The Sadien Sphinx and the Riddle of Black Female Identity

Identity has become more malleable in the internal sense, however the notion of
perceived identity still remains very fixed and limited. The disconnect between how one sees
themselves and how the world views them is common. Often our view of ourselves can become
completely contingent on the outside world, and in turn our agency, power, access, and freedom
all become colored by this external (mis)perception. Some internal identities have proven to be
more susceptible to co-option. This is especially true in the cases of racial and gender identity in
America.
While researching artist Kara Walker I found that she was born in Stockton, California in
1969 and moved to Georgia at the age of thirteen. Several sources noted that she received her
BFA from the Atlanta College of Art in 1991 and her MFA from the Rhode Island School of
Design in 1994. Yet, I was unable to find a single source that referred her as an American
artist or contemporary artist. She is always labeled as, African-American artist, Kara
Walker. As I scrolled I felt pang after pang. This was a familiar search. the search for
something that saw her, her ideas, and creations as belonging to her and her humanity, rather than
her race. I began to wonder how Walker saw herself, and if her racially charged work had
engulfed her artistic personality.
In his 1903 book, The Souls of Black Folk, scholar and author W.E.B. DuBois speaks of a
certain duality the mind of the minority takes on in order to survive. He speaks of it as, doubleconsciousness, this sense of always looking at ones self through the eyes of others. This

double consciousness becomes truly complex when the roots of African-Americans are called
into question. The truth is there really arent any. In many ways we are more hyphen than we are
African or American. Ive always felt it was unfair I had to assume a role in a community that
was originally constructed around the exploitation and shared suffering of a people who had
nothing to unite them but that suffering and a similar appearance. Presently, racial identity in an
internal sense may be comprised of significant elements such as shared culture and experiences,
but to acknowledge this on an internal level, felt as though I was condoning the external label.
My struggle to pin down identity took a turn for the better after spending some time
immersed in the world of Kara Walker. Walker reminded me that every black artist that makes art
about the black experience is not doing the same thing. By juxtaposing elements of her work
alongside other artists, it becomes clear that Walker has crafted a very distinct space, a
theoretical laboratory of sorts, for her to question and experiment with elements of both her
racial and gender identities. Proving that contrary to my former beliefs on identity, it is in fact
possible to unpack questions of race and gender without allowing what you find to define you.
In her book, The Sadeian Woman, author and feminist scholar Angela Carter makes a
case for the twisted and perverse narrative of Marquis de Sade. She deconstructs his writing to
reveal a man that enlarged the relationship between activity and passivity in sex, and in doing so,
provided some of the most revolutionary material in favor of gender equality. Carter writes,
The great men in his novels, the statesmen, the princes, the popes, are the cruellest by
far and their sexual voracity is a kind of pure destructiveness; they would like to fuck the
world and fucking, for them, is the enforcement of annihilation. Their embraces strangle,
their orgasms appear to detonate their partners. But his great women, Juliette, Clairwil'
the Princess Borghese, Catherine the Great of Russia, Charlotte of Naples, are even more
cruel still since, once they have tasted power, once they know how to use their sexuality
as an instrument of aggression, they use it to extract vengeance for the humiliations they

were forced to endure as the passive objects of the sexual energy of others.A free woman
in an unfree society will be a monster. (27).
In many ways the imagery of Kara Walker does this exact thing. It gets ahead of the
oppressor by using the oppressors language and perspective against him. A poignant example of
this is Walkers 1994 work, Gone: An Historical Romance of Civil War as it Occurred Between
the Dusky Thighs of a Young Negress and Her Heart. The wall installation is comprised of black
cut-out silhouette caricatures of antebellum figures whose form is inspired by that of German
fairytale illustrations. The figures are set against a stark white background where they take place
in odd sexual and violent scenarios. Walker repurposes the eighteenth-century cut-paper
silhouette to question the historical narratives of slavery and the perpetuation of racial
stereotypes. The work's seemingly cryptic title is a reference to Margaret Mitchell's 1936 novel
Gone with the Wind, set during the American Civil War. Walkers version begins and ends with a
happy white couple who sandwich a succession of tragicomic images that portray the broken
black identity in America. When asked about the piece Walker stated, "The history of America is
built on . . . inequality, this foundation of a racial inequality and a social inequality and we buy
into it. I mean, whiteness is just as artificial a construct as blackness is..
Walker's silhouette medium is vague but simultaneously spot on. The silhouettes rely on
subliminal associations that the viewer uses to fill in the blanks. From the beginning we are
asked to judge and then asked to consider how we did so. This unapologetic assumption of the
role of both artist and African-American is what elevates the work beyond old, tired racial
narratives. In a nearly all-white art world her silhouettes can be viewed as triggering and
victimizing, but they force African-Americans to examine our racial identity in a new context...
a self constructed context.

Carter would answer the claims that Walker dwells in the dark by pointing out that her
use of horrific imagery gives her ownership of her pain and history. It is a history that for too
long was authored solely by the oppressor. To not speak out and to hide these facts away with the
aim of preserving some fictional sense of emotional dignity is to stand idle while others tell you
what happened to you. It is as Zora Neale Hurston once wrote, If you are silent about your pain,
theyll kill you and say enjoyed it.
In The Sadeian Woman, Carter teases out evidence of the same newfound agency present
in Sades work. In Justine, the novels namesake protagonist suffers repeated degradation, rape,
torture, and humiliation due to her belief in the significance of her purity, a constructed idea
about her identity that she has come to embody. She casts herself into perpetual victimhood, and
rather than acting, she is acted on. The antithesis of this is Justines sister, Juliette, who Carter
labels as one of the most liberated and feminist characters of her time. Juliette schemes to make
use of the very system designed to keep her and her sister down. She is aware of peoples
perceptions of her as a woman and uses it to obtain power, money, and individualism.

