The sweet, earthy smell of incense envelopes me as soon as I enter the room. Right in front is a table with an offering box, a wilted sheath of flowers, and a condolence book for guests to sign. Behind that, a body wholly and neatly wrapped in a soft white fabric is suspended horizontally with ropes spanning to the ceiling. The body hovers atop an intricately woven bed as if ascending.
Tanzanian visual artist and curator Gadi Ramdhani’s month-long exhibition at the Alliance Française in Dar es Salaam, My Father’s Widow, is a meditation on death’s aftermath. “It is the most unavoidable thing, death” he says certainly before adding, “but I wanted to know what happens after. How do loved ones honour the deceased in mourning, in taking up their responsibilities, and in dividing up their resources.” Ramadhani researched death ceremonies in coastal Tanzania and East Africa for years before shelving his findings. That is, until a series of tragic losses in his own life inspired him to dust his folder off. His research, Ramadhani reveals, pointed towards a considerable number of court cases over widow inheritance. Customary and Islamic laws, the main systems of intestate inheritance in Tanzania, both restrict women’s inheritance on the basis of their gender. This- the limiting customs on widow inheritance-, coupled with the stigma around will-writing as many Tanzanian elders consider it to be a bad omen, has led to many women experiencing hardship following their husband’s passing. Some have resorted to taking legal measures, while others lamentably accept their fate. “I question why this is the case especially if she was one of the people that even contributed to those resources that are being divided,” Ramadhani wonders aloud as he explains his choice to centre the widow in his show.
My Father’s Widow pulls from traditional African art practices- a re-emerging feature of the contemporary Dar es Salaam art scene. Ramdhani fashions an immersive environment through the sense of smell with the incense, which many Tanzanians will associate with the religious practice of sanctification and imagery of ascension. He also considers the room’s spatial design- there is a combination of canvas hung on the walls, suspended from the ceiling as well as an installation such that the whole room is engaged.
There is a canvas on either side of the exhibition’s centrepiece. The first is an image of a woman busying her hands with work, several pots positioned at her feet. The image is brought to life with charcoal and acrylic, materials whose shades fill most of the canvas except for a piece of negative space in the shape of a standing man. The placement of this white space is such that the figure is impressed on top of the working woman, giving it the effect of a recollected memory. The second image, a woman half-turned to look behind her, holding up a lantern as if to expose what might be lurking behind her. Her wide-eyed gaze is fixed right at us. A radiant orange and grey khanga is draped over her body and a matching piece wraps her head. To the front of her there is a sprawling landscape, some of which looks to be a body of water. Finally the third image, also a woman, conjured from the same combination of charcoal and acrylics. She faces the front this time, her neck craned downwards possibly by the weight she carries on her head; a basin with an octopus, its tentacles slithering out the edges of the container.
Together, the three pieces on canvas serve to communicate the widow’s plight. They reveal a palpable melancholy about the past, apprehension about the present, and an accepted reality of the necessary but thankless labouring to come. Details like the covered hair, large waterbody, and seafood hinting towards the coastal and Islamic influences that inform the show.
Along the walls, Ramadhani has placed almost identical images of what looks to be a young girl screen printed on canvas. In some, an item is drawn on her head, and in others, it is on her back. “When you are alive you could be working hard to make sure your child lives a good life but when you die you could find that your child ends up in a bad space because there are no longer enough resources. People will recognise the items on the prints as local jobs people do to get money.” There is a sewing machine, a pair of boxing gloves, a termite-infested helmet, and an assortment of animals, all denoting an occupation or odd job- the thankless labouring.
