The Muse Looks Back: Black British Womanhood, Memory, and the Reclamation of Creative Authorship
- Zhakiya Sowah
- 5 days ago
- 10 min read
Reimagining musehood through the lens of Black British womanhood: a journey from imposed projection to self-knowing, creative authorship, and embodied memory.
As a writer and curator of stories for Khads Ark Magazine, I have spent years tracing the contours of other people’s creativity. I am listening to their visions, witnessing their processes, and attempting to translate their artistry into words. In doing so, I have often encountered a tension between admiration and distance: the desire to capture the brilliance of another while knowing that some aspects of their creation remain beyond my reach. Yet in tracing these artistic journeys, I have begun to reflect on the spaces we occupy as observers, and on the ways the figure of the muse that is so often idealised, eroticised, or silenced mirrors the complexities of my own creative self.
‘Women’s prevalence within art has largely been through their perceived image, and there is a question of whether the muse can ever really be separated from its reductive and passive nature.’ (Berger, 2008, p.47).
The figure of the muse has long occupied a paradoxical position in the history of art and literature: celebrated as the generative source of creativity yet consigned to silence within the works she is said to inspire. Traditionally imagined as an external, feminine presence, the muse has been placed at a distance from authorship. Her value is measured by the art that her image purportedly enables. However, this distance is not neutral. It encodes relations of gender, power, and race, which historically have rendered the muse as a passive and often eroticised body rather than an agent of creation.
In the context of Britain, this eroticisation and silencing took an institutional form. British cinema’s earliest roots in ethnographic and anthropological filmmaking carried a colonial logic that positioned the Black and brown female body as a spectacle. One that was exotic and available for the Western gaze. These films were proverbially known as truth documentaries but were in practice acts of projection. The ethnographic camera is doing exactly what the painter’s brush has done before by transforming living women into objects of fascination and distance. This has been sedimented into the visual culture modern Black British women have inherited. Seen but not known and unheard.
It’s worth noting that if the muse has been externalised and muted, she can also be reimagined. Lou Andreas-Salomé’s concept of “creative narcissism” points toward a different model of musehood: one in which reflection and self-knowledge become the sources of artistic power. Her theory is rooted in a re-reading of the myth of Narcissus as a self-knower who discovers creative energy within. This model acquires particular urgency when reframed through the figure of the Black woman. For the Black female creative, musehood is freighted with histories of misogynoir, fetishisation, and racialised projection. Histories she must reckon with and reckon through. To speak of a “self-knowing Black muse” is to insist on the reclamation of authorship, a radical collapsing of the distance between artist, subject, and spectator.
I will trace that reconfiguration across three movements. First, I will consider the role of distance in the construction of the muse and its entanglement with racialised gendered hierarchies. Second, I will explore how memory, water, and reflection offer resources for articulating a self-knowing musehood, through Julie Dash’s Four Women, Salomé’s creative narcissism, and mythic figures such as Mnemosyne and Lethe. Finally, I will turn to the Black female creative herself, offering a vision of the self-knowing Black muse as a figure of embodied agency, memory, and authorship.
Act I — Distance: The Myth of the Muse
Indeed, throughout art history women have played the role of a model objectified and reduced to the performance of appearance. As John Berger famously wrote on the subject; ‘men act, and women appear’ (Berger, 2008, p.47).
It is worth noting that Berger wrote from within the British tradition, his gaze shaped by the National Gallery and the BBC. These are the very institutions that have historically marginalised Black women's presence both as artists and as subjects. To cite him here is not deference but reclamation: turning the tools of the British canon toward its own blind spots.
Distance is the precondition of the muse’s traditional function. It is the gap that transforms a woman into a symbol, enabling the artist to project meaning onto her body without recognising her subjectivity. This distance manifests across cultural forms: in the studio, where the nude is posed as an inert surface for the artist’s imagination; in the museum, where objects are displayed behind glass, staged as silent vessels for interpretation; and in the broader history of art, where women are made to appear while men act, as John Berger observed. The muse becomes a figure of stillness that is visible but voiceless and she is aestheticised but never is she acknowledged as a co-creator.
