Romuald Hazoumé La Bouche du Roi (review)

Nka•161 ROMUALD HAZOUMÉ LA BOUCHE DU ROI HORNIMAN MUSEUM, LONDON DECEMBER 5, 2008–MARCH 1, 2009 AND TOURING of these “masks” are arranged side by side to represent the schematic described in the 1789 woodcut. Packed in dense rows, they symbolize not only the conditions on board but also the systematic (indeed, systemic) cruelty involved in the transportation of slaves. However, and unlike the depersonalized depiction of the slaves aboard the Brookes, each of Hazoumé’s masks has been personalized with various objects including blue and white beads (worn by the followers of the water goddess Mammy Wata) and red feathers (showing allegiance to Xevioso, the maker of thunderstorms). In other variations, some of the masks are splintered and broken (symbolizing those who died en route), whereas smaller masks represent women and children. Elsewhere, there is a yellow mask that signifies the white ruler imposed upon Benin by the French in the 1700s and a black mask beside it depicting the then king of Benin who colluded in the slave trade. The material, as opposed to symbolic, function of the “masks” is seen in the accompanying video, which shows the used plastic petrol canisters being treated with fire (to expand their size and capacity) by motorcyclists who in turn use them to illegally transport oil between Nigeria and the Republic of Benin. Filled beyond capacity, they often explode with fatal consequences and are to be found littering the streets of villages and towns, their use value long since finished. In the overall schema of this admittedly complex work, the actual canisters come to signify enslavement and the subsequent exhaustion and unceremonious discarding of spent individuals by European and African traders alike. In recovering these discarded remnants and personalizing them, Hazoumé would appear to be involved in a process of historical recuperation that seeks to give an identity to the individuals who were subjected to slavery. Hazoumé is not alone in using Clarkson ’s woodcut as a starting point for a work of art; both Willie Cole and Hank Willis Thomas have used it, in 1997 and 2003 respectively. However, and unlike both Cole and Thomas, Hazoumé’s use of it would appear to be serving an ameliorative if not instrumentalist function . In regard to the latter, such usage would be certainly in keeping with Clarkson’s original purpose; that is, the illustration of the inhuman conditions brought about by the slave trade. However , the continued use of the woodcut as a recurrent image—nowhere more so than in events last year surrounding the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade in the British Parliament—has given rise to criticism in some quarters for its depiction of slaves as passive victims. While not necessarily subscribing to such a view (Clarkson’s and subsequent uses of the image were suitably blunt given the dire necessities of the time), it is worth asking whether Hazoum é’s use of it as a schema recuperates identities per se or reinscribes a different form of passivity in the viewer. In 1786, the antislavery campaigner Thomas Clarkson published his influential “Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of Human Species.” A man ahead of his time in more ways than one, Clarkson realized that images both greatly increased his audience and gave graphic weight to his argument. In 1789, he duly had a woodcut produced entitled Description of a Slave Ship. In its directness and graphic simplicity, the image—a schematic of the infamous slave ship Brookes—did indeed have an effect, portraying as it did the inhuman and abject conditions in which slaves were transported from Africa to the Americas during the so-called Middle Passage. The image has since taken on an iconic life of its own and is regularly used in historical discussions of slavery and its iniquities. It also forms the basis of Benin-born artist Romuald Hazoumé’s La Bouche du Roi, a project realized between 1997 and 2005. Referring to the mouth of a river that was once a portal for the extensive slave trade in Benin, La Bouche du Roi has a number of interrelated components , including a landscape photograph of the area (“La Bouche du Roi” is derived...