Visual arts and literature can both be said to be modes by
which we can explore the human condition. Through them we can encounter new
perspectives, new realities and discover new possibilities. We can also
question who is allowed to speak, and who is spoken for. These possibilities
show only some of the many connections between the two art forms, and thus
creates a basis within which interdisciplinary bridges can be created.
Ingrid Pollard is a photographer,
media artist and researcher based in the UK. Her art practice is concerned with
representation, history and landscape with reference to race, difference and the
materiality of lens-based media. The work of Pollard which I am looking at here
focuses on the idyllic, romanticised representation of British countryside that
Pollard disrupts and challenges through the juxtaposition of issues of around
identity and belonging. Photography and text are placed together each a
necessary part of the issues that Pollard wants to raise.
The term ‘Bodies out of place’ used as part of the title of
this text is taken from Sara Ahmed’s book Strange
Encounters, Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. She writes;
Indeed, migrants are often
constructed as strangers (Diken 1998). In such a construction, the strangers
are the ones who, in leaving the home of their nation, are the bodies out of
place in the everyday world they inhabit, and in the communities in which they
come to live. The editors of Travellers’ Tales
discuss how ‘the migrant, journeying from ‘’there’’ to ‘’here’’ becomes a
stranger in a strange land (Robertson et al. 1994:3). Here, the condition of
being a stranger is determined by the event of leaving home. (Ahmed 2000:78)
Ahmed goes further to discuss the ways in which strangers are
viewed as strangers because they are seen as having come from somewhere else, however
she notes that this view removes from the discussion the way that a stranger becomes a stranger in the first place,
which is often through ‘…the marking out of uninhabitable spaces, bodies and
terrains of knowledge’ (Ahmed 2000:79).
In this text the literature of British writer Zadie Smith
will be used as a facilitating tool to connect with the work of artist; Ingrid Pollard.
I will explore how fictional text can be integrated to work as a catalyst for
discussion around visual artworks. I am focusing specifically on how Pollard
and Smith explore identity and belonging, and I draw upon understandings from
the field of cultural studies, critical race theory and post-colonialism. Pollard
goes ‘against the grain’ and resists past and existing limited representations
of black people, a challenge that Post-colonial theory encourages as do
anti-racist theories and cultural studies emanating from the likes of the late
Stuart Hall. Pollard highlights how visual arts can be a place for creative
inquiry, yet also a site for the deep consideration of political and cultural
struggles.
I begin first with an
excerpt which is taken from the novel White
Teeth by Zadie Smith. The book is centred on the lives of Samad Aqbal of
Bangladeshi origin and Archie Jones of English origin and their respective
families living in London and their place in a supposed multicultural Britain.
The part of the book discussed focuses on Samad’s son Millat and his
interaction with his primary school teacher.
Excerpt from ZADIE SMITHs ‘White Teeth’
‘Sometimes we find other people’s music
strange because their culture is different from ours’, said Miss Burt-Jones
solemnly. ‘But that doesn’t mean it isn’t equally good, now does it?’
‘NO MISS’,
‘And we can learn about each other through
each other’s culture, can’t we?’
‘YES MISS’,
For example, what music do you like Millat?’
Millat thought for a moment, swung his
saxophone to his side and began fingering it like a guitar. ‘Bo-orn to ruuun!
Da dadadadaa! Bruce Springsteen, Miss! Da dadadadaaa! Baby, we were bo-orn- ‘
‘Umm, nothing- nothing else? Something you
listen to at home, maybe?’
Millat’s face fell, troubled that his answer
did not seem to be the right one.’ (Smith, 2000: 155-6)
John McLeod highlights a similar point of focus to that of
Zadie Smith in his commentary and analysis on the work of British writer Hanif
Kureishi. Speaking about Kureishi’s essay ‘The Rainbow Sign’, McLeod writes
This essay records Kureishi’s
experiences as a young boy growing up in London, a visit to Pakistan as a young
man, and some comparisons between life in both locations. As a child, Kureishi
admits to having ‘no idea of what the sub-continent was like…’ Yet at school he
was mistakenly identified as an Indian by his teachers, one of whom placed
pictures of Indian peasants in mud huts before his class in order to show the
others Kureishi’s home…Kureishi’s identity was fictionalised by others as an
outsider who belonged to a land overseas, despite the fact that Kureishi was
born, like his mother, in Britain. He was not readily permitted to belong to
Britain like his classmates. (McLeod 2000:213)
Both narratives; Smith’s and Kureishi’s highlight the notion
of a body out of place, young people who only know England as their home
perceived as strangers belonging somewhere else.
