Ibrahim El-Salahi in The Tate Modern

Postcolonial Modernism

I saw a couple of paintings by this artist and was blown away, so I started reading up.

Self-Portrait of Suffering, 1961

The wars in Sudan and South Sudan, since independence from the British and Egyptians in the 1950s, have claimed four million lives, probably more, and have displaced millions more. There hasn’t been a significant period of peace in Sudan since independence. There has been genocide, military dictatorships, coups, and terror campaigns against civilians including intentional starvation. The word “Sudan” comes from the Arabic “bilād as-sūdān” or “land of the blacks.” This name can give a sense of inherent divisions between North Africans and Sub-Saharan peoples, but cannot begin to describe the more complex, shifting alliances of tribes and groups in the two countries. It is yet another story of ignorant, arrogant, failed colonial policies, such as the British decision in 1946 to unite the North and South Sudan without asking the people of South Sudan for their opinion. The British have a lot of blood on their hands, including but not limited to the one million+ people who died in the partition of India, the seemingly permanently botched partition of Israel/Palestine, and the botched handover of Sudan to warring peoples. They also built the university in which El-Salahi was educated.

The Brits are no longer in charge of the world. Until recently, we Americans were. The latest news from Sudan is about how the American withdrawal of all USAID workers, along with continued civil war, is leading to the preventable starvation of hundreds of people. Here is one quote: “Last year, the United States gave $830 million in emergency aid, helping 4.4 million Sudanese, the United Nations estimates. That was far more aid than any other country provided. But after Mr. Trump halted that lifeline in January by dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development, the effect in Khartoum was devastating.” The cost to each U.S. citizen of that aid last year was about $2.43.

Ibrahim El-Salahi was born in 1930 in Sudan and is in a pantheon of African modernist painters and artists. He lives in Oxford, U.K., an historical irony that only he can fully appreciate. He was also part of the government of Sudan and was jailed and almost executed in the 1970s by the regime that overthrew his employers. He was part of the Hurufiyya movement, which combined artistic ideas of European modernism with Arabic calligraphic traditions.

He went to Koranic school as a child - he describes it as focused on rote memorization. And then to a school he says was modeled on a British grammar school for the nascent elite of Sudan. He thought about going to medical school but went to art school instead. He went to the Gordon Memorial College, named for a British colonial leader by Lord Kitchener at the turn of the twentieth century and then renamed later the Khartoum University, and modeled on Oxbridge. He talks of going to the Slade School of Art in London. He talks of visiting the British Museum, in part to discover things about the long cultural history of Sudan--such is the weirdness of colonialism in which the Brits steal a bunch of artifacts and then skillfully put them on display such that the artist can study his own culture, which has been stolen from.

In his talk he describes the purpose of the Gordon school as creating advanced workers, not artists. But he also describes one of his teachers as an open-minded Brit who “dressed like us,” and who was interested in cultivating the local culture of his students, not imposing subservience to British rule, and fostering artistic intellectual inquiry, not mere vocational worker-training. One of the interviewers labels this teacher as “embodying the contradictions of colonial rule.” Someone went native and decided to treat the local students as people.

El-Salahi was the recipient of a UNESCO prize that allowed him to travel to the U.S. in 1962 and to see Abstract Expressionism and the American South at the end of Jim Crow. He met Elijah Muhammed and Muhammed Ali. He was supposed to meet Malcolm X, but X was assassinated a week before. He talks of this trip as having great importance to his artistic growth. Seems worth the money of those who contributed to UNESCO.

Overall, El-Salahi’s rich multicultural set of inputs is typical of a postcolonial intellectual. Unlike the typical European artist of the twentieth century, El-Salahi knew the European world but also the many worlds of his African origin. His personal marriage of European modernism and African/Islamic aesthetic traditions is a great source of power in his work.

In 1975, he was put in prison without being charged or tried and sat there for half a year. He smuggled paper food bags and tore them into pieces so that he could draw sketches that he might use when he got out. He buried the sketches so that the guards could not see. He had to leave them there. Soon after he got out of prison, he became an ex-patriate.

There are two paintings of his in the Tate Modern currently on display. There was a retrospective at this museum in 2013: here is the site the museum keeps live to remember that occasion. Here is an homage to El-Salahi by Hassan Musa. Here is a conversation he had with a curator at the Tate.

The text next to his painting “Reborn Sounds of Childhood Dreams I” quotes him from 2013 thus: “Today we seem to drift endlessly, driven by impulses and whims, within unstable circumstances that constantly change…I see no glimpse of hope in this ordeal but to return to the centre of authenticity within each one of us, artist or not, each according to his or her potentials and capabilities. Only by persistently following that course can we gradually steer humanity, against all odds, back to its original freshness and youth.”

From his mouth to god’s ear.

These are the two paintings now on display in London:

Reborn Sounds of Childhood Dreams I, 1961–5

The more I looked at the painting, the more worlds I found, worlds within worlds, faces inside of faces, Arabic letters, demons, monsters, skeletons, warriors, minarets: a cityscape of nightmares. What I see is a complex relationship to Picasso and surrealism, but taken into El-Salahi himself and utterly re-fashioned. In the talk he notes the moment when he decided to introduce the human face as an aesthetic mark alongside Arabic writing.

Untitled, 1967

This is on view at MOMA in New York:

No Shade but His Shade, 1968.

[I wrote a book: Late and Soon, a time-travel novel set in the art scene of New York's East Village in the 1980s.]