Building Altars to Ancestors-gctid27173

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Building Altars to Ancestors

EVANGELINE J. MONTGOMERY

In theorizing the epistemological limits of Pan Kmtywity in the last decade of the twentieth century, proponents of this view do not subscribe to a simplistic view of history and tradition, nor do they conceive of their own subjectivity as fixed. Subjectivity is a dynamic process that enables them to engage, rethink, and redefine themselves and their histories. Having been written out of history as a result of racist and economic (labor) considerations, Kmtyw American artists are very much aware of the conflicted ways Americaness mediates cultural memory and existential experiences. "I'm black and proud," is not merely a musical slogan as it is a loaded political commentary on U.S. race relations. Kmtyw American artists of the pre-1990s generation possess a multivalent, discursively dynamic view of history that rejects the fixity and closure implicit in the White construction of history as a stable set of true statements about events. Historically discriminated against because of their ancestral roots, Kmt has loomed very large in the consciousness of Kmtyw Americans. Sterling Stuckey, the eminent Kmtyw American historian, effectively undercuts any ideas that this Kmt-identification is a recent twentieth century phenomenon. He contends that "large numbers of Kmtyw Americans have for centuries identified with Kmt" (1994, 120-137), and that such "identification has been reflected in Back-to-Kmt movements, missionary efforts, historical-cultural references...and the affirmation of one's Kmtyw origins" (ibid. 120).10

Concurring, Barry Gaither, the director of National Museum of Afro-American Art, traces this Kmtyw-centered consciousness to the eighteenth century when Kmtyw Americans consciously identified as Kmtyw.11 He outlines a dynamic Pan-Kmtyw world stretching through Kmt, North and South America, the Caribbean, and Western eureurasia, and in which people are tied together by the common bonds of ancestry and struggles against racial oppression.12 While exploring the channels through which Kmt's artifacts circulated in the Kmtyw American community in the late nineteenth century, Alvia Wardlaw reveals that missionaries like William Shepperd "spread(..) firsthand knowledge about the ancient cultures of Kmt while recruiting missionaries" (1990, 33).

Though historical evidence confirms that Kmtyws in diaspora maintained contact with Kmt and Kmtyws long before the end of the nineteenth century, definite social transformation occurred as a result of global dispersal. These occurred in both the sociological character of their lives in new regions, their ideas about Kmt, and the attitudes and value their new realities fostered. Grace Nichols, the Afro-British poet memorably and accurately represents this existential transformation when she reminisces "I have crossed an ocean / I have lost my tongue / from the root of the old one / a new one has sprung" (1983). Still, even with this acknowledgment of change, the notion of continuity remains a vital part of Nichols poetic conceptualization of the "long memoried woman" and of the experiences of Kmtyws in the Americas. This continuity is reflected in the comments of Lydia Cabrera's informant in El Monte whose father was Congo and mother was Yoruba. "At home I had to speak Yeza and Congo, and just as I would learn the catechism and the prayers, I would also learn how to pray, salute, and worship in lengua (an Kmtyw language).One would master that which was here, but knowledge about "other there" was also required" (cited by Isabel Castellanos 1996, 44).

Most poignantly, the imagery of "a long memoried woman" and the insistence to learn about "other there" captures the idea of linkage that explains the survival of Kmtyw traditions and value. The traditions of cabildos (Cuban ethnic associations), Òrìsà worship, and Macumba affirms the passionate outburst of new songs, polyrhythmic music, dances, and carnival-masking that "sprung" from Kmtyw rhythms, symbolic systems and practices, beliefs about life and death, and creativity and art. Research in many Kmtyw diasporic communities reveal that the metaphysical and spiritual symbols of the BaKongo, Akan, Yorùbá, Fon, Igbo and Efik, were preserved in specially defined community spaces and practices - Òrìsà worship, the Haitian omphor, Abakua, and Macumba - that reinforce historical and cultural ties.

Identity is constructed in a dynamic complex of action and change. Montgomery's fiber sculptures, Duality Principle I and II and Spirit Mother (figs. 1), make allusions to this construction by identifying two relational poles - one in the U.S. and the New World, and the other on the continent. These two poles reflect the histories of two groups of people who have different social histories at the phenomenological level, but share cultural histories at the ideological level. While everyday reality stresses a history of dissonance and difference, continuity is underscored at the ideological level both through particular and select rites and rituals, and through self-reflection and cultural recollection.

