Sugarcane Magazine Loves Art

— Edwidge Danticat in Create Dangerously

Portia Zvavahera (Zimbabwean, 1985), Zvandiswededza (It Has Drawn Me Closer), 2017. Oil-based printing ink and oil bar on canvas, 173 x 168.3 cm.

Ablade Glover (Ghanaian, 1934), African Market, 1989. Oil on canvas, 77 x 77 cm.

— Warsan Shire

With this body of work I first portray the face of one of the women with the most beautiful face and I slowly vandalize the face by changing its feature into AFROEUCENTRIC destroying what is considered perfect to exhibit beautiful black features. Women portrayed in this body of work are aware of their beauty and they want to expose it by destroying the mask that the world continues to shape, a mask that gives women the illusion that when you don’t have an eurocentric feature, you are not beautiful. Women, If we don´t manifest resistance our pure existence as black, beautiful women will disappear. ——————————————————————————–Full text The western media has an ambiguous influence in Africa. African television, magazines and the fashion industry seems to follow eurocentrism without questioning what we became after our independency and how our blackness is being televised. The influence is noticeable in the choices our African women have with beauty standards. Although we have managed to create a natural hair revolution, we still have to cope with aggressive propaganda non caucasian women face daily from newspapers to magazines to remind us that when it’s not Eurocentric it’s not considered beautiful. Today with the use of internet even without following mediocre news pages of your interest on Facebook or Twitter the wind blows into your direction, you are confronted with studies that want to reshape your ideals about your own definition of beauty. The articles and advertisement contain images that are a loud bully to those that don’t have the Eurocentric features, these blatant articles contribute to the racial challenges we are facing today. As a woman of color I grew up not knowing how to react to the fact that my features were not considered beautiful. It was also noticeable that in our society, we have black children and asian children that somehow lost the battle and opt to make groups when their features would in a small way meet the eurocentric beauty standards that are taking us back to colonialism and segregation. Praising fair skin, a small nose bridge, straight hair and colored eyes. When I studied, big lips and a wide nose bridge was considered less attractive to white schoolmates. Uneducated black children with similar features would remind you that you were too African to be part of the group because they somehow had one feature that made them part of the beauty circus created centuries ago to divide black people and make them unstable and weak as a group. A strong education could have saved these children but growing up in a western country, white oriented schools have history books that are not an education weapon to shape children to believe that you are beautiful no matter your color or features. The manifestation of beauty lays deeper than your facial features, individually or with the guidance of our parents children can be introduced to books that explain this aggression in magazines and television. It´s abusive and as a child anything that you receive can easily shape your mind and change your thoughts for life. This year London-based plastic surgeon Dr Julian De Silva developed a scientific facial mapping technology evaluating Amber Heard, Kim Kardashian and other caucasian women as the women with the most beautiful face in the world. In a world with mixed humans, using methods that were made to whitewash beauty standards and make women of color feel less attractive means that we are mentally colonizing ourselves and letting writers, specialists and scientists continue to carry the worth of our existence by letting them write articles that our children read to reshape their mind into the mind of a contemporary slave of eurocentric beauty standards. With this body of work I first portray the face of one of the women with the most beautiful face and I slowly vandalize the face by changing its feature into AFROEUCENTRIC destroying what is considered perfect to exhibit beautiful black features. Women portrayed in this body of work are aware of their beauty and they want to expose it by destroying the mask that the world continues to shape, a mask that gives women the illusion that when you don’t have an eurocentric feature, you are not beautiful. Women, If we don´t manifest resistance our pure existence as a black, beautiful women will disappear. Thank you for reading, share your experiences with me. E: [email protected]

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Wooden bwoom helmet-mask of the Kuba people, present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo.  Artist unknown; 19th century.  Now in the Musée du quai Branly, Paris.  Photo credit: Siren-Com/Wikimedia Commons.