Transcription of Aimee Bessire for the show Art, Crossing Cultures #252
Lisa: It’s always a lot of fun for me to have people in the studio with me that I’ve known I wanted to have on the radio for years. I think that this next individual Aimee Bessire is someone I really have been talking in my own mind about having four or five years. Thank you for coming in today.
Aimee: Thank you so much for having me.
Lisa: Aimee received her PhD and MA in history of art and architecture from Harvard University and has an MA in ancient Near Eastern and 20th century art from NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts. She teaches courses on African art and culture, the African diaspora, American culture, cultural and critical theory, gender studies, popular culture, and the history of photography. She founded the nonprofit Africa Schoolhouse which is dedicated to building sustainable communities in rural Africa for children without educational opportunities. I’ve just cut out a whole bunch of other really interesting things that you have done that we’re definitely going to talk about but I really appreciate your coming in today.
Aimee: It’s so nice to be here.
Lisa: You just got back from Africa. I really want to hear about this Africa Schoolhouse that you’ve done.
Aimee: It started in 2006 when I was on a research trip in the village of Oyotunji Iand working with a village of Sacuma healers who I have known and my husband and I have known since the mid 90s when we lived in Tanzania. They on the very last night of my research trip, they said, “We need your help. Our kids don’t have a school and we need a modern medical clinic.” It’s really interesting too for me, having known them for so long, to also hear that this group of healers also wanted not only a school for their children but also a clinic.
I came home really excited to help in some way and at that point we thought it was going to be a school for maybe 100 kids from the village and when I went back to do more research to find out what did the school need to be, what did we need to do, it turns out to be a school for 600 children and also the clinic. My husband and I were at an annual dinner with friends and I know you’ve heard part of this story. We were talking about the project with friends and everyone at this annual dinner in 2006 said, “Let’s do it. Let’s form a non-profit and let’s build a school and a clinic.” Within a year and a half of that particular party where everyone said, “Let’s do it,” we broke ground and we started building the school.
The school was completed, it took two years to build the school. There’s fourteen classrooms and ten teacher houses. As soon as the school was opened, we broke ground pretty much the next day and built the clinic. The clinic was built within a year. Those were the two big projects. The school opened in 2010 and the clinic in 2011.
Lisa: This last visit, you brought your daughter with you. You brought her with you in the past but this time, she was 15 and it really meant something.
Aimee: Yeah. It was so great to be there and we had been as a family to get the project up and running in 2008 when we broke ground for the primary school and the girls had this great opportunity to … At that point we lived in a tent for two and a half months and they were little. They were seven and ten and they spent a lot of time running around the village, playing with kids and just having a blast. I think they made some bricks, they were participating in helping with the school project too and we went back again in 2010 so they weren’t that much older, it was two years after that. They were then 9 and 12. They saw some of the same friends from before but they still were young enough that it was … There wasn’t a meaningful to really do volunteer projects. We did do a project setting up hand washing stations and they did art projects with kids then but this trip was so much fun to go with our younger daughter Clay and she and I did projects with the girls at the girls’ school that we’re now building.
We’re building a school for at-risk girls so that they’ll have a safe space to go to school. For Clay to be with girls who are really struggling to be in school and get an education and to do a project with them which was so much fun, it was really … I think when she’s talked about it, hearing her talk about it I think was a really meaningful time for her and so nice to have that time with her there.
Lisa: You know that I have a 15 year old daughter and you and I were talking about this before we came on and I often think about what it means to be a 15 year old girl in other parts of the world. That 15 year old girls here and boys are relatively protected. They’re still in this childhood cocoon. In other parts of the world and I’m assuming Africa’s no different, 15 looks very different. What does it look like at the Africa Schoolhouse?
