OFILI'S BLACK MADONNA

 By Biko Agozino

 

The art of Chris Ofili causes offense to powerful interest groups the way that his historical subject, The Virgin Mary, caused and still causes offense to the non sensibility of certain communities of interpretation. The idea of a virgin mother was abominable in her historical era and she would have been stoned to death had the New Age man, Joseph, not accepted to play the role of a surrogate father to the child of his fiancee.

This is why we should avoid religious sectarianism and political posturing in our reading of what seems to be a historical excavation by Ofili for the purpose of recovering a lost tradition that is threatened with extinction. This work by Ofili seems to argue that The Virgin Mary was black. There is anthropological evidence in support of this argument. For example, Frazier's classic comparative anthropology, The Golden Bough, documents evidence that ancient Egypt was the first to develop the mythology of the Virgin Mother of the Sun God whose birth day was celebrated on the 25th day of December many centuries before the birth of Jeso Christi.

 

If Mary was blonde and blue eyed the way that Western artists portray her, it is impossible to understand why the Roman army and owners of Motels could have turned away a heavily pregnant blonde and blue eyed mother on the pretext that the motels were full. Such a treatment is reserved for black couples in racist cultures although racism would not be the same in those days as it is today. Even with a husband, the pregnant virgin could not find lodging in any hotel because she was a Black Madonna. Toni Morrison narrates this painful aspect of the black experience in her latest novel, Paradise, where even heavily pregnant black women were refused rest and forced to trek for miles to virgin land. The Black Madonna was turned away with the familiar excuse, 'No blacks, no donkeys, no bullshit'. And so, we are told, the holy Bambino had to be born surrounded by sheep, donkeys and, of course, smeared with dung!

 

If this was not enough indication of the lowly origin of the beloved Christ, we are told that the Virgin Mary was chosen because she was a maid, not a princess or a queen. Those who deny her African ancestry are forced to agree that the Wise Men came with gifts from Africa. The star that guided them was an Eastern Star, right? They had to be in Africa in order to follow an Eastern Star to Jerusalem. If they were from Persia in the European continent, as some white supremacists would have us believe, then the Eastern star would have led them to Moscow. They were from the East, not the Middle East and not from the Far East. Geographically, that East is Africa because Jerusalem is to the East of Africa and so travelers who follow an Eastern Star to Jerusalem must have started their journey from Africa.

 

Historically, there is evidence that the young family fled to Africa to save the life of the young Christ. Mary fled home to her kinsmen and kinswomen in Africa and she was taken care of, no questions asked, because Africans have had a longer tradition of belief in the ability of virgins to have Divine children. This is similar to the story in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart where Okonkwo had to go to Mbanta, his maternal kindred, when he was forced into exile by calamity. So the thesis of Ofili's essay is not as strange or as offensive as it seems. The Virgin Mary was and could only have been black.

 

Chris Ofili is not only a Catholic but also almost a Christ by name! His essay is challenging Modernist ideas of progress and increased human happiness to acknowledge that the Virgin Mary is a sad figure today due mainly to neglect and ridicule. He seems to have demonstrated, indirectly, that King Herod is still in power in New York and that he is still ordering the massacre of innocent creations. The controversy over the work reminds us that in spite of the posturing to being an enlightened age, we still clamor for the dung-smeared virgin to be excluded from respectable Guest Houses and confined to the manger once more. The same people who are chanting the rosary in condemnation of a homage to the Black Madonna would have been the first to chant, 'Crucify him, crucify him!' when Pilate gave them a chance to parole the innocent lamb.

 

Ofili seems to be arguing that the true origins of the Black Madonna have been hidden, downtrodden like dung; but that the Black Madonna is far from being a waste product. Rather, the dung represents manure, fertility, a source of life and a source of fuel, energy and strength. Blackness signifies dung to white supremacists except when it says that their bank account is in the black - an obvious reference to slave-holding measures of wealth and worth.

