I want to begin this third dispatch, this culmination of time and musings between Texas, The Bahamas, and Guadeloupe, with my initially proposed thoughts to this call for applications that lead to my luck and joy at being selected for the 2018 Tilting Axis Curatorial Fellow. Before countless conversations, siftings, tears, and coffees with those who have now become part of my wider family, these words were at the heart of my intention for my time in Austin. I am finding it still rings true for the work I am doing now. In ways, it felt like something of a love letter and call to action in one, for myself, for the community, and for something that I hadn’t quite felt prepared for. I felt a deep compulsion to respond to this palpable recent shift towards the spiritual and connectivity all the same.

The mouth holds a particular significance for Black people. Phenotype dictates full lips and white teeth set in dark skin – or is that stereotype in the ethnically “seasoned” blood of the diaspora, of those taken? Mouths of ancestors cried out in pain and horror, others still sustained bloodied lips and tongues. We had our teeth (ourselves) pulled from the root and put into the mouths of others to silence us and hoped Washington himself might choke on the dental and mental damages done. Black mouths have too much to chew on.

Americas. When we think of how these intersections weave into the tapestry of our personal and political histories, it can often seem that we are a pattern made of holes – sometimes what is not seen, sometimes negative space, can be the very thing that makes up the image of who we are. Looking at the scope of Black experience across varying localised bodies of works in conversation with each other is a visual dialogue, the illustrated text to our lives and histories. Translating the multitude of voices at this crossroads into discernible chorus can most often only be done by acknowledging just that, the buried and sedimented layers of the sound of Blackness over time. Just what sound do we make, what is the sound of Black noise? These notions, all rooted in the teeth and mouths of the African diaspora are what I wish to unpack in the Tilting Axis Curatorial Fellowship 2018.

Moving away from the disparateness of nationalism, and the insecurity of “authenticity” surrounding our particular, ‘once-removed’ sense of Blackness as it is tied to Afrocentrism that many in the wider African diaspora feel, I wish to draw on these collections and my own work curating in The Bahamas as a chance to speak to our heterogeneity away from the often homogenised views of both American and Caribbean Blackness on this side of the Atlantic.

The crossroads that is the Caribbean, the space where Eshu, Papa Legba, St Lazarus, and Eleggua rule (but so often in secret) has such a rich vibration that the basin that contains it cannot hold it - not in full.  There is a sound that comes out deep from the belly of the Caribbean sea that is unlike any other sound on the planet. Too low for our ears, it can be heard from space, it’s even been described as a “whistle”. It is a sound that collapses 5 continents into one space. For me, that sound was a call to action and to ancestry, and indeed, a call to ancestors too. Thank god for that, because I’m far too nervous within myself as it is, so being a mouthpiece for them suits me just fine.

The Idea Lab at the University of Texas at Austin’s Art Galleries for Black Studies may seem a modest space, but it holds within its walls and works some big moments for me.  “Lingua Franca: Black Spirit Speaks in Common Tongues” is the culmination of my journey into history, belonging, and selfhood. My initial questions centered around the idea of “what is black noise?” or “what is our call?”. I found myself preoccupied with ideas of the sound and feel of Blackness, and what it means for me as a Caribbean woman, a queer one, one who is Black and mixed race, and admittedly a perpetually perplexed one too. This journey took me not just across many miles, but also across many expanses of thought: racial representation, the mobility of Caribbean creative work, surrealism, magic, African cultural retentions, and finally to spirituality. 

Through the work of artists across the Black Diaspora so tenderly collected in the Christian Green Collection (CGC), I offered up space for investigations into Black spirituality across languages, countries, the Atlantic ocean, and time itself. African spiritual practices, and their “post”-colonial, post-slavery retentions in the Americas and Caribbean, stand as both a beacon of hope and act of resistance. History can be erased, rewritten, its access cut off from those who need it most - but spirit, magic, or any of its many names, cannot be written out of genetic code, out of the nature of being. Our differences are not divisive, but add depth into the greater story of Yoruba Orishas, of Louisiana Voodoo and Haitian Vodou Lwa, of Obeah healing and Candomble and the Black spiritual imaginary.