Aimee: Clay and I did a video project with girls and we worked specifically with twelve girls and spent time with them, really empowering them to tell their story and thinking about what’s their interesting story that they want to tell. The girls each worked on with a partner, they worked with another girl and just practicing working on their stories and thinking about what they wanted to tell about their life story. These life stories, there was a lot of overlap, a lot of overlap of families privileging their sons’ education over their daughters. The girls in the family, they all told a very similar story of going home after school and some of them have two hour walks to get home so they have to get up very early to get to school and then by the time they get home, the girls are the ones who go to the well to fetch the water. They bring the water home, they do all of the cooking, they do all of the cleaning up, and they were laughing about it. They were saying, “Our brothers, they’re out playing soccer and then they get to do their homework early but we don’t get to do our homework until we finish cleaning everything up, doing all the dishes and then it’s really late and we’re very tired.” They were telling a very tough story. Only 1% of girls in Tanzania graduate from secondary school which is a really sad number.
Lisa: How did your daughter respond to that?
Aimee: It’s really eye-opening for a 15 year old to hear the story of other girls who are struggling so hard and whose parents can’t sometimes pay all of the fees that are needed for school. There’s a new president in Tanzania who has made all secondary school free as of January this year, January 2016, secondary school is free which is so exciting and it’s now meant there’s a lot of overcrowding in secondary schools because kids who had no opportunity before can now go but you still have to buy a school uniform and you still have to have your school supplies and your books. Sometimes for some families, that’s much too much.
Lisa: You were referencing my hearing your husband’s version of this story and that of course is because your husband Mark, Mark Bessire, is the head of the Portland Museum of Art and he was allowed to be … Why do I say allowed, that’s a silly word but … We invited him to be part of Maine Live. The Maine Live that just happened this past spring is like a TEDxDirigo and he was standing up on the stage, really giving the background information. There was something about a friend of yours passing away at a fairly young age that prompted this group that you’ve described to invest in this African village the way that you have.
Aimee: This is our dear friend Josh Delinsky who was Mark’s best friend, died when we were in our early twenties and left a small amount of money for everybody to continue to get together as we always had on the night before Thanksgiving and his family lived and still lives on one of the blocks where you can watch the Macy’s Day Parade balloons blow up. We always had Chinese food and went to Josh’s to watch the balloons and we kept this up. He left this small amount of money to all of his friends that we could keep getting together but we have kept getting together for years and years ever since. It is something that we all make sure to be there for what we call the Josh dinner and it was at that dinner that everyone decided to do this and it was really in honor of Josh and this long term group friendship that’s really held together by this glue of everyone loving Josh but being so close together.
Lisa: You have a strong affinity for Maine and you’ve chosen very specifically to live in Maine. You’ve made it possible through doing a variety of jobs. Yet you still have a strong connection to New York. That’s where you’ve gotten one of your graduate degrees. I know that Mark also has a similarly strong connection. Why has Maine become so important to you?
Aimee: When we first moved here and we moved here when Mark got a job as the director of the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art and we moved with our first daughter, was six months old at the time and we moved here, thinking, “Oh, maybe this is one step in this career path that we both are entering.” Within six months of being here, we realized we never wanted to leave. We just fell in love with this amazing place. I think we frequently say to each other we’re so lucky that we have been able to live here and raise our kids here. We still think about how grateful we are to have landed in this incredible place that has amazing people, fantastic culture, beautiful outdoor life. It is very special.
Lisa: I find it interesting that your focus has been on African art and culture, the African diaspora, and that you have this strong relationship with Tanzania. Where did that come from for you?
Aimee: It’s a question that I have been asked so many times. Why Africa? It’s very hard to explain why we’re drawn to certain things and from the time that I was very young, I grew up outside of Chicago and remember going to the Field Museum as a kid and just falling in love with Africa at that museum. I just went back and visited this year and sort of felt that resonant connection that I felt as a kid. It was always there. Even though I didn’t study that in college and when I first went to graduate school I wasn’t focusing on Africa, I knew that it was something that I wanted to do. I switched tracks in graduate school and began to focus strictly on Africa.
Lisa: It’s an interesting thing to hear you say “I don’t really know why this happened but I know that it existed,” and then I went back to this and really believing that there was a reason for this resonance. Because I think so many of us feel drawn to something and because we can’t logically explain it, maybe we discount it more than we should. How is it that you somehow manage to stay with that strong connection?