 

Do you know that in Scotland, there is a mythology of the black foot? If the first person to step into your house after the New Year is black, that is an omen of affluence or in plain English, an indication that you will have your own house slaves to wait at your own great table. John Dunn, the Scottish poet illustrates this with a poem about 'One Blackamoore' in which a French merchant gave the king of Scotland a gift of an African Princess. The black woman was so beautiful that the king decided to organize royal battles in her honor. The prize for the winner was that they had to kiss her black ass. Of course, the king always won the battles! This is probably why many European cultures have cults dedicated to the worship of the Black Madonna in the spirit of capitalism, hoping to be made rich and prosperous at the same time that they were using a ship called The Jesus to engineer the African holocaust.

 

Jesus Christ once told his disciples that if no one believed his gospel, he would turn rocks into his obedient followers. Chris Ofili seems to be saying that Westerners no longer believe in virginity, period. Anyone who remains a virgin until marriage today in the West is to be pitied and ridiculed rather than admired or venerated. Similarly the elephant was, once upon a time, a venerated being around the world. Indians worshiped it and tamed it to transport them to war, Hannibal used it to carry his strong army to Europe, the Igbo of Nigeria sing a victory song that compares them to a community of elephants (Enyi Mba Enyi) - suggesting strength, fearlessness, intelligence, resilience, respect for elders and egalitarianism all at once.

 

But the elephant has since become a laughing stock. Wole Soyinka, the Nobel Laureate, laments this in his elegy to Ajanaku, a dead elephant whose skeleton and yam pounding mortar-sized molars are awesome and whose spirit seemed to be imploring humanity to celebrate the living elephant and not the dead one. Today, the elephant is more to be remembered for such laughable metaphors as a white elephant or an ivory tower. The French came to West Africa and did not see the elephants, how much less their mountainous dung. All they saw was ivory in a place that they tried to name the Ivory Coast! That was a better name, however, compared to the British who called the coast a Slave Coast long before it occurred to them that Gold Coast sounded better.

 

Ofili seems to be saying that the miracle of the elephant dung (how could one being do such a mountain of poo?) has been ignored, denigrated, marginalized for too long. He goes on to show that some cultures still value the dung for fertility and energy reasons. The lesson of his work of art is that Africans should take this to a higher level of technology. Africans should re-learn the culture of taming the elephant for transportation, agricultural and energy purposes.

 

The wider lesson from Ofili's essay is that we should try to see the beauty in things that are different. We should be more tolerant of diversity or we will continue the genocidal culture of massacring the innocent just to keep a clique in power. You do not have to be a Catholic or a Rocket Scientist to know that the vilification of Ofili is ill informed. Let us join him and chant the rosary, 'Hail Black Maria'!

 

First Published in 1999           'Ofili’s Black Madonna', October 26, http://www.artnespaper.com/flash/Agozino.htm also published in The Guardian, October 31, http://ngrguasrdiannews.com/editorial/en765801.htm

 

Identity ‘Formation’: Beyoncé’s Cultural Revolution

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By Biko Agozino

A brilliant undergraduate student of Sociology at an Ivy League university has written to ask me to explain how anyone could see the performance of Beyoncé during the Super Bowl 50 halftime show as revolutionary when she was apparently celebrating her privileged light skin color and fake white women’s long hair while flaunting her husband’s ‘Jackson Five nostrils’ just to make more money for herself in a capitalist economy but she did not mention that the backlash to boycott Bee is growing.

The mother of the student, a family friend, also wanted to know how the lyrics that talked about taking a lover to eat at a seafood restaurant after making love and about sporting designer labels could be conceived as revolutionary just because she took advantage of the iconic Black Panther Party clenched fist salute and used her dancers to invoke the revolutionary image of Malcolm X in their ‘formation’. What is revolutionary about that?

