Can the Subaltern Bleed? : Resisting Heteronormative Nationalisms in Black Art
Zanele Muholi’s debut photograph book Only Half the Picture released in 2006-twelve years after apartheid ended in South Africa- is a deep meditation on the everyday resistance of the Black Lesbian Body.
DYKE, BULLDAGGER, STUD, DOM, AG.
These are the taglines of what it means to describe a Black lesbian in the United States context. The work of Muholi ties us to a diasporic belonging in the parallel aesthetics of Black lesbianism. How are you performing into the localized gender? The black lesbian is constantly proving themselves as safe, as un-contradicting, as stable, as binary.
(Period I. 2005)
The anxieties that exist with navigating a “Born Free” South Africa as a Black lesbian is bounded to heteronormative nationalist narratives that deem you unworthy to mother the nation. The consequences of not adhering to the politics of reproduction in the black nationalist agenda renders one abject, left in aberration. Muholi returns the desire to gaze at the violated Black lesbian body by using images as an avenue to revisit rigid doctrines that communally police the Black body. She tackles this through the menstrual cycle, and displaying bloody menstrual pads, a menstrual pad sticking to boxers briefs, and blood down the tub drain. Period is about challenging notions that the Black lesbian body is a problem-to-be-dealt-with, but instead a product of the same structural subjugation that has left many Black people dispossessed in a post-apartheid South Africa.
(Period II. 2005)
What we imagine as a part of the post-apartheid imaginary is filled with the assertion of the Rainbow Nation. The Rainbow Nation is a totem for a new bright hopeful future that is fully healed from the past.“Each of us is as intimately attached to the soil of this beautiful country as are the famous jacaranda trees of Pretoria and the mimosa trees of the bushveld — a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world” Mandela preached harmony.
It was a belonging that was rested upon forgiving and forgetting the violent regime of Afrikaner nationalism and British colonialism. It was a forced peace, a reconciliation deferred. One that encouraged the social justice Westerner to move on to the next site of disaster capitalism in the world. That everything that happened in the past, all the segregation, all 752 children killed by the white supremacist regime during the Soweto Uprising in 1976, as if we must forget about the land dispossession, as if we forgot the colonial remnants that left Azania a stranger to herself. We deny the effects of apartheid. As if we weren’t marching to solidarity tunes in the eighties, as if Harlem USA didn’t bring the world to its knees to divest, as if Ron Dellums didn’t revive the Dellum legacy as anti-imperialist Negro leaders. It was a time to be in solidarity, now the connection is blurred. Did we forget about South Africa? Mandela walked slowly to the podium in 1992, screaming hoorah in his release, screaming salvation in 1994 at the voting polls. Democracy tasted so good, so sweet, when the face of progress was African National Congress, a promise of Black liberation. A promise of Black nationalism. Years later, we find ourselves in dispossession still. The blood of Marikana martyrs stains, Rhodes is slowly falling, the youth of Azania are seeking the truth to be seen, this is not the Rainbow Nation we’ve been sold. This is not the rainbow nation we were force fed for the World Cup in 2010. When Mandela died, the fantasy should have died. South Africa is still not free.
(Period III. 2005)
Zanele Muholi’s Other Half of the Picture is a gateway into addressing the paradoxes of citizenship and belonging in South Africa. She uses the Black lesbian body to point out that these formal freedoms (South Africa passed Section 9 in the 1996 Constitution with a non-discrimination clause for sexuality and gender) does not protect the vulnerable. The constitution cannot restore the trauma that exist being a product of a country newly free. In Muholi’s work we see that Black lesbian critique helps understand the gaps and discontinuities in the narrative of the Rainbow Nation and a free South Africa.
Other Side of the Picture features a collection known as Period I-V. These series of photos are a critique of how the the mother of the nation trope still applies to the Black lesbian body. The usage of the menstrual period is a critique on the denial of womanhood to Black lesbian bodies in the post-apartheid nationalist imaginary. The silence around “corrective rape” (referring to a violating act to convert lesbians back to heterosexual via sexual violence) in mainstream South African politics has been addressed by Muholi in her photographic theory. Muholi’s work resists “pleasurable consumption” (Pumla Gqola) with the menstrual blood from this black lesbian body being produced. Muholi “queers” the public space, by showing blood on the ground, in the tub, on the menstrual pad. Blood being shown is queering the post-apartheid imaginary. Blood shed is not a topic of progress. We forget about the civil war that happened between 1990–1994. Muholi reminds us of the blood.