But what happens when your newly enlightened interpretation of self and your self in
society is not received in an equally enlightened way? Walkers most recent, and highly profiled
work aims to discover just that. This past summer Walker moved her lab to Greenpoint, one of
New Yorks newest hubs of gentrification and muddied race relations. After reading countless
articles discussing the work and the tense environment it created, I had to experience the piece
firsthand. As the long line moved under the hot July sun, I looked around and noticed that the
line was made up of all sorts of races, ages, and nationalities. Staffers of Creative Time, the nonprofit that commissioned the exhibit, were handing out visitors release forms. My friends and I

signed and walked through the gate. On the side of the building right before you entered was the
works full title, A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and
overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of
the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant. As I
approached the door I asked the women clicking the counter what number I was. She replied,
1,237.
A sickeningly sweet scent hung in the thick, hot air of the room. As I navigated closer to
the works I could feel the grit of sugar beneath my feet. The soft crunch was barely audible
within the louder laughing and chatting that filled the space. People were having fun. My eyes
followed a pool of melted molasses up to the quickly melting source; a figure of a small slave
boy with large eyes holding an even larger basket. Next to that boy stood a young black boy of
about the same size and stature. Puzzled, the real boy looked at the life sized replica as though he
might have been a playmate in a past life. He looked up at his mother and asked her why the
boys all had baskets and if the baskets were heavy. I watched real time as a mother had to
introduce her son to the complex world of slavery. It was such a powerful and intimate teaching
moment coexisting alongside the ignorance that also pervaded the room. When the two walked
away I realized that I was alone and in my singularity the room felt too large. I turned to find
myself face to face with the subtlety... the sphinx. It was something that even my minds eye had
never seen and yet she also felt strangely familiar. The mammy head with its full African lips and
a flat nose... a doo-rag knotted on its forehead. She was part of me and not part of me. A
caricature rooted in some weird painful truth. Her size commanded attention. The overwhelming
physicality of all that sugar, the symbol of the pain and profit wrung from our broken black
bodies, hit me hard. I wanted to cower in front of her and simultaneously I wanted to hold her.

But where I saw her as regal others saw her as comical. I had read the articles that I thought
would prepare me for the selfies and mocked groping but nothing could truly prepare me to
witness the male gaze coupled with the white gaze, something neither Sade or Carter could ever
speak to.
I have never encountered a classic black female nude that wasnt rooted in some
fetishization. We have no artful Seine-side depictions or images accompanied by playful animals.
The history of our bodies and their desirability is often regulated to murky late night visits to
slave quarters...the unspeakable wrapped in thick layers of pain. This is not to say women of
other races don't suffer from sexual violence and the male gaze, but I am saying that our facet of
feminism is often overlooked, even by the most thorough of feminist scholars and artists. This
(amongst other things) is what makes Kara Walker brilliant. The sugar sphinx was created as a
time bridge of sorts between the image of the ancient Giza Sphinx and the modern-day videovixen, causing viewers like me to question associations about our own bodies and history.
The price we pay for having a new intellectual space is having to share it people
insensitive enough to mock grope the very representation of our oppressed bodies. In sharing art
about the black experience with non black viewers the artist runs the risk of creating a hotbed of
both tension and co-opted conversation. But Walker was clever enough to capitalize on even this,
secretly videotaping the publics interaction with her art and creating a subsequent video piece
entitled, Aftermath. This video component turns the exhibit into yet another meta-level lab
where the oppressor oppresses as expected, but that is in turn used to bring the discussion back to
where Walker wants it.

A collaged image created by Walker that later served as inspiration for the Subtlety.

Walkers video and other works remind me that inspite of the male gaze and the white
gaze, I as a black female have my own gaze. And in terms of voice I do not need to drown out
the voices of others (no matter how offensive) to have my own. People are going to bring
prejudices and racial entitlement into intellectual and artistic spaces but unlike the mute mammy
sphinx, the black community can now speak for itself. I used to think that art with a focus on
one aspect of the artists identity would reduce and limit the work to that one facet of its
meaning. I thought to truly be human and to not be a caricature, trope, or even worse, a victim,
was to simply reinforce that you are a human above all. And while my overarching humanity is
true, I now understand that part of being a human, and having a strong sense of internal identity,
is to figure out what these external classifications mean to me. When asked about her most recent
works, Kara Walker had this to say,

Kara Walker's work deals with history. Embedded in that statement [...] is a kind of
desire for a hero who can fix this problem of our history and racism and I don't think my
work is actually effectively dealing with history. I think of my work as kind of subsumed
by history or consumed by history .
After careful consideration I have decided that my life is not about my being a black woman, but
rather, it too is subsumed by it.

Works Cited
Carter, Angela. The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography. New York: Pantheon,
1978. Print.
"Du Bois, W. E. B. 1903. The Souls of Black Folk." Du Bois, W. E. B. 1903. The Souls of Black
Folk. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Dec. 2014.
"Inspiration - Creative Time." Creative Time. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Dec. 2014.

"SHORT: Kara Walker: "A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby" | ART21." SHORT: Kara
Walker: "A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby" | ART21. N.p., n.d. Web. 11 Dec. 2014.