Ni’ma
I created this piece of art from dried flowers on a backdrop of two of Alice Notley’s poems in response to The Wedding of Zein. I incorporated two poems from Notley’s book Culture of One titled “At the Beginning Stop Suffering” and “The Mercy Moment.” As I was reading about Ni’ma and her refusal to be subjugated under the patriarhcal culture in the novel, I was reminded very much of Notley and the way she also refuses to fall under a category. She builds and rebuilds herself and takes from what is used or old or broken and creates something beautiful. But Notley’s beauty differs from the cultural standards of beauty, and it is this that makes her even more powerful. Even more interestingly, Ni’ma was drawn to the name “Mercy” because she believed that one day she must sacrifice herself for something great, and this mindset I believe truly allowed her to view herself as more than the typical ideal of a woman in her culture. She had her own picture of who she was, and she was beautiful to herself because of her values. In “At the Beginning Stop Suffering,” Notley writes:
“I am Mercy; I have no understanding of who I am;
though, with my thousand arms, I have written of my own
nature since writing began. I inhabit you and you write about me again.”
Here, there is a sense of withdrawal from a the idea of a society’s physical being. Rather than following the institutionalized form of “body,” Notley creates her own, she creates this higher self that is either her own self or another self to understand everything around her. This reminded me very much of Ni’ma and the type of thinking that could have appealed to her.
In the sequel to this poem, “The Mercy Moment,” Notley writes:
“The most outstanding characteristic of the mercy moment, the time when she comes, is
how instantly the suffering stops.”
I was reminded of suffering because Ni’ma suffers from the mere fact that she is a woman in a society that does not value women so much as men. Women are objectified and viewed from a very physical sense, and this dehumanization in my idea is a form of suffering. And to draw from suffering to create personhood is the most beautiful thing. I created Ni’ma’s face from dried flowers for this reason. To me, dried flowers a different form of beauty, one that is often regarded as “sad” or “dead” and not as “worthy” as a blooming flower. To me, these mindsets are very similar to the phrasing used to describe women in the novel: “the best girl in town” versus a “first-hand woman.” And so I took the poems about Mercy and the poems about suffering and these dried flowers and made Ni’ma in the way that I thought could relieve her from the social standards she was born into.
I created this piece of art from dried flowers on a backdrop of two of Alice Notley’s poems in response to The Wedding of Zein. I incorporated two poems from Notley’s book Culture of One titled “At the Beginning Stop Suffering” and “The Mercy Moment.” As I was reading about Ni’ma and her refusal to be subjugated under the patriarhcal culture in the novel, I was reminded very much of Notley and the way she also refuses to fall under a category. She builds and rebuilds herself and takes from what is used or old or broken and creates something beautiful. But Notley’s beauty differs from the cultural standards of beauty, and it is this that makes her even more powerful. Even more interestingly, Ni’ma was drawn to the name “Mercy” because she believed that one day she must sacrifice herself for something great, and this mindset I believe truly allowed her to view herself as more than the typical ideal of a woman in her culture. She had her own picture of who she was, and she was beautiful to herself because of her values. In “At the Beginning Stop Suffering,” Notley writes:
“I am Mercy; I have no understanding of who I am;
though, with my thousand arms, I have written of my own
nature since writing began. I inhabit you and you write about me again.”
Here, there is a sense of withdrawal from a the idea of a society’s physical being. Rather than following the institutionalized form of “body,” Notley creates her own, she creates this higher self that is either her own self or another self to understand everything around her. This reminded me very much of Ni’ma and the type of thinking that could have appealed to her.
In the sequel to this poem, “The Mercy Moment,” Notley writes:
“The most outstanding characteristic of the mercy moment, the time when she comes, is
how instantly the suffering stops.”
I was reminded of suffering because Ni’ma suffers from the mere fact that she is a woman in a society that does not value women so much as men. Women are objectified and viewed from a very physical sense, and this dehumanization in my idea is a form of suffering. And to draw from suffering to create personhood is the most beautiful thing. I created Ni’ma’s face from dried flowers for this reason. To me, dried flowers a different form of beauty, one that is often regarded as “sad” or “dead” and not as “worthy” as a blooming flower. To me, these mindsets are very similar to the phrasing used to describe women in the novel: “the best girl in town” versus a “first-hand woman.” And so I took the poems about Mercy and the poems about suffering and these dried flowers and made Ni’ma in the way that I thought could relieve her from the social standards she was born into.
dmuhleisen said this on October 27th, 2015 at 1:28 am
I love it! Thank you for the inspiration. I’ve been thinking of ways to incorporate orga ic mayerials into art, but after reading this I became interested in the story. I’ll have to google it and check it out.
Linda Sturling said this on March 16th, 2016 at 7:54 pm
Very nice.
Graphic Designer said this on June 28th, 2018 at 4:06 am