Things Fall Apart at the Seattle Art Museum Free

Achebe introduces Okonkwo, his leading character, in the first page of his novel and asserts his role as a protagonist throughout the book. Okonkwo is a problematic hero. Major turning points and encounters in the village are measured by Okonkwo's reactions and his every move is observed, while his thoughts remain largely his own. Ultimately, he is a character, not an individual. According to James Olney's literary analysis, Achebe's fiction embodies an Igbo preference for not seeing anyone as an isolated agent, but akin to a character in a masquerade.

This observation about the Igbo preference for studying characters rather than individuals is echoed in the list of Afikpo masks Ottenberg provided to the museum. Each mask has a name matched with a profile of the behavior that the masked spirit enacts. For example, Igri is a masquerader who is known to dance in eccentric ways, act oddly and even crazily. Ottenberg's informants said that Igri has “a propensity for youthful exuberance” and that “even the dullest person will begin acting up when he puts it on” (Ottenberg 1975: 26-20). Otten berg recorded that Igri might sometimes appear at a play, but he also gets toward the front of the line during a parade. Plays and parades were the main arenas for masquerade and had different agendas. As a counterpoint to Igri, Okpesu Umuruma is identified as a mask worn by older players outfitted in dark costumes. The mask's face is twisted dramatically, which is said to be an indication of someone who suffers from social illness, not a symptom of physical illness. Whoever wears Okpesu Umuruma is expected to portray a character who stands for the greed and selfishness of elders and the destructive force of slave traders. As part of a parade, this character defies the line that others follow and instead gambols about.

Ottenberg's ongoing relationship with men who had been part of Afikpo masquerades was essential for the development of the display in the museum. He asked for the assistance of Samuel Okpara Irem (Fig. 3), then president of the Afikpo Association of America, who became fully involved with the process and kept providing goat curry and baklava to sweeten meetings with the museum staff that Carol Ottenberg helped coordinate. Irem, who grew up in the Afikpo region in the 1960s, was taken through initiation at the age of 12-13 and formed a lifelong admiration for what he calls the play and parade as “investigative journalism with a twist of comedy” (Irem 2008: 53-58). He also recalls the range of talents and skills that boys were encouraged to develop—they had to be artistic, good choreographers, compelling actors, adept musicians, and they joined together to create complex sequences that challenged their elders, who critically reviewed their presentations. With the guidance of Ottenberg and Irem, two dozen masks became the focal points of full exploration for the museum's installations.

Extensive preparations were made by Ottenberg, Irem, and Seattle Art Museum staff to create the appropriate context for the masks. Sketches of each character were drawn up by myself and generated a voluminous list of distinctive clothing and accessories (Fig. 4). Many garments needed from Nigeria—such as velveteen shirts with lions whose pink tongues stick out to accent a black shirt with gold outlines, or a cap worn by a titled man, knitted with red, black, and white stripes—were itemized by Ottenberg and Irem. Accessory lists grew, with a need for goatskin arm and leg bands, wigs, fans, bells, drums, and hats, all of which Irem agreed to acquire on a trip to Afikpo. He and Ottenberg traveled there together in 2006 and managed to assemble a large volume of new and used costume elements, with the assistance of his family ally, Ohabuike Ogbu Irem.

Another need that emerged was for custom designed mannequins that could not only wear the masks, but also be posed to walk, sit, or gesture in a manner that was true to the behavior of each character. This was a tall order to place in the realm of installation fabrication, as mannequins, most often purchased for the fashion industry, tend to be skinny, headless, and stand on their toes. Needing twenty-four body forms, the museum turned to Fitzgerald DeFreitas, a Seattle-based Trinidadian artist whose work constructing steel frame costumes for Carnival fueled a long career, with a competitive drive to accomplish something new every year. DeFreitas channels feats of engineering into making suites of costumes that often soar to 40 feet and must be attached to a moving body that dances for days. The assignment to sculpt a basic form for the mannequins was given to him, along with sketches of the body size, stance, gesture, and demeanor required. The mannequin bodies emerged with metal cores and Styrofoam limbs that brought each masquerader's basic shape and structure into view.

Eze Anamelechi, an Igbo artist based in Seattle, came in to oversee the final dressing of the mannequins. Anamelechi added local elements to reflect the fact that masquerades require spontaneous invention every time they appear. He deployed elements such as porcupine quills, feathers, bells, and cloth streamers to accent each character. At the last minute, well-worn shoes were placed on every mannequin's feet, paying homage to accounts of switching shoes as an essential part of the subterfuge of Afikpo masqueraders. To keep viewers from recognizing a spirit, every participant in a masquerade made sure that he was wearing someone else's shoes during the event. By the end of this process of preparation, all twenty-four characters were equipped to emerge as Afikpo spirits, awaiting their chance to appear in a play or parade.

