As it turns out, we aren’t going underground. We’re going
underwater: down, down, into African water, mid-Atlantic water,
Caribbean water, with light, colors and temperatures changing all the
way. No need for snorkels or goggles. Art is our oxygen. Nothing should
stand between us and it.
As we go, we pass the museum’s
permanent collection: masks from Liberia glistening with palm oil,
royal figures from the Grassfields of Cameroon, Ghanaian gold, Benin
ivories and, from Tanzania, a portrait of President Obama printed on ceremonial cloth.
Finally we reach the museum’s lower galleries and settle there, light
as bubbles, as if on the ocean floor, with the sound of tides rolling
and shushing above.
What we’ve come for is “Mami Wata: Arts
for Water Spirits in Africa and Its Diasporas.” If the title sounds a
bit formal, the exhibition is not. It’s as rousing as a drum roll, as
piquant as a samba, as sexy as Césaria Évora’s voice. It’s about
glitter and tears, bawdy jokes and baskets of flowers, miracles and
mysteries, money in hand and affairs of the heart. It’s about standing
at the edge of the sea at dawn and watching a world re-born. In that
world no one walks; everyone dances and swims; everyone, that is, who
has taken the plunge into Mami Wata’s realm.
Who is Mami Wata?
She is Mother Water, Mother of Fishes, goddess of oceans, rivers and
pools, with sources in West and Central Africa and tributaries
throughout the African Americas, from Bahia to Brooklyn. Usually shown
as a half-woman, half-fish, she slips with ease between incompatible
elements: water and air, tradition and modernity, this life and the
next.
Provider of riches, she is described as the “capitalist
deity par excellence” by the show’s curator, John Henry Drewal, a
professor of art history at the University of Wisconsin,
Madison, and as such, she’s a natural bailout savior for our time. But
when assailed by qualms over ethics, she can cause trouble, sending
Madoffian fortunes onto the rocks with the flick of a fin.
Her
beginnings are murky. Sub-Saharan rock paintings of great antiquity
depict fish, snakes and human figures swimming together, suggesting
that water was long considered a magical, difference-dissolving medium.
Beings that combine human and animal features are a fixture of African
art.
The image of the mermaid, though, seems to have come from
Europe in the 15th century, possibly on prints, playing cards or
tattoos. The specific image now identified as Mami Wata crystallized in
the late 19th century, after a German print portraying a non-European
circus snake charmer had a wide African distribution.
The
picture of the woman, with her light-but-not-white skin, cascade of
dark hair and long skirt covering what was presumed to be a fish tail,
caused a sensation. Her overseas allure was further amplified by an
overlay of Hindu influences introduced by South Asian immigrants to
Africa, many of them rich merchants.
This ecumenical mix, as
intensely exotic in Africa as African art is in the West, still has
currency. A Mami Wata dance mask carved by the contemporary artist John
Goba of Sierra Leone is a mini-Himalaya of Hindu motifs, with rearing
cobras and snarling dragons perched atop a triple-headed goddess.
Carved figures of Roman Catholic saints and a crucifixion, with Mami
Wata in doleful attendance, turn another mask, this one from Nigeria,
into a kind of chapel-chapeau.
But religious emblems are no
guarantee of sanctity. To some eyes, particularly those of
fundamentalist Christians and Muslims, Mami Wata is plain bad news.
Abdal 22, a painter from Congo, depicts her as a henna-haired,
Western-style femme fatale with a mirror, a comb and a faraway look.
The Pentecostal Christian artist Kwame Akoto, who goes by the
professional name Almighty God, presents her even more enticingly, but
X-ed out with blood-red lines.
Fluid in form, volatile in
temperament, foreign in origin, Mami Wata is feared and reviled as a
spiritual loose cannon. Inevitably, she’s been snagged in a net of
sexual politics. As women take increasingly active and independent
roles in contemporary life, they are perceived as a threat to social
stability. Africa is no different in this way from anyplace else. Mami
Wata has come to personify feminine power that must be brought into
line and tamped down.
[read full article]
“Mami Wata: Arts for Water Spirits in Africa and Its Diasporas”
continues through July 26 at the National Museum of African Art,
Smithsonian Institution, 950 Independence Avenue SW, Washington; (202)
633-4600, africa.si.edu
