Michael Stevenson

2006
wooden dumb valet, jacket, rubber inner tube, silicon, fabric, ribbon
116 x 140 x 114cm (variable)

(detail below)

Chitha means chucking out water, but it’s also slang for ejaculating. It’s a humorous term mainly used by young men – ‘I came’, ndichithile. The piece combines feminine and masculine objects. The bottom part is a woman wearing a rubber dress, stitched with pink ribbon, and a white frill with pink bows. The rubber has very phallic valves, as if you have to blow her up. She is lifting up a man, who is suggested by a brown suit jacket draped over a wooden dumb valet. This suggests a time in South Africa when the government has set policies to try and encourage businesses to empower women. The woman is lifting the man, so she has this weight, but also the power that she can lift a man. She’s in charge of the situation. She’s lifting the man right up against the wall. The man is not taking this easily.

The shoulders belong to both of them – they’re bound together, like Siamese twins or someone with multiple personality disorder. She’s wearing a shawl made of black silicon, the colour of mourning. Black absorbs energy, so the woman is taking all the energy from the man and pushing him right up the wall. She’s going to fling him over and take his position.

The way the woman is carrying the man, in the form of the wooden dumb valet, also reminds me of traditional African women. There’s an old saying, ‘the black woman’s power is on her neck’. Especially Xhosa women, they’d go to the forest to gather wood and carry these large weights on their heads. If you live in the urban areas of Johannesburg, you’ll see the Shangaan women who sell peanuts. They light their braziers using coals, then carry these hot braziers on top of their heads when they go to set up their stalls. There’s a sense of defying danger. It’s the same with women in the Transkei who go and gather wood. The Shangaan women and the Xhosa women, the reason they take the risk of breaking their necks, or having hot coals burn them, is because they’re working hard to provide for their families. Most of them play a very strong role in the running of the household; some are breadwinners. This work is looking at the idea of women being empowered to take charge of everything. And perhaps there are women hidden within some men’s bodies.

Chitha can also refer to destroying something. If this woman is taking over the man’s role and chucking her husband over her shoulder, putting him behind her, she’s destroying existing conventions. That’s what men are concerned about, they feel scared that they might not have a place anymore. Men are being taken out of their comfort zones, which is the effect of sexual identity politics on our heterosexual society.