#scholarday

Says my father-in-law.  Ibaye

The family that reads together, leads together! --Ava

Let's implement this as a community!

All quotes are taken from Jacob H. Carruthers' MDW NTR: Divine Speech: A Historiographical Reflection of African Deep Thought from the Time of Pharaohs to the Present

{Taken from pages xi, xviii, & 33}

“I further suggest that there is no law of opposites in Kemetic thought. Male and female are not opposite but complementary just as are time and infinity."

What is racism? Feminism?  Chauvinism?  Sexism?  Western constructs which, no doubt, inform the way many view society contemporarily.  When we look at the universality of African thought, {African thought being the purveyor of deep thought/consciouness amongst humans prior to the compartmentalizationof all-kind by Europeans}, we can see that there is no "other."  The efforts of all humans should be to better self, sustain the community & the earth, and gain proximity to the Creator.  However, the task to live as one was intended to live is now clouded with contemporary, episodic challenges such as our ties to the American nation-state, identity, gender, ethnicity, race, class, democracy, et al.

As we return to our African modes of thinking, ways of being, and methods of creating, we should first, as the Babas and Mamas who taught me often say, "let the ancestors speak."  Meaning that foundation has been laid for following our path, and once we find and accept said path, we must add to it accordingly.

How do we do that knowing that western thought has informed, shaped, and destroyed our sense of self?    {See below}

"An examination of modern African thinking about African thought is long overdue, because in the final analysis what Africans think in general and what Africans think about Africa in particular will determine the future of Africans. The task before the Africans both at home and abroad is to restore to their memory what slavery and colonialism made them forget."

"Now we must rescue [ourselves] from [western thought]. African deep thought must now speak for itself...African champions must break the chain that links African ideas to European ideas and listen to the voice of the ancestors without European interpreters."  {From the Foreword of MDW NTR by John Henrik Clarke}

Romare Bearden, son of Mecklenburg, South Carolina, began his career in the 1930s as a painter and cartoonist, but he is most known for his West African and southern United States-influenced collages.  Bearden, a long-time student of the works of West African art, began his use of collage in the 1960s, almost thirty years into his artistic career.  While living in Mecklenburg and later, Harlem, he drew the majority of his influence from the culture of African Americans who lived in both cities.  During trips to Africa and the Caribbean, he observed the presence of the culture of Africa in the  lives of Africans in the Americas, and sought to convey his findings in his work.

His 1964 collection entitled The Prevalence of Ritual features a myriad of collages with African themes that depict ritual in African American communities.  Bearden was a student of African art for its practical and philosophical functions.  It is for this reason that Bearden reproduces a majority of his images, themes, and subjects.  The subject of his 1964 collage “Conjur [sic] Woman” is replicated in his 1971 and 1975 collages of the same name.  Bearden has several other collages dawning the same title in other years, but those depict different subjects.

The conjurer is a revered person in her society.  Being an elderly woman, she is the motherly consultant for those who need advice and aid.  She has a power that only apprenticeship, time, and wisdom could render.  Using an older woman as his subject, Bearden shows the significance of the female and the elder in African American societies. Bearden’s reuse of this woman is both to redraft her and approach her from a different light and to show the various manifestations of the woman overtime.  In the 1964 collage, she is drafted in a black and white color motif.  She is walking through the forest, perhaps collecting necessary objects to perform her craft.  

In the 1971 painting, she is depicted in a black and white color motif with hints of color in the background, in the foliage, and in the snake in her hand.   I posit that Bearden depicts his subject in the same black and white motif so that the viewer can recognize her from the earlier collage; however, it is evident to the viewer that the subject is undergoing a change.  She is surrounded by a more vibrant background and has, overtime, learned how to hone her powers and commune with her environment.  

In the 1975 rendition of “Conjur Woman,” the last piece in which this particular conjurer makes an appearance, she is in the forest again.  However, by 1975 both she and her surroundings are vibrantly colored.  This conveys that she has become fully actualized as a conjure woman.  Both she and her environment have become one because time has allowed her to study and become engrained in her craft.  The snake from the 1971 collage has moved from the palm of her hand.  In the 1975 collage it is wrapped around her arm.   The new placement of the snake suggests that she merely found the snake in the 1971 piece, and by 1975, it has become an aspect of nature with which she is familiar.  

Harkening back to his ancestors’ West African roots, Romare Bearden’s collages show that art not only imitates life, but that art is life.  His collages’ subjects are always evolving, just as people are, and those subjects are able to relay ideas about the growth processes of life.  Each of Bearden’s works featuring this particular conjurer show Bearden’s ability to build on subjects and themes in his collages.  His body of work reveals and thereby legitimizes the African practices present in the lives of Africans in the Diaspora.