Endless Returns*
- mungowona
- Apr 21
- 7 min read
Looking at my art this week, a friend of mine said, “this could be your logo.” Then it dawned on me that a version of that shape is my logo. I had done it a long time before the art that was being referenced. This experience echoed what has been happening not only in my artistic journey but in my life, it is the great return or the endless great returns. Something I started earlier is making it’s way back into my life. Earlier this year, I was talking to another friend, who made the claim that ‘people always come back to what they were as a child and that’s their vocation’ as a part of their saturn return. Well, that is happening to me in many ways. I am coming back to myself in a way that feels empowering and potent. As though I have always known and been this, but I am somehow having revelatory epiphanies that are helping me embody what I have always known.
Right: My logo, Left: The art in question, which remains untitled.
I am returning to my passion for teaching. When I was wee little boy, I used to grab a stick and play with the plants a lot. They were my students, and I loved being their teacher. I would spend hours playing this way. I specifically remember this happening a lot at my mum’s house in Lilongwe. As I am doing my MFA, I cannot help but think about how beautiful it is that I am indeed becoming a teacher. I am living the dream of that young boy many years ago. It is especially apropos now that I am doing a Teaching Art and Design class that is a blend of pedagogy and a teaching assistantship.
Me, at my ‘being a teacher’ stage, circa 2007, Lilongwe, Malawi
I have been interested in education and particularly education policy for a long time. For my Extended essay, (a final essay written by IB students — 4000 grueling words for a 17 year old to produce), I wrote about education reform. I called upon the thoeries of Plato, Socratic methods and Henry Adams, who made the bold claim that he was educated outside the classroom and did not learn anything from being in class. My focus was on education reform because I felt education is not effective in the context of Malawi. I argued banking — feeding information to students to regurgitate — is not creating innovative, creative minds that can come up with solutions for the country.
What is the difference between William Kamwamba (The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind)1 and all the other boys in Malawi who are living in poverty? Is there something we can learn from a story such as his? Is there something we can teach? I see the potential of education to truly make good civil servants who can serve and save themselves by coming up with solutions that are relevant to where they are. And that is why I want to get into education. My belief in the power of education is reflected in this quote I used in the EE, by Nelson Mandela.
“Education is the great engine of personal development. It is through education that the daughter of a peasant can become a doctor, that the son of a mineworker can become the head of the mine, that a child of farmworkers can become the president of a great nation. It is what we make out of what we have, not what we are given, that separates one person from another.”
- Nelson Mandela
I suspect my interest in education is because of my curiousity about systems and how connected everything is. Everything starts with education because we learn everything from someone; walking, talking, driving e.tc. It might also be the influence of my sister, who was a lecturer at the University of Malawi, teaching vocal performance. Another possibility is that the belief in education that was constantly shared to me by family. It is most likely a mix of all of these things.
Education was the way out of poverty for my own family. My grandfather sold bananas so that my father and his siblings could go to school and get an education. My father took it the farthest out of all of his siblings, and not only went on to get a college degree, but got a doctorate afterwards. A man who went to school without shoes for a portion of his life, got himself a doctorate. That story is exactly what Nelson Mandela was talking about in the quote above. That is why when I found it, while doing my IB diploma, I was immediately drawn to it. I have always believed education to be a powerful form of empowerment when done right. That is why I believe education needs reform, especially on the continent of Africa. We are producing more obedient, self-hating(I will get into this on another essay) human beings who do not imagine beyond their reality. Education has become more about how much money you can make once you are educated than about what your education means for you and your society. When education is done right, it should empower us to continue the lineage of liberation. It should encourage critical thinking and show us holes in our system that we then feel empowered to help change. Like Kurt Hahn said,
“There is more in us than we know if we could be made to see it; perhaps, for the rest of our lives we will be unwilling to settle for less.”
-Kurt Hahn
This was my story, and that is why I believe we can empower more people with this mindset. After I attended UWC, I did a youth empowerment project informed by this quote and my research on education reform. That was my first teaching role and it inspired many endless returns.
I have worked in multiple roles as an educator and still, somehow, I never saw or really believed that this is what I want to do as a career. It always felt like something that I was doing on the side until I got into some other role. I taught English to kids in Spain, I taught at three different YMCA’s, and then was an assistant teacher in Boise at Riverstone (An International IB school). So my many returns to education have led me here. It was always there, obviously. I was a natural at teaching and the teaching jobs kept coming. Including teaching dance to adults for a year at Studio Move Boise. I am a teacher, GHADAMIT, let me accept that, celebrate that and embody it. I never really have embraced it the way that I am now.
Maybe that is what the endless returns are about, it is not about the daunting realization that I am suddenly that. It is about the embodiment of a truth that has echoes in so many areas in my life.
I am coming back to art, too. I did an undergraduate degree in art and I loved it but then I graduated and taught (one of my many teaching jobs). Then I started doing music, which one could say was my first love, but then it took me away from art in a way. Artistic exploration that is all-encompassing and revolutionary is very different from music (in the way it is set up in the world at this moment). I am now finding a way to include music in my art but, more than that, I want to be intermedial (the space between an array of elements that transforms each one into a third). I love to write, I love to make music, I love to make visual art and I love to dance. All of these things I have done in concentration for periods of time. However, the big return is to getting to do them all at once in ways that feel cohesive. Ways that feel transmedial.2 I have been building up to this moment. Now I am embodying it. This is why I have always loved intersectionality and the study of it. EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED, and so is the way I think about everything, too. That is why the birth of this substack is so important. All the connections become clear and can be expressed with visual references and links to videos explaining what I am talking about, I love it. Who knew I would love writing as much as I am? Another facet of the returns, perhaps? Yes, actually, because I used to love writing. In college, I wrote a bunch of articles that I lost after I dropped juice on my laptop (my bad).
Another return that shocked me recently was my curiosity on modernity and African modernity specifically. I wanted to talk about the masking that happens in a lot of African contexts, where foregoing everything you are feels necessary to fit in the modern African reality that is informed by european standards of living. I also wanted to affirm, in the way that Njideka Akunyili Crosby does, that it is not necessary to give up who you are to join this ‘modernity.’3 So, I explored a juxtaposition of the African masks with the western suit and powerful imagery was born. But where had I seen this imagery before?
My ‘Wish You’d See’ video…A suit and a mask to create a juxtaposition.
I am just loving this period of my life because it truly feels like more than just self-exploration. It feels more like self-mastery. It feels very magical and magnetic. I have integrated my shadows; I have a firm foundation on which to build from. Part of the endless returns to self and to my vocation is realizing who I am. I AM EVERYTHING. I am expansive, I am who I think I am. It took doing all of these different things to get to where I am now. I am so grateful for all of the paths. NOW WE SHINE and truly do some good in this world. You can’t do that with your head bent over. You have got to step into your power. Which brings me to my summer release. It’s a song called ‘lucky boy.’ An Affirmation for all my lucky boys out there and a reclamation of something that is so true in my life. I am a lucky boy. I have been so afraid to admit that. That is another story altogether. Whatever luck is, I am moving in an abundance of it and for that I am grateful.
*The name Endless Returns is one inspired by the conversation Njideka Akunyili Crosby had with kechúkwú Onyewuenyi, a curator and writer in Los Angeles, is manager of curatorial affairs and a curator at Performa for Aperture Foundation.
If you have not read this book, hurry. They made a movie on Netflix you can watch and they are making a musical that premieres in London this summer.
Transmedial (or transmedia) refers to stories, concepts, or experiences that unfold across multiple media platforms, with each platform contributing unique content to a unified narrative or world
Comments