Picture a town, amidst hills and valleys, with waterfalls and gorges, alongside a lake. Here, brilliant folk from around the world come, sometimes with their children, to study and do research unaware of just how ideal this place is. The children will attend schools with locals who either keep to themselves without malice or will embrace the foreigners. They will speak with their accents and not be aware they have them. One may be the only child of African heritage in the class and that will not matter. After school, for extracurricular enhancement the girls may play hockey and lacrosse, like the boys. In this town, a black Guyanese girl will not be racialised or othered and she will never be told she cannot do something because of her race or sex.
Imagine this black Guyanese girl, after many years in this space, returning to her country of origin as a young adult, facing shocking racism and colourism in a country of black and brown people and being circumscribed because of her gender. She is told a construction site is not an appropriate place for a girl, despite her being an aspiring architect and being in the company of her contractor uncle. She and her younger sister are told by her great aunt’s husband that housework is an excellent form of exercise for women. Those shocks are not the worst. Many other things are and Guyana becomes a strange sort of surreal space that she does not identify with. As she ages, travels across Guyana, and lives in different places along the coast, she realises more fully her un-belonging but her years here also mean she must belong.
I ask you to imagine this reality because this is my lens of distillation for Guyana. This country is an odd sort of place where outdated traditions have held on, despite those within who yearn for something more in step with advancement. One of those outdated traditions, although a global one, is patriarchy. Guyana is a patriarchal space that limits its women and their potential for excellence. Indeed, we can boast of having had a woman as president and we have ministers of government who are women but I suspect that what happens on the micro is the same on the macro. Women may pursue excellence and use their voice but only in accordance with what patriarchy will allow.
Pretty pictures can mask ugliness. A lot of art in Guyana masks ugliness. And by and large, our women who involve themselves in visual art have censored themselves and speak as patriarchy defines: flowers, nature, portraits of smiling happy people, etc. Not that every woman with the ability to paint or construct something sculptural does so. Imagine walking through a display of graduating student work, some of which, I am sad to say, was very unaccomplished for a class about to graduate, and suddenly stumbling on a visual discourse on womanhood in the boldest articulations one can imagine. I am thinking of the exhibition hosted by the E R Burrowes School of Art in late September 2022 at the Guyana National Museum. I recall walking around that space not quite sure what young artist Atashieha Bovell was trying to tell us besides the reality of menstruation – it is bloody, painful for some, and the life-giving force for all. But it didn’t matter because Bovell was being bold, stepping out of the remit of our usual visualisations to address something that although fundamental to humanity’s existence is scorned, shamed, and can be the bearer of pain to others in its presence and absence. The fatigue brought on by the work I had seen before her display dissipated. I wished she had been given more space to show her work. The lighting was bad and this did not help the viewing of the already chromatically dark images. I could not step back and view the work from a distance without obstruction. Nonetheless, I walked around the cluttered display space soaking in her boldness, hoping she would continue, but refine her visual discourse in the years to come.
Today as I write and I recall Bovell’s work, I think about a sculpture in a public place in a distant land: a greater-than-life-size bearded man, standing nude, holding a baby in hand in a cradling posture of a mother nursing as he feeds the baby from breasts that are unmistakably those of a woman. I think about discourses on what defines a woman – who is and isn’t, who can be so defined and not be defined. I think about the rejection of biology for feelings and how the assault on womanhood has intensified. I think of Bovell’s work within this context of asserting womanhood through this essentialist feminist expression.
I wonder about the general reception of Bovell’s work. I returned with others and they thought it was “too much” – a sanitary pad with red congealed fluid, an intimate drawing of a woman’s uncovered vulva. I wondered where the blood in use came from. I understood there was something Bovell was trying to say but I was uncertain of precisely what; the display was cluttered. Were we talking about violence to women’s bodies? One of her small sculptural constructions had visible nails. Was she celebrating the female body in its reproductive capacity? At the time of viewing Bovell’s work I had not even thought of writing this column. I was at the exhibition looking for new things to feel hopeful about so that I would not believe art in Guyana was undergoing a slow death.
I am looking to see how Bovell will advance her visual discourse. I am also looking to women artists to extend their discourse on womanhood – when they do – beyond the woman and nature paradigm in which they associate womanhood and femininity.
(To be continued next week)
Akima McPherson is a multimedia artist, art historian, and educator
