Body talk. (First Word).

What on earth could nineteenth-century Luba depictions of the female body have in common with the contemporary sculptures of Los Angeles artist Alison Saar? How is culture inscribed on the female body and who interprets it how? Is gender a performance? Is it for real?

Last February 24 thirteen scholars and artists explored these and other issues of gender, body, memory, race, and spirit in an all-day symposium at UCLA called "Dialogues on Body Politics," inspired by the exhibition "Body Politics: The Female Image in Luba Art and the Sculpture of Alison Saar." The exhibition, curated by Mary Nooter Roberts and Alison Saar (UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, November 12, 2000-May 13, 2001), juxtaposed small, elegant nineteenth-century Luba depictions of the female with Saar's mostly large, roughhewn sculptures. This unusual pas de deux was extended in wall text that reproduced a spirited conversation between the curatots. Like the exhibition, the symposium was cast as a series of dialogues, each organized around a theme (see program, p. 4).

In a refreshing departure from the strictly academic, two of the panelists "performed" their thoughts on these themes; a third took the audience into cyberspace. In the spirit of the material at hand, we therefore abandon the usual solo First Word in favor of a dialogue, this one between Henrietta Cosentino, an editor and writer, and Carine Fabius, a writer and for many years a dealer in Afro-Caribbean art. Henrietta and Carine found themselves together at the symposium. Here is the conversation that ensued.

HC: I love the fact that we're two nonscholars dialoguing on a scholarly symposium. But we both respond to the show and have backgrounds that make it resonate. I have lived in Nigeria and Sierra Leone (where depictions of women are so present and strong) and have worked at the Fowler Museum (and before that, at African Arts). You as longtime co-proprietor of Galerie Lakaye have collected and exhibited so much contemporary African American art. And as a Haitian woman you've expressed a visceral connection with Alison's work.

CF: My experience is not so much with African American art but more as a dealer of Black art (that term African American I have always found limiting). Also, the fact that I'm Haitian connected me to all the talk about spirit possession. And then there's this whole other area of my being involved with the world of henna body art, which is really a way of imprinting the will of the gods by using the sacred henna plant as medium ... But about the symposium, overall I did not readily see so many parallels in regard to Alison's art versus the Luba art. Alison's work is so personal and the Luba work so historical ...

HC: Yes, and Alison's is so rough and so large in dimension, the Luba art so small and finely wrought. I agree that the connection between the two is a challenge. On the surface, it might have seemed more logical for Alison's work to be juxtaposed with Yoruba art, since she has consciously studied it and drawn inspiration from it. But that wouldn't have been nearly as interesting. Maybe it's in the disjunctions that the stimulation lies. You said you fell in love with Alison's sculptures. But did you find yourself able see the Luba stuff--to get into it--before the symposium? After the symposium?

CF: I absolutely loved so many of those pieces. They are some of the most exquisite African sculptures I have ever seen. And after listening to so many people at the symposium making the connection between them and Alison's work, I did see some associations. All of her pieces dealt with women, and most if not all of the Luba sculptures were female in subject. And in reflecting on all the talk about why that is and about how women are the real chiefs at night while men are the chiefs during the day, and that in the ceremonial context men put on women's masks to better attract spirit because only a woman can hold the spirit of a king--all that kind of made me crazy, because on one level I know it's true, that women are the stronger and more intuitive and more magical sex(!), but when a man says it, it's kind of like paying lip service to it, because, bottom line, isn't the final word about economic power?

HC: Hmm. I guess I'd say yes and no. That's what the feminists of the 1970s said, and in the context of American society I think they were right. But in the context of African society--societies, because heaven knows there are a multiplicity--I think it's a lot more complex. As a Peace Corps volunteer in Southeastern Nigeria I encountered female power of kinds that I'd never encountered in the U.S.A., even among women who didn't necessarily have economic means. But they had all kinds of means for self-realization, and an innate sense of who they were and what kinds of power they had, and it was palpable, and made American femaleness seem very thin by comparison.

