W.J.T has characterised and critiqued these as combining an iconoclastic “contempt” for graphic images as uncritical “idolatry, fetishism, and iconophilia,” a “fear” toward visual discourse as a “racial, social and sexual other,” and a tendency to see any genre that combines the two discourses, such as theatre as a “battleground between the values associated with verbal and visual codes”.
This quote comes closest to expressing my feelings and thoughts on this topic. I read this article thinking, “Seriously?!” throughout. “Seriously?!” expressing my disbelief, disgust and fatigue with the Puritan, conservative, ‘conventional’ ideas that have leaked themselves into every Western (particularly American) institution and their every aspect, even that of typeface, and have leeched every element of these institutions of all vitality, vigor, spontaneity and authenticity. “Seriously?!” because this is not my culture and this issue, as to whether this society should dare embrace the merging of expressive visuals with text, that supposedly warrants pages and pages of debate and diatribe, is not an issue outside of Eurocentric conceptualisations of the word, of storytelling, of teaching, of knowledge, and of communication.
In original African ‘religions’ (ways of life), such as in the Kamitic and Ile Ifa Yoruban traditions, while there is a belief in one god, there are many deities, ancestral spirits and elements that are accorded respect, reverence, honour and are served. This ability to think in terms of the multiple as pertains to one’s very way of life, to perceive that there are multiple agents that impact one’s functioning and to view these ‘separate’ entities as extending and stemming from, convening and converging into, singular aspects of and the embodiment of the whole of one god is an ability that is innate to the African mind.
This perception is even featured to some extent in ‘primal’, ‘pagan’ practices. Furthermore, even Catholicism, the more rudimentary form of modern Christianity, makes use of this concept in some way (as it must since it is a theft and corruption of early African ‘religions’), with its employ of saints that govern particular causes. It is only when one arrives, in a supposed chronological plotting of history, at the people who pick themselves up and decide that stained glass offends them, who subsequently jump on The Mayflower to dress in the most undecorative clothes ever and to serve their god in the most stripped down, un-iconoclastic, vanilla way possible that the world sees this emergence of singularity. (Okay, I’m being slightly facetious….but not really).
This deification of the singular, the basic, the primary, the unornate has given rise to many problems in Western society, of which the appearance of text is but one. That words on paper and/or on screen must fit a conventional model is symptomatic of this mentality that would have one race be superior and deem all others “minorities”, one sexual orientation be normative and deem all others “queer”, that would have one family and social structure be standard and all others deviant et al.
I do not, nor have other acceded to any of the erroneous beliefs of this mind set bred by a people who were once deviants themselves, supposedly seeking a place to be free to practice their worship (except theirs was the worship of the one true god and that of the Native Americans nor the Native Americans themselves for that matter were of the elect, and thus their extermination posed no qualms) thus the idea of –gasp- using a different font from Times Roman, or adding pictures to my text, or utilizing the colours of nature as opposed to the dreary Amish-like basic black and white etc has never caused me pause. Let this article revolutionise the minds of those held captive by convention. I live above the influence. And I belong to a culture that has long told its tales through every medium available to us.
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