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from the New Yorker: The Defiantly Everyday Drawings of Fatima Meer

Culture Desk

The Defiantly Everyday Drawings of Fatima Meer

By
October 23, 2019
The show “The Pencil Is a Key: Drawings by Incarcerated Artists” includes work by the anti-apartheid activist Fatima Meer, from her time at the Johannesburg’s Women’s Jail.
Photograph Courtesy Constitution Hill Museum Collection, Johannesburg, South Africa
Photograph Courtesy Constitution Hill Museum Collection, Johannesburg, South Africa
Photograph Courtesy Constitution Hill Museum Collection, Johannesburg, South Africa
As a political prisoner, Meer was officially in a different category from most of the people with whom she was incarcerated, yet she often uses “we” in her captions. As a Muslim Indian woman living in apartheid-era South Africa, she saw labels and separations as bridges to connect rather than as walls to separate. Meer was the first woman whom the apartheid government “banned,” and she was banned multiple times, meaning that, for twelve years of her life, she was limited in where she could go and what she could publish, and forbidden from joining any gatherings. Still, she would swap her sari for a disguise, dressing as a poor white woman, in a big hat and pants, to bypass authorities and organize classes for poor, marginalized students. Meer also defies the state of being “banned” in her drawing “The Card-Players,” in which a number of detained women, along with a female warden in an orange jailer’s outfit and a green beret, sit in a circle, playing cards. The caption on another of her drawings, of the Wardress Cecelia playing a game of Spill & Spell with Edith Mbandla, a prisoner awaiting trial, takes delight in a simple fact: “Both are breaking rules.”
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