A Time Was Had: Black Women Artists, Memory and Play as a Black Feminist Visual Reading Practice

Abstract

One of my favorite games when I was younger was called “Iby’abana” (-for children). You would ‘play’ a family. Among a group of friends, you had to choose who were the parents, children and relatives and created scenarios where you performed these new identities and responsibilities. In this game, we created a world and persona of the future and what we imagined ourselves to be and lived them in the now. This world was based off the lives that we were living, the people around us were living or the lives we had seen on television. You literally could be anything. Your height could change, your hair length or you could be famous. These worlds could change from time to time, you could add or take out things. Whatever you could imagine, you could be. And you could be this person and have these future experiences in the now. This world was expansive and defied the laws of time. There was nothing impossible in this world. In order to be part of the game, you had to play with time and in order to understand what we were playing as an outsider, you, too, had to play. When I am looking, I am playing. This project defines looking as “a form of seeing ourselves and the world” and “a way to know our history, the present and invent the future” (hooks 2015, 131). Interested in a looking that antedates colonialism and slavery, I explore ways of looking in a Black world. To play in this project means to create worlds. As Sicart (2014) puts it, “through objects, others and spaces” (17). This project, however, develops a theory of play, ikinagihe that has its genesis in Rwanda’s audio-theatrical performances, ikinamico. Ikinagihe, etymologically putting together the wrods ‘to play’ and ‘time’, illustrates a mode of play that is of and stands in living memory. This play is a re-membering practice and throughout the project I investigate the ways in which Black women use it to show how we get know and see ourselves. Analyzing Black women artists’ work, I ask where play shows up in their works, what this play communicates and what worlds play helps them build? Overall, I propose ways this play contributes to Black feminisms and Black feminist theory. This project proposes a play that distinguishes itself from leisure or child development and instead delves into the utility of play’s refusal to be defined. This play is about contending with limitations and contradictions and rejects mastery, extending these as sites of knowledge production. Even more, it offers the ways in which play holds memories – dreams, hopes and aspirations – of the past, the present and the future.