“Sitting between my mother’s spread legs, her strong knees gripping my shoulders tightly like some well-attended drum, my head in her lap, while she brushed and combed and oiled and braided. I feel my mother’s strong, rough hands all up in my unruly hair, while I’m squirming around on a low stool or a folded towel on the floor…
I remember the warm mother smell caught between her legs, and the intimacy of our physical touching nestled inside of the anxiety/pain like a nutmeg nestled inside its covering of mace.
The radio, the scratching comb, the smell of petroleum jelly, the grip of her knees and my stinging scalp all fall into– the rhythms of a litany, the rituals of Black women combing their daughters’ hair.”
–Audre Lorde, “Zami: A New Spelling of My Name”
A Litany
Installation and performance.
First activated for the group show Roots and Roads curated by Anita Bateman at Franklin Street Works. Model: Gala Prudent
In combining basket weaving with hair braiding, A Litany illustrates connections between these frequently gendered modes of work. Initially inspired by the practice of women and children piling materials high upon their crown in order to transport items, this piece aligns imagery and textiles traditions from black diasporic– particularly Haitian and Yoruba– religious performance and art with the commonplace gestures of braiding, craft making, and commerce.
A Litany is thinking through the relationship of the hand to the body; of the politics of labor within craft and adornment; and meditating on the action of braiding as a particularly potent moment of black intimacy often experienced and performed between femmes, mothers and daughters, and viscerally queer in its eroticness.