Chinua Achebe's description of the heightened anticipation spreading like a wave through a crowd awaiting a masquerade conveys the sensory assault of music, voices, frenzied movements, and special effects that make masquerades into performances with indelible force. For anyone who has experienced this phenomenon, the vision of masks in a museum can be a contrastingly subdued quiet reminder of what is typically a catalytic encounter. Given the theoretical limitations in an art museum, where contextual immersion is not often encouraged due to conventions of preference given to the purity of visual experience, the closest substitute that could be found for this creative chaos was an installation that incorporated video in a new way.

Just as masked spirits disrupt, gallery spaces needed to be altered to accommodate them. Two Seattle-based artists were asked to suggest ways to do this. Alex Schweder and John Grade designed a sequence of projections to activate the stillness of the gallery and frame the masked players. First, they turned the ride up an escalator into a hint of masquerades to come, as masked performances from a multitude of African cultures were projected on glass barriers. Visitors were encouraged to observe, but not stop and stare at this suggestion of a performance, as it was not being offered for close scrutiny. For visitors who did want to see segments of masquerade performance videos and listen carefully to them, a touch screen monitor was made available nearby.

Schweder and Grade also installed screens to frame a platform filled with seated players (Figs. 5-6). One screen offers segments of a home video that features the provocative form of vaudevillian theater that Okumpka players enact.³ Rather than a tightly produced or narrated documentary, the video was provided by Nnachi Umennachi, an advisor from Afikpo, who obtained a video taken by a relative for his own use. In this footage, viewers see the seated characters transform into actors that agitate with sophisticated humor. A dozen short original songs and skits unfold before an Afikpo audience, who watch each performance with anticipation. A second screen focuses on the faces of the audience, showing what Ottenberg describes as the notion that “The Afikpo aesthetic carries with it the idea of participation” (Ottenberg 1973: 4). Men laugh, look embarrassed, speak back, shake their heads, are startled or surprised, and generally wait for the satire of the play to come their way. Museum viewers find themselves watching how the play affects men who are called out by name by the masked spirits, who do not hesitate to offer stinging criticisms. The soundtrack of the video is broadcast in a column in front of the players. For at least a few minutes, the museum visitor is transported beyond the static setting of a gallery and into the dense experience of viewing a masquerade.

Okonkwo's intention to kill a man's spirit is call for alarm. His actions go against what is often said to be an Igbo preference to see the king in everyman. To reinforce this, Achebe focuses attention on Okonkwo, whose imperiousness is dangerous to villagers who closely watch him. The Afikpo masqueraders themselves also reinforce the diffusion of authority—no one wears a crown, but they do wear subtle signs of their titles and societal ranks.

This egalitarian ethos is pervasive in the unusual parade called Njenje, which occurs in Afikpo villages (Fig. 7). In its recreation at the Seattle Art Museum, two children dressed respectively in plaid school clothes and a pink brocade two-piece outfit stand side by side as greeters in the galleries (Fig. 8). They introduce a sequence of standing figures who all walk in the same direction as if they are aligned in an Afikpo parade. Such parades don't rely on a narrative or theatrical commentary and reverse a common format of parades in many cultures which involve an illustration of hierarchical status, with leaders clearly honored by guards, elaborate floats, or convertible cars. In Njenje, there is a pervasive concern that no one character stands out, but each walks one behind the other in and around villages during four days of a festival with the parade as the main attraction.

The recreated parade in the museum winds through several galleries and reveals major types of Afikpo characters, from dark and ominous traders wearing old clothes and carrying bags of cowries with a gun; to richly dressed adolescent girls; to couples wearing modern, stylish outfits and the pair of children leading the line. By far the most elaborate of the parading spirits is the character of a young maiden who is said to rise to prominence wherever she goes.

Young maidens called agbogho mma (girl-spirits) take long striding steps in Njenje parades and they have a starring role in the Okumpka play, dancing and taunting men with their femininity. In an Okumpka play, such maidens are portrayed by young men who are at the stage in their lives when marriages are under constant consideration. The psychological drama and sexual tension that is a part of their everyday existence is projected into the maiden's role. For the museum's portrayal, two maidens came into existence with careful coaching from Ottenberg and Irem about these exacting references implied by their dress.

