The dripping man: art, the ephemeral, and the urban soul.

   Ma mere--lune
   se filme et se projette
   sur un grand rideau blanc envahi par
   des mouches et des fourmis.
   Elle eclaire les portraits
   defigures dans les couloirs
   et labyrinthes de cette ville
   follement ligotee.

   --Herve Yamguen (2005:82)

   "My mother--moon
   films and projects herself
   on a wide, white sheet thick with flies and ants.
   She casts light on portraits
   whose features have lost their shape in the hallways
   and the labyrinths of this city
   tied in insane knots."

   O mon corps, fais de moi un homme qui
   toujours interroge.

   --Frantz Fanon (1952)

   "O my body, make of me always a man who
   questions!" (trans. C.M. Markmann, 1967)

A man appears: torso, shoulders, and head (Fig. 1). His face is covered in white foam. The foam is dripping. It drips from his forehead, down and across his cheekbones, from his nose and chin onto his bare chest. His eyes are closed, his mouth slightly open.

We are looking at a photograph shot in 2001. It provides no hint as to who the man is, or why he is covered in foam. What the lathery whiteness is, is equally unclear. It looks vaguely toxic. As for the man himself, it seems that he may be at some risk of gagging on the stuff. His open mouth suggests that he cannot (or will not) breathe through his nostrils--too much foam there, or possibly an unbearable stink. As we watch the white liquid ooze down onto his lips, we begin to wonder if, shortly, he will be able to take in air at all.

Post Abu-Ghraib, we query if the scene we are witnessing was entered into by choice. True, the photograph predates 2004, the year we first "learned" that torture was rampant in US detention centers abroad. But our reading of images, we know, is conditioned first by our own temporal context and, only after we have stopped to think things through, by when and how they were produced.

One thing, however, is clear. Based on what we know of gravity, we can be fairly certain that this is a temporary look for the man in the photograph. The foam will continue to drip and, as a result, the appearance of his face will change. Within minutes, it will be altogether different.

Still, the memory will remain--this visage will haunt us--and the experiment will be repeated: this same man will many times appear in photographs covered in thick applications of lather (Figs. 2-4). On each occasion, his features will change. At times, we will barely recognize him. One thing only will allow us to relate one image of him to another: the ephemeral effects of the lathering process that makes him one man, then another, and another again.

In time, we discover the man's name. He is Herve Yamguen (b. 1971). One of the cofounders of Cercle Kapsiki, (1) a collective of Cameroonian artists created in the late 1990s, he is among the most thoughtful and innovative practitioners on the cultural scene today. He makes his home in Douala. When time and grants allow, he travels widely, giving workshops, collaborating with performance artists and taking up residencies across Africa and Europe. The ideas presented in this paper are born of extensive discussions, over nearly ten years, with Yamguen, in Douala and in Paris. For these exchanges, and for Herve's trust in sharing his views with me, both of which have significantly inflected how I look at and write about cultural production, I am deeply grateful.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Yamguen is best known as a poet, (2) installation artist, and scenographer (Figs. 5a-b) and as a painter. His photography, prolific though it is, has received significantly less attention. This is in all likelihood because, of all his work, it is the most complicated to engage. None of Yamguen's production as an artist is "easy" or "pleasant" to the eye (or ear). Systematically, it hacks away at cliches and ready-made ideas. In all of its iterations, it addresses themes and deploys imagery that destabilize, forcing viewers (and the artist himself) to ask difficult and at times thoroughly unpleasant questions. Of the media in which Yamguen works, photography is arguably the one in which he goes furthest in this regard. This intractable knot at the core of his images may explain why few curators, collectors, or writers have chosen to focus on them. Another, more specific reason may be one of the most fundamental characteristics of his photographic work: its insistence on showing the ephemeral not (as the very definition of the word "ephemeral" would suggest) as a fleeting phenomenon that leaves only passing traces, but as one that highlights forms of psychological violence that are unremitting. The ephemeral here remains aggressively present long after we would have expected it to dissolve. It leaves scars.

I focus here on a series of photographic self-portraits that Yamguen began developing as an experimental project in 2000 and on which he continued to work for several years thereafter. The works are argentic photographs, shot either by Yamguen himself with the use of a timing device or with an assistant. In both cases, he creates an elaborate mise-en-scene for himself, then sees to it that the photograph is taken exactly as he intends. (3) While a few exhibitions of his photography have been organized, most notably "Le corps certain" held at the doual'Art contemporary art centre (Douala, 2002), (4) there has never been a show of Yamguen's self-portraits. The only instance in which several of the pictures have been shown together, the artist notes, was in the context of an installation he created in Limoges (Centre Culturel Jean Gagnant, 2002), where they appeared not as prints, but as projections on a wall.

The images that draw my attention here highlight key political and economic issues. Through the prism of self-representation, they question what it means to be "African" (5)--to function, to think, and to create as a subject born south of the Sahara--at the edge of the twenty-first century. Art, here, is both the medium--the means used to articulate concerns--and the object of inquiry. This object, in turn, is deployed simultaneously as a scope through which to examine power politics and their impact on urban lives in the postcolonial present and as a rampart against this impact. I propose several ways of thinking about the photographs. My goal is not to arrive at an exhaustive interpretation of the works addressed, but to consider one aspect in particular of the series: the multiple ways in which it engages with the ephemeral. I examine how the artist puts the ephemeral to use as a concept, a process, a mode of self-defense, a tactic developed for use specifically in urban contexts and, ultimately, as an end unto itself.

TAKE I: MASK(S)

We return to the photograph with which we began. From a formal standpoint, several readings of the image are possible. I will focus here on two. The shut eyes, open mouth, and slack lower lip suggest that the man before us may be in a trance. Possibly, the white foam has something to do with this: a ritual of some kind is perhaps underway. Or something entirely different is taking place--something that requires the man in the picture to protect himself. His eyes may be closed to keep the liquid running down his face from blinding him; his mouth is open, possibly, because, as we saw earlier, were he to breathe through his nostrils, he would choke. The artist presents us with these two possible readings (and with others we could consider as well) for a specific reason: he is interested in the impact of preconceptions on the gaze we cast upon him.

