Rites to passage

Umemulo is one of the many beautiful Zulu words whose English translation is “coming of age.” While the word is synonymously Zulu, the ceremony it represents can be found in other cultures all over the world such as the Hispanic Quinceaneras. It marks the transition of a girl into womanhood signifying she is an adult and therefore ready for marriage. 

It Comes Unadorned

It comes
Unadorned
Like a phrase
Strong enough to cast a spell;
It comes
Unbidden,
Like the turn of sun through hills
Or stars in wheels of song.
The jeweled feet of women dance the earth.
Arousing it to spring.
Shoulders broad as a road bend to share the weight of years.
Profiles breach the distance and lean
Toward an ordinary kiss.
Bliss.
It comes naked into the world like a charm.

- Toni Morrison

Flesh and Symbol

The forgetting of the feminine and restructuring for the masculine is a century’s old injustice as Morgan (2005) articulates:

“African women emerged in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century imagination as monstrous and inhuman, thereby helping to justify the many faces of European colonialism (economic, political, cultural). Equally important, writers like Ligon were instrumental in carrying such images back to metropolitan centers like London, where readers who would never travel beyond their own shores could learn about the linkages being made between nonwhite sexuality and savagery and could participate in the colonial experience, however geographically distant.”

Morgan, J.L. (2005) Male Travelers, Female Bodies, and the Gendering of Racial Ideology, 1500-1770. 

Economically, physical abundance was equated with capacity for labour. Politically it symbolised savagery. Culturally, it was nothing but monstrosity personified. All of these perceptions grounded in masculine energy, rooted in the physical realm. Who would not forget?

The black female body is thus a preeminent site of our collective memory loss, and this artwork showcases the same body as creator and nurturer. This forgotten body becomes the means through which we explore myth, fear, lust and sentimentality… the means through which we embrace our feminine energy. The breast becomes, embodied differently according to the history, class, creed and culture that surrounds it, is the emblem of our recollection.

Remembrance 

The seeds of Maambo’s profound respect and appreciation for the feminine energy and the contributions of womanhood to the world, were sewn in his own upbringing, caringly tended by his mother. These values are reflected in all his work, but for these specific images and figures we must look into the past – after all, isn’t that remembering? – to the Old Testament and Maambo’s sacred ancestral traditions and ceremonies which are woven and entwined in an inimitable artistic interpretation of his homland and his life in South Africa.

“My complexion had always been an obstacle to overcome and all of a sudden, Oprah was telling me it wasn’t. It was perplexing and I wanted to reject it because I had begun to enjoy the seduction of inadequacy. But a flower couldn’t help but bloom inside of me. When I saw Alek [Wek] I inadvertently saw a reflection of myself that I could not deny. Now, I had a spring in my step because I felt more seen, more appreciated by the far away gatekeepers of beauty, but around me the preference for light skin prevailed. To the beholders that I thought mattered, I was still unbeautiful. And my mother again would say to me, “You can’t eat beauty. It doesn’t feed you.” And these words plagued and bothered me; I didn’t really understand them until finally I realized that beauty was not a thing that I could acquire or consume, it was something that I just had to be.” ‑Lupita Nyong’o