I responded by saying that Bee is a cultural revolutionary who is helping to redefine what an African American woman is capable of getting away with in a world where people still need to be reminded that Black Lives Matter – the backdrop of her representations of police brutality and the neglect of Hurricane Katrina survivors due to racism in her song, ‘Formation’ in which a sign was raised demanding "Justice 4 Mario Woods".

The use of the X formation during the dance and the choice of black leather bikini costumes to honor Michael Jackson, who wore the X across his chest during his own 1993 Super Bowl performance but no one noticed the reference to Malcolm until now, and also to remind us of the Black Panthers who rocked serious fashion themselves and stressed the importance of reproducing the next generation of freedom fighters. Mayor Giuliani picked up this message quickly and tried to condemn it because he mistakenly saw it as an attack on police officers to express love for black people.

Bee is a performance poet in the sense that all songs are poems although all poems are not songs. Therefore, we should not read the allusions in Bee’s performance literally because she was obviously using her poetic license to address messy current events and add her powerful voice to causes that she believes in.

Although she is a role model to many young women, I do not think that she has the power to legislate how parents should dress their children nor was she dictating what every woman should do to her lover after being freaked out. Bee is a grown donkey woman who is a married mother with the right to dress as she pleases, to speak her truth to power, and to treat her lover as she pleases without taking permission from anyone.

Just because this singer of ‘Independent Woman’ and ‘If I Was A Boy’ also used phrases and sang songs that some may consider sexist-racist-classist does not mean that we should remain blind to her revolutionary transformation of the opportunities that a black woman with a global stage has to address serious politics. No revolutionary is perfect and Bee may yet regret allegedly accepting a one million dollar performance check from a corrupt state governor and later president Jonathan of Nigeria who was said to have taken the funds from allocations meant to fight poverty. Bee could make it up by extending her famed philanthropy to poor Nigerians.

Those who do not like the lyrics of the popular songs that Bee sings should see it as an opportunity to write better lyrics for her to sing since she does not write all her own songs. But those with privileged elite education who may despise the low cultural expressions in pop music should know that almost all the new musical genres originated in the world in the past 200 years came from poor people of African descent with little education and hardly any from came those with Ph.Ds.

I sympathize with those who may be offended when Bee boasts about her flawless skin because they may see it as a reference to her light skin color and straight hair the way that Eric Williams boasted that having good grass (hair) may have helped to make him more successful than his brothers with kinky hair. But the prosecution of people for lewd dancing in Trinidad and Tobago (homeland of Eric Williams) should not be the standard of morality for judging the performance of Bee in the US.

Moreover, being flawless has nothing to do with skin color given that there are many white people with unsightly skin and there are many black people with flawless skin. People of African descent come in many different shades of color and for that reason Africans do not tend to love or hate based on color alone but based on the character of the person or the inner beauty. After all, we name our children after white people, dress like them, eat at their restaurants, send our children to predominantly white colleges, speak their languages, and affiliate with their religious beliefs. It is white people who appear to have problems with others that they need to get over.

Perhaps being teased that she was too light-skinned to be black may have contributed to the bouts of depression that Queen Bee suffered as a young lady. That may be part of the reason why she publicly campaigned for the election of President Barack Obama who was then considered to be too ‘white’ to be African American by many.

Let me end with a quotation from a lecture on ‘The Origin of Cultural Studies’ in which Stuart Hall (2006) clarified why we should take popular culture performers like Bee seriously by reminding us that:

‘The violence, aggression, hatred implicit in racist representation is not to be denied, but we understand very little as yet about its double-sided nature, its deep ambivalences. Just as so often the cultures of the West, the representation of women has currently appeared in its split form, the good-bad girl, the good and the bad mother, Madonna and whore…. Sexually available, half-caste slave girl is still alive and kicking, smoldering away on some exotic television set or on the cover of some paperback, though she is no doubt simultaneously also the center of a very special covetous aspiration and admiration in a sequin gown supported by a white chorus line. Primitivism, savagery, guile, unreliability, always just below the surface, just waiting to bite.

Dr. Agozino is a Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies at Virginia Tech.

