Backshack studio: Hope’s not on the map

It’s one o’clock in the afternoon and it seems like everyone is drunk. Not a let-the-good-times-roll drunk. A fatigued drunk, stupified drunk. The kind of drunk that comes from drinking whenever anything can be found to drink, since breakfast, if breakfast was to be had. A drunk that comes from poverty, not the revel of wealth.

The man who gets into the backseat, little boy of about three, possibly a stunted four in tow, reeks of it, but he’s coherent. Slow – sentences take awhile to formulate, there’s a pause between each word – but coherent, and he’s the only person of four we’ve flagged down who seems to have an idea where 120 Phumlani Extension 3 is.

We’re off the map, literally. Where we are headed does not exist, according to Google, and Waze, and there are no NAF signposts to guide us past the semi-feral dogs, stumbling adults, and potholes oozing sewage. Eventually a small collection of cars with an out-of-town look marks the likely spot further up the road.

The welcome given to us mlungus is warm while edged with a slight wariness. There’s an unspoken question: How are we going to behave? Are we, the descendents of the arrogant colonialists who did not deign to recognise their culture, here to hold ourselves aloof and judge, or have we humbled ourselves and come as equals? This is frontier country, the Kowie ditch still a line marking where our forefathers killed each other. It wasn’t that long ago

It seems we have succeeded somewhat in shedding our ancestors’ conceit; I, grey stubbled and wrinkling under the sun, am invited to sit with the elders, a communal tin of umqombothi passed to hand.

This, then, is the Backshack Studio at artist Nyaniso Lindi’s home in Joza, Makhanda. But it’s not cheese and wine and earnest theories of art, it’s vetkoek, umqombothi, cheap wine and brandy, and zamalek and milk stout and the women inside and the men in the yard. Whether it’s the women inside amidst Lindi’s intriguing prints adorning the walls or the men outside who drink the most is anyone’s guess although I suspect the women do, as they don’t have to pause for the speech by tat’mhkulu, they just need to drink quietly for a bit.

The only person who does not seem inebriated at this thanksgiving is the artist himself, Nyaniso, who, in orange construction worker’s pants and self-printed Boxer tobacco t-shirt sporting a boxing Mandela, moves between the younger men, and the older men, and the speckle of mlungus, and consults with his mother whose house it is that all is as it should be and everyone is welcomed before the speeches are made and visitors are invited to his shack behind the house where his works in progress are hung by clothes pegs on wire.

He points out some of the symbolism in his unfinished drawings filled with finely conceived detail, commenting on the different colour washes and how he might proceed to complete them. Questions as to their conceptual and political nature are fielded with refreshingly candid answers to the effect that he is not a political commentator, activist, or spokesperson, merely an artist who represents what he sees. There’s the fallist protestors on a perfectly architecurally accurate background of High Street beyond the Cathedral, with a clown juggling fishes on the one side. He sees the agitators, the populists getting in with their own corrupt political agenda. It’s up to me to decide whether it’s the EFF.

But while he stands apart from it, what he sees is political, as is everything in this riven country. Within this new work titled Battered and Broozed, there’s the drawing titled State Capture. It shows a man, head in hands at a table opposite an anthropomorphic female goat holding the penis of another man standing alongside. They are reflected in a mirror above the fireplace, placing us as viewers in the room and also offering a nod to painters such as Jan van Eyck and Velasquez. Both compelling and disturbing, with a grotesque reimagining of anatomy (a wheelchair’s wheel is made up of human arms, hands gripping wrists end-to-end), this and the other works in the series evoke Goya’s ominous atmosphere.

There is, paradoxically, also a sense of community; his position as observer is part of the whole. Nyaniso’s role in the community is also evident in the initial speeches outside, where he is referred to by the all-encompassing epithet of uncle. A nucleus of creative endeavour within broader impoverishment, conversation in the yard reveals there are at least three people who work under his direction, who laboured with him to prepare the exhibition currently installed at the Monument at the opposite end of town.

As with arriving, leaving, now having shared in a communal thanksgiving the motivation for which is ambiguous, takes time. Here, at the artist’s home, past Makana’s Kop and the demands of festival’s timetable, where language and experience stumble against each other, it becomes apparent that time is the gift received and to be given. Time to forgive, time to heal, time to celebrate, time to create. Time to understand, time to find hope.

The Backshack Studio opens again on 1 July at 11am. Tickets cost R30. Lindi’s exhibition Waya-Waya: iMoto Yocingo is in the New Gallery at the Monument.