piece itself helps me to move in those directions. It's kind of interplay between the work and me. It tells me and I direct it, just like the call and response.

How do you decide which ideas you don't want to incorporate in the design? Do you stop to think, or you do it intuitively?

Both, I do some of both. It's something that's very difficult to explain. If it doesn't feel right, and when I say that, I mean for the feeling to take into consideration a lot of things like training, my culture, everything. I try not to force an idea. Hopefully, I am open enough not to force anything on it that shouldn't be on it. I think I am fairly successful at that. I've been satisfied with most of the pieces that I've done, and when I'm not, then it changes. I don't have any problem with cutting it up, or rearranging, or starting over, or using other pieces in some place else. When an idea or concept is not working as it started out, I go with the flow too.

Well, paint is messy! I have a fondness for textiles. I like the feel of fabrics, the various textures, and I feel I can accomplish the same end with fabrics as you can with paint. You know it's just a choice of medium. I'm more comfortable with fabrics, and like I said, I can accomplish a lot of the same things. I can make textures with fabrics. I can organize space with fabrics, which painters do. I can explore colors relationships, and any kind of ideas. I do not work figuratively or narratively. I like to work abstractly, because I enjoy exploring shapes and forms. I would like my pieces to work on emotions. This allows everybody to bring something different to a piece. I enjoy having the viewer interpret that. What you bring to it will not mean the same thing to you that it meant to me when I was doing it. And I think that's probably true of most art works. So I try to leave some room for the viewers' interpretation too. Doing a work figuratively would be my telling you too much. But again there's a lot of very personal stuff.

When talking about Playing on the Edge [figure 1] you said there were a lot of things going on. What are they?

Organization of space, especially contrasts. You can see there's a large black solid area, played against an area that is very dense with patterns, also within that pattern, there is another area that is the repetitive triangular patterns, where the others are more. It's an attempt for me to put movement, to get motion and activity going on, and also to organize all those things. I have ideas in my sketchbooks that have been there for fifteen to twenty years and I have lots of sketchbooks. I go back to them always. I could look at something that I did maybe five or six years ago, and it tells me its incubation period is over, and its time to look at it again. Or, even use a piece of it. I think whatever your art or your craft is, it is bringing pieces of things together. Right now, I'm literally doing it in a quilt. It is a pieced work, but I think that whatever art form you use it works the same way. My husband and I often have this discussion because he is a writer, and he does similar kinds of things with notes. Very often things will appear in my work that I have forgotten about. So when you ask me about what is going on, sometimes there are things working subconsciously that I'm not even aware off. But then I go back through the sketchbooks and I say, "Oh, that's where that idea came from. I remember that several years ago." Or sometimes, well I don't have the camera right now, but occasionally, I will take photographs of things that are of interest to me. I find that when I go back through some of those photographs with some of the sketches there is usually a kind of common element. I think a lot of the photographs that I've taken are things that attract my attention visually, is a strip or stripping- type format. I see things that way or those are the things I am attracted to, those kinds of design elements. Is all this making sense?

No, you're not. I tend not to do structured interviews, where I have a set of stock questions to which artists have to respond. I find that a lot of artists reveal a lot about themselves and their works when they are very relaxed and they are allowed to talk things through. And it may seem as if one is rambling but, in a sense, a lot of pieces are coming together.

Well, the other thing is that the reason we are artists in a visual media is probably because we cannot articulate it verbally or in writing. One of the things I'm learning more about my work is that there is a definite cultural memory that is going on.

Well, it's interesting to me too because I don't understand it completely. I've told other people in interviews that I'm trained in a very Western manner, but clearly my work is, and in total contrast to that. There are a lot of things that are non-Western going on there, and I'm delighted at that. Well I'm more delighted to find where its coming from than that it exists.

Well, as I said, cultural things like the use of color, the use of patterns, the kinds of patterns, the repetitiveness of the patterns, and also, the spontaneous way in which I work as opposed to a very orthodox and planned way.

Do you see a difference from your design background and this sort of work you are doing? I take it that your design background is in the structured Western tradition?

Right, design interiors, commercial interiors. It is a contrast in a way. But in a way I use it also on my quilts too, I think the very organized, which is something that I tend to do. My quilts are architectural as a whole piece, but within that whole, there are a lot of other things happening there that are in contrast to the tradition. The textures are the quilting, the hand stitching (hand done). I don't do my own stitching anymore. Once I finished piecing the top, which I do with machine, I turn it over to someone who works with me to do the hand stitching, but I tell her exactly how I want it done.

