In my early days training for public services at Manuscripts and Archives, I was introduced to reprographics services by way of a researcher’s request for material from the Louise Bryant Papers, MS 1840, a collection documenting the life of the American radical leftist writer known most famously for her first-hand reporting on the rise of Socialism in Russia during the 1917 October revolution.

I was given an hour or so make copies, and while I dutifully did so, I couldn’t help but be transfixed by what passed through my hands. I already had some familiarity with Bryant (even beyond seeing Reds), but once I surveyed her correspondence, her photographs, and her drawings, I really had a sense of who she was as a person — all at once, I understood why researchers work with primary source materials. This, like Manuscripts and Archives’ receiving her papers unintentionally with the donation of the William C. Bullitt Papers, “in a single trunk … originally collected and saved by Bryant, not her daughter or Bullitt”, was a welcome revelation. MS 1840 has remained a personal favorite since.

Flash forward about six years to last week. A task had come to me that meant my necessarily perusing every folder of twenty-four boxes of Louise Bryant Papers. Once again reintroduced to her expressive, weird, and sometimes drunken drawings, I felt it was a prime opportunity to share them. One might consider them naive, sure, but many of them are quite funny (she’d been a political cartoonist prior to her storied work as a journalist) and allow us a privileged glimpse into some aspects of her character.

I found that Bryant continued to draw throughout her life. During her various world-wide travels, she’d occasionally make a quick sketch of a location or of a person that she’d see to presumably later describe textually in an article or essay.

While many of her drawings are undated and unsigned, context provides clues that she continued to draw for pleasure late into her life, with a particular fondness for caricatures, women’s fashion, and social commentary.

In 1924, Bryant gave birth to her daughter, Anne Moen Bullitt. In MS 1840’s Series III: Visual Artworks, comprising drawings in pencil, ink, and watercolor, one can find drawings by both Bryant and a young Bullitt individually, drawings that they made for each other, and even a paper doll that it appears they each had a hand in making. In looking at this material, I couldn’t help but think about the descriptor of the series in the finding aid, “While some of the artwork is signed by Bryant, much of it is unsigned and therefore might be the work of someone else.”

I then stumbled onto folder 9 in box 18 which contains a single sketchbook with very little writing. The drawing style here differs significantly from much of the other visual material in the collection: representational drawings are made loosely, with visible gesture lines, display confident, naturalistic shading and advanced pencil handling. Further, the book is composed almost entirely of landscapes.

I immediately considered another drawing I saw earlier in the collection, most likely pastel and gouache drawn on the inside of a previously published book cover; I’d thought it was a preliminary mockup for a book cover of William Bullitt’s 1926 satirical novel It’s Not Done and had noted its style, altogether different from Bryant’s other work.

Via web search, I was able to determine that this image is either an homage to a Robert Minor illustration for “The Masses”, or, however unlikely, a drawing by Minor himself. Further research led me to discover that Bryant, Bullitt, Minor, and others of “the Masses crowd” all lived near one another at Mt. Airy, New York. Could it be that the sketchbook of landscapes was the work of Minor, perhaps given to Bryant to eventually find its way into her trunk at the Bullitt home?

Speculation, yes, but Minor’s published cartoons bear some stylistic parallels to the hand that composed the landscapes. Still, none of the cartoons attributed to him that I was able to find depict objects, plant life, or structures. I contacted Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library to enquire about their collection of the Robert Minor Papers, but as their finding aid suggests, the collection holds no drawings.

Alas, the hunt is stymied for now. I can only hope that further research bears out or dashes my admittedly wild assumptions — either way, I’ll know Louise Bryant a little better.

People make marks. Shapes and letters, volumes and spaces. We lay lines down on paper to communicate and to inform, to motivate others or ourselves, or simply to have them exist. They can be measured in microns lifting from their substrate or by how deeply they penetrate their grounds; we can analyze how many pixels they occupy, or how much memory they use. It’s much more difficult to study the emotional weight of a line, though, to measure its incorporeal dimensions, or to quantify how much it matters.

The covers of the Shona language works that I selected from Manuscripts and Archives’ Pamphlet Collection are a riot of marks and lines of purpose, each evocative in its own way of the emotional and psychological shift that the generation of Shona people in the 1960s and 70s experienced as the unrecognized African state of Rhodesia moved toward its reconstitution as a republic.Charles Riley continues his exploration of the text of these materials.

  

“Authors of this generation whose works are featured here include Joyce Simango, the first female Shona novelist (Zviuya Zviri Mberi, ‘Good Things are Ahead’), John Marangwanda (Kumazivandadzoka, ‘Who Goes There Never Comes Back’),

the late poet Mordekai Hamutyinei (Maidei), and Amos Munjanja (Tsumo Nemadimikira, ‘Parables’, and Zvirahwe, ‘Riddles’).

“Ngugi wa’Thiongo, the renowned Kenyan author and literary critic, notes in Decolonising the Mind that the role of the Rhodesia Literature Bureau was to promote works that were not threatening to the colonial power, but even within those limitations there were substantial themes drawn out, including poverty in rural townships and the resultant urban migration.

