Honoring the marketplace is one of the rituals I keep from childhood. The colors, textures and faces inside these spaces continue to lure me in, and when I am inside the market, I feel like I am home, even if only for a brief moment.
The marketplace is mentioned every day in my news, and it points to the market of paper monies, the fictitious market of commodities on pigs, corn, soy, wheat and beans… the referential backbone of selling and mostly buying wealth, retirement funds, crashes and deep anxieties…
My remembered kept rituals from childhood bring me to some other, steadier place - the market that does not wish to die - homegrown and homemade food and craft essential for daily living. Not the supermarket, the mega-store… but that peculiar surviving event around each community, where I can go to give away, barter, sell or buy what I and my kin eat and produce.
From tropical fruit tree bonsai to endangered orchids, from crocheted doilies to exquisite carvings in wood.
Rules of conduct differ widely and there seems to be always a space in there for music to play.
In all the places where I have lived, I continue to feel attraction to these colorful happenings, and in particular, to the magnetic power of the herb people, very old and gnarly men. The old healers do not quite disappear but are sometimes replaced by the happy faces of younger men and women, who continue to keep the herbal knowledge alive, as advisors on ailments and prescriptions for basic root medicines.
I continue to hesitate to photograph the people in the markets… Granted, I grew up in a time and culture where folks resented deeply having their photos taken. Don’t mess with my soul type of feeling! My hesitation has something to do with that, I am sure, but there is more…
I read recently an article about On Photography, a book by Susan Sontag that I truly like. The article quotes Sontag: “To take a photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed." And it goes on to say that “the appropriation, the stealing without touching, the having a semblance of knowledge, she likens to perversion.” It is surprising, but not unexpected to find a high level of opposition to Susan Sontag’s views, in her warnings against using photography to reduce, so as to better consume the world…
She does talk about appropriation and on page 4 she places it in context: “To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge—and, therefore, like power.” She then investigates our current relationships to power.
My complicated relationship to photography and to power is a very juicy personal way to enter that sphere… and so is the work of an amazing art theoretician, Kaja Silverman. On page 11 of The miracle of analogy, she states:
“Photography is also an ontological calling card: it helps us to see that each of us is a node in a vast constellation of analogies.“
She sees in photography a path to analogy… photography, like the world, changes continuously, opening up ever new connections. So, photography is not a static representation of a reality, but rather always shifting and changing, as a door opening to discoveries. For certain a topic for another post!
For now, here, in my marketplaces, I see myself oscillating between the open movement of analogies and the taking of appropriations. It was difficult for me to choose and arrange a gallery of photographs from different markets, in Brazil and here in the United States, where I worked in more than one, for quite a few years - proof of my dilemmas.
The photo captions should read, starting at the top, from left to right:
“Fruit of locally grown apples, figs, sweet potato and kale; dusters made from native local grasses and tinted with synthetic dyes; me in the House of spirits, a famous place that specializes in the commerce of local sugarcane brandy cachaça; soapstone pressure cookers, wooden spoons; roadside stands with peppers, pawpaw and mangoes; endangered everlasting flowers; more peppers, some fierce; and native orchids taken, or not, from the wild.”
A glimpse of ever-changing natures.
The semi fictional marketplace text below was written about five years after I left Uganda, in the late nineties. The photographs, from elsewhere, came much later. I am still shy of photographing people, and the markets are like phoenix birds, finding ways to grow out of the ashes…
And in between, all this time, there was the city of Mbale and the marketplace. The marketplace where Ana searched and found the best Calvin Klein shirts on earth for twenty cents. The best Liz Claiborne, best name this side of the valley. The best dried fish wholesale, best groundnut paste and sesame, best cloth. Dainty white hands touched the greenish silver of antelope, home-made from Zambia, a tingling sensation, smooth fingers lingering over merikani cloth of Zanzibar, protection cloth, she was told, for the young girls who did not know "what to do with themselves". Maybe the yellow lions of Kenya touched on a coffee cup. Blue eyes delighted in the raised texture of gold trim surrounding cloth of indigo. She was told, the best plastic colanders ever made from China. Sculptured airplanes out of tin, oil can into airplane lamp, the best she had seen engineered and thought out so far. Exquisite sense of gadgetry, the tiny, the large, wear ever forever in there for the flow of their lives.
