As we approach the end of the school holidays, my wife and I are binge-watching the final season of The Handmaid’s Tale. The kids are going to bed later, so we often start at 11pm, which is a recipe for disaster. But we’ve been on a long journey with June Osborne & Co, and we’re going to see this torment through to the end no matter what.
It’s a love-hate relationship. The performances are by turns spellbinding and hammed up; the writing can be dazzling or ham-fisted. Plot points seem to repeat themselves. There are more aerial views of cars driving along forested roads, and more interior scenes shot in eerie horizontal light, than should legally be allowed to any cinematographer. Still, we persist in our devotion.
Many’s the time an ironic greeting of “Blessed day” or “Under His eye” has passed between us. Occasionally we say goodbye with “Don’t let the bastards grind you down” or, if a tough assignment awaits, “Lord, give us the strength to murder those goddamn motherf***ers!”
If you’ve never seen The Handmaid’s Tale, it’s enough to know that the show (like the Margaret Atwood novel on which it is based) demonstrates very effectively how biblical language and imagery are deeply gendered, allowing faux religiosity to become a cover for violent misogyny in dystopian Gilead. A particularly shuddering refrain in the early seasons is “Blessed be the fruit”, an allusion to the angel Gabriel’s announcement of Mary’s pregnancy.
The treatment of women as walking wombs, or as humanoid fruit-bearing plants, remains a common undercurrent in sociopolitical discourse (especially in Gilead — or, should I say, in Donald Trump’s America). It’s an assumption roundly critiqued by Josie Grindrod and Jann Cheifitz and in their combined exhibition Fecund: A Garden of Earthy Delight, at the Everard Read Gallery in Cape Town.
Grindrod and Cheifitz also invoke the other great Judeo-Christian association between women and fruit: the story of Eve and the apple. Tempted by the serpent to eat the fruit, Eve commits the primary sin. This myth complicates the “fruit of the womb” motif — for while eating the apple is partly an allegorical expression of sexual appetite, thus enabling reproduction, patriarchal discomfort with female desire makes Eve the first “fallen woman”.
I doubt that Many Libuta had any intention to reinscribe this narrative when he developed the concept for his latest body of work, The Red Apple, displayed at the Sisonke Gallery in the Cape Heritage Hotel. These paintings are driven by an environmental activist urge. They depict a series of figures facing a choice between eco-friendly behaviour and a continuation of things-as-they-are (in other words, heedless consumerism, climate crisis and impending ecological catastrophe).
In each case, the symbolic elements are the same: the figure is a woman, there is a red apple representing the “persistent temptation to choose paths that harm the natural world”, and there is a butterfly personifying “a conscientious awareness guiding us toward sustainable action”. The butterfly is a harmless presence, “a symbol of transformation, signifying our potential to grow, adapt and achieve harmony”. Unfortunately, however, the full weight of Western art history and the culturally ingrained sexism it portrays mitigates against Libuta’s aim with the apples.
The artist’s previous exhibition, last year’s Women and Nature at the AVA Gallery, “focused on the vital role women play in environmental stewardship”. The Red Apple continues the fusion of the feminine — and the female body — with nature; leaves cover, or even constitute, the skin and hair of the portraits’ subjects. Yet casting women in this “vital role” simultaneously essentialises them, consigns them to an identity linked to nature (reproduction) and deploys an ancient patriarchal chestnut: the notion of “good women” who resist temptation and “bad women” who do not.
Libuta’s broader message is, of course, an important one. We should all make “good environmental choices”, whenever and wherever we can. I don’t think that the onus to do so should be placed primarily on women. But maybe I’ve just been watching too much of The Handmaid’s Tale.
• ‘Fecund: A Garden of Earthy Delight’ is at Everard Read Cape Town until July 26; ‘The Red Apple’ is at Sisonke Gallery (90 Bree Street) until July 31.
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