DIS(re)MEMBERINGS - Nicola Roos

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DIS(re)MEMBERINGS Interrogations of the dichotomy of the Deviant Female/Nation- Mother through La Malinche and Krotoa-Eva Nicola Roos MICHAELIS SCHOOL OF FINE ART, UNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN 2016 Nicola Roos DIS(re)MEMBERINGS Michaelis School of Fine Art 2016 DIS(re)MEMBERINGS: Interrogations of the dichotomy of the Deviant Female/Nation-Mother through La Malinche and Krotoa-Eva You will utter it; it’s your word, and your word is my word… coat of arms of the race, life preserver when you’ve reached your limits, summary of history: Mexico’s password: your word: Motherfucker. – Carlos Fuentes, La Muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962) i. Abstract The involvement of two particular indigenous women in the global tale of European conquest has remained imprinted in the popular imagination and mainstream socio-philosophical discourse over the last five hundred years: La Malinche in Mexico and Krotoa-Eva in South Africa. Despite fading in and out of history, both La Malinche and Krotoa-Eva were unmistakeably present in their various contexts at that one particular moment in time when the indigenous and the colonial brutally collided and, allegorically speaking, one “empire” was destroyed forever while another was violently birthed. Their disputed legacies of cultural exchange and racial hybridity have continued to influence the psychological state of the Postcolony in South America and South Africa for over five centuries. Simultaneously regarded as ethnic sell-outs and ‘mothers of the nation’, there is no shortage of writings that explore and debate the true significance of both these phenomenal women. In this paper, I will use these two figures as catalysts to explore and interrogate the binaries in which these female bodies existed and continue to exist in order to unpack the ways in which they have changed our sense of cultural and racial belonging today – especially in a country where the concept of the “rainbow nation” is such an inadvertently sentimental and equally volatile postcolonial ideology. In order to illustrate how this conceptual exploration informs my own practice, I will be referring to (amongst others) the following three key texts: Marta E. Sánchez’s Shakin’ Up Race and Gender: Intercultural Connections in Puerto Rican, African American and Chicano Narratives and Culture, 1965-1995 (2005), Domino Renee Perez’s There Was A Woman: La Llorona from Folklore to Popular Culture (2008) and M.A. Samuelson’s Remembering the Nation, Dismembering Women? Stories of the South African Transition (2005). Even though I am planning to create a total of five figurative sculptures for this project, only three have been completed and the fourth was in production at the time that this paper was written. Therefore, I will commit to discussing only the three complete works: La Malinche (‘The Outsider’) [Addendum E], La Lengua (‘The Tongue’) [Addendum F] and La Llorona (‘The 1 Nicola Roos DIS(re)MEMBERINGS Michaelis School of Fine Art 2016 Lamenter’) [Addendum G]. Consequently, I will guide my focus towards La Malinche, utilizing the notion of Krotoa-Eva – upon which La Lengua is based – as well as La Llorona, as augmenters to my hypothesis. The reason for this is that the mytho-historical La Malinche is the fulcrum point from which the numerous interrelated themes and identities I will attempt to explore in this paper originate. 2 Nicola Roos DIS(re)MEMBERINGS Michaelis School of Fine Art 2016 After God, we owe this Conquest of New Spain to Doña Marina. - Hernándo Cortés, as cited in Crhóva & Escandón (2011:1) ii. From La Malinche to La Chingada: Maligning the Native Mother The core of the vast controversy surrounding the character and participation of La Malinche in Hernan Cortés’s military campaign in central Mexico can be tied to Romero & Harris’s theory that her role is either inflated or deflated in relation to the particular narrator of the historiography in question (2005:140). The understanding of this controversy furthermore rests heavily on the comprehension of the synonymy between the postcolonial Mexican identity and the ideology of mestizaje or the “Cosmic Race” (McBride-Limaye, 1998). Mestizaje generally designates a consolidation of indigenous Mexican and Spanish-European cultural and social identities – a symbiosis, per se, that has its roots in the 16th century’s Spanish conquest of Latin America. Additionally, the contested legacy of mestizaje itself cannot be fully comprehended without an understanding of the very woman who birthed it (ibid). This Nahua slave girl, who is known to history by various names – Ce-Malinalli, Malinal, Malintzin, Malinche, Marina – (Sobek, 2005:113) is ultimately credited with participating in two fundamentally important acts: aiding Hernan Cortés and the Spanish military in infiltrating and overthrowing the previously impenetrable Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán, as well as providing Cortés with a son – the first noble child of “mixed blood” in Spanish Latin America (Powell Wolfe, 2013:1). Despite the fact that rather little information about the personal history of this woman is known today, Hernan Cortés himself is quoted by Sullivan- O’Beare in McBride-Limaye (1998:1) as admitting that “The conquest of Mexico is not intelligible without the presence of La Malinche” – just as an understanding of cultural and ethnic belonging is equally devoid of meaning without her. McBride-Limaye (1988) confirms the theory posited by Romero & Harris (2005) that the significance of La Malinche’s role in early modern history is indeed directly tied to the narrator: In the Post-Conquest era, La Malinche’s birth name, Ce-Malinalli, is gradually silenced in the sparse assortment of historical records that contain references to her (McBride-Limaye, 1988:1). According to Kirley (2014:54), some of the only primary sources directly making mention of La Malinche are the writings of four prominent Spanish colonials who were personally acquainted with her: Hernán Cortés, Francisco Lopez Gómara, and Bernal Díaz del Castillo. However, as Kirley (ibid) continues to point out, these writings have come to “tell us more about the people who wrote them than about the woman herself”. In depictions of her within the various Codices of the Conquest, La Malinche begins her transformation into the honoured Doña Marina, a title she officially adopted after becoming 3 Nicola Roos DIS(re)MEMBERINGS Michaelis School of Fine Art 2016 one of the first women of noble status in Mexico to be baptised by the Spanish (Diaz de Castillo, cited in Jerkic, 2015:49). This sense of veneration is echoed even prior to her conversion to Christianity: The Aztec population amongst which she lived until she was “gifted” to Cortés by her former captor, the sovereign Motecuhzoma Xocoyotzin, came to address her by the name of Malintzin (Sobek, 2005:114). According to Candelaria (1980:6), the -zin suffix denoted a particularly courteous title in Nahuatl during this period. Regardless of these naming conventions delineating