But some of us are brave
Athi-Patra Ruga’s solo exhibition, which is a continuation of and the final piece of Ruga’s Future White Women of Azania series, opens at Whatiftheworld Gallery in Cape Town on November 28. This extract is from writer Lindokuhle Nkosi’s contribution to a
Athi-Patra Ruga’s avatars are black women — subversive, confrontational, playful, complex, brave. His oeuvre fucks with the exclusion that is the norm of black womanhood and queer femmedom, and challenges audiences to imagine a future where these people, who are often not considered people, are left to be.
Beiruth walks through the flat industrial yellow light and concrete of the taxi rank. Or, rather, she stalks it, haunting the hollow luminescence in white fishnet stockings that mark delineations on her legs.
The camera focuses, holding tight at her flank: a hand swinging at its side and next to it, the partial view of a red onesie stretched over her ass; above it, a sign in white and blue reads “Atlantis”.
Something covers her head and her face. It flickers, muted in intervals. The onesie is also rigged to flicker with the colours of the spectrum. A man in a white wife-beater leans, cocks his head to one side, and holds out his arm for attention. Another stops in his tracks, stares animatedly.
A woman in black shimmies for Beiruth, or the camera. From somewhere, a non-diegetic voice asks: “You tryna fuck me?”
With the onesie belted around her waist she stands, splayed against the wall of the Universal Church, her back and palms flat under the blue crucifix.
She moves slowly, horizontally, as if navigating the face of a cliff.
Her hand feels the wall, tentatively at first, then reaching for the white grating that secures the church entrance. She puts one high-heeled leg out, finds a footing, and spins her body, pirouetting into position.
And then she climbs, her helmet obscuring and obfuscating. She stays ready for the eventuality of a man trying to crack her skull one day. She has a hole on the top of her head, or she is avoiding one.
Are you trying to fuck me?
***
Johannesburg, 2008. Ruga weaves loose threads into fabric.
The president of the Republic has been recalled by the governing party and, from Ruga’s apartment downtown, he has a window view of the xenophobic violence that we later term the “miniskirt attacks”.
Beiruth was born here. She is the bastard child of Jo’burg Clubland’s fluorescent strobe lights and the violence of that time. Beiruth was born against ideas of women and femininity, and against the notions of nationhood.
***
In White Girls, American writer and theatre critic Hilton Als writes: “We were Barbara Smith and her twin sister, Beverly, and their feminism and socialism, and we understood every word of what Barbara meant when she and her co-editors titled their 1982 anthology All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies.”
Ruga is not a black woman, but his avatars are. Or rather they present as femme and, accordingly, draw the attention that a black woman’s body does.
They wear heels and helmets. They walk past glares and jeers. They seemingly exclaim: “Are you trying to fuck [with] me?”
“My work is very femme-centric. I want to bring femme queer dreams into the world, into art. There is a legacy of the imagination, imagination as affirmation,” insists Ruga.
*** We see this legacy of imagination with Miss Congo in her bleached denim number — a red bandana furled around her crown. She lies on her back, on a raised concrete platform. In her hand, a block of cloth which she embroiders, screaming at intervals. She lies again, another hard wall, another heap of dirt and broken things, red and white miniature airplanes. Diaphragm rising and lowering encased in gold.
These are altars of her making, blood lust and body as sacrifice. Who wants a tired sacrifice? Why do we fatten our beasts before the slaughter? We feed them whole and keep them hydrated. Here, Ruga’s altar lies in wait, too tired to be a sacrifice, baptised in things too hard that can perhaps be allowed.
***
In another of Ruga’s creations, Future White Women of Azania, the women are loud to the point of garishness. Here, the arms and legs