This process is like the old artist studio where the specialist would sketch out ideas and the apprentices would take over.

Well, I guess it is. For me, it is that I did all of it myself, because that is what it meant to be a purist, and that was what I thought I had to do. But doing that I couldn't produce enough. It would take me maybe a year and a half or two years to do one piece, and have a full time job. So I had to make a decision about what I wanted to do. For a number of years I didn't do anything with that because I was busy with work and things. About six years ago (1993) I went back in full steam to doing my quilting. At that time, I made the decision that I needed help. So I've been able to produce a lot more. I probably do, maybe a half dozen a year, about six to eight a year. And I know a lot of other people produce a lot more than that. But again it depends on a piece and how long it takes. There are some pieces that I have worked on for years. I find it's not working so I just have to put it away, and leave it alone for however long it takes, and then I go back to it. Or, I work on two or three pieces at one time. It varies.

I have a degree in Fine Arts. After I got out of college, I painted and did lots of drawing for a while; that's what I thought I was supposed to do. And all the time I was playing around with fabrics. I'd been sewing all the time, and then it occurred to me one day that I was making art, and making a statement.

One piece from the "Memory Series" is currently traveling. There, in the series, I am consciously incorporating what I think are some traditional African or African American feelings. They are there whether I am consciously doing them or do not. I have dedicated that series especially to that [idea of cultural memory]. One is called Reclamation [figure 2]; the other is called In the Spirit [figure 3]. The pattern is designed in a pyramid shape and, in each of those are blocks.

Interesting. There are people who are always telling me about the African fabrics [in there], and there aren't. It's just the way they [fabrics] were organized. I have now started to use them [African prints]. I don't think they are in that one. I used a lot of fabrics I find almost everywhere. Up until a year or two ago, I hadn't really used any of the African prints. My strips, the pieces that I put together, were a half-inch to three inches wide. So that's what you're looking at. Lots and lots of pieces that I just cut up, re-cut, and reorganized, and re-cut. In putting it back together it has formed an African-type expression. That's why I said I'm real pleased to see what kind of subconscious thing has come to the fore.

I believe in the power of the subconscious. A lot of ideas, forms, symbols are embedded in the subconscious...

...and people just draw on, and use them, and then think that they got them from some different frame.

That's what I'm finding too. I think its fascinating. I picked up a book [on Africa] and opened it. On one of the pages was what looked like a detail of my quilt.

(End of first interview conducted on July 1993. Second occurs a year later in October 1994.)

I find as I talk [about my work], more is revealed to me. You know it's like thinking out loud. There are not enough critics, or people who write about our works. We are ready to talk to somebody who we can trust about what it is we are doing; and to somebody who we know will understand, and not interpret it in a different way that's not related to our experience. I know you have heard Terry Gross of Fresh Air. It's interesting to listen how she interviews, and often turns around what is said by the person being interviewed. I think she does that for the audience that she is playing to. When she's interviewing somebody black, they will say one thing, and she'll latch on to something, some minute insignificant detail, and blow it out of proportion. But it's the kind of thing that white audience's want to hear about. She, then, turns that whole thing around. Obviously, I didn't find any of that in discussions or talks with you, just kind of talk like two girls.

But that's interesting! You've never heard of me. I'm somebody out of the blue, called and started talking. That, for me, was wonderful in terms of acceptance. It's like walking to a strange door, knocking, and expecting that the door might remain shut. You've no idea what's going to be at the other end. Yet I got the same warm response from all the people I talked to in doing my interview. They all seemed to say in different ways: "Come on in, we've been waiting for you for such a long time." It was as if they all secretly knew that this would happen. Even though they had no idea who I am, or what my motives were, they disarmingly entrusted me with valuable information. They all seemed to be saying that I couldn't possibly have an ulterior motive. It's very heartening. I often don't get such a response in Nigeria, and I am a Nigerian. When I go to talk to an artist or a collector, the response inevitably is: "Who are you? What do you want? What do you want to do with it?" Many are suspicious and very reluctant to give out information.

Next time I talk to you I want to ask you about a Nigerian artist, I think he's Nigerian, but I don't know his name. I saw his work in a little book I picked up in a bookstore. I was really taken with his work, very much. I just read part of the interview and he was saying how Jean Michel Basquait was impressed with his work in Paris. He says he works in Paris, and that [Basquait] brought him to New York. Do you know this artist? (Well I'll find the book, but he may not even have been a Nigerian.)

