By Ushie Jedy-Agba.
Earlier this summer my friend sent me one of her paintings and I realized that I had basically spent the majority of my summer marveling at colonizer art and didn’t even explore the rich artworks of my country (Wakanda Forever). Ok, I’m actually Nigerian but still. Anyway, the painting has extremely strong Eastern Nigerian influence and is called “Man of the East” by Chimira Natanna.
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| Man of the East. Chimira Natanna. |
It shows a man in rags going somewhere or looking for something that one might assume was work and prosperity (cause I mean if he was rich there would be at least ONE Gucci belt on him). This man is different though, because in most art forms when people are heading for a new better life they usually head west in order to chase that dream. Some notable examples are the Joad family in the Grapes of Wrath and Gatsby living in East Egg but the love of his life living all the way across in the West (I kinda feel him cause in the movie Daisy was bad I can’t lie). Anyway, it’s weird that this man is walking from west to east and vice versa so one can assume that just like the Joad family, this man moved to the west and found that the life he expected was nothing but fantasy. He is in rags so it’s either, he left because he couldn’t find work or he became worse off than before but one thing is certain is that the west ain’t it chief.
This particular painting is very important when talking in the context of the Biafran war era where Igbo people were not only unjustly persecuted but many Nigerians adopted colonizer mindsets and viewed everything white as more superior so would do their best to assimilate with white culture and leave theirs behind (I don’t know why someone would leave jollof for bangers and mash but to each their own). The man is returning back to the east, back to his homeland as he may have seen extreme poverty but from a different perspective he may not be doing that, he may be rebelling against the cultural erasure of the rest of the country and decides to stay true to himself. This is reminiscent of young artists in Paris and London in the early 1900’s who rejected a “normal” lifestyle and chose instead to live freely and live through their art and self-expression despite how hard it was. Most of them struggled to eat or even find a home but they remained to stay in poverty than to make money doing work they would not enjoy. This was them carrying on the starving artist trope which was first made popular, some believe, in the 1840’s by Henri Murger in his book “Scènes de la Vie de Bohème”. Conditions were harsh but these people didn’t care because they were living freely, loving freely and moving about freely but at the cost of drowning instead of dripping.
In another book, I can’t remember the name of, a young boy asks a man why he prefers to live off his art and be hungry than find proper work and eat. He responds, “I may be hungry but at least I'm not starving”, and some may think that man is crazy but this random man was saying that no matter how bad his situation is it could be worse. He also goes onto say that he may be poor physically but he’s rich in spirit. Bohemia looks down on the concept of physical money and has adopted free spirits and self-expression as its main currency.
Back to the man at hand anyways… So this man is seen walking from west to east and what’s significant as well is the natural setting behind him. We can see some plants and a bunch of grass behind him and this is the artists way of showing us his connection with nature in the sense that the same way plants die in the winter and start growing again in the spring and the sun rising in the east and sets in the west, therefore, the sunset on his life back in the west and his true self (the flower) withered and died as it was winter but the sun will rise again in the west and so will his flower of life as it does in the spring. He heads back east for new growth and new life to bloom once again.
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