|
Note: I submitted the article below to the Nation newspaper on June 23rd, since it has not been published I am posting it here.
by Annalee Davis
 Current regional debate on the issue of intra-regional migration is expanding the discussion and forcing us to address some of the more complex issues surrounding the state of the CSME and intra-regional Caribbean migration. Given statements made by some of the panelists on Sunday’s Brass Tacks and in the Sunday Sun of the same date, where our Prime Minister denied knowledge of ‘house raids’ in Barbados, I thought it would be useful to pose questions to the panel, the relevant authorities and Team Barbados, in an effort to further contribute to the debate. Read full article here (MAY 26, 2009)
By Stabroek staff | May 25, 2009 in Features
By Annalee Davis (Annalee Davis is a Barbadian Visual Artist, living and working in Barbados on a series of forty-five artistic projects that investigate the impact and anxieties of intra-regional Caribbean immigration. Please view www.creole-chant.blogspot.com to complete the questionnaire if you have a migratory experience you would like to share or www.annaleedavis.com to see her work.
On Tuesday, May 6th 2009, Prime Minister David Thompson politely informed Parliament of the policy determined by the Subcommittee on Immigration set up in June 2008. Non-nationals have one month to turn themselves into Immigration to regularize their status or be “removed” from December 1 2009... read complete article here
In the Diaspora is one of a series of fortnightly columns from Guyanese in the diaspora and others with an interest in issues related to Guyana and the Caribbean morning, June 10th 2009.
(2009)
By Annalee Davis
I initially saw Tonya Wiles’s work at her first solo show, which opened at the Zemicon Gallery in Bridgetown on June 7, 2009. One week later, I attended her talk at which, according to Tonya, she wanted to “explain” her body of work to the Barbadian audience.
Her exhibition Hide and Seek played with established local norms about viewing art in a gallery space. I asked Tonya how different it was for her to locate her work in Barbados versus situating it in the UK, where she had spent the last three years. She felt that given the greater exposure of a UK gallery culture predisposed to understanding contemporary work, returning to Barbados forced her to ask the question, “Is art viewing universal?”
She wondered if the work made sense in a Barbadian context, and we spoke about how the work functions differently in the two spaces. UK-based viewers might be well exposed to, and therefore more comfortable interacting with, objects like Tonya’s in a gallery space, whereas in the Barbadian context the work reveals a tension. Hide and Seek exposed the conformity of a small, conservative, insular island society that prefers to know the rules of the game before playing. Members of the audience, Tonya told me, not sure what to do with her work, sought explanation from her before engaging or participating.
to read complete article visit smallaxe.net
(2007)
By Sarah Clunis
Born in 1963, in St. Michael, Barbados, Annalee Davis grew up in Barbados leaving in 1980 to study abroad.
In 1986 she received her B.F.A from the Maryland Institute, College of Art and in 1989 she received her M.F.A. from the Mason Gross School of Visual Arts at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. In 1989 Davis returned to Barbados to live and has spent the last eighteen years teaching, creating art, lecturing, and traveling throughout the Caribbean and internationally.
In much of Davis' work the plantation is represented as a kind of maze-like structure or caged house, a confined center that embodies economic, social and emotional qualities. With elements of collage, installation and ready-made culture, Davis successfully juxtaposes ideas such as confinement within a plantation society with the contemporary restrictions of gender, motherhood, and marriage. Davis' personal life collages with her country's history and present in surreal juxtapositions. Her work, although personal, also deals with the institution of slavery in the Caribbean and its lingering psychological impact. Her use of organic objects such as palm spathes, mahogany, sugar cane, and sand reinforce the plantation and the land in Barbados as central to Davis' identity. The result is a series of hybrid juxtapositions of objects that examine the relationship between past and present issues of land use.
I always loved the land. Intensely. I felt like it was my arm. I understood myself through the land. I felt comfortable with the land in a way that I did not with the nation.
