maternity
by carlo della corte writer
”In pain thou shalt
bring forth children”, the Old Testament
maintains this and over the millennia it has proved
to be true. But then, when the world was still at
the dawn of civilization, the mother/child
relationship established itself as one of the most
tenacious and satisfying for both, until, in western
society, from the Greek tragedies up to the time of
Shakespeare, the sins of civilization,
with incest and consequent disasters,
spoilt a paradisiacal relationship which would
resolve with the growing up of children and their
consequent parting. Today, some western countries
have zero population growth and self- sterilization
is preached (the church, because of its principles,
is naturally against such methods). The world is
over populated and there is not enough food to go
around. In short and frankly, maternity is not
popular and tragically the rubbish bins are becoming
laden with new-born babies.
In certain countries yet,
where such alarming messages, however right they may
be, do not arrive or at least do not dwell in the
consciousness of the public, the primitive
mother/child relationship still maintains, wherever
possible, its touching and instinctive qualities.
The poetical expression
of maternity, without its risk factors and possible
sorrows suggests something magically primordial and
this, Etta Lisa captures in her photographs, some of
them really superb, taken during her many eventful
and even adventurous safaris across some of the
third world countries; from Guatemala to Tibet,
Ecuador to India, Papua New Guinea to Mexico, Peru
to Sri Lanka and from Yemen to Nepal...
It is like breaking up
and peeling a primary act, taking away its
additional implications with their potential for
becoming reductive even though reason can be
stretched and has, alas its own reasons. In its name
we risk forgetting certain other reasons which today
seem alien but which have nourished us for thousands
of years. The atmosphere which surrounds Etta Lisa′s
photographs, while allowing us to imagine a certain
degradation, has an ineffable grace, the essence of
which is captured before a doubt or an afterthought
could cause it to disappear.
Absurd as it may seem, in
today′s third world, unloved by the white
races with the exception of a few missionaries and
some precious layman, we see reproduced the typical
pictorial scenes of our greatest tradition, the
series of Marian maternities, conceived by the likes
of Lippi and Giambellino, to cite two of the better
known and poetic artists specialists in painting
'Madonne', who worked by commission but who were,
even so, possessed with a great sense of poetic
rendering.
Etta Lisa, the traveller,
displays a rigorous, sharp and impassive style. A
detail is enough, a hand, as in Mali, above the head
of a child clinging to its mother′s sari.
It is history already;
the story of yesterday, but with ramifications of
truth which will spread out even into our very much
contested today.
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