The Shattered Gourd: Yoruba Forms in Twentieth Century American Art.

The Shattered Gourd Yoruba Forms in Twentieth Century American Art by Moyo Okediji New York: University of Washington Press, 2003. 202 pp., 46 black and white photos. $40 hardcover.

This is a study of the history of the ways in which modern and contemporary African American artists have drawn, through their art, from Yoruba culture to express their feelings and reactions to their lives in the United States. To do this, Okediji employs two main concepts: counter-hegemony, the artistic reaction to the oppression of African Americans, the active resistance to white domination and racism; and auto-hegemony, art which is oriented towards healing and self-development. For the African American artist, counter-hegemony largely arose in the post-World War II period of racial tensions in the United States; auto-hegemony has had a more recent artistic flourishing, though Okediji sees overlapping trends in individual African American artists. Other concepts that work their way through this volume are amnesia and anamesis, the forgetting of the past (in this case Africa), and its recollection. Re-membering, in the author's usage, essentially represents African Americans' learning of Africa for the first time, in contrast to dis-membering, a term Okediji employs for the process of forgetting about Africa.

Nostalgia for the forgotten or little-remembered past is important to Okediji. Here, and elsewhere, he draws from the writings of Jacques Derrida. Okediji views "semioptics" as the visual equivalent of semiology. He writes that the term "refers to the use of visual objects as symbols of signification. In other words, semioptics is visual signification, or visual semiology" (p. 186, fn. 3), and he attempts semioptic analyses of Yoruba-related African American art. The theme of human destruction followed by healing runs through this work, of counter-hegemony leading to auto-hegemony. These terms and concepts provide the frame for Okediji's thoughtful analysis.

The author is superbly qualified for this project. Of Yoruba background, he studied art and art history at the University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University) and the University of Benin, taught for quite some years at the former school, took his PhD in art history at the University of Wisconsin, and is currently professor of visual arts at the University of Colorado, Denver, and curator of African, African-American, and Oceanic arts at the Denver Art Museum. His familiarity with Yoruba culture is intense--his frequent use of Yoruba proverbs, sayings, and poetry is enlightening and clarifying. The work complements the growing number of studies of the influence of Yoruba culture within the United States.

The "shattered gourd" of the title refers to a Yoruba tale in which the gourd holds perpetual life and happiness for all. The gourd is accidentally broken, its pieces scattered, and death and anomie appear. Okediji views the story as a metaphor for the diaspora, the human disintegration through the slave trade and slavery--the shattered pieces of the gourd representing the slaves sent to the New World--and the subsequent positive cultural transformations of African Americans as a reaction to this occurrence--in a sense, the reconstruction the gourd.

Okediji begins his discussion in Nigeria, with an analysis of the content of the twenty-four panels of a large wooden work, Atahun Atejo, by the well-known Yoruba sculptor Dada Arowoogunbuna (or Arowoogun; 1880-1954). Discussing each of the panels in turn, which often depict varied human and animal images, Okediji shows the work to represent a Yoruba war camp during the times of Yoruba intergroup warfare and also of European intrusion, the apparently arbitrary arrangement of the panels symbolizing the dislocation and fragmentation of the period. Okediji states of this work:

   In this attempt at recollection, in this
   symbolic journey into the collective and
   individual memory, in order to rekindle
   the vision of the group as well as the individual,
   Arowoogun provides a model
   for many African American artists, many
   of whom have seen his work, or other
   Yoruba works similar to his, and many of
   whom, a la Arowoogun, explore the elusive
   storehouses of anamnesis (p. 31).

Although Okediji later only occasionally follows this example with other cases of Yoruba artists at home, the message is clear; these Yoruba creators face some similar processes of amnesia and remembering that African American artists do.

This is followed by a chapter on African artists of the Harlem Renaissance period, in which nostalgia for the past appears in the work of African American artists, struggling with what Okediji calls amnesia. There is a longing, a yearning for some understanding of the past. Okediji discusses three large paintings by Hale Woodruff, created during the height of the Depression, when many African Americans were suffering unbearable hardships. It is the story of the mutiny of slaves on the ship Amistad and the subsequent trial of the mutineers and their return to Africa--a well-known event today; though not as well known outside of the African American community when Woodruff created it in 1939. Okediji's detailed analysis speaks of yearning, of counter-hegemony. In contrast, some of Aaron Douglas's paintings from this same period, which remind me of some of the creations of the Works Progress Administration artists, are auto-hegemonic, depicting black workers constructing buildings and monuments. And in at least one painting, Building Stately Mansions, there are references to ancient Egypt. In his four large murals, Aspects of Negro Life, Douglas depicts the often unhappy experiences of African Americans in the United States. The first panel consists of views of Africa, but here the work of the artist, as that of other African American artists of the time, is painted in a utopian, idealistic manner, as if to counteract the conditions of African Americans in the United States. In contrast, Mata Warrick Fuller's sculptures refer to Ethiopia and other African elements, which Okediji writes "demonstrates the best in the tradition of autohegemony during the period circa the Harlem Renaissance" (p. 60).