Best of all, Ana loved the people who would pick among the beans of many colors to find for her black bean, uniform kilo of just one color. A people who would come to her and go away from her – a flotsam and a jetsam. The market was the place where she would wander inside, not once, but twice and for days and days, without measure, and the numbers important to qualify the outsider and her heart. Because she wandered inside, many daily rituals emerged - the market and the people inside the market were never hers. Yet Ana knew she belonged inside. She recognized the people in the market and they recognized her. There was an intimacy inside that place of smells, a touch of shoulder, a touch from afar, a scoop of groundnut flour offered for one shilling, a word for a smile, a fair trade. To the side, space made for the sacs of goods to come in, on the backs of men, the tomatoes. Carried in large baskets, ten kilometers down from the village, powered by the legs, these short wiry men. The market beckoned her. A meandering of stalls that created shade everywhere, except where in the center, and in the center there was meat. Once or twice a week, depending on the rains. Sometimes she ventured too far, in her search for the meat man, when he came in from the southern fields with the cows. Go look for lung set raw and red on top of tables, in the open air, next to the water pots. Water merchants and meat merchants, from the lowlands and from the mountains. Day for slaughter same as day for red water pots.
There was talk everywhere. The Mbale market was a market that measured, to her metric estimations from childhood, where a city block, a “quarteirão” measured ten thousand square meters, then this market of Mbale measured about the size of a village - it was so big! It was the market of rarely the foreigner. "Wasungu!" the children yelled, running alongside her little truck, when she ventured into downtown by herself. It took her time to understand all the meanings of that word. The educated one, the foreigner, the one who is not one of us. The man that comes in with the knowing and leaves us all behind. But not here. This was the place of her joy of living - the small and huge discovery of tiny pleasures. A lost woman, not a "wasungu". Just a woman, in her fake white skin coat of a colonizer, a civilizer. So lost in her search inside this place, so much like her, when she wanted the best ground white maize, sold out of one hundred kilo cotton bags, measured and dispensed with swift movements, by the turbaned ladies of the market. Almost always making her feel she should be buying enormous quantities of the stuff, given her color and her status, and not just a meager two. Soon the inadequacy of her feelings forgotten in the next exchange. The next exchange, a nagging, a slight tug from the boy hired to carry the stuff. "There, look there, that’s what you are looking for, Mom, she’s here today!" And indeed, she was here today and she had what Ana wanted, for today. There was a new boy every time. Just like the people inside the market, they came in one day, they went away the next. Timid, belligerent, small, tall, always thin, all looked to be about ten, round, gaunt faces surrounded by mops of black curly hair. Perpetual slight frames not quite able to contain the defiance in their usual brown eyes, in their crooked smiles. When the market boys smiled, unavoidably, Ana smiled with them. They took her to the hidden places, through the alleyways, along the outside walls. The specials, they told her, in kind smoothing cajoling tones. The noisy dark smoldering corners where the metal workers hammered the old to make the new, stoves, ladles, pots and pans. The acrid smell of fish drying racks, brown smoked blackened cod, shacks where truckloads of used clothing disappeared, quickly sorted and parceled by feel and by color. Some local weave set aside, plenty of multi-colored unsorted pencils imported from Pakistan. It was her marketplace, her live cow and guts, her almost breathing lungs from a pig, her life connection to some fact that almost happened then, and to the safety line of western thought that almost kept her there. That same line that spit her out and made her leave for home. She felt like nothing at all, felt the right to differ. Unsolved puzzles, legacy from a country torn by war. She tried to find and to phrase, not another alternative, but to be human and brave woman enough. She tried to find something in her language that would be more sustaining. The safety of her western thought brought her back to very little. Years later she came back to the in between place, she came back inadequate and tentative to that marketplace. There was no marketplace. The market had burned to the ground. Ana stood there, quiet, eyes shiny, soul dull. Gone were the merikani cloth, the silver of Zambia, the lions of Kenya. Haunted this place that wished to burn out of existence. She remained there for a long while, tears not quenching the thirst inside. Mbale is the name of a small town in Eastern Uganda, in the outskirts of a tall volcano, Mount Elgon, where the weavers nest. Mbale is also the name of a very small flower. ________________________________________________________________________________________ Beneath the lines The seeds arrived today. It is almost time to plant again. Mitigating the uncertainties of the grocer’s heart…and the cultivation of nostalgia, that we are taught must trace the past. Let there be green, instead!
And a bonus click on to a colorful view of the final resting place of cast off clothing...
Marvelous
Wasn't it the market here that first brought us into connection with each other Erica? It's been too long now; the memories have faded. But, I can still picture Gordon selling his baked goodness alongside me in Muskrat Park. I turn to photography as often as I do to words for self-expression and as a means of communication. I think Sontag is misguided in her opinion, but were I to entertain the notion for the sake of discussion, I'd say if her premise is true, then it applies equally to every other creative pursuit. Words to the page, brush to canvas, hands to clay - could not each be described as reductionist in their attempts to bring the vastness of the world into manageable forms?
Enjoyed this piece!