Briefly Examined Pandemic Lives

A conversation with Wanjeri Gakuru and Marziya Mohammedali 

In late 2020 and early 2021, Jalada Africa, a Pan-African writers’ collective, released a two-part anthology in the theme of ‘nostalgia’, designed to be an exploration of memory; tradition and modernity, the tactile and the intangible, legacy and erasure, stagnation and evolution, the possible and impossible.

Nairobi-based Lead Editor (and the Collective’s Managing Editor), Wanjeri Gakuru and Arts Editor, Marziya Mohammedali, who lives in Boorloo (Perth), took some time to reflect on their time working on the project via an incisive, meandering email exchange conversation about grief, legacy, process, inspiration, and what they’d put in a time capsule.

Wanjeri Gakuru: Where did the pandemic find you in your creative life? What plans did you have or were then executing? 

Marziya Mohammedali: When the pandemic started, I was in a very strange position in terms of my creative life. I had just started a PhD and been to a conference in Melbourne the month before Perth was first locked down. Given that my research was looking at my own practice of protest photography, it was a bit confronting to suddenly have no ability to engage with that particular practice since Covid restrictions put an end to physical protests for a while! 

It meant that suddenly I had to figure out not just how to undertake the study but also what it meant to document protests in alternative forms, especially online. For a while, I think I was grieving, though, as it was something that I loved doing and suddenly having that taken away completely threw me off, [it] made it difficult to engage with the research part of my life. I saw this grief reflected in other artists who suddenly found they were completely unable to carry out their work or who had lost their incomes. I also felt like it was selfish of me to be grieving, though, when everyone was dealing with so much...in a way, I suppose I felt conflicted by what I was feeling and surprised [by] how much I was affected by this.

That said, in Perth, we have been fairly lucky and did not have the lockdown for as long or as extensively as other places. We also started having protests again, and the massive focus on Black Lives Matter meant that I went from not being able to photograph protests to taking literally thousands of photos of the movement. It felt different though, I felt like I was approaching my work in a different way, probably wary because of the fear of COVID. I think I understand more why I am drawn to taking photos at protests, not just in terms of documentation but also the entire experience of protest ‘through the lens.’ Having that brief lockdown period was beneficial to my understanding of why I did what I did and what might be other ways of being involved in creative activism. It also pushed me to look at other creative practices that I could work with, to experiment more with things like zine making as an alternative way to talk about protest visuals. 

How has the pandemic changed your approach to creative work?

Wanjeri Gakuru: I hear you on grieving and feeling conflicted about it, but the pandemic was a complete shock to the system, and we are allowed space to ‘feel all the feels.’ In any case, I actually started the year directing a short documentary. It was a commissioned project highlighting the challenges kids in two local informal settlements faced trying to access good schools. So, I was extremely energised and keen to maintain that level of creativity. 

I'd been reading ‘Regarding the Pain of Others’, a book-length essay by Susan Sontag examining war photography, to maintain a level of sensitivity around the images I was producing about my subject's lives. But then we found ourselves caught up in an invisible war and the images coming out of Italy, especially in those early months, were heartbreaking. I became even more conscious of how I was documenting the experiences of this time and wondered what else I could do. In April, I came up with a documentary project of sorts; ‘The Snapshot Project,’ a kind of time capsule exercise and asked family, friends and strangers to record 1min clips (audio or video) answering two questions: ‘one thing I miss’ and ‘one thing I have.’ 

It was based on what Sontag had written regarding ‘collective memory’ that it was not a remembering but a stipulating that: ‘this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the stories in our minds.’ The idea for Jalada’s ‘nostalgia’ issue sprung from that as well. That how we remember this time was equally important; where we placed our emphasis, spent our time, what we documented (and that we document) mattered. 

Were there articles/albums/spaces/films and shows/statements/ideas that you found yourself gravitating towards to stay sane as you worked last year?

Marziya Mohammedali: It’s funny you mention Sontag and ‘Regarding the Pain of Others’ as I was reading that too! I was looking at it from more of an academic perspective - then again, my academic and creative practices are intertwined. There were definitely parts of it that resonated with me and my work. Another one in the same vein was Judith Butler’s ‘Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?’ which I happened to be looking at right when the pandemic hit, the ideas around whose lives are ‘grievable’ and how they are portrayed, and the deliberate breaking of the frame of context in which images are taken or intended to be seen in, really resonated with me. 

[When] Posting and sharing creative work online you can’t predict where the images might end up and for what purposes they may be used. I came back to this concept (even if the text was not a light read!) time and again last year, when looking at the images of the pandemic and the images of Black Lives Matter, both in their own way addressing the question of ‘grievable’ lives, people grieving the loss of life, but also the loss of a way of living, when it came to the pandemic; and the demand to acknowledge the ‘grievability’ of Black lives and Black bodies with BLM.

