Kobena Mercer – Wifredo Lam’s Cross-Cultural Rhizomes

Wifredo Lam
Untitled 1974
in her travelogue, Tell My Horse (1938), and
which avant-garde film-maker Maya Deren
addressed in The Divine Horsemen (filmed
between 1947 and 1951 but completed
in 1977). In border-crossing practices
that allow glimpses of the multiple
identities within reach once the human
is understood as a process of becoming
rather than a fixed or final state of being,
Lam was one of the first twentiethcentury
modernists to grasp the egoloss
in ecstatic experience as a gateway
to fresh possibilities for shared modes
of belonging in a post-Enlightenment
world. Where, in Lam’s poetic space of
transculturation, “the pretensions of the
human ego are set aside for a complete
surrender to an all-encompassing force
that is not unlike the Romantic sublime and
certainly signifies the surrender of Lucumi
devotees to the will of the orisha,” 5 the
rhizomes he set into motion as a result
of his multiple journeys, from Cuba to
Spain and Paris and back again, deliver
aesthetic experiences that continue to to
resonate with the global challenges we face
in an era still struggling to come to terms
with the ethics and politics of multiplicity.
62