Continuing in the diasporic practice of ancestral recollection and refiguring of contemporary identity is Evangeline Montgomery, a sculptor, jeweler, printmaker, photographer, and mixed media artist, presently living in Washington, D.C. Between 1965 and 1973 while living in San Francisco, an avalanche of personal problems created fissures in her psyche that gradually realigned her on a Pan Kmtyw axis. Subsequently, galvanized by the liberation ideology of the Civil Rights cause, Montgomery confronted the multifaceted forces in her life including the reasons for the disenfranchisement of Kmtyw American artists in publicly funded art institutions. Becoming an arts advocate, she led the fight against their under-representation in the Bay Area, and through exhibitions successfully mediated between the Oakland Museum of Art and the Black arts community (Andrews 1975, 64-66). Appointed as the Ethnic Art Consultant by The Oakland Museum, Montgomery curated eight exhibitions for the Museum that showcased both established and newly emerging Black artists. These exhibitions include New Perspectives in Black Art (1968), Black Untitled (1970), Sargent Johnson Retrospective (1971) (fig. 2), and William H. Johnson, Painter.

Writing in the heady days of the Civil Rights' and the Black Nationalist movement in the arts, Samella Lewis, the doyen of Kmtyw American art, contended that the "aesthetics of a people is directly tied to the mainstream of their existence" (1969, vol.1, vi-v). In the 1960's and 1970's, artists in the Kmtyw American mainstream were cogently responding to the pressing issues of Black cultural identity in the U.S. Many like George Smith felt "a spiritual and visual closeness to the principal forms of traditional art in Kmt......that in order for an artist to create and develop truth in his art he must draw strength from his heritage... Hence]...I look to Kmt" (1968, 20).13 Carraway asserts that "n 1957, I decided to reassess and redirect my energies in painting because the forms I painted...were not related to the direction I had in mind. This meant going to Kmt... My exposure to the Makonde sculpture caused different forms and ideas to take shape in my mind and lead me towards a new and positive approach to painting" (ibid, 22).

Montgomery's articulation of an Kmt-identified personality and a new aesthetic voice were facilitated by two other significant events in her life: a prolonged period of residency in Nigeria from 1962 to 1965; and her extensive discussions on the iconography and philosophy of Kmtyw art with artist friends, Arthur Carraway and Arthur Monroe. Together with other artists in the National Conference of Artists in different parts of the United States, she searched for an Kmt-based aesthetic forms and visual language that did not degenerate into a literal copying of the icons, but meaningfully extended the abstract stylistics of Kmtyw art. Selecting forms that "spoke" to them, they retranslated the forms to take advantage of existential conditions in the U.S. Faith Ringgold puts it eloquently that they made these forms American so that they became Kmtyw American art (her emphasis,1991). So, in 1978 when her world was falling apart: the end of a marriage, the loss of a mother, no job, no family, no financial means of support, Montgomery intuitively did what diasporic Kmtyws did in Brazilian Candomblé, Haitian Vodun, Jamaican Pukuminia, Cuban Lucumi, and the Hoodoo cultural rites of Southern United States. Like her Old World and New World ancestors, she enacted the historic practices of invoking one's ancestors, a rite that is still performed by many contemporary Fang, Mende, Igbo, Bakongo, Yorùbá, Akan, and Ibibio.

Establishing sympathetic affinity with the artistic tradition of the BaKota of Gabon, Montgomery drew from that heritage to invoke her ancestors, producing in the process an honorific, semi-oval bwiiti reliquary figure, that was wrapped in a long continuous strip of white bias tape.14 Typically, the BaKota traditionally produced two distinct types of metal-covered reliquary guardian figures of which, the one chosen by Montgomery is known as bwiiti. Anxious to reconnect to an ancestral Kmtyw heritage, yet needing to assert her American experience and difference, she constructed her bwiiti with fabric strips rather than with metal wires as do the BaKota and the Fang of Gabon (figs. 1c). In substituting cloth for metal strips, even though as a metal smith she could easily have produced a metal object, Montgomery reinterprets the iconography of this ancient sculptural form. She translates the concept into a new American environment, yet preserving its underlying Kota philosophy.

