By Theresa Rézeau
Today is my birthday.
At least, it is the day I have chosen to call my birthday.
Every year, on 13 September, I celebrate being alive. There are messages, good wishes and the familiar language of birthdays: another year, another beginning, another journey around the sun.
But there is something unusual about mine. I do not know when I was born.
My passport says 6 February. It gives me a year too, as passports must. For most people, these are among the simplest facts of their existence. Name. Date of birth. Place of birth. We write them on forms without thinking. We use them to open bank accounts, cross borders, apply for jobs, prove our age and establish that we are who we say we are.
I cannot say with certainty that mine are true.
I have always celebrated my birthday on 13 September. I cannot tell you whether that is the day I was born. I cannot tell you whether 6 February is. More strangely still, I cannot be entirely certain that the year recorded on my documents is correct.
There is no mystery to solve here. No hidden certificate waiting in a drawer that I know of. The explanation is much more ordinary, and that may be what makes it more painful.
I was born in Zimbabwe.
When I was very young, I lived in the village with my grandmother and grandfather. My grandfather was blind. My mother was living in the city. My parents were young and had already separated, and my father died when I was very young. I cannot say with certainty how old I was.
By then, my birth had not been formally registered.
Eventually, my father's older brother and his wife went to the registration office to obtain my birth certificate. A date had to be entered.
6 February was written down.
They may have known something I no longer know. There may have been a family recollection behind the date. It may have been an approximation. I cannot ask my father, and with the passing of time, the people and memories that might once have provided certainty have become harder to reach.
So a date entered into an official record became a fact. It travelled from one document to another until eventually it appeared in my passport.
There is something extraordinary about the authority of a document. Once something is typed into the correct box and accompanied by an official stamp, governments, schools, banks, employers and borders accept it as fact. Bureaucracy has a peculiar ability to turn uncertainty into certainty.
Except, of course, for the person living inside the document.
A document cannot remember the day I arrived.
It cannot tell me whether it was morning or night. It cannot tell me what the weather was like, who held me first, what my father said when he saw me, whether my mother counted my fingers, or who looked at this new little person and wondered who she might become.
Most of us inherit these fragments from somebody else's memory. They become part of our own story even though we were too young to remember them.
When those memories are missing, they cannot simply be reconstructed through imagination.
I can invent an answer. But I cannot make it true. And that is the part that makes me sad.
Still, every year, 13 September arrives.
And I call it my birthday.
Not because I can prove that I was born on this day. I cannot. I celebrate it because somewhere along the course of my life, this became the day on which I stopped to acknowledge that I had lived another year.
There is something liberating in that too.
A birthday does not have to be only an anniversary of biological arrival. It can also be an act of recognition.
The child from the village grew up.
The little girl whose grandfather could not see her face became a woman who would spend much of her life looking at images.
There is something about that which moves me deeply.
My grandfather was blind, yet his granddaughter would eventually build a life around the visual world: paintings, artists, exhibitions, galleries, photographs and the endless human attempt to make experience visible.
He could not have known where my life would go.
Neither could I.
The Image & Culture Journal usually begins with a masterpiece.
Today, I begin with a portrait of myself.
Francis Bacon once described art as an obsession with life and suggested that, because we are human beings, our greatest obsession is ultimately ourselves. He also said, “I don’t think I could have been anything else but a painter.”
I don’t think I could have been anything else but an art addict.
And since this is my birthday, I will go one step further.
I don’t think I could have been anything else but a masterpiece.
Calling oneself a masterpiece is, admittedly, an outrageous thing to do. But it is my birthday, so allow me the indulgence.
There is also a certain mischief in the portrait accompanying this essay.
Yesterday, on 12 September, I stood at Phillips Auction House in London before an image by Francis Bacon and turned the camera towards myself.
Behind me was Francis Bacon's Study for Self-Portrait (after Study for Self-Portrait 1982), produced in 1984. It is an offset lithograph in colours on wove paper, with full margins, after Bacon’s 1982 self-portrait. The example I encountered at Phillips Auction House is signed and numbered 146 from an edition of 182 and was published by Marlborough Graphics, New York.