What Is My Name?

By Biko Agozino

When James Baldwin and Chinua Achebe met, Baldwin said that it was a miracle because when our ancestors were kidnapped and shipped away through the ‘Door of No Return’, we were never expected to survive and meet again as survivors of the slave raids and survivors of the genocidal middle passage, plantations and Jim Crow. I have just had a similar miraculous experience of speaking with a large African American family named Holland who traced their ancestry to a royal family in Cameroon. They gathered to honor their great-grandfather, Cecil Holland, after the racist Sons of the Confederacy placed a marker at his gravesite in 2002 to falsely claim that he served in the Confederate Army as a teamster hauling supplies for those who fought to keep him enslaved. The family repudiated the claim, removed the Confederate marker and replaced it with gravestones before holding an African mourning ceremony to honor him properly. The Confederacy supporters allegedly threatened to remove the gravestones and replace it with their Confederate marker in disrespect to the family.

Emphasizing the importance of self-naming, Chinua Achebe tells the Igbo folktale about Mbe, the tortoise, who begged to accompany the birds that had been invited to a feast by the king of the sky. The birds lent some of their feathers to Mbe to help him fly with them to the sky feast. But before their departure, Mbe told them that they should give themselves new names to appear more respectable at the court of the sky king. The birds agreed and named themselves things like Sun, Moon, Thunder, Lightning, etc. Mbe said that his new name was All Of You. When they were served at the feast, Mbe would ask whom the food and drinks were meant for and the servants told them that everything was for All Of You. So Mbe ate and drank everything while the birds starved. When it was time for them to return, the birds were angry with Mr. All Of You and asked everyone to take back his or her feather, forcing Mbe to fall from the sky and crash his shell which was patched with uneven surface remaining to remind all that there is enough for our needs but not for our greed.

The Holland family gathered from far and wide, with many wearing African garments, to sit in front of the family log cabin house. The sitting arrangement was in a semi-circle that is similar to the indigenous town planning design common in Africa. The African garments some of them wore and even the walking stick they gave to me as a gift were all adorned with the scaled, recursive, self-similar, infinite, fractional, and interconnected designs known as African Fractals, as documented by Ron Eglash and theorized by Abdul Bangura.

After a traditional prayer and the pouring of libations, William Holland, Cecil’s great-grand son, shared how he researched the family roots for years until he got conclusive proof that they originated from Cameroon. He and his brother wore traditional gowns that were given to them when they visited the area of Cameroon where they originated. William read out the family tree on his late father’s side and then on his living mother’s side. A medical doctor from Atlanta, Georgia, made a short presentation on how genetic traces of ancestry could be found in the mother’s line and in the father’s line. He cautioned that DNA results are still open to interpretation like any scientific data and that the more tests an individual does, the more specific the ancestry could be narrowed to a particular place where comparable DNA can be found.

Then it was my turn to talk about the importance of naming ceremonies in African culture. I started by making reference to the work of Kimani Nehusi who was initially named after a notorious slave trader, Francis Drake, because a white doctor in Guyana convinced his father that the brigand was a great man. He eventually recovered his African name and has authored a book manuscript on the meanings of African names in which he argues that the earliest known tradition of origin was that of ancient Kemet or Egypt where it was believed that the creator, Ra, spoke the names of every creature to bring the creature into being. Thus every creature has a name and anything without a name is considered a nonentity. Cheikh Anta Diop earlier made a general point in The Cultural Unity of Black Africa about the ‘disturbing’ similarities between certain African root words such as Barbarian, Gen or Gente that mean exactly the same in Indo-European languages to show ancient linkages among the people of the world who originated in Africa to such an extent that linguists consider it foolish to attempt to prove that there is no linkage between one language and any others in the world.