CF: I certainly would not argue that those women are not powerful, but I remember having this same discussion with a visiting Senegalese artist, Moussa Sene Absa, whom I think you met. We were talking about the multiple-wives issue, and he said the same thing--that they really ran the show, etc. Except I don't think any one of those women likes or appreciates the other wives. They accept it but they don't like it. I just mean that men used to know that women are the more powerful sex, and it seems as though now they just say it.

HC: Oh, I know what you mean. Men say it all the time, and when it comes to the issue of polygamy I think that very few women find it a happy situation. In the village of Mattru, in Sierra Leone, we got to know a lot of households of co-wives, and it seemed that their rivalry was the central fact and drama of their lives. It fueled most of the stories we heard. But polygamy was also, for the traditional households, more necessary than in the city--it was the basis of the economic system, and I don't know that women were more oppressed than men. But there the women had their Sande society, and it gave them an absolute domain of power that checked, contained, counterbalanced men's power. It gave women control over their sexuality and the right to judge men who transgressed their laws. I don't know about Moussa and his wives--that would be an interesting household to peek in on.

CF: All I can say is, better them than me. My husband knows and respects the fact that I'm a black magic woman, and he's very careful! One of the many beautiful visuals I retained from the symposium is when someone explained that women gesturing toward their breasts in many of the Luba pieces is a sign of devotion to the gods, and then Alison talked about women's breasts as secret sanctuaries. It got me thinking about how breast milk is a primordial life fluid for new human beings and about breasts as soft pillows for men to lay their heads on and in a sense to "come home" to. The gesturing toward them as a sign of devotion is really lovely, because it's as if they are thanking God for the ability they've been given to provide life and warmth and that feeling of coming home to other humans.

HC: Yes, I too loved the Luba pieces in which women gesture toward their breasts. In the African village, the meaning of breasts was so very different from what it is in America. Breasts were not sexualized. They were the symbol and essence of fertility, life-giving nourishment. No shame about them. New nubile breasts were so celebrated--young Sande initiates decked out their beautiful young breasts in ropes of beads, and everyone admired. And I think that African women--at least those in the traditional life--really had the strongest sense of their essential importance. One of the most haunting stories we ever heard was a tale of co-dependency between mother and daughter, in which the daughter was still nursing at the time of her marriage. And when the husband took her away from her mother it was such a crisis--she was haunted by her mother's breast, which followed her and kept her from staying in her husband's bed. She would hear her mother's refrain, "The breast is burning ..."

Of course, the cruel side of putting such a premium on woman's fertility is that infertility can be the worst nightmare imaginable for a woman, a tragic state. There was no good status in Mattru for a woman who didn't have children, unless she was a senior wife with lots of co-wives and their children to boss around.

CF: Wow. That's an intense story--breast-feeding past adulthood. There are many mothers who have a hard time deciding when to stop for fear of that separation, which must eventually come; but that kind of dependency, we can hope never to see. And certainly, African societies are not the only ones to put that severe pressure on women to bear children. I'm one of those who have never really felt a strong pull to bear children, and I remember having a conversation with my sister about it; and her reaction was, "Is your husband as selfish as you?" That made me feel so sad. But that's pretty much the consensus on this issue. Breasts as milk machines. I'm still thinking about breasts as art. Prettier than scarification, too, I'd say.

HC: You don't like it?

CF: Like is not the word I would use. In some cases it's incredibly beautiful, but it's still shocking to see.

HC: Well, I'm not personally up for scarification, but I do appreciate how beautiful it can be and what it means in those places where it's an identity marker. And I appreciate, too, how it marks a rite of passage. And what it means as a ritual. And--to get back to the show--as a site of memory, collective as well as individual. That was a concept I hadn't encountered until I saw the Luba pieces, and it thrilled me, the idea of woman's body, abstractly replicated as a lukasa, a memory board. Of course we know that our bodies remember everything, even when our minds forget, block, transcend. It's said that every experience is stored in the body, in every cell, and part of yoga for me is accessing those cells, not letting experience shut them down. So I believe that every bit of life is inscribed on the body, some of it visible, on the skin, some of it beneath the surface.

