Picasso, I Want My Face Back

by Grace Nichols

Art, landscape and memory are interwoven strands in the fabric of Grace Nichols' Picasso, I Want My Face Back. The collection opens with a long poem in the voice of Dora Maar, who, as Picasso's muse and mistress, was the inspiration for his iconic painting, "The Weeping Woman". The poems are almost interlocking reflections that echo the cubistic manner of the painting and allow us to enter the shifting surfaces of Dora Maar's mind and her journey of self reclamation.

Genres: Poetry

63 pages, Paperback

First published October 10, 2009

About the author

Grace Nichols was born in Georgetown, Guyana, in 1950 and grew up in a small country village on the Guyanese coast. She moved to the city with her family when she was eight, an experience central to her first novel, Whole of a Morning Sky (1986), set in 1960s Guyana in the middle of the country's struggle for independence.

She worked as a teacher and journalist and, as part of a Diploma in Communications at the University of Guyana, spent time in some of the most remote areas of Guyana, a period that influenced her writings and initiated a strong interest in Guyanese folk tales, Amerindian myths and the South American civilisations of the Aztec and Inca. She has lived in the UK since 1977.

Her first poetry collection, I is a Long-Memoried Woman, was published in 1983. The book won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and a subsequent film adaptation of the book was awarded a gold medal at the International Film and Television Festival of New York. The book was also dramatised for radio by the BBC. Subsequent poetry collections include The Fat Black Woman's Poems (1984), Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Woman (1989), and Sunris (1996). She also writes books for children, inspired predominantly by Guyanese folklore and Amerindian legends, including Come on into My Tropical Garden (1988) and Give Yourself a Hug (1994). Everybody Got A Gift (2005) includes new and selected poems, and her collection, Startling the Flying Fish (2006), contains poems which tell the story of the Caribbean.



Her latest books are Picasso, I Want My Face Back (2009); and I Have Crossed an Ocean: Selected Poems (2010).


Grace Nichols lives in England with her partner, the poet John Agard.

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars rounded up
This is another very good volume of poems by the Guyanese poet Grace Nichols. The first poem in the collection relates to the book cover, a reproduction of Picasso’s weeping woman. The portrait was of Dora Maar, a surrealist photographer, who was his muse and lover at one time. This is an ekphrastic poem which gives Maar a critical voice and she becomes subject rather than object. Nichols give her an agency which she does not have, her own history is unlocked. Here is a selection from the poem put together by the Guardian:
2
Even my hat mocks me
laughing
on the inside of my grief –
My twisted mouth
and gnashing teeth,
my fingers fat and clumsy
as if they were still wearing
those gloves –
the bloodstained ones you keep.
What has happened
to the pupils
of my eyes, Picasso?
Why do I deserve
such deformity?
What am I now
if not a cross between
a clown and a broken
piece of crockery?
3
But I am famous.
People recognise me
despite my fractures.
I'm no Mona Lisa
(how I'd like to wipe
the smugness from her face
that still captivates.)
Doesn't she know that art, great art,
needn't be an oil-painting?
I am a magnet
not devoid of beauty.
I am an icon
of twentieth-century grief.
A symbol
of compositional possibilities
My tears are tears of happiness –
big rolling diamonds.
14
Picasso, I want my face back
the unbroken photography of it
Once I lived to be stroked
by the fingers of your brushes
Now I see I was more an accomplice
to my own unrooting
Watching the pundits gaze
open-mouthed at your masterpieces
While I hovered like a battered muse
my private grief made public.
15
Dora, Theodora, be reasonable, if it weren't for Picasso
you'd hardly be remembered at all.
He's given you an unbelievable shelf-life.
Yes, but who will remember the fruits of my own life?
I am no moth flitting around his wick.
He might be a genius but he's also a prick –
Medusa, Cleopatra, help me find my inner bitch,
wasn't I christened Henriette Theodora Markovitch?
Picasso, I want my face back
the unbroken geography of it.
The rest of the poems are much briefer and consider art, landscape and memory (as the blurb says. A number about laughter, some about travel (I vaguely remember travel), some relating to events (the Iraq war for example). They are all good and are better listened to than read: plenty of examples on You Tube, but Weeping Woman is a great poem.