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

By offering himself up to us in photographic form, Yamguen has constituted himself as an object. The move is intentional. The question, he makes clear, is not whether we will objectify him--he has given us little choice--but how we will do so. He in effect dares us to name him, to tell him who he is, and, in the process, to unveil ourselves--to say who we are. At first, the exercise seems fairly straightforward; we know (or think we know) where we stand. As we begin unpacking our reactions to the image, however, we find that things are thornier than we initially imagined.

The first reading proposed, of a man in a trance, involved in some manner of ritual, is easiest to absorb, even if the image remains discomforting. This is because it suggests volition. If indeed we are being made privy here to a rite of some kind, we can reasonably assume that the man in the photograph has entered into it of his own accord. We may be troubled by the picture, but the fact that we stare at it attempting to establish what is going on does not (we can convince ourselves) make us voyeurs, for we are looking at an event that the subject in the image has willed upon himself--and that he has voluntarily presented to us.

The second reading, of a man suffocating, is more troubling. For one who knows something of colonial history and the physical and psychological violence inflicted on Africans under European rule, for persons aware of the beatings that African immigrants suffer in "Northern" (and increasingly in "Eastern") jails on a regular basis, for those who have not allowed news of an imploding economy to occult the post-9/11 horror of remand torture--for viewers so inclined, the image of a man whose sight and ability to breathe are being compromised by a strange substance cannot but set off some kind of alarm. This is potentially very ugly stuff. A similar reaction is likely to be felt by viewers concerned with police and military violence on the African continent generally, and in particular in the artist's country of origin (Malaquais 2003), or with the horrors of toxic waste dumping, as exemplified by a rash of hideous deaths on the outskirts of Abidjan in 2006-2007. (6) Seen through the types of lenses alluded to here, the image before us speaks both of one man (an individual) and of many like him (entire communities) in considerable danger or pain.

[FIGURE 4 OMITTED]

At first blush, then, we have two possible readings: either the man in the picture is in a trance that he has entered into willingly, in which case we look on with interest but (as good postmodern viewers) cast no judgment. Or we see this as an image that speaks of violence visited on the weak by the strong and, provided we are not hard and fast supporters of a fascist regime, we recoil in disapproval. In both these readings, we walk away stunned but, at a safe distance, neither complicit nor implicated.

Things, however, are not so simple and Yamguen intends to demonstrate this. The self-portrait with which he has presented us plays in richly ironic ways with "Northern" perceptions of "Southern" lives. Consider the reading of violence visited on an unprotected body. The dripping face, its features distorted by the liquid marring its surface, is likely to inspire pity in some, disgust in others. As these are, in broad strokes, the types of reactions that Africa, as it is presented in the media, elicits among mainstream European and North American publics, the portrait becomes a genre of Rorschach test: what Africa do you think you are looking at here and what, beyond Conradian tropes of sorrow and horror, does your vision (if any) have to offer? Other perceptions played with in the image center, as suggested by the first reading, on the nature of "African" religious beliefs. Ask the average person, whether formally educated or not, about Africa and there is a good chance the idea will come up of a continent and its peoples particularly attached to spiritual concerns. Needless to say, this is a cliche. It is not, however, specific to the "North": one is just as likely to hear such generalizations in Africa as one is in Europe or the Americas.

Yamguen, however, is averse to cliches. While (as we shall see) he is interested in ritual as both concept and practice, his self-portrait stands as a rebuke to preconceived notions of Africa as a locus of fascination with things other-worldly (blind faith, trancelike behavior, fear of the supernatural, and still other old saws that regularly make their way into mainstream discourse about the continent). In the portrait and in much of the series to which it belongs, the artist can be seen to be mocking (or in any event interrogating quite severely) two related concepts, both of which purport to explain "African" perceptions of and approaches to representation. The first of these is the idea of Africa as a place of masks. Yamguen here thumbs his nose at ready-made ideas concerning the status of masks as the African art form of record, at prepackaged notions of what an African mask is or should be, at how it is meant to be read, and at what precisely one can do with it. In the process, he raises fundamental questions about collection and exhibition practices, the art market, and the place therein of objects as well as artists. He also queries the nature of hidden or esoteric knowledge, suggesting that it has less to do with the spiritual or with quests for enlightenment than with class divisions--both socioeconomic distinctions in a Marxian sense and, more broadly, the act and the means of controlling access to power through gender, age, and other socially constructed distinctions within societies all too often identified as "egalitarian" by anthropologists, sociologists, and historians of classical African art.

One would be hard put to look at Yamguen's image of himself without seeing in it a man wearing some kind of mask. The way in which the picture is shot underscores this. Between the face and torso is a band of dark shadow; this creates a radical transition--an effective break--between the head and body. As a result, the white foam covering the artist's face appears as a distinct entity: it takes on a solid, objectlike quality made all the more remarkable by the fact that there is nothing solid at all in what we are looking at. The sense of "objectness" encountered here is reinforced by the handling of the hairline. Here again, a band of dark shadow appears. Where hair and foam meet, great attention has been paid by the artist to create a visible break. The lather has been carefully shaped, so that, at forehead level, it takes on a scalloped, almost sculptural appearance.

Anyone who knows anything about classical African art as it is constructed for market purposes knows this: more than any other type of object, an African mask, to be "authentic" by the standards of connoisseurs, must have been used, worn in the context of performances of a ritual nature. What, Yamguen's photograph asks, shall we make of the mask he has created for himself? Certainly, it has been used--indeed, it is shown in the process of being worn--in what is indubitably a performance and one which can be read as having distinctive ritual overtones. Is this an African mask? It is the work of an African artist, borne by an African man, in a performance devised by him and for him. By this definition, it is indeed a "true" African mask. The problem, however, is that it is a thoroughly ephemeral creation. The criteria of "authenticity" applied by connoisseurs of classical African art are to a large extent predicated on the notion of longevity: it is expected that a mask be of a certain age. Equally important is the fact that it should be possible to collect and thus display the mask. Here, we have neither age nor collectibility, for even as it is being photographed, the mask is beginning to dissolve. All that is available is an after-image, at best a simulacrum of the "real thing" and even then only a partial one, a part for the whole of something that has already begun to disappear as it is frozen by the click of a camera shutter.