CF: I was very intrigued with the concept of the body as memory board too, and how scarification, as well as tattoos and piercings and the actual memory board as divination tool, all tell a story--a story that is perceived differently depending on who is doing the interpreting. If scarification and other body art forms tell a story, whose story is it really?

HC: Yes, whose story is it? Well, with the Luba, the woman's scarified back is her story as it interacts with her people's story: as I understand it, she would have designs that partake of traditional patterns, but on her back they would have their own individuality, so they would mark her as one special person/member of the larger group. With the memory boards themselves, there's a whole new complex of meanings. And of course with Alison's pieces the embossed ceiling tin very deliberately evokes scarification and memory, but with, needless to say, very different content. And to get back to the symposium, I was skeptical at first when Abena Busia, in her keynote talk, focused on Toni Morrison's Beloved--on Sethe's body parts. I didn't see where she was going with that or how it would connect with the show: dissecting a literary corpus seemed like a pretty oblique way to get at the material in an exhibition. But the minute she put those two images side by side on the screen--first, the image of a Luba woman seen from behind, her back magnificently scarified, and second, the image of an American slave, his back a chaos of scar tissue, the result of whipping--well, I was chilled and riveted like everyone else in the audience. And suddenly I really got it--what Abena was getting at.

CF: There's so much jumping around in my head right now. What you said about yoga--I never heard that it can be used to access memory cells. That's exciting! I read somewhere that menstrual blood stores incredible amounts of data relating to our DNA coding and that women would be so much more in tune with their bodies and with nature if they were not taught that menstruation is a curse or something dirty. And, back to the memory board, it really is something of a ouija board. So amazing how the simple concept of accessing the spirit world transcends all barriers, eventually being the same under different guises, depending on the part of the world in which it is being attempted. I stopped breathing when she flashed those two slides on the screen. It got me to thinking about something I'd heard--that a majority of Western people with tattoos and piercings have experienced some kind of abuse in their childhoods or in their lives and that the "self-mutilation," as some people see it, is a way of reclaiming their bodies, a way of saying, "No one can hurt me, because I'm doing it myself." If that's true, then the motivation for it couldn't be more different from the cultural imperative that drives it in African cultures. Abena Busia seemed to think that tattooing and piercing are accepted forms of body adornment here but that scarification is still considered savage when it is being done by people in Africa. I don't believe that's true. People are still quite shocked by it here.

HC: I think it depends on where you are. It's still shocking outside the urban scene, but in the big city it's pretty common these days, which isn't necessarily the same thing as widely accepted. What an interesting thought--about the correlation between tattoos and abuse. I hadn't heard it. You're right: if it's true it's a reversal of the motivation among the Luba. As for the business of what's stored in our cells, I think it's something intuited in Africa. It goes to the heart of magic practice. It goes to the understanding of the nature of energy, and how energy leaves memories wherever it has touched and from wherever it was generated.

CF: Yes, and connecting with that energy. Spirit catchers are a big theme in Alison's work. Hair as spirit catchers. I recently met a man who works with women's hair, making them into dreadlocks (or locks, as they are referred to these days). He thinks hair is like antennas, and the reason modern people are so out of touch with nature or spirit is because of all the processing we do to our hair, which inhibits communication.

HC: I believe it. I believe that hair is like an antenna. Mine certainly is, and bad hair days are all about picking up bad energy, sometimes from within and sometimes from without. So when I look at Alison's many hair-ridden sculptures I see the antenna picking up all kinds of energy and storing it. Chaos in the Kitchen, Delta Doo ... Your mentioning DNA reminded me of something I heard on the radio the other day about the ethics of cloning--using stem cells, which have mainly come from the harvesting of fetuses for medical research. A lot of doctors and scientists, a lot of people, have a problem with the concept of mining fetal tissue, for obvious reasons--the implications are so scary. But apparently it's just been discovered that the cells of the umbilical cord, the so-called stem cells (which are the mother of all cells--"mother cells"!) can be harvested and used to clone brain cells (so far, only in rats of course). And this poses the only alternative to harvesting fetal tissue. So the "mother cells" that may hold a key to healing and regeneration can actually be harvested from a mother's umbilical cord, which is the ultimate mediator and the life-giving source. It's astonishing and yet completely logical!