Aimee: In some ways it was almost like a yearning which may sound a little bit strange. I loved what I studied when I first went to graduate school but when I wad focusing on 20th century art I was most interested in the modernist artists who were connected to and influenced by African art. I was still holding that connection there and I knew when I finished that part of graduate school that I did not want to continue in those fields. I absolutely wanted to move on and study Africa and it was. It was like a yearning. In some ways, I think that it was also a yearning and I had never visited Africa, any African country, but it was a yearning to actually be there and to study what was there and when I first went on a dissertation looking for my dissertation topic research trip, as soon as I landed in Tanzania and got off the plane and smelled the smell, it was like, “Okay, this is it.” There was something that just felt really right about being there.
Lisa: When you first came to Maine, I’m not sure what the timing was exactly but I think it was probably a significantly whiter state. It’s not a particularly non-white state now but we have really been blessed by people from Somalia, people from other parts of Africa who have come to Maine and I wonder how that feels for you to show up and have it be pretty Caucasian to now finally having some people that bear some resemblance to something that you feel attached to.
Aimee: The way that the state has diversified has been so exciting and has also been one of those parts of Maine that we love and has kept us here. When we moved, we were concerned that we were moving to and I think by the last census, we moved here in 1998 and by that last census, it had been declared as the least diverse state in the country. We had concerns about that and it was exciting to see the influx of people coming from Somalia, Sudan, Rwanda, Burundi, parts of the Congo and I was just telling a friend in Tanzania, they were asking me if I get to use my Swahili often in Maine, and I said, “Actually I do.” I have boldly entered conversations, most recently it was at the post office, at the Forest Avenue post office, I overheard two mean speaking Swahili and I went up and I said, “I’m so sorry. I don’t want to be rude but I …” I started speaking with them and they were so welcoming and kind and so happy to hear someone speaking Swahili. Of course I completely embarrassed my kids. It’s not uncommon that I have people around town who I can speak Swahili with which is exciting for me.
Lisa: How do you think that having people from Somalia or Rwanda, Burundi, how do you think that that is influencing Maine now, influencing Portland, Lewiston, and even other parts of Maine?
Aimee: Wow, that is a good and interesting question. All of the communities are adding so much to our state. We’re a state that’s had a long history of immigrants coming in, of Franco-Americans coming in and now we have an influx of many people coming from different African countries and I think it just adds to this great texture of our state.
Lisa: You have this interesting connection with the African diaspora. Talk to me a little bit about that because we’ve specifically talked about Africa but obviously people from Africa are now all over the world and sometimes were forcibly removed from that country and taken to other parts of the world. How has that impacted you?
Aimee: I see that really thriving African diaspora here in Maine. It has not been a large part of my research but another part of my research has focused on a Tanzanian and specifically Sacuma culture diaspora in Denmark and I see similarities between that diaspora and the diaspora coming here too. It’s been very interesting to see the diaspora here in Maine.
Lisa: When I think about people who are several generations removed from Africa, their families were part of the slave culture in the southern part of the United States, I wonder what they have kept with them. I wonder what they have kept with them from Africa, the culture, just the emotional connection. Do you have any sense of that?
Aimee: I think there’s always that deep emotional connection and I think even whether we’re recognizing that or not, memories of places that we’ve come from are there and even for that next generation, they might be there to some level. I know that there’s also ways that kids who are growing up here may want to take another path that’s less traditional than that of their parents and that sometimes can create conflict in families. There’s very strong heritage that comes with people and also those very difficult memories.
Lisa: I remember when we interviewed Peter Behrens who is a local author and he wrote about Ireland and he wrote about starvation and my family, part of it, came from Ireland and it has always fascinated me, the possibility of that imprinting, that maybe I don’t specifically remember starvation but what is it in my genetics or what is it in my upbringing that carries shadows from that past and from that leaving of that country? I wonder if that’s even a possibility for people who are several generations removed from Africa.
Aimee: Oh, I think absolutely. Absolutely. It’s many of the people who are here have experienced very traumatic lives before coming. In some way, their kids or maybe their kids’ kids, it’s hard to say what is actually held emotionally but it’s still there. It still can be there.