[Jacqueline · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dora Maar: Colonized by Picasso
A Review of the Poem, "Picasso: I Want My Face Back" by Grace Nichols
Award-winning feminist writer, Grace Nichols, born in the South American nation and former British colony of Guyana, immigrated to the United Kingdom in 1977. She brought with her a wealth of knowledge of Afro-Caribbean and Amerindian folklore, which she easily infuses into her writing, along with a dash of macaronic language for dramatic effect. It is easy to see why Nichols is comfortable writing from a multicultural perspective. Her insightful poetry celebrates many aspects of being a woman ("Grace Nichols") and is loaded with historical and religious themes. Grace Nichols took on the project of writing the 2009 poem, "Picasso: I Want My Face Back," after serving a residency at London's Tate Gallery (Rumens). She was intrigued with the painting called "The Weeping Woman," based on a scene from Picasso's famous mural, Guernica, of a woman and child in the aftermath of the bombing of the town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War (Tate). Dora Maar, his lover and muse modeled for the painting and Grace Nichols wanted to hear Maar's side of the story ("Grace Nichols").
The "de-colonisation movements of the 1960s and 1970s in Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America" prompted increased academic analysis of literature (Jyotsna) to unearth the social and cultural impact of early modern European social conventions on the lives of the people of colonized nations (Jyotsna). Nichols reimagined Pablo Picasso's painting into a living, breathing individual with feelings, concerned about the face she involuntarily shows the world. Maar was a "recognized photographer and a well-known" surrealist artist (Riding). The disfiguring of her face and hands, her best features (Caws), leaves her unable to work, rendering her dependent, just as colonization left the natives of the colonies dependent on colonists after depriving them not only of their environment, but also their families and culture. A deep reading of Grace Nichol's "Picasso: I Want My Face Back" demonstrates that the poem is a story of the colonization of Dora Maar, first in the violent way in which he captured Maar, then by imposing his culture on her and, finally, leaving her devoid of sense of self.
Nichols allows Maar, the victim, to tell her story as a first-person omniscient narrator. The violent start of the poem tumbles the story into a dark mood. Maars listens to what could be the comments of the gallery visitors attempting to decipher the meaning behind the painting and wondering what could have prompted the artist to paint a woman's face in such a disfigured way. She states that the gossip by the visitors is that "…instead of a brush, he used a knife on me." (1.1-2). This line is punctuated by the phrase "a savage geometry" (1.3) which speaks to the colonization of her face geometrically into an unrecognizable, disorderly native of another land. Nichols foreshadows the rising action in the poem in the next line when Maar's reveals that "This is the closest anyone has got to the pain." Maar could be commenting on her tumultuous relationship with the painter, a womanizer who "ended their relationship... leaving her to live he life as a depressed recluse… in the shadow of the image [he] crated for her" (Riding). Per Riding's article, "Dora Maar, a Muse of Picasso, is Dead at 89," "as… Maar's stormy relationship with Picasso deteriorated, she was increasingly portrayed in a cruel and tragic light." The structure of the poem is erratic, just as her relationship with Picasso. The painter, with calculated precision, manipulated each part of Maar's face to satisfy himself, just as the colonists manipulated the natives of the colonies to conform to their ways, eliminating what they identified as savage behaviors.
Maar goes on to detail the ways in which Picasso colonizes her face and hands by "twisting [her] mouth," (2.1) an act that would distort her speech, so that she would sound as if speaking a foreign tongue. He "gnash[es] her teeth," (2.2) like a wild animal, ready to attack. He deforms her fingers, making them "fat" (2.3), which characterizes her as clumsy. Maar reveals that the artist saved her "bloodstained [gloves]" (2.5), as if to use as evidence to show proof to his comrades back on the continent that he indeed captured natives. The reference here is to the gloves Maar wore when the couple first met. They were blood-stained because he stabbed her hand with a knife, causing it to bleed though the glove and kept the glove as memorabilia of their meeting ("Marie-Therese Walter"). This is a representation of the artist violently capturing Maar with a knife as his weapon, physically, and mentally, with his paintbrush and canvas. The violent artwork relates to their violent beginning as well as to the characteristic ways in which the colonists used weapons to dominate natives in foreign lands.
In stanza 2, Maar confronts Picasso head-on demanding that he explain what took place why she "deserves [this] deformity" (3.14). The questioning alludes to the natives realizing that they are oppressed slaves, thus they began questioning their captors and mobilizing to regain their independence and control over their nations. In removing Maar's pupils, Picasso intends to disable her, thus gaining full control of her, and eliminating any thought of her gaining independence. This exemplifies the inhumane physical violence suffered by the colonized, particularly when they attempted to resist their state of enslavement. Religion also played into the extraction of the pupils. In addition, removal of her pupils also has religious connotations, since the colonists believed the "indigenous people had no soul" (Grosfoguel) and needed to be converted to Christianity to be saved. She asks Picasso, "Why do I deserve such deformity… to be a cross between a clown… and crockery" (2.13-18). Picasso attempts to discourage the viewers of the painting from admiring Maar for her intellect, particularly when she is a domestic creature. This is consistent with the behavior of men towards successful women like Maar throughout the twentieth-century.
Independent women were a threat to men's progress and masculinity, because it meant that men would have to compete with them in the public arena, a venue which traditionally belonged to them alone. Picasso's violent disfiguration of Maar was his intent to destroy her character publicly. Maar, however, found victory in her pain, reaffirming who she is by saying, "Dora, Theodora…" and with fresh new eyes, realizes that Picasso "gave her… an unbelievable shelf-life" (15.3), and has made her famous… "despite [her] fractures" (3.1-3). She realizes that she is even more powerful as a historical figure representing women. Nichols is making a statement on the image of woman as created by a male-dominated society and how women have worked tirelessly to shed these stereotypes.
In stanza 15, Maar, determined to gain her self-respect, and shed the weeping woman persona given to her by Picasso, calls on powerful iconic women of history, like the mythical Medusa and the goddess, Cleopatra (14.7), to give her their strength, or as she puts it "my inner bitch" (15.7) to get her "face back" (15.9). Women have transformed from the role of silent domestic creature, enslaved by restrictive male-imposed rules and "icon[s] of twentieth-century grief" (3.13) to a vision of independent women, like Maar, demanding that men rectify the damage they have caused and return to her intelligent self, her beauty… her culture. A deep reading of Grace Nichol's "Picasso: I Want My Face Back" demonstrates that the poem, "Picasso: I Want My Face Back" is a story of Picasso's colonization of Dora Maar, first in the violent way he captured her, making he his lover and muse, then by imposing his culture on her by essentially butchering her character, calling her a "Weeping Woman," and, finally, by leaving her devoid of sense of self, destroying her beauty and intellect, in Pierre Renoir's words, by painting her with his prick ("Oxford Treasury of Sayings and Quotations").
 
