Egg of Odumare's Eyes

Who needs the 'Centre'

Friday, March 24, 2006 at 8:33 PM WAT
Adapted from a response to someone's postulations (in a yahoo discussion group) on the relationship between the Centre and the so-called Periphery.
THE CENTRE IS a SELFISH DISCOURSE SITE
The notion of the 'Centre' as the determinant of artistic discourse is like a monster that you could conceive in the notion of a ‘Beast of no Essence’ .. . it is one of those amorphous creations of self-preservationists. It always smuggled its caustic head into discourses about art and its role in the society. And whether we like it or not we shall have to always return to it.
The ‘Centre’ was at the centre of one's earlier argument on the question of Criticisms: i.e The Centre, the Mainstream, the General Trend, the Majority, the Normal way, the Accepted Standard, the Status Quo… and the ‘Centre’ has so many siblings that commentators on arts and culture affairs ought to be conscious of. For if you are not conscious of the dangerous possibilities of the notion ‘Centre’, you may not really know when you help to obliterate the cultures of other people or their ‘Being’ in your inadvertent action of pulling them along the path (or script authored) carved by the so-called ‘Centre’ or the ‘Centre-ist’.
The essential of Centre is that it is usually the CREATION of some self-enlightened interests ! Period!
The idea of the Centre itself is dictatorial, autocratic and, in practical terms, a negation of the place of the minority (views, objectives) in the scheme of things; albeit an attempt to foist a central ideology or mode of reasoning on all even if without your consent. Whereas it might work in other professions say law, Accounting, Medicine etc, I believe it is at its very essentials are anti-art, as it’s primarily against the notion of FREEDOM – the very basis of creativity.

THE CENTRE AS INTOLERANCE
What has Centre got to do with it. It is that everywhere the Centre is a self-centred, selfish, self-serving, self-indulgent monster which fights daily to ensure that its hold on the general imagination remains firm. Its bid is self-permanency, or self-perpetuation. It is often deadly in insisting on the status quo it has established being sacrosanct. If you challenge it you become an irritant, or worse an outlaw.

It is the perennial and obviously intractable Centre-sation of the human mind that indeed has brought so much tragedy to the human world. People ‘Follow Follow’ as if they too have no sense of their own; like they have no mind that could process an idea and make the right decision that would best serve the interest of their own personal objective.
Centre indeed connotes enslavement to doctrines or objective or truth authored by others. And you would be surprised that it starts from the family level.
So because your father is Catholic, you must be Catholic: He is Anglican, you must be… even if you do not share in the doctrine of that sect. Most often you end up a bad Catholic or Anglican and the supposed objective for which you joined it would have been defeated, then you live the rest of your life in regret and misery; especially if you are so obedient as not to step out of the cage.
If man behaves so slavishly to expectation of others, in what way is he different from the animals in the deep of the forest then. Still wondering why we have great Christians and Muslims who are worse than the devils? Because they live their daily life in abject falsehood, LIES… they exist for the truth of the other people, not for their own truth. The meaning of their life is as had been stencilled by other people… they have no freedom to choose. So they merely exist according to the truth of other people, not by their own self-authored conviction. That is the tragedy I spoke about earlier.
Centre-ness is what you find in such organisations as Bar Association, Chartered Accountants etc. where code of conduct is the God of their professional existence. And it goes beyond the cosmetic aspects of the trade i.e dressence, language of practice, mode of practice.. it also include the notion of inclusiveness. You have to belong to be relevant. That is the dictatorial regime. Thus everything you do as a practising lawyer must conform otherwise you would not be accepted, you will be excluded.
For the art however, greater circumspection is needed in approaching the notion of the Centre.
Art itself is Freedom we have said earlier. It is the process of challenging the existing such as in creating object out of vacuum, creating beauty out of ugliness or vice versa, deploying material and immaterial idea beyond the possibilities already established for them… all of which translates to interrogating what had been.
So you ask, why would Art be subject codes and doctrines of the ‘Centre?’
The greatest Centre that ought to exist here should be the self-constructed ‘Centre’.
If you want to extend the politics of it: you may create your own Centre then and ask others to buy into it.. if they do that there gain or loss would then be their own beast of burden.
But to create a Centre and dragged others by the neck to belong to it is what freedom is not about; what ART should not be.
I advise when next time we as Arts Writers, Workers, Activists, Communicators whatever, see the CENTRE set up as a CAGE -- even when it is made of the finest of gold -- we should pause and reflect deeply before we jump in or drag others by their hapless neck into the noose. To do that is to help to kill that which we profess to advocate – ART.. with its manifest freedom to let loose the senses; freedom to create, freedom to stretch possibilities of the human mind, the human world.
-- Jahman