When Women Meet 2*

Public Object #2: Kenya Arts Diary 2012

A 'meeting' can be  a gathering, a consulation or a convergence.  Coincidental or planned, serendipitous, an ambush, a joyful space, a clash.    “When women meet” is also the title of an oils-on-canvas painting by Fred Abuga, a visual artist at Kuona Trust.   A photograph of this painting is the artwork for the week of January 16 to the 22^nd in the Kenya Arts Diary 2012, which I use to order my life.  I had last year’s Kenya Arts Diary too.  I enjoy seeing the accidental propinquities between the scattered details of my daily life and the works of art that Kenyan artists make: meetings which are sometimes discordant, sometimes cacophonous, sometimes absurd, sometimes strangely related. 

I keep my diary in my bag next to the Constitution, close at hand so that I can check my schedule before I make a new commitment for my time.  Without my diary the experience of my daily life becomes disordered, disoriented and helplessly vague.  Where am I supposed to be, with whom, when and doing what, who am I supposed to meet?  Sometimes, my scrawled texts and the featured images seem to be a riff on a theme, to connect in some odd and quirky ways.  Abuga's work now illustrates at least three meetings between women in addition to the one he painted, because this week I was meeting "S.N, C.O. and B.M.'    Those meetings have now met the women meeting in Abuga's image.  I wonder what other meetings are occurring in other people's diaries, what accidents of intent and society, artistry and banality will wind and twine around each other in these ways.  

Abuga's “When women meet”  is an exquisite work.   His delicate downward brushstrokes make slender rainbow panels that seem to be in motion.  They stream down the canvas, below the bottom edge and out of sight, small plaques looking like elongated, exaggerated pixels.  They resolve themselves at the right distance and perspective into a small house with a sloping roof surrounded by greenery.  In front and to the side of the house, three women in pastel wraps stand talking under a tree.  Two of them are in profile to us: one's hand is on her hip, the other one might have her arms folded under her breasts. 

In the foreground, a line of earth-fire coloured strokes of paint-- reds and oranges and yellow-pinks-- suggest an enclosure-line.  A flowering hedge, a fence or a pathway lined with flowers, perhaps, defining the compound/space in which the women stand.   I wonder what the women are talking about there under their tree.  They look as if they are village women meeting to tell market stories, maybe, or to plan some work, pass on a bit of gossip, take over the country or all of these.  

If you move your head just right, squint a little or look at the painting slightly ‘squiff,’ this visual narrative of sky-compound-women-hedge escapes from sight and you see only the overlaid long dabs of blues running into greens running into reds:  easy distinctions of form disappear.  You can no longer see the women, meeting, talking under a tree.  Can they still see you?

Gazes are encounters, too -- power dynamics at play.

The third woman is talking.  Where her face is, you can see a dab of white because she is also the one figure facing out of the painting, towards us.  The other two are her audience, as are we who watch from outside.  My eyes turn repeatedly to the three of them.  The tightness of the circle they make, the raptness of the attention portrayed, the way the listening women attend to and create a space for the one speaking, by the angle of their bodies, by their posture, by the way they are turned to focus on her.  

The angle of view we adopt and the space of encounter we create matter for when women meet. 

Rebecca Kerubo and Nancy Baraza met at Village Market—it did not go well.  I think about the geography of privilege that surrounds the Village Market and wonder if the irony of “village” is intentional or a Freudian slip underlining the dissonance between sign and signified.  Or perhaps it is just another sign of the slipperiness of our post-colonial globalised condition that our words simultaneously refer to rural areas and to the 'global village.'   Village Market is not a 'village' if by that we were to mean a non-urban locale.   The area around Village Market is extremely urban, sleekly global and affluently cosmopolitan.  It might have the highest percentage of influential foreign residents of anywhere in Kenya.  It glitters with embassies and their extremely comfortably housed diplomatic staff, UN agencies, high-ranking members of the Kenyan Government and their pennant-sporting cars.  Village Market is a shopping centre frequented mostly by Nairobi's elite and upper middle classes.

We know that there are women who shop at Village Market and we know that there are those who guard them as they shop.  We also know that the two kinds of women rarely overlap and that these differences matter.  Had it been a village in the orthodox sense, perhaps the encounter between those two women would not have unfolded as it did.  Villages have different protocols: two women at a village market would not, perhaps, have experienced each other in the way that Rebecca Kerubo and Nancy Baraza reportedly did.  Other (even unpleasant) things might have happened, in other (even unpleasant) ways but perhaps not this and perhaps not in this way.   

Where women meet, and the hows and whys of those spaces structure the meanings of the encounter itself.

The person helping to evade responsibility for the disaster at Sinai and deny help to the victims might have been a woman. The government officials or person who ordered the demolition of the houses at Syokimau might have been a woman.  Perhaps, as in Phyllis Muthoni’s “Caterpillars”, that woman said about another woman:

“She should have known better than to erect her shack
on the railway/road/airport reserve.
I might have said she could, but only as a temporal measure.
Can’t she figure things out herself?”

Perhaps this woman yawned and stretched.  Perhaps, before turning away, she then casually said “Bomoa” and sent the lives of countless other women spiraling into despair.  Her word, unleashed into the world, to hunt down and prey on strangers who, as in Sitawa’s Inflamed Words  ‘could not know/Even now/They stood condemned.”

When women meet there can be desolation.  When women meet there is often rage and anger and callousness.  When women meet great wounding is possible. We can rip each other into nothingness, into tattered strips of tears and fear. 

But when women meet can also be full of wonder and surprise, a joyful play, a surge of power, the surprise of recognition, the making of a bridge.  When women meet, we can create.  When women meet, we can make and unmake the world and each other.

*g'zillion, apologies: I had posted an (even more) incorrect version earlier--about a week ago.