Figure de maternité

Mother and Twins

Long before Christian artists, Africans were depicting women holding a child in their arms or breastfeeding to celebrate fertility and the harmony of the community – especially when infant mortality, the capturing of young adults for slavery and disease were endangering the group’s survival.

For the Senufo people in north Côte d’Ivoire, such a representation celebrates the second, supernatural role the spirit woman evokes. The arms are holding up a dish, which during processions, contains the reflection of the ‘inner fire’. During ceremonies, such statuettes, daubed with shea butter then coated with kaolin powder, are carried by an elderly woman who has had several children, followed by a young girl. An antelope horn concealed in the recipient on the head contains magic substances. The scarifications, with rectilinear areas of hatching, and certain anatomical details (the separate fingers), are characteristics of the kuleo sculptural tradition.

The woman, the epitome of a life-giving mother yet hardly looking down at her two babies, is not inattentive but meditative. The circular arc of her face echoes her breasts, the babies’ arms and, lower down, the curves of her buttocks and the circle of the traditional stool. The twins drinking their mother’s milk are intentionally minute. [1] This prodigious bunch of living forms, breasts and mouths, is a symbolic representation of the mother as dispenser of life who, endowed with supernatural resources, does more than merely dispense nutriments. The work celebrates essential female attributes: childbearing and nourishing but also, on a sacral plane, the notion of lineage. The milk flowing from her breasts into the two greedy mouths is above all a symbolic transmission of values.

[1] The sculptor, by emphasising the protectiveness of the mother sheltering her offspring beneath her swollen, fountainlike breasts, was also reinforcing the sovereign, superior, elevated nature of the mother.