The Dogon of Mali have an ancient tradition of origin according to which the earliest created being was Nommo, an amphibious four-legged creature that was believed to have arrived on earth from the star, Sirius, which appears every 50 years to coincide with the Dogon celebration of the Totemic Nommo. Some European writers have disputed this astronomical knowledge of the Dogon and suggest that knowledge of the Sirius must have been revealed to them by visiting Europeans. But the Dogon insist that they have always known about Sirius and another smaller star that they call the White Dwarf that appears with Sirius.

The Igbo, my own ethnic group, believe that we are the children of Chineke, the procreator, whose wife gave birth to our ancestors. Thus we are the children of Mr. and Mrs. God whereas the Abrahamic religions appear to see God as a Bachelor who made human beings from clay. The very name, Ndi Igbo, literally means – early people or Ndi Gboo. The late Catherine Acholonu applied her linguistics skills to suggest that since human life originated in Africa, it is most likely that the language of creation was an African language with surprising correspondence between words like Adam (meaning literally, I have fallen, in Igbo) and places like Adamawa in Nigeria and Cameroon and in Ethiopia. Acholonu suggested that human beings evolved from dwarfs, our distant ancestors whose existence predates the time-line of the creation narratives in the scriptures of Abrahamic religions. Thus, according to her, Africans and the Igbo in particular, were the ancestors of Adam.

Mohamed Ali dramatized the significance of self-naming when he dropped his slave name, Cassius Clay. But his opponent, Ernie Terrell insisted on calling him by the slave name. Ali taunted him as Uncle Tom and threatened to beat him senseless in the ring to teach him to call him by his real name. Terrell said that his team thought that the name was a touchy issue with which to make Ali mad in the ring and thereby beat him. But it proved to be a bad strategy because if someone is out to whoop your behind, the last thing you want to do is to make the person mad at you. So Ali jabbed away at Terrell and asked him with every jab, ‘What is my name?’ If Terrell was wiser, he could have jabbed him right back with the retort, ‘What do you mean, what’s your name?’ Jab-jab. ‘Go ask your mama!’ Jab. Vivien Gordon argues that self-naming is an essential form of freedom and personal autonomy that must be respected by all.

Human beings are not the only ones who sign their names to differentiate them from other individuals – plants also have signs of their nature or signatures and it is from plants that we derive our own ‘doctrine’ of signatures. Human beings recognize this affinity with nature indirectly by naming their children after plants, animals, mountains, the sun, moon, the sea, the sky, especially in Africa. But Europeans tend to see it as their duty to name others – nigger, negro, kaffir, fella, colored, black, coolly, jap, con, and when others return the favor with names like redneck, cracker or hunkey, it does not stick, according to Randall Kennedy. African Americans have finally chosen to name themselves as people of African decent but some entertainers like Smokey Robinson say that they love being called Black Americans, Raven Symone does not identify as African American while many rappers prefer being called Nigga and Bill Cosby said that African names may make it difficult to get jobs as we battle with the ‘warring’ double consciousness of W.E.B. Du Bois.

The theft of the original names of Africans forced the Jamaican poet, Mutabaruka, to wail about the pain he feels every time he hears the sound that is not his name…. The New York Metropolitan Museum exhibited sculptures from a Nigerian community called Mbembe (suggesting the Mbe of Mbe, trickster of tricksters, in Igbo) and categorized the sculptures as representing male ‘killers’ and female ‘nurturers’ without realizing that Mbembe communities can also be found across the border in Cameroon, that men are not simply killers and not nurturers and that women are not simply nurturers and not also warriors in Africa. Naming African men as killers may be an ideological justification for the genocidal killing of Africans by Europeans and their African agents for a long time in history and naming the women nurturers simply justifies the history of wet nursing and the forced breeding of children for sale during the great destruction or Maafa slavery.