[FIGURE 5a OMITTED]

What then? The photograph is a play, also, on ethnographic portraits long a staple of anthropology, head and shoulder shots that, in many instances, were put to nefarious use (one need only remind oneself of the pseudoscience of anthropometry, which played so significant a role in the construction of racist ideologies deployed by colonial regimes). It harkens back as well to images of women and men acquired lock, stock, and barrel by European and North American entrepreneurs for display at World's Fairs and Exhibitions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Saartje Baartman and Ota Benga come to mind (Strother 1999, Phillips et al. 1992). (7) If the mask cannot be collected, the portrait hints, perhaps the entire man may be--not for display, but as an object himself, in this instance to be formatted as a saleable "African artist" by the Euro American (and, increasingly, the African) contemporary art market. Yamguen is quite aware of the kinds of niches that African artists can occupy in the North and its proxies, provided they play by certain rules. He knows full well what these rules are and how to put them to best use--not for him the role of the naive outsider ill at ease with the market and its presuppositions about who he is and what he is worth. Some of these rules, he argues however, can eat your soul. This is a matter of considerable concern for Yamguen, less for himself--he has made certain choices on which he does not plan to reneg, such as continuing to live in Cameroon under difficult conditions--than for younger artists of his acquaintance, whose sometimes quite eager engagement with the art world he sees as a form of suicide.

[FIGURE 5b OMITTED]

TAKE II: SHAPE-SHIFTING

For a better understanding of what precedes and of its impact on Yamguen's early photo self-portraits, a step back in time proves useful. We return, with the artist, to the place where he made the first images in the series. These were created in France, during a one-year residency (2000-200l) by the Kapsiki collective at the Ecole Superieure des Arts Deoratifs de Strasbourg (ESAD).

When Yamguen and the Kapsikis arrived in Strasbourg--the first European trip for all of them--they soon found that there were many "selves" that they were expected to put forward. While they were there to receive training, notably in the discipline of scenography, they were also to act as "new blood" pumped into the Ecole; their presence would add a touch of alterite, something to shake up the locals. In the first instance, they were to act like ESAD's mostly white students--attend classes, produce projects according to the rules of a European institution; they were not, in other words, to be "different." (It should be noted that they promptly refused, choosing instead to sample classes and workshops, dipping in and out and creating short- and middle-term partnerships with students and faculty alike, as they felt would be most profitable for their practice.) At the same time, it was implicitly expected--or hoped--that they would be "different" their otherness prompting dialogue and bringing a shot of energy to the school.

In the streets, beyond the confines of ESAD, there were other "selves" to be grappled with. These included: the figure of the Black Man constantly at risk of search by the police, lest it turn out that he is "illegally" in the country; the man whom many white strangers fear, or with whom, in any event, they feel ill at ease enough to change sidewalks past nightfall or fail to answer when asked for directions; the ethnographic subject to whom the most extraordinary questions can, in all good faith, be put (Are there cars in your country? To what tribe do you belong? Do they eat worms where you come from?); the sex object, desired for the exoticism he is seen to represent and a certain wildness he is presupposed to carry within him; the African traveling on a scholarship faced with other Africans and with French citizens of African descent, expecting from him particular kinds of behavior (humility, "proper" attire, dependence); the funky, dredlocked artist to be "discovered" and marketed by this gallery or that ... For each of these situations, and many others, a range of masks was required, which it was necessary for Yamguen and his fellow Kapsikis to slip in and out of at various times and for different occasions.

[FIGURE 6 OMITTED]

[FIGURE 7 OMITTED]

Considered in this light, the early self-portraits take on a particular meaning. It is, in a sense, as if the artist had created a visual record of possible responses, by him and others, to such times and occasions as are alluded to above. His images form a catalogue, a veritable wardrobe, of self-representations. Some are easy (or gentle), because beautiful, to look at (Fig. 6). Others (Fig. 7) are distinctly less so, because (depending on one's reading) properly bizarre ("the Black Man turns blue") or magnificently ironic ("the Black Man sings the blues"). Still others are imbued with a distinct sense of pain (Fig. 8).

For many people, such exercises in shape-shifting--donning one mask and then another and another still because such is the only reasonable way to make one's way forward--are damaging. Anyone who has read W.E.B. Dubois (1903) or Frantz Fanon (1952, 1967)--as indeed Yamguen, a voracious reader, has--is aware of the profound structural violence whence such shape-shifting stems and of the psychological gashes it leaves behind, in particular, the complex issue of double-consciousness. To survive in a world dominated by groups to which he himself does not belong, the "other" (thus defined by said groups) must be able to function in, at the very least, in two registers and often in many more, possessing tools--linguistic, rhetorical, gestural, sartorial and, most importantly, intellectual and psychological--to function simultaneously in parallel yet quite different and thoroughly unequal worlds. It is an exercise in shape-shifting that, to be successful, requires lightning-fast reflexes. The problem, however, is that the deployment of such abilities and the success that may or may not result from it can do profound damage to the psyche. For the artist, the obligation to slip in out of masks daily, becoming in the process himself a fully ephemeral object, proved at times odious. That others, perhaps less introspective than he, find themselves in this position over and over, because these are the rules one must play by to "make it" disturbs Yamguen. He sees it as a form of suicide, a breaking apart of the self that is both willful (some manner of agency is involved) and the result of circumstances beyond one's will. Several of the pieces in the photographic series underscore this.

Among these are several full-body shots, most of them nudes (Fig. 9). In these photographs, the artist's body appears literally in pieces. Carefully calibrated plays of light result in pictures wherein torso and limbs, arms and head have somehow become disconnected or whole body parts rendered altogether invisible, as if the artist had suffered a crippling operation. Fanon is present as a ghostly echo in these works, underscoring, without falling into the trap of simplistic blame, the fact that there is continuity between the colony and its aftermath. As Fanon writes in Black Skin, White Masks:

   Of course I [had] talked about the black problem with friends.
   Together we protested, we asserted the equality of all men in the
   world ... But I was satisfied with an intellectual understanding of
   these differences ...

