creative responses

Your gestures draw me in, Zuskeke, offering me an openness I don’t deserve. It’s your little lean, the way you steady yourself with your right hand in Nokwanda’s Makubalo’s lap and your left hand lightly wrapped over her arm on the other side.

I’m starting to lean slightly too, from right to left, as if I too were shaped, enfolded by protective arms, as I come closer to talk with you both respectfully among the roses.

I feel into the printed photograph of the Rose Altarpiece, every time I look at it. The oneness of Nokwanda Makubalo and her adopted child Zuskeke, orphaned by AIDS, evokes a deep longing. Their familiar posture reaches and holds fast onto my memories. Their centeredness, draped in cascades of colourful stitched fabrics, surrounded by streams of beautiful embroidery, embraces my attention.

The humbling generosity within the Keiskamma Art Project’s artworks moves me to find language for the ‘why?’ behind my intense emotion when I look at the inkjet reproduction of the Rose Altarpiece in my Brooklyn apartment. It is June 2022, not long after a Zoom interview with Eunice Mangwane, a health worker and central figure in HIV/AIDS treatment and advocacy in Hamburg. The intensity of my feelings towards a mere reproduction of the artwork takes me back to when I first encountered a Mark Rothko painting. I cannot recall which painting. But that overwhelming feeling is here again. The closest I can come to reasoning with my feelings, is to assume that I have been experiencing an empathic connection: a mysterious conversation, outside of language.

The study of empathy has many cultural roots. In her introduction to Empathy: A History, Susan Lanzoni conveys how this term ‘holds together an array of ideas and practices to form a textured weave rather than a uniform fabric.’[1] The many phases of its definitions over time convey how challenging yet necessary is the need for human beings to relate to one another. According to clinical psychologist Ramani Durvasula, empathy ‘is an awareness of, interest in and presence with the emotional states of another person in a way that results in some kind of behavioral shift in us: we listen to someone, we help someone, or we otherwise respond to that person in a way that is consistent with understanding their feelings.’[2] It is not merely a metaphorical walk in someone else’s shoes but, for Durvasula, a vulnerable, incremental and consequential interaction. Empathy does not mean to replace or to feign a full understanding of another’s experience. The German word for empathy, einfühlung, can be roughly translated as ‘feeling into’ or ‘feeling with.’ This resonates with the words of Eunice Mangwane, in a 2012 interview for the television and online series, I Am Woman—Leap of Faith: ‘The only way to feel connected and to be cared for is to share your truth,’ she says.

In the hands of the Keiskamma artists, empathy is a brave offering. In our interview, Mangwane recounted to me a moving incident during the creation of the Keiskamma Altarpiece. While working in the Keiskamma clinic, she heard an unusual amount of noise coming from the nearby studio where the artists were completing their intricate embroidery on this large-scale piece. Mangwane looked into the room and witnessed the women singing, preaching, praying and offering their personal stories of grief as they embroidered. ‘It was time for them to share,’ Mangwane said. ‘They would speak about the problems and about the children they have lost because of HIV/AIDS.’ Through the devastation of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Hamburg, exacerbated by the deadly impact of government policies that delayed the administration of life-saving antiretrovirals (ARVs) in South Africa, people had been suffering in isolation. What Mangwane witnessed were challenging, yet overwhelming cathartic, encounters between women who were finding and creating a safer place to be.

Freed from their silos of grief to share their losses with one another, the Keiskamma artists went on to create the Keiskamma Guernica, a searing portrayal of a prolonged period of devastation from the HIV/AIDS crisis in Hamburg. Risking immense stigma in the community, they bravely chose to offer others an opportunity to be aware of, interested in and present with a critical time in Hamburg’s history.

The artists and artworks of the Keiskamma Art Project embody empathy’s complex nature, offering rich narratives of lives lived in community, shaped by shared experience. Their art process is imbued with harmonious and encompassing kinship, from the art-historical references that serve as inspiration, to the artists’ brave truth-telling through artmaking, to the invisible, imagined community receiving these powerful stories of love and anguish.

Twenty-five years since the founding of the Keiskamma Art Project, we are invited to feel with and into the artists’ profound and humbling truths.

Bibliography

Chait, Lisa, Lauren Groenewald and Miki Redelinghuys. I Am Woman—Leap of Faith. Episode 16: Eunice Mangwane, South African Broadcasting Corporation. July 15, 2012. www.iamwomanseries.com.

Durvasula, Ramani. ‘Being Empathic vs. Enabling.’ http://doctor-ramani.com. Accessed March 29, 2021.

Lanzoni, Susan. Empathy: A History. Yale University Press, 2018.

[1] Susan Lanzoni, Empathy: A History, 17.
[2] Ramani Durvasula, ‘Being Empathic vs. Enabling.’