Mapping the Earth's Embrace: Queer Life-Building in Mame-Diarra Niang's Éthérée
2024; UCLA James S. Coleman African Studies Center; Volume: 57; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1162/afar_a_00741
ISSN1937-2108
Autores Tópico(s)Caribbean and African Literature and Culture
Resumo“The only place that welcomes you and opens its arms to you after you die,” Mame-Diarra Niang tells me, “is the earth. It's the only place you can be at home. But for us, homosexuals, it is the only place where we are unwelcome.” [Le seul endroit qui t'accueille et qui t'ouvre les bras quand tu meures, c'est la terre. C'est le seul endroit où tu es chez toi. Mais nous, les homosexuels, c'est le seul endroit où on n'est pas accueillis.]1Niang, an Afro-diasporic visual artist with ties to Côte d'Ivoire, Senegal, and France states this as she explains the origins of her performance-installation Éthérée. She had learned of the hate crime against Madièye Diallo, a young, gay, Senegalese AIDS activist who was HIV positive and died in 2009. After his death, Diallo's corpse was exhumed from a Muslim cemetery in Thiès, Senegal by anti-gay vigilantes and left on his family's doorstep. A cell phone video of the exhumation was disseminated widely and sold as a DVD on the black market, his body and his life posited as sources of Western, secular contamination that threatened a postcolonial and heteronational Senegalese identity (Coly 2019). Unable to find a safe place to lay their son to rest, the family ended up burying him under their own home. The incident prompted Niang, a queer woman who had spent her adolescence in Dakar and was living between Dakar and Paris in 2014, to reflect on her own future death and where she may want—and may not be allowed—to lay in rest (Lovhold 2014). By dwelling on this future dispossession in death, Éthérée renders searingly visible the disposability of queer African and Afro-diasporic lives, at a critical point in time in Senegal's history. Yet what might be missed at a first reading of Niang's statement is that it also quietly affirms the possibility of a lived experience of queer belonging in Senegal; by stating that it is after death that queer people lose the potential home (the earth) that is normally opened to others, Niang's poetic phrasing implies that there are places, in life, where queer folks are welcomed, are homed, in Senegal. This article will examine how Éthérée performs, historicizes, and envisions the two sides of Niang's statement: the disposability of queer lives in Senegal and the skillful and creative ways of living queer lives that persist despite that disposability.The title of Niang's performance-installation, Éthérée, means “ethereal” and is a play on the French word détérer, which means “to unearth” or “to dig up.” Éthérée was performed only once, on the afternoon of May 11, 2014, at a private home in Dakar, as part of theat year's Dak'Art Biennale of Contemporary African Art/OFF program. In the performance, Niang sits next a mirror-lined grave that she dug, with a linen shroud laid out next to it (Fig. 1). The empty grave alludes to Diallo's absent corpse, while shrouding his imagined body in privacy. A short text placed near the entrance of the exhibition tells the story of Diallo's exhumation, but Niang herself does not speak and no other elements in the performance-installation refer to Diallo or his queerness explicitly. Instead, as Niang sits, she steadily folds sheets of paper. The sheets of paper are printed with a map that she titled Sanctuaire de poche: Plan de lignes (Fig. 2). The “map” features photographs taken by Niang of an abandoned bunker on Dakar's coastline. At the top and center of the map is a black-and-white diagram of a heart, with the cross-hatched arteries branching out like a series of winding roots. In the background, the soundtrack to an experimental opera about Charles Darwin, written and recorded by the Swedish band The Knife, plays on loop. Some viewers sit on the grass or lay on the shroud next to the grave for a while, as new people enter. Niang, from time to time, offers an audience member one of the folded maps. But each time someone reaches for it, Niang lets it go, letting the map fall into the mirrored grave. To retrieve the map, participants must reach down and lift it out of the grave, seeing their reflection against the sky (Fig. 3).While the performance was meant to honor the lives of queer persons in Senegal, Éthérée ended up experiencing the very violence it denounced. Niang had envisioned a small performance learned about through word of mouth. However, a journalist from the French newspaper Le Monde learned about Niang's upcoming performance and, before it even took place, published an article lauding the artist's courage for addressing homosexuality in (what the journalist called) a homophobic country (Azimi 2014a). The coverage in the global North raised the visibility of Niang and other queer artists’ work at the Biennale within Senegal, inciting a local backlash from extremist