The Shattered Gourd: Yoruba Forms in Twentieth Century American Art

African Arts, Summer, 2005 by Simon Ottenberg

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).