With Scarred Dreams, palm spathes from the Royal Palms that traditionally line the driveways to old plantation houses are wrapped and bound with white lace, cotton or vines to indicate class distinctions. Visual signifiers of vegetation and land play an important part in Davis’ work. The palm spathes act like ready-made icons of colonialism and are just one of a number of objects that relate intimately to the landscape of Davis’ past. They bleed, representing the lost appendages of people, as well as severed states of being. With Scarred Dreams Davis makes reference to a kind of schizophrenic way of existing with the land, one, that in her case, is bound up with isolation and privilege. While she acknowledges her privilege Davis is frustrated by questions of authenticity. Her interaction with other Barbadians often reinforces for her that she must constantly verify her legitimacy as a Barbadian. Subsequently she clings to the land as a symbol of her belonging.
For this reason contemporary issues of land use are important for Davis and her art examines the ways that the sugar and tourist’s industries evolve from and exist for places other than Barbados. Davis’ piece Barbados in a Nutshell (revised) (2002) can be viewed as a cross section of the rapid shift in Barbados from an economy based on agriculture to one based on tourism. Displayed in an acrylic cabinet, are various commodities such as rum, colorful plastic tourist curios, a teacup, sugar cane, and golf balls. At the bottom of this display case are elements such as sand and seawater. With this piece Davis comments on the transformation of cane-fields and sugar factories into golf courses and housing developments as well as the reality of the rural landscape being sold to create idyllic vacation spots that cater to outside interests.
Today, as a tourist destination, Davis feels that Barbados continues to map itself for others as a paradise and play ground. Her work continues to addresses the struggle for land in Barbados and the subsequent displacement of people and compares it to similar post-abolition issues on the island. Her concerns focus on the fact that most Caribbean islands were once completely dependent on fragile sugarcane or banana industries. Now they are highly vulnerable to globalization and ill-equipped to deal with increasingly high levels of poverty.
This island has no cockpit country or tropical rainforests, no untamed alternative place to retreat to. Barbados has been stripped of its wilderness. We have “evolved” from our well-furrowed fields and more recently replaced the plantations with hotels.
Davis’ narrative focuses on the land and her individual connection to it in order to weave a historical narrative that is intentionally subjective. With Just Beyond My Imagination Davis creates the Caribbean archipelago, islands of sand traps and a sea of green Astroturf. The title of the work is adapted from the Barbados Board of Tourism’s marketing slogan, “Barbados - Just Beyond Your Imagination.”
Almost four hundred years after being settled, and forty years into our independence, the ancient practice of mapping continues to impact on our sense of self and other. The mapping of the region started in the seventeenth century by cartographers documenting recently conquered territories. Then, we were mapped by others and for others. Today, as a tourist destination, we continue to map ourselves for others in the way that we package the islands as exotica or paradise and on maps which display parts of the island, largely of interest to the tourists.
Davis’ interest in the phenomenon of mapping and tourism in the Caribbean has also involved an investigation of movement within and outside of the Caribbean. This interest is expressed in her piece (up)rooted (1997). (up)rooted, a small wooden house supported by a mass of large vines, explores the tensions of small-island polarized societies as well as complex patterns of migration out of, back to and within the Caribbean. The “roots” in the piece could be the branches of a family tree, the arteries of a single body, or yet another map that tracks the tangled routes of the Caribbean Diaspora. (up)rooted distances and controls access to this place called home. The home, a ubiquitous symbol in Davis’ paintings, prints and installations, is the central focus. In a personal way (up)rooted also explores the concept of home within the space of contemporary Barbadian society that finds it difficult to bridge the divides between class and race that still exist because of historical circumstances.
Two video works, On the Map and A Collection of Civilized Creoles Continue to Cross the Middle Passage of the Southern Caribbean, continue to investigate patterns of migration. On the Map is a thirty-two minute documentary that focuses on interviews with un/documented migrants, all displaced in some way in spite of the region’s current attempt to create a single space. On the Map questions the myth of a unified Caribbean as it reveals the contradictions of lived realities versus the rhetoric of integration.
With both Knotty Head (1997) and An Alliteration (1997) knots are used as a way to express “the most important things that need to be said and can’t be spoken.” An Alliteration , part of a three part installation, is a curtain of white, knotted strings. Dangling between these strings and knots are miniature wire houses. The houses are like little cages for tiny birds. Part of this piece includes a poem. An excerpt reads, “this matter of mending the mask…the malaise…”
Resembling a mosquito netting, an ubiquitous symbol in the Caribbean, An Alliteration offers viewers a repose, a place to hide from harsh elements: the hot sun, mosquitoes, other people…the malaise. It is a space of privacy and solitude. The houses dangle from the knotted strings, telling the story of “being cooped up – enclosed.”