Islamic groups promoting a homophobic agenda.2 The work also received pushback from other political and cultural actors that, while not explicitly rejecting homosexuality, claimed that the queer artists were not representative of African art more broadly speaking (Cummings 2014). The Biennale's secretary-general, Babacar Mbaye Diop, attempted to distance the Biennale from the controversy, saying the organization was not responsible for the “OFF” programming (Steinhauer 2014; Azimi 2014b). After the vandalization of the exhibition Image précaire, visibilité gay en Afrique at the gallery Raw Materials Company, the Senegalese government closed down all exhibitions featuring artworks that addressed homosexuality, citing security reasons. Niang left Senegal due to the threats of violence she was receiving (Lathrop 2014; Sene and Adaya 2014; Azimi 2014b; Drake 2014).The public displays of homophobia that marked Diallo's burial and the 2014 Dak'Art Biennale exemplify a growing tendency towards public homophobia and anti-gay vigilantism in Senegal that began around 2008 and often decry homosexuality as un-Senegalese and as a (neo)colonial imposition.3 It should be noted that these displays are part of a broader rise in homophobic discourses in other African nations, a so-called African homophobia that has been amplified in the global media in ways that disturbingly reanimate colonial discourses of primitiveness (Kaoma 2016; Epprecht 2013: 55; Packer 2019: 131; Currier 2012). In the case of Senegal, Ayo Coly (2019) describes the change in public discourse on same-sex desire first and foremost as a political homophobia, rather than a sociocultural one. Homophobia serves as a tool of statecraft, mobilized by Senegalese political actors to position themselves as defending the cultural authenticity of African nations (Coly 2019).Such nationalist discourses that position the rejection of homosexuality as an anticolonial stance, Coly and others argue, are stoked by an erasure of precolonial and indigenous practices of gender variance and same-sex sexuality and a rewriting of such intimacies through the Western vocabulary of LGBTQI+ identities and rights (Coly 2013; Hoad 2007; Currier and Migraine-George 2016; Gunkel 2013). One example of this is the resignification of goordjiggen, a term once used in Senegal to denote a social role for men that included the performance of hyperfeminized behaviors, though it was not necessarily linked to a sexual orientation or practice. Coly (2019), Broqua (2017), and Gning (2013) show that the term is now used interchangeably with “gay” or “homosexual” and subjected to discrimination and violence; goordjiggen, who once played key social roles in Senegal, are now seen as foreign to the Senegalese national body. Unsettling homophobia in Senegal therefore requires an unsettling of what Gopinath calls “the globalization of ‘gay’ identity that replicates a colonial narrative of development and progress that judges all ‘other’ sexual cultures, communities, and practices against a model of Euro-American sexual identity” (Gopinath 2005: 11).I've chosen to analyze Éthéree because it offers precisely the opportunity to unsettle global and neocolonial narratives of both homophobia and of queerness in Senegal. Firstly, the performance-installation helps us understand how, through aesthetic practices and objects, queerness can be articulated through Wolof-Senegalese ways of being; and secondly, it helps us to understand, at a moment when homophobia was being mobilized to promote certain visions of national identity, how this homophobia is entangled in longer histories of colonial regimes of disposability. While other artworks from the vast Biennale OFF programming can also help us undertake this investigation, Éthérée serves as a particularly rich conceptual object and one, moreover, of which few traces and documentation exist. Organized by Niang herself, outside the structures of an institution, Éthérée was meant to be ephemeral and intimate, but we have much to learn from sitting with its traces. In a 2020 interview with me, Niang revisited this work, sharing her audiovisual archive of the performance and speaking to me about the process of making the work and its aftermath, as well as her interpretations and intentions for it. Indeed, in reconstituting the performance-installation and bringing in the artist's interpretations of her own work to the formal analysis and historical research I conducted, my aim is to understand Éthérée as a mode of theory-making. As Macharia contends, queer African experiences are more often treated as data points that demonstrate cultural variability than as conceptual tools that reconfigure well-established ideas in queer studies (Macharia 2016: 185). A close examination of Niang's Éthérée allows me to articulate a set of conceptual tools from the performance installation and then use those tools to illuminate practices and possibilities of queer life in and beyond Senegal.To elaborate, this article argues that Étherée's