Return to Bibliography

Thompson, Robert Farris. "Bighearted Power: Kongo Presence in the Landscape and Art of Black America," in Gundacker, ed., Keep Your Head to the Sky: Interpreting African American Home Ground, 1998, 37-64.

"Bighearted Power" is a reference to the vital spiritual qualities that Robert Farris Thompson sees in African American art.  Addressing the alternative tradition of visual arts developed by African American slaves and their descendants in the United States, Thompson analyzes visual stratagems for protecting the house and yard, using material writing systems as examples of African American art.  He posits an idea of "metaphorical communication," in which sound and other sensual forms are translated into the material/visual dimension. Items such as the wheel, tire, and hubcap ornaments that decorate some African American yards are circular symbols representative of Kongolese notions of time and the immortal journey of the soul. (These forms are of roughly the same significance as interpretations of African American dance kinesics and black musical structure.)  This correspondence of the African American yard and 'metaphorical communication' shows with minikisi -- healing charms (singular: nkisi) from Kongo and Angola used in material communication with the spirits. These charms have both the "power to give and take back," and to "greet and to defend" in a way that mirrors the circular notions of time expressed in the wheel ornaments described above. Yard displays feature a myriad of local and contemporary objects that serve the same purpose as traditional African minikisi (rocks, mirrors, jars or vessels, motion emblems, cosmograms, flowers, herbs, root sculptures, found images, dolls, plaster sculptures, stuffed animals, shiny bottles, tinfoil, bones of animals, etc.) These are placed with care to create the desired spiritual messages and to give visual pleasure to the community. [H. Nasstrom Evans.]