Abstract
I hosted ourselves + others: african feminist re-CREATIONS at SOAS as part of my work on AFRICA SALON, a contemporary African arts festival I founded in response to the dearth of knowledge about African arts and culture in academia. I wanted to fill that void with space for audiences to experience, learn about and celebrate African arts.
When I began curating ourselves + others, I had in mind two experiences I had at SOAS to which I wanted to respond. The first was academic racism, which I encountered in certain women lecturers. Academic racism believes its knowledge of blackness and Africanness is superior because it is learned within the white, Western institution rather than outside it, through lived experience or through alternative, indigenous ways of knowing.
The archive from which Western academics draw to teach, in which few black and African thinkers are represented, perpetuates the exclusion of black and African knowledge and ways of knowing from the institution in both its content and in its very form, which is written rather than oral. Granted, writing systems in Africa such as nsibidi in my native Nigeria date back to precolonial times, so it should be acknowledged that the binary that associates writing with Western culture and oral communication with African cultures is false. Still, oral communication in the context of the Western institution seems to be a form of knowledge production and transmission that is more hospitable at times to black and African knowledge than the written word.
Oral archives are created in classrooms through exchanges about the class material. They are stored in the memories of those present. In one experience I had at SOAS, my contribution to a class discussion about Nigerian linguistics was dismissed because I spoke from my lived experience as a Nigerian. Rather than learning from me, my tutor asked me to find a text that could prove what I had shared. In other words, she expressed that written knowledge about my culture, retrieved from an archive largely produced by white men, was legitimate, and my experiential, orally transmitted knowledge was not.
After this experience, I stopped speaking in this particular class. At the time, I lacked the vocabulary for the disorientation I felt, but I know now that the pain was caused partly by the fact that as a black, African scholar of African arts and culture, the majority of my knowledge comes not from a textbook but from my lived experience, from my body, from conversations among ourselves and with others. If I accepted that orally transmitted, lived and embodied knowledge was illegitimate, I would be left without a theoretical foundation to stand on. This is why I felt I could no longer speak. Then, on two different occasions, I overheard conversations between other black women who spoke of similar experiences of silencing. These SOAS students expressed how they had decided, following an experience of academic racism, to stop participating in classroom discourse. I thought, I want to hear what these women have to say. We can’t just lose our voices. By not speaking, these students and I were voluntarily (though whether we had a legitimate choice is debatable) excluding ourselves from the archives being generated in our classrooms. I wanted to correct this. Drawing on my work on festivals, I knew that a space devoted to experiential rather than text-based knowledge, where black and African participants and publics were centred as co-producers of that knowledge, could create a safe environment for sharing our thought.
The second experience I had in mind was my encounter with an essay by Dr Obioma Nnaemeka called ‘Nego-feminism: theorizing, practicing, and pruning Africa’s way’ (2004). The first time I read this essay, I felt like I could speak, because this Nigerian teacher was articulating how she thought academic institutions should deal with African knowledge. I read in her writing a call for institutions to defer to local knowledge, which for me meant the knowledge of people from African cultures, like myself. Dr Nnaemeka’s essay gave me the vocabulary to articulate what I was experiencing at SOAS, the raw material with which to create an alternative space.
Translating my responses to academic racism and nego-feminism into a festival, I invited creatives from SOAS and around London to speak about their platforms and practices in a festival event called Creative Market, which reimagined the market as a space for trading ideas. African literature platform Afrikult. responded to the nego-feminist proposal to seek the ‘ethnographies of the particular’—a call to move away from generalised, monolithic ideas about Africa and towards plurality and nuance—as a prompt for the workshop they presented (Nnaemeka, 2004, p. 375). Normally, Afrikult. workshops position several authors and poets in relation to each other. However, for ourselves + others, the collective led a deep examination of the work of Momtaza Mehri, a young poet of Somali descent and former Young People’s Laureate for London—in other words, a bearer of local knowledge.
A key objective of mine would naturally have been to record the knowledge shared at the festival so that it could be archived and circulated. However, we did not produce archival audio recordings or video documentation. Despite having the help of incredible volunteers, my energy was spent after conceptualising and guiding the execution of the festival without compensation. As Yula Burin states in ‘Sister to sister: developing a black British feminist archival consciousness’, ‘[The] work of preservation requires resources of time, energy, money and infrastructure. When we lack these, we hasten the degradation and deterioration of […] our herstories’ (Burin and Sowinksi, 2014, p. 113). Documenting the festival came second to curating the festival, and in the end I was not able to work as both curator and archivist.
