MY MOTHER’S PORTRAIT

There is a portrait of my mother that hangs in the reading room at Boys’ Quarters Project Space. It pops up in the many photos we take in the space I think lending a hip, hopeful and nostalgic quality to anyone or anything photographed near it. The eyes of the large face that looms in a red head tie are not looking at you and the mouth smiles softly and modestly. This is one of my favorite portraits of all time and to my mind it is iconic - and not just because it is of my mother. The dark bottle-green zero setting off the red headdress. The symbols in the background (that normally I dislike in Nigerian painting) but here somehow it works because of the chalk used and the texture of the board on which it is marked.

Before it lived in our gallery, the painting hung in the living room of our home in Port Harcourt. My twin sister, little brother and I would gaze at it and feel comforted by it on our summer holidays. This was our mother. Unknowingly we began to understand the power of portraiture as the painting worked on us. For paintings are in constant dialogue with their surroundings and the viewers emotions. Good portraits - and sometimes even bad ones - hold something. I had no doubt that it held my mother, or at least an idea of her, in the work.

When I moved back to Port Harcourt in 2013 the painting was no longer on the wall downstairs. It sat in obscurity in a corridor turned around, leaning against a wall. It did not belong there. And when I decided in 2013/2014 to transform my father’s office into a mini museum and contemporary art space, I knew I that I wanted this work to be shared with the wider world.

My father commissioned the portrait on the event of their tenth wedding anniversary in 1977 (my twin sister Noo and I were a year old). The artist is Haig David-West. He wrote recently to me: “Your dad and I were very close friends and he commissioned the painting of his beautiful Maria (your mom) to mark their 10th wedding anniversary. The medium is acrylic and chalk pastel on masonite.”

He had wonderful source material, in the form of a photograph, one that the whole family loves of my (very beautiful and very modest) mother. For years I thought the painting was based on the photo on the right but now realize it is the one on the left.

This painting makes me feel what the Brazilians call “saudade”. Both happy and sad plus a pinch of nostalgic. It makes me think of a time when my family was in a very different place and space. My little brother had not been born yet. We still lived in Port Harcourt and it was a very different Port Harcourt from today. According to Professor David-West, “the Port Harcourt of the second half of the 1970s that we shared was a vibrant intellectual and cultural hub. The University of Port Harcourt was taking off and had brought with it icons such as E.J. Alagoa, Claude Ake, Ola Rotimi, Gerald Moore, Robin Hurton, among others.”

Known as The Garden City, Port Harcourt lived up to its moniker and the title was not the ironic tragedy that it is today. It was beautiful and verdant then. Professor Haig continues:

“Then the visual arts were experiencing a creative fervor with contributions from leading artists such as Jubilee Owei, Cliff Masi, Sydney Worlu, Idakoru Boyle, Jackson Wariboko, Daye Oruwari, and others. Literature flourished with Ken Saro-Wiwa, Gabriel Okara, Elechi Amadi, and Theo Vincent setting the pace. In the performing arts, "dance-theatre" was trending with Paul Worika, Willie-Pepple, and Columbus Irisoanga in the lead.”

I simply cannot imagine a Port Harcourt this vibrant with artistic activity. The city now feels transactional and acultural. Professor Haig relocated to the United States in 1991 and now teaches at university in Indiana. He still paints portraits but his major focus in the past decade has been on research into the indigenous African sources of Cuban visual art. It seems the cultural energy dissipated around the time he left. Ken Saro-Wiwa would be executed four years later in 1995 and a new, turbulent phase in the life Niger Delta introduced. Culture and vibrancy would be replaced by fear, crude commerce and militancy. Port Harcourt would never be the same again.

The city has been through a lot of upheaval since Professor David-West left and the people, for the most part, are still good and hard working with a unique sartorial flair. But the art scene is moribund. It is one that relies on the patronage of a dwindling expatriate workforce mostly connected to the oil industry. Of course I believe that the tide must be turning. Instead of always providing decorative works for the expat market or having no other choice but to exhibit in Lagos, Boys’ Quarters Project Space exists in Port Harcourt to provide a space to tell new stories about the region - as well as the very idea of environment - through more searingly personal and less commercial works. To open up fearless internal interrogations and outward national and international dialogues in order to re-invigorate the art produced in this troubled and contested region.

My mother, when she is in town, is a regular visitor to the space. It was she that, many years ago, found and employed Victor our wonderful caretaker who, it transpires, is a genius when it comes to designing and laying down our bottle top floor! Full of wonderful ideas as to how I can improve things and on the last visit re-organising our very modest library (and my wardrobe and drawers at home, it transpires, which I am simultaneously grateful for and incensed about), my mother says little about the portrait on the wall. But I assume she is happy about it as she has not told me to take it down.

I draw attention to it today because it is Mother’s Day (at least on this side of the Atlantic). But this year, due to the unwittingly sadistic rhythm of the Roman Calendar, it is not a day of opening cards and receiving flowers. Rather my mother is buying flowers and taking them to the graveside of her youngest child - my little brother - who dropped dead at school 22 years ago on the 15th March. One of the bitterest day of the year for all of our family. She visits his grave every year, mostly alone.

Femininity and suffering.

The two go hand in hand in this place, on this continent, it seems. And so I have been told early on in my time here in Port Harcourt. As I was yelling about something no doubt very important as we struggled with the refurbishment of the space at Aggrey Road, I was pulled aside and told “it is an African woman’s place to suffer”. The implication being that in my outrage at whatever was happening I had demonstrated that I had not understood that this is my lot as a woman to suffer. To suffer not in silence (this is Nigeria afterall) but with dignity and a level of acceptance. Women and suffering. An idea I hope to mine and explore in coming discussion groups and exhibitions at Boys’ Quarters.

The placement of my mother’s portrait in the gallery is consciously symbolic. It is about the restoration of the feminine. The power of the feminine in a hyper politicized space. If Mother Nature is, by definition, a feminine force, then the Niger Delta in all its verdant fecundity is a woman. One that has been violated. One whose identity and very body has been decimated by wars waged by angry men. It’s time to re-introduce a new way of responding to and valuing the land. For it is more than just a producer of oil. It is also time to re-introduce a new way of valuing the women that work this land. (Most small-scale farmers here are women and their work is not respected as it should be). Women in Port Harcourt are commonly characterized as concerned mainly with looking for a boyfriend or any man to assist them. (People think of Nigerian women as “strong” but what does this even mean?) Prostitution is common here. Such an industry thrives wherever oil or minerals are mined in the world. I shouldn’t even try to begin to outline the issues of The Women Of Nigeria here. Suffice to say, there are a tangle of stories to tell that must consider the feminine and the female perspective. It is time to unravel this side of the Niger Delta story. There are too few women artists to tell these stories, though I think there are many artists wandering around this place that do not realize that they are artists. But I consider the feminine as something that well-balanced men must incorporate into their everyday lives and practises too.

But for now, this post is really just to celebrate Maria Saro-Wiwa and all mothers on this Mother’s Day. And also to thank Professor Haig David-West for painting such a glorious portrait, and whose work and research on the African influence in Cuban visual arts I would love to see in our space one day.

To The Mother.