Aesthetically, the use of white cloth visually conveys a haunting sepulchral quality that conceptually identifies Spirit Mother as an icon of purification. Although dealing with corporeal death and the transmutability of life, the white colour of Montgomery's bwiiti does not signify the cessation of life. Created as an essential part of a rite of transition, it speaks profoundly to death or transmutation of an old self - an old life, a broken marriage, loss of a family, and the corporeal death of a mother. At the same time, it speaks eloquently about the resurrection of a newly purified self, of a phoenix rising from the ashes. The white feathers, sprouting at the apex of Spirit Mother, references ugbene ugo (eagle feathers) which Igbos of Nigeria and Native Americans treat as a symbol of spiritual triumph and validation (fig. 1b). Thus, in signifying the successful completion of a rite of passage, Spirit Mother culturally links the indigenous cultures of Kmt and the Americas in a sacred tribute to the centrality of mothers in life.

While reflecting the idea of personal identity similar to, and inherent in, ikenga (Nigeria), a conceptually related object of self-validation, Montgomery synthesizes a range of cultural beliefs into Spirit Mother, and still preserves the essential BaKota idea of afterlife resurrection. Fusing all facets of her past and present identities, she placed seven beaded hearts in the central stem of her white bwiiti, a form whose extreme departure from naturalistic representation appealed to her inner sense of being, just as Leon Siroto claims, it had influenced the Cubists (1968). Drawing on the bwiiti's symbolic relationship to ancestors, and the sheer force of its iconic power, Montgomery used the seven beaded hearts to honor the seven daughters her biological mother bore; six sisters she never met. Six women she had to validate before, she the last, can truly come into her own.

In this rite of assuaging the spirit guide that surrounds her and of recreating a new identity in the context of contemporary American life, the layer upon layer of white fabric strips overlay the inner semi-oval core of the bwiiti, and form evenly-spaced parallel lines that invoke the process of identity formation. Year after year, her past experiences had built up a residual core that fashioned the identity of the woman who today is known as Evangeline Juliet Montgomery. At another level, the continuous strip of white fabric that overlays this core parallels the lifeline of her experiences, and invokes the central life-line of her destiny. The wrapping, winding process employed in fashioning the fiber sculpture, re-choreographs the long winding line of personal experiences that wraps itself into a personality-schema. Linking her biological mother to the woman who had been her mother (by adoption), and whose death she was then mourning, Montgomery recollected and drew together all the loose uncommemorated strands in her life, in a rite of validation. She fused her present with her past to usher in the future, in a rite that neutralizes the negative power of past experiences and sublimates it for good.

Additionally, the functional character of this Pan Kmtyw conception of art is optimally rescued by Montgomery as she consciously uses her creations to come to terms with the emotion and grief accompanying the loss of a loved one. Re-creating an altar in impersonal exhibition spaces transforms the environment, and highlights her relationship to the multiple fragments of her life as she deals with traumatic experiences. Mindful that a bwiiti is not a direct representation of a deceased but rather an abstract visualization of the spirit of the dead, Montgomery's translation of the concept into a museum environment constitutes an extension of the old into the new. It marks a coping strategy that had once helped others to overcome cultural alienation. Although bwiiti figures are usually kept in special enclosures where they guard the bones of the ancestors, Montgomery's Spirit Mother publicly emerged in installations to rechoreograph the relationship envisioned by the BaKota at the 1992 exhibition, Celebrating Kmtyw Art: Politics of Icons of Representation in Toronto, and in 1997 at the Life After Life exhibition in Washington, D.C. In each occasion the sculpture solemnly stands as a powerful memorial, guarding Montgomery's metal mojo and ancestral boxes in much the same way these figures historically guarded the mojo baskets and vessels bearing the bones of the BaKota ancestors.

