Wilson's King Hedley II
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Between Piaget and Pinochet:
Brazil's documentary boom
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Bidden fruit: Reversing the
spells of patriarchy

“Bidden Fruit” features the work of Asheville artists Eva Scruggs Allowos and Kathryn Temple.
The exhibit will open on Friday, Feb. 7, with a reception from 6-9pm,
at the Wedge Gallery on Roberts Street (off Clingman Ave.). Photo by Beth Trigg

By Beth Trigg

Asheville, North Carolina, Feb. 2 (AGR)-- Last week, I heard that federal funding for Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) programs was in danger because money was being diverted to the “war on terrorism.” I kept thinking about the skewed values system this policy decision represents, and what a straightforward statement of our culture’s priorities it is. As we’re faced with seemingly more and more of this kind of news daily, it’s refreshing to see the work of two women reinterpreting power and re-envisioning some of the largest-looming symbols and myths of our cultural landscape. “Bidden Fruit,” an art exhibit featuring the paintings of Kathryn Temple and Eva Scruggs Allowos, simultaneously reclaims and subverts traditional stories, archetypes, and images from a feminist perspective.

In the context of the strutting machismo of our government’s latest warmongering, of the ongoing consolidation of power by the wealthy and by corporations, where do activists find hope? I found a glimmer in the new, woman-centered visions of power in the paintings of “Bidden Fruit.” The day after I heard the news about VAWA funding, I visited Kathryn in her studio. Bursting from her huge canvases are deep purples, lush reds, and luminous white. At the center of “What is the use of a book without pictures or conversations?” a perfect red apple shines against a background of billowing folds of fabric -- the shapeless, Victorian dress of a young girl facing away from the fruit and the book on which it rests.

Images of fruit tie together the two women’s work, though they paint in styles quite different from each other. Eva Scruggs Allawos, whose studio is in the same Wedge Building as Temple’s, paints and reinterprets biblical stories, infusing them with elements of modern culture, and seeds of feminist doubt. Replacing the apple as a symbol of evil that’s usually placed in Eve’s hand, Eva gives Adam a shiny red grenade—a truer symbol of the evil of patriarchal, militaristic power.

The lush, fruity, fertile, sensual kind of power that Kathryn and Eva imagine—a snake twining out of Eve’s snaky hair, languid across her skin; succulent fruit bursting open, resting on the pale pages of a book is a potent answer to the “power-over” model of control and repression that characterizes patriarchy. Eva and Kathryn have said of their work: “We live in a culture that has taught women to deny pleasure, goodness, and actual nourishment. We are reclaiming traditional images and reversing their spells. What was once forbidden is now bidden.”

Kathryn grew up in Atlanta, and has been active in the global justice movement since 1995. Her work includes a painted documentary of the El Mozote massacre that has been exhibited throughout the Southeast and a chapter on globalization, to be featured in an upcoming collection of feminist essays published by Vintage Anchor. Eva was raised in Sylva, NC, and is a committee member of the Asheville City Murals Project, an art educator, and an organic farmer. Her work has been exhibited extensively throughout the Southeast.

“Bidden Fruit opens on February 7th at the Wedge Gallery on Roberts Street off Clingman Ave. with a reception from 6-9 pm. For more information, or directions, call 236-2451.

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Wilson's King Hedley II

By Beverly Andrews

London, United Kingdom, Feb. 1 (IPS)-- August Wilson is America's most commercially successful playwright. He is also African-American and it is his cultural, rather than national, heritage that informs his work.

King Hedley II, the latest in his epic cycle of plays, charts the evolution of African-American life. Wilson's plays cover most of the last century and King Hedley is not only the latest, but also the bleakest. The play conveys the disturbing message that very little has changed for the vast majority of African-Americans and that those who do succeed are the exception.

The central character is not, as the title might suggest, a reigning monarch but rather a young embittered ex-convict struggling to create a new life in Pittsburgh in 1985 after having served a seven-year jail term for manslaughter.