CF: Logical and fantastic in terms of discovery and progress, but totally disquieting when you bear in mind that scientists will try to harvest those "mother cells" for profit. And the umbilical cord is so like the snake, which Babatunde Lawal referred to as being like a woman who is able to regenerate herself by giving birth.

HC: Yes, well, it's a common African understanding, and a Haitian one too--the snake as a metaphor for regenerative energy. I'm thinking of Danbala of course and of Ayida Wedo. The snake suggesting both male and female energies and related complementarities, the yin/yang of heaven and earth. And I did love learning from Babatunde Lawal about the importance of the baby wrap in the Gelede masking costume and how it also suggests and signifies the umbilical cord and all that power of fertility ...

CF: Isn't it funny how Westerners tend to think of spirit possession and the information gained through that process as being primitive or savage, phony for the most part, when artists do it every day? Remember how that came up after David Rousseve's performance? How he channeled his Creole grandmother before our very eyes?

HC: So true. His performance was amazing, and I had no doubt of the presence of his grandmother's spirit, whether it was spirit possession or some other kind of channeling, and that the greatest artists achieve a channeling of spirit. David's grandmother was with us on stage and so was his child self ... It occurs to me that channeling has to start with an appeal to the spirit--which is what Olabayo Olaniyi and Babatunde Lawal did in the blessing at the start of the symposium. I meant to ask you, what did you get from it?

CF: I felt it was a great way to start. Olabayo's energy was so charming, so lovely, that huge smile ... And the eloquence of Babatunde Lawal! Such an organic practice in a modern building. The contrast was striking, but the blessing did what it was supposed to do, I think, which was to put everyone in the right space to consider affairs of the spirit and of art.

HC: Yes, exactly. I felt the same way. It sanctified the proceedings and demonstrated the African answer to the binarism that has dominated Euro-American ways of seeing--the "either/or" thing. Instead, the blessing appealed to our common spirit and to all that mediates the seeming opposites.

CF: I think we would all do a lot better if we started our daily affairs by recognizing spirit. Connecting with spirit connects us with nature. In fact Babatunde L. said it best when he proposed that "there is no culture without nature in Africa."

HC: Yes, overriding, once again, that Western binary opposition, nature versus culture. Instead it's the wonderful "and/and" of so many non-Western thought systems.

CF: Being from Haiti and coming from a segment of society that frowns on spirit possession and worship as a way of checking in with the Highest, I have to ask myself: If Haitians can deny something that is so much a part of their culture, how does a country like America ever tune in?

HC: Oh, how true. Well, the irony is that America is obsessed with religion, and in politics just now we're seeing a presidency try to subvert the most fundamental separation of church and state. And yet the same folks who want to do this don't seem to have any respect for spirit in the sense we're speaking of. Imagine the spirits of the founding fathers, rolling in their graves.

CF: Right. Capital punishment--yeah! The right of a woman to choose whether or not to be a vessel for spirit--boo! It was very depressing to me, and telling, too, when it came out that both presidential candidates were born-again Christians.

HC: Also, I think in America there's a deep fear of the uncontrollable--ecstasy, ecstatic behavior is frowned on. But it always seeks a way to express itself--through drugs or in mosh pits.

CF: And then three strikes and you're out if you try to reach an altered state. Not that I'm advocating the use of drugs.

HC: Heaven forfend!

CF: No drugs, but with a little alcohol in the system, it's amazing how those same politicians become something else. I bet there are quite a few dresses hanging in some of those closets!

HC: Don't we know it. Speaking of J. Edgar Hoover, that bitch ... trying to control the rest of the world but intent on channeling his inner woman while plotting to kill Martin Luther King.