performance of mourning for Diallo models an ethics of care rooted in local practices of living quietly queer4 lives. Drawing on an interview with the artist, the formal qualities of the artwork, and embodied experiences of the performance as recounted by Niang and as observed in the public through a recording, the first two sections of this article show how Ethérée mobilizes an affect of quiet discretion that I read as an aesthetic materialization of the values of sutura, a Muslim and Wolof principle of honor broadly shared by the Senegalese population. In dialogue with queer studies scholarship on gender and sexual variance in contemporary Senegal, I demonstrate how Ethérée's formal qualities and performative elements reimagine the practice of sutura as a Senegalese way to reclaim the humanness of queer subjects. The third and fourth sections of this article turn attention to a printed map used as one of the main props in Niang's performance. Decoding the composition and the sources of the images in conversation with historical research on the colonial settlement of Dakar in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, I untangle how Ethérée indexes the racially based colonial urbanization of Dakar that marked some bodies as disposable and others as worth protecting, thus linking colonial and postcolonial discourses of exclusion based on race and sexuality. Finally, the conclusion of the article brings together the previous sections’ methods and evidence to reflect on the soundtrack that Niang selected to accompany her performance. This concluding move enables me to open the argument about Éthérée's aesthetic materialization of sutura as a skill for queer belonging in new directions: I point to how the performance's sutura-inflected queer carework articulates a planetary sensibility, offering an ethics of care that encompasses human and more-than-human beings, decentering colonial definitions of the human and human sovereignty over nature.Niang kneels, dressed in green on the green lawn, blending into the garden landscape (Fig. 4). Rows of the folded paper maps line up next to her, like the small tents of a miniature encampment. On the grainy video recording of this otherwise ephemeral performance, I am fascinated by the movement of her hands. Up and over, and over and over, her hands ply the sheets of paper into small rectangles. She is quiet, but she is not still. Through these repetitive, meditative gestures, Niang holds herself apart: protected. She is engrossed in the task— folding—that she has given herself, despite being on display. It may be an easy task, folding, but to do it for the duration of the afternoon requires endurance and concentration. It may be a humble task, folding, but the steady, relentless movement of her hands discourage interruption. As Niang folds these plan de lignes (transit maps), they become small enough to tuck away (Fig. 5). It is no coincidence she titled them Sanctuaire de poche; like the ubiquitous Paris Poche metro maps in the French capital, Niang's maps are meant to be carried with you, slipped into a pocket, purse, or fold of a robe. In fact, plier, the French word for “to fold,” is also at the root of se replier, which means to retreat or withdraw. The act of folding the map evokes a stepping back, an introspective retreat, a tucking of oneself into a place of respite. Niang's careful staging in Éthérée thus creates a sense of intimacy and shelter even while publicly mourning queer lives that are considered disposable.In fact, the quiet labor of folding in Éthérée emphasized the importance of being present, rather than presenting oneself. During the performance, Niang refused to speak, resisting the demand for a verbal explanation or dialogue. “I am not telling this young man's story,” she insists; “Rather, I am trying to mourn this place, to mourn not having the right to die here.” [Je ne raconte pas l'histoire de ce jeune homme. Plutôt, j'essaie de faire le deuil de cet endroit, de ne pas avoir le droit de mourir, là.] Keeping her hands busy was a way to quietly mark the work of mourning. In Niang's words, folding paper was something concrete, “factual.” You start with a smooth piece of paper; by the end it is folded. These repetitive, mechanical, and quotidian gestures recall the kind of home labor that is often the domain of women: folding clothes, sweeping dust, pounding cassava. Through her silent, relentless folding of the Sanctuaire de poche, Niang embodied the continual, material, wake work5 that caring for those rendered vulnerable through their exclusion from full personhood requires.Niang's refusal to fully disclose her identity during the performance enabled an aesthetic of discretion that reflects the everyday practices of queer life in Senegal. As Niang affirms, “I don't need to introduce myself. I just need to exist.” [Je n'ai pas besoin de me présenter. J'ai juste besoin d’être.] In her interview with me, Niang explained that in Senegal, queer intimacy is lived, experienced, discussed without being