With her installation Growing Up Without an Echo (2000) Davis provides us with a spiral maze that incorporates a labyrinth. With Evocations (2002) and Creole Madonna (2002) Davis moves through time to become a Caribbean woman of various ethnicities with corresponding deities, and effectively represents the often unacknowledged racial mixture of Caribbean White Creoles with the use of brightly colored silk cloth, cascading like ball gowns to the ground. Indigo and hibiscus pink join an emerald green and a shining orange so that we are enveloped and caught on the wave of color and texture. With these installation spaces, paths and spirals unfold, revealing a landscape of infinite possibility.
In Davis’ work objects are in limbo, suspended between collectible and souvenir, public and private, outside and inside, communal and intimate, and personal and national. She offers us captured moments of a complicated story; souvenirs, sugar cane, palm trees, and golf balls, all kept in place, like islands in an archipelago that tell us different stories of a Caribbean past and present.
September 2007
(2004)
Panel Discussion at the Barbados Museum & Historical Society in response to Joscelyn Gardner’s Solo Exhibition “White Skin, Black Kin: Speaking the Unspeakable”, May 19, 2004.
“The shaman is the person, male or female, who in his late childhood or early youth has an overwhelming psychological experience that turns him totally inward. It’s a kind of schizophrenic crack-up. The whole unconscious opens up, and the shaman falls into it…
The artists are the mythmakers of our day…they are today’s shamans who communicate myths for contemporary society, recognizing and rendering the “radiance” of all things, as an epiphany showing forth their truth.” Taken from Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers in The Power of Myth.
Tonight, I would like to speak about this exhibition as “an epiphany of showing forth” our truths and to suggest that Joscelyn Gardner is a contemporary Barbadian shaman and that this exhibition represents a watershed in our ongoing and fractured development of cultural production.
First I would like to speak about the show from the point of view of this work being a creative body of work. These ideas are presented to us as art as opposed to any other format. Secondly, I would like to speak about the idea of schizophrenia as it relates to the work. And finally I would like to address the idea of wholeness. I am speaking about schizophrenia and wholeness both within the context of what we deem to be unspeakable.
It would be remiss of me as an artist not to address the technical expertise that Joscelyn so beautifully and proficiently displays. The process of physically making the work is something that Joscelyn enjoys as she very carefully renders, embroiders, writes, draws and prints these ideas into a form that is accessible to us – the thirsty audience. You should be aware that the pillow cases are made by Joscelyn, the embroidery is sewn by her hands, as are the topsy-turvy dolls. The photocopies of the prints that are hanging in the hallway pale in comparison to the limited edition, fine art lithographs that are on display at the Zemicon Gallery. Those carefully rendered drawings of black hairstyles are lithographs which are printed on frosted mylar. They are exquisitely beautiful and one should not miss the opportunity to see these works in the flesh.
I particularly appreciate the idea of Joscelyn using the Museum’s galleries as her canvas. I think it is a bold and daring venture to take what is a hallowed national arena and dance around the icons that reek of status, privilege and puffed up patriarchal chests, and suggest a topsy-turvy plantation space that begins to create a language which defines this nation’s history. Instead of a static display of inanimate objects, we now have movement, sound, rhythm, and voice; we have an animated space which breathes life into our history and honours the fact, with compassion, that we are bound to the vein. The Caribbean has propagated centuries of shame around our stories. We have been taught to be uncomfortable when history shows up at the back door, stating claim to our blood line. But now, thanks to Joscelyn’s careful words and works, we have a creative language that is starting to fall from our lips, we can begin to speak about the unspeakable.
As a result of this exhibition, the BMHS has become an even more provocative space and it might be interesting for the BMHS to actively involve artists in engaging with the space on a regular basis, to allow the cultural producers of this country to respond to the displays so we can continue to speak the unspeakable.
Secondly, I would like to speak about schizophrenia as it relates to the works on display. Schizophrenia is a mental disease marked by disconnection between thoughts, feelings and actions. The word makes me think about madness – a disordered mind, as well as it makes me think about schism - a split, rupture or division.