Edward Said in
Orientalism (1995) forced many to question what it meant to represent and speak
for a culture, who had the right and authority to do so and what it meant for
the group being ‘represented’. Said (1995) talked of having been educated in
the British colonies of Palestine and Egypt and in the United States, but
despite his western education he was always very much aware of ‘being an
“Oriental” and therefore aware of the ‘traces’ left upon him by the West. Similarly,
Frantz Fanon in Black Skin White Masks
talked about the negative and painful emotions of becoming aware of oneself
through the eyes of other races (as transparent and invisible). Said’s
awareness of the traces left upon him by the West and Fanon’s awareness of self
through the eyes of others, identify the problem faced by many who have been
defined as ‘other’.
Coming back to White Teeth the character of Miss
Burton-Jones assumes that she can define Millat but is surprised to find that
the ‘culture’ with which she thought Millat would relate to is not the one he
had in mind. This results in Millat, who is of Bangladeshi origin but born in
London, left feeling confused and uncomfortable, a stranger in the only place
he knows as home.
Notions of being spoken for are present in the work of Zadie
Smith, as is becoming aware of oneself through the eyes of others. The
character Millat is conscious of being out of place, having said the ‘wrong’
thing, highlighting issues around belonging, preconceived stereotypes, having
to negotiate his identity with another.
Now Zadie Smith’s
work speaks to Pollard’s work in a number of ways. Pollard, although
working much earlier in the 80s than Smith’s work from the early 2000s, was
considering in visual form notions of inclusion and exclusion. This can be seen
through the way she positions herself in the photograph with the barbed wire
behind her thus seeming to exclude herself from the surrounding countryside.
Similar to Millat in White Teeth,
Pollard also experiences that feeling of a body out of place, trespassing in an
environment that is presented as reserved for another. As with Millat whose
musical tastes had already been designated and prescribed for him, Pollard is also conscious that as Black woman the
designated space for her is ‘within an urban environment’. Black people have
been a part of Britain as far back as the 18th century, yet Ingrid
Pollard feels as a body out of place in the quintessential English countryside.
Yet her experiences as a Black British woman have afforded
her great creative material, she is able to look at the way that society
categorises, labels and places individuals into boxes and boundaries, and seeks
to question and challenge this. Both Pollard and Smith are using different art
forms to explore similar themes.
Pollard uses her
physical body to create art, her body performs as part of the artwork. The
artist takes her body and places it in a specific location of her choosing.
Whereas the characters in the work of Kureishi and Smith can be read as having
no control over their locations, which it could be said are forced upon them. Pollard
as an artist has full control over what she allows her body to do, where it goes
and what it says to others.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ahmed, S. (2000) Strange
Encounters, Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (London and New York,
Routledge)
Arana, V. (eds)
(2009) “Black” British Aesthetics Today,
(Newcastle Upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing)
Bhabha, H.K (1994) The
Location of Culture (London and New York, Routledge)
Ashcroft, B., Griffiths,
G. and Tiffin, H. (eds.) (2006) The
Postcolonial Studies Reader 2nd edition, (London and New York,
Routledge)
Doy, G (2000) Black Visual Culture, (London and New
York, I.B Tauris Publishers)
Fanon, F.
(1993) Black Skin, White Masks (Pluto Press)
Gikandi, S
(1996) Maps of Englishness, Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonisation,
(New York, Columbia University Press)
Said, E. (1995) Orientalism
(London, Penguin)
Sesay, K. (eds) (2005)
Write Black, Write British, From Postcolonial to Black British Literature (Hertford, Hansib Publications Ltd)
Smith, Z. (2001) White
Teeth (London, Penguin)
Spivak, G. (1999) ‘Can the Subaltern Speak’ in B. Ashcroft, G. Griffiths and H. Tiffin
(eds.) The Postcolonial Studies Reader 2nd
edition, London and New York, Routledge, 28-37
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