During the year, I discovered a set of YouTube videos by The New School, from when bell hooks was in residence there. Those were amazing. I have loved hooks for a long time and own several of her books, but to hear her speak, and in conversation with some amazing activists and feminists, was another thing altogether. I stumbled on to the series quite by accident! I saw a quote from her that someone had tweeted, that said: ‘…All of our lives we’ve experienced ourselves as queer as not belonging, as the essence of queer[…]queer as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.’ That quote spoke to me, spoke to my identity and creative practice, to my life. It really gave me a way to describe what I was doing, and to also frame protest as an inherently queer practice, a queering of space. I ended up going on a deep dive to find out where it was from and eventually found the video in which she said this.

Another person I read a lot from was Sara Ahmed. Her work around Willful Subjects in particular was something I kept returning to, thinking about the notion of 'will' and how it was playing out in my own life and those around me. I gravitated towards these works in particular because of the similarities between Ahmed and myself in terms of our identities, but also because she has a poetics to her writing, teasing out every nuance of a word and bringing it to life through experience. The commentary on wilfulness is a personal interest, as it links directly to my name - مرضی (marzi) in Urdu translates to volition or will. I cannot help but be willful, and I explored this through Ahmed’s work and commentary, seeing how it manifested in my own creative work. Maybe this is why I’m so stubborn, ha!

During the pandemic I saw a lot of online chatter about people wanting to do things they would not normally have the time to do. Conversely I also saw people talking about how the pressures of the pandemic made it more difficult to be productive. Did you feel pressure to be more or less creative/productive in this time? How did you work with these feelings?

Wanjeri Gakuru: We were reading the same book! How exciting! Loving the books and lectures too. Will definitely seek them out. bell hooks is an incredible thinker and I understand the joy of hearing her words come alive and seeing her engage with others. Reminds me of Chimurenga’s new journal that I want to get into. It features reflections on FESTAC '77, that magical time thousands of artists, writers, musicians, activists and scholars from Africa and the black diaspora assembled in Lagos inspired by the philosophies of negritude and Pan-Africanism. I understand even Audre Lorde was there! How cool is that?

I am currently on a social media break so I can’t speak to having witnessed those particular online conversations. However, I did hear similar thoughts from friends and family. The biggest thing people were now finding time to do involved rest and play but it seemed to come with a huge sense of guilt and anxiety. This ‘great pause’ was incongruent with years of participation in the rat race. Such joyful endeavours were considered wasteful and there was a real threat to people’s incomes that understandably brought on the latter feelings. 

But, being a freelancer, I was used to engaging with all four things in a healthy way. Ha. I work with international brands and colleagues based all over the globe so it was largely the increase in virtual hangouts and the resulting screen fatigue that I had to contend with. I’m grateful to have adjusted so quickly and to be able to serve as tech support on everything including Zoom birthday parties. 

When it got too much though, especially when the curfew in Kenya was at 7pm and I hadn’t seen my loved ones for ages, I would ride my bicycle in the estate parking lot late at night to ease the pressure and feelings of claustrophobia. 

Has this season of loss made you think about legacy and what will remain, what to contribute to and why? 

Marziya Mohammedali: I think we can blame capitalism for the idea that creative work or any non-commercial activity that brings joy is considered wasteful. Yes, we have to earn a living, and not everyone is lucky enough to be able to do something they love in order to do it. However, the idea that an afternoon of rest is wasteful, or a day of writing or painting or playing is unproductive...these are dangerous! Just because it doesn't always produce something that can be bought or sold doesn't mean it doesn’t have value. It is these little things that we need to stay sane in this world of ours, even when things are slowly going back to ‘normal’ (whatever normal is).

Yes, I get annoyed when there is this admonishment of ‘you’re doing nothing at home’ even though someone might be doing creative work that is fulfilling to themselves. Can you tell?

To get to your question, I think the question of legacy has always been there, just that it's been the staple of epic poems and introspective songs rather than a thought that I've consciously paid attention to. Seeing posts about people passing away - old, young, famous, ordinary, people who I’d never even heard of and in some cases people whose names were not known...that really hit hard, thinking about what's left when you go, and wondering how people will remember you. There is some vanity in the idea that you want to think that you're going to make something that people will be talking about forever, but we may not realise that even the smaller things leave some kind of mark that maybe only a few remember, but it is important to them. 