But the fact that the festival was not recorded with traditional, Western archival tools does not mean it was not archived. ourselves + others was archived in the memories of those who attended the event. The mostly female, mostly black and African audience captured the festival in their conversations and in their own documentation—for example, in a looping recap video that one SOAS student posted to Instagram, or a voice note that writer Siima Itabaaza sent me on WhatsApp in which she recounted the panel she moderated with critical gender studies lecturer Awino Okech and African feminist blogger Minna Salami.
Listening to Siima’s voice note in the course of writing this piece, I am struck by the quality that her narrativising of the day’s events affords this alternative archival record. Speaking directly to me, Siima summons me as a listener and interlocutor—so differently to the classroom and written, academic archives, which seem incapable of imagining me in these terms. Unlike an essay held behind research journal paywalls, I could easily send the voice note to one or ten of my black women friends, inviting their voices into the conversation. Siima’s storytelling conjures a mental picture of the event, its atmosphere, particular moments of heightened energy—it makes the space present again. This archival technique aligns with what Alexis Pauline Gumbs observes, that contemporary Black feminists are using the moment-to-moment updatable technology of blogs, interwoven with other forms of new media and creative and community-building educational events, to create an experiential archive of Black feminist practice. (Gumbs, 2011, p. 19)
Gumbs attributes this kind of archiving to black feminists who recognise that institutions will not value their experiences enough to record them. Through digital recording and sharing tools like WhatsApp, it becomes possible for a participant like Siima to also play the role of archivist, a role that she may not have otherwise had the capacity to play. Taking this task upon themselves, the Instagram user and the rest of the ourselves + others audience became, like Siima, ‘witness[es] to our own herstory’ (Burin and Sowinksi, 2014, p. 118). Granted, this kind of archiving is only available to women with access to social media like Instagram and WhatsApp—women likely living in the first world with enough disposable income to purchase data and the freedom to use social media to communicate as they please—and these women are not representative of women everywhere. While digital archival tools are not universally accessible, among the London-based women I speak of they are a means of speaking into institutional silence.
Gumbs herself practises this kind of archiving through the many strands of her work, but the creative project of hers with which I am most familiar is the Black Feminist Breathing Chorus. Using audio, music and collage, Gumbs has created a collection of meditations based on black feminist quotes. These bursts of black feminist thought create another alternative archive: a catalogue of notable, under-recognised black feminists and a repository of some of their most consequential ideas. At the same time, Gumbs’ meditations offer a practice through which one or more black women can create for themselves a space for embodied experience—experiences of learning, of poetry by black feminists like June Jordan, of the experimental music that forms the soundtrack of each meditation. The experience of each meditation is an interdisciplinary event. Thanks to the internet and the power it affords to circulate content, any time we black women begin one of Gumbs’ meditations, we are chiming into her intended ‘chorus’ of black women elsewhere who may also be meditating in that moment. In this way, this alternative archive can create opportunities for connection, collectivity and presence that do not exist in the traditional archive.
This work of ‘presencing’ is so important because it rectifies another effect of the archive: in silencing me and other black women students, the archive also makes us less present (Lewis, 2017, p. 4). One who does not contribute to the classroom archive may well be recorded as absent from that class. This is what makes the African feminist festival and the particular opportunities for archiving that it affords so imperative: the presence of a black woman at an event where she is seen, recognised and recorded by her peers cannot be erased from her fellow black women’s memories (as long as they remain in good health). The festival and the alternative archive are important because they hold the black woman’s presence both in the present and for time to come. I must acknowledge that this kind of presence is likely only available to women who live in cities like London where festivals such as ourselves + others take place, who are healthy, able-bodied and able to travel to the event and who have the means to purchase admission. The festival emphasises the importance of physical presence, affording attendees a tangible community, but in doing so the festival excludes those who cannot be present.
While I use the term ‘presencing’ to describe physical presence, Gail Lewis (2017, p. 4) uses it to discuss how on a structural level the black woman is rendered absent as a political subject by the racist and sexist construction of gender, state violence, biased statistics and the intersection of these forces. Drawing on the work of Hortense Spillers, Lewis makes a connection between the ungendering and dehumanisation of black women through slavery and colonialism and the refusal of the contemporary state to recognise black women as political agents. In other words, that today, ‘the black woman pops in and out of presence in the statistical snapshots of social topography’ is related to the historic black ‘female body […] bleeding […] because “‘the overseer’ … has popped her flesh open[”]’ (ibid., p. 11). As a result, black women are absented from statistics and physically disappeared through violence, as in the case of Sarah Reed. Unable to be seen as woman or human, the black woman is not protected as either. Lewis (ibid., p. 4) shows how presence produced through practice can be a ‘decolonial move [with the] potential to detoxify the effects of colonial discourse’. Indigenous practices and archiving are among the possible anchors for black women as our social and political presence is threatened with being swept away.
