I let my art website lapse, or I’d post this there. I wrote this a while back, nearly two weeks ago, and have been letting it percolate.
It is a post about this painting:
In a world of what feels like relentless bad news, of a tide of atrocities that scroll past amidst kitten rescue videos and Leo DiCaprio memes and the outrage of the day, it’s easy to become inured to it all. Another headline, another body. This was a body that didn’t even get to make a headline – at least, not one that I’m aware of. But ever since I saw a video, shared by a Facebook friend, of a naked woman fleeing men with guns somewhere in northern Mozambique, I’ve been haunted by it. (Why did I watch it, knowing it was going to be horrible? I don’t know. I could write an essay trying to figure it out and I’d still be at a loss for an explanation.)
I remember how casually they filmed her, and wondered what had happened before this clip, why she was naked, what they’d done to her. As the camera recorded, one of the men approached her and sjambokked her. She yelled and shat herself as he hit her. And then, after the blows stopped raining down, she turned around and marched down that dusty road, head held high, arms at her side, knowing – she must have known – that the bullets would come. They shot her in the back, in cold blood. As the first bullet struck, she cried out and stumbled. The next few didn’t take long. In the end, she was a rumpled heap in the road, the slugs kicking up dust next to her inert form. The camera stopped.
She had no name. There is no context in the video. No indication as to why she was targeted, other than being a woman whose path crossed with men armed with AK-47s. Probably like so many other women and girls in Mozambique, across Africa, around the world. Easy prey. Barely regarded by the predators as human. Not even a statistic, because who would be there to record her death?
I clicked the sad face icon on the past, made a comment about how outrageous it was, scrolled on. As you do. But the memory of this woman stayed with me even as I moved on. In the middle of the night, when I couldn’t sleep, I thought of her. The loneliness and humiliation and callousness of it all.
So I decided to memorialise her somehow, in a painting. Mark the fact that she had died but, more importantly, that she had lived, and in so doing, trying to recover some of the dignity those men had tried to strip from her.
(What was her name? Did she have a family? Do they know what happened to her?)
Initially, I thought about depicting her facing the viewer, defiant. But that felt contrived. So I kept the painting closer to what happened in the video, with her walking away from the guns, head high, arms straight, towards a horizon where freedom is possible. In the first version of this painting, I depicted her naked, as she was in the video. But in retrospect, I didn’t like that. She deserved not to be naked. I don’t think she wanted to be naked. So I’ve drawn clothing for her.
The words written into the horizon are words I’ve attributed to her:
Your guns will not erase me.
It won’t make any difference to her, but it’s not… nothing. She has an existence beyond that terrible video, and that feels like it matters in some vanishingly small way.
discomombulated 