Works Cited
"A Famous Artist Who Became A Suspect." PBS. Public Broadcasting Service, n.d. Web. 03 May 2017.
Grosfoguel, Ramon, "The multiple Faces of Islamaphobia." Islamaphobia Studies Journal, Spring 2016, Volume 3.2 (2016):12. Print.
Fulford, Robert. "Picasso's Dark Muse Dora Maar: Elegant but Just Slightly Dangerous." National Post. N.p., n.d. Web. 03 May 2017.Hl11. "Children's Literature Interest Group: Interview with Grace Nichols." Children's Hudson, Mark. "Pablo Picasso: Women Are Either Goddesses or Doormats." The Telegraph. Telegraph Media Group, 08 Apr. 2016. Web. 03 May 2017.
Literature Interest Group: Interview with Grace Nichols — University of Leicester. N.p., 01 Oct. 2013. Web. 03 May 2017.
"Marie-Therese Walter." History of Art: Pablo Picasso. N.p., n.d. Web. 05 May 2017.
"Oxford Treasury of Sayings and Quotations." Google Books. Ed. Susan Ratcliffe. Oxford University Press, 2011. Web. 05 May 2017.
Riding, Alan. "Dora Maar, a Muse of Picasso, Is Dead at 89." The New York Times. The New York Times, 25 July 1997. Web. 03 May 2017.
Rumens, Carol. "Poem of the Week: Weeping Woman by Grace Nichols." The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 14 Dec. 2009. Web. 03 May 2017.
Singh, Jyotsna. "Post-colonial Reading of The Tempest." The British Library. The British Library, 24 Feb. 2016. Web. 05 May 2017.
Tate. "Weeping Woman, Pablo Picasso 1937." Tate. N.p., n.d. Web. 05 May 2017.