an image of a woman held in high regard by all the different groups that she had prolonged contact with, history has come to firmly cement her within the role of “La Malinche” or “The Outsider” – the purported “sell-out” who betrayed the Mexica in support of alien profits. Accordingly, she is often solely remembered in the minds of modern Mexicans as the architect of the depreciation of Mexican socio- cultural inheritance and national identity (Birmingham-Pokorny, 1996:121). Candelaria (1980:1) summarises by stating that, “If there is one villainess in Mexican history, she is Malintzin. She was to become the ethnic traitress supreme.” Thus the question remains of the series of psychological dominoes that were triggered to lead to this deep-seated controversy: Why was such a respected character so precipitously cast as a “Mexican Eve” (Birmingham-Pokorny, 1996:121), a scapegoat for the enervating “self-loathing” (ibid) and misogyny that sabotages the modern Latin American consciousness? In this light, the actions of La Malinche can most accurately be described in the dispassionate contemporary voice of Cuban-born social theorist Fernando Ortiz (Cypress, 2005:23). Ortiz posits the concept of transculturation in opposition to acculturation, which can best be described as a static, passive-receptive action: the adoption of a “dominant” foreign culture to the detriment of one’s own; a process most commonly sparked by a desire to mitigate or diminish socio-cultural conflict and consequent inter-cultural violence. Transculturation, on the other hand, is characterised as an inherently dynamic process employed as a means to the same end (ibid). Cypress argues that La Malinche has far too often been held accountable for acculturation in modern literature and popular imagination alike. This stigma makes its first official appearance in mainstream discourse in Octavio Paz’ essay “Los Hijos de La Malinche” (‘The Sons of La Malinche’) that appeared in his 1950 collection entitled El Laberinto de la Soledad (‘A Labyrinth of Solitude’). Referring to the unspoken concern of whether La Malinche and Cortés’s child was the product of rape, Paz notoriously brands La Malinche as La Chingada – a term that has since been absorbed into the arsenal of modern Mexican vernacularisms (Chakraborty, 2010:256). La Chingada originally translated as, literally, “the fucked one” – referring to a woman who has been the victim of sexual violation (Hinojosa, 2013). Sánchez (2005:151) explains that, according to Paz himself, this term has its etymological geneses in the Spanish verb ‘chingar’, meaning “to act upon”. Consequently, Paz’s notion of La Chingada is that of an entity entirely stripped of its preceding implications of hostility, and re-imagined as a signal of unsullied accessibility. La Chingada becomes she who is “acted upon”, owing to an innate flaw of 4 Nicola Roos DIS(re)MEMBERINGS Michaelis School of Fine Art 2016 receptivity. She is the symbol of pure inaction. She is the ultimate passive dupe (De Castro, 2002:144), the desecrated traitor-mother of the modern Mexican nation (Sánchez, 2005:43). Paz’s La Chingada forcibly dispossesses La Malinche of her autonomy. According to Hinojosa (2013:28), La Chingada embodies the “weakness of the mother”, an inferiority further asserted by a failure to safeguard her kin against foreign aggressors. Paz, cited in Hinojosa (2013), suggests that the “anxious tensions” that plague the modern Mexican is encapsulated within the axiom ‘¡Viva México, hijos de la chingada!’ (Long Live Mexico, Sons of the Bitch!). This avows both an elation and a resentment with regards to Mexican cultural circumstance. As the Mother-Chingada, La Malinche is reconstituted as an epithet of both “Everything” and “Nothing” (Sánchez, 2005:30). Simultaneously, Paz posits her as the mother of a New World, while she remains the initiator of the obliteration of the Old World that was marked by the fall of the great Aztec capital at Tenochtitlán in 1521 (De Alba, 2004). Paz exemplifies La Malinche as Nothing by defining her as nothing other than an “inert heap of bones, blood and dust” (Paz, 1950, cited in Sánchez, 2005:30). In relation to Paz and the concept of La Chingada, for example, Sánchez (ibid) maintains that there remains a sense of inert power within this “double irony” that Paz unintentionally assigns to La Malinche. Even though Paz sentences her to become an “inert heap of bones” as punishment for her so-called betrayal, it can still be argued that he essentially discloses a certain paradox picked up on by Sánchez (2005:30): La Malinche is, above all else, “too active for her own good and the good of others.” Similarly, in modern Mexican, La Chingada is now more commonly translated as “The Bitch” (Chakraborty, 2010). This defames the woman herself as a consequence of both her “sexuality” and her “public persona” (Cypress, 2005:24) – and so, too, it vilifies her descendants who are doomed to incessant suffering by genealogical and cultural association with her reputation as the Mother-Whore. I have chosen to portray La Malinche in a very particular stance: forward-facing and rigidly upright with her feet neatly together and her hands behind her back. This is reminiscent of two aesthetic points of reference. The first is the body language of Coatlicue, the Mexican mother-deity with which La Malinche has often been associated (I shall elaborate on this aspect in Section III) – as the goddess was portrayed in a colossal Pre-Columbian stone carving unearthed in the ruins of Tenochtitlán (Johnson, 1994:163-164.) The second is the “La Malinche” of the Codices: the commanding, central entity that appears in the midst of various scenes depicting diplomatic encounters between colonial and indigenous bodies. Despite both of these references being associated with fulcrum points of pronounced socio- cultural/religious significance in history, La Malinche – I employ italics here to denote a reference to my sculptural piece instead of the woman herself – can also be read as a symbol of passivity. In this light, the hands behind her back signal a resolution not to act. The closed eyes imply a willingness to accept her circumstances, a reverie of plausible deniability: she is not engaging, not confronting, not witnessing. She is the inert heap of bones, blood and dust, the prevailing paradox – the dubiously silent entity whose words still ripple across the centuries and who remains the facilitator of various discourses today. 