   [T]hen the occasion arose when I had to meet the white man's eyes ...

   The real world challenged my claims ...

   My body was given back to me sprawled out, distorted, recolored,
   clad in mourning in that white winter day (Fanon 1967:112, 114,
   emphasis mine).

[FIGURE 8 OMITTED]

Like Fanon's body, dismembered and re-articulated by the white man's "authorized" (because dominant) gaze, Yamguen, as he appears in his full-body self-portraits, is a man rearranged, largely, it would seem, against his will (a son corps defendant, one would say in French: literally, in an act that his body seeks to defend itself against). Fanon writes amidst the turmoil of Algeria's, and more broadly Africa's and the colonized world's, quest for autonomy. Yamguen engages in a politics of the body nearly half a century later. One man's experience is not the other's; such teleological readings are far too simplistic. The fact remains, however, that, as a comparison between Fanon's words and Yamguen's images suggests, rather less progress has been made in the passage from colony to postcolony than one might perhaps have hoped.

Clearly, Yamguen's sojourn in France had a powerful impact on his psyche and the early self-portraits must be considered in light of this experience. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that his first encounter with Strasbourg and related cities (Paris, Mantes-la-Jolie, Celestat, Berlin) is the sole focus of the early pieces. To do so--to insist that issues of "race" are the driving force in the initial portraits--would be to vastly oversimplify Yamguen's project. This is underscored by the longevity of the undertaking. When Yamguen returned to Cameroon, he continued to produce images for the series (Fig. 10). The masking practices he had developed at ESAD were not for use in Europe alone. They were simultaneously an expression of trauma and a form of armor constructed to shield oneself from such trauma wherever one might be.

The overall effect, when one considers the self-portrait corpus as a whole, is of a devastating critique not of one place or moment (Europe in 2000-2001), but of the contemporary world, broadly speaking. Ultimately, the series engages not with one man--Yamguen--or with any one location but with a condition: that of life lived as an "African man" (with all of the potential and contradictory meanings that the term may encompass), anywhere in the postcolony. Following the work of Achille Mbembe (200l), the postcolony here is taken to be neither a place nor even a clearly defined epoch, but a political, economic, and social system that transcends national and continental boundaries, breaking bones as it goes, as Fela Kuti (1992) might have put it and as Yamguen shows us in his most haunting full-body shots (Fig. 11). It demands of those who would survive it that they manage a high-wire act: as described earlier, in regard to Yamguen's Strasbourg days, one self will not suffice; others must be brought into being and made to function simultaneously. Obviously, there are considerable dangers involved, lest one lose track of the thread that ties one self to another and another still--lest one become oneself an experiment in the ephemeral that ends badly. Indeed, the risk, should one fail, is a headlong fall into an aspect of the postcolonial condition described in a mix of poetry and dread by Mbembe (2001:166-68): a form of self-perpetuating hallucination wherein the subject has been made to adopt (or accept) so many contradictory forms of behavior that, ultimately, s/he becomes one with the very system imposing this form of social schizophrenia. The end result, Mbembe writes, is an "indwelling": the system ("power," in Mbembe's formulation) "gets inside its subjects" and, whether they are aware of it or not, devours them from within.

[FIGURE 9 OMITTED]

Yamguen's self-portraits and a later series of portraits of others that he executes in a similar mode (Figs. 12-13) can be seen as an active engagement, a mano a mano that he is likely to lose but that he is nonetheless intent on waging, with the inner workings of the power Mbembe describes. Against the machinery of hallucination wielded by the postcolony, Yamguen deploys a weapon of his own: a becoming-ephemeral that he alone intends to control or, should he fail to control it, should he become overwhelmed (as we shall see that he sometimes does), that he will turn as best he can against the forces that would oppress him.

[FIGURE 10 OMITTED]

But, of course and as ever with Yamguen (or Mbembe, for the matter) things are not so simple. Neither the artist nor the writer is under the impression that the situation with which he wrestles as a subject of the postcolony is a matter of either/or responses. The risk of being devoured by the machinery of power--a manner of gangrene that begins at the subject's core, moves outward, and is recognized for what it is only once the vital organs (heart, brain, even soul) have been touched and the process has become irreversible--is ever-present, and it is not because one thinks one has beaten the system that one is not in fact in thrall to it. In such a situation, the act (or the ideal) of becoming ephemeral stands out as a potentially powerful rebuttal: neither here nor there, tangible nor wholly absent, the ephemeral being is less likely to be (successfully) attacked by the necrosis that the structures of power wield as their weapon of choice. Arguably, though, and this, it seems to me, is very much present in Yamguen's reflections on the question, "becoming ephemeral" is a potentially dangerous act--dangerous, that is, to oneself. Simply put, the "prophylaxis" may turn out to be just as damaging as--or, worse, simply another facet of--the disease, of the devouring to which the "shitstem," to quote Peter Tosh, would gladly see its subjects succumb.

[FIGURE 11 OMITTED]

TAKE III: FLOODS

The mask with which we began is simultaneously an indictment of imagined rituals and the product of a performance that can be read as having profound ritual overtones. This, considered in tandem with Yamguen's concern with the soul-devouring practices inherent in the postcolonial condition, suggests still another entry point into the photographic series considered here.

In 2005, Yamguen published his most accomplished collection of poems to date, Le deluge en soi n'est jamais trop loin (the flood within is never far away). The book is in two parts. The first, "Ma lanterne" (my hurricane lamp), is the chronicle of an ongoing dialogue with a figure who is both the poet's lover and, for lack of a better term, his own soul. The figure in question is a fluid entity made of intersections between a range of times, places, emotions, and physical sensations: past and present; pain, pleasure; anger with the violence imposed on bodies and minds by a system of governance that leaves entire communities bereft of the most basic amenities; profound anxieties as to the very possibility of remaining true to oneself in such a setting, of never ceasing to interrogate oneself despite the damage that such questioning invariably does. The second part of the book, "Ma demeure" (my dwelling), takes the form of an exchange, key parts of it in direct dialogue, between the poet and a female figure who is both mother and moon. Only two interlocutors are referenced, but in fact others seem present as well or, more precisely, different facets of the same two "speakers." Who is addressing whom, at given points, is intentionally unclear; one figure bleeds into and ultimately becomes the other and vice versa.