The reverse is also true - things pass by so fast, and we get distracted and don’t necessarily notice. So many stories that are just...gone. I think it is this latter idea that’s made me more keen to take risks in my creative practice or to experiment with things, mostly because it feels like less stress when things are ephemeral. It reminds me of what a student told me once, that everything is transient...and it is. It makes me both hunger to make a mark that will still be there after I’m gone but less concerned about making a mess because, in the grand scheme of things, it's not going to matter. 

What would you put in a time capsule from this past year, for someone 100 years from now? What advice might you give them based on what you’ve experienced?

Wanjeri Gakuru: Agreed with the strong feelings about the ‘doing nothing at home’ brigade. And yes, capitalism is at the heart of such sentiments, and in some ways, I get it. I mean, that’s all they’ve known, and it is designed as a messed up reward system, especially on the continent. On one hand, you have the ‘respectable’ white-collar jobs, and on the other, you have cunning, shadowy characters that we admonish in public but secretly want to cut a deal with. There is no space for stillness or creativity for its own sake. That’s partly why I took a social media break. My online life didn’t feel mine anymore. I was following a script, playing a character who was subtly engineered to look and act in certain ways. Good thing the documentary The Social Dilemma (and everything Adam Curtis has ever made) confirmed all this not to be a conspiracy theory. 

We need new ideas about how to live. One very cool one has been proposed by The Nap Ministry - the name says it all. 

If I had to put a couple of things in a time capsule from 2020, one of them would have to be the Verzuz battles; a homage to African American musical excellence. I’d also include whole segments of Twitter and TikTok though I’d need to include extensive footnotes. The black and brown corners of these spaces became incredible communities of care and archive and soapbox, and everything else people needed at that time. They also showed the generosity of spirit that existed then. We immediately sought to comfort each other, escape the madness together, see and affirm each other. I would advise people in the future to take Toni Morrison’s advice: ‘Just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else.’ 

How did you develop your technique for the image artwork in the Nostalgia issue? What was that process like? What spoke to you in this theme? 

Marziya Mohammedali: I love Toni Morrison. So much wisdom and so much strength. I remember reading The Bluest Eye when I was 16, and it was haunting.

The artwork for Nostalgia came together over a few months. I started with looking into Nostalgia itself - the etymology of the word, what other words linked with it in other languages, and who had written about it. One of the quotes that struck me was from Milan Kundera’s work, Ignorance: ‘The Greek word for return is nostos. Algos means suffering. So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.’  It positions nostalgia as inherently linked to suffering. However, I feel like nostalgia can also be joyous, can also heal, but it is never fully devoid of that longing to return. I would say this influenced my interactions with the works and, ultimately, the process of creating the artwork for the issue.

Given that the artwork is a conversation with the pieces they are paired with, I needed to get a feel for the tone of the issue, for what might be some of the narrative threads that carried through the stories and essays and poems, and how that might translate into visuals. There were a lot of common motifs I found - trees, water, sand, rocks - these kept coming up as I read through the works. There were also the characters - some had distinct descriptions, others were vague, but in each, I tried to find something that would help me with picking an appropriate picture to represent the character in the piece, a feel for how someone might hold themselves, or how they might act.

At the same time, I was doing research into styles of a few decades, trying to see what the most common elements were from those times. The aesthetics are so varied! I also looked into actual methods of design. I was lucky enough to have a conversation with someone who used to work in a publishing house in South Africa before everything was digitised, and she told me about the process of setting out documents and magazines, and literally pasting elements on the layout boards. I also found an article about paste-up that included a video of the process. That last one really formed the base for what became the Nostalgia artwork. 

While I did all the artwork digitally, I wanted to replicate the look and feel of the layers placed over one another, with different elements from the stories being referenced in the backgrounds and the character who would be the focus of the image. I was also experimenting with different effects being applied to images, trying to see if a cross-processing effect for the photographic elements might be useful - while I didn't end up using exactly those effects, they did yield some interesting results. It introduced artefacts, such as speckles or areas of high colour, which became visual signifiers for the way an image might be perceived as a memory or an old photo, sometimes with saturated colour or with light leaks, not as clear as the digital images that we are used to. Each one of the artworks consisted of several layers, including a background, a layer that was set up to mimic the adhesive layer between the character and background, the main character, and several processing layers.

Looking at the process now, I feel like these artworks have been some of the most extensive in terms of their development, but at the same time, some of the most personal pieces I have done for Jalada. So much of the issue was personal, filled with stories of people’s lives, and it bled into the process of image - creation where I wasn't just looking through a set of images and finding one that was ‘close enough’ but rather using the text to truly inform the image and what became part of it, how the colours would link with the tones of the piece, what small narrative element might become the link that ties the whole set of image and text together.