THENEWYORKER,AUGUST17, 2020 25
self had cause to note this paradox when
she came across another vital reference
point for “A Countervailing Theory,”
an installment of the BBC’s 2010 radio
series “A History of the World in 100
Objects.” The episode in question con-
cerned an example of one of Nigeria’s
greatest art treasures, the sculpted Ife
heads, which, when it was first discov-
ered, in 1910, by the anthropologist Leo
Frobenius, was believed to have been
created by Greek “Atlantians,” so im-
probable did it seem to Frobenius that
such fine work could be the product of
“savage” Africans on African soil. (Mod-
ern scholarship suggests that the heads
were sculpted sometime around the
fifteenth century, exactly where they
were found.) For Ojih Odutola, this ab-
surd analysis is not only a pathetic error
of the past but a continuing problem:
How could such a vivid imagination be
afforded to a very misguided German anthro-
pologist—to the point of insult in concocting
such a tale—yet the very creations of our an-
cestors and that of our own today are seen with
such limited scope and complexity?
Listening to the episode, I was struck
not only by the ugly racial theory but
by the form of the countervail, which
was offered, in the episode, by the Ni-
gerian poet and novelist Ben Okri:
The presence of tranquillity in a work of
art speaks of a great internal civilization. Be-
cause you can’t have the tranquillity without
reflection, you can’t have the tranquillity with-
out having asked the great questions about
your place in the universe, and having answered
those questions to some degree of satisfaction.
And that, for me, is what civilization is.
It is, of course, natural that when we
are “othered” by the deficient colonial
imagination we should want to defend
ourselves against the accusation of “sav-
agery” by asserting our own claim to
“civilization.” However, I couldn’t help
but remind myself that what is called
“civilization” always and everywhere has
its discontents, that is, those people who
are not satisfied by your answers. When
Walter Benjamin claimed that every
document of civilization is at the same
time a document of barbarism, he made
no exceptions, and, painful as it can be
to acknowledge, the historical fact re-
mains that the same community that
made the exquisite Ife heads also proved
capable of slave raids, of selling their
fellow-Africans to European slavers,
just as the same culture that produced
Constable conceived the Royal African
Company, which issued slave-trading
licenses to the merchants and middle-
men of a thriving global business. When
we are tranquil, when we believe our-
selves perfectly civilized, it is usually be-
cause the claims of others are invisible
to us. And there are always claims.O
jih Odutola’s radical visual rever-
sals function like thought experi-
ments that take us beyond the merely
hierarchical. By positioning the unex-
pected figure of the black woman as
master, as oppressor, she suspends, for
a moment, our focus on the individual
sins of people—the Mississippi over-
seer, the British slave merchant, the
West African slave raider—and turns
it back upon enabling systems. It was a
racist global system of capital and ex-
ploitation—coupled with a perverse and
asymmetric understanding of human
resource and value—that allowed the
trade in humans to occur, and although
that trade no longer exists in its previ-
ous form, many of its habits of mind
persist. In “A Countervailing Theory,”
the habit of thought that recognizes
some beings and ignores others is pre-
sented to us as an element of a physi-
cal landscape, the better to emphasize
its all-encompassing nature. That sys-
tem is the air Akanke and Aldo breathe,
the bodies they’re in, the land they walk
on. For Ojih Odutola, it is expressed by
one unending, unfurling charcoal line:
The purpose of beginning the story from
the perspective of Aldo, one who is subjugated,
is intentional: to show how easily one can be
indoctrinated into a systemic predicament. Be-
tween Aldo and Akanke, there isn’t a clear de-
marcation of good or bad with regard to their
respective worlds and who they are. The system
in which they coexist is illustrated through the
striated systems in place—with literal motifs
of lines throughout the pictures—represent-
ing how the system is ever present and felt,
but not explicitly stated. The system is fact.How can such systems be disman-
tled? Surely, as Audre Lorde knew, it is
not by using the master’s tools. “A Coun-
tervailing Theory” offers some alterna-
tive possibilities. Here love is radical—
between women, between men, between
women and men, between human and
nonhuman—because it forces us into a
fuller recognition of the other. And cun-
nilingus is radical, and seeing is radical,and listening is radical, for the same
reason. We know we don’t want to be
victims of history. We know we refuse
to be slaves. But do we want to be mas-
ters—to behave like masters? To expect
as they expect? To be as tranquil and
entitled as they are? To claim as righ-
teous our decision not to include them
in our human considerations? Are we
content that all our attacks on them be
ad hominem, as they once spoke of us?
If our first response to these portraits
of black, female masters is some varia-
tion on #bowdownbitches or #girlboss,
well, no one can deny the profound
pleasures of role reversal, of the flipped
script, but when we speak thus we must
acknowledge that we can make no si-
multaneous claim to having put down
the master’s tools. Akanke is in these
images—but so is Aldo. He must be
recognized. The dream of Frantz Fanon
was not the replacement of one unjust
power with another unjust power; it was
a revolutionary humanism, neither as-
similationist nor supremacist, in which
the Manichaean logic of dominant/sub-
missive as it applies to people is finally
and completely dismantled, and the
right of every being to its dignity is rec-
ognized. That is decolonization.
One of the premises of this complex
visual tale is that everything we see on
the walls is archeology: pictographic im-
ages found in a black-shale deposit, with
Ojih Odutola playing the role of an-
thropologist, directing the research. I re-
alized, working through these documents
of a vanished system, how indoctrinated
I am within my own systemic predica-
ment, for I read “Parable Rock, Riyom,
Nigeria, c. 2200 BC”—in which the heads
of Akanke and Aldo are carved in stone,
pressed lovingly together, and loom over
the land—the same way I read Stone
Mountain, in Georgia, or Mt. Rush-
more, or the many giant Stalins that
once dominated the landscape of the
Soviet Union, that is, as an example of
sentimental and deceitful state-sanc-
tioned memory. But to the artist herself,
I discovered, this rendering in rock of
Akanke and Aldo is sincere—a celebra-
tion. It speaks of two beings who hoped
to start a revolution by genuinely recog-
nizing each other, in their full selves, and
thus momentarily challenged a system
expressly constructed to keep them apart.
It almost worked.