Throughout the book, Yamguen develops imagery that points to the impossibility of clear-cut boundaries (between public and private space, self and other, thought and action). Most problematic, he suggests, are boundaries between inside and outside. Violence, pain, and questioning, initially contained--they reside in the characters' arteries, in their bellies, throats, and gray matter--begin oozing out of openings in the "speakers'" bodies (mouths and nostrils, ears, sexual organs). At first a slow trickle, this movement outward (and making visible) of what was hidden gradually accelerates. The body-as-container becomes overwhelmed. As a result, two things happen: the body turns itself inside out, its inner workings becoming its outer shell and, in a tour de force that recalls some of the most disturbing images in Yamguen's paintings, the inside births the outside, bringing it into being precisely as a woman's womb opens up to bring forth a new life (Fig. 14a).

[FIGURE 12 OMITTED]

[FIGURE 13 OMITTED]

[FIGURE 14 OMITTED]

Placed side by side, the body of photographic self-portraits we have been considering (Fig. 1) and the poet's words in Deluge function as a diptych: one speaks to and amplifies the other. A passage from the second part of the book is particularly striking in this regard:

Elle qui a ouvert son uterus, / elle a ronge ma demeure. / Elle qui danse avec les morts / elle qui se voue a leurs serments / en ouvrant son ventre a la terre. / Elle qui en moi hurle. / Elle qui a rna peau /dans son cri. / Elle qui a rna voix /dans ses peurs. / Elle qui a mon corps darts ses odeurs. / Elle qui bat / dans rna gorge. / Elle qui me fair hurler pour laver des roots. / Elle qui se fermente /dans mon ventre. / Elle qui a ma voix dans ses pas. / Elle qui me sort des yeux. / Elle qui me sort des narines. / Elle qui tape dans ma tete. / Elle qui attrape mon nombril et le lie. / Elle qui s'accouche en sortant de mon ventre (Yamguen 2005a:88).

   She who has spread open her uterus, / she has dug her teeth into
   my home. / She who dances with the dead / she who has given herself
   over to their vows / by offering her belly to the earth. / She who
   shrieks within me. / She who carries my skin / in her cry. / She
   whose fears / contain my voice. / She who smells of my body. / She
   whose rhythm beats / in my throat. / She for whom I howl to wash
   words clean. / She who ferments / in my entrails. / She who bears
   my voice in her footsteps. / She who crawls out through my eye
   sockets. / She who drips from my nostrils. / She who pounds inside
   my head. / She who grabs my umbilicus and ties it into a knot. /
   She who births herself as she exits my innards.

The passage contains several references to ritual practices ("Elle qui danse avec les morts / elle qui se voue a leurs serments" // "Elle qui attrape mon nombril et le lie"). This is true of the book in general. Such practices, however, are never presented as univocal entities: ways of doing or thinking specific to a particular region or set of religious beliefs. They are always, at very least, a mix of actions that the poet has seen others perform (his parents, notably, who in the city have sought through various approaches to recall what over time has become for them a largely imagined place of origin--the Bamileke highlands of West Cameroon, with which they retain few effective ties) and of rites that he has created for himself: uses of painting and writing, performance, installation, and photography deployed to manage--to simultaneously engage with and keep at enough of a remove not to drown in--the deluge he faces daily as a subject of the postcolony.

At no point, however, does Yamguen provide his readers with a key, a way to understand how, precisely, the rituals he has elaborated for himself function or, indeed, what exactly they are. In this sense, the artist is very much wearing a mask. We are made privy only to what he is willing to tell us. Yes, he has turned himself (and others) inside out before our eyes, yes he has showed us, quite graphically, the holes sprung by his body (Fig. 15), but at the same time he has constructed boundaries: he intends for us to get only so far. He will tell us what we can and cannot have and what we can have he will give us because doing so serves his needs. He requires--demands--our gaze. We would be cowards, he suggests, to look away. We would also be extraordinarily cruel. His is not just an indictment or a cry of anger. It is also a plea: will you engage with me, take me on in all my debordements, (8) talk with me about how we, collectively, have come to this place at the heart of the postcolonial present?

Maintenant, a cette heure, / maintenant, c'est urgent, oui, Monsieur dit, c'est urgent. / Maintenant, a cette heure, c'est une veine. / Ce sont les arteres. C'est urgent, c'est ouvert. / A cette heure, c'est un corps nu, silencieux, calcine, montant dans la rue. / C'est urgent, Monsieur diagnostic. / A cette heure, c'est urgent (Yamguen 2005:89).

Now, at this very moment, / now, the situation is critical, yes, Mister says, it is critical. / Now, in the present hour, it is a vein. / The arteries are involved. Critically--open. / Now, right now, it is a naked body, silent, reduced to ashes, walking up the street. / The situation is critical, Mister diagnosis. / Now, right now: critical.

Lest we think that our gaze will be enough, however--that containment is in fact an option--Yamguen makes his position clear: there will be no putting him or the larger issues to which he speaks in a box (or, as he might put it, a grave). An invasion is coming our way, a globalized deluge. It is his answer to the tactics of subjection posited by Mbembe:

Oui, de cette mare boueuse. / Oui, de cette innondation. / Oui, de cette mer d'arteres ficelees, /je n'en veux plus. / J'en ferai du pate, / du pate d'arteres et de boue / clue je vendrai au marche mondial (Yamguen 2005: 89).

   Yes, this mud-filled puddle. / Yes, this flood. / Yes, this sea of
   arteries held together with bits of string, / I do not want it any
   more. / I will mash it all up, / make a mash of mud and arteries /
   and sell it on the world market.

Yamguen's self-portrait series is just that: a broken dam, an immense and messy flood, that the artist simultaneously claims as his own as his condition as a postcolonial subject and refuses to face down alone. It is ours too, his words and images state, whoever (and wherever) we may be. Looking, even if unflinchingly, will not be enough. We will have to grab a bucket and bail, or drown with him.

