Trauma and Identity

 

“The artist’s mother witnessed the Mau Mau rebellion in the late 1950s and “remembers as a little girl having to take a secret oath to promise never to be a traitor. There was killing, there was cruelty, and there were foreigners telling your elders what to do, ” Ms. Mutu continues. “The one thing that’s always missing — I think it’s part of the trauma — is the personal element. My parents don’t often talk about their experiences in terms of how it made them feel.”

-Quote from Wangechi Mutu: A New Face for the Met By Nancy Princenthal

I watched videos by psychologists, professionals and those who experienced trauma that discuss how trauma affects the identity and brain. Our core beliefs like feeling safe is destroyed and in order to survive 3 personalities are created the traumatized part, the survival part and the healthy part. The healthy part regulates our feelings or at least tries to. The survival part in order to guard and protect may try to deny the trauma. The traumatized part remembers the event, remains the same age the event occurred and may be triggered (smell, visually, sounds, etc). The brain in the core perception part changes where one may see danger where others may see manageable that’s because the confidence which might have been there before said trauma occurred is no longer there so there is no trust behind ones thoughts, actions, feelings, etc. The sense of self is weakened as a defense to the state of terror that was felt like body shakes so to calm the system people may become addicts (not only drugs) or start to dampen certain responses to pleasure and connection. 

“All literary and visual forms – the novel, painting, photograph, Hollywood film, advertise- ment – have the capacity to activate the imagination. With the most rudimentary training in theories of representation we can see human movement in the multiple edges of Braque’s cubist portrait; we can see huge landscapes in the minimalist canvases of the Australian painterFred Williams. Such interpretive skills allow us to produce a sensible social environment. In this light, identity is a shifting category. It can be thought of as a residue, ‘an image pieced together’ from ongoing events, a manner of acting in situations in which we know we are being judged and classi- fied (Goffman, 1967: 31). It can be a belief, an almost universal accep- tance of a real, tangible, verifiable substance as well as an apparition, an effect of the morally charged environments in which we always expect others to judge us. Self-identity is a discourse embedded in cultural conventions. Its nature, substance, durability and origins are of less in- terest than the habits of social engagement that sustain it. We enter every moment with assumptions that seem natural and self-evident. We adroitly assume a role, pick up a script, find a place in the continuous babble of the moment.”

-Quote from The Art of Self Invention Joanne Finkelstein, Chapter 2 Manners

I remember as a kid always looking at facial expressions as cues to how to respond or not. I was very careful as to what I said to the point where I rarely spoke. Lack of confidence due to the environment I grew up may have cause me to always question everything I do, think and say. There may be circumstances where we pick up roles as said in the book but there are also times where a person would rather be invisible.

Readings:

“I have wondered ever since – how little does it take, how slight a movement does one make before raising the ire of someone else?”

-Quote from The Art of Self Invention Joanne Finkelstein, Chapter 2 Manners

I think as soon as someone is in our space and shows their mannerism we are somewhat apprehensive, alert and skeptical. This may be even more so for those who live in the city where you always have to be aware of your surroundings and looking behind your back. 

“Like money, and like fashion, identity itself was in dan- ger of coming out of the commercializing smelting kiln without real substance, referent, or real value’ (Wahrman, 2004: 208).”

-Quote from The Art of Self Invention Joanne Finkelstein, Chapter 2 Manners

In the commercial, consumer, capitalist world we live in the products are sold with the idea that these objects will give us an identity (class, appeal, personality, etc). You especially see this with the uprising of ‘influencers’ on social media either advertising or flaunting expensive or admired objects. 

“Her caryatids clearly radiate power of their own. Titled “The NewOnes, will free Us,” they represent, for Ms. Mutu, “words that we haven’t heard, people we haven’t noticed. They will be our redemption.”

-Quote from Wangechi Mutu: A New Face for the Met By Nancy Princenthal

Our identity and mannerism may change to make ourselves noticeable, to be heard in a way we weren’t before. 

“She describes her father, a businessman, as a self-made academic and sometime poet; her mother is a nurse and a midwife. Ms. Mutu (like many of her urban peers) learned about her cultural background by visiting her grandparents upcountry. Her parents speak the language of the largest ethnic group in Kenya, the Bantu Kikuyu language, and they worked to preserve that heritage by conducting interviews with elders in the countryside. “These are oral cultures — there isn’t a literary record,” Ms. Mutu points out. “They say that when an old person dies, a library goes with them.”

-Quote from Wangechi Mutu: A New Face for the Met By Nancy Princenthal

This remind me of the dialect called Kichwa that many speak in Ecuador. It was more of a spoken dialect but as of recent has a written form so that new generations can learn. Knowing this makes me glad that there is still a chance to reconnect with my indigenous identity and learn their mannerisms.

“I’m interested in powerful images that strike chords embedded deep in the reservoirs of our unconscious.”
-Quote from Wangechi Mutu The Feminist Challenge of Wangechi Mutu by Heidi Hirschl Orley
Ms. Mutu’s artworks are striking and intense. The figures and the lines contour, turn, bend and twist. Even though her work consists of many images placed together they go well with each other.

Mutu is best known for spectacular and provocative collages depicting female figures—part human, animal, plant, and machine—in fantastical landscapes that are simultaneously unnerving and alluring, defying easy categorization and identification. Bringing her interconnected ecosystems to life for this exhibition through sculptural installations and videos, Mutu encourages audiences to consider these mythical worlds as places for cultural, psychological, and socio-political exploration and transformation.

-Quote from Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey by Elizabeth A. Sackler

Her work reminds me of dreams that are basically a collection of memories that skew maybe even merge with each other. However all of it in a strange way makes sense and you can connect to the visual warping representation.