The European way of naming is hierarchical and divisive, always in search for evidence of the superiority of Europeans over all others but they have failed to find any evidence of white superiority unchallenged. They finally settled on the naming of literacy as something that Europeans have while Africans, being ‘headless people’ without chiefs, supposedly only have oral traditions. This was challenged by Jacques Derrida who was born in Africa and who had his French citizenship stripped from him because the Nazis said that he looked too dark and too Jewish to be French at the age of 12. He said that such a trauma of having his identity stolen laid the foundation of his philosophy and a lifelong effort to deconstruct all systems of white-supremacy to expose the fact that, for example, writing in general is found not only in Europe but in every culture that has the ability to name itself, not to mention the fact that Africans invented writing as a pharmakon to be used with care for healing the world, according to Plato.

The African tradition of naming is consistently that of recognizing that we are all members of the human nature known as Ubuntu or the bundle of humanity, according to Archbishop Desmond Tutu. This philosophy of naming is recognized by African Americans with the saying, I am because we are. On the contrary, the European will to conquer, kill and plunder all others is justified with the Cartesian dogma, I think therefore I am, a suspect individualism that is even uncertain of itself (I think, not really sure). Ubuntu is expressed in my Igbo culture as Mbari, a miniature house that the whole community gathers to build with clay and with figurines representing every race, gender, class and generation to be left to the elements until dust returns to dust and the community gathers again to rebuild the Mbari. Martin Luther King Jr, recognized this wisdom of community with the analogy of a family that inherited a World House from their ancestor and have to share the house or fight and kill each other and burn it down. He gave the same speech three times with reference to segregation in America during his Nobel Peace Prize Lecture, apartheid South Africa, and the Vietnam War to emphasize that we all should share as brothers and sisters.

What is my name? According to Alex Haley, it was the father of Kunta Kinte who held him high under the full moon and named him. But in my Igbo culture, a father does not perform masculinity in the naming of sons in isolation. Rather, it is the whole community that gathers for a naming ceremony with up to ten names being given to one child and I have my many names from which I chose the most common one, Onwubiko or ‘Death Please’ spare this one, since my mother lost many babies in infancy. My own family name, Agozino, means “I Bless The Enemy”. Such a name would be strange to cultures that perceive enemies as people to be wiped out with genocide but the name makes sense to those who understand the core teaching of Jesus Christ that we should love our enemies. That message must have been confusing to the Jews who believed that Jehovah was exclusively their own tribal God. But Jesus was taken to Egypt as a baby and he was educated there before returning to Palestine as a 12 year old with the message of ancient Egyptians that there is only one God for all. The ancient Egyptians arrived at this revelation by observing that the sun that shines for them also shines for their enemies, it shines for men and for women, for whites and for blacks, for the rich and for the poor, and so we should love all and hate no one as Rasatafarians preach with One Love.

People of African descent appear to be the ones who have practiced the love of the enemy more than any other group of people. Only people of African descent name their children after their enemies and since naming of children is a supreme form of honor and love for the ancestors, the naming ironies of Africans with European names symbolize the love of the enemy brothers and sisters, perhaps to win them over and help to end racial, gender and class hatred. However, those people of African descent who have recovered their stolen African names are not haters of others but lovers of their own ancestors too.

We may need to go beyond personal names and wonder why it remains difficult to accept that some of the place names in America came from people of African descent who must have named a few places after living here for hundreds of years. One such place is Kanawa in West Virginia which simply means, Let Us Go Home, exactly like Calabar in Nigeria. Next door to Kanawa is Shenandoah, a place where the Virginia Frontier Museum established an Igbo village to acknowledge that the majority of enslaved Africans in Virginia were people of Igbo descent, according to Douglas Chambers, author of Murder in Montpellier: The Igbo of Virginia. Coincidentally, the name Shenandoah literally means, ‘Say Sorry To This Land’ in Igbo language. If you are wondering why anyone would name a place that as the young people building the Igbo village museum asked me, I ended my talk by performing my poem in Igbo and English urging the audience to say sorry to the land because there was bloodshed on the land, tear drops on the land, sweat drops on the land, rape on the land, warfare on the land, slavery on the land, sorry land.

Dr. Agozino is a Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies at Virginia Tech.