By Biko Agozino
On Sunday, 09/19/16, I heard an
artist, Kenyetta Hinckle, open her exhibition on Virginia Tech campus with a
talk about her reworking of colonial photographs of topless African women in
sexualized poses. She gave them suggestive titles like 'Vendetta', 'Reprisal',
'Witness', 'The Sower' and called the entire series, ‘Uninvited’. These titles
remind us of the fact dramatized by Fanon in critique of Freud when he
suggested that some women invite rape by fantasizing about it whereas rape is
by definition, uninvited or non-consensual, just as there is no such thing as colonization
by invitation, despite assumptions that we asked for it. She wondered why people called her little African but scratcher as a child.
Kenyetta Hinckle also exhibited
paintings of Tituba, the African Caribbean woman who was accused of being
responsible for inducting Salem Massachusetts girls into witchcraft. For some reason,
her work was displayed along the ‘Corridor Gallery’ and people kept streaming
past during her engaging talk, making it look like a street arts performance.
Her work reminded me of attempts to
justify the unjustifiable records of the postcolonial genocidal state.
Interestingly, she said that when she was in Nigeria as a visiting professor at
the University of Lagos, some of her colleagues told her that the topless
photographs came from a time before 'civilization'. I told her how apt that was
given that Sigmund Freud saw civilization as a violent exercise in the
repression of the instinct for love and death, pleasure and pain. She spoke
again to my Africana Philosophy of Nonviolence class on 09/19/2016
When I shared the story of her
initial talk on Facebook, an art historian and visual artist challenged my
Freudian interpretation as follows: ‘You know, of course, that the Nigerians
she spoke to had something entirely different in mind. I hope you also pointed
out that they are wrong, and they cannot be wrong and right all at once. As an aside, Biko, have you noticed how the vast majority
of younger Nigerians who graduate from Nigerian universities have little grasp
of grammar in any language?’ I responded as follows:
‘They are obviously wrong as Cheikh Anta Diop proved long ago
with Civilization or Barbarism, with Precolonial Black Africa, and with The
African Origin of Civilization. But at the unconscious level, they are also
right as Freud would argue. The artist understood that they were
suggesting barbarism and she said that she was shocked because as an African
American woman, she could be seen in the role of neo-Tarzanism given her effort
to cover up the innocence or Dadaism of the women with her African fractal
patterns of drawings that looked like thin veils. She also reported that on her
trips across Europe, white men were frequently flashing their genitals at her
under the assumption that she must be a sex worker and when she complained to
her white male professor, he asked what she was wearing as if it was her fault.
She said that she was appalled to hear in Nigeria that the police routinely
shoot non-violent protesters to death but she was told to hush it because that
was the order of things under neocolonialism.
‘Regarding the murder of the English language by Nigerian
graduates, I will agree with Martin Luther King Jr. that they can serve even if
their grammar is ungrammatical. So like Fela Kuti, Naija musicians, and Chief
Zeburudaya, let the creative ones go on adding value with the ginger in the
swagger of their grammar. The artist noticed the peculiar grammar of our broken
English because everyone kept telling her, 'welcome back', when it was only her
first visit. Freud also argued that the repressed keeps returning to futilely
challenge the patriarchal authority with infantile dreams of killing the father
to marry the mother, trying to repress his own instinct to love and death, and seeking
to exploit nature. Fanon said that such Oedipal neurosis was not known in the
Caribbean, perhaps because female-headed families were more common, but also maybe
because the instinct for imperialism is peculiarly European. Thanks for your
usual provocation. You should offer VT an exhibition.’
Then, one of my former students
from Trinidad and Tobago and now a Lecturer commented as follows: ‘Oh my how I
wish I was at VT right now’. I replied as follows: ‘Thanks,
I will report on the discussions for the benefit of your … class. But note that
Chief LeRoy Clarke and Shawn Peters, among others, have been
offering similar 'pain things' (paintings) about the Caribbean crisis of
control-freak societies. I hope that your class is watching them and not only
the TV.’
Another Facebook friend also
commented saying: ‘Interesting perspectives on "civilization" -
I was unaware of Freud's comments on the subject. It reminds me of the day,
when I was teaching at Ascension High School in Eleme, Nigeria, that one of my
students asked about "civilized" countries, making it clear he felt
that European countries were civilized and African ones, including Nigeria, of
course, were not. I was not terribly surprised by his comments, but disturbed
by them, nonetheless. The other students, (5th formers, I believe they were)
obviously agreed with him. I began my rebuttal by pointing out the horrors
inflicted on others by such Europeans as Hitler and Stalin, people from two of
the countries this student thought were civilized. I said that Nigeria was
indeed "civilized," that it contained some of the finest (and
civilized - in the most positive use of that word) people in the world, and
that we have to be careful not to denigrate countries due to a perceived lack
of "civilization" nor feel inferior to countries that had no
superiority over any African nation.’