One-third of the way through the book there has yet to be any specific reference to Yoruba culture in the creations of the artists discussed. But in the next chapter, titled "The Double-Headed Axe," Okediji turns to four post-World War II African American artists who draw from this culture, finding the Yoruba god Shango to be particularly attractive due to the related concepts of force, power, and a fiery temper associated with this spirit. The counter-hegemonic climate of the 1960s and 1970s was, for African Americans, a time of opposition and conflict in America. The image of Shango's double-headed ax has been particularly attractive to a number of African American artists as a symbol of resistance and liberation, but there are also other, related images, such as Shango's garden and, in another work, his wives. Okediji discusses five Shango paintings created by Ademola Olugebefola, who had been initiated into the New York Yoruba Temple. David Driscoll, Paul Keene, and Jeff Donaldson all draw from Shango in a variety of ways; the fascination with this spiritual figure in African American art of the time is evident.

In the next chapter, "(Re)visioning Africa," Okediji moves from Harlem to Chicago and provides a useful background to the rise of AfroCobra (African Committee of Bad Relevant Artists) group, founded ill 1968 under the impetus of the African American artist Jeff Donaldson. After migrating from the South, Donaldson wrote a PhD dissertation at Northwestern University on African American artists in New York from about 1900 to 1945, under the art historian Frank Willett, who was very knowledgeable about Yoruba art and culture. Although Donaldson was put off by the fact that the literature on African art was by non-Africans, he was attracted to Yoruba art and culture. He created a number of counter-hegemonic works, some directly linked to concerns with racial and political issues in the United States and others, which draw on the Yoruba spirits Shango and Eshu, that Okediji analyzes in detail. In his career, Donaldson has been an influential artist in drawing the attention of African Americans and others to Yoruba culture, considering Africa to be a civilization rather than a mass of primitive societies, as did the European artists who drew from African sculpture and human images. Although trained in the European canon, Donaldson largely rejected it.

Okediji moves on to the case of the artist Howardena Pindell, who expresses in her art the conflicts that her mixed white-black ancestry raise within her. Pindell's early work was apolitical. However, in the process of trying to regather her memory after a serious automobile accident in which she lost it, she turned to making use of Yoruba stenciling work in adire cloth, after traveling widely in Yoruba country and observing its preparation. She began combining forms drawn from these designs with those from other sources, then going on to do a series of highly autobiographical works, in mixed and other media, concerned with attempts to deal with her dual ancestral background and her struggles to recover her memory. In Pindell's art, memory is important in two ways, in terms

of Africa and in terms of recovering her memory of her past life; these seem intertwined. Some of her works, particularly where she employs written language in her pieces, are highly counter-hegemonic, but as she has strived to heal herself after her accident, some of her art has auto-hegemonic qualities, representing a positive, forward look.

In the penultimate chapter Okediji considers four recent artists who

   tap into Yoruba cosmological systems,
   study ethnological materials, and present
   their observations in visual forms rather
   than in writing, as ethnographers. They
   could be regarded as ethnographists,
   while their work could be de-signed as
   ethnographs, because they graphically
   present ethnic materials in artistic form
   (p. 172).

Three of these artists have been to Africa. All four fit Okediji's auto-hegemonic category, being less concerned with reacting directly to the racism and politics of life for African Americans in America than with looking for ways of self-development, healing, and moving on. Olushegun Muneer Bahauddeen, in searching for satisfactory religious and general beliefs, joined the Nation of Islam but later became disillusioned with this group. Working as a guard at the Chicago Art Institute, he came into contact with the Yoruba art scholar Marilyn Houlberg and became interested in Yoruba culture. A visit to a Yoruba diviner in Chicago indicated that he was destined to become a priest to Obatala, which he proceeded to do, taking a new name and developing a deep spiritual interest in his new religion. He has created an altar piece for a Shango shrine, another mixed media celebrating the myth of Ogun, and other Yoruba-related works, all expressing his knowledge of, belief in, and appreciation of Yoruba religious beliefs.

