artistic bravery and claiming (family) history

a post in two parts...

this past week was that bizarre and creepy holiday of thanksgiving. and i sucked up my vacation time in the city, filling my week with family, friends, movies, and trips to see music, theater, and an art exhibit.

Kara Walker,
from The Emancipation Approximation,
1999 - 2000.

so this post will be a rambling of my thoughts on the movies "Amandla: A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony" and "Everything is Illuminated", and the Kara Walker exhibit "My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love" at the Whitney Museum, the bilingual (english-yiddish) cabaret "Kleynkunst" at the manhattan JCC, and Matana Roberts' performance of her piece "Mississippi Moonchile" at the BlueNote. that's the order i saw them in so i will write in that order. and somehow they're all related to my thoughts on how we claim (or don't claim) histories. ready for a VERY LONG post?



"Amandla" is a documentary about South Africa's anti-apartheid music. i spent five weeks in Capetown, South Africa in july of 2005. this movie made me miss the place and mostly the people i met there. i was visiting on a human-rights academic program but by the second night together, the group of students was singing, dancing and teaching each other protest songs from our different countries (the students were mostly from the U.S., S.A., and Zimbabwe, but also other African countries.) i was thrilled-- i had in fact been set on traveling to SA someday when, several years before, i had the amazing opportunity to sing in my high school choir with Hugh Masekela. South Africa has a rich musical history and i was pleased to watch, dance to, and create so much music while there. the film's footage of people protesting and singing, and interviews with important musicians like Masekela and Miriam Makeba was inspiring and also brought back memories of my own experiences (like witnessing my friends and other people singing and dancing at a demonstration in Cape Town protesting high unemployment rates; this protest felt more powerful than any i had ever been to in the u.s.)

i could go on and on about these experiences but the bottom line is the way that they made me think about the power of music. and i began to compare the role of music in SA to music in this country. i can think of somewhat parallel american musical situations (music of the civil rights era and other "folk music" of the 60s perhaps), but what is the equivalent now? and where has this music gone now? who remembers it? when this group of american students and african students got together and started singing, we americans had a hard time finding songs of substance that we all knew. we could kind of remember the words to the early-90s Toni Braxton hit "unbreak my heart" but could we all sing "we shall overcome"? and here i was (having grown up at a socialist-jewish summer-camp) suggesting we sing "if you miss me at the back of the bus" and thinking, but not even bothering to suggest, some yiddish songs. no one knew them. i felt, well, culture-less. what is this evasive thing called "culture" and how's an american supposed to stake a claim to any of it!?

these comparisons between S.A. and the U.S. were not limited to musical histories. traveling and being "somewhere else" made me realize how little i know about my own country, state, or city. i was learning about housing issues, for example, but how much did i know about housing laws in america? i began to think about the common white college-student "adventure" of going abroad to "find myself". the point is, "Amandla" reminded me of this tension that exists for me; i am trying to learn about what is local, personal, immediate, part of my past, while feeling connected to cultures that are not "mine" while acknowledging my own subjectivity and the danger of idealizing and other-izing. and nothing is clear-cut. for example, south african protest music is influenced by jazz and other american musics. i may claim everything and nothing then?



and then, the next evening, i watched "Everything is Illuminated" which is based on a novel (which i have read) by Johnathan Safran-Foer. it is partially the story of an american man's journey to the ukraine to search for the woman who saved his grandfather from the nazis. my family is eastern-european jewish too (though i am mostly third generation brooklyn jew.) and i have thought that at some time in my life i might take a trip to poland to find the places that my ancestors (with some reluctance and fear due to antisemitism?) called home. but i haven't thought seriously about this in a while. and watching this movie i thought, what do i know of poland!? very very little. and while i have thought a fair bit about being jewish in the past, not so much lately.

i think it's because i only really realized i was white when i got to college. in the liberal communities where i was raised, i was taught to admire folks who struggled to fight their own oppressions. and i wanted to think of myself as part of these groups. so better to think of myself as a woman or a jew, but not a white person, understand? but in the world i live in, for the most part, jews are white folks. and college was my first experience in a private (rural) school and so my first time studying in such a white-occupied institution. when i watched how students of color, even if they grew up several blocks away from me, had a different experience than me at the same college, my own whiteness registered in a way it hadn't before. many conversations, readings, thinking, anti-racism meetings, musical experiences and a trip to south africa later, i've spent more time in the past few years contemplating my own whiteness than my jewishness (though certainly they are not mutually exclusive.) and i want to continue to think about this. because white privilege means that thinking about race is a choice.