directly named. This is especially true as the names used to designate queer people in the Senegalese public space are rarely the terms that queer persons use to name themselves. As Jason Ferguson's work among men who have sex with men in Dakar shows, a local vocabulary for gender variance and same-sex intimacy, drawn from both French and Wolof, will not necessarily be recognized by those who are not already in the queer community; it is a vocabulary that favors ambiguity and opacity rather than disclosure (Ferguson 2017). While homophobia plays a role in Senegal's quiet practices of homosexuality, Niang's refusal to fill a silence with words comes from a choice to stay quiet rather than name and define with inadequate words. Her silence within the performance space responds to the limited categories of sexuality for describing corporeal and affective same-sex intimacy, categories that serve more to, as she describes it, “put people at ease” [mettre les gens à l'aise] than to capture a sense of being. Though she places her body on display, she refuses to make herself legible.Indeed, African queer scholarship and queer postcolonial studies more broadly has challenged the centrality of “coming out” and its presumed “liberating effects of sexual (self-) disclosure and public recognition” (Dankwa 2021: 37; Love 2007; Eng, Halberstam, and Muñoz 2005). In Serena Dankwa's ethnographic study of women who love women in southern Ghana, she takes the women's reluctance to name themselves as lesbian not as self-censure, but as invitation “to perceive the vibrancy of everyday same-sex intimacies that have not been captured in the language of sexual identity” (Dankwa 2021: 19). Many of her respondents described themselves not as being lesbian but as doing lesbian, theorizing queer erotic desire, intimate care, and kinship as a practice— as a labor of care—materialized through action, rather than an identity materialized through discourse (Dankwa 2021: 43). Describing the intimacies, practices, and relationships of women who love women in Senegal as quietly queer, Loes Oudenhuijsen similarly notes that “much of the everyday lived realities of queer persons in Senegal escapes discourse” (Oudenhuijsen 2019: n.p.; 2021). Dankwa and Oudenhuisen's observations are echoed by other studies of queerness in Africa that highlight the meaningfulness of silence as a way to resist “the imperative to make African sexualities knowable and intelligible in colonial languages,” which “obscures the importance of silences” (Moreau and Tallie 2019: 56). While silence may be in part a strategic choice in the face of state-sanctioned homophobic violence, Stella Nyanzi contends that silence has a cultural significance that enables it to serve as a “collective language” and a “gesture of defiance” in some queer African contexts (Nyanzi 2015: 190, 188). Queer life is made possible not in spite of silence, but through its skillful deployment and through quiet practices of care that are not always publicly labelled as queer.The quiet, meditative space created by Éthérée, I propose, reflects these local understandings of and practices of queerness in that the performance opens up an intimate space where neither Niang nor the participants would be compelled to choose a label for themselves or to articulate through speech their reactions to Diallo's exhumation; they could focus instead on the work of mourning and healing at hand. Niang's performance claimed and curated a space of quietly queer belonging which may seem at odds with normative global frameworks of protest and resistance, but may nevertheless powerfully reshape local understandings of community and care.6Analyzing Niang's description and intentions for Éthérée, as well as material and corporeal elements of the installation-performance, clarifies Éthérée's quiet engagement with homosexuality and how it opens a space of safety and care. The performance's aesthetic materialization of quiet queerness, however, also resonates with discourse analysis and interview-based anthropological research on gender and sexual variance in contemporary Senegal. Through an engagement with this body of scholarship, my aim in this section is to show how Éthérée can function as a queer reimagining of the Senegalese practice of sutura.Sutura is a Wolof-Arabicized term that signifies the virtuous embodiment of discretion, modesty, privacy, protection. It is part of an Islamic Wolof—and more broadly, a Senegalese— code of ethics that defines an honorable life (Sylla 1978; Ly 1967: 57-58; Coly 2019). Sutura is an action as much as an attribute: one possesses sutura by adhering to certain behaviors, such as extending sutura to others by not revealing an indiscretion. There is a material—a textural—quality to this concept, as it is common to refer to “covering” someone in sutura and to speak of a breach in sutura's code as a “tearing” of it (Mills 2011: 3, 137). Sutura is sometimes mistaken as a wholesale silencing of the vulnerable, and of women in particular (Mills 2011: 