In August 2004, InTheFray published an interview with artist Josh Arseneau, along with some of his work. His artwork, inspired by news of the 2003 civil war in Liberia, portrayed the plight of child soldiers in West Africa and explored cultural connections to those children. Josh’s interest in the subject took him to the Gambia and Senegal last fall, where he gained  new perspectives to apply to his future body of work. Here Josh reflects on his trip and, through photographs from his travels, gives viewers an eye into his experience.

Click here to enter the visual essay.

One of the things I remember most clearly about Africa was drinking Sprite in the Banjul International Airport before leaving Gambia. It was my first cold drink in three weeks, and it was delicious.  

Occasionally I realize that an exact moment, even something as banal as drinking soda, represents what it means to be alive — not just alive, but possessing vitality. For some reason, I found more of these “near-life experiences” in Africa than halfway around the world, where I am now.

Cleaning rice in the afternoon sun was one of those experiences — an instance when I felt life buzzing around me like a super-charged aura or an energy field. While I picked out the small rocks and other inedibles that had gotten into the white rice, Mariama watched me intently.

She was the daughter of Nyimah, a friend of my guide and mentor, Haruna. I had met Haruna through an English website for the guesthouse he maintains. Born in northern Senegal, he was a member of the Fula tribe and spoke five languages, despite having never gone to school.

That afternoon, he sat to my left and smoked a rolled cigarette while rocking Nyimah’s son, Pamusa, to the sound of the hard rice being sifted in its metal bowl. The sun was just starting to set over the ocean, and goose bumps prickled up through the sweat all over my body. It was a feeling that screamed, “This is what it means to be alive! This is what matters to the rest of your life — this is experience you will never again attain.”  

Why rice-cleaning resounded in me so strongly remains a mystery. Perhaps it was that it differed from all of  my previous knowledge of Africa. For 18 months prior, I had been researching, from a distance, child soldiers in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Uganda. All of my information had been gathered secondhand; I never talked to a child soldier, never saw one in person, and never talked to anyone whose life had been adversely affected by one.

What I did experience was haunting articles, essays, and interviews, and some of the most chilling photographs I had ever seen. Most of the material had come from online news sources and periodicals. Many of the images were appropriated from The New York Times and Getty Images. I had planned to translate all of this secondhand information into a large body of visual art that I would create — paintings, prints, and drawings — all based on, and in response to, the photos I collected from the various online sources.

When I went to the Gambia, I was on vacation, but I was still interested in following up on my research. The southern region of Senegal that borders the Gambia is Casamance — an area filled with militia fighting against the Senegalese government. One day, Haruna and I visited Alfonse, an art teacher at a French school and a farmer from Casamance. As we drank coffee and ate peanut butter on bread, I asked Alfonse about his experiences with the rebels in his home village. He became agitated while describing how young boys and men who could not afford school often turned to the rebels. They found the wealth they had always wanted at the end of their AK-47s.

Alfonse said it wasn’t uncommon to see them robbing people at checkpoints, taking everything but the victims’ clothes, and then driving off in the stolen car. He said the rebels had forgotten what they fought for; some of the younger ones never even knew. What they knew was the power of a gun waved in someone’s face.  

Alfonse’s stories of his hometown struck me, but registered as secondhand — I was still only experiencing the child soldiers from a distance. When I returned home, I flipped through the hundreds of photos I had taken. Compared to my research, the photos, at first, seemed horribly mediocre. They were images of daily life in the village of Katchikally, where I lived with Haruna — views of Tuman Street, the pier where the fishing boats docked, and children in the neighborhood. They represented the banality of daily life, and, I came to believe upon reflection, the most alive kind of experience.  

I realized then that the appeal of cleaning rice was its quiet completeness as a process of living. In John Dewey’s book, Art as Experience, he writes that experience may be of “tremendous import … or it may have been something that, in comparison, was slight, and which, perhaps because of its very slightness, illustrates all the better what it is to be an experience.”  

Dewey also writes, “Nothing takes root in the mind when there is no balance between doing and receiving.” I thought about how the final act of consuming the rice qualified cleaning it as an actual experience. And I wondered whether translating my research on the child soldiers into art qualifies it as an experience as meaningful and important as simply helping to get dinner ready.

It was clear to me then that my new body of work would try to combine these disparate experiences on the canvas — the experiences I lived, and those I translated in the safety of my studio. The new work would be done from photographs — my own and the hundreds I discovered during my research. As I turned all these photos into drawings, paintings, and prints, would my lived experience show as more authentic than my secondhand experience? And what would the experience of the viewer be, who sees these lived and secondhand images on the same picture plane?

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URL: http://www.josharseneau.com

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