Owning her, loving her, beating her - Walk with me
"There is a lot of hurt here" the man said softly. He and I were in the room with Akima McPherson's installation 'Walk with Me - A Show'. It was raining outside. An elderly man had come in to read some of the text on the walls from the story of Jasmine and Neil, but didn't seem to linger.
One wall of the room has three shelves with clay ovals. The exhibition notes say that the clay ovals show markings which reflect scars, different scars including hidden ones. And the egg shapes to show a kind of fragility.
A part of the wall is used as a screen for a 15 minute video. A woman tells her story of walking away from an abusive relationship. The woman's voice is calm. The face is hidden, according to Akima, to protect her identity. The hands are moving. Gently moving. The woman in the video talks through her process at leaving, at preparing to leave, the spiritual and psychological preparation.
I remember a woman telling me as a child, hearing her father beat her mother. She took her siblings downstairs to make tea so they could not hear the sounds. She recalled being calm doing all this.
A woman who facilitates group sessions said that she uses a clay egg to pass around the group, to signal whose turn to speak and because the egg shape is comfortable in the hands, to roll around as a kind of comforting gesture when telling the stories of violence. I connect the hands in the video with the clay ovals..
Thinking of the women sometimes who rolled the clay ovals in their hands for awhile before being able to speak, or choosing not to speak in the sessions. I think of the men who sometimes roll the ovals around, or would be inclined to crush them or break them.
"He had owned her publicly.."
Two walls are used to display 81/2 by 11 inch pages of the story of Jasmine and Neil. It is Jasmine's story showing how the love story developed into the horror story, and how Jasmine left. The story takes a while to read. I read a bit, walk around the room, then go back and read the rest. I read some of the pages at the end first. Jasmine was able to leave quickly. She did not recognise the signs of abuse first. "He had owned her publicly" sounds nice. All the lovey dovey things.. the holding tight and so on, the 'possessing'. Possession sounds nice.. marriage is a 'bond' and so on. Bondage.
The first steps to control for abuse. Jasmine left early.
Some people take time. Leaving is also a time of great risk. Entrapment is complex.
"Allow him no ownership of you"
"Allow him no ownership of you" , in contrast to, or almost connecting to "He had owned her publicly". Allow him no ownership as part of the healing mantra, as part of the different messages that say 'you are not to blame, you do not have to up with any abuse". Ownership is love.
There are some pieces of paper hanging from the roof. Kind of like Christmas decorations. Or a Chandelier. The piece is called 'Text suspended' - bits of journals. These are like the kinds of comments, pieces from different women or about the experiences of different women. They kind of float in the hair. A letter to a penis. A letter to an abusive husband. A note to a woman. The pieces keep turning so it is not easy to read them unless you hold them or touch them. But since the rules are 'don't touch'.. you keep moving around to read.
Listening is like that. You have to focus. You have to pay attention, sometimes move around. You have to move with the person talking sometimes, and touching might be necessary to make a connection. And if anything in breaking the silence, in encouraging people to tell their stories to start to heal, is the need for listening. A woman walked into a newspaper recently and found someone to listen to her for about two hours.. a story of abuse not only by the neighbour, but also by the system which she was trying to use to get justice and help.
The fourth wall has a painting from Akima's Mood Introspection series. The corner has some clay figures on three shelves. 7 figures representing women on the lower shelf representing the women in distress. The burdens and hardships are on the second shelf, the middle shelf. The top shelf has figures of women dancing, praying .. in victory. There is something about the hardships in the middle and how the hardships and burdens which are just because of being born with a vagina. The violence is not only they physical and sexual violence of loved ones. There is the systemic violence.
I think of the two women who died from cancer, and their struggle to find answers to what was ailing them and to find healing. One woman navigating different countries. Another woman navigating different 'doctors' and having no easy solutions. Being told that they were cured when they were not cured. Of not being sure. Of the other woman who underwent chemo who might not have had cancer but who could not get a diagnosis for the bleeding from her uterus.
The title is 'Walk with Me'. 18 year old Ranella Benfield's body was found in the BV Cemetery. Trying to imagine walking with her, woman who was working, who had written CXC. A teacher at her school said the students were upset, horrified.
She must have walked with confidence, going home after work, thinking of Christmas, friends.
Her body found on the day when some the people responsible for making the place safe for women and men were hollering Rape in the Parliament. And the mad place where Ranella's murder gets less outrage than the circus of men who dress in suits in the parliament and the women who danced around them.
The installation piece is not permanent. One of the pieces of paper has some dust on it already.
A UG student had another installation in another exhibition with headlines and the body of a woman. She had asked viewers to write down what could be done to deal with gender based violence
Akima in her gallery talk had explained that she wanted her work to stimulate conversation and expression about dealing with gender based violence.
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