Conversations with Myself: Lungile Mbelle

Lungile Mbelle
Conversations with Myself
Acrylic Ink and Paint on Paper
TLC Student Collection (South Africa, 2020)

Overview. Two heads, self portraits of the artist in dreads, face one another. The eyes of the left, lighter figure are obscured by newspaper print, and his mouth is open; the eyes of the right, darker figure are open, his mouth closed. Below the left figure, and nestled in his hair, we see a simple spiked circle, perhaps signaling the sun or the novel coronavirus. Two vertical yellow bars are visible behind the left head, perhaps impaling it as if it is a kind of trophy; a similar bar is placed horizontally below the right head. Two much smaller lines with a circle at their end seem to enter each head, perhaps evocative of the now familiar protein spike of the virus.  In the muted wash colors of the background, other pictographs are glimpsed, including, perhaps, different phases of the moon.

Artist's statement:  The artist writes that much of the violence of the Lockdown is between black people, many of whom are police officers, “sent frequently to Black communities to physically abuse  and arrest those who don't stay indoors.”

Pamela Allara:  With the enforced isolation resulting from the global coronavirus pandemic, people tend to withdraw into themselves and sink into their own thoughts. Often these thoughts are fleeting and lack focus, as there is no feedback from a fellow interlocuter that might elicit a coherent response. Yet underlying all of these internal dialogues is anxiety about a medical and economic crisis without a foreseeable end point, no ‘return to normal.’ Under current conditions, life is lived in a state of suspended animation.

These thoughts were precipitated by Mbelle’s acrylic painting “Conversations with Myself,” which juxtaposes his disembodied, suspended heads, the one on the left apparently ‘speaking’, the one on the right, seemingly ‘listening.’ The ‘speaker’ is only able to mouth what he has previously read in the news, which serves as a blindfold that prevents him from seeing different points of view. From his pursed lips and blank stare, the face of Mbelle’s ‘listener’ suggests that he suitably skeptical of the parroted information offered by his othered, blinded self. The vertical lines behind the speaker (a doorway?) and the horizontal line beneath the listener (a window) reinforce the impression that he is in two different spaces mentally. Surrounding this bifurcated self are symbols, free-floating ‘thought balloons’ if you will, that are suggestive of his thoughts without permitting the viewer to pin them down: the sun, the moon, a circle, a triangle, elemental shapes like those a child first makes. Have his thoughts both lost coherence and nuance? Does such simplistic thinking open up the possibility of interracial violence? This provocative artwork provides much for us to think about.

David Coplan:  On the left, blinded by words, texts that blind, but send the voice into overdrive. On the right ear, moon dominated by sun - broad, blind day - the face has an actual corona of gold. On the left, the questioning, listening self, stunned and sullen into silence. A dark visage, but the eyes emphatically see. In the background, a virus spike or two, and near the top, sun dominated by moon. The face coronad. His image speaks, but does not like or trust what he says. His self lacks authority. That is why the darker face on the right dominates, draws the viewers' eyes. But somehow he knows that silence is the wisdom of the wise.

Mark Auslander:   Mbelle's double self portrait calls to mind the first work featured in the TLC Extension Collection, Sizwe Khoza's  Kuzolunga, Mfana, (All will be well, young man), in which  a young man during Lodkdown sits pensively high on a wall, pondering his past and future.  Here, the artist externalizes an internal dialogue, showing two heads, two aspects of the same self, facing one another, in a conversation that seems to be agonized, even tortured.

Mirror symbolism in this instance seems well suited to the double predicament of the virus and the Lockdown. As is well known, the virus, an alien invader, hijacks the body's own cellular processes and thus hovers ambiguously between the self and the non-self. In this specific instance, the artist's concern with internal violence within the black community, especially at the end of the police enforcing Lockdown, also lends itself to mirror imagery, in which the boundaries between I and Thou  (and between different components of the self) are especially ambiguous. The everyday experience of Lockdown in low income South African communities has often involved capricious instances of violence by police officers; in these scenarios solidarity associated with shared skin color, common language, or kinship bonds seems to matter little. A quarter century after the formal end of Apartheid, public security officers in many quarters are viewed as a kind of occupying force, divorced from the fundamental needs and aspirations of those being actively policed and subject to aggressive surveillance. The criminalization of everyday life in low income locations,  long a feature of South African life for the urban poor, has tragically been intensified during the era of the virus, even as waves of rape, sexual assault, and domestic violence, by and large, escape effective regulation and prosecution by law enforcement and the judicial system.

Consistent with George Dupre analysis of Kinshasa (Congolese) paintings, this work may be organized around a left/right contrast, a striking instance of Robert Hertz's classic observation that the left side is often associated with the powers of Death and the right side with Life.  Mbelle's left head, appropriately, is infested, as it were, with pictographic signs of the deadly coronavirus, and itself seems to be impaled on two vertical spikes; his eyes are obscured by a newspaper article, harbinger of grim news, or, as Pam and David suggests, purveyors of false information. The right head has open eyes, and is in that sense perhaps more 'alive,' but is itself under threat from at least one of the protein-like spikes, and refrains from speech.

I am unsure how to read the imagery of sun and moon noted by David.  Solar and lunar symbolism are important in all indigenous South African societies, and are often tied to important sequences and phases in life.  In an ideal universe, perhaps, sun and moon would be complementary pairs, mutually enhancing one another. In this image, one senses, opposites do not offer the solace of mutual exchange, but are simply juxtaposed in an unresolved fashion. The vertical and horizontal poles or bars associated with each head might, if joined together, create the sign of the crucifix, which might offer the subject a sense of redemption or protection, but at the present moment,  it would appear, even that promise is a distant one.

A Rite of Becoming? 

The following thoughts are highly speculative: Might the image also evoke the transformative trials of  Ulwaluko,  the Xhosa male initiation process?  In his autobiography, Nelson Mandela famously recalls that the climatic moment of the ceremony, intense pain delayed him shouting out the ritual phrase, "Ndiyindoda" (I am a man!), a minor lapse for which he later chastised himself. Through this rigorous rite of passage, which includes surgical remaking of the male organs of generation, the umkhwetha initiate is forced to face potentially feared aspects of his own inner being, even as he enters into close proximity with the ancestral shades and emerges as a strengthened member of the male community: paradoxically, enduring acts  of cutting and moments of self doubt, forcibly separating oneself from earlier affiliations, enables the formation of deep bonds to the wider collectivity, across the thresholds between the Living and the Dead.  In Mbelle's doubled image, the subject's head seems to be pierced, in a possible allusion to the circumcision process, and some sort of exchange between the Dead and the Living is hinted at.

Yet, in contrast to conventional initiation, it is far from clear that the subject is here being seamlessly re-integrated into the social and spiritual continuum. Rather, the dominant imagery seems to be suffering, uncertainty, and a predicament of being perpetually suspended between different poles of existence. The Lockdown is a period of prolonged separation that bears some structural affinities to the enforced separation phase of a coming of age ceremony; yet it is far from clear what sort of new world those who emerge from this unprecedented liminal period will find themselves traversing.