Sculptures and the Idea of Lifelessness

By

Obododimma Oha

There is something about sculptures: they tend to suggest the idea of lifelessness. If this is a confession of a phobia, well, let it be. For your information, I started having that impression right from childhood. Faces of masks that people wore in secular masquerading, which were popularly called “okporompi” in my part of Igboland, scared me for they resembled human faces; in other words, they were projects of mimicry, of resemblance and analogy in the visual mode. But apart from this, there was that morbid resemblance between the lifeless human face of the mask and the face of the person lying in state. I was frightened by lifelessness in them and this dread was extended to sculptures of human figures (you know death is frightening!). In fact, an uncle had a wooden form, called “nwagoro oyibo” and it always frightened me, in spite of the oyibo attached to it. To meet Nwagoro oyibo in my dream was terrible. I always made sure I woke up, but, of course, I held the person sleeping next to me tightly.

Don’t think that I was the first to draw attention between the iconic visual image and lifelessness. The thinker, Michel Foucault, was there before me. He was interested in photography and saw the still-life capturing of the image by the camera as similar to death. The image is a transformation and trans-fixity into deathly or deathsome lifelessness! At the time the person takes a pose for a photograph or is adjusted  by a photographer to have a particular pose, the transformation has taken over: the living is becoming the dead!

In Nigeria, this lifelessness is coming back to frighten me in Rochas Okorocha’s commissioning of sculptors to sculpt his friends in government. First, he commissioned the sculpting of Jacob Zuma, a later discredited president of South Africa. Why Jacob Zuma? Some people were wondering. What has he or his government done for Imo State? But as destiny would have it, Zuma was removed in South Africa and coincidentally, his statue was pushed down in Owerri, Imo State, as if being forced out of government was a kind of death signified by the fall of the statue. See Figure Three below. 

Figure One: Sculpture of Jacob Zuma. (Source: Facebook wall of Dada Babatunde Seun)

Zuma was disgraced out of office in South Africa, a symbolic fall for the sculpture too, I repeat!

 With the exit of Zuma, Okorocha was not yet done with sculptures, and particularly the sculptures of the controversial. The sculpting of Muhammadu Buhari and the  planned commissioning of the statue at a time Buhari’s government is accused by Nigeria’s South-East of being unkind to it and discriminatory, is only very provocative, even insulting. See Figure Two below.

Muhammadu Buhari's sculpture to be commissioned. (Source: Facebook wall of Franklin's Chinedu)

Let us hope the sculpture, which has also made my phobia for  the scuplted image become updated and epidemic, would not be violently pushed down and smashed when Rochas leaves office and when Buhari follows.

Humans register their inevitable mortality and lifelessness in sculptures. Or, to put it differently, sculptures are good narratives of our mortality. There is time for everything, says Qoheleth’s Rhythm. There is time to narrate mortality in sculptures and there is time to see the mortality of both the sculpture and the sculpted. There is a time for sculptures to stand erect and time for sculptures to take a plunge, a Zuma plunge.

Figure Three: The symbolic plunge of Zuma's sculpture. (Source: Facebook wall of Adebayo Olusola)

I like lifelessness of sculptures, although it frightens me that the boundary between the living and the dead, as narrated by them, is slim. Sculptures tell us about lifelessness, now and after. Sculptures indicate that death is our nearest neighbour, always.