Hold It In Your Mouth A Little Longer

It is a man. It is a woman. It is neither. It pulls tight up to its neck the lines, dots and fractals of traditional West African mud cloth – the sacred geometries reflected like stars, like water – like ancient cosmologies on its face. Hair cropped close to the scalp, a blonde like Beninoir gold. A black. A white. A gold in between. Hold it in your mouth a little longer.

- Lindokuhle Nkosi

In a file of audio recordings archived from a London-based arts hub active in the ’70s, exiled South African writer Lewis Nkosi interviews the Sudanese painter Ibrahim El-Salahi and the East African artist and thinker Elimo Njau at FESMAN, the first ever pan-African festival of the arts held in Dakar, Senegal, in 1966. They discuss the relatively new and divisive concept of Negritude, a term imagined and theorised by the pan-African surrealists Aimé Cesairé, Léopold Sédar Senghor (the first president of Senegal) and Léon Damas. It is tense: El-Salahi is trying Negritude on. A new skin, perhaps ill-fitting. ‘The first time I heard the word Negritude, it gave me a strange feeling. And I had to chew it for some time to see what taste it had. And I must admit that when I came here, I came with a little bit of prejudice. And I realised that what I’ve seen here, it hasn’t nothing to do … it has no implication with the racial thing in itself, as much it has to do with a cultural thing.’ The painter takes the term, turns over with his tongue, rolls it hard against his palate. He holds it in his mouth a little longer.

Toyin Ojih Odutola is a Nigerian-born artist who works across multiple mediums. In ‘Hold It In Your Mouth A Little Longer’ and ‘LTS III’, markings score cloth, score skin. She dashes, hyphens, commas, dots. She hieroglyphs the traditional scarification of a tribe we might know, but whose name we have not learnt to pronounce.

Born in Nigeria, raised in Alabama, schooled in San Francisco and now based in New York, the multiplicities of the artist’s geopolitics are contemplated, complicated and reflected in her work.