Lisa: We ask people who come in what their favorite places in Maine are, their favorite place in Maine is. You had a hard time narrowing it down. You actually said Long Pond in Acadia, Old Port any time of day, Scarborough Beach, Winter Walks, Kezar Lake, Five Islands on a hot summer night, Mt. Katahdin, Lisbon Street in Lewiston, the whole state … You like it all. These are all very different and some of them are fairly specific times of year. Are these related to memories? Is it the sense of place itself? Tell me about that.
Aimee: I loved seeing the question and as I was looking at I thought, “Oh wait, I can’t pick just one.” I just took a deep breath and went very stream of consciousness. I’ve had so many beautiful dog walks out at Scarborough Beach when it’s completely empty this past winter. That was just magical, to stand there and just take deep breaths in that cold air and there’s so many places in the state. I couldn’t pick just one.
Then I was thinking about just walking. We live in the West End in Portland and just walking downtown, walking to the Old Port, any time of year, any time of day, feels so special to me. It really was hard to narrow it down. I have so many and I think we as a family have so many happy memories of different parts of the state and there are some parts of the state that we realize we haven’t explored enough with our kids. We’ve talked about even just taking other trips around the state because there’s still so much more left to explore and I know those would make my list of favorites too. It’s just too hard to pick a favorite.
Lisa: I feel the same way. I don’t know that somebody could ask me, “What’s your favorite part of Maine,” because I’d say, “What time of year? What exactly are you looking for?” I think that’s one of the things that I really love about Maine. There’s such a diversity of experience that’s possible. We’re very lucky. We absolutely are.
This is I guess a completely random question but do you see any connection between the visual arts that arise out of Africa and the visual arts that have arisen out of this state? Is there any kind of relevance of one to the other?
Aimee: That is such an interesting question. I don’t feel any real connections between the two visually, aesthetically, I don’t feel connections but I think there are definitely connections that could be made of people painting or photographing or working on things that inspire them. I see artists in Tanzania or East Africa working on creative issues that inspire them the same way that artists here are doing that. I think that’s the one connection I could make but visually, not a lot of resonance.
Lisa: It does seem as though where you’ve described all of these places that you feel very connected to in the state and I know many people have the same response. If there is some passion, some sensual connection, and then I wonder if the same is true in Africa and Tanzania for example. I wonder if there is something big and bubbly that causes people to really be willing to jump in and explore things that are more artistic.
Aimee: Absolutely.
Lisa: I know it’s a random question. Sometimes I like to ask the random questions and see where they go. These last few years I know you’ve been very busy with your teaching and with the Africa Schoolhouse and you have children who are 15 and 17?
Aimee: 18.
Lisa: 18. I know that many of us, as our kids hit that final stretch, it causes us to return back to things that maybe we always wanted to explore, it strengthens things that were important to us. What does that look like for you?
Aimee: That is also a really good question. I think that it’s been one of the things that feels really exciting is that it’s been really wonderful to work on Africa Schoolhouse and work on the projects, building this girls’ school and also being able to involve our kids in that too and to have them connect and they’re helping brainstorm how we’re using social media. We were teaching the girls at the girls’ school how to use Instagram so that they could be instagramming photos and we could actually be sharing them also. Doing things like that is really exciting.
In terms of what that looks like in that phase as kids are in the, you put it really nicely, kids are in that phase where their last few years at home before college. I think even … Maybe this is just at this point in my life part. I’m not sure if this is the question you are asking but it’s meant also more grounding, more being at home to just enjoy time with them. Taking time to do small trips as a family and really enjoying every moment. Our daughter is headed to college in the fall and every moment feels very precious right now. Really, really special.
Lisa: I feel exactly the same way. I have children who are 22 and 20 and 15 and so I think when the first one was getting ready to graduate, I started to … Actually, it was probably two years before he graduated. I started to feel acutely that my relationship was going to change with him. It’s really interesting, it’s really interesting that we grow with these other human beings in our lives and that they never stop being our children but the way that they are our children and the way that we are their parents is very significantly different. I really enjoyed this conversation and I think it’s been worth the five years we’ve waited to get you on the show. The time must have been right. We’ve been speaking with Aimee Bessire, who is a teacher and co-founder of the Africa Schoolhouse and so many other things. I really appreciate your coming in and having a conversation with me today.
Aimee: Thank you so much for having me. This was really fun.