“Lingua Franca” was a way for me to embrace our commonalities as peoples of the Black diaspora. I had never had the chance to see so much work from the Caribbean in one place before - this is in part due to the xenophobia and nationalism that run rampant in The Bahamas. I had to come to Texas to see works by Haitian intuitives like Frantz Zephirin, Myrlande Constant and Antoine Oleyant. And in seeing these works together, I got to better understand the spiritual practices that form the base of the Caribbean everyday, and what I would argue is at the base of so much Black experience and resilience itself - regardless of your own personal belief systems in relation to Vodou, or your lack of beliefs altogether. If Haiti is the navel of Black Freedom birthing itself at the height of the colonial era, and if I come from a Caribbean space, I should not struggle to find work in my space from this country that is so vital to our history, and yet …

This exhibition was for me an invocation, a summoning, and a celebration of spirit. It was a great questioning when I come from a space that does not encourage questions… What is it to draw a sigil in memory that even the waters of the Atlantic couldn’t break? Or to conjure a great-to-the-tenth grandmother’s loving wisdom at an altar? This drawing upon African ancestral knowledge (both literal and metaphorical), on rituals of unbreakable collective spirit and culture, is the common tongue of the Black Atlantic experience. It is a Black lingua franca. By using Haitian Vodou flags as a point of departure this collection of works seeks not to explain, but to convene, commune, to gather, and to give space to the simultaneous similarity and difference we share as people of the Black diaspora. As Vodou shifts from drawing veve symbols for spirits in chalk to sewing them in sequined flags held aloft, so too do we find different voices to speak our rituals and spirituals.

Vodou flags, like the ones that first commanded my attention when I began sifting through the CGC, are objects of resistance and reclamation of personhood when this is precisely what was robbed of so many of us. In my investigations these were also the overarching themes that cried out from just about every work I saw. Because, for me and for Rudy Green, that’s what so much of Black and African Diasporan creative practice is and it is where we found common ground and family. This resistance may not always be (nor need be) the intention, but to find this common language of spirit - from the roots imaged in Jacques-Enguerrand Gourgue’s work to that of Radcliff Bailey, from Haiti to Black America, we are dealing with translations of similar identities, a shared root, and that’s what I ultimately wanted to give space for in this selection of work. 

This was a chance to embrace the work of some of the most celebrated and recognized artists of the global Black creative community - like Betye Saar and Wifredo Lam – and importantly, to allow space for us to embrace them on even footing as they commingle with intuitive artists such as that of the aforementioned Zephirin and Constant. The pieces collected so carefully and caringly in the CGC show us through their deceptively, and sometimes quietly radical, decolonizing practices what it means to refuse to translate your spirit, and to even have it understood in spite of this. These intuitives will not be tokenised, will not be called naive or outsider, as they speak for the ancestors, and that needs no external validation. This theme of intuitive practice, of anti-hegemony, and of Black magic, was laid out even more fully as I gathered with creative kin at the site of this opportunity I was so generously awarded – the Tilting Axis annual conference.

Decolonization cannot afford to be a buzz-word. 

This year’s theme for the annual Tilting Axis conference, “Beyond Trends: Decolonization and Art Criticism”, had us delve into just that. From the honouring of indigenous culture and practices in the Caribbean, to the legacy of Edouard Glissant’s writing and thinking (which, in sad irony, so often itself seems coopted for the sake of academic vogue), the Memorial Acte in Guadeloupe gave us rich ground to sift through these thoughts. Conversations on decolonizing (occurring within the seemingly colonized space of Guadeloupe), and what it means, so often happen without the colonized (and post and neo colonized) in these spaces. In that way, Tilting Axis always has and always will continue to be a radical act of love within our space, where too often our intellect has historically seen itself exported and translated without context. More radically still, as co-founder of the conference, Annalee Davis, gave as an opener - we were asked to consider how do we decolonize shame? Imposter syndrome? Love? The work the region needs cannot just be in the conversation, it’s the actionability we require most. And as artists, cultural agitators, academics, and all manner of creatives and lovers of the creative gathered together in a space that paid deference to the complex beauty of the Caribbean, there is a special kind of activism to be done for our region in the power of communing. This was our communion.  In a deeply moving presentation on the preservation of indigeneity by Guyanese Academic and Indigenous activist Mireille (Ho Sack-Wa) Badamie, we were asked to consider that humankind only truly has past if they are aware of having one, and the implications of this line of thought on Taino and Black communities within our Caribbean. Badamie introduces the possibility of dialogue and choice in regards to how we interpret, accept, and engage with our past as a wondrously and almost impossibly diverse region. Otherwise we have a history we are subjected to passively, as has largely been the case for so many of us, rather than something we have active autonomy and duty to engage with.

