Dinner celebrates the Feminine
Zina Saro-Wiwa stages a dinner inspired by her homeland and its dining traditions
The artist Zina Saro-Wiwa was in a dancing mood Thursday.
Guests on the Blaffer Art Museum’s patio sipped bespoke cocktails made with rhum agricole, a type of rum originally from the French Carribbean; pineapple; and lemongrass syrup. Golden pineapples glittered on long tables under the white tent where her “performance feast,” “The Mangrove Banquet,” was about to be served. A friend in Nigeria had made the pineapple-print napkins.
Saro-Wiwa had been in a kitchen for two days, working with chef Benjy Mason and other members of the Treadsack restaurant group team to concoct a five-course feast showcasing foods from the Niger Delta. She’d made some of the ingredients herself, including the curry leaf oil that went into the aoili and the scent-leaf syrup for the dessert.
Now Saro-Wiwa couldn’t resist moving to the music. “It’s all by sensuous black women,” she said. “‘The Mango Banquet’ is really about lust.”
She wanted to celebrate the feminine side of a homeland she only came to appreciate as an adult — a place with turquoise snails, fatty seeds called egusi and a medicinal spice called alligator pepper. Growing up in England, she assumed the Niger Delta was nothing but a wasteland.
Thousands of oil spills from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s soiled Africa’s largest wetland, one of the most biologically diverse spots on Earth. Saro-Wiwa’s father, Ken Saro-Wiwa, was hanged in 1995 by Nigeria’s military regime along with other environmental activists for protesting Shell’s activities there.
“On the 20th anniversary of my father’s death, I was looking at a lot of Twitter feeds about how much we’ve achieved — or not — in the past 20 years. It seems very bound up by talk about pollution,” she said. “It’s a dissatisfactory way to quantify the life of a man who worked for the environmental health of the Niger Delta. What’s important to me is looking forward. Cleaning up the Niger Delta is not enough. We have to challenge who we are on the inside and think about our relationship with the land.”
Her Blaffer show, “Did You Know We Taught Them How to Dance?” is about how oil has affected her country’s spirits, souls and relationship with the land, she said.
Less than a decade ago, Saro-Wiwa was better known as a BBC journalist than an artist. Her life changed after she made the 2008 documentary “This Is My Africa.”
She founded the alt-Nollywood film movement in Lagos in 2010, and in 2013 created the contemporary art gallery Boys’ Quarters Project Space. Housed in her father’s former office in Port Harcourt, the gallery is a “social sculpture” enterprise similar to Houston’s Project Row Houses.
Museums around the world love Saro-Wiwa’s work, which combines video installations as well as objects. (The Menil Collection included her in its 2012 show “The Progress of Love.”) She now divides her time between Brooklyn and Nigeria.
Returning to Nigeria as an adult, Saro-Wiwa was floored by the fertility of the land she saw. “Every weekend, I’d go into Ogoniland, and every time I’d go I’d be struck by how majestic it was,” she said. Her Ogoniland cousins farm and fish on the weekends.
She wanted to celebrate that with “The Mangrove Banquet.”
Tyres Donnett, the wife of Houston artist Nathaniel Donnett, performed throughout the evening, a muse in a big, round mask, a long dress and body paint who pounded a wooden pole into a wooden urn, as if grinding some exotic spice.
“It’s not easy trying to do something with our food. The ingredients themselves are stubborn,” Saro-Wiwa said. She brought a few ingredients from Africa; Mason helped her track down others, including the scent leaf, in a Nigerian grocery store in Houston.
The feast yielded surprisingly diverse flavors, textures and color. “These are all traditional foods re-imagined,” Saro-Wiwa said.
After the Egusi Deviled Eggs came Cold-Smoked Snapper cured in Zina’s Invisible Man Tree Bark with Carrot Ribbons and Curry Leaf Aoli. The bark was from the same source as her “Invisible Man” mask upstairs, Saro-Wiwa explained.
“When I started going to the Niger Delta I wasn’t looking for militants and oil pollution. I was looking for carvers and culture. I started finding people who used to make masquerade masks, and I commissioned one for myself. It’s called ‘The Invisible Man.’ It’s about all the men who have disappeared in my life: my father, my brother, my lovers and all sorts of people,” she said.
Then came Hibiscus Broth with Scent Leaves, which are similar to clove basil. “Normally, we drink it as a sweeter tea, but I’ve mixed it with a goat broth in a savory context,” Saro-Wiwa said.
The delicately flavored Palm Wine and Alomo Bitters Granita was her mother’s idea. The main course, an incendiary Wood-Roasted Red Snapper stuffed with Mustard Leaf, lay under a confetti of pink, marinated onion strips and orange carrots. Pounded Avocado and Roasted Sweet Plantain were necessary cooling agents. “The wood-roasted fish is traditional. I haven’t messed around with that too much,” she said. “If you would like, you can eat it with your hands, but I won’t judge you if you don’t.”
The meal finished with Poached Guava with Scent Leaf Syrup, Alligator Pepper Ice Cream and Crushed and Toasted Chin Chin, crunchy bits akin to soy nuts.
Nigerians don’t eat sweets, Saro-Wiwa said, “But I was brought up in the West, and love my ice cream.”
The meal really finished with shots of Nigerian moonshine — Raffia Palm Gin flavored with Tree Bark.
In one of the show’s galleries, piles of periwinkle shells hint at an exotic item that didn’t make the menu. The shells are slender and conical, mahogany-colored, with studded spirals that look like ancient carving. The snails that emerge from them are turquoise-colored — a plentiful staple of Niger Delta diets, Saro-Wiwa said.
Periwinkles kept people alive during Biafran War, she added. “They’re also a building material.” Donnett’s mask was made of them.
The night’s pineapple theme wasn’t so easy to explain. “They’re from Brazil, but I’ve been obsessed with them for about two years,” Saro-Wiwa said. “I don’t know why. I made a video installation piece where I mutilated one.”
molly.glentzer@chron.com