TAKE IV: THE EPHEMERAL CITY

The question, of course, is who "we" are. Lest we come to the conclusion that Yamguen's statements in image and verse are directed solely (or even principally) at those of us engaging with him here--I at the keyboard; you, reader, African Arts in hand--he makes his position quite clear. If there is going to be engagement and bailing--and, as far as he is concerned, the two go hand in hand--it is going to be on a far broader scale.

I noted above that, in his early self-portraits, Yamguen can be seen to play with two key preconceptions about representation in Africa. The first of these, I suggested, is the notion of Africa as a place where spiritual concerns are paramount and have mostly been explored through the medium of masks. The second, intimately related to the first, is the idea, widespread in the "North" and the "South" that most African audiences are not prepared to think seriously about works of contemporary art. The most common explanation for this alleged lack of preparedness is the fact, once again, that Africa is "a place of masks": in other words, that Africa's involvement with the arts has historically been (so the argument goes) with ritual objects and that, as a result, conceptual pieces such as Yamguen's are either of little interest or incomprehensible to most inhabitants of the continent. Underlying this "explanation" is a double misconception: first (mostly, but not exclusively, a "Northern" argument) that the notion of "art" did not exist on the continent before the arrival of the white man; and second (an argument hinted at, but not quite stated, at least in public, by pundits to the "North" and the "South") that many Africans, because they lack higher education, are ill-disposed toward abstract reflection, as if dealing with the complex symbolism of masks were not an example of such.

[FIGURE 15 OMITTED]

The first of these preconceptions has been discussed at great length In the literature and thus requires little comment here other than to say that (from my perspective at least) it is inaccurate. The second requires some attention, not because it bears any relation to facts, but because its origins are rather more complicated than one might at first think. Clearly, it rests on fundamentally racist visions of the continent developed largely in the service of colonialism and which have insinuated themselves into contemporary discourse in pernicious ways. That this is so in Europe and North America is one thing; that such ideas hold sway--and they do indeed--in Africa is another matter entirely, which belongs squarely to the realm of "colonized mentalities" articulated by Ngugi wa Thiong'o (1986) and is the bane of contemporary creators such as Yamguen. There is more to the issue, however. Underlying the notion that many inhabitants of the African continent today lack the ability or willingness to "think conceptually" are deeply rooted assumptions about class as a determinant of the capacity for intellectual engagement.

[FIGURE 16 OMITTED]

Indeed, in the living rooms of the well-to-do from Lagos to Miami, Paris, and Mumbai and in many classrooms in between, we are told that appreciation for the contemporary arts in "developing countries" is a matter for those who have the means, i.e. the time, the schooling (mostly "Northern"), the money, and the wall space. Youth "off the streets," one is commonly told by the nomenklatura in Douala, cannot be expected to have any interest in conceptual work like Yamguen's because their primary concern, in a country where entire families live off the equivalent of two dollars a day, is to find the next buck, the next meal. We are also told that la jeunesse is too indolent to focus on such things as art. However, time spent in Douala and other cities where contemporary art scenes are burgeoning but largely unsupported by the middle class (Kinshasa, for instance) suggest that the contrary is arguably true. Members of the (often US-educated) nouvelles bourgeoisies in Africa, like their counterparts in Europe, Asia, and North America itself, are not likely to appreciate such work. (9)

Moreover, young men and women from poor and disenfranchised communities may in fact prove far more open to work like Yamguen's than their counterparts in the "nicer" parts of town. This is so for several reasons. One in particular is striking and has tended, for the most part, to be overlooked: for production and local exhibition, art such as Yamguen's often relies on tactics that make more sense in the city's less well-to-do neighborhoods. Among these is reliance on temporary or altogether ephemeral arrangements. Youth cultures in districts such as Ngangue, where Yamguen lives, practices, and often shows his work, thrive on movement. Language and dress codes, meeting places, dance moves, and text-messaging styles developed to travel information about these from one location to another are constantly shifting (Malaquais 2006; Simone 2004:92-n7.). Such shifts are intimately linked to the city itself and to the inequities on which it is built. Neighborhoods such as Bonanjo and Bonapriso (the colonial core of the city) and Denver or Santa Barbara (nouveau riche enclaves built over the past ten to fifteen years) are patterned on European models. Every effort is made by those who inhabit them to ensure both a sense and an appearance of stability; to this end, extensive use is made of (largely private) policing. Temporary structures--roadside vending stalls, most notably--are regularly destroyed, despite the fact that they provide essential services and play a central role in the urban economy. Neighborhoods such as Ngangue, in contrast, are first and foremost spaces of the temporary. Roadside stalls are a key architectural feature: they define the shape, economic organization, and social structure of entire blocks. The definition they bring is characterized by flexibility. A stall, a bar, a squat, a noontime kitchen here today may well be elsewhere tomorrow. Where it has gone and why is widely known, because here information travels along a multiplicity of routes simultaneously, in ways that it structurally cannot in neighborhoods intent on keeping the temporary and its unpredictability at bay.

In a mirroring of this state of affairs, Yamguen (and Cercle Kapsiki more broadly) has made the area of Ngangue into a sort of laboratory for experimentation with the arts. In-the-street installations, film projections on a sheet strung between two lamp poles, performances held in a courtyard that the next day bears no trace of what took place there, workshops involving practitioners who come for a week and end up spending a year (10) (or vice versa): cultural production, here, has become an explicitly transitory practice. The neighborhood has emerged as a kind of ephemeral gallery. At times it buzzes with activity: every facade becomes a potential space for engagement with ideas about representation (Fig. 16). At other times, sometimes for months or even years on end, it is silent. Only Yamguen and small groups of artists who come visit him from across the world are active. Though certainly plans are laid out and followed, unpredictability is the norm.

Considered in this context, Yamguen's photographic self-portraits prove particularly arresting. They are not themselves ephemeral but, as we have seen, both come into being through and act as records of ephemeral processes. In this sense, they function as extensions of the urban environment in which the artist makes his home. This is brought to the fore most strongly by a second series of photographs, which the artist began on his return to Cameroon in 200l. Back in Douala, we have seen, Yamguen continued to produce self-portraits. At the same time, he extended his photographic practice to images of others: first members of his family, then lovers and friends, neighbors and, finally, strangers who came to him referred by others. Using lather once again, mixed (as in some of the self-portraits) with paint and altered by low-tech lighting sources handled in original ways, he soon adopted a host of other materials: plastic bags, string, pieces of straw. Over several years he created a veritable photo album of the neighborhood (Figs. 17-19).