CF: After bringing up David Rousseve, I started thinking about his colleague, Bennetta Jules-Rosette, and her presentation on Josephine Baker.

HC: I just loved hearing about Baker's absolutely dazzling experimentation with identity, defying every kind of classification from race to gender to age to religion ...

CF: Yeah, I had never really thought of her as a gender-defying sort. I looked at her in those men's suits as an artist fooling around with clothes.

HC: Well that's what she most essentially was--an artist. But as an artist she was damned if she was going to be restricted by anybody's "isms." It blew me away to hear that she'd tried on every religion as well as every costume you could invent, from bananas to tuxedos. The journey from Protestant to Jewish to Moslem to Roman Catholic--wow.

CF: She did blur all kinds of lines by experimenting with just about everything that crossed her path! In the end, though, she is more remembered for being in the nude, for being a savage thing and an icon of sexuality and femininity. It was so sad for me to hear that it was only last year that France recognized her as a humanitarian! Even after the rainbow tribe!

HC: Yes, but better late than never. And we can be part of the re-remembering, thanks to Bennetta's presentation. We can change the collective remembrance, just the way Toni Morrison subverts the obliteration represented by the scars on Sethe's back. We owe it to Josephine to challenge the collective memory. In fact the collective memory includes us, and we expand it.

CF: I loved hearing about those aspects of Josephine, but I have to say that I had trouble connecting David R.'s performance and Josephine as gender-bender back to the exhibition, except as it referred to Luba artists making female images only and men donning masks in ceremonies. Thanks for bringing that together for me.

HC: Ah, well, I guess it seemed to me very relevant; in fact I thought it was the most fully successful panel. It all revolved around the idea that the body is a locus of memory, and it brought that idea into so many dimensions. I guess that's why I was so jolted by Mary Helen Washington's challenge to David Rousseve, when she asked, "What gives you the right to dance [as] a woman?" I suppose it was valid from a feminist perspective, but the feminism sounded so rigid and hostile in that question--it seemed to come from the very Western, binary, you-gotta-be-either-this-or-that perspective. What gave him the right was so obvious, to me: it was the right of an artist. I thought David Gere's question was much more interesting: "What gives you the ability to dance a woman?" I don't know about Gere's suggestion--that Rousseve's ability derived from being gay--but at least it's worth a debate. Whatever it is, it's the mystery the mystery of art--and of channeling.

CF: I had the same thought. What gives an artist the right' to do anything at all? Expression is inspired by the spirit realm, and who can make a judgment on that? As regards the panels, taken as a whole, they did tie together many ideas within the exhibition, but separately I didn't always follow the reasoning for them. I sure was stimulated, though! I felt like both Rousseve and Alison in a way, in that they both talked about how the ideas in their work evolve even for them over time. It was funny to see them both reacting to comments about their art in a way that suggested, "Oh, I never thought of it that way, but I am open." For example, when Bennetta Jules-Rosette told Alison that she saw Yemaya in her' sculpture Clean Sweep. Although Alison's motives were entirely different when she made it, you could see how her openness to Yemaya in her own life could have influenced the piece, and she acknowledged that when the suggestion was made.

HC: Yes, I agree. I loved the openness of the artists to new interpretations, and that is certainly one of the life-affirming and generative qualities of art--that it has its own life through time and in relationship with the viewers, and opens out to new possibilities. That returns us to the question of how Josephine is remembered--as being a savage, an emblem of sexuality and femininity--and it's because of the power of a few visual images that have set and limited and diminished hers. It connects with the subject that came to the forefront in the first afternoon panel: the static of the visual, as it's fixed in a Western context (I'm talking about the visual that's generated by mass culture, not the visual of the art in the exhibition), as opposed to the shifting, sensual nature of memory. I think that Hollywood has fixed us with a few images--of Josephine in a banana dress; of Voodoo as zombies and scary rituals around the fire--and these visual images are so dominant. Harryette Mullen and Mary Helen Washington talked about how, in The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison tries to disempower that mass-marketed visual, has her character try to subvert it.

