Ta Voix

Did you ever imagine that one of your daughters would be looking at your art ten thousand years later? Did you ever think that she would be standing there, imagining your eyes, the shape of your smile, or the way you laughed? Could you have seen her, trying to imagine your ochre-stained hands move against the striated rock, wondering why they were creating what they did?

Perhaps, the ability, or even the desire, to imagine the past is a privilege for those of us living in modern times, who have so much of it in our midst to discover, access, and learn from. For you, though, your today was all that mattered, for tomorrow, with its inherent uncertainties, just did not and could not exist.

On a sunny January morning this year, wandering amid the large, hulking, sculptured rocks that once gave you shelter, I found myself compelled to jigsaw together your existence. You were initially a stranger, many, many millennia removed – and yet, you increasingly became more familiar with each further step I took into the landscape that you called home thousands of years ago.

I recalled reading the other day that the first cave artist was most likely a woman, challenging the popular historical opinion that the earliest cave artists were men, due to the predominance of hunting and game depictions in the art discovered so far. And so I found myself wondering: indeed, why is it that only a man could have drawn game? Why couldn’t a woman have done so, too?

I imagine you glimpsing the surrounding landscape day after day: the constantly changing skies, the wild creatures inhabiting the forests, and the trees themselves, some leafless, some containing unbuttoned buds, within them new beginnings. I see you sitting cross-legged below the rock overhang, rocking the baby to sleep, abstracting pigment out of the surrounding the red rock. I imagine you first drawing the lines in your head before transliterating them upon the canvas most easily accessible to you: the rock. You initially liked to draw horses but sometimes you drew turtles or monkeys too. When the rains arrived and the peacock would flaunt its many-eyed costume, you once spent an entire day drawing that too. It was only after you became a mother for the first time that you started to draw figures: a heavily pregnant mother, round as the distant hills, the entwined hands of a mother and child playing with one another.

You drew whatever you saw and remembered: it did not occur to you to need permission, to ask what or whether you could draw. You would fortunately lack the prescience to know that generations later men would silence your daughters’ voices, insistent on subsuming them on their own. You would not know that these men would decide what your daughters were permitted to create or even if they could create in the first place. You would not know either, that they even would even try to bury your voice, too.

But I like to think that you were the person who made the first ever painting – and in the journey of doing so, you set alight the first verse of a story that would lengthen and become richer over time. Women were not just the first artists; they were the first storytellers too. While the men were away on hunt for days, the women gathered around the fire every night, cradling their babies and children, telling and listening to stories. They told stories about the crescent and fattening moon: who would know better than them the ways of the moon? They told stories about the dying female boar, shedding tears about for its babies who howled nearby, hidden in bushes, knowing their mother took her last breaths. And they told stories about the trees, the ones who flowered every year, the ones who didn’t.

I peered at the art, marvelling how its ochre and chalky hues and their strong, defined lines have survived millennia of rushing water, expanding heat, and contracting cold. I studied the rock canvas, observing and touching it, but only briefly, for my plastic and concrete world was soon calling for my return. For you, though, the rocks were much more than just your shelter from rain or cold or scathing sunlight. It was the rocks that you made your pigment out of. It was rocks who were your canvas. They were the firm, immutable constants of your precariously fragile world, where every minute contained within it a harbinger of potential, unwelcome change: a wild elephant trampling down the father of your child or a disease decimating many of your clan members. The rock, however, would always be there.

Time would have been as precious for you as it would be for your daughters in the distant, telescoped future. Like them, you too would have created in the interstices of the hours marking the day. You usually drew soon after daybreak but, sometimes, when everyone else was asleep and you were still awake, you drew by the full moon’s light as well. The moon watched you as you made outlines, coloured them in, and finally went to sleep underneath the art you had made. When the saffron sunlight flooded your shelter at dawn, you would sit up and gaze at the art, thinking the moonlight was as good a guide as the daylight.

The figures you drew during the night seemed to have walked out of your dreams and onto the rock. One day, when you were old, wrinkled, and knew your days were coming to an end, you would tell a story about them: the art, the night, and your dreams. But even so, when you finally bid farewell to the world, you could not have possibly imagined that one of your daughters from many, many generations to come would come searching for your art. And having now discovered it, she would spend her days afterward piecing together your story, painting by painting, wondering what it was that you so urgently wanted to tell.