10; Oudenhuijsen 2019; Miller 1990; d'Almeida 1994). Certainly, sutura was and is a practice through which hierarchies of caste, gender, and class are articulated (Mills 2011; Mbodj-Pouye 2013; 2012; Gueye 2011: 69). Modeling one's behavior to uphold sutura—which often means covering the indiscretions of the men in their families or higher-caste, higher-class members of society—is particularly important for women, as the value of sutura is the foundation of feminine honor (Oudenhuijsen 2021: 435-36).7 Nonnormatively gendered subjects are typically excluded from sutura; they are seen as incapable of possessing sutura and unworthy of benefiting from the protection that sutura can offer (Mills 2011: 3-4). Nevertheless, sutura is not a social value that is inherently harmful or inherently good: rather, this concept is a cultural and epistemological resource that can be creatively taken up to expand a notion and practice of care for those that human society has rendered vulnerable. As Ivy Mills argues, “the hierarchizing ethics of sutura are both reproduced and contested in the contemporary period,” and sutura is being refashioned today into a feminist ethics of communal care (Mills 2011: 12).Scholarship on the public and political discourse around homosexuality in Senegal shows how sutura might be recuperated as an asset to protect and valorize queer life in Senegal. In response to the homophobic discourse that claims that queer individuals violate Senegalese cultural norms of gender and sexuality, Coly (2019) and M'Baye (2019) both argue that it is antigay vigilantes and invasive media representations that violate the Senegalese cultural norm of sutura by making the intimate lives of queer persons the subject of public discourse. Such violations are only permissible, Coly argues, because “the homosexual” has been transfigured into a “barely human being” (Coly 2019: 38). Extending sutura to someone is recognizing their personhood—recognizing their humanness within a Senegalese ontology—and thus covering queer individuals with sutura by insisting that their intimate lives remain private takes a step toward recognizing queer persons as fully human. While this mobilization of sutura to condemn public displays of homophobia and violence is productive, it is limited in that it nevertheless casts sutura as something that the non-queer community must extend to cover the queer community's deviance, stopping short of recognizing honor and honorable practices as part of queer life.In contrast to the previous scholarship, my analysis suggests that Éthérée depicts queer individuals as agents of sutura, able to cover others as well as be covered by sutura. The shroud that Niang carefully laid out next to the grave recalls the burial cloth in which corpses are wrapped for Muslim burials, the layers of thin fabric cradling the body as it meets the earth's embrace. The performance-installation Éthérée, I posit, recasts sutura as a practice of queer carework through which the humanness of queer subjects can be reclaimed. The shroud functions as a material metaphor of the sutura that can be torn from the queer and gender-diverse individuals outside of the garden walls. In the performance, the fabric is extended—opened—an invitation for the audience members to settle their bodies in it and imagine being covered in its protection. Niang noted that during the performance, the audience members who laid down on the shroud were mostly individuals from the queer community. Through this placement of the shroud, Ethérée refashions the Wolof and Muslim value of sutura in ways that honor queer lives and queer bodies, including them in a community of care in life and dignity in their death.Éthérée thus functions as an invitation to explore sutura as an intrinsic property and practice of queer life in Senegal. The performance-installation opens an intimate, safe space for the audience members to be present with each other, to rest, and to sit discreetly with their grief, their love, their joy, their pain without being prompted into unchosen disclosures. This reflects the everyday practices of queer life in Senegal, where sutura can be mobilized to refuse to answer invasive questions about one's sexual life or to choose some modes of dress when visiting elders and other modes in other spaces (Oudenhuijsen 2019). The quietness about sexuality and gender is not lived as a contradiction or a lie, nor does it index the shame of being closeted, as it might in EuroAmerican understandings of gay identity. Instead, this quietness, this choosing when and when not to disclose, is cast in the performance as an expression of sutura: of an honorable life (Broqua 2010: 49). Rather than mobilizing the secular and global language of identity-based rights to demand protection, Éthérée centers local and religious epistemologies in its articulation of a queer, honorable life that participates in a broader Senegalese community of care. Ultimately, it posits the practice of sutura as a Senegalese way to reclaim the humanness