In my reflections on ourselves + others, I learned three lessons that crystallise for me how and why to create an alternative archive of the African feminist festival:
I. Not recording a festival responds to the rejection of knowledge gained through lived experience by offering knowledge that one must gain through experience. If you were not physically present at SOAS on 25 November 2017, you can never fully share in the artistic experiences and interpersonal exchanges that took place there, nor access the festival’s atmosphere. This shift from the traditional, Western archive’s emphasis on written record to an emphasis on presence is radical in a world where black women are both silenced because of the absence of their voices and experiences from the archive, and prevented from contributing to the archive. It indicates that our simply being present is not just productive—it is enough.
II. Not recording a festival causes those who know to draw on their experience and memory to transmit knowledge of the event through oral communication and/or, as is likely among my generation of black feminists, social media. Archival audio and video recordings and writing contain certain ideologies. They freeze knowledge in time and cast the subjective lens through which knowledge is produced as an objective framework. This suggests that knowledge is fixed rather than fluid, objective rather than subjective and individual rather than collective (i.e. coming from one author to an audience rather than collectively generated through exchange). I am not arguing that this is or isn’t the ‘true’ nature of knowledge; rather, I am interested in other understandings of knowledge. I struggled to find examples of indigenous African thought on the question of the archive, which is perhaps illustrative of the ways in which this knowledge has been erased from Western academia. I did find Gail Lewis’s thinking about knowledge production among the Nishnaabeg, an indigenous nation in Canada. In Nishnaabeg practices described by Wanda Nambush and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, knowledge is produced orally and even non-discursively, through ‘movement of body’ (perhaps dance), ‘sound’ (music), ‘testimony and witnessing, remembering … and storied presencing’ (panel discussions, talks, informal conversation)—all elements found at a festival (Lewis, 2017, p. 4). Through oral communication, knowledge evolves through memory and can be understood, learned and remembered through exchange. Through both oral communication and social media, knowledge is interpreted through subjectivity. Think about the difference between Siima sending me a voice note and what would have been an audio recording, video or transcript of the conversation between Awino and Minna. Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ subjective, creative archiving of black feminist ideas affects and is accessible in a different way than is possible with the traditional archive. Spoken, heard and experienced aesthetically, these ideas have the capacity to be absorbed into everyday practice, applied to life. They acquire a form that makes them more easily and so more widely shared. These ways of archiving are important for us as black feminist individuals and more broadly for, as Lizzelle Bisschoff referencing Cook in Blouin and Rosenberg says, If our understanding of archives solely rely [sic] on text-based archival terminology and definitions, huge quantities of historically valuable materials, including those of marginalized groups […] will be excluded from social memory and historical understanding. (Bisschoff, 2013, p. 62)
Bisschoff’s observation makes the situation in the aforementioned SOAS classrooms even more dire. If silenced, the ‘historically valuable materials’ of black and African students (their contributions to classroom exchange) will not only be excluded—they will not even exist.
III. Not recording a festival fosters knowledge transmission that directly supports the production of subsequent festivals. After each AFRICA SALON, I have circulated surveys. The most important question is always that of publicity—what got people to the event? Almost every year, the top answer is word of mouth. In 2016, we covered campus with flyers designed by the talented graphic designer Jerome Harris. We heard that people loved the flyers so much, they took them off the bulletin boards—even if they didn’t plan on coming to the event. On the other hand, people who actually attended (and took the survey) largely heard about the event from friends—through conversations. Print publicity reaches people, but oral communication is what gets people in the room. It is my hope that the women who attended ourselves + others will tell their friends about the event and encourage them to attend AFRICA SALON in future. In this way, their presence at the event would invite other black women to be present at future African feminist events.
I am not arguing that the traditional, Western archive should be abolished. Rather, I am proposing that in light of its exclusive nature, archives generated, stored and circulated through oral communication, memory and social media can effectively serve as alternative means of knowledge transmission and preservation for us as black and African feminists. This alternative archive can be generated both within and outside the institution. It is non-hierarchical; rather than gatekept by a single teacher and passively received by students, it is collaboratively produced—anyone who can experience, speak about and/or digitally capture an event can participate. While on an individual level, we may sometimes find ourselves without the capacity to produce archival transcripts, audio or images, collectively, the work of producing the alternative archive is achievable. Furthermore, this archive can help to extend the life of black and African feminist spaces for experiencing, learning and celebrating. The African feminist festival taught me that if the institution dismisses our knowledge, we can create a home for it ourselves.