Indigo by Catherine E. McKinley

Author:Catherine E. McKinley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Published: 2011-05-20T04:00:00+00:00

Six

Amazons, Wives of the Gods, and Mama Benz, Ghana/Togo/Benin

In Irving Penn’s lens, the daughters of the Mino, the legendary Amazon women warriors of the ancient kingdom of Dahomey (the modern country of Benin), stare into the camera with a watchfulness of women beyond their years. They are lithe, their bodies on the meridian of pubescence, their breasts taut and bared of everything but collars of powder—a cosmetic, with spiritual purpose too—appointed with thin coral and gold and metal necklaces. The heavily cicatrized bodies of some of the girls mark their clan, their status, and their various initiations; the fresh wounds were likely rubbed with a mix of henna and indigo to deepen their relief against the skin. Their bodies are wrapped gloriously in indigo cloths designed with chieftaincy leaves and scar-like lines and patterns like sugar cubes. The cloths were ironed or beaten on a wooden block by a wooden mallet, until they achieved a starchy crispness and sheen. The girls sit as if in ritual as much as studio scene. Their heads, tied in wax cloth and satin, disturb the palate of blue and white and black, with a sudden flash of red or gold.

The photos appeared first in Vogue magazine in 1967, when Penn journeyed with his ambulant studio on special assignment to Dahomey. The girls’ faces are arresting; so much feeling moves behind their impassive stares, and the cloth absorbs every mood, projects it as a fiercely playful theater. It is character acting. Penn admits that the photos he took are a creation of “extreme artifice”: the bodies are in studied poses, recast in startling relief against a stark white studio backdrop.

I find the photos troubling for their exoticism, for the way the girls were sexualized, and yet I realize their power, because the girls’ eyes and the way the cloth was photographed lived on in my imagination. One morning I woke up thinking of the images, and I decided to travel to Benin to see if I would find something to supplant them; bits of blue sugar cubes and leaves. I also thought of the journey as a kind of dry-run to Nigeria, which was just a few hours beyond Porto Novo, a chance to test the infamous road and border crossings through Togo and Benin, to see if I was ready for the indigo badlands, the place from which Fulbright had revoked its grants.

The next day I was leaving Accra in an ancient Peugeot at breakneck speed, the road below exposed through the rusting carriage. I sat in a middle seat between a woman with baskets of dried fish and yam at her feet and a Cameroonian student returning home on vacation.

You won’t travel far on the road leaving Accra before the modern, mostly whitewashed cement-block houses change to clusters of small adobe structures with corrugated tin or fiber roofs. Occasionally you pass a hotel or the mansion of a chief or wealthy person who has built in his hometown—the domain of his ancestors and clan; usually only returning to these homes for obligatory rites, most often funerals.

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