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

They say that instead of a brush
he used a knife on me -
a savage geometry.
But I say, look again,
this is the closest
anyone has got to the pain.

Green knows me -
Not the green of new shoots
but the ghastly green of gangrene.
Yellow knows me -
Not the cheery yellow of the sun
but the sickly hues
of this war's putrefaction.
Blue knows me -
Not the boundless blues of sky or sea
but the blues of the singer's
deepest sorrow.

Mother Dolorosa
this grief has got to me.
Under the poise of my red hat
I hear, as if from a great
distance,
my own stifled scream.

- Weeping Woman, 1, pg.

* * *

Even farmhouses -
mossy-thatched, arthritic, had wind
of your brushstrokes daring -

So did every cornfield and wheatfield
and every sinewy blade, rejoicing the recoiling
under the steady passion of your gaze

Vincent who leaves us inwardly agape
Vincent of the starry nights and crows
Vincent of the bandaged ear -

And no money. And no idea
that sunflowers - beloved yellows
would cost millions one day.

- Van Gogh, pg. 32

* * *

A boo aimed
at the impossible stars?

The frozen O
of a mock-horror laugh?

Or just a man
caught in the vortex of the void
screaming at the red midwife of sky?

- Munch's Scream, pg. 39

[Tanya · Rating 3 out of 5]

O England
Hedge-bound as Larkin
Omnivorous as Shakespeare.
[from 'Outward from Hull']

I'd previously encountered the 'Weeping Woman' poem for which the collection is named, though couldn't recall where: it may have been when it was Poem of the Week in the Guardian, in December 2009. The poem-sequence is effectively a monologue by Dora Maar, Picasso's lover and the model for Weeping Woman: I do remember being struck by the line 'He might be a genius but he's also a prick'.

I find it challenging to review a collection of poetry, especially one as wide-ranging as this: Nichols interweaves art, landscape, memory and the female experience -- the latter especially in the 'Laughing Woman' series of poems -- and gives voices to subjects and objects as diverse as Ophelia, the Empire State Building and Tracy Emin's Bed. Her snapshots of life are vivid (for instance, a poem about how to cross a road in Delhi) and her evocation of a trip into the interior of Guyana, where she was born, makes me crave an experience I've never had. I think my favourite in this collection, though, is the title track, the shifting tone and perspective of Dora Maar celebrating and bemoaning her fame, and reclaiming her self.

Fulfils the 'Poetry Collection by a Black Woman' prompt for the Reading Women Challenge 2021.

[Hesa Almheiri · Rating 4 out of 5]

Art, personal history, historical events and laughter
If I had to simplify the arrangement of the book it would be in that form
But that is too simple and unjust, to look at a painting and hear it speak, to look at a window to find safety and to think of laughter and say Woman!
The poems were short and the language was easy, some of the pieces were fun to read and made me smile
The opening poem "Weeping woman" is the most memorable piece in the book which I liked the most
I tried writing poetry based on art pieces at a museum but this is the first time that I read it

[arimoanga · Rating 4 out of 5]

i watched nichols perform "advice on crossing a street in delhi"; every enunciation, rhythm, enjambement was vocally punctuated, further wrapping her poetry as a daring, beautiful and relevant work. everything about reclaiming women through men's abstract arts, arts that capture women, commodify them, sell them post-humously for more aristocratic men to fawn over like a panopticon; i truly adore nichol's poetic form.

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a lovely poetry book! I finished it so quickly. Grace Nichol’s writing style is so authentic and fresh. The arrangement of the poems is beautiful. If you hate Picasso, read this.

[Octavia · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is so beautifully written.
If you know, you know.

[zo · Rating 3 out of 5]

j’ai rien compris je me sens bête la poésie demande une sensibilité que je n’ai pas ou alors je suis idiote peut-être allé bisou

[Jonathan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't realise this was a book of poetry until after I bought it. I only bought it for the title, which is a winner. Having said that, some of the poems aren't terrible.