TCHAKA
Say My Name: bowl of sweets for Leopold’s daughter(s), from the Candyman with love (Peele) was created by Keambiroiro Khalfani Ra. It is quite a mouthful but not atypical for Ra as he is known for creating titles as engaging and thought-provoking as the work itself. He has often stated that he creates the title first, because then the work must live up to its title. Say My Name was one of three works Ra exhibited in the group exhibition “…And I Resume the Struggle” in February 2023.
The assemblage includes six meticulously sculpted clay pieces in a glass bowl placed on a black doily then enclosed in a rectangular glass case. The clay is shaped like a large chocolate bar which dominates the circular composition framed by five other bite-sized chocolates shaped to look like dismembered hands. Peeking out from the chocolate hands are razor blades, stealthily placed to ambush the tongue or throat of an unsuspecting victim. Say My Name gives new meaning to the expression bittersweet.
K. Khalfani Ra, Say My Name: bowl of sweets for Leopold’s daughter(s), from the Candyman with love (Peele). 2022. Clay, razors, glass, ceramic. 8.5 x 11”
Chocolate, razor blades, and severed hands may be hard to swallow for some, but in Belgium, the Antwerpse handjes (Antwerp Hands) are a hit. During the savage rule of King Leopold II of Belgium (still a highly celebrated figure there) Black men, women and children in the Congo were often mutilated under Leopold’s orders having their hands and feet severed as punishment for not supplying the daily quota of rubber. What is even more sinister is that one of the most popular chocolates in Belgium today is Antwerpse handjes (Antwerp Hands), chocolate shaped to resemble severed human hands. An undeniable vestige of slavery and colonialism, the chocolate ‘handjes’ reference the hands of the Africans who were mutilated just a hundred years ago.
Today the ghost of Leopold II manifests itself in the United States and other Western powers who are complicit in profiting from the mass exploitation of resources, forced displacement, murder and rape of millions of Black Congolese people. The current situation in the Congo is but a contemporary outcome of Leopold II’s rule at the turn of the 20th century.
The deceptive combination of materials creates an interesting juxtaposition between pleasure and pain, one intended to bring comfort and the other capable of causing serious damage. The pleasure-pain dynamic raises several questions: Who is meant to feel pain and who pleasure? Is it the consumer of the sweets, the victims whose hands were cut off to create the chocolates or the chocolate-maker watching his victims consume the deadly treat? The work suggests a sadomasochistic relationship between oppressor and oppressed. The oppressor derives pleasure from inflicting intense pain on the oppressed resulting over time in the oppressed coming to crave and internalize the abuse through a psychopathological process of conditioning. This metaphor of sweets, consumption, pleasure and pain has come to epitomize the colonized negro[1] experience.
The colour of the clay lends itself effortlessly to the sculptural forms giving the illusion of chocolate. However, the colour also becomes politically charged when combined with the forms of dismembered hands to reference Black skin. Symbolically the severed hands speak to historical and current physical and psychological abuses meted out to Black people globally from white oppressors and the sadistic fascination of whites with mutilating the Black body, especially the genitals of Black men and boys. The severed hands also serve as a metaphor for the amputation of Black people from their ancestral home (Africa), religious practices, languages, customs and high cultures during colonialism while simultaneously being fed a Lucullan feast of whiteness and anti-blackness.
Europeans often kept severed body parts of Black people as souvenirs, and war trophies, even consuming them as food at times. In 1961, the first democratically elected prime minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo Patrice Lumumba was assassinated by the Belgians in collaboration with the US government. Lumumba’s body was dismembered and dissolved in acid by Belgian police commissioner Gerard Soete who kept his gold tooth as war booty. In 2022, 61 years after his assassination, the tooth was reluctantly returned to the family of the former prime minister after years of protest.
Patrice Lumumba’s tooth. Belgian policeman Gerard Soete kept the tooth in a padded box in his home in Belgium. Source: BBC by Jelle Vermeersch
Say My Name: bowl of sweets for Leopold’s daughter(s), from the Candyman with love (Peele) also references the 2021 Black horror film Candyman written and produced by Jordan Peele and directed by Nia DaCosta which is a sequel to Candyman (1992) written and directed by Bernard Rose. The film was inspired by the African-American myth of Candyman, a character forged through the centuries of violence carried out on the collective Black being and employed in this film as a force against such white injustices. Ra states:
Using the agency of this interpretation of Candyman as an administrator of retributive justice, by way of the invocation of a historicized Black self-reflection, mirroring the horrors of white oppression, the work seeks to intervene into an ongoing atrocity in Belgium and its world-leading chocolate industry, a direct inheritance and consequence of the infamous colonial evils of that nation abetted by their erstwhile and still largely celebrated king Leopold.
