This week I visited my family in Ottawa for the first time in two years. My parents are some of my best collectors, which means I get to visit many of my old paintings when I’m there. Here is one of the paintings hanging in their dining room. After I painted it in 2016, I wrote what I had inspired me to paint it. Here’s what I wrote:
From October 2016:
I spent the month of August back in northern Uganda. It’s an uncomfortable feeling being the privileged outsider asking questions, gathering ‘data’, taking notes about what is so mundane to most but otherwise exceptional. But this should always be uncomfortable. This trip was just as much about maintaining relationships as it was about research, but the two are really the same, which contributes to my discomfort. Things are simpler with distinct boundaries, but no relationship is ever so simple. Obvious binaries (West/Other, privileged/oppressed, white/black, colonizer/colonized, researcher/researched, etc.) relate, but power should never be so simply defined and divided.
I find Camaroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe difficult to understand. I sometimes get it, but then I lose my grasp once I try to articulate my understanding. What I think I can say is that he positions Africa beyond the all encompassing construction of it as always postcolonial, and thus suggests a kind of amendment to postcolonial theory. Always seeing Africa as postcolonial keeps the entire continent locked within the colonial gaze as the tragic and impoverished entity that is forever resisting, simultaneously providing the West with a discourse about itself:
“…aucun pensée du sujet ne saurait être complête qui oublie que le sujet ne s’apprehende que dans une distanciation de soi a soi et ne saurait s’éprouver que dans la reconnaissance de l’Autre.”
(Mbembe 2000, VIII)
His alternative positions Africa as dynamic and complex, a postcolony rather than postcolonial. I think that’s the general idea. I think.
One thing I noticed during my visit was the increase in corruption. Of course, corruption exists in relation to many other things such as unemployment, poverty, insecurity, distrust, and so on. You need a lot of money to get a job in Gulu. Or to be let free when you’ve been wrongly imprisoned. And the impossible endless fee demands from schools is a legitimized form of corruption. And if anything goes wrong you’re quickly assumed to be guilty of corruption. A vicious cycle rupturing relationships.
Mbembe discusses power and corruption in the postcolony and I’ve returned to him for help understanding it. This painting was created in the midst of working through these emotions, reflections, and new ideas. The text is taken from something I read earlier this year. At the time, it seemed to make a lot of sense in relation to my data. But being ‘in the field’ challenges theory and frameworks of understanding, particularly Western ones.
Cheers!
Beth