It's interesting because most of the artists or people, whose works has influenced me if I can say that, have been other painters or artists rather than quilt makers. And you know I'm a quilt maker! Since my show has been up, people at the gallery have told me that all these women keep coming in, and they have been taking notes, and wanting idea for their quilts. It's interesting but somehow I've never really been influenced by other quilt makers. I'm more interested what other artists are doing or have done.

Well, all kinds: painters and sculptors. It tends more to be painters mainly because of the way they handle space in two-dimension, organizing masses. But then, I guess it could be sculptors too because I mentioned last time we talked, about Barbara Chase- Riboud. She is a sculptor whose work I admire.

When you talk of being influenced by painters, is it painters you know personally, or painters whose works you see at exhibitions, or in books?

All of that. There is a couple locally whom I know. Well, there are a number that I know locally who are excellent painters and are good friends of mine. This kind of gets into the realm of memory too. How much did their work influence mine? I don't know. But I suspect that there have been some.

You say that they are friends of yours, do you often visit their studios, or their living rooms where their works are hanging?

Yes, yes. One artist, in particular, is Allie McGhee, who is a very good friend. He is an abstract, nonfigurative painter. I visit him in his studio, which is as often as I can, and which is not very often, `cos he's working. I don't want to intrude or be a bother. So, maybe once a year or something like that, I'd go over and see what he's doing, talk to him, and hang out, basically.

Anything! He talks! He is the chatterbox. I love him! He goes on and on and on about stuff, and he's funny! He talks about his kids, and his work. He and my husband were good friends in high school. Since my husband is usually there [too], and he's also funny, it's like watching two stand up comedians! The last time we went over to see him was about a month ago. At some point, my husband drifted away in the studio, examining some paintings and doing something on his own, and Allie and I were talking together without him, which was kind of nice. I don't know what we talked about, maybe about naming things, and how the works have gone. I admire him. He is one of the few who have not compromised his work and lifestyle, and whom I know personally. Very early on, he had a young family, he had a family at a young age, and tried to do corporate things, he was a business owner. I guess he decided very early on that that wasn't for him. Since then he has been a full time painter for many, many years now. Finally, I think he's starting to get some recognition. He is an excellent painter. He's only gotten better. His family has been very supportive. I really admire that because it took a lot of guts to do what he did.

How does he arrange his living space? Does he have his works, and the works of other artists around?

Yeah, and I haven't been there in the living space for a long time. [The visits were mostly at the studio.] But last time I was there, there were other people (artists' works) in the house.

Everything! Lots and lots of everything! Artifacts, I have quilts. I don't have much wall space now, as we'd like, especially as we have acquired a lot of other people's art works. We have a lot of books. I could use some more space.

I really could! Unfortunately, because of the limitations of wall space a lot of what I have tended not to be big pieces. Not as big as I'd like. My quilts are probably the biggest, and I've got two up. I've got one up in the living room and one up in the dining room. But I wish I had more wall space so I could acquire larger works by other artists.

Is there a lot of art-exchange between artists in the African American art community? I mean, the buying of other artists' works, trading of works, exchanging of things...?

They are institutional clients and do not take in much art. They are usually taking about reproductions, mainly poster art.

I have a piece by Al Loving, in New York. And coincidentally the piece that I have is The Quilt. It's a painting, made of handmade paper and paint; it's very reminiscent of a quilt. There is another local artist whose name is Harold Neal, an excellent African American painter. He was an early influence. I remember being introduced to his work when I was in college. I met him around the same time, so he became a good friend and mentor/teacher very early on. Of course, I haven't been working [as an artist] for a long time. Recently we just did an exchange and I finally acquired a very nice piece of his. Most of the artists whose works I have are friends.

Some of them. Another friend whose work I have lives in New York; his name is Maceo Mitchell. I have prints by Jacob Lawrence. I have a variety of things and some African artifacts. The things I probably have the most are African textiles. Some of the first things I bought were Peruvian fragments, and I've had those maybe for twenty-five years. I didn't know much about them, I just thought they were interesting. I'm sure we've had them even longer than that. You don't even know you are collecting until after a while you look back and you say, "Hmm, I have so many of these, and so many of these, and they fall into these category." I have a nice little collection of textiles starting, of course, from the Peruvian fabric, and Molas from the Kunei Indians in Panama. My African things are Kuba [Congo], a number of pieces of Kuba, various kinds; they are the ones that look much like patch work—the cut-pile—they are appliquéd kind of raffia materials. I have bead works, and belts. I've also got some Dogon pieces, and some doors.

