Author Archives: B Merritt

Monsters and Phantoms

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This post was contributed by Oyedepo Olukotun a student on Birkbeck’s MA History Of Art with Photography.

In Professor T.J. Clark’s talk Was Picasso a Woman? : Reflections on Nude, Green Leaves and Bust hosted by the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities on Friday June 7 to accompany the launch of his book Picasso And Truth: From Cubism To Guernica, it soon became clear that Picasso was not gender swapping but was casting himself as a woman artistically. Speaking even artistically, in light of statements Clark attributes to Picasso, the notion of the artist as a woman seemed far-fetched. “I would love to paint like a blind man who pictures an arse by the way it feels” or “Like any artist, I am primarily the painter of woman, and for me, woman is essentially a machine for suffering” did not lend credence to Picasso’s case.

Monsters and Phantoms

In light of the above statements Picasso’s terse “I am a woman” is soon sidelined. However, what proceeded to catch my attention in Professor Clark’s talk, which focused on Picasso’s Nude, Green leaves and Bust (1932) and Nude on a Black Sofa (1932), was Clark’s periodical refrain of “monsters and phantoms”. In Lecture 4 of his book, Clark embarks on an analysis of Picasso’s The Painter and His Model (1927) to explore the artist’s fixation with monsters. At a basic level Clark, in his capacity as a social art historian, aims to divorce Picasso’s art, one painting at a time, from a connoisseurial or biographical interpretation.

The transcendental truth that Clark reveals in Picasso’s paintings is the long tradition of art with the objectification of women. That Western art depicts women the way it does is a practice Picasso inherited from a deep-rooted tradition as the British Museum’s Ice Age art: Arrival of the modern mind exhibition has shown us. That this depiction is because he is artistically a woman and Picasso’s sexualised reasons for his stance made for fascinating and revelatory observation in Clark’s talk. Further on Picasso’s stance aligned with his depiction of women as monsters makes for an interesting juxtaposition in Clark’s book and talk.

Women as Monsters

The practice of depicting women as monsters may or may not have began with Picasso however it is not unique to him. In her article The MoMA’s Hot Mamas Carol Duncan points us in the direction of artists like Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Willem de Kooning and Robert Heinecken who, among many, depict women as monstrous, grotesque, menacing and castrating. Duncan uses Picasso’s paintings as a prime example of this genre of women deprecating art; this would have met with the approval of the artist who, according to Clark, was concerned with posterity.

Clark, fascinatingly, traces for us the genealogy and journey of Picasso’s monstrous women and sets us up for the excitement of discovering the truth that transcends autobiography in art which would explain the root of the emotion that has led artists to depict women as monsters.

Racial integration in US cities

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This post was contributed by Mayur Suresh, an intern at the Birkbeck Institute for Social Research.

How racially integrated are US cities today? Are they more integrated today than previously? An insightful presentation at Birkbeck by John Logan, Professor of Sociology at Brown University, paints a complex picture.

Using New York City as an example, Prof Logan argued that cities in the United States have always been segregated to some extent. While in the early 1900s only 1% of the city was African-American, other recent immigrant communities such as Russian Jews and Italians were confined to specific parts of the city. By the 1920s, poverty and the persistence of Jim Crow laws in the southern US forced many African-Americans to seek better lives in urban centres in the north. This “great migration” of the 1920s saw the creation of “black ghettoes” such as Harlem in New York city.

In the 1920s, New York City’s index of dissimilarity for African-Americans was about 0.7 (0 being the most integrated, 1 being the most segregated). This index hovered between 0.8 and 0.9 for most of the 20th century, and this level of segregation of the African-American community continues today. The civil rights era and the passage of fair housing laws did little to change this level of segregation.