5 Nicola Roos DIS(re)MEMBERINGS Michaelis School of Fine Art 2016 Contemporary sculptor Jimmie Durham’s La Malinche (1988) forms part of his series on what Mulvey (2013) calls “historical go-between figures” [Addendum A]. This particular piece, which returns the focus to the singularity of the human body, is an assemblage-based likeness of La Malinche that is comprised of little more than a white skirt, white stockings and a golden brassiere to bestow a sense of form on an abstract wooden body that has been diminished to a head and hands. The prominence of the slightly enlarged hands, lying inactive in the lap, tie into my use of the (dismembered) hands as a symbol of loss of personal agency. Also in correspondence to my rendition of this woman, Durham’s work acquires more “iconic verisimilitude” (Mulvey, 2013) the closer the liminal subject moves to the “European world”. The golden brassiere of Durham’s La Malinche not only evokes Paz’s notion of La Malinche as the epithet of European heterosexual desire of the ‘native woman’ and the ‘native land’, but also possesses and oppresses her sexuality through this exclusively Western clothing convention. This also brings the subject closer to a state in which European culture confers external “visibility” through clothing; a state where the traditional connotations of female betrayal are submerged under an image of human tragedy: the one side of her face is painted with an illegible, dark pattern portentous of depression, despair, defencelessness and defeat (ibid). As Willingham (2010:xxi) suggests, a paralleling of these crises of womanhood and the mestizo national identity can also be witnessed in the paintings of Frida Kahlo. Even though Kahlo frequently represents various forms of Nahua divinities and racial/cultural cyphers in her art, she also felt a close connection to La Malinche in her personal life. Burton, quoted in Willingham (2010:xii), elaborates on this by proposing that Kahlo sought a mirror for her private angst about reconciling two incongruent cultural identities in her life and her artistic practice. Kahlo then discovered that this mirror was indeed the “conflicted character” (Burton, cited in Willingham, 2010:xii) of La Malinche: According to Burton, it is known that Kahlo occasionally signed her letters as Frida Kahlo/La Malinche. Furthermore, in her 1945 self-portrait entitled The Mask [Addendum B], Kahlo covers the face of her own character with a cavalcade-like mask of La Malinche’s face. Despite connotations of disassociation that often accompany the icon of the mask, Kahlo successfully offers a far more human perception of what is arguably one of what Willingham (2010:xii) calls “the most vexed” symbols of cultural identity in Mexico. As Jercik (2015:39) notes, the entirety of our knowledge about La Malinche as a person can only be sourced from “texts in which she is mentioned, and images in which she is depicted”. This is problematic in the sense that she is remembered above all as an interpreter and yet she has no accurate voice of her own, seeing that “nothing she might have written has been saved” (ibid). Moreover, according to Castillo, cited in Birmingham-Pokorny (1996:124), “to speak is to create a surface of propriety, of propriety relationships that can be exploited in various directions.” Chakraborty (2010:258) suggests that accounts – such as the Codices – referring to La Malinche as La Lengua (‘The Tongue’) are often guilty of omitting the few crucial words that complete that disputed title: La Lengua de dos Dioses, “The Tongue of the Gods”. In the Aztec society in which La Malinche lived during her enslavement under 6 Nicola Roos DIS(re)MEMBERINGS Michaelis School of Fine Art 2016 Motecuhzoma Xocoyotzin, the sovereign himself was known by the title of Tlatoani, which can more or less be translated as “He Who May Speak” (Hinojosa, 2013:8). Motecuhzoma alone was revered as the designated instrument of the gods in the mortal world, the mouthpiece of the divine on Earth. This also designates Motecuhzoma as the only authoritative body permitted to directly address the people. In one instance in the eighth book of Fray Bernardino de Sahagún’s encyclopaedic compilation of documents and imagery pertaining to the Conquest, the Codex Florentino (1578-1579), La Malinche is portrayed as standing near what historians assume to be Motecuhzoma’s Great Temple in Tenochtitlán. In this particular image, La Malinche is positioned in-between Motecuhzoma and Cortés. This positioning, in addition to the “speech glyphs” (Hinojosa, 2013:9) that are floating outwards from La Malinche in the direction of both men and the crowd, suggests that she is living up to her duty as The Tongue while simultaneously adopting Motecuhzoma’s authority and lecturing the populace. However, Sahagún particularly chooses to use the term interpreté (‘interpreter’) and not lengua, which suggests that a distinction is being made between “technical ability” and far more intellectual, “professional activity” (Jerkic, 2015:68), which is what La Malinche is engaging in. Another aspect of this sketch that renders it of particular importance is the fact that La Malinche is not only the central and most conspicuous character in the scene, but that she is also depicted marginally larger than either of the men beside her – an aesthetic honour traditionally more commonly reserved for male subjects (ibid). My La Malinche feeds into this particular visual language. She is slightly taller and her body itself is somewhat more imperious than that of the average woman. In the spirit of the Chicana Feminist authors, my elevation of La Malinche on a (albeit modest) pedestal speaks not only of her socio-cultural authority as La Lengua de dos Dioses, but seeks to return a sense of veneration to this long-maligned individual. This positioning forces the gaze upwards, accentuating her gender and the forte of her public persona simultaneously: From this vantage point, her breasts seem more pronounced and her imposing stature appears even further exaggerated. As Hinojosa (2013:9) states, this is proof of a transcendence of her so- called “prescribed gender role”. As Castillo (1942), cited in Hinojosa (2013), emphasises, her ability to not only communicate with the Aztec people, but particularly to “command them”, was what set her apart as such an excelente mujer (“extraordinary woman”). It serves as a reminder that she commands the same authority over the Postcolonial population today, even if this authority can, like Castillo’s concept of a “surface of propriety”, be “exploited in various directions” (Birmingham-Pokorny, 1996:124) – as it indeed has been over the last five hundred years. For example, the elevation of the figure also augments a certain connotation of idolatry and a sense of misplaced veneration to La Malinche – the exaltation of a “false god” (Jercik, 2015:120). Even though La Malinche is entirely transfigured in the 20th century especially, the roots of this idealization can be traced back to the Codices. In contrast to the better-known Codex Florentino, the Codex Dúran does not depict La Malinche in her indigenous huipil tunic. 