Kudzanai-Violet Hwami's Ain't Leaving this Country

                                                                  

In Zimbabwean artist Kudzanai-Violet Hwami’s 2016 painting Ain’t Leaving this Country, a figure lounges cross-legged on an orange vessel stationed along the edge of a sea. The vessel cuts diagonally across the bottom half of the canvas. While the sea expands toward the background in thick strokes of blue and gray, the land upon which the vessel is docked is rendered abstractly in the patch of black that fills the painting’s bottom right corner. A white sign behind the vessel reads “BEITBRIDGE SEA FRONT,” the vessel itself labeled “QUEER ZIM FREEDOM BOAT.” These geographic markers locate the painting on the northern shore of the Limpopo River, which forms the border between Zimbabwe and South Africa. What invisibly scaffolds the painting are the stories and histories of the many LBGTQ+ Zimbabweans who have migrated south in flight from political violence, social hostility, and discrimination. For Hwami’s figure, however, flight is not the obvious aspiration. The message of the title (“Ain’t Leaving this Country”) seems to be attributed to him as a posture or attitude more than a form of speech. He poses with a causal confidence that relays his resolution as a kind of provocation. 

The attitude of Hwami’s figure calls to mind Lindsey B. Green-Simms’ discussion of varying and divergent “registers of resistance” in Queer African filmmaking in her recent book Queer African Cinemas. Green-Simms introduces the concept of “registers of resistance” as a framework for thinking about artistic representations of queer resistance beyond the conventional metric of overtly defiant political action (20). As Green-Simms argues, the forms of resistance practiced by queer African storytellers and everyday citizens are not always positioned as agential forms of mastery or political action: they do not always easily fit neatly into a progressive political agenda (or even a more radical critique of that agenda), and sometimes they might not be immediately discernible as narratives of subversion (21).

Though working with cinematic representations of African queerness, Green-Simms’ Queer African Cinemas offers a generative framework for interpreting a range of queer African artforms that depict or express modes of resistance that register at a “lower frequency” than conventional Western models of subjective autonomy and political agency (23).  

One form of resistance taken by Hwami’s figure is his simultaneous rejection of traditional masculinity and embrace of a claim to belonging in Zimbabwe as a potentially queer man. Lounging on his docked sea vessel, the figure’s pose recalls the European art history tradition of portraits of reclining women. Hwami subverts this tradition by associating her figure with representations of femininity. Shoulders tilted and seemingly striking a pose, Hwami’s figure is depicted with markers of effeminacy that also signal his potential queerness. What is less ambiguous is the figure’s self-assured claim to his Zimbabweaness. In addition to the title of the work, the painting’s color palate expresses this claim. Recurrent shades of brown, black, and gray makeup the figure’s body and the land interjecting the sea in the background of the painting. This mirroring of body and land implies a natural rootedness in place that also works quietly to challenge the idea that non-heteronormative sexualities are un-African.      

The form of resistance embodied by Hwami’s figure registers at a frequency that is initially difficult to pick up. In a complete rejection of the masculinist ideal of overtly defiant political action, Hwami’s figure lounges resolved in his choice of inaction (Ain’t Leaving…). Instead of passivity, however, Hwami’s figure opts for an alternative form of agency in his choice to stay in his country rather than to cross the river on the Queer Zim Freedom Boat. The name of the vessel and the fact that it is and will remain docked mean that the figure, perhaps counterintuitively, refuses the promise of freedom. The color of the vessel and the strip of horizon in the background are even similar, suggesting a connection between political migration and a brighter future. Anthropologist Saba Mahmood's concept of the docile agent provides another critical perspective on the kind of rejection expressed by Hwami's figure and the limits of Western social ideals and discursive practices applied to contexts outside of the West. 

From an analysis of a women’s mosque movement in Cairo emerges, as Mahmood offers us, the concept of the docile agent. This concept seeks to make up for the limits of traditional liberal feminist concepts of agency, which have relied on theorists such as Foucault who write about agency as belonging to an individual seeking his or her freedom, which is primarily undermined by the state or members of a dominating group (Mahmood 203). Mahmood’s docile agent, conversely, does not exercise power in subverting or resisting a male authority, but by striving to embody an Islamic tradition. Importantly, Mahmood points out the ways in which particular readings of Arab Muslim societies have erred in presupposing the humanist ideals of autonomy and self-expression as metrics of agency (Mahmood 206). Mahmood attributes the traps of these misguided readings to liberal feminism’s political prescriptions, which naturalize an individualized notion of freedom as a universal social ideal (Mahmood 206). 

On a conceptual level, the aesthetics of the painting mirror the focal attitude of Hwami’s figure. The whole scene of the portrait is set up as a kind of negation. We see the imagery of a journey passed up at the time and place of its possible outset. Our figure lounges on a vessel that is definitively inert, docked on land rather than afloat at sea. In this painting, Hwami brings us to the shore of a flight dream and halts us there on the edge of fantasy. This refusal on the part of the painter is as well a kind of provocation, prompting us to consider the complex entanglements of queerness, cultural and state-sanctioned hostility to sexualities deemed nonnormative, and belonging.  

If the pose and attitude of Hwami’s figure are both provocations, the question of to or at whom his provocations are directed should be asked and answered. Several possibilities arise. If primarily political in aim, perhaps they are directed at the Zimbabwean government, with its well-publicized record of homophobic rhetoric and legislation. If more socially motivated, they are perhaps directed at those members of the Zimbabwean public who would have non-heteronormative sexualities expelled from the nation’s body politic and history alike. Aware of its circulation in transnational art worlds and networks centered in the West, perhaps the provocations are directed at viewers outside of the country who may too readily cast Zimbabwe as a country forever unlivable for its queer citizens, fixing the nation in a place of historical stasis.