The title becomes even more relevant in light of the ongoing daily atrocities of racially motivated killings of Black people in the United States where white police officers (Slave Patrol)[2] commit approximately 99.9% of the murders. The phrase “Say Their Names” was coined as a response to these atrocities. It became famous after the murder of Sandra Bland in 2015 who was ‘found’ hanged in her Texas jail cell. She was a politically active Black activist who fought against racial injustice and police brutality. The Soul-ar series is a body of work by Ra, including work about Sandra Bland such as: Fire dance, I no be lady, towards the evolution of Sandra Bland, from the soul-ar series.
Khalfani Ra. Fire dance, I no be lady, towards the evolution of Sandra Bland, from the soul-ar series. 2020. Hand-cut collage and coloured pencils on digital print.
Sweets bearing razors reference the film Candyman (2021) in which it is used as a sacrament in Candyman’s initiation ritual, metaphorically representing the unspeakable horrors of the Black experience. However, Ra flips the meaning in his work from a sacrament of initiation and Belgian schadenfreude to a weaponized food for the consumption of the beneficiaries of colonialism, particularly but not limited to those of the Belgian empire. In other words, in this act, Ra is giving the imperialist a taste of their own medicine.
The idea of the dismembered limbs can be seen as a metaphor for how Africa was carved up by Europeans at the Berlin conference of 1884.[3] The severed hand is also an important and recurring motif in Candyman (2021) in which, after being accused of impregnating a white woman the artist Daniel Robitaille was ganged by a lynch mob and beaten. In the process, his hand was sawed off and replaced with a hook. His white attackers then covered his body with honey and allowed bees to sting him to death. Thus, the first Candyman was created through pain, abuse and ultimately death. Hence, the violence he later metes out against his abusers is but a natural, healthy and justified response, one of self-defence and not sporadic brutality.
Khalfani Ra, Say My Name: bowl of sweets for Leopold’s daughter(s), from the Candyman with love (Peele). Clay, razors, glass, ceramic. 8.5 x 11
This reference is significant for several reasons. Firstly, it brings into focus the brutal history of lynching African Americans in the United States. Often these lynchings were a result of rape accusations made by white women, which were often trumped-up allegations created to feed the sadistic appetite of white men, women and children who enjoyed watching and participating in these events.
It is also significant because Daniel Robitaille, like K. Khalfani Ra, is an image-maker. Perhaps, for Ra, this work signifies a personal identification with such an amputation, and the violence associated with it. As the opening of the work’s title, Say My Name may suggest an autobiographical element associated with the perception of due recognition or the lack thereof and its practical corollaries. Historically, this speaks to the continued efforts of the white power structure and their gatekeepers within the Black community, to stifle or suppress serious Black creative expression of self-determination especially those based on a consciousness of Black power. This is evident in the numerous assassinations of Black leaders worldwide and the destruction of striving Black communities such as Tulsa Oklahoma (Black Wall Street), Rosewood, and others.
Still from Candyman (2021)
In summation, the work Say My Name is an exceptional work both in formal and conceptual terms. Khalfani Ra manages to present us with a highly complex artwork which skilfully responds not only to historical and current events but also to the history of art and visual culture as a whole. More importantly, it urges the viewer to contemplate the horrific atrocities meted out against the Black masses globally and proposes a solution for dealing with the agents of anti-blackness.
Footnotes
[1] The word “negro” is not used merely as a synonym for Black but rather to make a political distinction. Here, it is not used in the way Marcus Garvey used it but more as Malcolm X did.
[2] Policing as we know it today has its roots in the Slave patrols, an institution started in the 16th century to maintain the system of slavery through the use of extreme violence and intimidation, similar to the maroons in Jamaica.
[3] On November 5, 1884, a gathering of white men from all the major European powers, the United States and the Ottoman Empire, came together in Berlin to stipulate the conditions under which the ongoing project to colonize and partition Africa would be regulated. This conference is popularly known as the Berlin conference but more correctly could be called the Congo conference as the Congo Free State was the main topic of the meeting and the only state to emerge from the discussions.
