24 THENEWYORKER,AUGUST17, 2020
an aesthetic project? Is it sufficient
merely to counter? Or might a higher
synthesis be conceivable?
T
he project started, according to Ojih
Odutola, with a “wandering char
coal line,” which she followed, “rather
blindly, letting my mark making guide
me...to see what aesthetic character
istics and proclivities recur and how to
incorporate these as motifs in the work.”
(Though Ojih Odutola’s
images are often mistaken
for painting, she has so far
worked exclusively in pen,
pencil, charcoal, and pastel.)
Following this line, she ar
rived at an unexpected des
tination, framed as a ques
tion. “What would it look
like if women were the only
imperialists in known his
tories across the globe?”
Which led to another: If the powerful
women she was drawing were the mas
ters, over whom did they have mastery?
The story developed:
My initial aim was to tell a tale of two be-
ings, one born, another made/manufactured,
who exist within a system that enterprises and
stratifies war, imperialism and hierarchies—
and how these two mitigate their respective
lives within it to, ultimately, cross over and
come together to bring the whole system down.
But they fail.
The two beings are Akanke, who
is a member of the Eshu—the ruling
class of women—and Aldo, one of the
Koba, male humanoids manufactured to
work for the Eshu, mining and cultivat
ing food. The Koba far outnumber the
Eshu—just as slave populations usually
dwarf their overseers—but, like slaves,
their lives are not their own and they
live in fear that their masters will “de
commission” them at any time, for any
reason. The first eight pictures give us
an idea of what it is to be Aldo. Like
all Koba, seams run through his body,
etched into the skin, through a pro
cess implemented, as another image,
“This Is How You Were Made; Final
Stages,” suggests, by the Eshu. And, as
is true for all beings, Aldo’s own exis
tence seems to be a puzzlement to him,
although perhaps, as an oppressed being,
he puzzles over it more intensely than
the ruling class, who, in their tranquillity,
tend to think only of their own power.
In “Introductions: Early Embodiment
(Koba),” this existential anxiety is ex
pressed through the depiction of hard
toparse liminal spaces, for Koba seem
to come into being in a zone somewhere
between the bardo, the depths of a mine,
and a penal colony—amid circles, lines,
waves, and shadows, where it is difficult
to say what is floor or ceiling, ground
or sky. In this strange, transitional place,
Koba avert their eyes; they seem fearful;
each grips his own naked
body, which appears to be
his only possession.
The contrast with what
we glimpse, in “Unsuper
vised Education,” of Eshu
childhood is striking. Young
girls, future rulers, roam
their environment freely,
evidently curious, touch
ing and examining the land,
even breaking off pieces
of it, at ease within their surroundings
and never doubting that ease. When
Ojih Odutola was asked about some
of her sources of inspiration for Eshu
society, she offered a line of Camille
Paglia’s—“Society is a system of inher
ited forms reducing our humiliating
passivity to nature”—and also the geo
metric costumery of the Dutch designer
Iris van Herpen. It is easy to see, in the
imperious Eshu, the ways in which this
feared vulnerability is systemically dis
guised and obscured, by staffs and hel
mets, by bodies trained to show no sign
of weakness or potential decay, and by
clothing that, like van Herpen’s, mim
ics the patterns of nature and aspires to
nature’s authority of form.
And yet Ojih Odutola never loses
sight of the mutual melancholy that
pervades asymmetric relationships of
power. In “Suspicions Left Behind,” an
Eshu woman crouches on the ground,
her staff set aside, her helmet in her
hand. She has a troubled look on her
face. What is she thinking? Has she
begun to suspect (like many a colonial
ist before her) that the asymmetric re
lationship between the Eshu and the
Koba is untenable? For what Hegel re
vealed about the masterslave dialec
tic—and Frantz Fanon took and use
fully applied to the asymmetries within
both slavery and the colonial relation
ship—applies equally to the Eshu and
the Koba: the Koba recognize the Eshuonly on pain of punishment or death,
while the Eshu recognize the Koba only
as far as doing so supports their own
distorted selfrecognition as “masters.”
And, further, as it is in slavery, the more
the Eshu rely on the Koba’s labor, the
more dependent they in fact become
on the Koba, and the more the Koba
understand their own creativity and use
fulness visàvis the land, and demand
to be truly recognized. In this mourn
ful fable of mutual misrecognition,
the secret relationship that we see de
velop between one Eshu, Akanke, and
one Koba, Aldo, results in the creation
of a third kind of being (conceived, in
this world, through the act of cunni
lingus—the Koba have no penises). In
“Consequences Unforeseen,” twin fe
tuses emerge, half Eshu, half Koba, the
product of a disruptive affection.
These future beings would seem to
lend visual expression to Fanonian ideas
of hybridity, and to offer a promising
departure from a Manichaean world.
But hybridity alone is insufficient. There
is still the law—unjust, half blind, writ
ten by the tranquil conquerors—and in
the concluding series of images we see
the law crush Aldo (he is accused of
killing an Eshu, a crime he did not com
mit). Akanke and her female partner,
another Eshu, do not intervene, and
Aldo, as a subject with no rights, who
cannot be saved by love alone, perishes.
An important lesson: recognition of the
other is never solely an individual’s gift
to give. Love is not law. The system in
its entirety must recognize the other.I
nstead, the system is oblivious; it is
always facing the other way. In “To
the Next Outpost,” Akanke gazes out
toward a distant point of her people’s
colonies while Aldo, facing the viewer,
carries a heavy cable, his labor unac
knowledged. In “Mating Ritual,” we see
several Koba, naked as ever, bending
their bodies into striking voguelike
shapes, all without actually touching
one another; perhaps sexual activity be
tween them is only psychic or virtual.
No Eshu are present, but we can as
sume they know little of the mating rit
uals of their underlings. Why would
they imagine a complex culture exists
within a community they have refused
to recognize as autonomous? In truth,
power sees so little. Ojih Odutola her PREVIOUS PAGE: COURTESY THE ARTIST AND JACK SHAINMAN GALLERY