Origination

Identities Part 2

We became very aware of our gender on board ship. From before we arrived we were repeatedly warned of the Polish seamen. We were told again and again how unusual it was for two young women to travel in this way. So things haven’t changed that much in 100 years.

Victorian Lady explored a fictitious idea of a genteel past of sea travel, where lady travellers in full dress would paint careful watercolours. Perhaps a more accepted version of what a woman artists should be? In contrast, for Dangerous Cargo we printed our bodies with the words Dangerous Cargo and posed on the bridge; playing on the fact that we had been told that passengers were the most ‘dangerous cargo’ on board ship, as they could move, ie. fall overboard. The sub-text to this was the danger we presented as women, a danger of temptation? In No Name, (Wilkie Collins, 1862) Magdalen takes on different roles through a series of disguises. Arguing with her servant over the servants’ lack of willingness to swap roles with her, Magdalen says: “Shall I tell you what a lady is? A lady is a woman who wears a silk gown and has a sense of her own importance.”

Cross-dressing was suggested as one solution to our gender issues, and for Sailor Suit, Katy wore a sailor suit and moustache to take on the typical male role of seaman. The experience wasn’t one of integration, but it did make her feel more in sync with the ship, and the male-ness of the spaces we inhabited.

While in Antwerp, we happened upon an exhibition which included Helio Oiticia’s Parangoles (Made-on-the-body-cape), and it seemed a strange coincidence that the name of our ship was Green Cape. During the journey we embroidered and printed a piece of fabric as a “Green Cape” and then filmed Rebecca wearing the cape and dancing to unheard music on the fore of the ship. This work took on Oitcicia’s philosophy of non-theatre, non-ritual, non-myth; process not display; not-nostalgic but rather concrete action. (Helio Oiticica, 1972, Synthesis-Parangole) The identity became not about the photograph or document, not about the past or our history, but about our being on the journey, on the ship at that very moment; it felt liberating. In another unintentional performance, the Crossing the Line ceremony, an event orchestrated not by us but by others (the crew) also spoke more about a moment in time and space than about an attempt to define identity.

Katy Beinart

References:

Rachel Garfield, Towards a Re-Articulation of Cultural Identity; problematizing the Jewish Subject in Art, Third Text, Vol. 20, Issue 1, January, 2006

Helio Oiticica, Synthesis-Parangole, 1972

W G Sebald, Austerlitz, 2001

Art Speigelman, Maus, 1996)

Wilkie Collins, No Name, 1862

Identities Part 1

We set off on this journey with a pile of books and texts and a suitcase of assorted costumes, unsure as to how these would coincide on the journey to unravel the myth of identity we were trying to explore. In Austerlitz, (Sebald, 2001), a search for lost identity, the main character explores narratives of place to re-find memories of self:

“And might it not be, continued Austerlitz, that we also have appointments to keep in the past, in what has gone before and is for the most part extinguished, and must go there in search of places and people who have some connection with us on the far side of time, so to speak?”

Being on this journey, we hoped to somehow keep these appointments, to touch moments our ancestors had experienced in their migrations Southwards. But we became more and more aware that our identities were performed, invented ones, constructing an idea of a fictitious past based on our own (recent) histories.

We reconstructed family photographs taken on board ship, and dressed in the original garments belonging to grandparents and great-grandparents. What was curious was the change in sense of self, as Rebecca felt herself filling out the enormous dinner jacket and shoes of her Granddad Ben, and Katy felt herself taking on the airs and graces of her Great-grandmother, Edith. The photographs themselves are a deliberately unhistorical reconstruction, a hotchpotch of times and places; the setting is a ship constructed in the 1980s, the clothing dates from the 1930s and 1950s. But perhaps this is a more honest attempt to explain our confused identities than a deliberately accurate reconstruction of the past.

