Abstract:
The Guyanese poet Grace Nichols’s ekphrastic poem “Weeping Woman” in her Picasso, I
Want My Face Back challenges Pablo Picasso’s iconic status in twentieth-century art. Written in
the form of a dramatic monologue, the poem gives voice to Picasso’s model, muse and lover, Dora
Maar, who was a Surrealist photographer before she had an affair with Picasso. Unlike traditional
ekphrastic poems which involve the description of a fixed, silenced and gazed beautiful image
through a male persona who is also a gazer of that image in poetry, Nichols transforms Maar’s
objectified position in Picasso’s painting into a subject by voicing her critique of the artist’s cubist
art, his use of colors as well as his geometric figures, and of his maltreatment of her. Through
this ekphrastic stance, Maar reconstructs her identity as a photographer and rids herself from
the artist’s domination over her in his art and personal life. Hence, the aim of this article is to
discuss in what ways Nichols’s poem problematizes the privileged status of the male artist over
his silenced female model and acknowledges the artistic talent of the woman through the use of
ekphrasis.
