In starting to describe this work, it is tempting to reach for metaphor, to say—in this work—body is archive. Or, to point out dualities, that—through her work—Zohra names herself as both child and mother. But, in the end, Zohra’s work does as it is. So – though I imagined this an orderly narrative – I’ll start this writing where her work starts: outside of time, mid-fall yet without anxiety, like the dark, cool, quiet of dreaming under heavy sheets in winter.

In the chapters of The Myths of Eternal Life, Zohra is a curator of memory, which she makes literal, material. She has a tendency to stitch the past into the present, like rendering the contours of a series of carved faces in thread next to a screen-printed, photographed collage of the stone originals so that we no longer know which one is artifact or reference. Time is truer to the body here. Her work takes place in the slippage between body and textile, between an object and the thing that covers and protects it. She insists on intimacy, showing us how vulnerable a thing a body is when broken down into its component parts. Pieces of her body re-appear through her works like untethered shadows. In describing herself, she uses a phrase which, translated from the German, becomes “I’m built close to the water,” meaning, one who cries easily, often. Her world is a tangled mesh of open sky and ocean floor. How else to explain these colors? Ink blues so absolute that their moments of variation are textural, tactile; lurid, slime greens of algae; a flash of washed-out peach sky like a sudden, vivid, winter sunset. She favors the colors of organic marginalia—of turning; things gone rotten, or on the verge of doing so; carved stone weathered craggy, pockmarked, gray. She tells me that colors, like memories, come to her in dreams. That in Ghana, like I do, she dreams deeper and more intensely than anywhere else.

The Myths of Eternal Life borrows its structure and its language from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, an ancient text which provides instruction of preparation for the afterlife. Speaking to me of how she’d prefer to be buried, Zohra says “let me just be burnt, and become one with the sea.” Because of this, I see the pearled brass pieces scattered through these works as her, melted down and carried on the wind, where, inevitably, she becomes suspended in bare tree-branches, or settles over the snarls of her own curls in a screenprint of her face in profile, adorning her past embodiments with their eventual, godly manifestations; marking herself for eternal life. In the Book of the Dead, ba is the name given to the human-headed bird that a person’s spirit would take the form of once they had passed on. It is in a similar form that Zohra appears in a work whose title begins “Maat is in my belly with the turquoise and faience of its monthly festival,” where she is winged and ghostly and, perhaps, ba, or perhaps a God of her own choosing, or perhaps her own mother, who she tells me often dreams of flying. The language of this title, as all of the language in these chapters, is taken directly from the Book of the Dead. Zohra tells me she has no relationship to writing, though, in this work, she is a clear crafter of new languages. In Chapter I of the Myths of Eternal Life, titled “Healing Hands,” she uses hands as a “metaphor for hieroglyphs” – a metaphor for a metaphor, or, more precisely, a metaphor for the symbolic. It is this kind of alchemy that marks all the works in this series. Zohra’s most common movement is towards resistance: resistance of linearity, resistance of simplicity, resistance of the confines of embodiment and mortality. Another passage she references from the Book of the Dead begins “I give my mouth to myself (so that) I may speak with it in the presence of the gods of the Duat.”

Above all, this is the work of the Myths of Eternal Life, for Zohra to gift herself a voice that can speak her wholeness into existence in this life, the past life and the next.

By Delali Ayivor