Yes. I do. As I said we are running out of space, with all these books and magazines.

Well, you are actually telling me a lot about memory, and rites of memory, and how ideas get embedded in the subconscious, than you know.

Oh no, we are still right on the subject. You've been telling all along without realizing it, the processes and the informal ways of memory-preservation, and how relationship with the other artists becomes a process of gathering ideas and expanding the corpus of symbols and patterns.

We tend to devalue informal activities, but that's one of the ways that these ideas get passed on.

I agree, the gathering and collecting which I have been doing all my life, and I've been wondering, saying why all these little things.

The process of artistic influence need not be a one-to-one process, such as the stereotypical reproduction of a mentor's style, or of African forms. They could simply be suggestive, in which things that give you the flavor of the cultural areas are suggested. Knowing that you collect art catalogues on African art enables me to make a much stronger argument.

So, it might seem that we are not on the topic, but we are still right there. Let's talk about the naming process of your quilt.

Well, I hope you do too. I will dissuade anybody else who is interested. The thing that comes to mind when I think about how I title works in the Memory Series is music.

The Sun Gon Shine on My Back Door [figure 5] is a line that comes from a blues song "Trouble in Mind":

I think what I was doing with my titles was reflecting my own kind of personal optimistic philosophy. I wanted to attach a title that was uplifting as opposed to negative. After you asked about that, I looked at the titles that I've done, and I tend to do this for all of them. I think what it is, is kind of my own personal philosophy. These were words that I heard as I was growing up. You know, the kind of philosophy that was passed on to me through my parents, no matter how bad it gets it could always be worse, it's gonna get better. No matter how bad you think it is, somebody else has it even worse than you, and that "sun gon shine in my back door someday." Lots of African Americans have a very high religious background or influence, that's not to say that mine wasn't. My parents sent me to Church, but my cultural influences, or at least the one's that I picked up on came from other places like the music. My mother and my father neither of them were musicians but at a very early age they gave me music lessons, and it was always music in my house.

Piano, classical. I always wanted to play jazz and popular music and I took lesson for about ten years, till I got to high school. As a matter, the High School I went to, I went originally to study music, as least that was the intent. But I finagled myself out of the music curriculum. At that time I was fifteen. I wasn't interested in music anymore. But I can see now, thirtysome years later, what an influence it did have on my life and how it continues to influence me even if I didn't play jazz and I wanted to. It made me understand particularly about improvisation, when all those times I was not listening to my teacher on theory and doing the chromatics of scale. I can see how the jazz musicians use that, particularly, the piano players. We have some very great piano players that came out of Detroit, and a lot of them, as a matter of fact went to the same High School that I went to study: people like Tommy Flanagan, and Berry Harris, and Hugh Lawson. There were lots of other jazz musicians that came out of Detroit. Now we have Jerri Allen, a contemporary jazz musician, and a woman. I hope I am doing the same thing in art.

Who are the blues and jazz musicians that have had such an enormous influence on you?

No one specially. I'd think about these titles, and remember mother would always say, especially when you are a teenager and you are discouraged. Now I look back I can see she was really pretty smart in doing this. If I were down about something she would say: "Well, keep on pushing.", which was the title of a popular tune at that time by the Temptations. Or "We gonna make it," another tune by the Temptations. She would kind of draw on contemporary things that were happening in my life and musical things and apply it, philosophically. [Affectionately] Oh Mum! She was pretty smart.

Yes, I do. More and more as I get older and she gets older. I'm taking her to brunch in a little while, this Tuesday is her birthday; she'll be seventy five. She's pretty cool.

She sounds like a formidable presence in your life. You are now seeing a lot of that.

Yeah, I'm just happy that I can actually recognize this. And, I tell her every chance I get.

In a sense, you are saying that she is the philosopher in the home, and she is the initiator.

Yeah, she is, and she held it all together. My dad was out working; she was also responsible for this really positive attitude, and that philosophy. She instilled in me that I could do anything. One thing is that people are always talking about role models, I don't have it. She just said you could do it, whatever you want to. I wasn't looking for anybody outside, or anything, it was centered in my own authority.

