THE SUBMERGED SUNRISE OF WONDER

Ashraf Jamal

‘Anthropocene’ is the tongue twister on everyone’s lips, a word fashioned by humankind to describe its abomination on earth, for it tells us that it is we who are responsible not only for our own destruction, but the destruction of everything living and inanimate that informs the destroyed ground we stand on. There is much talk of the ‘End Times’. Certainly, a creeping despair now overwhelms us, a deep sense of fatality. Walking through a piercing green forest in the South of Sweden – enthralled by ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower’ as Dylan Thomas writes – I might be forgiven, or chastised, for failing to see that Spring had come late, or that the warmth – too balmy – was out of synch, the earth consumed at either hemisphere by unnatural extremes in temperature, fast losing its gravitational hold and benign orbit. I am no climatologist, no environmentalist, but I do know, like any other sentient being, that ours is a borrowed time, that our present is betrayed, our future squandered. That those dearest to me in South Africa are feeling the acutest despair borne of governmental dereliction, further underscores a pervasive sense of nihilism – in the case of South Africa, the death instinct at the root of failed governance. We all know this, know that we are not only facing an ecological collapse, but a secular one too, worse, as a consequence, a psychological and spiritual one too. ‘Humankind cannot bear very much reality, T.S. Eliot remarked, but neither can we stomach lies. If ours is an immoral time, this is not only because of our delinquency as a species, but our corruption and corruptibility.

Wangari Muta Maathai (1940-2011) was a Kenyan environmentalist and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. She was right in noting that ‘We are very fond of blaming the poor for destroying the environment. But often it is the powerful, including government, that are responsible’. Though African chauvinism chose to blame the women – the water and wood gatherers, providers of food – for deforestation and environmental degradation. But the greater problem, colonial and neo-colonial, local, regional, or global, has undoubtedly centred on the control, management, and distribution of resources – the varying aggravation and greed centred on the value, scarcity, or degradation of these assets, in particular, mineral resources, gold, oil, platinum, diamonds, and many others. The root of our degradation directly stems from the burglary of the earth, from mining, and the economy and consumerist culture it feeds. As Maathai justly noted, ‘We think that diamonds are very important… we call them precious minerals, but they are all forms of the soil. But the part of this mineral that is on top … the skin of the earth, that is the most precious commons’. A realist first, idealist second, Maathai sought to protect our ‘commons’, that earthen skin that bonds us profoundly, spiritually, ethically. We are told that the Industrial Revolution is the root of our ills, a revolution built on coal, but an ancient Latin proverb, mistakenly deemed obsolete, is a reminder that greed and vanity is age-old –Cuius est solum eius est usque ad coelum et ad inferos / for whoever own the soil, it is theirs up to the skies and down to the depths.

The prophetic ecologist, Rachel Carson, writes in Silent Spring that ‘God sleeps in the minerals, awakens in the plants, walks in animals, and thinks in man’. This evolutionary scale is by no means a compliment, for it is the human mind that has proved the root of our damnation. Between the sleep of God and the perverse reasoning of Humankind lies a fault – geological and psychological – that cannot be repaired or reversed. In the 1500s, Michel de Montaigne, the first psychologist of human folly, asks – ‘Can anything be imagined so ridiculous, that this miserable ad wretched creature (man), who is not so much a master of himself, but subject to the injuries of all things, should call himself master and emperor of the world, of which he has not power to know the least part, much less to command the whole?’

Opposite: GEO-SEAM Gilt Economy while Unite rightly challenges the aberrations of mining – disenfranchisement, indenture, exploitation, greed, inequality, and its devastating impact on African history, South African history in particular, we cannot ignore the fact that the temperament of the exhibition at Iziko – titled Plot – is not accusatory, but revelatory. Unite’s purpose – if art can be said to have a purpose – is to reveal our general complicity in mining, in a global extractive economy, that feeds our grotesque conspicuous consumption. Because, of course, there would be no reason to plunder the Earth, if there were no desire for its perceived riches. It is consumption that begets extraction. It is desire that is the greater, deeper, darker engine room.

