Alot Of Whys & Alot Of Whats: Ato Malinda’s Prison Sex II

Kenya Wed 01-07-2009

Alot Of Whys & Alot Of Whats: Ato Malinda’s Prison Sex II
By David Kaiza/Africancolours.com

The audience begins paying attention to Ato Malinda from the moment she starts setting up the gadgets for her show: she needs three laptops, three projectors and three screens.

The video performance art piece is called Prison Sex II. But what is the triad of equipment for? Intriguing from the beginning: the first projector goes on and there on the screen is a woman clad in a green and yellow kanga.

The second projector lights up. There is the woman in Kanga; the third projector and there she is again in a khanga.

Incomprehension follows curiosity: repetitive, beautiful images that don’t move into action, say like in a movie. There is the constant flatter of khangas; spliced images and superimpositions ensuring there is no clear structure.

Artist Ato Malinda

The abstraction is both intriguing and oppressive. It is when you have watched the movement of the woman in the video (Ato) – her pallid step-taking and the remorseful manner in which she hung her head – that you realise this oppressiveness is thematic.

Partly because they tend to come across like a riddle and mostly because of the hypnotic power they hold over the audience, we are bound to take performance art seriously:

For Ato’s Prison Sex II, take the hypnosis, add to it a pinch of riddle and think of a movie in which different segments are simultaneously projected on three screens and what you will get is not entertainment.

Entertained is not what Ato means for you to be. Prison Sex II is a difficult and angering story. As the title suggests this is about gender and the law, the story of two women who in the last century were imprisoned in Fort Jesus, Mombasa.

The first is the well-known story of Mikitilili, the environmentalist who was thrown in by the British a hundred years ago for protesting the destruction of Giriama forest.

The other story is not very popular, but is known well enough on the coast. It is of a woman, tired of her marriage, who suing for divorce, was thrown into fort Jesus for six months before the divorce could be granted.

Prison Sex II came to her obliquely. She was in Mombasa for an arts’ workshop when walking along a street, a young man accosted her and demanded to know why she was walking alone. Where was her husband, he asked. Perhaps worse, she was not wearing a veil.

Whenever Ato tells this story, a gasp of disbelief rises up from her audience, unable to comprehend that social structures of this kind survive right in the 21st century.

She never answered the young man. But her response went to the heart of his mentality: She used the props of his social definitions – the veils women are expected to be covered in and the lowered head they are taught to approach men with, to make this reply.

There were a lot of whys when he asked me why I was walking alone,” Ato says. “A lot of whys, and a lot of whats – what is the situation of women in the society, do they like it?

You don’t think it consciously but you wonder how do I relate to this? Even in the 21st century I am still feeling the elements of the imprisonment that was felt by a woman who had to be literally imprisoned in order to gain her freedom.”

To tell of the oppression of women, she uses the kanga – the piece of print fabric overweighted with history and politics - as the sartorial imprisonment of womanhood. She not only wraps herself up as is the fashion on the coast, but goes a step further and paints the parts of her bared face and forearms in the same pattern of the kangas; an extended metaphor hence.

The video was shot in fort Jesus, where both women were imprisoned and in it, we start to see how women in such circumstances often walk a different, unmerciful, parallel world overwrought with vestiges of ancient, inexplicable tradition. The oppressive, ungraceful battlements of Fort Jesus – surely a misnomer for all the usage it’s been put to – with its iron grating, deepen the sense of injustice.

There are flashes of ingenuity here as when Ato uses part of a wall to paint out the patterns on the Kanga costume. She explains the footage of kangas drying on the line: “When you walk along the coast, you see all these kangas but you never see the women.”

A performance artist for two years now, who on leaving university thought she wanted to be an actor but “decided I wasn’t good at that”, Ato is one of a handful of artists in the region who have gone into an art form unfamiliar to the general audience.

Perhaps this comes from the capacity of this art form to subvert the structure of narrative we all expect naturally. Confusion is a typical reaction that non-traditional art forms provoke.

Whether it is new circus (too serious for clowning around), dance or video installation, the lack of a recognizable narrative structure in performance arts always means that the audience has to strain awhile to see what direction the show is going.

Performance art’s capacity to burrow underneath and speak to the soul gives it an air of the esoteric. It calls on its audience to read metaphors, to work their way to the subject through a series of riddles. Its impenetrability, the ritualistic and the gestural aspects of it, take a spiritual hold over the audience.

It is also the story of another art form returning to Africa – one of several which colonial education and religion had condemned as satanic.

The language in which it was described did not help; it was “shamanic”, “witchcraft” – the reductive language in which colonial administration addressed any aspect of African life that was intellectual, that could speak back to it and which did not contribute manual labour.

Of the parade of art genres produced in the region, it is “new”. Like dance, it is not generally thought of as “art” – if it is thought of at all. Perhaps it is a problem of instruction.

At colleges and universities, anything with the word “performance” attached to it, is to be found in the department of Music Dance and Drama. It is painting, sculpture, printmaking, clay and modeling that are thought of properly as “art”.

Hence in Prison Sex II, she is fighting two wars – the first is for better treatment of women; the second is selling a “new” art form to mesmerized audiences whom she says are simultaneously “confused and receptive.”

Not all are receptive. The use of the body itself as art medium can be disturbing to art-illiterate audiences. Little wonder that at the coast, she was referred to as “shetani” – the devil at one of her shows.

Her message is a powerful one – and you have to contend with performance arts’ magisterial force – to appreciate that its elevations and condemnations are like final judgment. She has used this form to highlight such hot button issues like Female Genital Mutilation in a previous show, FGM.

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