No, I have a younger sister and a younger brother. I'm the oldest. Anyway, that's what I look for when I'm trying to title something. I look for something that will give a positive energy, and very often they are taken from musical elements; musical phrases, which also reflect the folklores and culturalisms.

Well, the obvious reference is in the cloth. If you want to take that a bit further, there are little bits and pieces of other aspects of memory that come through that you can call threads because they are only little parts. You don't remember anything in whole sections, or whole chapters, or whole images; its just kinds of snippets. Hopefully, that's what I'm putting there. They're really impressions, which may again explain why I'm not particularly interested in figurative or literal representation. I'm trying to give the cultural impression, or an emotional impression, to evoke an emotion. I think that there are some artists who can do that literally or figuratively, but that's not my way. It kind of goes back to this thing about being bored. When I start doing a drawing that's very figurative, I get really caught up in making it accurate. I make a nose just like that person's nose, whereas using the medium that I do use I can quickly do impressions of ideas and emotions.

Why are you so caught up with representing impressions and ideas, why do cultural impressions matter?

All kinds. All kinds of emotion. As I said, I just get really bored in having to do something so exacting, as sketching out, getting down with that little pencil, drawing...its frustrating for me, I want to move on. I guess its because I have a lot to say, and I can do it in broader strokes.

So in a sense, being able to open up spaces and create images for people to think about. As opposed to closing up the space by being too specific.

My life, that was taken away; the life of all African Americans that was taken away. Just the ability to be myself.

Well, I think the difference is having something taken, as opposed to giving, which is a voluntary as opposed to an involuntary act. Maybe we weren't ready to give it away. That's why it's important to claim it now. Now if I want to, I can't.

I could say, who cares, it happened so long ago, it's not going to help you today...

Well, that's part of the memory thing. It may have happened a long time ago, but that taking away is still very much a part of all of our lives. It's still a lot that has been taken away. Now look at how lost, a lot of our young people are today.

Is it because the "act of taking away" evokes the helplessness of the situation that you feel you have to reclaim it? I'm trying to understand why there's this need to reclaim, not just for you but also for others.

Well, I don't know. I'm still struggling with it too. But it's like any kind of violation. Someone comes and takes something that is yours, you feel very strongly about it. You're still wronged. You know there's a part that's missing, a very important part that is missing.

So in a sense, you feel you don't have your whole self, because you don't have your whole history.

Right! But we are forced to assimilate and take on another, somebody else history and life.

Right! Right! That; they didn't take it all. There's still some of me there and I'm reclaiming it. You know trying to put it all back together.

That's a whimsy, and it kinda has a dual meaning. Well, you know, On the Q.T., means between you and me. That's the colloquial meaning of the phrase. And then the other whimsical part about it, is that, when I was working on that, Quincy Troupe was in town to promote his biography of Miles Davis, I met him and he came over to the house as I was working on it. And it was on the floor in the living room, in pieces, in parts and he just kind of went nuts, and was going on about it. After he left and I was looking for a name, I just said I would call it On the Q.T. I don't think he even knows that I named it in response to his visit. But that was how that came about.

So, it's an everyday colloquial expression to say Q.T. and mean "between you and me"?

Something in Blue [figure 9], does it evoke the blues down-feeling or the up-blues feeling?

Oh the up-blues feeling. It's the title of a Charles Mingus tune. It's always up, always up. Again something about the function of blues in black people's lives. I don't think you had always to have the blues to make you feel bad. That's white people's impression of the blues. Blues is about feeling good too. It can be purging, it can make your soul feel good; getting that bad stuff out.

That's also a title of a tune, actually that was by Doctor John, a white New Orleans blues pianist and singer, very much in the black tradition. If you know Doctor John's music, it's upbeat. Such a Night is very upbeat. That particular one reminds me of the nightfall over the city, it looks very architectural, very structural which is another thing that keeps popping up in a lot of my compositions, very monumental and architectural buildings. I don't know if that's memory from my profession. What I've been doing for the last twenty-five years is working with architectural things. Angela Franklin suggested that architectural things come from some place else, even further back. We were talking about this one day and she was saying things about the Egyptian pyramids. If you'll notice, one of the things I found that kind of blew my mind, is in the quilting pattern, the kind of linear repetitions that I use in the quilting pattern in the black ground which you can't see too well on the slide. But they are very reminiscent of the kind of things that West African women do in their house painting. Not so much the Ndebele, but the West African ones. They use their fingers to make the textures, the linear rows. I have been doing that on my quilts, similar kind of designs. And then I got that book African Canvas and I say, "Wow, look at this!" Those kind of things are kind of eerie to me, and kind of reinforces that there is a kind of memory that work across time, oceans, and across continent. We're doing the same thing that kind of transcends time, space, and identity.