Through his eyes, we see the other individuals who inhabit his desperate world: A loving but wounded young wife, an estranged mother eager to reclaim love from a son she abandoned long ago, and a smooth talking charmer who was once a friend of Hedley's father.

Next door to this struggling family lives a neighbor who sees religion as the explanation for every tragedy these people are forced to endure. These characters inhabit a world of poor housing, causal jobs and early tragic deaths.

The play focuses on Hedley and his doomed attempts to create a new life, symbolized by the tiny garden he plants in front of his shabby house. The audience is shown his frantic struggle to escape his fate.

Hedley, in his quieter moments, acknowledges that it is a fate he cannot avoid. The situation, the playwright argues, has little to do with Hedley's own actions but everything to do with the social and economic conditions, into which he was born. As Hedley says to a friend while trying to sell stolen refrigerators, “I know which way the wind is blowing and it ain't blowing my way.”

It is this self-awareness that gives the play certain poignancy. The characters realize that their lives are doomed, yet they retain their dreams. These small though unobtainable dreams give them dignity and help keep total despair at bay.

August Wilson is often referred to as one of the richest and most profound theatrical voices to come out of America today. His work has drawn comparisons to that of other theatrical legends like Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller.

It is perhaps all the more remarkable to note that Wilson's plays, which take an unflinching look at stories of black disillusionment and political disenfranchisement, have managed to conquer the mainstream. This commercial success has also been mirrored by critically acclaimed recognition; Wilson has already been awarded two Pulitzer prizes.

August Wilson is the first black playwright to succeed on Broadway since Lorraine Hainsberry, author of A Raisin in the Sun, written over 25 years ago. He is also the first to have created an extensive body of work for black writers, directors, and actors throughout the country.

But perhaps Wilson's most significant achievement has been his documentation of a history which is often overlooked but is crucial to understanding the current racial tensions which still exist in America today.

The playwright has also proved to be a valuable inspiration for black authors working in other countries. “There's is nobody in this country, in my experience, who can be a celebrated artist ... and who can remain, as August has said on a number of occasions, quintessentially the man that he was when he entered into manhood,” says Britain's acclaimed playwright Kwaime Kwei.

August Wilson's journey to theatrical prominence was not a typical one. He was born Frederick August Kittel in 1945 in the African-American district of Pittsburgh. He is the son of a white German baker and a black cleaner named Daisy Wilson.

He recounts how, when the family moved to a predominantly white suburb, the treatment of the siblings who were fair was very different to that of those whose skin was much darker. In a recent interview he states: “My brother's pain was my pain. It pained me also to know that I would receive privilege that he didn't.”

All the children, despite their mixed parentage, gravitated toward their African-American heritage. His mother eventually remarried a promising African-American athlete who turned to crime and subsequently spent 23 years of his life in prison, dying in 1969. Wilson's teachers knew him to be a bright, intelligent child, but he was forced to leave his all-Catholic school because of the vicious racial bullying there.

Ironically, it was his experience at the subsequent African-American school he attended which drove him out of formal education altogether. There a black teacher questioned his honesty over a course paper.

Not believing that the child could have produced the quality of work he handed in, the teacher gave Wilson an E, and, in protest, Wilson dropped out of school and instead spent all his free time at a public library.

It is this complex difficult childhood which has given August Wilson the foundation he has needed to produce work of both power and insight, work that questions the American dream and suggests that, for at least one of its largest minority groups, that dream can also be a nightmare. Many of his most acclaimed plays, such as the award-winning Fences, charts characters' violent reaction to the restrictions placed on their lives simply because of the color of their skin.

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Between Piaget and Pinochet:
Brazil's documentary boom

By Mario Osava

Rio De Janeiro, Brazil, Feb. 1 (IPS)-- A football coach fired for taking off his clothes on the field, a young, unabashed prostitute and an elderly woman who decides against suicide are some of the real-life characters in Edificio Master (The Master Building), a documentary that marks the height of a boom in this film genre.