Francis Bacon (1909–1992) spent much of his career returning to the human figure and, eventually, to himself. His self-portraits do not offer the reassuring stability we often expect from portraiture. The face shifts. Flesh appears to move. Features become compressed, displaced or dragged across the head. Identity remains recognisable while refusing to remain fixed.
There is something almost cruel about looking at yourself for too long.
Bacon understood that.
Standing before his self-portrait yesterday, on the eve of the birthday I chose for myself, I found myself thinking about identity in a way I had not expected.
The photograph accompanying this essay is therefore not simply a photograph of me beside an artwork.
It is a self-portrait made in front of a self-portrait.
Behind me, Bacon’s face refuses stability.
In front of it, I look directly into the camera.
And yet the woman whose face appears so clearly in the photograph cannot tell you with certainty the date on which she entered the world.
There is an irony in that.
Portraiture has always been concerned with the human desire to preserve ourselves against time. Kings commissioned portraits. Families preserved photographs. Artists painted themselves repeatedly as their faces changed. Today, billions of us carry cameras in our pockets and record ourselves almost without thinking.
A birth certificate attempts to fix the beginning of a person. A portrait attempts to fix an appearance. A passport attempts to fix an identity.
But a human being refuses to remain fixed.
The child in the village became a girl, then a woman. Countries changed. Homes changed. People arrived and disappeared. There was love and loss, motherhood, work, faith, disappointment, ambition, failure, survival and reinvention.
And all the while, a date remained printed neatly on a document.
Birthdays encourage arithmetic.
How old are you?
It is an innocent question. We ask children almost immediately. Adults sometimes become less enthusiastic about answering it, but the number remains one of the principal ways society locates us.
For me, there is something almost absurd about the question.
If I cannot be completely certain of the year in which I was born, then I cannot be completely certain of my age either.
For a long time, I thought of this simply as one of those peculiar facts about my life. Sometimes I could even laugh about it.
But beneath the humour is sadness.
There was once a day that belonged entirely to my arrival in this world, and the knowledge of that day has been lost.
Art understands something about the inadequacy of facts.
A work of art is rarely contained by the information written beside it. We can know the artist, the date, the medium, the dimensions and the provenance and still know almost nothing about what it means to stand before it.
The label records facts.
The encounter creates meaning.
Human beings are not so different.
Somewhere beyond the dates written and remembered exists the actual day on which I entered this world, a day that happened whether anybody recorded it correctly or not.
The date beside my name may be uncertain. The year may even be uncertain.
But the life that followed is not.
And maybe we should allow ourselves the indulgence of calling our lives masterpieces more often.
A masterpiece is not necessarily something without damage. Look closely at the works we treasure most and you find cracks, losses, restorations, alterations and histories that have changed their surfaces forever.
Their value does not depend upon remaining untouched. Why should ours?
A human life acquires its marks too.
Some are visible. Others are known only to the person carrying them. We are revised by grief, love, parenthood, migration, disappointment, belief, mistakes, forgiveness and time.
We are never finished.
That may be what Bacon’s observation about our obsession with ourselves ultimately reveals. Our fascination with the self is not necessarily vanity. It may come from the extraordinary difficulty of understanding what a self actually is.
We look into mirrors. We make portraits. We write diaries. We keep photographs. We tell stories. We count birthdays.
Again and again, we ask some version of the same question:
Who am I, and what has this life made of me?
I cannot answer that question with a date.
My passport says 6 February. My life says 13 September.
There was a child. She was born. She lived.
And the absence of an accurate record cannot erase the fact of her existence.
So today, I no longer need 13 September to prove when my life began. I can allow it to mean something else. It is the day I celebrate the life that followed.
The people I have loved. The daughter I brought into the world. The work I have made. The words I have written. The art I have stood before. The places I have left and the places I have called home. The mistakes, the losses, the laughter, the faith, the ridiculous ambitions and the dreams that still refuse to leave me alone.
I don’t know exactly when I was born.
I may never know.
But today I know something far more important.
I was here. I am here.
And the masterpiece is still unfinished.