7 Nicola Roos DIS(re)MEMBERINGS Michaelis School of Fine Art 2016 In this exclusive instance, she wears characteristically European attire – a visual embodiment, perhaps, of her adoption of the Christian faith and her consequent Evangelical associations (Romero & Harris, 2005:140). This illustration is also unique in that it depicts her with distinctly pale skin and long, flaxen hair – in keeping with the Western beauty standards of the time. Similarly, my La Malinche dons a corset tailored in 16th-century Spanish fashion. As in the Codex Dúran, this element extends the image beyond simply existing as a naïve acclamation of European beauty ideals. When subverted, as it is when assimilated within characteristically indigenous clothing elements and symbols of Mexican mythological and cultural identity (such as the copili crown and the “serpent skirt”) – it serves to accentuate the heroic implications of La Malinche’s extraordinary abilities (Romero & Harris, 2005:140) as a mediator and a cultural conduit (Sánchez, 2005:43). The copili headdress I have created is a variant of a crown-like accessory worn exclusively by Mesoamerican nobility (Herrera-Sobek, 2012:769), from which La Malinche was presumably descendant. The copili underlines the importance of heritage, both in the genealogical and the cultural sense. As the daughter of a nobleman amongst the Chontal Maya of Yuacatán (Restall, 2003:82), La Malinche’s mestizo legacy was not only a brand of impurity, but also a reminder of an inherent sense of dignity imbued in the “blood” of the novel Postcolonial identity. 8 Nicola Roos DIS(re)MEMBERINGS Michaelis School of Fine Art 2016 In a certain sense all of us, by the simple fact of being born of woman, are ‘hijos de la Chingada’, sons of Eve. – Octavio Paz, “Los Hijos de La Malinche”, El Laberinto de la Soledad (1950) iii. The La Llorona-Malinche Paradox: A Postcolonial Denial of Origin Since La Malinche was originally recognised for her diplomatic abilities and mastery of various languages, including Chontal Maya and Nahuatl (Jercik, 2015:39), it is only fitting to catechise how language itself has been applied against her in the last five hundred years. This particularly pertains to the significance of the titling of my sculptural figures. One of the most prominent hurdles when perceiving these works is the sheer volume of historical references and mythological associations that the viewer is confronted with. In order to contextualize each of the different figures and cement their association with a certain fragment/persona of La Malinche, I have titled my work by making use of the various different names by which she (and Krotoa-Eva, for that matter) has been called in various colonial and postcolonial discourses: La Malinche (‘The Outsider’), La Lengua (‘The Tongue’), La Chingada (‘The Bitch’), La Llorona (‘The Lamenter’) and La Virgen (‘The Virgin’). The question of whether the first mestizos were born out of an act of seduction or of rape not only spurred Paz to condemn La Malinche as the passive-receptive whore, but also lead to a far more widespread disavowal of origin amongst modern Mexican people. As cited in Miller (2004:150), Paz (1950) argues that the modern Mexican cannot accept his ethno-national identity as either a Spaniard or an Indian: “He does not want to be descendent from them. He denies them. And he does not affirm himself as a mixture, but rather as an abstraction: He is a man. He becomes the son of Nothingness.” Here La Malinche is the whoreish (Cypress, 1991) mother that has been repeatedly physically and psychologically conquered by both the Aztecs and the Spaniards (Miller, 2004). Her descendants find themselves facing the same sense of vagueness and delusion that form the very foundation of the ideological ‘construct’ that is La Malinche. Paz, cited in Chakraborty (2010:256), explains that “To the Spaniard, dishonour consists in being the son of a woman who voluntarily surrenders herself: a prostitute. To the Mexican it consists in being the fruit of violation…” Moreover, Paz suggests that this offers the modern Mexican no other choice than to renounce his inherent prospects of “productive hybridity” (Paz, 1987, cited in Miller, 2004). He is unable to reconcile incongruent ancestors, nor amalgamate the finest elements of each forefather into a novel identity. Sánchez (2005) confirms that the symbolic Martín is shamed by his mother’s rape and her eventual abandonment of him when he is entrusted to the care of another of his father’s confidantes and his mother is promised in matrimony to another man. Mestizos, the hijos de la Chingada (‘sons of the Bitch’) are burdened by the suffering of the Mother who is subjected not only to colonial exploitation, but also to the “corrosive and 9 Nicola Roos DIS(re)MEMBERINGS Michaelis School of Fine Art 2016 defaming action implicit in the verb that gives her name” (Paz, 1950, cited in Chakraborty, 2010:256.) According to Jercik (2015:121), a shift in the representation and interpretation of relationships of “dominance, discrimination, power and control” (Wodak, 2003:6-7, cited in Jercik, 2015:121) occurs in the 20th century: La Malinche loses her authority to Cortéz, the father figure of the new patria (‘fatherland’). This relegates La Malinche to the inert “Weeping Woman” (Perez, 2008:11) – who later merges with the idea of La Llorona. After giving birth to Cortés’s son, Martín, in around 1523, La Malinche fades almost entirely from the historical record (Powel Wolfe, 2013). She resurfaces promptly in popular imagination around 1935 when she is assimilated into the mythological identity of La Llorona (Mueller, 1999). According to Perez (2008:30), La Llorona effectively serves as a “cultural counterpoint” to La Virgen de Guadalupe, another Latin American religio-cultural entity to whom La Malinche has been likened. Romero & Harris mention a case in Carlos Fuentes’ 1970 script, Todos Los Gatos Son Pardos (‘All Cats Are Grey’), where La Malinche is posited as an ‘overture’ to the Virgin of Guadalupe – the Mexican Virgin Mary – who is venerated throughout Catholic Mexico as the “mother of the nation displaced” (1993:8). Fuentes’s concept spurred the influx of a wave of Chicana feminist authors during this decade who continued to herald La Malinche as a near-deity as an attempt to mitigate the national shame attached to the idea of her rape (Névarez, 2004). The descendants of La Malinche are now abruptly metamorphosed from the “illegitimate offspring of a raped mother” to “the children of the Biblical Virgin herself” (Romero & Harris, 1993:8). Rebolledo, cited in Daniels (2001:27), affirms that Fuentes’ La Malinche became “a woman who deliberately chose to be a survivor” – a person of agency and a sound mind who made a sentient decision to place her life and the life of her child in the hands of foreign powers in order to warrant the continued existence of her own race in the New World (Cypress, 2004). La Malinche’s descendants, in turn, are entrusted with the grandiose task of restoring the Mexican motherland back to its imagined precolonial “utopian state” (Kasey Hellerman, 1974:868). Most retellings of the folk legend of La Llorona involve a woman who finds herself helpless against a male companion who not only ostensibly exploits her, but also abandons her and her infants (Perez, 2008:30). The destitute woman then eventually sees no other escape from the situation other than to abandon or murder their children to free herself from her bonds to him and to “exact her revenge upon him” (Perez, 2008:31). In the Codex Florentino, La Llorona features as the “sixth portent” or omen of imminent disaster: a female phantom who could be heard lamenting and howling about the fate of her children as she wandered the streets of Tenochtitlán at night