“I use Piaget a great deal, but if I need to, I use Pinochet,” says Sergio, the manager of the 12-story Master building, to explain how he imposes order and discipline on the 500 people who live in the 276 small apartments.

Jean Piaget (1896-1980) was a Swiss psychologist whose theories on learning inspired new teaching methods. Augusto Pinochet is the Chilean general who led the bloody coup that overthrew socialist president Salvador Allende in 1973 and went on to rule the country with an iron fist until 1990.

Interviews with the manager and 37 residents of the Master make up the new film by Eduardo Coutinho, “father” of a new generation of Brazilian documentary filmmakers, whose output has grown recently, with works gaining unexpected success among critics and audiences.

A great deal of humor mixed with personal tragedies, emotional moments and abundant frankness might explain the positive reception of Edificio Master since its premiere at the end of last year.

An elderly woman living at the Master had resolved to commit suicide after losing all her savings when an assailant forced her to withdraw all her money from the bank, under threat of a supposed hidden gun. But at the last moment she decides against jumping out her apartment window because she “couldn't die leaving debts behind.”

The “garota de programa,” as “high-class” prostitutes are known in Brazil, is not ashamed to admit to her profession on camera, saying she needs the work in order to take care of the daughter she had when she was 15.

“This is all normal” in a world with so much corruption, violence and “the government robbing the people,” she says.

Coutinho is a veteran documentary filmmaker who took more than two decades to complete -- in 1984 -- the film that established his career: Cabra marcado para morrer (Marked for Death), about the struggle for land reform in Brazil's impoverished Northeast, before and at the end of the country's military dictatorship (1964-1985).

But in recent times he as been able to put out a feature-length documentary almost yearly, an achievement in a country where directors tend to battle for years before making their dream of a film premiere come true.

Since 1999, Coutinho has filmed Santo forte (Strong Saint) and Babilonia 2000, the former about the religious beliefs found in a favela, or shantytown, and the latter about the expectations of favela residents for the new millennium.

In Edificio Master, the director continues his traditional method of choosing a community and then interviewing its residents. But this time he did so without a core theme.

The resulting documentary shows a great human diversity, but one in which the elderly predominate.

The Master is located in Copacabana, the famed beach neighborhood of southern Rio de Janeiro and also home to the favela of Babilonia 2000 -- and to a high concentration of retirees.

Another successful documentary being shown in Brazil this Southern Hemisphere summer is Onibus 174 (Bus 174), by director José Padilha. The film recreates and provides analysis of an incident that shocked the country in June 2000.

Sandro do Nascimento, a young man who seven years earlier had survived a massacre of street children committed by the police, hijacked a bus in a middle-class neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro. Armed with a pistol, he took several people hostage.

The police cordon and the negotiations for the release of the hostages lasted for more than four hours and were broadcast live on television throughout the country.

The incident ended in tragedy.

Nascimento stepped off the bus with a hostage and the police shot at him twice at close range. But the gunshots missed the target, and the woman hostage was nicked instead. Nascimento immediately fired twice, killing her.

The young man was arrested unharmed, but he died from asphyxiation in the police vehicle that was transporting him to jail.

The disastrous police intervention and the story of the life and death of Nascimento, who never knew his father and whose mother was stabbed to death when he was just six, give Padilha a structure in which to underscore the social injustices and insecurities that reign in Brazil.

The directing, the drama of the incident and the variety of viewpoints included in the analysis hold the audience's attention for the 130 minutes of Onibus 174, a long film, especially for a documentary.

Also surprising is the success of the documentary Janela da alma (Window of the Soul), directed by Joao Jardim and Walter Carvalho, shown in theaters in previous months. It tackles the philosophical, aesthetic and social questions associated with those who have limited sight or are blind.

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