Someone called it "genetic memory." At the Crossroads [figure 11], tell the story here.

Well, At the Crossroads. For most of the title, the visuals kind of suggest a title. I looked at that one and At the Crossroads may be a phrase that is part of our African American heritage in that we often find ourselves at the crossroads. It's a term that you use when you get to the point where you have to make a decision, which way to go. It also comes from a term in a play that my husband was working on at the time. It's a play about the blues singer Robert Johnson, who legend has it met the devil at the crossroads one night.

He didn't meet the devil; he met Esu Elegba, the trickster in Yoruba lore that is wrongly interpreted as the devil.

That's amazing! I'm going to tell my husband what you said. That's what the play is about, the trickster. Well, that's the title of the play, Robert Johnson tricked the devil.

Okay, that's that architectural shape. Are you looking at it? Can you see that? Inside everything is filled with color and excitement, everything on the outside is dark, except for down at the bottom, the little picket fence.

That, too, is the textures that I talked about that are similar to the West African women wall painting. I remember when I was looking for, trying to come up with the design, I looked at a lot of books that had a lot of, particularly the Hausa...

...architectural wall patterning. Wow, this is going to be wonderful. The Appropriateness of Yellow [figure 13]?

No, I haven't re-titled it, but I wish I had. It's kind of a play on words. It's a particular thing but another of my very favorite artist whom I forgot to mention, Raymond Saunders. He lives in California. I love his works. I think a lot of what I do is influenced by having seen his works both in pictures and in person. As a matter of fact, I recently acquired a little drawing by him.

There was a very influential exhibition at the time. They were all African American artists. I think John Scott was one of the others. He does sculpture. Very intricately engineered movable pieces that are intricately painted too. Beautiful colors!

I'm going to ask you about three more works, I need to use the pictures as stories, because that's one way of memory recall. One is Where It's At [figure 14], we began to talk about it last week but I need to have it on tape.

Where It's At? Again that's a whimsy, that is a colloquialism too, like "What's happening?" "Where its at?" My husband and I were fooling around looking at the piece, and then he says, "What is this, this red line going right there? Now what's that supposed to be?" And I said, "Where its At." But there's also some other significance in that line, though. I have found it to be a common element, or common thread in a number of my pieces, I don't know if you've noticed that. There is a horizontal kind of grounding thing. The horizon is very important; it helps me to organize a lot of the elements that I'm working with. Probably, it's a grounding force in my life too.

Well, the new day we can finally reclaim our history, you know that positive thing comes in again, when we can just be who we are.

Yeah! And I think the more we realize it individually, the more it will happen as a people.

It's the spirit of all those ancestors. Absolutely! That's a big one in the memory series. It's homage, a tribute to all those people that are speaking through me.

...as well as the quilt. It's in the spirit of those women who paint those houses, and the spirit of the grandparents that I knew and didn't know,

...who survived and passed on the life, and the art works, and the traditions, and the stories, and the will, and the use of creativity to survive.

PART II: An Analysis: Enu bu Oda: (The World is a River Current)

(1965. On the other side of the Atlantic a family spiral down the threads of memory and seek to break the manacles of enslavement. We/I re-member other identities. I/she remembered as the mnemonic sound of the gong sliced into consciousness.¹ Gom.

They had known for a long time they were "owned." She winced at that euphemism for the debasement of slavery. It was humiliating to know she was somebody's property — a moving, thinking, feeling one at that. Finally in the late 1960s, after arduous inquiry, after thirstily feeding off the memories of those they could trust to remember, the family got an answer. They learned that their grandfather had been kidnapped from Nsugbe when he was a boy. He had then been sold to an Aro trader who, when he couldn't fetch a fair price from the niggardly white traders, sold him to an oil palm trader who later gave him to this Onitsha family, whose name they now bore.