Prof Logan then compared this level of segregation of African-Americans with the Italian and Russian Jewish communities. In the early 1900s both these communities lived in specific areas – Italians in Greenwich Village and Russian Jews in Lower East Side. Many of the African-Americans who migrated to New York City were from different social classes – while some did blue collar jobs, others could be identified as middle class. Italians, by and large, performed manual labour and many dropped out of school. Similarly, the Russian Jewish population mostly did working class jobs, and came to be closely associated with the garment industry. Both these communities had higher indices of dissimilarity than African-Americans in the 1920s but the indices for both communities fell rapidly to about 0.3 by the 1990s. Prof Logan argued that both these communities were able to integrate rapidly by virtue of gradually being identified as “white”.

Moving on to segregation today and its relation to class, Prof Logan looked at the social and racial make up of neighbourhoods today. While it’s assumed that African-American people lived in African-American neighbourhoods because they were poor, what Prof Logan’s data shows is that racial segregation occurred regardless of class. Meaning that poor white people lived amongst other poor white people and poor African-American people lived in poor African-American neighbourhoods. Comparing the data across classes presents an even more complicated picture: the average poor white neighbourhood had less poor people than the average rich African-American neighbourhoods.

Switching to segregation in education, Prof Logan’s data showed that schools were even more segregated than neighbourhoods. The majority of African-American children went to African-American majority schools while the average white student went to white majority schools.

According to Prof Logan, the traditional model of viewing changes in racial composition of neighbourhoods has been the “Invasion and Succession” model: African-Americans enter a neighbourhood resulting in an exodus of white people (white flight) until there is a majority African-American population. Recent demographic data about immigration of Asian and Hispanic population reveals a different pattern. It was found that in neighbourhoods that start off as all white and into which Asian and Hispanic populations begin to settle, and then into which the African-American population migrated, there was no white flight. These neighbourhoods resulted in what was referred to as “global neighbourhoods” in urban areas. According to Prof Logan this is having an impact on the meaning of race for white populations in the United States today.

Where We’re From, Who We Are

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How do our backgrounds – where we were born, where our parents and grandparents were born and where we live – shape our sense of ourselves and how we express that sense of self? Birkbeck creative writing lecturers Anthony Joseph and Liane Strauss explored these questions at two free events hosted by Islington Central Library as part of Islington’s Word2013 Festival.

Anthony Joseph’s inspiring writing workshop encouraged Islington residents to think about their ancestors by focusing on voices from the past and family ‘black sheep.’ A week later, workshop participants read their work alongside Birkbeck students at Liane Strauss’ exciting performance event.

Liane said “The theme of the Islington event: Where We’re From, Who We Are, fit right into themes we had been exploring on the course. On the evening, our creative writing students were joined by some of the participants on Anthony’s workshop. It was a wonderful mix of poems and poets, a great opportunity for potential students to meet current students and hear their work. A brilliant evening and a great success!”

WE WERE BORN ON A SUNDAY

1.
[Saltpond, Ghana 1681]

My name is Eresi Mebrabrabio
I’m tall like palm wine tree
My husband calls me Odo
Yes, Odo, for he loves me like the smooth
Arabi coffee I warm for him at break of day
But few know me.
I am Mami Wata.
I hide my wares in Egyaa number two
And sell them in Kormantse,
I come home with beads.

2.
[Jos, Nigeria, 1979]

Sister Esi Panyin; now she is a marvel to behold
Hair like crown of Frangipani tree; body
Tall like Araba; skin smooth like
Clay, Rayfield laterite; and eyes,
Eyes wide like Bush-Baby.
Many fear the lash of her tongue,
Bulala tongue that fells Baobab tree
Faster than a Kwado-frog catches flies.
But her smile, when it comes, is the cool, cool of
Rain after a season of punishing dry.

3.
[London, England, 2013]

Eresi I wanted to have your name
But mother said no,
I wanted to bear your tribal mark
But mother said no,
Sister Panyin did not care.  She smoked
Her spliff and she laughed: “Let’s go to the
Niger Bend and bury bare feet in the dust!”
My name is Esi Kakraba and
That is how it was.

 Juanita Cox Westmaas

 Black Sheep

I am alone. Sitting in a room with my husband who no longer speaks to me,
And the two remaining children that I was allowed to have back
I am alone.