Two agbogho mma appear. The first is in the parade, wearing a face mask that extends above the head to carry an image of a child. Her headdress rises up over her head as if to act as a beacon of her extraordinary presence—in its performance context, light would flash from a mirror over her forehead and feathers on the rim would move whenever she walked or danced. Both maiden recreations wear loads of jewelry on their arms and a massive accumulation of strands of plastic disc beads known as jigida on their hips. When in a parade or play, the subtle sounds and movement of these strands remind everyone that she is embellished to tempt suitors. In her right hand, the maiden figure carries a wooden cane, which she uses to maintain her balance and straight posture as she navigates her way with dignity, and often a hint of a swagger.

The second maiden is at the center of the group of seated spirits enacting the Okumpka play. She is distinctively dressed to be a beacon of feminine features. Her face is white; she wears a white shirt, white gloves, white shoes, and dangles a white handkerchief out in front of her in one hand and a flywhisk in the other, in a gesture that underlines her haughty nature. She also wears a wig of tight black curls, a strap of red velvet and brocade that is called a “breast holder,” and a pink headband. Her legs are tightly closed and straight out in front of her in a posture that warns, “do not come too close.” Other masqueraders surround her, fending off any unwanted suitors. Her nickname in Afikpo songs and skits is the unattainable maiden.

A real-life version of the maiden character is seen on a nearby video. During the video of the play, a multitude of young maidens make their appearance, each carrying an upright fly-whisk that moves slightly up and down as they dance, maintaining discipline as most of their movement is concentrated in their hips, which surge up and down in sharp rotations. They become a line of temptresses, though each is portrayed by a young man. After making this impressive entrance, the maidens act aloof to the attention they receive and tend to reject any suitors that come their way. Eventually the competition to get a maiden's attention is broken when an extremely ugly masquerader wearing a highly distorted mask manages to sweep one of the maidens away and they march off together.

The primacy of the unattainable maidens in Afikpo plays and parades is unmistakable. In an analysis of the phenomenon of men imitating women, art historian Nkiru Nzegwu has offered numerous insights derived from her study of Igbo art. She points out that “A maiden in resplendent glory struts around as a breathtaking work of art” (Nzegwu 2011: 15). Nzegwu's assessment credits women for this heightened impression:

She urges recognition that while a mask or sculpture doesn't reflect the reality of Igbo life (wherein females contribute artforms that may not be collected), it should not be ignored.

Nzegwu also emphasizes the portrayal of maidens as a way of addressing sexual matters. Her analysis reinforces some of Ottenberg's observations and takes them further. In his work on boyhood rituals in Afikpo (Ottenberg 1989), he points out that during their maturing years, young boys were very involved with their secret society instruction and spent a great deal of time imitating others—both in and out of masquerade costumes. Distance from females was expected, except for prescribed interactions like “Moonlight Dancing,” which encouraged young unmarried boys and girls to sing and dance in the village commons during the yam planting season, and the “Feast of the Tortoise,” when young men and married women gossip in an unusual outburst of sexual feelings and opinions in public. Nzegwu reinforces how coded speech is used to discuss sexual matters and attraction to the graceful elegance and fertile creativity of young women. As she states, “Hidden in plain sight is a visual philosophical treatise on art and sexuality, specifying a socialization program for males that is mapped on the beautified, sexualized body of new maiden graduates of womanhood” (Nzegwu 2011: 20). At the time of life when young men and women are betwixt and between the world of children and adults, masquerades put their negotiations on view.

In the world described in Achebe's Things Fall Apart, it is acknowledged that everyone is aware of a fundamental deception that all masquerades rely upon—earthly men transform into otherworldly spirits. The human man Okonkwo becomes the masked spirit Evil Forest and is ready to kill with his horns and his smoked raffia body. Yet, if someone in the audience was looking carefully at who was absent and who had the same springy walk, they could deduce by these distinctive traits that Evil Forest really was Okunkwo. The importance of this deceptive quality of masquerades was made clear in the process of preparing the Afikpo assembly. Every single masked spirit had to combine a wide range of costume elements, reflecting the careful practice of dressing differently when wearing a mask. No one can wear anything that is normally identified with them. Masquerade preparation requires borrowing clothes from others, often from women who are keenly aware of the need to keep quiet if they do recognize a son, husband, or friend when they are in a spirit form.

