Our planet has been severely shaken by the coronavirus pandemic, which caught us all unawares. All our activities daily activities have been put on hold. I was unable to escape from this, as an artist living and working in Kinshasa with all that entails: yes, it is a heavy burden to be an artist here, in other words, a bearer of new meanings in a territory such as ours: a place that has experienced the darkest side of the world, with all its attendant horrors… there is no need to repeat this here.
Under Covid-19, life in Kinshasa has become even more uncertain. People’s habitual resourcefulness has brought some respite, but Kinshasa cannot stop for a single moment; otherwise, life will simply cease. The urgency of daily survival has made people ignore Covid-19 and its attendant constraints, which demonstrate the precariousness of human existence across the world. I have found the complete vulnerability of life beautiful: in this respect, the people of Kinshasa lead the world. Because living here means waking up every morning, walking through a place where there is nothing in order to live in an empty home, then sleeping while marvelling at what we lack, then waking up the next day, content to have survived, then smiling and starting all over again. It’s crazy, but that’s what made Kinshasa open up to itself while the world was isolating itself. The predictions of the prophets of doom have burned in the heat of the city and the still vibrant laughter of the people of Kinshasa scoffing at the world. In the media we saw macabre images of this catastrophe that only highlighted the vulnerability of today’s world as it marshalled itself into a number of smaller, closed worlds.
During this period of confinement I have made uncertainty into my compass, and it has guided me towards myself. When my inner landscape became flat and featureless, I was saved by the love and care of my friends scattered throughout these small-new-worlds. Did they not simply hope that we would get our wings back, so that we could maintain a human bridge between those worlds?
As a citizen of the world, I burn with heat and I sometimes need the cold to stay human. As a citizen of the global south, it is sometimes my duty to bring a little bit of heat to warm humans living elsewhere. As a convinced citizen of the world, I am from here and from everywhere. As an artist living in Kinshasa, but above all as a human being, I feel like a bridge between madness and reason, between the matriarchy and the patriarchy, between verticality and horizontality, between my parents’ cultures and contemporary cultures: I simply feel like a human seeking a state of balance. Finding that balance is the reason why I am an artist. The main goal of my artistic activity is to make my contemporaries, and most importantly myself, a little more human. That is why I am seeking to recover the wings of freedom that have been severely damaged by Covid-19 in order to continue my little journey towards humanity. Will I have to circumvent new, additional frontiers to take the little piece of Kinshasa that I represent out into the world?
The world, or rather my world, revolves around Kinshasa. When I leave Kinshasa, it is always towards her that I travel. I never reset my watch, whatever the time zone, whatever part of the world I am in. When I land in Ghent or Lubumbashi, in Ouagadougou or Harare, in Marseille or Kisangani, my final destination is always Kinshasa. I have to constantly remind myself where I am from. I am from Kinshasa, the town of my birth that has survived human catastrophe, where every sunrise is the symbol of the resurrection of over 15 million souls struggling to survive. This magical city has embraced every possible dictatorship, and she has survived. I entrust myself to her, she offers herself up to me, and I merge into her: Kinshasa inhabits me.
I have become a walking, humming, roaring Kinshasa, and I have decided to try to name my worries and anxieties so that nothing is left unsaid and so that I am never submerged. Probably because of the global uncertainty that looms over our part of the world, I call my fear hope; I call my heartbeat the music of my life; I call my death life beyond breath. I refuse to put my life on hold. I see life beyond my uncertainties. My artistic work saves me from this uncertainty—a compass that sets me adrift when I try to go somewhere other than towards myself. Little by little I am learning, like all my contemporaries, to live with uncertainty and all the ghosts that Covid-19 brings in its wake. But I know that now I have caught my breath, little by little I am recovering my zest for life, beyond all hope; because I am no longer holding my breath under Covid-19.
I am no longer holding my breath under Covid-19
Kinshasa, 6 October 2020
Michael Disanka