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Aubrey Williams, “Carib Ritual IV”

Communing With Spirit

In Kamau Brathwaite’s essay “Timehri”, Brathwaite analyzes the artistic praxis of Aubrey Williams, a Guyanese artist who works with the form of indigenous rock paintings. Timehri are described as “rock signs, paintings, petroglyphs; glimpses of a language, glitters of a world, scattered utterals of a remote Gestalt; but still there, near, potentially communicative” (40). Brathwaite suggests that it is the spirit of Williams’ indigenous ancestors that communicate through Williams’ expressionistic brush strokes. When speaking of his own practice Williams invokes a “primordial” sense of the Pre-Colombian Caribbean that is essential to a making of identity there.

Today I lit three candles on my altar. One for my grandmother Alexandrina, one for my grandmother Francisca, and the last for my child self. I called on my ancestors to help me manage my anxiety and bring ease to my breathing. The candle I lit for a young Wendy was to help her heal from the pain of her childhood. If there is anything that shows us that the past is not past it is trauma. The felt wounds of the present signify an enduring reckoning with the past. Present and past are not quite same but they are fused together. Some of these wounds have not healed over generations. At the same time that I invoke my ancestors to help me heal I am doing the work of healing their persisting wounds. They possess me and I possess them.

My visual research praxis is an act of reading the present as a palimpsestic accumulation of past traces. It is a work of dreaming the past and present together as one. The method is both conscious and unconscious, informed by beings, figures, and ancestors. My method breaks with progressive historical understandings of a telos of past to present to argue that the present is always inflected by the past, and the past is a way of telling the present. Like in Caribbean carnival pleasure, pain, stillness, and jouissance of present and past all fold into one another.

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In the Caribbean whether it be African or Amerindian, the recognition of an ancestral relationship with the folk or aboriginal culture involves the artist and participant in a journey into the past and hinterland which is at the same time a movement of possession into present and future. Through this movement of possession we become ourselves, truly our own creators, discovering word for object, image for the word.

Kamau Brathwaite, Timehri (1970) 

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Making Kin

A taste. A feel. A tell. Mary Prince’s final paragraph contains insights without the predominance of sight. Her narrative of her enslavement in British colonized Bermuda, Antigua, and Turk’s Island is a reckoning of her suffering within a network of relation of other sufferers. Prince repeatedly places the terrifying details of her own experience in relation to her observations of the predicaments of the other enslaved. She listens. A sense of empathy pervades. Her empathic storytelling can be understood as a way of making kin through a sense of shared pain.

Making kin was a necessary practice of African born and African descended slaves during and after their fateful voyage into the Atlantic. New associations formed in the face of intentional cleaving of cultural ties between groups by Europeans. Since previous traditions of making kin were untenable new forms of autopoiesis and sympoeisis became necessary. The enslaved formed alliances, romances, enemies. They created and carried on culture.

An understanding of shared pain that is felt and not always seen is a part of the way Prince makes kinship with other slaves. Empathy becomes the condition of possibility for kinship in her writing. It is this kind of empathic forging of relations that I invoke as a method in my visual praxis. In any kind of representation of another I am attempting to forge a kinship through sharing an energetic connection and empathic awareness of what they might be experiencing.

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All slaves want to be free—to be free is very sweet…I have been a slave myself—I know what slaves feel—I can tell by myself what other slaves feel, and by what they have told me.

Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave Narrative

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Method: Audiovisual production

(Clip from Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives)

My primary practice which I will be approaching through the methods of possession, hauntology, and dreamwork is a video and sound practice. Video and sound here can act as a “medium”, a way of invoking and channeling spirit. I am inspired by the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul in particular, which unfold like dreams in a non-sequential, non-linear, meandering flow. In the film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, fables are interspersed between dreamlike realities in a felt, anachronistic way. It reminds me of the way that a dream will pull you in any direction at will based on what is buried in the unconscious, propelled by one’s desires and fears. The screen functions here as a ghostly apparatus, a conduit that temporarily frames the passage of the phantasmic subject, whether they are dead, alive, or somewhere in between.

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“In botany and dendrology, a rhizome is a modified subterranean plant stem that sends out roots and shoots from its nodes. Rhizomes are also called creeping rootstalks or just rootstalks. Rhizomes develop from axillary buds and grow horizontally. The rhizome also retains the ability to allow new shoots to grow upwards.“ - Wikipedia

“The underground sprout of a rhizome does not have a traditional root. There is a stem there, the oldest part of which dies off while simultaneously rejuvenating itself at the tip. The rhizome’s renewal of itself proceeds autopoietically: the new relations generated via rhizomatic connections are not copies, but each and every time a new map, a cartography. A rhizome does not consist of units, but of dimensions and directions.” Inna Semetsky (2006). Deleuze, Education and Becoming

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From Kamau Brathwaite, Barabajan Poems, 1994, p. 147

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Sycorax Video Style

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Sycorax by Robert Anning Bell

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Caliban writes to his mother Sycorax using a computer. Brathwaite called this form of writing “Sycorax video style” and writes using what he calls “nation language” a creole formed in the Caribbean.