In hindsight, we can believe ourselves less ignorant, unless we continue to hold onto the mantra ‘Greed is Good’. That Montaigne’s Essays is now an immensely popular read, that we find ourselves returning to Stoicism, a philosophy that embraces threat and danger with equanimity, should surely suggest a greater open-mindedness, and preparedness for the worst.

It is this pivot that informs Jeannette Unite’s solo exhibition, part installation, part wallwork, at the Iziko National Gallery. For if Unite notes that we must take personally all that happens to the Earth, it is because we cannot separate ourselves from it. Ours is no longer an irrational imperial claim to sovereignty of the earth and sky, but a judicious management of its impending extinction, and our immoral role as perpetrator, or victim, therein. Her primary focus, in this regard, is mining, certainly the definitional extractive economy. As Ivor Powell and Andrew Lamprecht have justly noted, ‘The art Unite produces … is inextricable from the impact mining wrought on African history. We would live on a very different continent – and indeed a different world – were it not for the epochal discovery of diamonds, gold, and other mineral deposits in the second half of the nineteenth century and the concomitant and sometimes tragic effects of these discoveries’. Indeed. In the back of my mind, I can hear Maathai’s appeal to the greater ‘commons’ of beneficent soil, forests, fresh water, but, while we must defer to her wisdom, we must also, after Montaigne, acknowledge our suicidal perversity.

It is now commonplace to note that desire is the basis of capitalism. However, as Unite realises, desire is far more complex, for while it may be voracious, it cannot, finally, be satisfied – because it is the perversity of desire that it remains fundamentally and eternally unfulfilled. This is the bracing view of the psychoanalyst and student of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan. In Ecrits, he notes that ‘Desire is a relation of being to lack. This lack is the lack of being whereby the being exists. This lack is beyond anything which can represent it’. So much for the prevailing illusion – ‘instant gratification’. If Lacan’s view is seminal to Unite’s art, it is because what matters to her is the irresolute and unfinished nature of art, its inability to explain its complicit and obtuse relationship to a shared historical burden, one in which the Earth, no longer a ‘commons’, remains the root of on-going inequality and despair in South Africa.

There is a word for this despair, Unite tells us – it is solastalgia, the negative psychic impact produced when natural resources are exploited and one’s home territory is left in a desolate state. This is certainly the horror that Maathai sought to avert, this the foundation of African history, which, in its current neo-colonial guise, is disturbingly subject to China’s imperial extractive control. Unite’s purpose, however, is to invite us into a destroyed yet beautiful sanctum, into a ruin. Therein, in the hull that contains her art, she calls us to prayer, for if there is one core drive in her art, then, after Mark Rothko, after Pierre Soulages, it is consolation. Unlike the celebrated Eastern German novelist, Unite is not ‘Homesick for Sadness’. Unlike the eighteenth-century aesthete, she finds no great pleasure in a Gothic ruin. Rather, what compels her is a complex solace. In knowing, after Fredric Jameson, that ‘history hurts’, she nonetheless has chosen to bind our shattered nature. Scouring the world’s mines for its dross, its ‘precious dust’, Unite then combines these with pigment and resin. The process is alchemical. Her vast canvases, often polyptych’s, a combine of multiple panels, are works, largely abstract, though figuration plays its enigmatic role, that address the caverns within us. Because, of course, Unite is not only interested in the gutting of the earth alone, but also the gutting of our body, psyche, soul.

In this regard, it is unsurprising that Freud, in The Interpretation of dreams, should describe the unconscious as a striated archaeological dig – his life’s work as a study of the suppression of desire. Unite, as intuitively, sensorially, haptically, viscerally, returns us to this underworld. In titling her exhibition Plot, she reminds us that extraction is never innocent, that narratives of legitimacy are akin to confectionary, that the Earth, divvied, owned and contracted, is never the silent partner in the deal but the greater howl. And yet, Unite’s art is never noisome, never aggressive. Rather, the subtle shimmer her paintings emit are gloamings, sensitive emissions, sometimes brilliant, other times sepulchral, all in all, diurnal and nocturnal. Looking at Unite’s monumental series of paintings, her panels, her frescoes, I’m reminded of G.K. Chesterton’s words, that our task is to dig for the ‘submerged sunrise of wonder’.

GEO SEAM Carboniferous, Coal and Chalk