The New African Diaspora

15. Immigration and African Diaspora Women Artists

15 IMMIGRATION AND AFRICAN DIASPORA WOMEN ARTISTS Nkiru Nzegwu The literature on women, art, and immigration is thin. Hardly any literature exists on the impact of immigration on women artists in the African Diaspora world. This is not to say that no books have been written on African American women artists, or on a mixed selection of African and Caribbean women artists in Britain and Europe.1 The focus of those books lies elsewhere. Whatever their claims they do not explore the conditions, processes, and rationale of emigration on the work of these women artists, nor do they examine the choices the artists may have made at the pre-migration phase of their lives, or what were the consequences of those choices on their careers. The point is that there is a wide analytical gap between the pre- and post-immigrant experiences of African Diasporan women artists and what critics and art historians take them to be doing. This essay attempts to fill this lacuna by focusing on three African Diaspora (two African and one Caribbean) women artists from three different countries, residing in three different geographical spaces. The first is an Ethiopian, Kebedech Tekleab (b. 1958), a painter who has lived in Washington, D.C., since emigrating to the United States from a Somalian concentration camp; the second is Hërsza Barjon (b. 1958), a Haitian wife, mother, and mambo-in-training from Port-au-Prince who now lives in Miami, Florida; and the last is Ebele Okoye (b. 1969), a Nigerian painter and animator who lives in Cologne, Germany. The essay explores who they were prior to their emigration to their new homes as well as what are the central themes of their art in their new environments. It strives to understand what their works say about their personal experiences and the larger social reality around them. How have their paintings or animations been shaped by their personal and social experiences at home and in their new spaces? What do the paintings and animations say about how they imagined the world and are imagining change? What theories of home, displacement, and integration are expressed in their works? What do these 303 304 Nkiru Nzegwu say about their hopes and desires, and how do these impact on issues of identity and power in their new homes? Lastly, in what ways are they redrawing the artistic landscapes of the countries—United States and Germany—in which they have settled, and reshaping the idea of global culture? Before proceeding to analyze the works of these artists, I should state that owing to space constraints I will address only a few of the questions I have raised. Also, it is important to state that these women were not selected at random. They were chosen because of their distinctive visual language, and more importantly, because they are exemplars of new and exciting trends going on in African and women’s immigration. These three artists represent three different types of women migrants: the war survivor, the mother-wife and priestess, and the young single pursuer of dreams. The common bond that holds them together in this essay is their search for a better life, their tenacity of will, their agency, and the fact that they are remarkably successful artists. N E W A F R I C A N D I A S P O R A W O M E N A N D M I G R A T I O N A common assumption in African immigration discourses is that men are the key migrants, with women following behind as dependent spouses.2 This picture is increasingly being falsified at British, American, French, and Canadian Consulate visa offices in Lagos, Accra, Dakar, Nairobi, and other African cities; and in Kingston, Port-au-Prince, Port-of-Spain, and other cities in the Caribbean. There are as many women as men seeking visas to travel or to emigrate, given the dire economic trends and general insecurity in diverse parts of Africa. Conflicts in Ethiopia, Somalia, Rwanda, Congo, Sierra Leone, and Liberia, for example, have contributed a significantly large pool of women to the immigration and refugee resettlement programs of the United States, Canada, France, Germany, and the Nordic countries. For instance, from 1983 to the present, Somali, Sudanese , Liberian, and Ethiopian refugees make up the majority of admissions in the United States (Singer and Wilson).3 The numerous local and regional wars that have devastated many African communities and killed off husbands, fathers...