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 Re: فى صدور كتابها الجديد عقب عام من رحيلها عبدالله على إبراهيم يكتب عن التشكيلية البقيع بدوى محم (Re: احمد الامين احمد)
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الرحمة والمغفرة لدكتورة البقيع التى فى صمت أنجزت مثلما فى صمت رحلت .
تحية للعابرين بهذا البوست .
تحية وتقدير للمفكر السودانى والأكاديمى الضليع بروف عبدالله على إبراهيم هذا التقديم الثر للكتاب والإضاءة الثرة حول منهج وشخصية الكاتبة وفضاء وزمان أطروحتها وقد أعاد لأذهان من تابع (أنس الكتب)
ذينك المقالين النادرين عن :
1- عربى فلايقرأ حول عبدالله الطيب وأصداء النيل ربما وكذلك
2- القربان والبشارة والخروج ديوان المجذوب الذى حجب شعره الصافى جدا ( الشرافة والهجرة ) و ( نار المجاذيب )
أدناه المقال الأصلى لدكتور عبدالله حول مؤلف بقيع فى لغته الاصلية التى كتبه بها ثم ترجمه للسان العربان
ويلحظ أن بروف عبدالله هذا العصر يندرج ضمن قلة ربما لاتتجاوز عدد اصابع اليد الواحدة من الأكاديميين و( المفكرين الإستراتيجيين ) السودانيين الذين يكتبون بالعربية والإنجليزية بذات المستوى من الرفعة والرقى مقال عبدالله فى لسان شكسبيريقرأ:
This book, The Invention of Beauty during the Time of Hardship: The Story of the Sudanese Women Basketmakers in Darfur, Western Sudan, by Bagie Badawi Muhammad, sadly published posthumously, celebrates women and their creativity in the clearest of terms ever. It studies the basketry industry in Manawashai village in Darfur of western Sudan in the 1980s during the "famine that kills," in local parlance popularized by Alex deWaal, resulting from the the unrelenting droughts of the decade. Muhammad studies the basket craftsmanship at a fork in the way; a time in which its function changed from utilitarian to decorative art. The women, the sole creators of baskets, were compelled to make this change to sell their produce to the tourists of the many aid workers in the region. With the money they earned from selling baskets they bought grain. With the change of function of basket the artists changed the size of the cover basket to smaller ones. This gives them more time on their hand to produce more baskets and to work on beautifying them to increase their appeal for prospective buyers.
The research for this study is based on a fieldwork in Manawashai village in 1984 at the height of the famine that hit the region. A follow-up visit to the field was made by the author in 1994. Doing field research at adverse times is frowned upon by some scholars who ask researchers to have mercy on victims of calamities by not harassing them with interviews on their situation. To Muhammad this is sheer sentimentality. From experience she argues that informants in dire circumstances are willing to engage researchers because they know that "reliable information may be worth thousands of tons of food or many crates of medicine." Even more critical is that people believe that their problem issolvable by genuine research to which they are a party.
Muhammad's study "focuses on the creative role of … [these] Sudanese women who created opportunities for earning a living out of their traditional art." She is curious about the dynamics of the "invention of beauty in desperate times" and sees it as" an affirmation of life, an act of self-acculation and empowerment."
Muhammad is at her best reading the social realities weaved into the basketry texts. She gets into the theory of material culture to support such a reading. In believing that art is social (but not exclusively), she is led to argue that the artifact is more than its total sum. An artifact, in her view, is not made merely by material, but by ideas. She thus sided with scholars Warren d'Azevdo and Henry Glassie, who consider social factors in reading artifacts, rather than Dell Upton who focuses on the artifact in and of itself. Upton argues that the "symbolic order of the artifact is a product of individual experience, and artifactual meaning is always filtered through the individual mind." The artifact thus deserves to be studied directly as a source of understanding rather than through its dependence on other circumstances surrounding the creation of the artifact". He is of the opinion that we "need to focus on the imaginative act by which the people fuse their surrounding into a meaningful whole" incorporating formal qualities and formalist concerns such as style.
Unlike Upton, Muhammad is inclined to take social factors into consideration along lines established by d'Azevdo and Glassie. The former argues that: "Art could not be confined to artifacts of things but resided in the thinking, feeling, and productive activities of the members of a culture." Glassie also argues that the object "exists within the set of associations that constitute the mind of the creator." Even styles cannot be studied in isolation of the tumults social life. He further argues that "studying an object in isolation might clarify its formal details, but it might also abrogate the ultimate goal of perceiving human behavior and thought existence."
In focusing on the social in the creation of artifacts, Muhammad recognizes the women artist behind these creations. She gave voice to these artists in two ways. One: She challenged the European concept of art that frowns on Africans and non-Western art as "unaesthetic." Manawashia creators would be judged by Europeans as having no capacity for aesthetics simply because their artifacts are studied in isolation from the creators. In the specific realities of the scholarship of Darfur material culture, Muhammad says, the study of Darfur basketry was marginalized. She complains that the few works devoted to it are mostly descriptive in which "the object was usually isolated from its context." Creators themselves did not find any difficulty to relate to the realm of aesthetics when they had the opportunity. Muhammad takes note of how these women welcomed being called "artists" without further ado. When the term funun (fine arts) entered their discourse they matter-of-factly called their creations "funun." They never hesitated to claim the profession. When they realized that the function of their products changed from the utilitarian to the aesthetics they rechristened them "manzir" (beauty for people to see, decorative art, fine arts). They did not stop once to doubt their belonging rightfully to the realm of creativity.