shortly before Cortez’s invasion of the city (Mueller, 1999:129). However, according to Mueller (1999:137), commonly accepted incentives for this infanticide vary from a desire to gain retribution against the husband and father who has abandoned his family, to a shame-driven endeavour to disguise the birth of an illegitimate child; a failure to provide; a method of removing the obstacle that the children posed in the way of a new 10 Nicola Roos DIS(re)MEMBERINGS Michaelis School of Fine Art 2016 relationship; an expression of downright denial of maternity, etc. Consequently, certain retellings present La Llorona as the lesser of two evils: a “negligent mother” (Mueller, 1999:137) rather than a slaughterer of the innocent. In such chronicles, she is perceived to be an involuntary perpetrator in a series of events that lead to the loss of her children, who then become the victims of wicked activities that she is incapable of preventing. As Rebolledo, cited in Perez (2008:31), explains, the way in which any particular narrator chooses to view La Llorona is of little importance when considering that she unfailingly remains “a cultural icon” that is in one way (or many) “tied up… with sexuality and the death or loss of her children: the negative mother image”. Other variations render La Llorona as a wraithlike temptress that lurks about the empty streets at night and lures adulterous men into following her, presumably with unpleasant consequences for the lusty pursuers (Mueller, 1999:128-129). Perez (2008:28) affirms that the greatest issue Chicana Feminists have taken up with the idea of La Llorona is that she essentially serves as an embodiment of the aggressively masculine view that female agency and autonomy inevitably leads to the creation of “monsters” that cause nothing but destruction and ill-fortune for their descendants. Johnson (1994:167) maintains that although the Aztec world-view during La Malinche’s time was fiercely patriarchal, an ancient sense of matriarchy underpins a majority of images depicting Aztec supreme deities. For example, particular reference is made to a figure that is often represented as governing “side by side with the King”. The significance of this figure lies in the fact that, although it frequently adopts the visual form of a man, it “bears the name of the Terrible Mother: The Snake Woman”. Although this “Terrible Mother” could just as easily be associated with either La Malinche, La Llorona or Coatlicue, Contreras (2008:106) explains that “La Malinche” was one of the primary names that Chicana Feminists adopted to describe the concept of “the native woman”. Naturally, like La Malinche herself, the idea of the Native Woman has always been described by numerous names: “Coatlicue, Coyolxauqui and Tonantzin” (ibid) were amongst those that soon followed. Thus it is inevitable that La Malinche, in the form of “The Terrible Mother”, has been likened to Coatlicue, or “Lady of the Serpent Skirt”, the Aztec deity revered and reviled as both the Creator and the Destroyer of all life (Perez, 2008:101) who immaculately conceived the ferocious war-god and patron of the Mexica, Huitzilopochtli (Hellerman, 1974:869). Anzaldúa & Keating (2003:301) explain that Anzaldúa coined the term the Coatlicue State to describe the inherent confrontational sensation that modern Mexicans experience with regards to the process of acclimatization to new knowledge and the introduction of novel mental circumstances. Bost (2003:56) claims that this oppositional urge has a genealogical point of origin, developing out of the “Indian woman’s history of resistance” against both internal and external forces of colonisation. Anzaldúa (ibid) perceives this “goddess of birth and decay” as a phase – a juncture in time that cannot be defined by any static classification or conclusion. Using Coatlicue as a vehicle for restructuring La Malinche’s legacy of mestizaje, Anzaldúa assimilates the symbolic identities of both these women, invoking the notion of a forward- 11 Nicola Roos DIS(re)MEMBERINGS Michaelis School of Fine Art 2016 moving, dynamic process of self-discovery: She, like numerous women of mixed-race heritage, finds herself “at the birthing stage where you feel like you are reconfiguring your identity, but you don’t know where you are” (Anzaldúa, cited in Bost, 2003:56). She maintains that the Coatlicue State can often lead to either the advantageous transfiguration of divergent forces, or a sense of “paralysis” (Anzaldúa & Keating, 2003:301), despair and disgrace. My La Malinche contains various visual clues to the aesthetic language of Coatlicue as she is most frequently represented in Aztec imagery. The characteristic “serpent skirt” that La Malinche is wearing is the most recognisable indication of the parallels that are being drawn between these two women. The severed hands around her neck simultaneously make reference to the statue and the inescapable burden of the colonial legacy that the “children” of the Postcolony still have to bear today. White (2014:9) suggests that disembodied hands, particularly with regards to American folklore, signifies a “loss of agency”. It also serves as a haunting reminder of war crimes perpetrated in Central and Eastern Africa during the colonial expansion of the mid- to late 19th century. For example, King Leopold II’s military forces engaged in a custom of offering the severed hands of rebels to their officers as proof of stifled recalcitrant activity in what later became known as the Belgian Congo (McKenna, 2001:20). This also strongly ties in with my chosen medium of inner tyre tubes: A more commonly known act of mutilation committed in the Belgian Congo was the severing of hands by militants and colonial overseers when plantation workers were unable to harvest the prescribed quota of rubber during the early 20th century (McKenna, 2001:22). Furthermore, Perez (2008:217) describes Coatlicue as the “Mexica antecedent” to La Llorona. The rubber marigold flower adorning La Malinche’s crown suggests a subtle link between the Americas and Africa, and between all three female entities: As Lafayette de Mente (2011:118) notes, Mexican marigolds, which are regularly erroneously called African marigolds (or Stink Afrikaners) despite being native to Central America, were often referred to as the sacred flores de los muertos, ‘flowers of the dead’, and were commonly used to decorate altars venerating Coatlicue and to cleanse the corpses of the deceased in burial rituals. Just as La Malinche often exists synonymously with Coatlicue, La Llorona only truly exists in relation to her cultural and religious counterparts: La Malinche and La Virgen de Guadalupe (Limon, 1990). As Alarcón, cited in Perez (2008:31), states: “Insofar as feminine symbolic figures are concerned, much of the Mexican/Chicano oral tradition as well as the intellectual are dominated by La Malinche/Llorona and the Virgin of Guadalupe… The Mexican/Chicano cultural tradition has tended to polarize the lives of women through these national (and nationalistic) symbols, thereby exercising almost sole authority over the control, interpretation and visualisation of