Achebe's observations about White men are laced throughout Things Fall Apart. Set in the early twentieth century, these comments are an omen of the more involved interactions with English colonial officers and missionaries that were to come. By the time Afikpo masks were being created in the mid-twentieth century, English characters filtered into the masquerades. Male and female masks called Beke (“White person” or “foreigner”) appear in the both Afikpo play and parade (Fig. 10; see also Fig. 2). One is given a pith helmet and a button-down yellow shirt, and the customized mannequin is posed to lean over as if inspecting the action of the play around him. Another appears as a female parader, wearing an English-style dress, gloves, and high heels (Fig. 11). She accompanies another parader who wears a Seattle Art Museum guard uniform, thereby integrating the local authority into the mix of characters, as would have occurred as the Afikpo men adapted the parade composition to reflect recent events in their midst.

Humor is a mainstay of both Achebe's novel and any Afikpo masquerade, but how it is made apparent to others is not easy. In Things Fall Apart, when the first White man begins to speak, his interpreter speaks a different dialect that leads him to use words strangely and miss the tonal shift of one particular word. Whenever the White official says “myself,” the translator announces that he said, “my buttocks.” This became a source of hilarity that was used against him and his credibility in speeches forever after.

How to translate Afikpo humor for a museum audience became a challenge. Hints about the sophisticated humor involved in Okumpka plays are offered in the labels and videos and in tours by museum docents. Labels offer quotes from the songs and skits that poke fun at henpecked husbands, men who behave as if they are “rabbits of the night,” men who are stingy, and leaders who take advantage of others. On the video showing the faces of the audience, humor keeps people tuned in as men erupt in laughter, smiles, and embarrassed discomfort when they are skewered in satire. In the middle of the play arena is another point of departure for humor, the “pot of foolishness” (Fig. 12). It sits quietly in the center of the platform and is seen in the video, when the pot becomes a trophy for the most foolish. To begin this highly unusual competition, a masked player comes out to explain why he is the most foolish man of all. Others disagree with him and step forth to offer their own case for the stupidest thing they have done, reciting their reasons as a long-chanted story of their folly. Play leaders finally decide who has the best credentials as the most foolish and give him the pot as a trophy to be danced with. Asking museum visitors if they would be willing to offer their own case for the stupidest thing they've done recently often evokes a sense of the teasing and testing of self-deprecating humor that is in place. Indeed, while humor can be explained in written texts, it often seems far more tangible as a concept to explore during tours. Speaking with visitors about songs, pointing out the pot of foolishness and what it represents, then discussing the Okumpka play with a comical tone and gestures, enlivens the translation with more impact for audiences than the written word alone.

A scene involving the tearing off an egwugwu mask is a cataclysmic betrayal in Things Fall Apart, signalling the death of the integrity of the tribe. Unfortunately, the fate of the Afikpo masquerade in real life does seem to have followed the ominous demise of the fictional egwugwu depicted in Achebe's novel. In the course of work on this installation, both Irem and Ottenberg remained firmly committed to trying to convey the value of the masquerade process, but also reported that they had witnessed the slow fading of this process in Afikpo (Irem 2008: 53-58).

In the 1950s, boys’ societies were diminishing in importance. During the Biafra War, Afikpo was occupied by Nigerian troops and cultural performances were put on hold. Afterwards, a revival of masquerades helped renew Afikpo identities, but the boys’ societies slipped out of prominence in social control and legal powers. Commercial versions of masks began to appear in the mid-1960s, to some degree with the encouragement of a Peace Corps teacher (Starkweather 1968). When Ottenberg returned in 1988 after a thirty-year absence, he recounted that his book had stimulated new awareness that masquerades were considered art by outsiders, and men told him, “We are becoming art minded” (Ottenberg 1989: 4). However, both Sam Irem and other Afikpo sources cite that 1993 may be the last year that a full Okumpka play was enacted and filmed.

Reasons for this slow drain of masquerade activity are many. First, the emphasis by parents and government officials on formal education has often taken boys away from home and supplanted the time allocated to join a boys’ society who enacted masquerades. Second, Protestant and Catholic missions have discouraged emphasis on secrecy, masking and rituals, and more recent evangelical churches have diminished their appearance. Third, masquerade was aligned with a seasonal way of life, when most men and boys were reliant on farming and an entire cycle of observances based on natural processes. Fourth, the entertainment industry has moved into individual homes with a multitude of choices available in popular media.

Achebe and Otttenberg, who knew each other (Fig. 13), both commend the artistry of masked spirits. In this installation of a play and parade, museum staff and community advisors rallied behind Simon Ottenberg's guidance to activate the viewer's experience. It provides a sharp contrast to the usual art museum presentation of masks as faces and heads, not full characters. The results encourage recognition that we are always living with people who may appear open and free but are always harboring their own private desires—and that masked spirits can help people cope when things fall apart.