The Broom Closet: Usha Seejarim

by Pamela Allara and Mark Auslander

The eighth day of The Lockdown Collection is devoted to a multimedia piece by Usha Seejarim, “The Broom Closet.” About forty broom sticks, stacked mainly vertically, have been chopped into short segments and reconnected.  Hanging from the walls are about seven pointed metal bases, perhaps flat irons, their flat bottoms facing outwards and their pointed ends directed downwards, rather like bared teeth.


The artist writes:

“The Broom Closet is a metaphorical place in which magical religious identity is hidden, likened to a concealed sexual orientation.

Here, there is nothing hidden; the closet is open. It reveals dismembered parts of domestic objects, reconfigured to create an assemblage of strands; a curtain.

The time of lockdown, social distancing and isolation have forced us to literally be at home.

Apart from the occupation of domestic chores; it has given us the opportunity to introspect on what it means to at home with ourselves.

To truly connect with who we are devoid of identity politics of religion, gender, race—even beyond the identity of what we do in our jobs and careers. We are prompted by this virus to come out of the broom closet with whom we with ourselves, our families, and with the environment.

There is an element of uncomplicatedeness in this piece.”

Pamela Allara:  Usha Seejarim was born in 1974 in Bethal, South Africa. Seejarim received a B-Tech Degree in Fine Art from the University of Johannesburg in 1999 and a Master’s Degree in Fine Art at the University of The Witwatersrand (WITS) in 2008, She lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa, She has exhibited widely, and has completed numerous public commissions including the public portrait for Nelson Mandela’s funeral in Qunu, South Africa in 2013; Figures Representing Articles From The Freedom Charter in 2008 in, Soweto, South Africa; and artwork for the facade of the South African Chancery in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (2008) amongst others.

In her art, Seejarim employs mundane objects that are commonly used in domestic labor: including brooms, irons, hand soap, and wooden clothes pegs. The strong tactility of her sculptures subtly underscores the fact that the objects are primarily used by women in the course of physical labor. The repetitive actions  involved in creating the works also allude to women’s endless battles in ‘keeping the dirt of life at a distance.’ Because her art is not overtly polemical or political, it might be called ‘post-feminist,’ but nonetheless it makes explicit that feminism has not achieved its goal of releasing women from the sole responsibility for the drudgery of housework.

In The Broom Closet, (2020), her contribution to The Lockdown Collection, Seejarim slices broomsticks into pegs that when strung on wire, gain a resemblance to strands of human hair. But the potential for movement is stymied by the insertion of rigid iron bases, which resemble vagina dentata with ‘iron-hard’ teeth.

She has stated that the current lockdown has encouraged us to “truly connect with who we are,” and although she considers The Broom Closet to be uncomplicated, I am inclined to disagree. In her statement for her exhibit at the SMAC gallery in Johannesburg last year, “Transgressing Power,” Seejarim noted that women who transgress power are labelled as ‘witches,’ and those who transgress sexuality, ‘whores.’ In coming out of the closet, this female sculpture brings along with its swinging freedom a threatening core. Transformed, brooms and irons become unexpectedly aggressive. 

Mark Auslander:   Usha Seejarim's Broom Closet puts me in mind of Emily Dickinson's poem:

Remembrance has a Rear and Front —
'Tis something like a House —
It has a Garret also
For Refuse and the Mouse.

Besides the deepest Cellar
That ever Mason laid —
Look to it by its Fathoms
Ourselves be not pursued — 

In this poem  Dickinson would appear to anticipate by many decades Sigmund Freud's insight in his 1919 essay on the Uncanny that the house is an especially resonant model for the dynamic human mind, and that its hidden recesses are intertwined with the mysterious operations of the Unconscious. Freud famously jokes that there is nothing more Uncanny ("unheimlich", lit. "unfamiliar" or "un-homelike") than the home-like (the "heimlich"), the very seat of the family itself. The family home, where we develop as sentient beings, is entangled with the full range of unfulfilled desires, longings, inhibitions and terrors, and is thus key to our experience of the Uncanny, the profoundly disturbing, even terrifying sensation of simultaneous familiarity and unfamiliarity. (Hence, in the modern imagination, the most feared ghosts lurk within the house.)  To look unflinchingly into the inner depths of its deepest cellar, "its Fathoms,"  in Dickinson's terms, is vital to the work of sanity, so that "Ourselves be not pursued" by our inner demons, never far from the surface

What powers and anxieties, then, are embedded in the Broom Closet, especially under conditions of the Lockdown?  What scene does this "curtain," in her terms, rise up to reveal?  An early hint may be found in the image of the ancient Roman goddess, Deverra, symbolized by a broom, who safeguards women in childbirth, midwives, and newborn babies from the dreaded divinity Silvanus of the Wood. A sacred broom was thus honored within Deverra's temples. (The operativeimagery seems to have been that the broom both sweeps together grain, necessary for survival in the agrarian household, and sweeps away evil, establishing a ritual boundary between the inner domestic and the encroaching dangers of unbridled nature).  

In the 15th century, an era of renewed assaults on women's ritual capacities and autonomy, all lumped together as "pagan," this ancient symbolism was violently appropriated and transformed by men: women with special, transgressive powers were branded as witches who supposedly flew on phallic broomsticks between their legs to the "Witch's Sabbath."

Brooms also became signs of the labor of impoverished males, including boys, whose subordination coded them as comparatively female. But even then, the magicality of the broom, born in antiquity, endured. Most famously, in Goethe's 1797 poem The Sorcerer's Apprentice,  the apprentice's ill-advised spell brings a broomstick to life, to carry pails of water for him. The broom's extravagant energies cannot be stopped even when the apprentice chops the broomstick to pieces, until the Sorcerer intervenes, disenchanting the broom and returning the boy to drudgery. (This sequence is famously elaborated in the 1940 animated Disney film Fantasia, in which the apprentice, played by Mickey Mouse, unwittingly calls up the power of the broomstick to hilarious, chaotic effect: the chopped-up (symbolically castrated?) broomstick pieces reconstitute themselves and return with a vengeance as a marching army of bucket-toting brooms, rather like Nazi troops on the march.)

The modern Lockdown has separated off untold thousands of domestic units, preventing women, who remain symbolic guardians of the household, from daily interaction with one another. In effect, broomstick, ancient signifiers of households, have been chopped up into innumerable pieces, which may not easily be glued back together.

Seejarim's Closet may thus be understood as an enduring temple to the domestic in the inner recesses of the house, and also a symptom of how, in this strange era of fear and separation, the fundamental values of the domestic realm, including compassion and nurturance, are under daily assault, chopped into little pieces. We need, in our quest for sanity and integration, to honor and repair all that is gathered within the Broom Closet, "Ourselves be not pursued."