Body talk - First Word - Transcript

African Arts, Summer, 2001 by Henrietta Cosentino, Carine Fabius

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.