TORTOISE ONTOLOGIES (2015)

In Tortoise Ontologies (2015), Saro-Wiwa explores the psychic impact of folktales, specifically tales which center the tortoise. This photographic series is one of a number of works the artist created over a five-year period that explore the role of the tortoise in Ogoni storytelling and its wider implications.

The tortoise is a prominent figure in Ogoni and other West African folktales. Globally, turtles are depicted in mass-media and popular culture as easygoing, patient, and wise creatures. Due to their long lifespan, slow movement, strength, and wrinkled appearance, they are an emblem of longevity, stability, steadfastness and tranquility. But in Nigerian folktales, the tortoise character is often portrayed as a conniving trickster. The tortoise appears nimble, agile, wily – wise, but devious. He is cunning. He is never satisfied. In the stories we find him frequently complaining, securing assistance from a hapless fellow animal to solve a problem, then cheating those who have assisted him. He sometimes gets away with his crimes be it murder, rape, or theft. Sometimes he does not. The tortoise trickster has been problematic and of great fascination to Zina Saro-Wiwa. The artist states:

“I’ve long struggled with tortoise trickster stories. Reading them, dealing with the jagged, discomfiting, disjointed, morally ambiguous nature of them. They are, at once, unsophisticated and altogether much too sophisticated. They collide adulthood and childhood. Animal and man. Justice and injustice. They marginalize women. It makes me wonder what it means that this animal is imbued with these characteristics in this culture? Why did we pick up on these characteristics? Why the tortoise? What is the tortoise communicating to us? What does it mean to have such unforgiving stories at one’s cultural core?”

Tortoises are often imbricated into cosmological stories and fables around the world. Saro-Wiwa also sees a vital and unknowable power in this animal.

“In Ogoni folktales, the tortoise is talked of as if he were a man. When reading the stories there is a kind of shapeshifting going on as the tortoise takes on physically human capabilities then the very next moment is at the mercy of his tortoise physiology. They swap characteristics and embody one another. Man is tortoise, tortoise is man. The psychic slippage is both disturbing and fascinating.”