If the bigger canvases are of the widow, then the smaller ones along the walls are of the child, afflicted by her father’s loss and her mother’s now desolate condition. As written in the artist’s statement; “loss reshapes family and social dynamic,” and there is a clear demonstration of “defiance amidst adversity,” from the labouring woman. It is certainly an accurate representation of how the coastal patrilineal methods of inheritance have adverse impacts on women and children, but it is neither a novel nor a particularly compelling representation. Beyond its accuracy- and its sentimental value as the work was inspired by personal loss-, it is a fairly surface-level observation of the changes in material conditions caused by death, by appealing to the archetypal image of the suffering woman and the girl child. An archetype that does not do much beyond communicating that suffering is synonymous with womanhood.
The far more fascinating commentary lies entirely within the exhibition’s centrepiece and its more expansive exploration of “emotional and cultural dimensions of mourning,” as Ramadhani states in the closing sentence of his artist statement. Through the use of death as a communal ritual, Ramadhani illuminates the circularity of life and the rituals that coastal communities have in place to uphold this circularity. Firstly, the bed on which the wrapped body hovers, made of tightly wound rope and a smoothly carved wood. “I used the bed as the symbol for the ritual that brings forth the next generation, and then how we lay the body in death. The bed is the site of beginning and the end,” he explains. In both rituals, when one is being conceived and being laid to rest, one is not an active participant. A reminder of our inevitable service to each other.
On the foot of the bed he arranges three materials. First, the charcoal. A material as useful in its life as it is in its death; a material that facilities the life of another in its afterlife. A clear nod to life’s cyclical nature, and also to his own fascination with the material in his work- you would be hard-pressed to find a contemporary piece by the artist that does not feature the black streak of charcoal.
A sand-like material known as dalia follows. “Many Tanzanians don’t know about it, but chiefs and kings used to use dalia to contact ancestors. You know the violet sand that the king in Black Panther used? Yes, just like that” Ramdhani tells me. In many Tanzanian communities, including the coastal ones that the artist draws from for his exhibition, death only represents transition out of the physical realm and into the spiritual one- as represented by the ascending body in the exhibition’s centre piece. The possibility for communication with those who have passed on only emphasises death as alchemical transformation, not an end.
Then the candies strewn across, their translucent wrappers shimmering in stark contrast to the somber atmosphere, signifying “the initial three-day mourning period where no one talks anything bad about you. They talk only about the good of relating with you,” explains Ramadhani. The mourners’ complementary and endearing thoughts and words acts as a primer, a spiritual preparation of sorts for the next 40 days, where the close family will begin assuming responsibility of the departed’s resources in good faith. “If it’s needed then your children will be given to someone else that was close to you, or your farms and such. That was the meaning of the 40 days, so there was no need for a case in court because everyone understood to do what was best,” the visual artist clarifies. By drawing onto past communal rituals, Ramadhani is honing into the purposeful nature of coastal Tanzanian (and East African) emotional and cultural dimensions of mourning. That the rituals were designed for emotional and material comfort. “These rituals used to give us social security, it was unacceptable to have children of deceased parents wandering the street,” Ramadhani says emphatically.
The quiet implication could be that we might be better off returning to these past practices. That our modernity has stripped us of a crucial pillar of social security and rendered widows and their children inevitably harmed. But when we consider that the history of women’s inheritance inequality is as long as the inheritance rituals themselves, this suggestion does not hold up. In fact, most succession practices are predicated on the idea that the widow and her children would not survive the loss of the man of the house, hence the necessary communal mitigation through succession rituals.
My Father’s Widow’s merit lies not in its prescription of what we should do about the problem of widow inheritance and discriminatory succession practices. Ramdhani agrees as he simply says, “I just wanted to start the conversation.” He shares the delight of witnessing audiences learn about death rituals they only vaguely knew about, during the show’s opening night. He would then go on to have another discursive event towards the end of his exhibition tenure for members of the audience keen to unpack the themes that came up for them.
Really, the show’s value lies in its tracing a line through history and magnifying the significance of death ceremonies for coastal communities, both as a necessary emotional and social crutch. “Because art should document time,” as Ramadhani puts it himself, “and we should be able to trace back to time using art as an archive, I want this work to be part of that archive about death.”