CF: Unfortunately, images that come from Hollywood or the media leave such a lasting impression--of what is beautiful, of the effects of nature. Take the full moon and its negative associations--like increases in domestic-abuse calls and emergency-room visits--as opposed to the moon as the feminism nine aspect of God. And Haitian Vodou dolls and pins, which don't really exist that way in true practice.

HC: Exactly. And that subversion of mass image is part of what Alison is about--her Afro-Di(e)ty, for example, overturning the accepted visual image of the hero as male, white, war inclined. Her odalisques playing on and challenging the traditional European paintings--that wonderful suite of paintings that Michael Harris showed--where woman is simply an object of the "male gaze."

CF: I absolutely loved Afro-Di(e)ty. So strong in its depiction of virtual femininity, and so other than how it is usually perceived.

HC: Yes, a most exquisite piece.

CF: The imagery of the water/river was so powerful, and then to hear her say that it also represents women doing the wash and wringing out clothes. And then comes Babatunde L.'s vision of it as the snake, which pops up again and again in history--in Africa as the image of woman, in Christianity as representation of the Devil.

HC: ... that Christian urge to brand as negative what is really understood in Africa and Haiti as the power of shape-shifting, mediating, regenerating--of the life force. In African-based cosmologies it's so much richer, the complementarities and all. But isn't it wonderful, in Haiti, how the visuals that are supposed to capture and impose Christian concepts get overturned--the way St. Patrick stamping out the snakes is seen as Danbala harnessing their power.

CF: Yes! I'm sure the church loves that! So, now, since I had to leave early, after Babatunde's presentation, what did I miss?

HC: Well, Victoria Vesna took us into cyberspace, and it was hard to rope it all in and relate it to the exhibition. But, still, fascinating. She's a conceptual artist working with computers--just as Lawal talked about how Gelede deals with virtual femininity, Vesna explores virtual gender--virtual bodies and virtual communities. She started with a brief videoclip of a Latina, a santera, who smoked a cigar and talked about the power of smoke to access the spirit world. Then she explained a recent computer project in which she and a colleague sent out an Internet questionnaire proposing to create virtual bodies on request and asking, basically, what kind of body you would like. They were so inundated with responses that they could not keep up with the requests--some 10,000, I think she said. And two things astonished her: first, that such a large number of men expressed the desire for a female body; and, second, that so many people seemed to desire androgyny. Well, being overwhelmed with responses, they decided to create an interactive body that each visitor could manipulate him- or herself. And from there (I hope I have this right) they decided to create a virtual community that would be encoded to continue growing on its own, without their intervention or guidance, but which would evolve in response to every visitor, depending on the nature of the interaction. And here's the kicker: the computer schematic looked and behaved like a string of genomes. Which brought us back to the most current questions of gender, race, and so forth. Vesna's final comment was that if we think race and gender issues are a challenge now, they're nothing compared to what's to come, now that the genome has been mapped.

CF: How so? I'm not sure I follow.

HC: Well, this mapping will open up all kinds of new possibilities for manipulating aspects of the body--like gender--in advance. Genetic control of the unborn.

CF: That's scary. So those who control technology ...

HC: Yes. And I've heard this talked about by a bunch of scientists on Pacifica radio. It's a huge concern, because apparently the two outfits that have mapped the human genome are now trying to gain copyright for their mapped chains. And think about it: they are claiming ownership of what amounts to natural law--something that's never been been allowed before--as if Einstein could own E=m[c.sup.2], or Darwin own the principles of evolution, and so forth.

CF: How typical. Like harvesting the stem cells for profit. I didn't realize they were doing that.

HC: I didn't either, till this program. And meanwhile, one of the other scientists--an emeritus professor from Harvard--spoke about what she found most thrilling in the mapping of the genome. For her, the greatest revelation was that it reveals absolutely nothing about what it means to be human. Nothing! This tickled her no end, because the original premise of the project was that once we "mastered" the genome we would have the secret to life. We'd have broken the code. And lo and behold, not at all. There's hardly any difference between our genomes, which number about 30,000, and those of an earthworm, which may be around 22,000. And the codes themselves are not fixed; they're more like operating instructions for the genes. That is, the genomic behavior--how the genomes act upon the human body--depends on other factors that can't be predicted or mapped. In the end, science still can't capture the essence of spirit.