They heard their family name for the first time on the rite of the seventh moon. That, was both music and freedom to them! Yes, the colonial government had abolished slavery. But what did that proclamation mean? Did it change anything? Did it restore their roots, or assuage their anger? Did it remove the pain and stigma of being "an owned one"? It was only when they learnt who they were and heard their family history that the gapping holes in the fragile fabric of selves began to heal. Their only regret was that their father and grandfather had not lived to witness this miracle. Their bitterness was knowing that they had both died as "owned ones" less than twenty six miles from the freedom offered by their ancestral home; and they didn't even know it.

They planned their return to the ancestral site, where they would begin a new existence and identity. They were told they had to undergo a rite of purification, so as to ritually cleanse them of the de-humanizing effects of their previous existence. They were told they had to be "washed" before they could enter their new identity and the ancestral abode. Years later when she had fully grown into her new self, she visited Ogbuefi Ezenwa, the gray haired patrilineage priest who officiated on that memorable day. She had to learn the full significance of the rite "into a new self."

He spoke in measured tone: "Forcing a person into slavery both physically and psychically binds that person's subject-hood. In the same way the physical shackles restrain and prevent one from realizing one's full potentials, the psychic shackles that are created at the time of bondage, equally constrain and limit one's inner being. One thinks, lives and becomes an object. Unless those manacles are ritually broken, even if the owner or the government frees the slave, the so-called freed slave remains psychically bound, and subject to the conscious and unconscious desires of the owner. The tie of ownership is more powerful than people realize."

Continuing after a lengthy pause Ogbuefi Ezenwa declared: "We live the past as we make the future in the present. Enu bu oda. The actions of today were born in the past; they will flow like a current to shape the future. Properly performed, purification is the knife, which severs the link that binds one to an ignominious past. It provides the space to purge oneself of suppressed anger, rage, guilt, and bitterness. Nwa'm (my child), to be free is to break the bond to that weighty psychic baggage. This is what we did that day. We ensured that you were no longer tied to your former masters and mistresses. We brought you home. We took you out of their circle and placed you into ours. We made you one of us."

"The evil of slavery is that freedom can never come from, nor be given by an owner. You see, the `act of giving freedom' is, in fact, a re- assertion of power by the owner, and an acknowledgment of that power and control by the so-called `freed' being. Where is freedom in that? Look it boldly in the eye, and you will see that it is illusory; it too is bondage."⁴

'Bringing home the spirit' entails breaking the manacles of bondage. It alludes to the importance of historical memory in the construction of identity. The test of "who we are" rests in our ability to give a comprehensive family lineage and a social and cultural history. This requirement on identity is complicated by the demand on non- Native Americans for a cultural history that extends beyond the geographical boundaries of the Americas. Underpinning this American test for personal and cultural identities is the implicit idea that "who we are" must entail an awareness of an "Old World" geographical, national, or ethnic locale to which one belongs. In this call for knowledge of previous histories of "selves," the idea is that present reality is centrally mediated by lineage history and ancestral identity, and that a geographical anchor is crucial to human centeredness. Naturally, those who fail to meet this criterion are doubly dispossessed, first in being robbed of their human nature, and second in being robbed of their history.

The rite "of new self" described by Ogbuefi Ezenwa recognizes the important interplay between the present and the past, between present identity and ancestral legacy. We are the eyes of those who watch our backs. We are the eyes of the ancestors. "Who we are today" is the sum total of decisions and actions that were made in the past just as we today are making the future. Enu bu oda. The interconnectedness of human lives mean that the `rivers of life' flow in diverse channels of lineages whether or not those histories are consciously affirmed or remembered. The child is the proof. Because self-worth is intimately tied to those things that make us human such as an awareness of family histories, and because it is of crucial import in interpersonal relationships and in how we experience the world, to be dispossessed of one's identity creates a sense of lack, of incompleteness, of alienation.

In the capricious, conflicted character of Esu Elegba, European revisionist historians have "recast" world history to promote the sub-humanity of Africans, in the process serving up a horrible lie that only from its "beneficent" laws can freedom and liberation come to members of that wronged group. Filling up the holes of a torn psyche. Knowing that completeness involves recouping the extended multivalent selves and the articulation of unarticulated cultural history, critical interventions are needed to suture the ruptures in human history. "Bringing home the spirit" is a process of repairing ruptures in psyches, by tracing out the cultural/family circle to which one belongs, and ceremoniously taking one's place in it. The rite of "a new self" generates a new identity, by restoring to consciousness the links with an older legacy that had either been ignored or forgotten. The restoration mitigates the psychological and cultural emptiness that feeds self-shame.

