Kobena Mercer – Wifredo Lam’s Cross-Cultural Rhizomes

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Pierre Mabille and Lydia Cabrera with Wifredo Lam, Cuba ca. 1943 change in place of stasis -- is to say that the inscriptive space he always keeps open and flat in his paintings was a key condition for breaking through into a realm of crosscultural poetics that carried far-reaching philosophical implications. At a time of crisis when Europe was about to plunge into global war, forcing Lam to flee Paris in 1940, the humanist ideals of Enlightenment modernity were being torn apart. Travelling by ship to the Antilles in the company of André Breton, André Masson, and other Surrealist Group members, it was Lam’s friend Pierre Mabille, an editor of Minotaure and founder of the Haitian Bureau of Ethnology, who first recognized what the hybridity principle was opening up. Decentering the rules of post-Renaissance picture-making where monocular perspective created “a structure dependent on a single centre,” The Jungle inspired Mabille to argue that, “this jungle where life explodes on all sides, free, dangerous, gushing from the most luxurious vegetation, ready for any combination, any transmutation,” was inherently counterposed to, “that other sinister jungle where a Führer … awaits the departure … of mechanized cohorts prepared … for annihilation.” 1 Where hybridity undercuts all-or-nothing absolutes by embracing the mutability of boundaries in the interdependent ecologies of human, animal, and plant life, Lam’s figures -- with payaya-shaped breasts and phallussprouting chins, with horse-like manes on mask-shaped heads -- embody a readiness for further metamorphosis that reveals something unique about the Caribbean conditions of their artistic genesis. Lam flourished when he returned to Cuba, and while his “homecoming” is often interpreted biographically, as a reclaiming of ancestral roots from his Chinese father, Lam Yam, his mother Ana Serafina, of mixed Iberian and Congolese heritage, and his godmother, Mantonica Wilson, a Santeria priestess, I would say that a broader understanding of his Afro-Atlantic originality comes into view when we consider the multiple routes leading the artist toward hybridity as a questioning of any claim to fixed or final identity. Where New World syncretic religions such as Santeria combine Yoruba and Catholic deities to transform European and African sources in the creation of new, translational, syntheses, 1940s debates among artists and ethnographers cast radical doubt on the idea of assimilation in colonial governance. Poet Nicholás Guillén 60
and writer Fernando Ortíz coined the term “Afro-Cuban” to acknowledge the paradox of the expressive power transmitted by the lowest segment of their nation’s ethnic hierarchy. Their investigations suggested that Caribbean societies were ready for “any combination, any transmutation” by virtue of the counter-Enlightenment gained in coming to terms with violent histories of forced migration that nonetheless gave rise to multiple recombinant potentials among African, Chinese, South Asian, European, and Muslim diasporas. Ortíz introduced the concept of “transculturation” in Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar (1940), showing how “the loss or uprooting of a culture (‘deculturation’) and the creation of a new culture (‘neoculturation’)” 2 go hand in hand, thereby mapping altermodernity avant la lettre. Addressing the two commodity crops of Cuba’s agricultural economy as allegorical personages, Ortíz’s text acts as a fertile interpretive source for grasping how subversive Lam’s intentions really were when he said The Jungle, “has nothing to do with the real countryside of Cuba, where there is no jungle but woods, hills and open country, and the background of the picture is a sugar cane plantation.” 3 Where the title of his 1943 masterwork appropriates a key trope of primitivist discourse to resignify la selva (‘the jungle’) as el monte, a sacred clearing in the forest (which has correspondences in European folklore), the cognate term la meleza (‘the undergrowth’) positions his creaturely hybrids in a subtle critique of plantation slavery. In the vertical rhyming between the sugar cane stalks and their dancing limbs, we behold a subaltern ritual performed at night (for the deep blue background casts the scene in moonlight even as amber and green foreground tones evoke illumination by firelight), opening a line of flight into uncharted realms of possibility. Since the hybrids are fully immanent to the undergrowth, in their transculturative dance they constitute a rhizome, a term philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari employ to distinguish arborescent root systems, such as oak and pine, which organize growth in dichotomous hierarchies, from strawberries, cassava, and mangrove, plants which create unpredictably interconnective relationships with their environment, thereby facilitating the transmutation of identity on the part of all elements swept up in a rhizomorphic assemblage. 4 The femme-cheval is another hybrid figure constantly recurring across Lam’s Afro-Cuban production from 1942 onwards. Addressing the psychic state the Santeria worshipper enters into when the orisha is said to cross the border separating gods and mortals, taking possession of the devotee by “riding” him or her like a horse, the femme-cheval visualizes what happens to human identity in the liminal state of ecstatic trance, which was a line of inquiry Zora Neale Hurston pursued Movie Still from The Living Gods of Haiti, Haiti 1947-51 61
Page 2 and 3: Wifredo Lam’s Cross-Cultural Rhiz
Page 6 and 7: Wifredo Lam Untitled 1974 in her tr
Page 8: Publication © Galerie Gmurzynska 2

Kobena Mercer – Wifredo Lam’s Cross-Cultural Rhizomes

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