After all, surely our family, by leaving behind their home and community, were trying to create new identities. The idea of the diaspora can suggest either a clinging to memories or liberating from the past, either a feeling of homelessness or an unreal sense of rootedness in a fictional homeland. Garfield (2006) writes: “Jonathan Boyarin suggests that nostalgia is a denial of the state of sustained rediasporisation, which is the nature of Jewish history”; why attempt to reconstruct a past which most Jewish families have for one reason or another been forced to leave behind?. “Diasporic subjectivity offers the contemporary world a way of understanding community without statehood or attachment to territory..the emphasis is not on where you are from, but where you are going.” This makes sense in the context of our journey – we are not seeking a complete identity, a return to the past, but rather like our ancestors perhaps more of a disentanglement from narratives of orthodoxy; acknowledging the complexities of heritage, with Jewishness as a part of our identity but not all.

When his father says “I don’t want you should write this in your book. It has nothing to do with Hitler, or the Holocaust”(Maus, 1996), Art Speigelman, argues “But Pop, it’s great material. It makes everything more real – more human.” It is precisely the details and handed down elements of disaporic existence and of migration that constitute the human identities of our family. So for us, it’s not the archetypal traditions but rather a family recipe that allow us to reconstruct an identity. And its the changes in these elements that capture the sense of that diaspora as temporal rather than territorial/geographical. No place better to realise that than on board ship, a no-country, non-place – so identities can be constructed, without actual adherence to rules or nations.

Katy Beinart

(Mis)Communication

Without easy communication, time slows down, and we think more about what to say, how do we communicate our feelings. We miss people. Writing a letter becomes an action, a gesture of expressing feelings and emotions which have no other outlet.

Jiba tells us that there is a tradition of sending a message ‘home’ when you cross the equator. We decide to send messages in bottles, to past, present and future homes. We write to our great-grandparents in South Africa, our father in England, and to our future selves, who knows where. We mail the letters by dropping the bottles from the side of the ship, watching the words disappear into the waves. Perhaps this is the most appropriate place for our words to go – we have let them out, but it is the lived emotions that really matter, not the externalised words.

We send a lantern into the sky on New Years Eve, with a message translated into Morse Code. Using the code, words become a series of lines and dots. The ultimate removal from the confusion of emotion to the cool rationality of representation. Maybe its right that the lantern is caught by high winds, the code is ripped and flies off to the skies, part caught on the crane, burning. Words on fire, seems to express them better than the ink on dry paper. Bergson writes that language used to describe emotions and feelings can trap and externalise feelings. Language rationalises things which are not rational.

Translation, which derives from the Latin ‘Transferre‘, meaning ‘to bring across’, can be seen as a metaphor for migration. (Basu & Coleman, 2008) An object transferred takes on a new set of significances – or may be evoked using new objects which ‘stand for’ the original. Similarly, in the carrying over of language, words take on new significances; Benjamin’s question of how translation can constitute the continued life of the ‘original’ mirrors the question of how the migrant can continue the life of their ‘home’ in a new context. The difference between translation (word for word rendering) and transduction (sense for sense), and therefore of entextualisation, extracting discourse from its original context and re-inserting it into a new context, expose how translations and migrations can transform, as well as cross boundaries.

The written language of ship is in a multitude of words: German/Polish/Italian/English..a palimpsest of makers/users/voyagers. Original signage has aged and one language has gradually replaced another, hastily typed and pasted over. The crew speak Polish, and we write out a series of questions for them, and ask the Captain to translate for us. Somewhere the question “A family recipe” gets confused into the Polish “what do your family think of your job?”- a question that has a very different, emotive meaning. We provoke angry, difficult, upset responses without meaning to. By the time we work out that the word ‘recipe’ has been confused with the word ‘receive’ we have already had some difficult but interesting conversations about the hardships of their lives, one perhaps we would have avoided with a question about the culture of food.

On Christmas Eve, we were invited to share and exchange tiny pieces of communion wafer with all the officers and crew, a ritual they always share at Christmas. The etymology of the word communion is moi, and signifies change or exchange. (Newling, 2001) Common, communicate, mutual and renumerate all spring from the same route. Etymologically, a companion is a person with whom we share bread. Sharing the wafers, or our baking bread from the starter culture and offering it to the crew, seem more profound means of communication and exchange than the verbal questions, which lead to confusion.

