Glossy Glow

A few months ago I did an art “family time” with markers and paper, and everyone was sort of bored. Reviving the art idea, I decided to take my sister's advice of introducing collage making. I grabbed colored papers, tissue paper, scissors, glue and some of those soft colored mini palm-palm thingies that you may remember from kindergarten as serving close to no purpose in this world. Ah, and on the way there I grabbed a few magazines.

In the end, it was all about the magazines.

I remember how Sudanese, Congolese and Eritrean refugees in Israel used to hang up cut-out images from magazines as wall decorations. I remember how I used to hang up cut-out images from magazines as wall decorations. But I forgot just how much I used to and just how rare glossy magazines in Rwanda are. At family time, the combined culture of high school and magazine rareness created a crazy rush of magazine cutting and lots of anxious, eager and quick ripping off of any image that caught anyone’s eye.

This wasn’t the first time I had brought magazines, but it was the first time I had brought them with scissors.

A life of practice in precise scissor cutting is something I now know is a luxury. Scissors dexterity is one of those usually useless skills you may have picked up if you grew up in a country with a plentiful supply of scissors, and I tried to show the students how Angelina Jolie and the Rolex could be removed from their backgrounds and placed next to or on other images that were cut out – say, adding bunny ears to Angelina or making the watch fall from the sky. But eagerness to get as many images cut out as possible before I left overshadowed the careful art of cutting along the lines. “Do you have tape?” one girl asked. “What,” I responded, “anything to stick things?” She nodded and I gave her glue stick, which a few students tried to use to hang up pictures on the wall. When that didn’t work, I needed to break the news that there was no tape, another rarity round these parts.

Magazines really are placed on a rare-commodity pedestal. Above pastels, fancy 8H pencils and glass beads. If I had to choose between pretty beads and old magazines from 2009, I would choose beads. But if you walk into the art room at ASYV, beads abound, even as magazines mysteriously disappear.

As the end “family time” grew near, one girl was left on the floor, turning a page a millisecond, ripping whole pages out with this nervous face full of fear that time would run out and I would be taking the magazines back before she maximized the total number of interesting and semi-interesting images she could find. “It’s ok,” I told her, “I will leave the magazines here.” I picked up scraps of construction paper and put them in the recycling box, cleaning up. It was getting late. But she kept on going.

In the end she reached the last page and joined me in cleaning up, carefully tucking away her new collection of glossiness, perhaps with plans of creating a glossy magazine shrine as soon as she found enough tape.

Though she, like everyone else, ignored the colored, soft, palm-palm thingies.