And I responded, saying: ‘Thanks for sharing your critical
thinking with your Nigerian students. Dr. Assata Zerai also reported that when
she was a visiting professor at the University of Ife, undergraduate students
kept telling her that we were wicked sinners until the missionaries came to
save us. Freud presented his unusual hypotheses in Civilization and its Discontents and also in Moses and Monotheism. But the hypotheses run through his body of
work. He believes that the Id is the wild one bent on gratifying all pleasure
instincts. But soon the Ego emerges through socialization to check the
selfishness of the Id by teaching the little motherfucker that the mother was
not accessible to his Eros. Frustrated, the brothers leave home to found their
own families where they repress their own sons while still battling with their
despotic father with the childish dream of liberation in the form of patricide.
Finally the Superego comes in to regulate the instinct for pleasure by imposing
the work ethic that makes people sweat for their living when they would rather
avoid all work and simply enjoy erotic pleasure (with the exception of the
privileged few such as artists and intellectuals who may truly enjoy their work). The trick
is to let people believe that by working, they are simply battling with nature
and conquering it in order to exploit it.
Thus civilization is an endless exercise in repression of
natural instincts of Eros and Nirvana. Herbert Marcuse (Eros and Civilization) subjected Freud to a detailed critique in
which he demonstrated that this idea that repression equals civilization runs
through Western Philosophy from Plato and Aristotle to Hegel before Nietzsche
dissented with his queer sense of morality as immorality. Marx, Lenin, Mao, Du
Bois, Diop, Nkrumah, Fanon, Rodney, Cabral, Toyo, Achebe, Davis, hooks, Amadiume, Nzegwu, Collins, Ekwe-Ekwe, and Hall are my model critics of Freud because they revealed
that what was mistaken as Eros was mainly the profit motive of greedy
capitalists who would not hesitate to kill their fathers or sons to maximize
profits. Freud speculated that some of my model critics did not really end
repression but actually founded repressive regimes that they brazenly called
the dictatorship of the proletariat in their efforts to refuse the 'reality principle' that civilization progresses through repression. Marcuse disagreed with this speculation by Freud and insisted that a non-repressive civilization is possible when we allow our imagination to roam free in the arts and sciences without being bogged down by the 'performance principle' that is prone to aggression in the psychology of Freud. I have critiqued Freud elsewhere on his
view that Africans, Aboriginal Australians and Maoris were extremely neurotic
for their stringent maintenance of incest taboos compared to Europeans who had
no qualms about marrying their first cousins. Today, science has proved that
those 'natives' that Freud called barbaric in this context knew what they were
doing because inbreeding weakens the genetic pool.
During her presentation to my class, Kenyetta introduced the
land of Kentifica which she discovered and mapped as the intersection of
globalized Africana homeland and Diaspora with its own handmade musical
instruments (as is the norm in Africa), with food shared publicly as performance
(common in Africa), with colorful hair designs and textiles covered in African
fractal patterns (also common in Africa). She said that she resented being
called Oyibo (European) in Nigeria and retorted to her seamstress that she
spoke the way she did because some of our people sold others into slavery. I
intervened to remind the class that one of the books we were reading for the
Introduction to African Studies class was How
Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney. That book proved that it was
not really a slave trade but a class war in which a few African chiefs
collaborated with their European class allies to wage war and capture Africans
to be enslaved. The rest of our ancestors fought hard to prevent our beloved
from being captured and enslaved and the struggle continued through the middle
passage to the plantations. We are all survivors meeting one another against
the odds.
About the artist…
Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle is an
interdisciplinary visual artist, writer and performer. Her practice fluctuates
between collaborations and participatory projects with alternative gallery
spaces within various communities to projects that are intimate and based upon
her private experiences in relationship to historical events and contexts. A
term that has become a mantra for her practice is the "Historical
Present," as she examines the residue of history and how it affects our
contemporary world perspective. Hinkle received her MFA in Art & Critical
Studies Creative Writing from CalArts and BFA in Painting from the Maryland
Institute College of Art.
Her work and experimental writing
has been exhibited and performed Fore at The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY,
Project Row Houses in Houston, TX, The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, CA and The
Museum of Art at The University of New Hampshire. Hinkle was the youngest
artist to participate in the multi-generational biennial Made in LA 2012.
Hinkle’s work has been reviewed by the Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, Artforum,
The Huffington Post, The Washington Post and The New York Times. Hinkle was
listed on The Huffington Post’s Black Artists: 30 Contemporary Art Makers Under
40 You Should Know. She is also the recipient of several fellowships and grants
including: The Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Award, The Cultural
Center for Innovation’s Investing in Artists Grant, Social Practice in Art
(SPart-LA), and The Jacob K. Javits Full Fellowship for Graduate Study. Hinkle
is a recent alumna of the US Fulbright Program in which she conducted research
at the University of Lagos in Lagos, Nigeria.
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