CF: Science keeps trying to find the secret to life, but the more they seek, the more their answers lead them back to the big mystery. How does one explain that a catalytic chemical reaction, which is thought to be the source of life, somehow, billions of years later, produced a genome structure that is the same in humans as in fruit flies? There was a New York Times article a couple of years back that reported a wild finding by scientists, who discovered that every living thing in nature is connected by one mathematical equation. An equation showing that the exact same ratio exists between humans and birds and flies and elephants and even trees in terms of things like weight in relation to skin surface, number of heartbeats in relationship to vascular system ... I wish I could remember more. But our blood flows exactly the same way that sap flows through a tree! It all points to an irrefutable master plan that blows all other theories out of the water.

HC: Well, yes. And it's clear that science cannot separate the material from the spiritual, put it under a microscope and hope for a revelation of meaning. And for me that sums up the wonderful mysteries explored in the symposium and in the show.

CF: It seems like the symposium came full circle, then, from cyberspace back to the invocation of spirit by Olabayo. You told me to remind you about his performance--what was it like, what was it about?

HC: Oh, you would have loved the idea of it. Talk about spirit! And breasts! Olabayo came out in a masquerade which was like his own private Gelede, his own homage to woman. On his head, he carried a huge inverted breast. But at first it was veiled and you couldn't tell what it was: he was framed by a rectangular canopy of that blue Yoruba cloth--adire cloth. Then, when he shed the canopy, the thing looked like a large calabash, and he resembled a woman going to market with a heavy load of produce on her head. But gradually it was revealed to be a ceramic breast filled with mysterious things, lots of them, all connected like an integrated circuit--which some folks in the audience were invited to look at but no one could understand. And then we learned that the breast weighed so much that indeed not a single person was able to lift it from Olabayo's head. All this was explained by Yoruba proverbs (which Babatunde translated), revealing deep Yoruba philosophy--I like to think of it as Yoruba yoga--about life as performance. About woman as the source of life; the breast as metaphor for all that nourishes us in the performance of life; and its contents as the mysterious stuff of our own heads and hearts--of all we've seen and done and chosen on our life's path--of the load we choose to bear. Anyway, it was very moving. But I only wish it had been half as long and much earlier, maybe at the start of the day instead of at the end, because there were huge holes in the auditorium, and energy had seeped away.

CF: Imagine if every woman were to look at her breasts in that way, in that context, the world would certainly be a different place. Let's start a movement!

SYMPOSIUM PROGRAM

OPENING REMARKS Mary Nooter Roberts, UCLA Betsy D. Quick, UCLA

KEYNOTE SPEAKER Abena Busia, Rutgers University 

REPRESENTING WOMEN Alison Saar, artist Michael Harris, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 

PERFORMING GENDER David Rousseve, UCLA Bennetta Jules-Rosette, University of California, San Diego David Gere, UCLA

WRITING ON THE BODY Harryette Mullen, UCLA Mary Helen Washington, UCLA

VIRTUAL FEMININITY Babatunde Lawal, Virginia Commonwealth University Victoria Vesna, UCLA

"ERU: HOW HEAVY IS YOUR LOAD?" Olabayo Olaniyi, University of Michigan 

HENRIETTA COSENTINO, once Assistant Editor at African Arts and later Senior editor at the UCLA fowler Museum of Cultural History, is currently working on a case study of women and spiritually in one Los Angeles neighborhood.

CARINE FABIUS, co-owner with her husband, Pascal Giacomini, of Galerie Lakaye in Los Angeles, has a background in public relations and journalism. She is the author of Mehndi: The Art of Henna Body Painting, and with her husband introduced this art to the Los Angeles area. She is at work on a new book tentatively called Celebrated with Ceremony (forthcoming, 2001).