The need for roots

African Arts, Spring, 2004 by K. Anthony Appiah

The extraordinary objects in the exhibition "Genesis" reflect the concern of people in a particular range of societies with questions of origin. These objects, and the practices within which they were intended to live, can best be made sense of against a background of narratives about the earliest common ancestors of the people of a particular place--a creation myth, a Genesis story, whose subject may be a family, a clan, a social group, a nation, or our species.

One way in which the societies that produced these objects were, and to some degree still are, different from ours today is in the sense that people had in them of the continuing presence of the ancestors. The centrality of funerals and funerary art in African societies reflects, of course, a recognition of the enormous significance of the transition from life here on earth to whatever follows, but it does not mark a transition in which the dead are no longer part of our community (Fig. 1). In the family shrine of my abusua (matriclan) in my hometown, elders gather regularly to feed the ancestors through the blackened stools that represent them; one old lady I know dreams of my dead father and passes on his messages and tells me how he is doing. For her these dreams are conversations, not fantasies: his sunsum, his soul, converses with her soul as she sleeps.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

While the dead matter differently, in short, they still matter; and we can appeal to their interests and concerns, especially their concern with the maintenance both of the family and its living members and of conformity to norms. Here we can say that granny wouldn't have liked yon to do something or ask you to do something in honor of her memory; in Asante I can tell you that granny won't like it and that you are not only despoiling her memory but upsetting her. And in Asante you have to worry whether she'll do something about how she feels. When certain things happened at my father's funeral that interfered with the plans of those who didn't want his will carried out, it was an obvious hypothesis--floated by many people that I talked to--that he was working in the background to achieve his ends. How he was able to do this is one of the mysteries that people accept: we could see his body lying in the casket, so we knew he was not acting through it anymore.

That is one way the sculptures in this show work: they embody now the ancestor whose living body is gone, they solve the problem of how the dead can act. Through them an ancestor can be present in a masquerade or a shrine (Fig. 2). And the performance of the masquerade and the offering at the shrine are ways of maintaining a relationship that can no longer be maintained by ordinary human interactions. We are defined, each of us, in part dialogically, as the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor puts it. (The idea, he would be the first to insist, goes back at least to Hegel.) Through dialogue with others we define ourselves ... by contrast with them, but also through shared projects and understandings. For the people who made these objects, people who died did not exit the conversation that defined them, did not inhabit it only through memory; they were still there, if in a new way, and that sense of the presence of the past--the life, if I may put it this way, of the dead--is something we can surely feel in these objects.

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

It is almost inevitable with African art shows outside Africa that our interest in the objects is likely at first to focus on differences of this sort between us here and now and them there and then, on the ways in which what they did there is not like what we do here. No harm in that, I think, unless it leads us to forget what is human in our focus on what is African, in general, or, more specifically, Baga, Boyo, Bwa, Bwende, Chokwe, Dogon, Fang, Kuba, Luba, Kurumba, Hemba, Mossi, Tabwa, Hemba, or Yoruba. But I should like to speak mostly about some impulses we share with the creators of these objects, impulses that have to do with the deep way in which most societies, including our postmodern New York metropolis, depend on narratives of origin to give meaning to contemporary identities (Fig. 3). So I shall be talking mostly in these brief remarks about the human need for roots.

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

To speak of identities in this context is, I think, completely natural for us, because what strikes us about these genesis stories is that they narrate the beginnings of a group--a lineage, a clan, a state, a people, a community--or a practice--agriculture--and, in so doing, give shape to some collectivity in the present (Figs. 4, 5). The vocabulary of identity is our natural response to such processes, because we see communities as mattering in large measure not in themselves but because of what they provide for members of those communities. And part of what they provide is aid for each of us in shaping our lives, which they do by way of their role in helping to make our individual identities (Figs. 6, 7). The story of Osei Tutu and Okomfo Anokye, the founding narrative of Asante, where the family narratives of Abena Busia's father and mine begin, is important now, we are inclined to think, because being-Asante matters to certain people (and, perhaps, because not-being-Asante matters to others). So it is easy for us to move between thinking of Asante as a collectivity--the Asante people--and thinking of being-Asante as an identity, the one that the members of the collectivity share.