   “Restricted as they were, the works were still powerful enough for many of them to face censorship after Rhodesia’s declared unilateral independence under minority rule in 1965. The cover of one of Amos Munjanja’s works quotes a defiant Shona proverb, Tamba tamba chidembo muswe ndakabata—‘Play your skunk-tail tricks on me, but you will not succeed.’

“One of the figures to be interviewed after the Lancaster House Agreement, Father Emmanuel Ribeiro, had provided shelter in 1975 during Robert Mugabe’s escape into Mozambique from the Rhodesian Security Forces. The work of Father Ribeiro’s that had become part of the standard secondary school curriculum after having claimed the literature bureau’s prize in the mid-1960s examined the Shona view of ancestral spirits. Its cover is shown here, with the title Muchadura (‘You shall confess’).”

…

There are those who would challenge the significance of our marks, of art, or in understanding its power, attempt to inhibit it. Its purpose, its relevance, and its meaning have all come into question probably for as long as people have been making it. Perhaps it’s not surprising. Even during our epoch of neuroscience and of theoretical and philosophical aesthetics inquiry we still encounter a vociferous debate concerning art’s legitimacy and what role it should play in our lives. Even when science, culture, and art blur and our self-reflection plumbs ever deeper into the essence of humanness, we see censorship and antipathy aimed at art.

But then, art among all other things is here to challenge us. It’s a simultaneous reflection and critique of who we are at specific moment in history, and it’s become wed to our existence. As the authors and illustrators documenting the great change in Southeastern Africa have shown us, even in the face of repression, art thrives. Of course, no one has ever said that life is without its paradoxes.

While most of Manuscripts and Archives’ patrons expect to find textual materials documenting history in our holdings, the repository is also home to a surprising array of content which appeals to our visual and aesthetic sensibilities, often found in unexpected places. Whether it be through intentional art-objects or just the bored meanderings of pen that we may see in the margins of a personal journal, that humanness expresses itself in this way, whether representationally or abstractly, consciously or not, is just as important as how it’s expressed in syntax and ordered thought; it can help the researcher approach the psychological and emotional spaces of their subjects of inquiry in ways that the written word cannot. These are the oblique angles of research.

Over the past several months, I have had the great opportunity to work with SML cataloguing librarian Charles Riley on an Arcadia funded project cataloguing all of the African language pamphlets in MS 1351, the Pamphlet Collection. Literally hundreds of these pamphlets pass though my hands every two weeks or so, and while I can’t read any of them, I’ve grown accustomed to gleaning their meaning from the idiosyncratic illustrations that many of them employ. The examples that I’ve selected were all chosen from boxes 203 and 204 of the collection, are written in the Shona language, a Bantu language native to Zimbabwe and southern Zambia, and were mostly published in the 1960s and 1970s.

The drawings are emotional, sometimes feverish, depicting an array of social norms, spirituality, and family life during a time of upheaval in African politics and culture. Methodical hatches fall into pointillist textures. Soft-pencil scumbling washes over frenzied accent lines. Heavy contours, almost cloisonné, recall the formalism of artists from Paul Gauguin to Robert Crumb.

            

Charles Riley will help us contextualize these drawings and the new literature of an independent culture in emergence.

“Rhodesia during the 1960s and 1970s was a country in the heat of transition.  It had declared unilateral independence in 1965 from the United Kingdom in defiance of the official policy of ‘no independence before majority rule’, shedding its status as the British colony of Southern Rhodesia, and entered into a prolonged civil war, marked by arson, bombings, anthrax and chemical attacks.  This lasted until the ceasefire of the Lancaster House Agreement in 1979 that led the way to independence under majority rule in 1981, as the new nation of Zimbabwe.

“One institution that successfully managed to survive the long period that came between decolonization and majority-led independence was the Southern Rhodesia Literature Bureau, founded in 1953, which changed its name first to the Rhodesia Literature Bureau and then to the Zimbabwe Literature Bureau, operating under the Ministry of Education in cooperation with external publishing houses until its closure in 1999.  While the literature that resulted was definitely not free from pressure and influence to meet with the approval of whichever government was in power, it was able to fulfill a mission of producing and promoting literature in Zimbabwean languages:  notably Shona and Ndebele.

“The founding of the bureau came three years before the publication of the first novel in Shona, Feso, by Solomon Mutswairo through Oxford University Press in Capetown₁.  His Ambuyamuderere (‘Green praying mantis’) is a collection of children’s songs and games published in 1967 as a collaboration between the bureau and Oxford University, with translations in English.  Mutswairo wrote the lyrics for the new Zimbabwean national anthem, Simudzai Mureza wedu WeZimbabwe (‘Blessed be the land of Zimbabwe’) in 1994.  Predecessors to the adoption of this anthem had been Ishe Komberera Africa, the Shona translation of the Xhosa Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika, and Rise, O Voices of Rhodesia sung to Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’.  Of Mutswairo, G. P. Kahari writes, “the traditional story-teller, the ‘sarungano’, told his tales well but Mutswairo, in taking advantage of the latter’s techniques and incorporating them into English nineteenth-century narrative styles, did better.”

Charles and I will explore more Shona history, texts, and art next week. Stay tuned!

₁ correction