Katy Beinart

References:

Bergson, Time and Free Will (Essai sur les donnees immediates de la consience)

Basu & Coleman, Introduction: Migrant Worlds, Material Cultures, Mobilities Vol 3., No.3, Nov 2008

John Newling, The Kitchen Table, August 2001

Time and Waiting

For four days the table is occupied by Katy’s jigsaw puzzle. It mustn’t be moved. It’s a difficult one: a picture of a steam train, with lots of leafy foliage and vague white steam, which means many pieces that look extremely similar. Katy works at it patiently, and spends an entire day finishing it off. She tells me that she learns a lot from the experience: that you only find the right piece when you stop looking for it; that when you think there’s no solution and you walk away, the solution offers itself to you when you return. I do not help with the jigsaw puzzle. I have made a surprising discovery about myself on this trip: I am impatient.

We have a calendar on the wall, on which we cross out each day as it ends – counting off the days until we arrive in Cape Town. Due to bad weather, and waiting at anchor, we have been adding days almost as fast as we cross them off: seven extra days so far. A lot of this voyage has been about passing time, and waiting. Waiting to leave, waiting to arrive. In some ways it is a luxury for us both: to have so much TIME at our disposal. Time to think and read, time to sunbathe and relax. But as we near a month on the boat, we feel like we are running out of ways to fill the time. Each day is similar, the routines of the boat runs like clockwork, and there is a ‘Groundhog Day’ like repetition of waking, meal times, and conversations with the crew. We repeat daily tasks to keep track of the passing time: a logbook, a video diary, daily sea observations, and photos of the sunset.

We have been reading Henri Bergson’s writings on Time and Duration. Bergson challenges our usual conception of time, as a linear experience: he argues that this way of understanding time is based in a scientific, spatial way of thinking. The way we describe our experiences of the world in this mode of thinking are as something we can count, and quantify. He argues that what we actually experience in our lives is very difficult to reduce to language, and that our experience of time is not an unwavering forward march. He offers instead the notion of ‘Pure Duration’: our experiences as we live them, which are not a linear narrative. Time is simultaneous, fluid and flowing: our inner experiences of the world are overlaid with immediate and remembered emotion, sensation and association. The closest we may come to an awareness of Pure Duration is in our dream life, where there is no linearity.

Bergson uses the metaphor of melody as a way of thinking about our experience of duration: ‘The metaphor of the musical phrase conveys the notion of ensemble that attaches to the experience of duration… a multiplicity without homogeneity, in which states of feeling overlap and interpenetrate one another, instead of being organised into a distinct succession.’ [Time & Free Will, p67]

Bergson’s ideas change our way of thinking about the duration of this journey. There are a host of characters, stories and memories that are travelling with us – as real and influential on our experience as Niko the steward or the Captain. In some way, our ancestors are making this journey now, with us – and we are making it with them, then. The seascapes slide into one another: not a series of distinct scenes, but ever-changing and flowing, exactly the same and always different from yesterday, a year ago, a hundred years ago. We count the days, but we also stop counting. We give in to the idea that we will arrive when we arrive.

Rebecca Beinart

Sea Observations Part 2

1^st January. I saw flying fish shimmering over the sea like giant dragonflies.

2^nd January. On the bridge I look over the railing, straight down to the sea, 15 metres below. The deep blue is interrupted by clouds and eddies of white and turquoise, caused by the turbulence of the boat’s passage. Looking down I have a half-desire to jump, a half-fear of falling. It is vertiginous.

4^th January. I watched the lifeboat drill: the sailors jumped in whilst the boson winched the boat down to the water. They tested the engine and ran a few checks before being winched back up again. As the boat levitated a few metres above the sea, a seal appeared underneath it, and turned belly-up before slithering away beneath the waves.

5^th January. Still at anchor outside Walvis Bay. We have been sitting here waiting for two days. Being close to land, and still, the Sea is completely different. Calmer, more transparent, a patchwork of colours and currents. There’s a rich turquoise green and a muddy brown, clouds of pink-orange jelly fish and dark seaweed. There are seals and birds. And on the horizon is the hazy yellow desert – a series of colours and shapes that seem all the more foreign to eyes that have seen only sea for two weeks.

8^th January. Ha! the sea says. Ha! you thought you were safe, that all I had left in me was calm-blue easy-riding. Oh fools, never underestimate me! I can still toss you awake at night and shake your brain, making you wobble around like a drunkard.

(I didn’t sleep much last night.)

Rebecca Beinart