The overwhelming majority of the images Yamguen produced have never been shown outside Ngangue. In part, this is because they have evinced little curatorial interest. At the same time, Yamguen is responsible for this state of affairs: he has not pursued exhibition possibilities as aggressively as he might have. Though there are many reasons for this, one in particular seems worthy of note here: the fact that, in the end, Yamguen is more interested in the process of creating these works than in the works as final products. The act of welcoming models into his studio, explaining his project, transforming the faces of those whom he is about to photograph, adjusting the light to do so and, finally, taking the picture; the aftermath of the photo session, in which the model's face is returned to "normal;' arrangements made for the person photographed to see the image (printed or on a computer screen) and goodbyes exchanged; the conversations to which these various moments give rise (with and about the artist, among and concerning the models, neighbors, and passers-by, regarding what will and will not be done with the images): each of these "events" creates a link and, together, these links make up an architecture, a web of bodily and verbal ties, that both reflects and impacts the neighborhood. The process of making art becomes, here, a means of reconstructing what has been actively un-built by economic, political and social violence over a century and a half, since the creation of Ngangue and the larger area in which it is located: New Bell (see Mainet 1979a, b, c).

[FIGURE 17 OMITTED]

The ephemeral, here, as both process and production, becomes a full-fledged architectural practice. Through it, networks of people--an infrastructure of bodies, actions, and ideas (Simone 2004b)--come into being. New Bell, and within it Ngangue, have long been (or sought to be) bastions of opposition to the power that Mbembe references. In retaliation, the government has left the neighborhood to its own infrastructural devices. Decades of abandonment have resulted, in which municipal authorities have done virtually nothing for the well over one million people who live in New Bell. Raw sewage, crumbling buildings, roads so potholed that many areas can be accessed only on foot and, every rainy season, floods that carry entire dwellings away: these are par for the course. As one might expect, such difficult (and willed) conditions result in divisions among members of the community. These divisions are willed too, encouraged by those who hold the reins of power: they serve as highly effective means of dividing and conquering interest groups who (heterogeneous though they may be) have in common a profound dissatisfaction with the state of the city and the country more broadly.

[FIGURE 18 OMITTED]

[FIGURE 19 OMITTED]

Processes of art production such as those deployed by Yamguen effectively counteract this morseling of the local body politic. They actively draw on techniques developed in and by the urban environment from which they emerge and put them to positive use. The goal is not criticism (of the city or government) alone. Yamguen makes clear his attachment, ambiguous though it is, to the urban space he inhabits: were it antithetical to the creation process in which he engages, he would have left long ago. Nor is he under the impression that the art-making process in which he is involved will have a fundamental impact on Ngangue or Douala more generally. His goal, rather, is to incite reflection and, in doing so, to open up spaces of discussion that in time may yield viable alternatives. Just as it is not the specifics of current government politics that interest him, the short term is not his focus. If his work is going to have any impact beyond itself, it is as a means of destabilizing a system that extends far beyond Ngangue or, for that matter Cameroon, and in a time frame that far exceeds the moment and the condition of its production.

A paradox is at hand that, in Yamguen's hands, ceases to be a paradox: from the ephemeral, a future more stable, because less violently unequal, will emerge.

   A travers nos ombres sur les pierres.
   A travers les empreintes de nos souliers
   sur les terrains vagues.
   A l'endroit ou nos odeurs et nos regards
   se rejoignent. On se cherche. On se trouve.

   Where our bodies cast shadows against stone [walls].
   Where our footprints appear
   on the ground of vacant lots.
   Where our gazes and the smell of our skins
   meet. We look. And find one another.

   --Herve Yamguen (2005:51)

ALL PHOTOS [c] HERVE YAMGUEN EXCEPT WHERE OTHERWISE NOTED

References cited

DU BOIS, W.E.B. 1903. The Souls of Black Folk. Chicago: A.C. McClurg.

Efoui, Kossi. 200l. La fabrique de ceremonies. Paris: Editions du Seuil.

Fanon, Frantz. 1967. Black Skin, White Masks, trans. C.M. Markmann. New York: Grove Press. Work originally published as Peau noire, masques blancs, 1952.

Kuti, Fela Anikulapo, with The Africa 80. 1992. "Confusion Break Bones (C.B.B.)." Underground System (phonograph album). Nigeria, Kalakuta.

Mainet, Guy. 1979a. New Bell: Prototype des "quartiers des etrangers" d Douala. Yaounde n.p.

--. 1979b. New Bell: Environnement et cadre de vie. Yaounde n.p

--. 1979c. New Bell: Emplois et moyens d'existence. Yaounde: n.p.

Malaquais, Dominique. 2003. "Blood/Money: A Douala Chronicle." Chimurenga 3. http://magazines.documenta. de/frontend/article.php?IdLanguage=1&NrArticle=1365

--. 2006. "Douala/Johannesburg/New York: Cityscapes, Imagined." In Cities in Contemporary Africa, eds. G. Myers and M. Murray, pp. 31-52. New York: Palgrave McMillan.

--. 2008. "Douala en habit de festival." Africultures 73:83-92.

Mbembe, Achille. 200l. On the Postcolony, trans. A.M Berrett, J. Roitman, M. Last, and S. Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Mudimbe, V.Y. 1988. The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge. London: James Currey.

Ngugi wa Thiong'o. 1986. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. London: Heinemann.

Phillips, Bradford Verner, and Harvey Blume. 1992. Ota Benga: The Pygmy in the Zoo. New York: St Martin's Press.

Simone, AbdouMaliq. 2004a. For the City Yet to Come. Durham NC: Duke University Press.

--. 2004b. "People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg." Public Culture 16 (3):407-29.

