Soul Talk by Akasha Gloria Hull

Author:Akasha Gloria Hull
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: African American Women / Spirituality
ISBN: 9781594775215
Publisher: Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
Published: 2012-03-09T00:00:00+00:00

Painting with an Open Hand

So far I have discussed spirituality and creativity in terms of a poet and a novelist, women whose medium is language and the written word. Creativity, of course, manifests in all art forms and, beyond that, can brilliantly color every daily act. Lucille Clifton indirectly made this point. When she spoke about writing poems, making it seem as if it were a natural process of simply allowing something to happen, I said to her, “You sound like you think everybody can write poetry.” She replied,

I think everybody can express. I know everybody wants to. I know there is in humans a great urge toward expressing that ineffable thing that is a part of us. I think some people do it with poems and I know people that can cornrow pretty close to it. I think that people tend not to listen. It’s educated out of you. My luck is that I wasn’t that educated.

When artist Michele Gibbs discusses her paintings, she takes us into another medium of creative expression—closer to a tactile and visual art form such as cornrowing. However, everything she says continues to link spirituality with creativity at the same time that it proves that creativity is not dependent on “education” or rationality for its being—in the same way that spirituality happens outside of or beyond the accustomed order of reality.

Michele begins her story of how she took both her spirituality and her art to a higher level at the point where she left Detroit with her husband, George. They were both unusually fermentoriented social activists who found themselves ready for major changes in their life. They decided to go and live in Mexico, with indigenous people of this hemisphere who had been colonized, exploited, and oppressed, but who had survived. She says, “It was an entirely different energy that they had, and since they were still around, they must know something since the extermination process had certainly been more severe in their case than in ours [African Americans].” She and George settled on Oaxaca, one of the poorest states with one of the highest percentages of indigenous people. Sure enough, what they found was “a clear power space with totally different energy.”

This clear power space in Oaxaca opened up Michele artistically and literally opened the door to the material for her art, which turned out to be amate, the sacred, pre-Colombian pressed wood bark of the Central American timber tree Ficus glabrata that was used historically by the Indians to ceremoniously record their codices and cosmology. Having come in contact with this material fifteen years previously, she had always wanted to work with it. Now she was able to secure ample quantities of the amate, engage meditatively and creatively with it, and thereby produce paintings that were a radical departure from her previous work and from the way the material was utilized by the native artists. Being in Oaxaca made all of this possible because, not only was it a center of magical

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