Sleeping Woman

Part One

March 1980. Temperature in the mid-70s. Humid. An overcast sky obscures the subtropical African sun. I open the door to an art gallery, step inside, and am transported to a magical world, a world unlike any I’ve ever seen, a world made of stone, a world created by the Shona sculptors of Rhodesia. There’s a life-sized hippopotamus sculpted out of a single enormous block of stone. A mother and child. Two lovers. Spirit animals.

I want to gather everything in this small world and take it home, but I can’t. After all (money aside), New York City is seven thousand seven hundred and fifty-nine miles from where I’m standing in Salisbury, Rhodesia. Naturally, I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for work. The civil war may be over, but traveling on roads outside the city is still dangerous unless accompanied by armed guards. Even so, if you need guards, you need them for a reason. There are still marauding bands in the countryside. So, still not safe outside the city.

In a few weeks, white-ruled Rhodesia will disappear, replaced by Black-ruled Zimbabwe, and I’m here for an interview with Robert Mugabe, who will be the new Prime Minister and later its President (dictator) until his death in 2017. Although the disappearance of the white government is a settled matter, not much else is. In the hotel where I am staying, the lobby at night is filled with reporters from all over the world, along with most of Mugabe’s lieutenants and hangers-on, all jockeying for position and/or power in the new nation. Mugabe is nowhere to be seen, secreted away in a ranch-style house not too far from the city’s center. Also absent from the lobby’s hubbub is Joshua Nkomo, Mugabe’s main rival and eventual loser in the struggle for post-war leadership. Two years later, Mugabe’s Shona followers would attack and massacre 20,000 of Nkomo’s Ndebele tribe. Nkomo would flee the country, leaving Mugabe in complete control of a one-party state.

But this afternoon, none of that is on my mind. I am the only person in the quiet of the gallery, stroking the cool, smooth, blackish/greenish face of a placid hippopotamus. I have to bring something from this place home with me and wander from one sculpture to another, looking for the right piece, one that speaks loudly to me. And that I can manage to carry onto an airplane.

Finally, I settle on a sculpture of a sleeping woman. Her eyes are closed, and her large, out-sized hands are clasped around her. I wonder if she is clasping something in those arms, if someone is hidden within them. The saleswoman tells me that the figure is a traditional subject of the Shona tribe and that the sculptor is Nicholas Mukomberanwa, a name that meant nothing to me at the time but who I discovered decades later is among the most illustrious of the so-called First Generation of Shona sculptors (even though the tradition of Shona sculpture goes back hundreds of years). Regardless, the statue means something to me if no one else. I want to be clasped in the sleeping woman’s arms, safe from the storms that swirl both within and outside me, the storms of life. (Well, that’s a bit hyperbolic.) So, I carry all fifty or more pounds of it back to the hotel and then on the plane when I return to New York.

It’s been forty-four years since I first saw Sleeping Woman, and she has accompanied me wherever I’ve considered my permanent home. Whenever I see or touch Mukomberanwa’s woman, I can still feel the peace emanating from it, flowing into and around me.

How does that happen? How does this inanimate object, a stony lump shaped by someone so different from me, feel so imbued with feelings and emotions that it reaches out to me despite all that separates us?

For my attempt to find an answer to that question, stay tuned for Part Two of “Sleeping Woman.”