and another thing, i have read so much, been exposed to so many images of the holocaust. they begin to lose impact. it's scary how desensitized we become. and i've been frustrated by how in my studies of history, the holocaust of world war II is often taught as the genocide, trivializing other peoples who have been massacred. (why do we rank oppressions?) and i've gained a certain amount of ambivalence about my jewish identity based on my grandmother's manipulative ploys to send me to israel. and my fear of and anger at the israeli government.

but losing your own culture is a violent thing. and for some reason, this movie reminded me that this violence is part of my own history as well. the literal violence of genocide, and the violence of re-writing history, and of assimilation. my folks made serious attempts to raise me with a sense of jewish identity. but what do i know of poland? what do i know of yiddish?-- a few words, a few stories, a few songs? how much is feeling truly connected to the past? how much is enough? what responsibility do i have to hold information about "my people" and our history? does this knowledge become lost if i do not seek it out?



history dissappears due to the very fact of it's own violence. and its own relevance to the present. who wants to remember these things? who can bear this collective memory? these questions are related to the Kara Walker exhibit i saw as well.

"The artist is best known for exploring the raw intersection of race, gender, and sexuality through her iconic, silhouetted figures. Walker unleashes the traditionally proper Victorian medium of the silhouette directly onto the walls of the gallery, creating a theatrical space in which her unruly cut-paper characters fornicate and inflict violence on one another." (this is a bit of her bio from the pbs website. also read a really interesting interview with her here.)

and what can i say about her work? it is engrossing, disturbing, violent, historical, fantastical... the provocative imagery is freeing-- it opens a conversation by making public what is usually shut away, but at the same time the sheer pain and violence of these images are debilitating and silencing. walking through the show was emotionally exhausting. Walker seems to be addressing some of my above questions about an individual's responsibility to give voice to pasts that is forgotten. she stretches the space between history and fantasy, public and private, personal and political. she forces viewers to watch the reality and the metaphor of race and gender relations as played out mostly through sex.

making this artwork seems a dangerous act. Kara Walker's work has been very controversial. and one piece in the exhibit was a series of framed pages spread across the width of a wall. they were journal entries of sorts; brief sketches and short writings. they were her own reactions to her critics. i was struck by the publicizing of her own fear and ambivalence about the work she makes and how her own racial identity relates to it. she seems unafraid to place herself in her work. her name appears in titles of pieces, you can see her hands and sometimes her face as she moves the silhouette puppets in her video work... and one get the sense she is overtaken by her own artwork and the manic perversion it illustrates. in several places, she writes about a dream she had were she and another black female friend seek vengeance by raping a KKK man. she has entered her work and her work has entered her deep down to her sleeping life.

or maybe it's not that her work has entered her life, but that her work, while on the surface it appears to be some combination of history and fantasy, is already about the real and the present. because racial power dynamics still act out in sexual and violent ways. and because the danger of forgetting the past of course, is that then we cannot address it's place in the present. the danger of seeing this artwork as pure history (read:fact) or pure personal experience (read: emotion) is that we, the viewers, do not see ourselves in it.

but i do see myself in Walker's work, in literal and figurative ways. her pieces with projections are displayed in such a way that you cannot help but pass in front of the projectors and see your own shadow on the wall next to the painted silhouettes. taking in her work is more active than your average art exhibit because of the content. one cannot help but feel like a voyeur. and doesn't a voyeur gain some responsibility for what is seen? and the title of the exhibit "My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love" comes from a written address she makes to white folks. and so how can an audience not feel involved? but the museum is a strange space. and there were all these (mostly white) people milling around in silence. one man stood for a good five minutes in front of a projector, oblivious to his own shadow taking over the very wall he looked at.

i want to think more about re-contextualizing history. Kara Walker's use of historical documents, images, and even songs (in some video work) made me think about some recent experiences i've had combining music with images. in a music class we've been experimenting with improvising to film. and one day the teacher brought in "Birth of a Nation" and, with difficulty, we played along to it. the music we made was clearly very different from the original music and, well, much creepier. it made me wonder if this could be a musical equivalent to Kara Walker's artwork. what would it be like to compose music to accompany historical imagery? perhaps there is a commentary here that is of a different value than verbal or written commentary?

but again, how do we take this on? when imagery is so emotional and grotesque, creativity can be stifled. in the same class, we did some improvisations to work by a local video artist. a few of her pieces were about self-mutilation and there were images of her own scabbed wrists from where she had cut them and also images of her sewing thread directly into the skin on her hands. beyond being squeamish, these visuals triggered some disturbing memories for me. several of my close friends were "cutters" when we were in high school. i began looking at these images and thinking about my friends, thinking about our helplessness and our attempts to help each other anyway. and all the young women who cut themselves because they feel so out of control. and i couldn't play anything. i couldn't make any music. it was too much. so what do you do if you want to tap into these loaded, personal experiences? how do you make that into art; maintain the personal connection and be outside of it enough to be a commentator? how does Kara Walker do it?