women.” In contrast to the Codex Dúran’s depiction of La Malinche as a white European woman, Mexican photographer Delilah Montoya’s La Llorona y La Virgen de Guadalupe (2004) [Addendum C] – reworked from her 1999 series Guadalupe in Skin, Heart Settled – transposes tattooed imagery of the Virgin Mary on to the bare-skinned back of a veiled anti-heroine in an attempt to re-configure contrasting identities into non- Western ideals of beauty (Vargas, 2010:41). Montoya claims that today’s Chicana artists are 12 Nicola Roos DIS(re)MEMBERINGS Michaelis School of Fine Art 2016 “drawing on a collective memory – a memory of absence”. Returning the focus to the female archetypal body is a means to “discuss things that have never been discussed,” such as the sway that monster-women such as La Llorona has held over the sexuality and beauty standards of young Mexican girls (Montoya, Marquéz & Chayova, 2006:2000). Similarly, my rendition of La Llorona is a simple and yet wholly ambiguous figure. Wearing little more than a dishevelled huipil dress as the only clue to her identity as one parallel to that of La Malinche, she stands upon her pedestal with an empty cradle at her bare feet – a symbol, perhaps, of the destitute mother. She is perpetrator and victim alike; she presents herself to the viewer for judgement, naked from memories of any dominant culture or specific moment in time apart from the colossal knitted cloak draped across her shoulders. The cloak bears down on her with the weight of associations that has been applied to her within each of the various spheres of meaning in which she has existed over the last five centuries. To De Alba (2003), cited in Perez (2008:33), “La Llorona is the border.” The Weeping Woman, as she is commonly referred to, becomes equated with both the physical and the psychological frontier that separates ‘New World’ identities. La Llorona becomes the “undocumented” (Perez, 2008:33) citizen of a “new cultural landscape”. Samuelson (2005:4) asserts that this so-called “sacrificial-redemptive” narrative, which culminates in the mythos of La Llorona, “writes women out of authorship and censorship and into motherhood”. My La Llorona equally stands within such a space of unchartered territory where the denunciation of motherhood is a painful means to a state of restored autonomy. Her eyes, too, are closed as she stands upon the brink of a terrifyingly indeterminate future; holding an infant’s bonnet, she is the silent mourner of all that had gone astray within the labyrinthine processes of transculturation (Cypress, 2005:23). In addition to the infant’s bonnet alluding to the notion of lost maternity, La Llorona also dons a neckpiece bearing star anise, a spice that Sharpe (1856:222) proposes is valued for its alleged ability to “assuage pain” and soothe melancholic emotions. Star anise is also presumed to contain certain herbal oestrogenic hormones and is often suggested as a supplement to breast-feeding mothers in order to aid the production of breast milk (ibid). This Janus-faced purpose augments the viewer’s impression of La Llorona as a casualty of the patriarchy. León-Portilla, cited in Perez (2008:17), argues that history is inevitably always transcribed by the conquerors: “The losers are usually silenced, or [….] dismissed as liars, censored for being traitors, or left to circulate harmlessly in the confined spaces of the defeated.” However, Perez (ibid) maintains that, albeit being branded as a traitor, La Llorona survives: As long as she continues to howl, the indigenous voice of modern Mexicans cannot be silenced entirely. Nevertheless, as Perez (2008:31) emphasizes, it is of particular importance to continue to view these figures as separate, despite various voices asserting their unanimity. La Malinche/La Llorona can only be viewed in the light of accurate synonymy when considering the acts of treachery that were “perpetrated against them”. Although two women have both endured similar denigration over the last five centuries, they materialise, especially in 13 Nicola Roos DIS(re)MEMBERINGS Michaelis School of Fine Art 2016 contemporary renderings, as two very distinct personas who are frequently misidentified as a single entity because of their collective “history of conflict” (2008:31) with what Perez (ibid) calls “Old World, Spanish and Catholic patriarchy”. However, it is the effects of this past conflict on each of these women that have come to define them in the present. Perez (2008:79) claims that the differences can best be explained by defining what each of these women has meant for Chicana women in modern society: Coatlicue lays down rules of feminine behaviour; La Malinche proposes guidelines; the Virgin of Guadalupe offers advice; La Llorona hands down cautions. As Sánchez (2005) so accurately summarizes: “These themes, and others, radiate out from the name and meanings of La Malinche. No categorical divide separates the themes; they are interrelated, mixed, and never singular, like spokes on the wheel of interculturalism.” 14 Nicola Roos DIS(re)MEMBERINGS Michaelis School of Fine Art 2016 La Malinche's story can usefully inform our understanding of Krotoa-Eva's symbolic significance, given the depth of scholarship on it and Mexico's prescience in terms of the nation-building discourses we encounter during the South African transition. – M.A. Samuelson, Remembering the Nation, Dismembering Women? Stories of the South African Transition (2005) iv. The Second Eve: The Role of Krotoa-Eva in Negotiating New South African Nationalities The two decades since the advent of democracy in South Africa have been witness to the emergence of various new nationalist ideologies. The most recent of these is what Coetzee (1998:112) describes as a “new trend in popular expressions of Afrikaner identity” that is characterised by a desire to reconnect the Afrikaner with an African ancestry. This encourages a re-examination of the figure of Krotoa-Eva, possibly one of the most written about women in (South) African history. Samuelson (2005:13) also highlights the importance of using the hyphenated form of her name: “Krotoa-Eva” comes a hybrid of her indigenous and colonial identities, situating her in history and discourse as a liminal entity. As Scully (2005) states, Krotoa of the Goringhaicona people of Table Bay was known as much for her linguistic and diplomatic skills as for her baptism: As a permanent member of the household of Jan van Riebeeck, Krotoa was christened under the name of Eva – the “first woman” of the new era. Despite this, her participation in the origins of many “white” Afrikaner people today has frequently been repudiated. According to Cypress (1991), cited in Samuelson (2005:16), the legacy of La Malinche, the so- called “historical echo” (Samuelson, 2005:15) of Krotoa-Eva, is divided between that of the treacherous interpreter and that of the “first mother” (2005:16). While references to Krotoa- Eva as the first womb are more frequently of a positive nature, allusions to her “voice”, such as in the case of La Malinche, are virtually entirely adverse (Cypress, 1991:102). Samuelson (2005:16) further argues that