This is not a question: Do you believe in ghosts?

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Do you believe in ghosts? What a tricky question! In answering it, not only does one reveal how they perceive the world around them, but they also inadvertently express their engagement with that world. For some, specters are mere figments of the imagination, while others regard that same imagination as an unequivocal truth at the foundation of reality.

The question posed above “Do you believe in ghosts?” is the conclusion of the research I conducted during the Tilting Axis Fellowship 2019. In many ways it forms the answer to all the questions that I set out to investigate during my fellowship. Having embarked on this epistemic journey, I employed the fellowship to the best of my abilities to begin answering the three fundamental questions that underlie both my artistic research practice and my own ontology:

1. What constitutes a Caribbean and/or Black identity? [2]

2. How can we imagine this identity?

3. What cognitive tools can be developed to engage with Caribbean/Black identity?

Perhaps one can easily imagine that ruminating on the aforementioned issues might yield more questions than answers. However, my observations suggest that the question “Do you believe in ghosts?”, is the answer. This claim is made under the assumption that rather than possessing an unchanging ontology, identity is something dynamic and abstruse. Therefore, a question is ostensibly more suited as an answer to a problem regarding identity than a statement could ever be. Whether you believe in ghosts or not, the question remains: How and why did this specific question become the answer?

This report aims to paint a picture of how a Caribbean body engages with the afterlife of colonialism in the Scottish context while giving insight into how one sews together (counter-)narratives of self in order to formulate and express identity. Initially, the spectral agency of Blackness is introduced as a concept that describes the condition of its existence in relation to Western paradigms. Thereafter, evidence of phantoms living in Glasgow’s own POC community is presented to support this thesis. Concurrently, issues are addressed regarding the telling of history and the silencing of Black perspectives – a sentiment very much felt and expressed by the POC community in Glasgow. Ultimately, the report posits the Black imagination as a device for reconfiguring collective memory and reclaiming histories. It becomes clear how the formulation of a healthy Black (and thus Caribbean) identity is inextricably tied to processes of decolonization and the negation of institutional regimes.

Where do we begin?

~ Tuesday October 1st , 2019 ~

At The Gates of the Cemetery

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To start, a retrospective gaze upon my time and fellowship in Scotland invokes a contemplation of the uncanny. Perhaps it was strategically planned that my October visitation coincided with the UK’s Black History month. Black History Month, a time dedicated to excavating the Black narrative, which eerily culminates in All Hallows’ Eve…as if calling for a hauntological framework with which to imagine Blackness and describe its presence in the (Caribbean) afterlife of Colonialism.

Contrary to popular belief, a spectral perspective in October is not birthed from European paradigm alone. Once, an Iyalorisha shared with me, the nature of this blustery autumnal month and its association with a spirit named Oya. In West Africa the age-old Ifá cosmology speaks of Oya as the spirit of the winds and keeper of the cemetery. With Afefe (the wind) as her messenger, she has been guarding the gateway between Aye (the physical realm) and Òrún (the spiritual realm) since the time before she crossed the Atlantic and made contact with The New World. So, for much longer than we can remember, the shifting winds of October have always set the stage for a haunting, during which Oya allows us to address the specters of our past.

The designation of Black History on the other hand, to the same month in the UK, is a new development by comparison. [3] Though its popularity as a consumer holiday in some parts of the western world continues to grow, All Hallow’s Eve began as the eve of Celtic Samhain. As the barrio between worlds grew thinner during Samhain, ancestors were though to cross over into our world. [4] Arguably, in this particular postcolonial landscape, Oya comes to represent the peculiar union between two distinct ideas: that of Black History (in the Old and New Worlds) and that of Halloween. Consequently, invoking this particular spirit within the Scottish landscape reveals the junction where Caribbean and African realities meet.

On the third day of the fellowship, we assembled near the Glasgow Cathedral Cemetery where we stood curiously in a loose circle. That day, only people of color were invited to partake in what could have been the start of a séance. By introducing ourselves, we discovered that many of us came from remote places scattered across the African continent and the Caribbean. Those who identified as Glaswegians, either had parents or grand-parents who moved to the UK long ago from similar parts of the world. The woman responsible for gathering us here was Adebusola Debora Ramsay of Lagos Nigeria, for the purpose of taking us on a Black History Walking tour of Glasgow. That day she would reveal to us the historical links between the city’s built heritage, the transatlantic slave trade and chattel slavery, and empire and colonization.

In hindsight, this must have been a séance! Ramsay’s title of historian could have easily been replaced with that of medium. Perhaps she represented Oya herself in that moment. The tour brought attention to the spectral legacy of Blackness that Scottish history has tried to forget. Under Ramsay’s guidance, we forged acognitive junction that was both trans-generational and transnational. We addressed the ghosts of violence, oppression, racial inequality, and intergenerational trauma underpinning today’s harsh social realities. As successful as the tour was in revealing the vestiges of violence and trauma hidden in plain sight, it failed to produce a real apparition. Or so I thought…

Unbeknown to me, the ghosts arrived as soon as Ramsay had us stand in a circle and engage with each other. Though I could not see them at the time, there was an eerie feeling that came over me that day and it stuck with me throughout my fellowship. The feeling began as a strange sensation of isolation I experienced as the tour progressed through the city. Not only did I feel this way personally, but I felt this on behalf of the group as well. Despite taking place in the busy streets of Glasgow, it felt like Ramsay had been taking us to the most remote places. We were invisible to the masses; existing within a separate reality known only to us, where we engaged with things that only we could see and ever understand. As a group of persons of color we occupied a liminal space, becoming the ghosts manifested by the impromptu séance!

This is how, leading up to All Hallows’ Eve that Scottish October, our Black bodies walked the streets betwixt and between inclusion; a condition that extends itself well beyond the city of Glasgow into the globalized realities of the Atlantic world. Ontologically, this condition renders W.E.B. Du Bois’ notion of double consciousness as a liminal state of being wherein Blackness – and therefore Caribbeaness in some instances – is equated with hauntology.

Ghosts and Skeletons

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Mark Fisher, in What is Hauntology?, Describes a haunting as “intrinsically resistant to the contraction and homogenization of time and space.” [5] Hauntings allow for both the resurfacing of experiences that have passed, as well as the nostalgia for future timelines. In other words, experiences are transferred from other bodies and other times. [6] Hence, the trope of the haunting ghost demonstrates how the past, present and future can never fully be separated from one another. Moreover that which enjoys an absent presence, strives not to be forgotten or discarded. [7] Departing from this, by regarding the Black body as a ghost in the post-colonial sphere and rendering its identity to the realm of hauntology, one disentangles Black identity from experiences of erasure. Instead, identity is understood and harnessed as a node in a complex web of overlapping and secret histories.

That day, when I left the cemetery and walked through the gates of Oya, I knew with certainty that I was stepping into a parallel place. Here, modes of knowing were challenged by the parameters of not knowing. Thus, it became clear to me that Tilting Axis functioned as the epistemic vessel with which to navigate the phantasmagoria that plagues my Caribbean existence.

The confidence in my spectral thesis only grew as I met more people from the POC/diaspora community in Glasgow. One of the first people I met, Barbadian- Scottish artist Alberta Whittle, addressed how our gaze on the past is shaped by white perspectives. Her work departs from the understanding that privileged white men have always sought to replace more ancient and informal ways of understanding history through the use of historical records they deem to be legitimate. [8] In her solo exhibition at Dundee Contemporary Arts, How Flexible Can We Make The Mouth, Whittle counters this orthodox way of knowing through an exploration of healing, writing, breath and orality. [9] The afterlife of slavery is aptly expressed by the trauma that comes with the New World context. Emphatically, in this exhibition, the hurricane was proposed as one of the major constituents of the trauma experienced. Here again, as if by providence, the winds of Africa’s mythic past stirred about me and there stood Oya, staring me in the face.

More ghosts came out of hiding in the archives at LUX Scotland. They were seen in the work of Ayesha Hameed, who created a cinematic lecture-performance Black Atlantis: Retrograde Futurism, which highly resonated with me. Hameed’s work at LUX looks back at a most ominous event that occurred in 2006. After four months at sea, ghost ship with 11 petrified corpses washes up in Barbados, an unnerving headline loomed through the pages of The Guardian newspaper that May. [10] Zombies! The apparition took place off the southeastern coast of Barbados. Petrified by salt, sun and wind, the corpses seemed to have deliberately sailed across The Atlantic.

The title playfully departs from a trope introduced by Paul Gilroy that shifts away from the borders of nation-states in exchange for an alternate organizing principle on which to base Black agency and identity in the West. Here, the choice of ‘Atlantis’ over ‘Atlantic’ signifies a critique on historiography. She reclaims the narrative from the gaze of the media that superficially describes the realities of migrant bodies from Senegal, Guinea Bissau, and Gambia. Fleeing from realities forged in the postcolonial, these migrants set sail for the Canary Islands from Cape Verde, only to disappear into the Atlantic and reappear in a state of petrification four months later in the Caribbean. Thus, the gripping allegory of the ghost ship becomes a device for Hameed to combat historiographical inadequacies and reflect on the norms of knowledge production.

The ghost seized him and shook into him the memories of her life…

This line echoed in my head after hearing it at Transmission Gallery, where I was brought to meet Ashanti Harris, a visual artist, teacher and researcher. Like Whittle and Hameed, Harris’ show, The Skeleton of a Name, also addressed censorship of Black bodies by the subjective process of writing history. The Skeleton of a Name explores the historical relationship between Guyana and Scotland by presenting a case belonging to a number of Caribbean women who arrived in Scotland over two hundred years ago.

Archival investigation revealed that colonial records omitted or erased information in letters, legal documents and travel records belonging to these women. The historical censorship was so invasive that only the skeletal structure of the documents remained, such as names, dates and events. [11] Thus far, my interactions in Scotland reiterated my anticipated qualms surrounding the heavy reliance on institutions and archival research for constructing identities. If there were any corporeal traces to the afterlife of the Black Atlantic, as described by Whittle and Hameed, Harris’s title aptly unearths their macabre skeletal remains.

In other words, if we were to construct Black identity solely on the vestiges of history provided by institutional ways of knowing, our ontology would remain skeletal. Black histories and identities have been subject to erasure and censorship by the Western gaze throughout contemporary history. What constitutes the afterlife of the Black Atlantic then, is at once the condensation of all Black histories into one month a year, while simultaneously restricting it to the parameters of coloniality. Therefore, it can be stated that our identity has largely been compromised by an institutionally induced state of amnesia.

The Decolonial Realm

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One of the driving forces behind my project Ghost Island and the motivation for taking part in this fellowship is to reclaim my own history and identity beyond the scope of modernity. Growing up in Saint Martin, formal education taught that the island’s previous inhabitants were the Arawaks (often described as peaceful and weak) and the Caribs (described as barbaric and inhospitable) before Columbus first ‘brought civilization’ in 1493. Later, in the absence of the indigenous peoples, the Europeans transported Africans to the island as slaves to work on the plantations and harvest salt from the ponds. As a child of the diaspora, no formal institution ever introduced the idea that my history and identity might extend beyond being a descendent of slavery.

When one’s history starts with slavery, everything seems like progress. Hence, it is imperative to uncouple the Black narrative from the colonial sphere. In fact, viewing colonialism as the foundation of modernity frames the enslavement of Black peoples as a large constituent of white history. In contrast, slavery is a relatively small chapter in the larger overarching chronicles of Blackness; a history that paradoxically predates the advent of the term Black. Therefore, Black and Caribbean identities can never be fully reclaimed if our histories are only spoken of in relation to the colonial matrix of power. If we do not escape its grip, then without knowing, we will always remain spoken for; this is the definition of cultural aphasia.

How can we, in the face of modernity, move away from the post-colonial paradigm while we exist within it? Gayatri Spivak states in An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, that the current problem with knowledge is how to know of something, rather than what to know. [12] As she did, I propose training and harnessing the imagination for the production of knowledge. The imagination can be described as a faculty of the brain that produces concepts created by connections that seem arbitrary and illogical. In devising his Mnemosyne Atlas in 1927, art historian Aby Warburg renders the imagination as an intuitive juxtaposition in the form of montage. Following from this, the mapping of this intuitive juxtaposition i.e. the mapping of imagination, helps unveil secret relations between the images and concepts that shape collective consciousness and culture.

Here is where ghosts play an integral role in mitigating the knowledge lost to the ravening hand of historical censorship. Addressing ghosts can help to create an epistemic dynamism and conjure zones of exploration. It is through addressing the unseen, unheard, and untold that imaginative linkages to the past are forged, revealing alternate historicity. Therefore, the specter can be utilized as a visual dialogue to dissect and engage with a collective imagination within Black (and Caribbean) cultural ecosystems.

So, what I call imagination is a faculty that goes beyond empiricism and allows us to pull from it revelations about our realities and how we relate to them. Deriving from this, the Black imagination comes to represent a matrix of a collective subconscious underpinning both the known and unknown facets of Black history and identity. This formed the premise of the lecture I devised especially for the Fellowship, Ghost Island: Exploring Decolonial Imagination, wherein I called for a reconfiguring of histories by expanding the concept of the Black Atlantic into the phantasmagoria of the Black Imagination.

Ghost Island: Exploring Decolonial Imagination posits the Black imagination as a continuum from which to extract secret knowledge; the Ghost, acting as an agent in this continuum of the imagination, becomes a device with which to engage history. For example, as a minor anecdote, I screened an interview (conducted in January 2019) with Ruby Bute, an esteemed painter and storyteller in Saint Martin. During the interview she revealed that she once had a mysterious encounter with a ghost:

Well dem tings wha allu be talking about is true because… when I was pregnant wid my daughtuh, I used to sleep wid de doh opin… you coulda do tha den; sleep wid de doh opin. En sumtin com en tell me “Let’s go to the picnic” in ma ear! [13]

In following-up with her, I asked if she knew what the statement “Let’s go to the picnic?” referred to. The sentence must have haunted her for years, judging by the fact that she now had grandchildren and could still recall the line. However, its meaning never revealed itself to her until now. Uncannily, in my research a month or two later, I stumbled on a line in Lasana M. Sekou’s book National Symbols of St. Martin:

In olden St. Martin, Blacks and whites referred to a picnic far away from the plantation or one’s house (i.e. to Pinel Key), as a maroon.

Here, we can see how the ghost acts as a very real agent in the Caribbean cultural ecosystem. Knowledge is relayed from an imaginative source to an individual in a seemingly arbitrary way. It then occurred to me that for all the ghosts that appeared to me in Glasgow through the workshops, exhibitions, and tours, no one else really spoke about them. Rather, they only spoke of what ghosts represented as a metaphor.

The Jinn

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Ghost Island: Exploring Decolonial Imagination debuted at the School of Art history at the University of St Andrews as part of the Art History Research Lecture Series and St. Andrews Photography Festival. In addition to the anecdote above, the lecture purports to explore alternate historicity of the Atlantic sphere by focusing on liminal figures birthed from the Black imagination.

Departing from what can be described as the semiotics of a dream, the lecture presents a case of the Arabic jinn whose presence can be found scattered throughout both sides of the Atlantic world. Birthed of a syncretism in medieval Muslim Africa, the jinn crossed the Middle Passage to assimilate into the creolized folklore of colonial Brazil and the Caribbean. However, it is only upon further inspection brought about through direct engagement with imagination, that you find the same jinn to have already crossed the Atlantic once before. During a time predating European expansion, the jinn participated in the Mesoamerican myth of the hurricane in Mayan cosmogony. Again we see how Oya is omnipresent and collapses time into the concept of her breath.

Revisiting and reclaiming the Black Atlantic world at once rejects white chronology while redefining the concept of African Diaspora. Crucially, rather than occurring at one singular point in time designated by European historiographies, the African Diaspora occurred at several points throughout history. In turn, this has drastic repercussions regarding Caribbean identity. What it means to be Black and what it means to be indigenous in the New World is now thrown into relative obscurity by an unfurling of conflated histories spun by European dogma. Suddenly, being Black in the Caribbean also denotes the possibilities of pre-Columbian ancestry in that region, significantly delinking the Black Atlantic World from Eurocentric modernity.

Haunted Houses

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As an artistic researcher the aim of my lecture was to properly present a reconfigured historicity, while at the same time demonstrating the engagement with imagination and alternate modes of knowing. Remember the importance of how to know of something over what to know! Tilting Axis has provided a discursive platform for presenting my thesis on the Black Imagination and testing it as a tool for constructing decolonial epistemology. Though I was trepidatious about introducing such an unorthodox methodology at first, I am pleased to say that the lecture seemed to be well-received. I was subsequently asked by Dr. Marika Knowles to be a guest during her seminar the following day to continue the discussion.

About two weeks later, I gave the same presentation at the Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA) in Glasgow in Partnership with Glasgow School of Art’s (GSA) Race Rights and Sovereignty series. It was curious to notice the differences in the way the two audiences engaged with my work. After my presentation, the questions asked by the students of Art History at the University of St Andrews focused upon the production of my photographic images themselves and their visual language. Whereas at CCA, the audience – consisting largely of the GSA’s student population – were more engaged with the Ghosts and the usage of imagination than the images presented.

Not only did these academic institutions offer a space for discursive sparring, their archives and libraries were also at my disposal to conduct research. In particular, The Special Collections Division at the University of St. Andrews graciously laid out a sample of their photographic archive. The collections contributed to the group discussion with invited students and staff from the Art History department, primarily revolving around Scottish-Caribbean relations. Stephen McLaren’s Jamaica: A Sweet Forgetting, Franki Raffles’s documentation of girls in education for International Women’s Day 1989 in the Dominican Republic, Maitland Dougall’s albums of Victorian tourism photographs, Hugh Lyon Playfair’s lantern slides depicting The West Indies, J. Valentine’s images of Jamaica all served as points of departure for speaking about overlapping cultural histories and identities.

I felt privileged to be granted access to the archives of the Titling Axis partners. However, the experience was as complex as the discourse to which I work to contribute. I was reminded of the relative absence of such archives where I am from and was confronted by the fact that the fantastic opportunity I had been given was rarely afforded to people like me. Privilege and access coalesce into the paradox of the Black body within the institutional archives. Once again I realized that I was the ghost in the archive, highlighting the importance of how rather than what to know.

The same holds true for institutions in general as they seem to inherently exhibit coloniality. How does an institution reflect, include or exclude the different (social) realities that contain it. Somehow, Eurocentric epistemology seems to conceal its own geo-historical and biographical metadata. This tendency has succeeded in creating the idea of universal knowledge as if the producers of knowledge were themselves universal and unbiased. [14] This is a paradigm that Black bodies are continually forced to navigate to varying degrees. I found this sentiment to be shared explicitly and implicitly by the many members of the POC community in Glasgow to whom I had been introduced. The works cited above by Ramsay, Harris, and Hameed stood out as examples of this, but the sentiment was evident in the work of many others, too numerous to mention in this report. There is a sense of urgency to escape coloniality as the afterlife of colonialism.

Happy Halloween

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If an archive of Black imagination is to successfully generate and present knowledge, then it must be constructed in a way that allows for the transmission and communication of hidden narratives to take center stage. This is the junction into which my entire fellowship culminates; it is the place where one can both construct and engage with identity at the same time. Identity does not need to be invented, for it has been in existence for as long as mankind can remember. Storytelling is the original living archive and transmitter of knowledge. It bridges geographies and paradigms, creating junctions in reality. At the same time, orature has the ability to collapse past, present and future into the same space. Storytelling is at once tangible and immaterial, in that it needs bodies to participate as nodes that channel information drawn from a palimpsest of ancestral memories.

CCA was the perfect platform to test out the potency of this living archive. It was my intention to harness everything I learned during the fellowship to construct an epitomical engagement with identity and imagination. I called this experimental platform Jumbee Stories, a title that connotes a Caribbean hauntological basis for reviving the old ways of knowing though channeling ancestral memory and Black imagination. Jumbee Stories was curated as a POConly event for all ages in which an experimental platform was created for a session of storytelling and sharing of experiences in relation to ancestral memory.

It was imperative that Jumbee Stories be an event created by POC for POC in order to effectively create a safe space without the white noise of coloniality. As we gathered in a circle once more, just in time for Halloween, we could finally see through the veil of our own phantasmagorical constructs. We came into our ghostliness that night, and vowed not to share the hidden truths that appeared to us from beyond the veil of Black imagination.

Therefore, from an ethical standpoint, I cannot report on the contents of the event. However, I can mention that the participants seemed to possess an innate urge to share their stories, as though they had held their tongues for ages and were now eager to plumb the hidden depths of the Black imagination. Despite this seeming urge, many were apprehensive at first, because they were unsure what kind of story constituted a hauntological experience. The presence of uncertainty in the room about what constitutes hauntology indicates that it was probably the first time in a very long time that someone had posed the question: “Do you believe in ghosts?”

In storytelling, institutional structures of power are subverted because anyone can be a node of knowledge. One does not need to look toward an intellectual elite to know of history or to construct identity. Jumbee Stories is an exercise of epistemic disobedience that harnesses independent thought and decolonial freedom. Moreover, it functions as a living and secret archive that conceals epistemology from oppressive paradigms, in the same ways our ancestors did to avoid the exploitation or dismantling of their ancestral identity. With this mode of collecting and sharing knowledge we are challenging the asserted dominance of occidental epistemology. By asking “do you believe in ghosts?” we enhance our faculties for constructing our own past, present and future narratives, while critiquing the geo-politics of knowledge. Consequently, only in answering this question can ontology and hauntology meet at the junction of identity.

Retrospective

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I spent my final moments at Hospitalfield where I had the chance to reflect on all the specters I met that October. Harnessing the imagination for the production of knowledge is decolonial in a sense that it inherently deviates from any rigid scientific method and does not require institutional validation. Specifically, by embracing the Black imagination of the African Diaspora we contribute the process of decolonization by breaking free from the shackles of institution. The problem with institutions is that they dictate what constitutes valid knowledge while controlling both who has access to it and who may contribute to it. Arguably, decolonization starts in the mind of the post-colonial subject, which is why you cannot talk about decolonization without de-institutionalizing.

It is important to note that I do not regard the trope of the ghost in a way that hides differences and discontinuities of trans-Atlantic communities. In fact, it stresses heterogeneity and merely proposes that the common denominator to the Black narrative in coloniality is a skeleton of hauntology. From here, my ongoing project Ghost Island seeks to build an epistemological framework and metaphor with which to document and process the dynamic and unseen influences of identity; the Black imagination.

Tilting Axis has been a crucial step in the building of the epistemological framework that is Ghost Island and my artistic research practice. The Tilting Axis Collections and Commissioning Fellowship granted me the opportunity to challenge the identities and borders imposed on Black/Caribbean people, by imaginatively reclaiming and rebuilding the Black/Caribbean narrative. Over the course of my residency, I worked to syncretize all the criteria of the fellowship into a reemerging curatorial form: storytelling/orature; a living archive. Accordingly, my fellowship culminated in the development of an educational tool that springs from Black Imagination. Jumbee Stories is a workshop specifically designed for a POC-community to engage with ancestral memory and Black imagination. Though still in its early stages, this living archival workshop forms a pivotal start to producing publicly accessible and critical knowledge about identity.

I could not have imagined a better marriage between a fellowship and an artistic research practice. The name Tilting Axis in itself is already highly evocative of a liminal state of being; like the whirling winds of Oya that exist in a constant state of fluctuation. Liminality is key! At the start, I could not have known that this would be such a fantastic ghost story. I hope that the resulting images and text aptly convey the lessons that I learned during a time that somehow stood still and flew by at the same time.

Uncannily yours,
Lisandro Suriel