This show allows us to explore the tangled threads of history in an attempt to unravel the postcolonial mess we have inherited. Barbados, like the rest of the Caribbean, has been part of one of the world’s largest experiments in hybridity and its resultant creolisation. An innate part of this experience is the schism, schizophrenia or madness Joscelyn references in her catalogue by mentioning Jean Rhys’ character, Antoinette Cosway. I wanted to extend this schizophrenic schism to Joscelyn’s exhibition and suggest several areas where the splits can be seen in the works.
1. In a formal sense, the juxtaposition of what is on the surface with what is underneath – the schism between the beautifully and carefully rendered braided hair with the brutal torture implements.
2. The schism between the fixed portraits of the white Creole mistress and her children versus the fluid movements of the ghostly house slaves.
3. The division in the female sound works which talk about the various forms of oppression to which all women at this time were subject - .hearing in a ruptured way, the snippets of monologues and dialogues that are connected by circumstance but disconnected by hierarchy.
4. The schism of the topsy-turvy doll – a single doll divided at the centre of her being – a sweet, soft, cloth doll demonstrating an unresolved, split identity.
5. The schism of Pinky – the young white Creole girl who was sent to England to be civilized, who needed to perform as dictated by the colour of her skin, who then came to represent, ironically the epitomy of civilization, this White Creole. Joscelyn repatriates this girl by placing her in a Barbadian pastoral landscape, extending the schism even further.
6. The schism of how we see ourselves versus how others see us. The division between how a white Creole artist who sees herself as Barbadian; a native with the right to speak as a cultural producer about things of national significance, but who is often seen by others as an other. (Every one of us seems to have an other!)
7. The schism between an elite academic language versus the experiences to which we refer and which are lived by the average Barbadian. The division between the arenas in which these common experiences are written about and thought about versus the relative inaccessibility of these thoughts and words for the average person.
And finally, I would like to speak about the idea of healing as it relates to wholeness.
In the catalogue, Joscelyn states that the white postcolonial Creole woman “is charged with actively negotiating the re-construction of her own identity…”
I would like to extend this mandate to every member of our society, on both an individual and a collective basis. Healing is about making a choice. Reconstructing, or rebuilding our identity puts us in a position of power. This exhibition provokes us to think about the construction of our future in relation to our past, and some of the questions that we may ask are; how do we move forward, what is our next move? What steps have been taken by our postcolonial government to heal the wounds and move beyond the cycle of guilt and the polarity of superiority/inferiority complexes? How different or similar are we as a society today from the society to which Joscelyn refers in her work?
Nations can make steps towards healing which recognize at the national level that there has been rupture and we need to heal. Some examples of this at the national level are seen by the USA who created Affirmative Action as a healing mechanism. South Africa had their Truth & Reconciliation effort. Many Caribbean islands have become independent and some have become republics. Free education for all, is another step towards healing. Barbados formed a Committee for National Reconciliation in 1999 which has produced a report with suggestions for ways in which we can heal as a nation and move forward. This exhibition is an individual effort at healing which has been offered as a national gift for others to heal as well.
I wonder if the notion of healing, becoming whole beings who are healthy, happy and successful is a choice that is truly unspeakable.
Are we willing as individuals to heal and to become whole? Do we have a government that can choose to heal the wound and close the gaps?
I would like to close my presentation by recalling an article I read a few years ago when South Africa was undergoing their Truth & Reconciliation exercises. There was a story about a poor black SA woman from one of the townships who was in court at the trial of a white SA policeman who had brutally murdered her husband and only son in the most heinous way. The judge asked her to offer her comments about how this man should pay for what he had done to her family. She stood in the courtroom and she said; firstly, I want to forgive you. Secondly, I want you to come and visit me every month, because you have taken away my entire family and I need someone to spend time with me. And thirdly I want to adopt you as my son, because I have none left. The policeman feinted at the stand.
That woman, on that day, as an individual, demonstrated wholeness. And her leader, Nelson Mandela was a national example to her, as a whole person.
This is the unspeakable truth. To be whole is unspeakable. In a society that is heavily rooted in values which are oriented towards an external saviour, it is a challenging notion for many to think about taking the responsibility to claim a power to save themselves.
To affirm;
I am whole.
I am complete.
I am happy.
I am healthy.
I am the other.
The other is me.
I am. This is speaking the unspeakable.
Thank you.
back to top
|