The studies Encountering the Muse and Martha Gane’s The Myth of the Muse illuminate this logic from different angles. Encountering the Muse welcomes us into the context of a museum, where inspiration arises precisely because of the separation between visitor and artefact. Visitors overlay their own stories, memories, and associations onto objects that are silent, framed, and withheld from direct contact. One participant reflects that a pastel by Siqueiros reminded her of friends, politics, and even Disney films, which are connections forged not by the artwork’s voice but by the visitor’s projection. The muse operates analogously and her silence permits the artist to project desires and fantasies that turn her body into a canvas for meaning.
In The Myth of the Muse, Gane situates this mechanism within the history of art, showing how women have been inscribed as muses through objectification and erasure. Whether in Gauguin’s fetishisation of Polynesian women or the Surrealists’ exaltation of women as “dream figures,” the dynamic is consistent: the muse is a spectacle of absence, her identity consumed by the artist’s fantasy. What appears as inspiration is sustained by structural inequalities such as colonialism, patriarchy, and racial hierarchy. A structure that renders women, especially Black women, as available surfaces for projection. The myth of the solitary male genius depends on this asymmetry: his creative autonomy is built upon the silenced labour and erased subjectivity of the muse.
To acknowledge this distance is to confront the complicity it demands of audiences. The spectator, positioned within the triangular relation of artist–muse–viewer, is invited to see the muse only through the artist’s framing. In doing so, they become complicit in the erasure of her subjectivity, consuming the aestheticised body without hearing the voice that animates it. Distance, then, is not merely a condition of projection; it is a mechanism of power that structures who gets to create, who is seen, and who is silenced.
For the Black woman, this distance is intensified by racialised forms of eroticisation and fetishisation. The “dusky maiden” trope in colonial painting, the sexualised archetypes of popular culture, and the persistent reduction of Black womanhood to hypervisibility without voice all mark the ways distance intersects with misogynoir. Her body becomes both overexposed and unheard, both centrepiece and absent. To reclaim musehood under such conditions requires a profound subversion: collapsing the very distance that sustains projection, and turning the gaze inward to find the source of creation within.
This subversion points toward a different musehood. Not the externalised figure who inspires another’s art, but the self-knower who generates her own.
Act II — Musehood: Memory, Water, and the Self-Knower
If distance defines the traditional muse, memory destabilises it. Where distance demands silence, memory insists on continuity. A continuous threading of past and present, body and voice. To reimagine musehood through memory is to shift from the figure of absence to one of presence, from the externalised muse to the self-knowing subject.
Julie Dash’s Four Women offers a powerful and deliberate instance of this reconfiguration. The short film features Linda Martina Young as four Black women, Saffronia, Sweet Thing, Peaches, and Aunt Sarah, embodying archetypes of Black femininity set to Nina Simone’s haunting voice. Crucially, they do not speak directly to the camera but what I love about this film is that their silence is not muzzling. Simone's disembodied historical voice is reanimated through the dancer's body, finding flesh and presence again in Young's movement. The archive breathes.
The muse speaks through the sensitivity and precision of movement that take enduring stereotypes of Black womanhood and rotates them to destabilised critical angles. Dash does not discard these stereotypes; Young inhabits them with such deliberate, interior fullness that their colonial architecture becomes visible and exposed. The muse herself is no longer externalised but instead the very impositions that were built around her are. The archetypes are held outward, examined, and refused their original function. She steps out from inside the projection.
Dash places us as viewers, in the position of witness rather than voyeur, collapsing the triangular structure of artist–muse–spectator that we identified in Act I as the mechanism of erasure. Unlike the mute muse of classical myth and British colonial film, these four figures are not surfaces for projection but vessels of lived experience. They transform Simone's voice into embodied testimony. They collapse the separation between voice and body, subject and muse. In doing so, Dash enacts the first principle of a self-knowing Black musehood: that the body which has been the object of the gaze can become the origin of its own meaning. Here, memory animates and insists that Black womanhood cannot be reduced to silence or distance.
A parallel and distinctly British instance of this reconfiguration can be found in Michaela Coel's I May Destroy You. Where Dash works through movement and archetype, Coel works through the raw, non-linear grammar of traumatic memory. The series, which Coel wrote, directed, and starred in, enacts the very collapsing of distance. She is simultaneously artist, subject, and muse, refusing the separation that traditional musehood demands. Arabella, her protagonist, does not recover memory as a smooth and continuous thread but gathers it in fragments, flashes, ruptures, partial images that accumulate into a reckoning. Coel's creative act is itself an act of embodied testimony, transforming the most violating form of projection, through the non-consensual claim on another's body, into art authored entirely on her own terms. Like Dash's four women, she insists that Black womanhood cannot be reduced to silence or distance. But she goes further: she makes the act of remembering itself the form of the work.
