I walked the yellow taped line of the Africa section in a museum in downtown Dallas. The cowrie shell-rimmed masks sent twinges of something up and down my spine – a memory? a question? a voice?
For a thousand years cowries – named for secrets – were harvested in the Maldives. Fishers interrupted their quiet, monogamous lives on the ocean floor. Women washed creature from shell. They scrubbed the shells over and over, alternating salt water and fresh water – old world and new world – the violence building a gleam into the shells until their shine could trap the sky.
From the Maldives cowries were carried in boats and on backs into every corner of the globe as currency. It took one year for cowries to reach West Africa. Then, in 1515, the Portuguese filled their ships with cowrie shells and raced the camels swaggering across the Sahara. They began trading for slaves. By 1770 a human could be sold for 176,000 cowrie shells.
Maybe because the shells were washed with so much intention, carried for so many footsteps. Maybe that they were weighed in exchange for human bodies. Maybe for the simple fact that they were money. Somewhere on the shores of West Africa cowries became magic: in sub-Saharan Africa they granted protection & fertility.
Achebe wrote that a wife could be bought for twenty bags of cowries. Each bag holds around 24,000 shells, sixty pounds of ocean floor. Imagine all of those lives scraped from the bowels of the earth, shovelled into sacks, traded for your one body.
In West Africa, cowries tell the future. They hold greed and power and strangely, beauty. People feared the small shells for their teeth and how they look like the secret of women.
In Uganda, cowrie shells came with the 17th century. In the early 1900’s, the British brought coins to Uganda with hollow centres to replace cowrie shells.
In the early 2000’s, in northern Uganda, my parents hung a decorative hanging in our living room, rimmed in cowrie shells. None of us were aware of the journeys those shells took to reach Uganda.
One day a visitor entered our home and saw the decoration. She couldn’t sit in the presence of those shells. My parents took down the cowrie shells and they never went back up.
Years later, in the Dallas museum, I wandered the masks & sculptures & kingly stools & weapons & cowrie shells and then, eventually, escaped to the tight corner of Ethiopian crosses, cold and quiet. A museum employee from Eritrea found me. She stood shorter than me, with ten thousand fashioned questions in her eyes. We talked about the knotted crosses.
I confessed, in a whisper, my unease over the clear glass, the prosaic information cards, the illusion that objects removed to Dallas simply lose their power. These artifacts, displaced by greed and confusion and a lust for knowledge and maybe – maybe – an innocent measure of admiration. The employee took my arm. “Honey,” she said, “I know. I walk these halls every day and pray in the name of Jesus.”
It's been years since Dallas but I still think of her. One woman who wades daily through the demons of history, the tears of the cowrie shells, the lost memories of families in the slit eyes of masks, the unspoken words heavy on carved lips – she wades through all of it and declares her own words of light and peace, and so it is. And a hundred, a thousand, unknowing people walk those halls taking pictures and making jokes and barely paying attention to any of it, or to her, except to ask where the bathroom is and then ask again because they say her accent is too thick. They do not know – we do not know – who is watching over our lives, the torn holes in our histories. Let us praise the museum worker.
P.S. - This painting might not be the most interesting but it fascinates me because, as I was painting, I was thinking about the choices we make about what to conceal and what to reveal in what we tell and how we tell it. Art lives at the intersection of mystery and revelation - which is another way to say, the artist has one hand behind their back and one stretched out and open, and this is what throws us off balance is just the right way. It’s a tricky art to master; telling your story. Or making art.
P.P.S. - This piece, along with many others on my Instagram, are among the paintings I’m taking to farmers markets in the Fraser Valley region this Summer. If you see one you love, and you live far away from British Columbia, message me to see if it’s still available. (One day I’ll have an official online store. It is not that day.)
"the violence building a gleam into the shells until their shine could trap the sky." Until their shine could trap the sky! Love that line. And the story as a whole. I love that the encounter with the museum worker stuck with you until now.
Harrowing history and presentation. I saw cowries in your painting too. Chills!