"Paintings Like Prayers": The Hidden Side of Senegalese Reverse-Glass "Image/Texts"

There are no arrested things, only myriad relations "in the making."

--Houston Baker, "Beyond Artifacts" 186

Establishing links between African literatures and African arts is both a straightforward and a complex process. In an intellectual age when cultural expressions are presumed to have "texts," it may seem obvious to Western observers that the commonalities of African literatures and arts must outweigh the differences. What W. J. T. Mitchell calls "the imbrication of visual and verbal experience" (83) makes it questionable--and undoubtedly arbitrary--to separate the two as completely as people in the West often have, because of the oddities of their own intellectual and academic histories; and a number of engaging interdisciplinary approaches to the "Sister Arts" have been developed to reveal "structural homologies between texts and images" (84). Yet as Mitchell further asserts, such work may lead to the proposal of facile "master narratives" for literature and visual arts that stifle appreciation of "other forms of relationship [between them], eliminating the possibility of metonymic juxtapositions, of incommensurability, and of unmediated or non-negotiable forms of alterity" (87). Mitchell's caveats are especially pertinent when considering the narrativities and visualities of non-Western cultures (see Nelson forthcoming).

If visuality is a Geertzian "cultural system" of formative and productive interpretive processes varying from people to people and time to time, as Robert Nelson suggests (forthcoming); and if there are "different regimes of visuality," perhaps even within any given society as derived from an inexorably changing "politics of sight" (Foster xii-xiii); then the astounding cultural diversity of Africa must be matched by a multiplicity of distinct visualities, differing from ethnic group to ethnic group, faction to faction, and changing for the same group or faction over time. African ways of seeing are endowed with an equally broad array of visualizations--that is, performative and plastic artistries that articulate visuality.

Imbricated with these expressive forms are oral and written literatures from precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial times, derived from "narrativities" varying across cultures and periods, as reflected in oral artifacts and performative events. Following Mitchell's logic, however, "imbrication" implies the difference of particular elements, even as it implies dialectical contingencies. Extending the metaphor, the "mortar" joining individual literary and visual "bricks" in tight configuration provides a mediating space of intriguing potential for both the blurring of literary and visual genres and their non-negotiable juxtaposition.

Senegalese literatures have received more scholarly attention than Senegalese visualities. ¹ As art-oriented scholars, we shall approach the former through the latter, as expressed in examples of contemporary visualization among Mourides, a Senegalese Sufi tariqa, or "way." Reverse-glass paintings will be our focus here, among the visual arts we have been studying since 1994, which include urban wall murals, devotional paintings on canvas, calligraphy in healing arts, spiritual architecture, and contemporary "gallery" arts destined for international markets. ²

Reverse-glass paintings are works drawn and then painted on the backs of panes of window glass or, less frequently, on shards of plate glass or recycled automobile windshields. The viewer sees an image that reverses what the artist has composed, through an enantiomorphic--or mirror-like--effect that may sometimes add to the image's mystical impact (see Fernandez 162). Senegalese reverse-glass paintings have been exhibited widely in Europe and the Americas in recent years, and two coffee-table catalogs (Renaudau and Strobel; Bouttiaux-Ndiaye) make a broad selection of images readily available to a wide audience. Scholarship remains surprisingly underdeveloped, however, with most writers relying upon the predoctoral research of Michèle Strobel. An exception is a brief idea-piece by Mamadou Diouf in 1992 that inspires the following paragraphs.

The first Senegalese reverse-glass paintings were executed around the beginning of the twentieth century, with Gwar Moussé Gueye, an artist remembered from those early days (Renaudeau and Strobel 12). The technique...