Memory is so beautiful in the way that it unsettles the myth of the muse. I’d like to explore it through its deep association with water. In Greek mythology, Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory and mother of the Muses, is often depicted through lakes, sites of stillness and reflection. Her counterpart, Lethe, the river of forgetting, embodies the opposite: restless movement, the washing away of memory into oblivion. This contrast is instructive. The lake holds, it gathers, it reflects; the river flows, disperses, and erases. The muses, born of Mnemosyne, inherit not silence but recollection. To remember is to gather fragments, to make still the waters of history long enough for reflection, and then to reconfigure those fragments into art.
Lou Andreas-Salomé’s re-reading of Narcissus offers a way of understanding this act of stillness as creative power. Narcissus, in her account, does not perish in the surface of his reflection but plunges into it, discovering within himself a source of generative energy. The reflective surface of the lake becomes a portal into depth rather than a trap of vanity. What destroys the Narcissus of myth is his misrecognition and the belief that his reflection is an Other to be seized. What animates Salomé’s Narcissus is the recognition that the image is his own, and that in turning inward, he finds authorship.
Coel's I May Destroy You enacts precisely this plunge. In wading through her own traumatic memory and transforming it into art, she does not perish in the surface of projection but passes through it. She discovers within herself a generative and sovereign creative force. The show's fragmented structure mirrors Mnemosyne's gathering of still waters. Not erasure, not forgetting, but the slow, deliberate work of recollection made form.
For the Black female creative, Salomé's plunge carries a specifically political charge. The overdetermination of her image functions precisely as Lethe does. It’s a current that carries self-definition away, replacing it with someone else's meaning. This extends past cultural misrepresentation to the structural erasure of interiority, the same mechanism Act I identified in the colonial camera and the externalised muse. To look into the water and see herself as self-defined is therefore not a private act of self-care but a counter-archival intervention. A refusal to let the river have her. Mnemosyne's lake offers what Lethe denies. The stillness in which fragments of suppressed history, embodied knowledge, and inherited creativity can be gathered, held, and reconfigured into form. To plunge into this stillness is to author from memory rather than from absence and to reject the role of muse as projection surface and claim instead the position of origin.
Taken together, Dash’s Four Women, Mnemosyne, and Salomé’s Narcissus map a trajectory from distance to presence. They show how the self-knowing muse emerges in memory and reflection. She is a remembering subject who draws on history, body, and voice to author her own creative energy.
Act III — The Self-Knowing Black Muse
You have inherited a world that has long sought to define you, to project fantasies, fears, and ideals onto your body, your voice, your imagination. These projections are heavy, layered across history and memory. They are not yours. To reclaim your authorship is to shed these external expectations. To pause in stillness and recognise your own reflection. Look into your own depths of memory and embodied experience and allow yourself to see the histories you carry. The joy, pain, and resilience. All the things embedded in your gestures, your movements, your breath. Here, in this self-confrontation, you are not the object; you are origin.
This is an invitation to plunge fully into yourself. Let your memory, reflection, and embodied knowing be the materials of creation. Write, dance, draw, sing, sculpt your histories into forms that are yours alone. Laugh. Cry. Revisit what you have been told to forget. Explore your own imagination without seeking validation or recognition from the external gaze. In inhabiting this internal space, you are simultaneously creator, muse, and audience. You are learning to honour the complexity of your experiences and to reclaim the generative power that has always been yours.
The self-knowing Black muse is this figure: a subject and source of her own creation, whose artistry arises from reflection, memory, and embodied practice rather than external imposition. She is a radical reclamation of agency, a refusal of imposed stereotypes, and a living archive of cultural and personal histories. To enter her world is to recognise that the wellspring of creativity lies within, waiting for your courage to reach in. Plunge into it. Know yourself. Make art that is yours, entirely and unapologetically.
Sources:
Encountering the muse: An exploration of the relationship between inspiration and information in the museum context
Four Women Julie Dash 1975
Myth of the ‘muse’: a History of the Gender Roles Conceptualised in Art by Martha Gane
No happy returns: aesthetics, labor, and affect in Julie Dash’s experimental short film, Four Women (1975) by Ayanna Dozier
Seeking the Muse in the Pool of Narcissus by JANE FELDMAN
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