Michelle Tejuola Turner draws on Yoruba gourd design. After starting to work with gourds she visited Yorubaland and studied calabash-carving techniques, though she employs her own images and favors a different shape of gourd than the ones the Yoruba employ. Among her works is one in celebration of Shango. Michael Olushina Harris draws from Akire shrine paintings as well as African traditions elsewhere on the continent. This artist and art historian also has visited Yoruba country to view these shrines. He not only draws from the stimulation of the shrine paintings, but also creates mixed-media Akire-style altars. Winnie Owens-Hart has lived and taught in Yorubaland, studied ceramics with traditional artists, and created some works based on the female human body. A notable work is Initiation I, in glazed ceramic, with an African American head and torso on one side and an African woman with ritual scarification on the other.

This book is a highly competent study. The background biographical information on the individual artists is rich and very helpful to the understanding of how they derived their interests in Yoruba culture. The historical approach and the embedding of the artists and their art works in the more general activities of African Americans through time are of great value. Okediji shows how varied artists' responses have been to Yoruba culture and how multiple have been the employments of Yoruba culture by African Americans. He is clear on how the social and political setting of the times and the personal skills and interests of the artists influenced their particular ways of drawing from Yoruba life and art. The book depicts interesting cases of reverse diasporas--African Americans, with their own strong history and traditions in America, looking to African culture to support and enlarge their beliefs and views.

The analysis of the aesthetics and the contents of the individual works of art are clear, detailed, and well related to the historical times in which they were created. This book complements past and ongoing studies of the Yoruba diaspora in the United States. The use of the concepts of amnesia and anamnesis, counter- and auto-hegemony, remembering and re-remembering, provide a theoretical frame for the writing in keeping with postcolonial scholarly discourse. And these have been employed with some care. For example, Okediji shows that a single artist may work in auto-hegemonic fashion, while at another time in counter-hegemonic form, and still in another work the piece may have qualities of both.

However, there are dangers in using these dichotomous terms. The counter-hegemonic works that Okediji discusses are generally a reaction to social and political conditions of a particular time, as he indicates, and they tend to explore themes of strength, such as various images of the Yoruba double-headed ax, as if to combat these issues, saying "We are not going to take it lying down." But are these not also ways of healing for the artists, a condition that Okediji indicates exemplifies auto-hegemony, in that they create a sense of self-pride, of a demand to be heard, to become visible, on the part of the artist? Are these not also forms of self-development, as the auto-hegemonic works are? Conversely, auto-hegemonic elements, which in his discussion often involve exploring self-identity, self-development, and making use of positive Yoruba religious elements for healing, also are means of countering the disparaging world outside, perhaps more subtly than the counter-hegemonic art; thus they have counter-hegemonic aspects to them. Other dichotomous terms that Okediji employs are subject to similar problems. I do not deny their usefulness in Okediji's overall analysis, but some discussion of their underlying ambiguities would have been helpful.

Again, Okediji claims to be employing a semioptic approach to visual art. But while his analyses of individual works are skilled, thoughtful, and helpful to the reader, I do not see anything unusual in them. They read like first-rate analyses that I have encountered elsewhere. If Okediji is trying to forge a new way of looking at visual art through the concept of semioptics, I do not see that he has done so, though what he has accomplished is done very well.

I also wonder why there is no mention of the well-known African American artist Jacob Lawrence or his work. He and his African American wife spent some months in Lagos and at Oshogbo in 1964, at first without the assistance of the US Embassy, and finally with it and with the help of Ulli Beier, who arranged for him to take part in a workshop at Oshogbo. Jacob Lawrence created some ten paintings on paper, variously employing watercolor, gouache, tempera, and graphite, and six brush-and-ink or crayon drawings on paper. These works are often of views of Yoruba markets or street scenes, or portraits of persons, such as a turbaned woman selling from a tray containing various items. Disillusioned with conditions in the United States, the Lawrences went to Nigeria hoping to settle there, ending up in Yoruba coutry. In Okediji's terms, Jacob Lawrence's art was a protest based on events occurring in the US. On the other hand, most of it his work was positive in content, generally depicting Nigerians in a colorful manner. He and his wife, also an African American artist, returned home to the United States after their brief Nigerian interlude, convinced that settling in Nigeria was not the solution to their needs. Okediji may have not included this artist since the Nigerian stay was a very brief interlude, and Jacob Lawrence did not seem to have followed it up with other Yoruba-related work upon his return. Further, none of his Nigerian pieces appear to be well known in the United States; perhaps these works did not influence other African American artists. Yet his Yoruba experience deserves to be discussed by Okediji, for it was a form of artistic, African American protest linked to the Yoruba.

Despite these caveats this is a remarkable book and an exciting contribution to art history studies. It contains much new material, thoughtfully presented.