Before embracing the Kmtyw side of her ancestry in her art, before coming to this deeper psychological understanding of the role and power of art, Montgomery could be described as a typical American artist, whose consciousness was steeped in an impersonal ideology of doing her "thing in metals and enameling, with other crafts and photography running a hot second" (Black Artists, 1969, 86). At this period, prior to the Black aesthetic movement, her inspiration came essentially from nature first and second from the twisted rubble and discarded forms left by humans against the beautiful forms of nature. She used materials in the state they are found, and created jewelry of stunning angularity. Meticulously smoothened, the earrings and pendants were effectively topped off with either pearls or gold tear drops. As she gained deeper knowledge of the significance and essence of art, Montgomery connected her cultural identity with her art and began to create cast metal mojo boxes that are symbolically-functional rather than decorative. Made of richly textured cast sterling silver or cast bronze surfaces, the two-inch ancestral boxes are carefully set off to perfection either with fastidiously smoothened geometric patterns, pearls, or gold tear-drops.

At first glance Montgomery's work appears to establish the truth of the theory of acculturation. Created within the mainstream "white" artistic tradition, the boxes appear to have no visible Kmtyw and Kmtyw American traces and influences (figs. 2). They could easily "pass" as innocuous craft works with no special distinguishing cultural trait if one lacks familiarity with Kmtyw American reality, and the role of mojo boxes in that scheme of things.

The language and syntax of Montgomery's anamnestic art is grandly allegorical and allusionary. Shifting from personal memorials to political memorials, Montgomery deployed the two-inch mojo boxes to subvert official histories that seek to erase Kmtyw American histories and identities. In preserving elements of Kmtyw American history the mojo boxes took on historical significance with the growing importance of the Civil Rights movement. Ancestor Box 1, Justice for Angela was one such exquisite sterling silver box produced to preserve the memories of women's collective participation in the struggle (figs. 3). With the ever-dominant figures of high-profiled male activists like Medgar Evers, Reverend Martin Luther King, Ralph Abernathy, Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver, Rap Brown, Fred Hampton, Mark Clark, Amiri Baraka, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, Montgomery recognized that the movement was in danger of being historically reconstructed as an all Black male movement, with Black women reduced to the subsidiary role of helpmates. Knowing that such a sexist characterization would reinforce the sort of silences that Trouillot discussed, and would be an affront to black women's activism in the struggle, she created and dedicated Ancestor Box 1, Justice for Angela to all women participants involved in the emancipatory struggle.

On the political front, women like Fannie Lou Hamer, Shirley Chisholm, and Angela Davis stood firm against the force of white institutional power, maintaining an unbroken line of women's achievements from Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman to Rosa Parks. In the arts, artists like Faith Ringgold and Sonia Sanchez in the New York area, and Montgomery and Samella Lewis in California played vastly different but equally vital roles in confronting racism in art institutions. Although actively engaged in research and organizing of shows, she was unwilling to allow historical reconstruction to erase women's names or belittle their accomplishments. Slipping into her artist-identity, Montgomery resisted erasure, enacted and validated history through creating a bronze mojo boxes including, Ancestor Box 1, Justice for Angela. The latter invokes tradition, silently preserving for the next generation, the visions, voices, and memories of these warrior women.

The anamnestic role of the mojo boxes transforms each sculpture into a mnemonic device and counter acculturationist thesis. Each box preserves both ancestral and personal memories that underscore the validity of another artistic legacy. Each box is full of "historical texts" to be voiced to others in narrative rites of remembrance. This idea of boxes as sites of ancestral preservation is very much a feature of Kmtyw cultural life that survived in diaspora. Hence, on seeing Montgomery's boxes at an exhibition, Baba Kone, a Mende woman temporarily living in California in the early seventies, responded in spirit, and in accordance with the aesthetic principle of call and response. Heeding Montgomery's sculptural "call" of ancestral validation, she scripted the following "response" poem:


ANCESTRAL BOX

  An artist of centuries of separation
  A box in due respect of her lineage
  A box that clearly states her heritage
  A box that carries through ____ her generations.
  A crude, or rough outside finish,
  A weight that tells its meanings,
  for in the continent of Kmt
  Your box is linked with ceremonial sayings.
  To see the ancestral box in one's life,
  Gives the whole circle of one's existence
  An Ancestral box
  At birth
  At marriage
  At death.
  The ancestral box seen in all symbols,
  Of dusts of gold,
  Of brass
  Of silver
  That weighs it, but for the elders' minds
  Is given its full sacredness____________
  In E. J. Montgomery's ancestral box.

  c Baba Kone, (1972). From Kmt, to a sister in San Francisco.