the “negative aspect of La Malinche is given the name of ‘La lengua’, literally ‘the tongue’…”; in various historical accounts, she is simply given the role of the “mouthpiece” (1999:141), bereft of any name or personal agency. Despite the ideology of La Lengua later being appropriated by Chicana feminists to reintroduce La Malinche as the Cultural Mediator, Romero & Harris (2005:18) argue that she was subjected to a gradual descent from the position of La Lengua to that of La Matriz, “the womb.” My Krotoa-Eva is the only seated figure in the group. This alludes to what Samuelson (2005:32) defines as the “colonial stereotype of the “idle Hottentot”. This notion was first proposed by J.M. Coetzee, who, cited in Samuelson (ibid), claims that it indeed inactivity that resulted in the “Hottentot” being excluded from “Eden”. Krotoa-Eva’s supposed idleness casts her as the passive-receptive Chingada and efficiently splits her off from the notion of an ancestral matriarch in the South African past. Her wide-legged pose is reminiscent of a 15 Nicola Roos DIS(re)MEMBERINGS Michaelis School of Fine Art 2016 promiscuous invitation; she is the raped Mother forcibly dispossessed of her part in “a line of descent that leads from Adam […] to civilized man” (White, cited in Samuelson, 2005:32). Furthermore, in correspondence with Jimmie Durham’s use of the golden brassiere in his La Malinche (1988), the “leather” skirt that my rendition of Krotoa-Eva is wearing signifies patriarchal possession of her matriz, despite her exaltation of female societal function through the myriad of ostrich-eggshell beads stitched onto her neckpiece and her belt. As Carey (1986:41) explains, the production of the leather skirts frequently worn by the Khoikhoi were exclusively produced by male members of the community, while the characteristic ostrich eggshell beads were shaped by the women. Moreover, by naming her La Lengua (‘The Tongue’), I speak directly to the attempts made in European discourse to dismember her legacy. By fulfilling the traditional female obligation of the womb, she becomes little more than a “negotiable” (ibid) possession of the European patriarchy to be used for the purpose of establishing dogmatic coalitions and providing opportunities for sexual exploitation. Similarly, Krotoa-Eva is situated in a similar space in European hegemonic discourse: In the role of The Speaker, she is treacherous and perilous; as a procreant entity, her legacy is slightly restored through her delegation to the role of the loyal “domestic subject” (Samuelson, 2005:16) – or, in more contemporary terms, the initial matriarch of the so-called Rainbow Nation. Fundamentally, Krotoa-Eva’s “acts of translation” (Samuelson, 2005:16) are re-translated into “acts of maternity”. La Matriz is fetishized and disarticulated from its “speaking” self: The conception of the nation is remembered through the dismemberment of the mythos of its matriarchal female icons. The desire to rediscover Krotoa-Eva as an ancestral idol for Afrikaners, does, however, not necessarily mean a desire to mitigate complacency in South Africa’s racially segregated past, on both a colonial and postcolonial scale (Samuelson, 2005:16). Reconnecting with Krotoa- Eva instead becomes a means of identifying with the colonised peoples that sets the stage for a far less ‘forced’ request for clemency with regards to the countless acts of violence and abuse that had been committed in the name of what Samuelson (2005:16) describes as “white racial purity and superiority in the more recent past”. In a period of political and social evolution, such as we have been experiencing in South Africa over the past two decades and still continue to experience today, the need to re-achieve a sense of domestic “wholeness” (Coetzee, 1998:114) indeed proves difficult to ignore. As Perez (1999:6), cited in Nelson (2008:2), proposes, figures like Krotoa-Eva are bound to an imaginary de-colonial interstice that conjures up “fragmented identities” and “fragmented realities, that are ‘real’, but a real that is in question.” These fragmented identities are also brought into question in Dan Sleigh’s 2002 historical fiction, Eilande (‘Islands’), which speaks to the establishment of identities during the first half- century of European settlement at the Cape of Good Hope. Slemon (2006:105), cited in Anker (2009), argues that “[T]he illusion of a stable self/other, here/there binary division” has never truly been accessible to the discourses formed within what he terms “Second World” territories, under which South Africa is classified. This results in the inevitable internalization 16 Nicola Roos DIS(re)MEMBERINGS Michaelis School of Fine Art 2016 of “figural contestation between oppressor en oppressed, colonizer and colonized.” In the novel, this contestation manifests in the Governor’s secretary’s notes, which suggest that the undoing of Krotoa-Eva testimony to her “inherent evil” (Sleigh, 2002, cited in Anker, 2009). Therefore, it could be argued that, as Brink, cited in Samuelson (ibid), states, an identification with such a genealogical point of origin so uncompromised by the hierarchies of culpability that have been established since the first colonial encounters on South African shores could all too easily facilitate a disavowal of past struggles. The healing metaphor has always been a much disputed one, especially if it pertains to the acknowledgement and restoration of the “feminine principle” (Coetzee, 1998:113-114). In the video installation entitled Secretly I Will Love You More (2007), Andrew Putter investigates both the healing metaphor and the internalized “contestation” (Slemon, 2006, cited in Anker, 2009) between “oppressor and oppressed” (ibid). Within the frame of the 17th Century painting, the character of Maria de la Quellerie, wife of Governor Jan van Riebeek, tenderly sings a lullaby to a young Krotoa-Eva, who exists silently within the imaginary space beyond the picture frame. Despite De la Quellerie singing in the last surviving spoken language of the Khoi people, Williamson (2008) explains that “the translation informs us that the song celebrates Della Quellerie's warm feelings for Krotoa, admiring the soft woolly hair and the shiny skin of the girl child.” Contrary to the “traditional colonial set-up” (ibid), Putter’s installation suggests that the oppressor-oppressed relationship was experienced in far profounder ways than what is to be found within the annals of official history. The healing metaphor is transcribed in Putter’s own words; this piece not only unlocks a non-traditional imaginary in which characters from the colonial narrative are not bound together by conflict alone, but explores the “secret utopian potential of the historical encounter between the Hottentots and the Dutch at the Cape in the 1600s” (Mussai & Talmor, 2013). However, as touched upon in Eilande, official history often discredits Krotoa-Eva as nothing more than a Hottentottin (female ‘Hottentot’) operating under a “veneer” of civility and Christianity (Coetzee, 1999:116). The inherent weaknesses tied to her ethnographic identity are posited as the sole reasons