In her concern for reading society into basketry, Muhammad views the designs of the basketry as documents of history that accurately depicts "the horror of the famine and record other social, political, and cultural events." Traditional and emerging basketry patterns archive the social in Manawashai. A pattern named qadees kashar is an imprint of the unrelenting Darfur famine. It represents the famine as a furious beast; qadees (cat) showing its merciless teeth. Furthermore, to represent the homelessness of displaced people as a result of famines a julu (wondering aimlessly) pattern was invented. Again, to depict the hopelessness of the famine-stricken a meskeen daladam (the poor one is crawling) pattern became a recognized one in the industry.
This resourceful in weaving emerging meanings into basketry opens up an interesting door to the creation of hybrid texts by these artists. When socialism was in vogue an ishtraki (socialist) design emerged consisting of small diamond shape placed vertically in a sequential manner around the cover of the basket. A Khartoum Fair design and ' alam aldwal (the flags of nations) was adopted to commemorate a visit of one of the artists to Khartoum Fair held every winter in the capital city, Khartoum. Interestingly, Maradona, the famous Argentinean soccer player, "stormed" these designs. The creators renamed bol altor (ox's urine), a zigzagging design, maradona for the players recognized maneuvering skills. Hybrdity turns negative occasionally. Darfurians who did not like dried milk they got from aid organizations called it faradaxi (for dogs). They guessed that this is the milk Europeans give their dogs. Hence "for dogs" is corrupted to become "fardaxi."
Concern and enthusiasm for women's resourcefulness and creativity was perennial with Muhammad. For her Masters thesis she wrote about the making of taqiya (skull-cap) worn by men, an exclusive women art. The thesis was published in a book form in 2008 titled :Al-Tashkil fi A'mal al-Ibra in Omdurman, al-Taqiyya 1885-1940 (Fine Art in Needle Work in Omdurman, 1885-1940). It is again built on her basic argument that art is the power of the powerless. Confined to home in those early times, women "branded" with colors the ######### of their unchained incarcerators.
Muhammad is never tired telling about talented women of "self-confidence and courage" she conversed with in Manawashai. A proud woman stopped her from taking a picture of women fighting men over a sack if grain provided by an NGO and succeeding. The woman said: "You want to take our pictures because we have become beggars. Those words caused Muhammad's hand to shake. Another woman told her: "We are suffering from a majaaa (famine), but the reason you don't see it is because we hide it under our tobe (under the cloth that cover our clothes)." She also tells about Haj Nasra, an artist of the field, who refused to be used by the government and protested taking her donkey to support a government project. She confronted the omda (mayor) and protested taking the only means by which she brought water to her orphans. Old Haja Sukara minces no words to hit their degraded reality on the nail. She exhibited courage and expressivity in a remarkable way. In answering Muhammad's question about how could she see the stitches at this old age and wearing no glasses, she said, "Girl, in the old days I was really good at it, but nowadays I search for the pain then I inject my ishfa (needle)." Taken by her unrelenting eloquence, Muhammad comments: "Her creativity act was a medicine by which she cures and heals all of these ailments." Muhammad is also impressed by the category of Darfurian women singers known as hakamat (from hakam, ruled; passed a judgment). These poetesses and singers exercise the right to criticize authority. Hakamas have variously criticized the IMF, the World Bank, and other local and global systems that brought misery to their home.
Having known the late Muhammad since the late 1970s I will suggest reading her book as an autobiography of a kind. She chose a career in art and art scholarship against all odds. She could have ended as a primary school teacher, her first job. In 1964 she was teaching in Kassala town in Eastern Sudan when the October Revolution broke out. She boarded the "Freedom Train" that left Kassala to support the popular uprising in Khartoum. Women got their full citizenry thanks to this successful revolution. This historical change may have been the driving force for Muhammad to go back to school and pursue her love of fine art with confidence and social responsibility. She graduated from the College of Fine and Applied Arts, University of Sudan. With her interests in women creations she joined the Department of Folklore of Khartoum University to obtain a diploma and a master degree in folk culture. She left in 1990 for the USA to obtain a doctorate degree in folklore from Indiana University-Bloomington. No small wonder that Muhammad identified with the arts and artists she researched. Her celebration of women creativity was a self-endorsement and self-congrats.
Muhammad climaxes this celebration of women creativity in words that seem to echo her personal experience as a woman, a single mother, an artist, and a scholar. Her passion for women's creativity is unquenchable, unrelenting, and unlimited. It occasionally shades into pure poetry:
"With a mixture of excitement and a fear of the unknown, women artists have been creating beautiful works to conquer the shadow of ugliness stretching over the land as a result of hunger and starvation . . . with the humility to work with their hands and with the pride to create beauty, they have the vision to conceive change and the talent to make it a reality."
* سوف أحاول قدر جهدى إستعراض مؤلف بقيع الجديد الصادر بالانجليزية فى بوست قادم إن طال العمر والله أعلم مع الرحمة لها والشكر للجميع
(عدل بواسطة احمد الامين احمد on 10-21-2013, 02:06 PM)
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احمد الامين احمد
فيس بوك
تويتر
انستقرام
يوتيوب
بنتيريست