I embarked on the project ‘My Mother Taught me to tie Gele’ because I wanted to explore how multifaceted culture is. I had been reflecting on my own cultural heritage and I was drawing on how culture back home is reflective of how many different ethnic groups can exist under the name ‘Nigerian’. Now this goes against the perception people often have of ‘Africa’ [to speak quite generally].
In Nigeria there are over 250 ethnic groups and over 500 languages alone and that to me already depicts its ‘bigness’, not to talk of other African countries. I really wanted to depict this visually so I made a map of my life so far (i’m not that old…in fact i’m not old at all)… and I circled back on a ‘ritual’ I used to do as a young girl- play dress up. Not just with any piece of cloth but with Gele. Gele is a long piece of fabric Yoruba women tie on their heads- it is part of our cultural wear.
I realised that the fact that Gele untied is a reasonably lengthy piece of cloth, I could use it to show how multifaceted culture can be. If you were at a Yoruba wedding, you will come in contact with a lot of women with all their interpretations of how their Gele should sit on their heads but the diverse thing about the adornment is that the variety of the styles don’t make them any less Nigerian- they all still fall under ‘being Yoruba’.
So diversity in that sense is popular and should be celebrated as is.
As I tied my Gele each time, a new visual picture of how else it can be tied popped in my mind [refer to my previous post] and although some of these styles may be considered ‘extra’ by a vast majority of Yoruba women, the styles still speak to what Gele is and can be.
