Pasichigare: Where My Storytelling Began | Petey Art

Long before I understood storytelling as an art form, I knew it simply as something people did.

When I visited family in the rural areas of Zimbabwe, we would sit around the fire and listen. The stories were full of idioms and allegory, told in a way that didn't always explain itself to you. You listened. You laughed. You remembered. And sometimes, years later, you understood.

Song could break out almost without warning.
Someone would reach for an instrument. Another voice would join. Stone sculptures and figures of elders lived among ordinary household things, while stories of pasichigare, of long ago, existed alongside the business of the day.

It was mundane and special at the same time.

What the Fire Left Behind

I didn't know it then, but that fire circle planted something that still shapes how I make work today. This pull toward the relationship between what's visible and what's hidden.

A painting, like a story told at pasichigare, doesn't always explain itself right away. Sometimes you sit with it. Sometimes you understand it years later.

That's part of why writing has always lived alongside my painting, not apart from it, the way a proverb and a song could share the same evening around the fire. When the studio goes quiet, the words don't. They're the same practice, just a different instrument.

It's there now in Keepers, the triptych I'm working on, trees aged differently across the same light, a baobab holding centuries the way an elder holds memory, and a concealed witness watching it all pass.

That's pasichigare too.

Long ago, sitting quietly inside the present.

I don't tell these stories at a fire anymore. I tell them on canvas, in poems, in the quiet space between a painting and whoever stands in front of it. But the shape is the same one I learned as a child. Don't explain everything.

Trust the listener.

Trust that some of it will land now, and some of it will wait.

That's what I hope for with the work I make under Petey Art: something that doesn't ask to be understood all at once. A painting you return to. A question that stays open longer than the first look allows.

Pasichigare taught me that before I had a word for it.

I'm still learning it, one canvas at a time.