Mainstream politics negate what Muholi has coined as the “Black Lesbian Genocide.” Post-apartheid nationalism are built on a denial of the Black woman’s genocide. Muholi, through the curation of these photos, proves that you can not see the blood of the lost lives, but see the blood of the black lesbian menstrual. I still bleed, I still am woman, I am natural. Keep me alive. This assertion of the menstrual speaks to the homonormative nationalist politics that are about reproduction, and a denial of Black lesbian existence as it is unAfrican.
(Period IV. 2005)
Muholi takes on the idea of menstrual period to highlight how identity categories are simple projections onto the black lesbian body. Mass interpretation of the black lesbian body has led them to be further silenced in the national, the local and the intimate. The body is used as a critique of the post-apartheid narrative that says homosexuality is unAfrican. The normalcy of the menstrual cycle helps question Is my period unAfrican? Muholi’s emphasis on the Black lesbian body in the Other Half of the Picture is an opportunity for a reopening of national narratives that have asserted that homosexualtiy is unAfrican, and that the Black woman must be the mother of the nation. Muholi reconstructs these assertions. I am African, I am your mother.
The denial of womanhood on the Black lesbian body is a performative act. I use performance theorist April Sizemore Barber to ground me in the aesthetic of displacement that appears in Muholi’s work. Aesthetic of displacement is the “desire to witness the the violated black lesbian body” which thus becomes a “mode of performance that displaces the focus off the violated bodies and onto the spectator’s own complex desire to view the violation” There is a displacement of notions of Africanness that becomes tested on the Black lesbian body in South Africa. There are narratives of the Black Lesbian body in South Africa: that she is hunted, that she is counter revolutionary. Muholi allows for the audience to renegotiate their notion of, specifically masculine of center lesbians, what it means to bleed.
When Muholi shows the pad, and the blood on the pad, it is a witness. These photos are displaying a symbolic witnessing of proving I, too, am a woman. This is the foundation of post-apartheid reality, not the imagination of the Rainbow Nation. Muholi is inviting the audience to witness the blood. The spaces the blood appears. We expect the blood of a lesbian woman, because of the violence, the rape, the murder, however the title of the photos are Period, alluding to the subject matter of these photos being a menstrual cycle. We must provide testimony. The pad is proof, I, too, Am a Woman.
(Period V. 2005)
An aesthetic of displacement is critical to interrogating Black art. Black death is pornographic. Black lesbian death is pornographic. One must appreciate the blood in these works. We expect the blood of a black lesbian body, so we can all play witness, so we can all miss what we knew could not survive. Blood is a symbol for the aftermath of being violated.
Image Period II is about preventing the audience from seeing the violence. The is blood on the ground, situated in between soil, rock and grass. Blood on the streets. We could think it is blood left over potentially from a murder scene, we expect that from narratives of Black lesbian genocide, however Muholi opens her legs to prove this is her blood in Period IV. She sits, and we see her boxers with a pad in them. Her boxers have a menstrual pad in them, the absurdity, however, is the boundaries. There must be a boundary to how much can be projected onto the black lesbian body. Those projections do not protect her, it reproduces the gaze. The black lesbian body is imagined to be a rejection of womanhood, sometimes the motivation for corrective rape, however the bleeding of a masculine woman is a reinterpretation of that nationalist narrative.
Period is a critique of voyeurism of traumatic acts in African art, and also in relationship to queer bodies. The black queer body must be abject, absent, or corrected. In 2009, Zanele Muholi’s work was deemed ‘pornographic’, ‘immoral, offensive and going against nation-building’ by the Minister of Arts and Culture, Lulu Xingwana, in South Africa. This led to national galleries rejecting Muholi’s work, and thus Muholi’s art practice was unAfrican. What does it mean to be a shadow to your self? There is a “crisis of representation” for South Africa, where the truth contradicts narratives of progress. Post-apartheid imagination is Rainbow Nation, however how can that be actualized when images of Hector Pieterson shot during the 1976 Soweto uprising still linger? The necropolitics of South Africa exist in Muholi’s refusal to materialize representation of sexual trauma and violence. Muholi refuses to adopt grotesque symbolism for white/western/outsider sympathizers.
The Black lesbian bleeds.
(Period I. 2005)
(Period II-IV. 2005)