They scream for me externally and I scream for her internally
The one they took away from me.
I try to see her face, but it’s fading.
I try to hear her voice but its fading.
My now-babies scream louder.
‘Aren’t you going to see to them?’ my husband says.
It’s the first time he’s spoken to me today, yet he still doesn’t look at me.

I pick up the first baby and jiggle him on my knee.
I’ve forgotten how to be a mother.
I coo and sing until he’s settled, and pick up the second baby.
The only daughter I have left.

I try to see my child that was taken; the one I used to cradle so tightly.
The one whose hair had that sweet cotton candy smell.
The one who looked nothing like her father.

When I gave birth to her I was sick;
Not through sickness, but through knowing.
My husband held my hand through the birth, and told me that he loved me.
I just cried.
I knew when I saw her face that those dark eyes belonged to another man.

In the following weeks my husband cooed over me and her and bought us both presents.
He stayed up and read the now-babies bedtime stories before tucking them in,
And then he’d sit by her cot and he’d watch her.
‘She’s so beautiful,’ he’d say, ‘Just like her mother’.
Bile rose in my throat – I began to resent her.
She was a constant reminder of my mistakes, of my lies, of my shame.
Her eyes gave her away.
I knew that when she grew older, she would reveal our secret.

When my husband went to work, I looked at those eyes that would soon betray me.
I didn’t feel love nor hate, as I snaked the fingers of my right hand around her neck, cradling her head with my left.
Her skin felt so soft.
My heart danced as if it was on fire.
I had no choice.
I felt for her windpipe and started to squeeze.
‘What are you doing?’
He was at the door holding flowers.
He left work early as a surprise.
He caught me strangling my youngest child.
That was the beginning.

 Kim Fraser

Land Rush

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This post was contributed by Sonia Rothwell, an alumna of Birkbeck’s MSc International Security and Global Governance. This event was part of a series of film-screenings leading up to Surplus: A Sypmosium on Wealth, Waste and Excess, which takes place on 21 June.

There is sometimes a danger when discussing Africa and big business in the same sentence to see commerce as the hawkish outsider taking advantage of fragile or indeed non-existent governance. Hugo Berkley’s film, “Land Rush”, about agribusiness, produced for the Why Poverty? strand on BBC Four last year, has a more ambiguous, cautiously optimistic slant. Could big business bring big bucks to Mali and turn some of its smallholders into sugar cane growing specialists?

In the fascinating Q and A session after the film screening, with Birkbeck’s Isobel Tomlinson, Berkley admitted he had a whole raft more material and this already hot topic would certainly bear more airings. The thrust of the story is that land poor rich nations such as Saudi Arabia are leasing fertile tracts from countries such as Mali to feed their own populations.  The case studies Hugo Berkley has found represent the dilemma facing subsistence farmers whose own livelihoods and needs appear to be at odds with the ambitions and financial needs of their state. Some farmers appeared to back the project which was being developed by SOSUMAR (the Markala Sugar Company) while others complained of a land-grab. The balance of the film was fine: can development increase at the pace which Mali arguably needs without the involvement of the global private sector?

Tantalisingly, there was no conclusion to the story, the project which was to have brought sugar cane farming to Mali’s central region was delayed by bureaucracy and the outbreak of serious civil unrest: the investors moved elsewhere. And it is that same unrest which has exacerbated the food security situation recently with some NGOs estimating that one in five households in the North of the country is facing severe food shortages there. Could the food shortages trigger more long-term unrest, forcing families to migrate elsewhere, with all of the potentially unsettling consequences that suggests?

One has to question however, the decision to grow sugar cane. What is motivating nations like Ukraine to invest in these crops, is it to satisfy the appetites of domestic markets or is it to satisfy quotas on the production of bio-fuels (of which sugar cane is a source)? Another question which the film does not answer but which merits further discussion, is whether land in the world’s poorest countries ultimately is being used to help prop up global commodities corporations and if so, what can or should be done to regulate such trade?

The film is a curtain-raiser to Birkbeck’s upcoming event, Surplus: a Symposium on Wealth, Waste and Excess, a debate which promises to be as compelling as it is timely.