Sarah Forbes Bonetta as Omoba Aina as Persephone, 2021
Appliqué textile
108 x 408 in.
274.3 x 1036.3 cm
274.3 x 1036.3 cm
$ 150,000.00
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The centerpiece of Christopher Myers's ongoing project I Dare Not Appear, 'Sarah Forbes Bonetta as Omoba Aina as Persephone,' 2021, presents one way of reading her life, as a string...
The centerpiece of Christopher Myers's ongoing project I Dare Not Appear, "Sarah Forbes Bonetta as Omoba Aina as Persephone," 2021, presents one way of reading her life, as a string of incidents that resonate across a century. This monumental tapestry depicts many of the defining moments of her existence: her travels back and forth to the continent, her career as an educator, her marriage, and the raising of her children. She is envisioned as an icon that stands at the intersection of multiple narratives of slavery, colonization, civilization, and culture.
Her letters, like her life, are hard to read. They offer very few answers, but the questions they raise are worthy of asking today. Myers writes of Forbes Bonetta: “Her place as an in-betweener, someone not fully home, neither here nor there, presages a lot of folks in the world subsequently. I have often thought of African-American identity as the first hyphenated identity. For all of the diaspora, globally, we live on the hyphen, like Sarah Forbes Bonetta, in the space between here and there. One aspect of this hyphenation is the ease and currency onto which histories are imagined onto our bodies. Where the Victorians took her story to symbolize the magnanimity of the Empire, the civilizing mission, the ‘generosity’ of the colonial project, subsequent generations imagine her as an avatar of our ‘royal’ past, a recuperative imaginary of histories long denied, fairytale fantasies of princesses and castles in an African mask.”
Her letters, like her life, are hard to read. They offer very few answers, but the questions they raise are worthy of asking today. Myers writes of Forbes Bonetta: “Her place as an in-betweener, someone not fully home, neither here nor there, presages a lot of folks in the world subsequently. I have often thought of African-American identity as the first hyphenated identity. For all of the diaspora, globally, we live on the hyphen, like Sarah Forbes Bonetta, in the space between here and there. One aspect of this hyphenation is the ease and currency onto which histories are imagined onto our bodies. Where the Victorians took her story to symbolize the magnanimity of the Empire, the civilizing mission, the ‘generosity’ of the colonial project, subsequent generations imagine her as an avatar of our ‘royal’ past, a recuperative imaginary of histories long denied, fairytale fantasies of princesses and castles in an African mask.”