We are encouraged to remember and when we do we find that memory is viewed as unreliable. History is equated to textual documentation a process that robs us of our memory that have carefully been preserved in modes that do not easily give up the story. Responding to her conflicted American history and identity, a Detroit-based African American interior designer and quilt artist, Carole Harris,⁵ sees the recovery, preservation, and transmission of her cultural histories and memories as of critical importance in a sociopolitical context of life that suppresses and erases such narratives. Skillfully and aesthetically enfolding her history into the pieced patterns of multivocal quilts, she recaptures important elements of African American history and cultural experiences. The strands of [inline:Reclamation II,renewD.jpeg,Detail] from the memory series stunningly, cascade down from the brightly patterned, reddish 'V' shaped swatch of cloth at the upper half part of the quilt, and which plunges down to a mid-way point where it tapers off. Tumbling down in an entwined mass against a solid black quilted backdrop, the cascading strands, symbolically represent threads of memory, evocative of the African peoples generational lines, lives and contributions that have gone into shaping the American national character.

Using the Memory series quilts as sites of recollections and for assembling and reviewing her history, Harris confronts the present poverty in the lives of African Americans in inner-city housing projects. The striking parallel in the relative level of material deprivation in the Projects today with the conditions that existed in the post-reconstruction period urgently speaks to the endemic nature of institutionalized oppression. This goes right back to the enslaved condition under which Africans were first brought to the United States. In the process of cutting, re-cutting, assembling, piecing the patterns, and sewing the long threads of memory, Harris sees the cutting, and re-cutting, the dispersal and assembling, and the piecing and fracturing of lives of millions of Africans, wrenched from their families by powerful economic forces that placed greater value on profit than on human and family values. That nothing seems to have fundamentally changed today is apparent in the dysfunctional, inhumane, socially insensitive character of global capitalism and the yawning economic imbalance that is spawning slave- nations in the Third World.

With the devaluation of the Euromodernist "art for art's sake" ideology, given cultural, marxist, feminist, and postmodernist critiques, art historians and critics in the last quarter of the 20th century are increasingly acknowledging that creative expression is mediated in a variety of ways by the artists' race, gender, class and cultural location. Not only is it the case that the theme an artist chooses to explore, the visual language of rendition, and the calibrated voice of presentation all derive from a sum total of experiences and issues that are of importance to, and from the artists' perspective. More importantly, creative expression must be understood in the specific historical and social context of production as opposed to the fictitiously timeless lens offered by the "Great Art" syndrome. A relational notion of art resists the art world's authoritative attempt to wrench it from its appropriate context, reify and entomb it in an artificial exclusionary world.

Harris' astute relocation of sites of historical remembering from an abstract temporal sequence to specified family sites disrupts the tidy linearity of chronological time underpinning historiographical narration. Where, typically Euroethnicized facts are deployed to establish an unbroken sequential line of continuity, and linear progression is exploited to indicate change, Harris' focus on homeplaces as sites for historical narration, explodes the illusion that linear historical progression necessarily implies progressive change. The subversive historical memories of her Memory series asserts that the relocation of history from the actual lives and actual oppression of people to abstract time, oppression is inevitably reproduced in subsequent historical periods. For Harris, the erasure of such histories and the suppression of the injustice perpetrated against African Americans have led to the vilification of the black presence in American history. The cumulative effect of this injustice on many African Americans has been the disorienting psychosomatic holes their truncated histories and 'incomplete- selves' that are created in their identities.


	Mary Carruthers refers to this memory- consciousness as 'memorial'. In The Book of Memory, she articulates a hermeneutical notion of memory for the medieval context that captures elements of my construal of a well-trained memory as constituting the basis of reflexive knowledge. Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).


	Okwa: a bird with a loud, unpleasant grating call.


	Excerpted from the poem 'Symphony of Tears' (1973) by Nkiru Uwechia.


	A short story on the complexities of personal and family identity formation, and the resolution of a conflicted history, written by Nkiru Uwechia for the exhibition Celebrating African Identity: Politics and Icons of Representation, (A Space, Toronto, June 1992).


	Most of the ideas were elicited in a series of personal interviews with Carole Harris. Two of the interviews were taped the first on September 3, 1993, and the second on October 10, 1994.