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A few summers ago, I was visiting a close friend I hadn’t seen in years but with whom I have always felt I could share intimately. I was telling her about some events in my life that had combined to have a significant impact on me, but that I hadn’t really shared with many others. As she listened, she said something I found to be such a beautiful and compelling turn of phrase, and one that has always stayed with me, “You need a witness to your life.”
As our schedules get busier in the end-of-year rush, and the troubles in the world only seem to intensify, it’s difficult to attend to all that life demands of us. I’ve found that the phrase “bearing witness” comes up in my mind again and again, as I think about our human need to attend to our individual and collective joys and sorrows. For me, a more expansive understanding of bearing witness is about not turning away from the experiences of our lives, whether good or bad. We are observers of our own and others’ lives. So how can we be more attentive to the beautiful complexity of our challenges and conflicts, as well as our successes? And how do we bear witness to other people on a regular basis, blurring the lines that separate us from one another?
I’m smitten by “Granddaughter” (1956) by American painter Andrew Wyeth, which speaks powerfully to me about one of the ways in which we bear witness. A young girl dressed in white shorts and a blue shirt stands in front of her grandfather, her hands clasped behind her back. Her grandfather is hunched over, resting against a wood-panelled wall. His gnarled hands are wrapped around a wooden stick and his head is tilted down. We only see the top of his hat.
Depending on the country, the time in history, the family we are born into, our lives have very different sets of challenges and triumphs. In this painting, the girl’s posture suggests her respect for her grandfather, as her elder and the bearer of truths and wisdom to be passed on. Each elderly member of our family or community offers a line back, in turn, to the ancestors who have shown them how to navigate a life. By spending time with her grandfather, the young girl is bearing witness to his life because bearing witness is also about being present in the lives of others.
I have always been drawn to the regal women striding forward in “Walking”, the 1958 painting by the modernist artist Charles Henry Alston, a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance. In bold colours, Alston depicts a group of black women in long skirts and dresses walking determinedly forward in a widening line along a red road. The woman at the very front of the group has her head thrust forward and her chin raised. Beside her a woman in a green dress moves as determinedly along, eyes forward, her arm around a little girl who seems to stand still and face us, the viewer, directly.
Alston painted it to capture the mood and events of the year-long Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955-6), a non-violent protest against racial segregation on public transportation, and a pivotal moment in the larger civil rights movement. These are everyday women who believed in their right to equality and walked together to bear witness to that belief. Yet even without knowing the background of the work, a viewer can see that these women are on a mission, and there is a feeling of universality, that this could be happening anywhere and about any issue.
I love how the women’s bodies are structured like sculptures. Their long necks and dresses lengthen their form and give a feeling of grace and elegance to them and their call for equality. I appreciate how tightly together Alston painted them, giving a sense of their unity, and how the three figures on the sides seem to be walking to join the movement. They are bearing witness to one another’s experiences in the shared injustice but also in the shared courage and willingness to seek change.
In some way, the role of the artist is also to be a witness bearer. I’ve always thought of art as a form of truth telling, less about appeasing the masses and more about being a beholder of the times and our lives. And in this painting, Alston reminds me how bearing witness to the ways we have been mistreated, misrepresented or taken advantage of is often intimately tied to bearing witness for others with similar experiences. Experiences of injustice, as painful as they are for the individual, are usually tied to some larger system of power structures.
I gaze at this painting and in my ear I hear “no one is free until we are all free”, those famous words of another bold woman, the civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer. And speaking so, Hamer was also bearing witness to those who had come before her, saying in a different way what Martin Luther King Jr had said less than a decade prior: that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”.
The words “Tell It Like It Is!”, written in large black script, glare from a wood-framed electric sign box. It is a work from a lightbox series by American multimedia artist Sam Durant, in which he repurposes slogans and phrases from political and social movements around the world and gives them new life and expanded meaning through a format normally reserved for commercial signage.
Without the original protest or demonstration context of the slogans, viewers are confronted with the power of language and how we can make meaning arbitrarily and selectively. As I thought about the idea of bearing witness, whether speaking about social or political events or personal issues, I was struck by Durant’s work. In the US, the phrase has been spouted by politicians promising to be hard-nosed truth-tellers. To “tell it like it is” means to not hold back to make other people comfortable or to play it safe.
But language is a tool we often wield without full acknowledgment of its power. Words can have histories layered in them and when we speak we may be bearing witness to narratives of which we aren’t fully conscious. Durant’s work, for me, is a call to have the courage to see, think and speak with heightened awareness and intention, to remember that we make meaning with language and that our words can often be more politically charged than we even are aware.
To tell it like it is always depends not only on who is doing the telling, but also on how the teller perceives. How do we faithfully bear witness when what we believe to be true may not necessarily be the whole truth? We are always working with the limited information we have, and from the perspective we hold. As we speak what we know to be true from our own vantage point, we must also remember that there will always be another voice who wants and needs to tell it like it is.
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