Colour: A space where we can negotiate freedom
Afopefoluwa Ojo
Toni Morrison has been likened to a musician or a composer with regard to the rhythm of her literature. She also talks about colour when she says she stripped “Beloved” of colour, when she says the origin of “Jazz” for her was imagining the book as a painting and writing the book was like reincarnating the painting, painting it back with words and letting it write itself.
While reading her interview, Paris Review, The Art of Fiction № 134, my attention is drawn to the way she speaks as though she has mastered confidence in her process of creation, in her experiments and mistakes. I know one should expect nothing less of a Nobel Laureate who spent many daybreaks with her back hunched over her writing desk with nice number two pencils on yellow legal pads, coffee brewing while doing the work. Her work is excellent not because certain people have said it’s excellent but because it’s excellent and relevant only because it’s relevant. It addresses poignant issues: of beauty, race, loss, love, and the discrepancies between in a way that seems as though it’s set out to spill blood from the very beginning; almost at the point of fiending to break the threshold of subjectivity if that’s even possible.
When a creator stumbles upon a beautiful thing, I imagine that it comes first from a lot of tinkering, experimentation, and deliberation. Deliberate work is kind to critical eyes because there often is something truer and neater about it. The work that goes into its creation is from a lot of research, creating, recreating, revising, editing, imposing, re-imposing, composing, and even above the actual work, there’s the internal process. How things are actualised in the mind as canvas before they’re actualised on canvas as canvas and then thorough revision. But it never just falls on the laps of the creator.
Photography as art is more visual and colourful photos unlike colourless words are not at all strange so I wonder why Logo Oluwamuyiwa has decided also to remove colour from his photos. Logo’s photos are sharp, clear and demanding in how they catch your attention and force you to look. I see everything yet I look for the things I cannot see like the cow at the back of the photograph of foams which I did not see until I saw. And because I have sometimes found them myself, I am determined to find them again, like a puzzle. It’s many people, it’s one person, so I’m tracing their stories with my eyes, intrigued by the way they seem so comfortable with the photographer and how their eyes are so true. But still, my Lagos is colourful, so why has he decided to represent it without.
He says he’s done this to draw our attention to the things we’d otherwise be distracted from. Lagos is a city buzzing with people, noise, colourful cars, yellow buses, awfully multi-colored houses, black and white cable dishes jutting out of the rust-colored roofs, blue uniformed security guards, black uniformed police officers, wine and yellow-uniformed Lastma officials standing at different intersections of the roads, brown nepa poles, red and white masts, tight places dark with brown dust and other places alive with night lights and trees.
Through Logo’s “Monochrome Lagos” project, we see the quiet of loud Lagos, the similitude of Lagos to lines and forms and patterns that would otherwise go unnoticed. He shows us that Lagos is not any less of Lagos without its colour. It is as if to say, now colour shines light, now colour makes known, now colour amplifies, but even without colour, these things would still have existed and would have still been beautiful.
Toni Morrison does something similar with her Book “Beloved.” In her interview, she talks about the stripping of words of their colour and then the re-imposing of colours in certain areas to bring light to the thing that would otherwise have been ignored. She says this and I imagine “Beloved” as colourless.
There are two instances that she uses colour to show us the thing that would have been ignored. Morrison writes: ‘Suspended between the nastiness of life and the meanness of the dead, she couldn’t get interested in leaving life or living, let alone the fright of two creeping-off boys. Her past had been like her present — intolerable — and since she knew death was anything but forgetfulness, she used the little energy left her for pondering color. “Bring a little lavender in, if you got any, Pink if you don’t”. And Sethe would oblige her with anything from fabric to her own tongue. Winter in Ohio was especially rough if you had an appetite for color.’
As Baby Suggs dies, all she wants is colour. She says bring me this colour and that colour as though her whole life has lacked colour. She consumes one colour and moves to the next. Morrison tries to show us the dullness of black life during slavery. She says that most black people wore only slave colours and so colour for them was like luxury. So there was Baby Suggs, on her sick bed, about to die, but before death, ready to consume all the colour her bleak life (of loss and suffering) had eluded her. Bring a little lavender in, if you got any, pink if you don’t.
The other instance is when Sethe runs amok buying ribbons and bows, enjoying herself the way children enjoy that kind of colour. Here, Sethe, Beloved, and Denver have a wonderful time. It’s rare for them to live like that, eating sweet things and playing loudly while dressed in even louder colours, exotic costumes made by Sethe, exaggerated with colour. The circumstances that surround these moments are strange. Sethe is overwhelmed with guilt and tries to appease her dead baby who has returned. The end result is devastating.
These parts of the the book amongst others are peculiar because of how colourful they are. Other scenes are not that colourful and so not so peculiar or maybe peculiar in other ways. In Logor’s recent projects, he’s re-imposing primary colours back into his work too. These works are more surreal. He’s shown you the photograph in black and white and now goes ahead to highlight some parts of the photograph with primary colours as if to say “Look at this! Look at this!”
It’s expression. He says his art is for expression: “Primary colours are used in maps to identify landmarks and label the maps for easy reading, that is, they tell stories on maps. I take out colour from my work to further showcase and accentuate the story. I am curious in putting back the colour not to beautify again but to use them as maps do — identify key spots of the story based on meanings of each colour in media and branding. For example, red means stop, danger, etc”
Toni Morrison and Logo both show us the essence of colour in their art. They’ve made deliberate effort to make colour (or the absence of it) mean something more than just colour (or the absence of it). It’s conceptualisation in different contexts that allows for ultimate self-expression. They’re both teaching us to look at our environments with different eyes, to look through the flamboyant or the absence of it for the things that lie beneath. They’re teaching us ways with which we can negotiate our freedom in the spaces where we allow ourselves truly be free, especially through our expression and of course, solely on our own terms.
About the Author: Afopefoluwa Ojo lives and works in Lagos, Nigeria.