of queer subjects, not necessarily in opposition to the normative, national values of sutura but through a skillful deployment of its queer potential.In its practice of sutura, Éthérée renders queer lives as precious rather than disposable, human rather than dehumanized. It would be easy to read Éthérée uniquely as a response to the homophobic strains in contemporary Senegalese society. However, the folded map—the Sanctuaire de poche—quietly indexes longer histories of dispossession embedded in the colonial settlement and urbanization of Dakar, revealing how they resonate with contemporary discourses on disposability. In this section, I will turn attention to this prop and analyze its cartographic function, the sites and image sources it references, and its formal or compositional qualities to untangle the colonial histories it references and critiques. Like the folding gestures enacted during the performance, the Sanctuaire de poche's composition adopts an aesthetics of intimacy, privacy, discretion that reclaims and reframes a site of colonial violence. This reclaiming and reframing counters the colonial discourses of contagion, discourses that have an uncanny resonance with the ways queer bodies are discussed in Senegal today.In its unfolded state, the Sanctuaire has a black-and-white, eighteenth-century diagram of a human heart in the center, with a compass rose and an unmarked scale. Surrounding the heart are ten photographs—four small, four medium, and two large—taken on the rocky coastline of the southernmost tip of the peninsula on which Dakar is situated, a point called Cape Manuel. The photos show glimpses of an abandoned military fortification that looks out to where the Atlantic Ocean turns into the Gorée Bay (Fig. 6). The photographs all have a diagonal composition, lining earth, ocean, and sky into angled, repeating blocks of red, gray, and blue. The colors are slightly muted as the different surfaces—water, basalt rocks, iron-rich laterite soil, and concrete—reflect the white light. Though it is labeled Plan des lignes (subway map), indicating its cartographic function, the Sanctuaire shows no clear routes or indices for navigation. Instead, Niang's map favors a fractured vision, oblique sightlines, and contrasting angles. It is a horizontal visuality that offers only partial views of the military bunker and make its location more, not less, difficult to identify.The components of the Sanctuaire de poche thus offer a contrasting regime of visuality than the one engendered by the colonial cartographic regime. Privileging distance over proximity, colonial mapping projects resulted in “the staging of Earth on a piece of paper before one's eye as an enframed whole that can be ordered, secured, rendered knowable, and ultimately masterable” (Jay and Ramaswamy 2014: 33). The mastery was both material (maps accompanied treaties that served to claim territories for European powers) and symbolic, positioning the human as a disembodied “measuring eye” that gazes on the geographic territories it rules (Smith 2014: 277). In contrast, the vistas in the photographs on the Sanctuaire are embodied ones, taken from the ground, and they do not cohere into a holistic view of the site. The Sanctuaire not only impedes vision, it draws attention to what is beneath the ground through a close-up of the rootlike cardiac veins that seem to grow under a photograph of a dry, grassy patch of soil on the volcanic bluff. Through this framing and composition, the Sanctuaire thus begins to map out an alternative relationship between human body and geographic territory than the one invited by colonial cartographies.Moreover, the anatomic engraving of the heart in the center of the Sanctuaire likens the human body to the earthly ground and subtly introduces the notion of diagnosis and disease to this cartographic document. Fittingly, the anatomic diagram comes from a medical reference book by Jean-Baptiste Sénac, a physician who served under Louis XIV and made breakthroughs in understanding and treating heart disease. One can trace the origins of cardiology to this systematic cartographer of the heart's treatise (Bowman 1987). In the Sanctuaire, the bottom two-thirds of the photograph in the top left corner is overlaid with an inset from the heart diagram, a close-up of coronary arteries and cardiac veins as they twist and branch around each other. The topography of the human heart here resembles the flesh of the earth and reminds viewers that their buried bodies will slowly decompose and nourish the soil. This cartographic document joins human bodies and geologic bodies in their shared materiality, mapping the relationship between human and land not into one of dominance, but of co-constitution.Finally, the Sanctuaire brings the unique geographic location of Cape Manuel into the performance space, making it a parallel burial ground for Niang's wake work. Taken from different angles, the photographs of the military fortification
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