Kenya

      Emma Zaidi

In 1996, Emma Zaidi, then seven and a half years old, was in India visiting her father’s family. She and her two brothers spoke no Urdu and their hosts found it difficult to follow their Kenyan-accented English (yes, dear Kenyan readers, it works both ways), so they had so far on the trip been rather subdued, not talking much but taking everything in. One day, sitting in her grandmother’s drawing room, listening to her father’s spinster aunt telling her grandmother that the children should learn to speak the language of their father as otherwise they would miss out on a glorious cultural heritage, she began to sketch in a drawing pad with oil pastels (she was already a good enough draughtsman for her parents to keep her supplied with fairly good quality drawing materials). No one noticed until she had finished the drawing, when her mother glanced around and exclaimed, “Hey, that’s good!”

It was a curious sketch for someone of her years – a psychological portrait executed with impressive economy of line, showing her great-aunt poised on the edge of the sofa, a Persian cat at her feet. She was all sharp angles, from the snappy draping of her sari to her stiffly held straight-backed posture, yet her slim figure had a suggestion of feline grace and self-containment echoing the much more obviously flaunted elegance of the cat. To Emma’s father it spoke eloquently of the prickly, fiercely independent character of his mother’s younger sister - a poet and dramatist who had been a fiery revolutionary in her youth, the first woman in a deeply conservative Muslim town to discard the veil, who had briefly been jailed for leading a “black flag” demonstration against India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and who stayed single in a generation in which such a life-choice for a woman was incomprehensibly alien. Predictably, the subject herself was not amused, especially by the visual puns evoked by the parallelism with the cat. “Hmm,” she sniffed, “I don’t look like that, of course. Still, the child is talented…”

Nearly all children, if given art materials and encouragement, make interesting and original drawings. A few retain and develop the talent into maturity, becoming competent illustrators or designers. A very few, usually in their teens or even later, make the transition into becoming true artists, those tormented souls whose whole energy is poured into an interrogation of the visual world, an effort to make it yield up the secrets concealed in its glittering, enigmatic variety, to “blow away the dust from the surface of everyday life,” in Picasso’s phrase. It is perhaps not fanciful to say that Emma made that elusive transition that hot, long-ago afternoon in India, though it would be a long time before she herself realised that she had a future as a painter.

Curiously enough, that same year, Emma’s mother, Irene Wanjiru, attended a sculpture workshop at Nairobi’s Kuona Trust conducted by Elijah Ogira, sold the first piece she made there, was invited to participate in the Wasanii International Artists Workshop in Naivasha towards the end of 1996, sold another two pieces created there and was almost immediately hailed as one of Kenya’s leading women sculptors. A decade later, even as this profile is posted on the web, Irene Wanjiru, her reputation well established, is halfway through a sculpture residency at the Carving Studio and Sculpture Centre in Vermont in the US, a high point in her career. Meanwhile, back home, her daughter has already sold her first few paintings and her sheer mastery of technique have attracted the attention of Africancolours.net, giving her the opportunity to share her work with a vastly greater audience. So did Emma inherit her mother’s talent even before her mother herself had discovered it?

Till a couple of years ago, Emma Zaidi was resisting the suggestions of her teachers and parents that she take art seriously, insisting she wanted to be a lawyer. Then her parents got her good quality acrylics and paper but otherwise dropped the whole subject. Nothing happened for a while, then gradually the lure of the acrylics proved irresistible; painted gourds started popping up around the house, then Emma started painting on some of her mother’s sculptures, and finally began a series of increasingly ambitious plant studies and still-lifes. Soon she announced that she was dropping a subject and taking up art instead for her ‘O’ levels. “I’m so happy,” the beaming teacher at Nairobi’s Braeside School told her parents. Now she is expected to get an A* in the exam she completed in June.

Emma’s work is done entirely from life, accounting for the hallucinatory intensity of her realism. Hers is a ‘hungry brush,’ seeking ever greater visual complexity – she makes a platter of fruit come lusciously alive by lovingly detailing the blemishes and scars on the mangoes and bananas. Perfection here is delivered not as supermarket uniformity and bland brilliance of colour but as a property of life and growth. Perhaps one can say that Emma Zaidi’s art blows away the plastic from the surface of everyday life…s