Our keynote, and the honest and heartening opener so vibrantly delivered by the rightfully esteemed Manthia Diawara (Malian writer, filmmaker, cultural theorist, scholar, and art historian), gave us a moment to consider the importance of opacity in a time when transparency proves so elusive and difficult. Diawara’s discourse on Edouard Glissant’s notions of opacity, asked us to consider that when something is clear, it is by nature separatist, but “When I consent to your opacity and you consent to mine, we can find a way to confer truly.” The recognizing of synchronicities within Blackness and Caribbeanness makes us feel special because of what we share, but looking to those things that feel less clear, that feel alien between us, and giving space for these to exist as we coexist, is at the heart of our Black community but so regularly robbed of us through systems, structures, and spaces not made for us. 

For Diawara, colonization never intended for people from colonies to meet and talk to each other – the logic is that you discover, conquer and exploit, not that we would come together, its very masculine because you need to fight it. Glissant believed that what happened was the world was united in an unintended manner via the globalization that was catalyzed through the colonial era’s mass scramble for (and mass accumulation and polarization of) wealth. We came together, and desired to intuitively create solidarities. You yourself might have an idea, an intuition – and perhaps that idea isn’t a sacred moment in and of itself, as someone on the other side of the world is having it at the same time as you – this is why we need to acknowledge our solidarity together. The world at large doesn’t understand or know the aesthetics of its connection, because we are still dealing with the “old way” of binaries rather than opaque gray spaces. Diawara explained that we have lost the work of art in a rush to make it beautiful, signify an identity or a political stance, we have destroyed the spirit of the work of art. This spirit is something I feel we are returning to, as an unspoken mecca. Magic energy and spirit are being considered in more seriousness, and the personal sanctity of objects that have been in close contact with the human body, and later abandoned, help us in restoring the traces of the human we have violently lost and been distanced from. 

But why does it feel insecure, and uncomfortable, to discuss spirit and decolonizing practices within institutions such as museums and universities? In spaces that so often seek to exclude us. In a heartfelt and wildly hopeful text by la paperson that was shared with me by my conference colleague Berette Macauley, we see that the conversations in these spaces is not disingenuous or merely to be accepted as part of the dangerous machine, but vital. 

This centering of past, present, and future in one space breaks open the linearity of how we think of our Caribbean space, to consider our futures in the now is necessary for building the afro-indigenous future that we dare to dream of. As Dr. Jerry Philogene (Haitian-American, Associate Professor in the American Studies and Africana Studies Departments at Dickinson College) elucidated in her presentation on possibilities and potentiality, this particular kind of futurity allows us to radically imagine, even in a space as precarious as Haiti, the beauty of the possibility of creating an alternative world. One that may not be a part of what we understand in the global north as traditional or part of social life. Because the Caribbean is and has always been lived through a particular type of questioning – dealing with land, politics, social – there are always these precarious moments. But even in these moments there is unabashed livability – the ability to imagine a space that may not even be temporally and spacially produced for you to exist. And, in our case, one that can also feel as though it is actively pushing you out. Especially in the era of climate injustice.

The Caribbean, that same crossroads the world hinged itself around, has always lived at the underside of colonialism. First with slavery, and then with the same accumulation of gross wealth disparity that lead to the industrial era that has put us in this carbon-dense mess we find ourselves saddled with as low-lying, small island developing states in and around the Caribbean sea. 

September 1st, 2019 brought forth a legion of new ancestors for many in The Bahamas, who endured what was an apocalyptic moment in global history. This is not hyperbole.  It is a moment that changed not only my understanding of my country and culture, but of its place in the world, as this exhibition to present my findings, this errant child that is Lingua Franca was presented nearly 3 weeks afterward. That same sound we hear from the Caribbean sea, that my Bahamas lies on the margins of, is to my mind the sound of this army of spirits, of the pains and joys we share and the crushing weight of history and present. Perhaps the biggest lesson I learned from this fellowship in my practice, and in my self, was that we must do our part to let their voices be heard in the way that offers them the most justice. This is the start of that for me, and this space and selection and the experiences I carry with me that have left an indelible mark on my own spirit, is my altar to them.