4 - No More Silent Victims: Agency, Authority and Artistry in the Black Woman's Story in Revenge (1992)

Summary

‘I was trying to write myself, paint myself, and my compatriots, my fellow black artists, if you like, into the history of British painting’, Lubaina Himid writes of the aesthetic, political, ideological and cultural philosophies undergirding her series, Revenge (1992). Warring against the iconographic and invisibilising stranglehold exerted by white western male artists in particular, she says, ‘I’m trying to make a comment about how European artists … have hijacked some of our African and Caribbean imagery, our bodies and all the rest of it’. Staging her own acts and arts of revenge against white western strategies of appropriating and objectifying Blackwomen’s bodies and art-making traditions, she exults in her successes by declaring that ‘I’ve hijacked some stuff back’. ‘The old solutions did not seem to allow for creative imaginings nor did they enable the black woman's story to take its place amongst the other voices’, she concedes. Himid diagnoses a situation in which ‘old solutions’ or dominant representational modes are responsible for denying as well as distorting ‘the black woman's story’. Working to do justice not to one but to many Blackwomen's stories, she cuts to the heart of the matter: ‘Her story is complex and constantly interwoven through the whole, yet is often told simply and by others as that of a silent victim’.

According to Himid's radically revisionist, interventionist and imaginatively transformative practices, the Blackwoman is no ‘silent victim’ but a vocal agent, author, artist and activist. Among the many weapons in her arsenal of radical tactics is her ‘device of placing two black women in a painting together’ according to which she inserts Blackwomen's lives into the battleground of art history. As she explains, this ‘was an early method I used to counteract this assumption that there was only one story and that the black woman never spoke’. Working to cut to the heart of multiple narratives and memories for her Black female protagonists, she confirms that the ‘use of pattern and dress has always been important too’. As she readily admits, ‘I am constantly exploring the notion that textile design could be a secret and yet visible language between women’.