Spiesse, Emanuelle. 2009. "Lagos et les lieux de sociabilite de l'artiste contemporain: les galleries d'art." In Lieux de sociabilite urbaine en Afrique, eds. O. Goerg, L. Fourchard, and M. Gomez Perez. Paris: Harmattan.

Strother, Zoe. 1999. "Display of the Body Hottentot." In Africans on Stage: Studies in Ethnological Show Business, ed. B. Lindfors, pp. 1-61. Cape Town: David Philip.

Yamguen, Herve 1998. Le temps de la saison verte. Besancon: Les Solitaires Intempestifs.

--. 2000a. La nuit crystalline. Limited edition (12 serigraphs).

--. 2000b. Entre brume et crateres. Limited edition (one original [pigment on cardboard and oilcloth] and 10 serigraphs).

--. 2005. Le deluge en soi n'est jamais trop loin. Douala: Centre Culturel Blaise Cendrars.

--. 2007. Journal de la lune horloge. Mantes-la-Jolie: Collectif 12.

Yamguen, Herve, et al. 2005. Boulevard de la liberte. Douala: Centre Culturel Blaise Cendrars.

--. 2006. Interdit de laver sa mobylette isi. Limited edition (49 handmade volumes).

--. 2007. D'Aujourd'hui: quinze pontes camerounais. Douala: Centre Culturel Blaise Cendrars and Editions de l'Estuaire.

Notes

Many thanks to Christine Kreamer and Allyson Purpura for encouraging me to think and write about conceptions of the ephemeral addressed in this paper. The artist Herve Youmbi, Yamguen's closest associate, with whom I have been working since 1999, has played a key role in shaping my views of the work discussed here. I am most grateful for his guidance. Thanks are due too to Jean-Christophe Lanquetin (Ecole Superieure des Arts Decoratifs de Strasbourg), who collaborates closely with Yamguen and has been kind enough to discuss with me his approaches to the pieces addressed hereafter. Any errors of a factual or interpretative nature are, of course, mine to shoulder. All translations, unless otherwise noted, are my own.

(1) http://www.eternalnetwork.org/scenographiesurbaines/index.php?cat- doualacollectif

(2) Yamguen is the author of several books of poetry: Le temps de la saison verte (1998); La nuit crystalline (2000); Entre brume et crateres (2000); Le deluge en sol n'est jamais loin (2005); Journal de la lune horloge (2007); and several volumes in progress (Les eclairs fun fragment, suivi de En memoire de la brume; Cendres et lys; Les flammes d'un jet). He is the author of a play, La machine a vapeur (in progress) and is currently at work on his first novel. A number of his poems have appeared in collective volumes, among them Boulevard de la liberte (2005), Interdit de laver sa mobylette isi (2006) and D'Aujourd'hui: quinze pontes camerounais (2007).

(3) When he works with an assistant, Yamguen gives detailed instructions as to how images should be shot. Yamguen's first assistant, with whom he created the initial photographs in the series addressed in this paper, was a young artist named Benedicte Gros.

(4) http://site.voila.fr/cameroon_pics/decouvrir/ herve_yamguen.html

(5) The term African appears in quotation marks here and in other sections of this paper for a specific reason: to underscore the fact that, all too often, the word relates to "invention(s) of Africa" (Mudimbe 1988) rather than to any form ofpre existing reality. Such inventions take a wide variety of forms and hail from multiple quarters, without the continent and within.

(6) For an overview of the facts surrounding this case of toxic waste dumping, see: http://www.green peace.org/international/news/ivory-coast-toxic-dumping/toxic-waste-in-abidjan- green

(7) See also South African artist Tracey Rose's remarkable self-portrait as Baartman (www.fallonandrosof.com/images/rosevenus.jpg). For artwork inspired by Ota Benga see: http://www.simoneleigh. com/images/thmnls/a4_th.jpg; http://www.allaboutjazz. com/php/article.php?id=27337

(8) 'Overflowing'. I use the French term here for three reasons. In common parlance, it refers to ways of acting associated with people who are particularly sensitive, whom others may think give away too much of themselves; of this, Yamguen has been accused by some, while, at the same time (as I have suggested), he can be described as a man who keeps very much to himself. In the language of psychoanalysis (a subject that Yamguen has read about quite a bit), the term is used to identify moments in which trauma cannot be contained or, alternately, when behavior is engaged in that impinges in disturbing ways on another person's body, psyche, or sense thereof. Finally it means 'food; a word of some use in Douala, where neighborhoods like Yamguen's are constantly being reshaped by a combination of torrential rains and nonexistent plumbing, resulting, quite literally, in an architecture of the ephemeral.

(9) It should be noted that such lack of interest on the part of the middle classes is not an Africa-wide phenomenon. Even if one (quite arbitrarily) focuses on sub Saharan Africa alone, one certainly finds cities in which the middle class is interested in the arts. This is the case, as numerous recent publications and projects have shown, in South Africa, and it is so in Nigeria as well (Spiesse 2009). Morever, the range of contemporary and conceptual art now available to audiences across the continent, and the ways in which tastes relating to cultural production are cultivated for different reasons and to different ends, are so varied that speaking of a normative approach on the part of any one class(ed) audience is problematic to say the least.

(10) A case in point is the Togolese artist Dodji Efoui, brother to Kossi Efoui, the author of the critically acclaimed novel Lafabrique de ceremonies (2001). Dodji, a painter of considerable talent, came to Douala to collaborate for a few months with the Kapsiki collective and ended up remaining there for years, becoming a key figure on the Douala arts scene.

DOMINIQUE MALAQUAIS is a senior researcher at the Centre d'Etudes des Mondes Africains, C.N.R.S., Paris, and director, with artist and educator Kadiatou Diallo, of SPARCK (Space for Panafrican Research, Creation and Knowledge--The Africa Centre, Cape Town), a network-driven, multiple-platform arts and activism project developed in tandem with choreographer Faustin Linyekula and urban sociologist AbdouMaliq Simone. She is the author of Architecture, pouvoir et dissidence au Cameroun (Karthala, 2002) and of numerous articles on contemporary urban culture in central and southern Africa. Malaquais is associate editor of Chimurenga Magazine and sits on the editorial board of Politique africaine. [e-mail]