13th Rencontres de Bamako - Biennale Africaine de la Photographie, 2022-2023
On Multiplicity, Difference, Becoming, and Heritage
Dwelling made of rainstorms of the deluge
Of Flows, Transitions and Supranaturality
By all counts and standards of the art, Amos Tutuola’s “The Palmwine Drinkard” and Ben Okri’s “The Famished Road” are some of the most, for lack of a better word, sophisticated invocations and exposés of the manifestations of multiple beings creating, negotiating, existing in and in-between and dwelling in varying worlds.
Tutuola’s palmwne drinkard sets out to find his tapper in the land of the dead, ‘Deads’ town’ where it was said his tapster was living with deads. on this journey he meets and fights death, travels through endless forests where he meets a complete gentleman whose body was made up of body parts he had rented from others, and when they time came he gave them back and paid rents for the body p-arts. On his journey, the palmwine drinkard also meets animals as big as elephants, with fingernails as long as two feet, its head ten times bigger than its body, with a large mouth full of teeth as long as one foot and as thick as a cow’s horns, on its head were five horns and its four feet were as big as a log of wood. Tutuola writes of houses in trees with dancing halls accommodating 300 people, and he writes of women pregnant through a swollen thumb and giving birth to adult children.
Ben Okri writes of kings who sometimes appeared in the form of a great cat, with a red beard and eyes of greenish sapphire, and most interestingly he had been born un- countable times. Okri’s main character Azaro too was no stranger in the business of being born several times or circulating between worlds. He was also constantly accompanied by spirit companions who provoked his oscillation between the spirit world and other worlds. Okri also conjures spaces ‘past hell, past spirit lands where our ancestors ask one another impenetrable riddles all day long’ or of realms and spaces that are landscapes of genius, and supposedly the worlds before birth, the worlds of pure dreams and signs.
Every effort to pigeonhole these stories as magical realism, surrealism, sousrealism or otherwise inevitably fail as they tend to be reductions.
What these stories have in common is their ability to create worlds that defy categories of real, genuine, concrete, actual, existing as well as they completely disregard categories that might imply the opposites like imaginary, supposed, fictional, imitation, artificial.
Since time immemorial, (some) art has offered the possibility of navigating different spaces, different worlds. Art has facilitated the oscillation — sometimes gentle, cajoling, deceivingly beautiful and placating, and sometimes like a tour de force, thunderingly tearing, untenably shocking — between what is understood to be real and imaginary, and has served as a enabler in the accommodation and habituation of such spaces. Indeed life is a constant negotiation between these worlds, and while that transition sometimes feels like going down a slippery slope, other times it must feel like walking on a rocky road full of hot lava.
In this chapter titled “dwelling made of rainstorms of the deluge — Of Flows, Transitions and Supranaturality” for the 13th edition of the Bamako Encounters, artists from the four corners of the African world have been grouped together as their works in one way or the other thematize fluxes of varying kinds, be it physical and geographical movements across zones, across borders, and transcending time realms — constantly shifting between past, present and future, and constantly questioning, if not to say refuting the linearity of time, and advocating for other understandings of time as cyclical, spiral, discontinuous and disharmonious. In their works they evoke the impossibility of stagnation, directly or tangentially insinuating that everything is in motion, and even though one proverbially talks of marking time, that time is never still. Some of the art works that come together in this chapter also concern themselves with the ubiquitousness of spirituality. Not the reductive, monodeic, monotheistic, cul-de-sac-like religiosity, but a wider more holistic, all em-bracing, ever-offering idea of spirituality. Maybe it is that spirituality that can also be understood as a kind of supranaturality that is the mediator, the conveyor, the facilitator, the catalyst between multiple worlds.
Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung