I left Cuba before I was old enough to remember it. Yet I keep returning, again and again. Both inside and outside at once. Today I write from the diaspora, from a distance that is both comfortable and painful. I watch the island from afar. I watch what hope looks like now, worn thin by decades of hardship. I watch what speaking up still costs there.
In Kenya, most people speak English and Swahili, and each tribe has its own language. My mother tongue is Kidawida. We were forced to speak English in school. If you spoke in vernacular, you had to wear a plug around your neck saying, “I am a vernacular speaker,” and later you would be punished.
Andil Gosine takes us across a span of time between a photograph taken in 1970s George Village and its display at a museum in present-day America. It is an intimate, temporal space in which he considers what he has made of himself; what he has made with others; what he has made for us.
Like the ixora’s habit of branching and growth, its flower-clusters attracting pollinators into its constellations of small flowers, there is something essentially creative and generative about Gosine’s work. Each new project gives rise to new connections. His approach to ideas seeks not to answer but to ask, not to close subjects but to open them…
The nature culture divide has been the ruling rubric in determining which animals have the right to be considered human and ipso facto are rights bearers in general—namely those who renounce their animality and are cultured into humanity. Of course, the gatekeepers to humanity are none other than those privileged to attain such status simply by being, by the simple fact of their existence as dominant males occupying the very apex of the totem pole of the universe created by Homo patriarchus.
Wata destroys as she creates. Our bodies
of water recall the deep language of toil,
the mixing of our sweat and anguish and
lamentations, the lingua franca of the gods
Shivanee Ramlochan In the canefields, even gods are allowed to be queer. The ecology of...
Andil’s video natures: a guerilla girl story, presents a diptych video of an interracial male couple framed shoulder-to-head. They are pictured on a screen to the left, in a white ceramic tiled room, playfully wrestling on a bed while kissing.
The direct gaze of the two men who occupy the painting’s center suggests a contemporary and queer replacement of the man-woman dichotomy of the iconic painting American Gothic, which represents the tillers and toilers of the land. In Root’s image, McCaskell and Fung express desire for and actual participation in a larger world — the expected backdrop of portraiture is replaced by suggestions of world travel and adventure.
The two figures, Gosine and Carlitos, appear together in London, Ontario-based artist and poet Angie Quick’s majestic eight-by-four-foot oil painting and diptych Carlitos’ Way (2023), whimsically titled by Gosine after the 1993 gangster film of the same name.
In her newest series, Jamaican visual artist Roberta Stoddart takes on the discomforting task of inviting viewers into the Caribbean home-space to interrogate and disrupt the practice of incest, a reality we shudder to face and stammer to speak of in the Caribbean. Over six oil paintings, none larger than 20 x 15 inches, Stoddart tells the story of a Caribbean family attempting to hide wounds of incest inflicted within the home.
Nature’s Wild grew out of the book of the same name and addressed the same tensions: human-animal relations and histories of animalization and race in the Caribbean — how colonists, then postcolonial elites, put the onus on marginalized people to prove themselves human and “not-animal,” for example through dress codes, laws about sexuality, and definitions of citizenship.