for her eventual banishment to Robben Island, where she died from what is often ascribed to an over-use of European alcohol (Scully, 2005). Even in Trudie Bloem’s 2010 fictional account of Krotoa-Eva’s life (Krotoa-Eva: The Woman From Robben Island) Krotoa-Eva’s European husband, Pieter, regards her behaviour during a domestic feud as a “reversion to type” (Samuelson, 2005:37). The disruption of domestic unity is blamed upon her indigenous heritage, and serves to justify the revocation of her custody over her three children and their subsequent reintegration into the Dutch society at the Cape. Samuelson argues that framing Krotoa-Eva as the bad mother speaks to a nationalistic anxiety surrounding the possible fate of the metaphoric children of Africa if they “degenerate into their maternal line”. Once again, her “unruly tongue” (Samuelson, 2005:30) is posited as the catalyst for her disruption of domestic unity. Similarly, in Los Hijos de La Malinche, Paz (1950) builds his argument for condemning La Malinche as a national betrayer upon the significance of 17 Nicola Roos DIS(re)MEMBERINGS Michaelis School of Fine Art 2016 steadfast relations between fathers and their sons. In the abovementioned scene in Bloem’s novel, the conflict between husband and wife erupts when Krotoa forcefully attempts to take her infant son from Pieter. Paz proposes that the ruin of the sacred familial unit, la familia (Sánchez, 2005:30), directly translates to the ruin of la patria, the ‘fatherland’, itself. Krotoa becomes the violent-tempered “indigene” (Samuelson, 2005:29) notorious for hurling strings of curses at European patriarchal figures. According to Wicomb, cited in Samuelson (2005:29), “Eva-Krotoa offends and transgresses precisely through speech that proclaims her difference, and so asserts her resistance to translation. The scandalous speech-act falls in the space between her two names, pushing them asunder: The assimilated Eva who is admitted to the Governor’s presence, and Krotoa, the indigene who asserts her otherness by disturbing the grand event.” The abovementioned notion of a “reversion to type” is illustrated by my choice of dressing La Lengua in clothing reminiscent of traditional 17th-century Khoikhoi garments. The exception is, of course, the colonial corset, which remains as a testimony to her enduring, albeit repressed, European self. Samuelson (2005:19) states that “Krotoa-Eva’s movements to and from the Fort, in and out of her Batavian attire and Khoikhoi skins, from one language to another…” serves to prevent identities within either sphere of existence from being consolidated into what Bhabha (cited in Samuelson, 2005:19) calls “primordial polarities”. Even though La Lengua is seemingly embracing her own culture, she is not a polarized body. My La Lengua refutes categorization, seating herself in the fundamentally liminal space “[... in which] we may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of our selves” (Bhabha, cited in Samuelson, 2005:19). Krotoa-Eva, like La Malinche, existed at one of those perfect “moments in colonial time that foreshadow the ideals of young republics” (Buchenau, cited in Névarez, 2004:68). She is the South African Malinche, the vehicle for the re- conceptualization of the colonial narrative. She presents herself to us to be reclaimed and re- remembered as onse ma (‘our mother’), in order to abate the “nightmare” (McBride-Limaye, 1988:9) of our deeply conflicted, violently segregated, ethnographically chaotic national history. 18 Nicola Roos DIS(re)MEMBERINGS Michaelis School of Fine Art 2016 The story of female treachery is particularly necessary in the nationalist epic, especially the epic which has its origin in a conquest and a defeat. – Jean Franco, Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico (1989) v. Conclusion Various narratives of masculinity and male hegemony underpin the histories of European exploration in the period of early modernity (Scully, 2005). In the historiographies of both South America and Sub-Saharan Africa, one particular ‘narrative’ seems to infiltrate and empower that of the male hegemony: the hyper-sexuality of the indigenous woman in the majority of large-scale colonial encounters in the early modern world. The willing female body has become the undisputed central axis of the ever-evolving nationalities that have taken root in the colonial and postcolonial sphere. The maternal aspect of central female figures such as La Malinche and Krotoa-Eva has been vastly maligned to justify their denunciation as the mother-whores of the new nations they have conceived, their traitorous “indigenous” blood forever condemning their descendants. Despite their roles as interpreters and translators, they have been dismembered by all the voices who have spoken for them and through them over the last five centuries in a struggle to consolidate a myriad of disparate ancestries in today’s Mexico and South Africa alike. Venerated by some as the symbols of feminine salvation instead of ethnic betrayal, these women both stood at what Sánchez (2005) calls the “intersection of race and gender”. The female body has been eradicated by La Chingada, the Mother of Nothingness – of La Raza (‘The Race’) without roots – and then transfigured as La Virgen de Guadalupe, the stammoeder (‘ancestress’) of a re-domesticated, self-created, hybrid national identity here on the African continent and across the entire ‘Atlantic World’ (Scully, 2005). Word count (excluding headers): 8048 19 Nicola Roos DIS(re)MEMBERINGS Michaelis School of Fine Art 2016 Addendum A Jimmie Durham, La Malinche, mixed media, 177 x 60 x 89 cm, 1988 Jimmie Durham, La Malinche (Detail) 20 Nicola Roos DIS(re)MEMBERINGS Michaelis School of Fine Art 2016 Addendum B Frida Kahlo, La Mascara (‘The Mask’), oil on Masonite, 40 x 30.5 cm, 1945 21 Nicola Roos DIS(re)MEMBERINGS Michaelis School of Fine Art 2016 Addendum C Delilah Montoya, Guadalupe Tonantzin, gelatin silver, print size unknown, 1999 Delilah Montoya, La Llorona y La Virgen de Guadalupe, digital print on canvas, 60.96 cm x 50.8, 2004 22 Nicola Roos DIS(re)MEMBERINGS Michaelis School of Fine Art 2016 Addendum D Andrew Putter, Film still from Secretly I Will Love You More, video installation, 1:24 minutes, 2007. 23 Nicola Roos DIS(re)MEMBERINGS Michaelis School of Fine Art 2016 ADDENDUM E Nicola Roos, La Malinche (The Outsider), mixed media sculpture, 2150 mm x 530 mm x 420 mm (excluding 800 mm x 200 mm base), 2016 24 Nicola Roos DIS(re)MEMBERINGS Michaelis School of Fine Art 2016 ADDENDUM F Nicola Roos, La Lengua (The Tongue), mixed media sculpture, 1560 mm x 600 mm x 1060 mm (excluding 1000 mm x 1000 mm mat), 2016 25 Nicola Roos DIS(re)MEMBERINGS Michaelis School of Fine Art 2016 ADDENDUM G Nicola Roos, La Llorona (The Lamenter), mixed media sculpture, 1670 mm x 720 mm x 310 mm (excluding 800 mm x 200 mm base), 2016 26 Nicola Roos DIS(re)MEMBERINGS Michaelis School of Fine Art 2016 Bibliography Anker, J. 2009. “Aspekte van postkoloniale verset in Eilande deur Dan Sleigh” [Aspects of postcolonial resistance in Islands by Dan Sleigh]. 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