Proposal for a New Necropolis

Ashleigh Deosaran

I. The Danger

Caution tape is something with which we, Trinbagonians, have become intimately familiar. We see it fluttering across the front page, sprawled onto our screens, stretched out around our homes. “CAUTION CAUTION CAUTION CAUTION,” ripples its way through our lives so often it has almost become mundane. That is, until recently, when this familiarity was unsettled by the material’s overnight appearance on a public statue in Port-of-Spain.[1] The blood-red tape formed the shape of an X on the figure’s chest, then climbed up to wrap around his neck, warning “DANGER DANGER DANGER DANGER…”

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Bodies of water: recent work by ANDRAE GREEN

I used the sea as a backdrop in my exploration of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in my M-E-T-A series. The earlier work uses the sea as a backdrop to captivity in contrast to the new work that uses the sea/water as an element of liberation.

Andrae Green. The Nine Lives of St. Sebastian, oil on canvas, 2011
Andrae Green – Figure In Repose With Two Sharks, oil on canvas, 2011
Andrae Green: Divers I, oil on canvas, 36″by 46″,2020

THE COVID FLIGHT DRAWINGS

These works (THE COVID FLIGHT DRAWINGS) are inspired by bodies of water and the Caribbean landscape. Growing up in a small island country, this is not only a big part of the environmental consciousness but my personal consciousness as well. Inspired by memories of boys jumping off the dock at Kingston harbor, water is a metaphor for the weightlessness and freedom of the abyss. It is about a leap of faith.

Andrae Green is a painter whose work explores the nuances of the collective consciousness that has been shaped by time, mythology and memory. Green was born in Kingston, Jamaica where he attended the Edna Manley School for the Visual and Performing Arts. Soon after in 2006, Green was awarded a full scholarship grant sponsored by the Jamaican government and the Chase Fund to obtain his MFA in Painting at the New York Academy of Art. In 2011, he was awarded a residency at the CAC Troy, New York. Andrae Green’s paintings have been shown internationally in the US, Jamaica, Canada, China, and France. In 2012 he was one of the first two artists chosen to represent Jamaica in the Beijing Biennale. In 2013, Green was selected as a part of the American delegation that represented the US at the Salon de Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, at the Carrousel du Louvre in Paris, France. In 2019 he was an artist in residence at Experience Jamaique in Geneva Switzerland. Green’s paintings are included in many private collections around the world. In 2017 his piece “Acquiescence I” was acquired by the National Museum of China. He currently lives and works in Western Massachusetts.

Beach as Plot?

Annalee Davis

I
must be given words to shape my name
to the syllables of trees

I
must be given words to refashion futures
like a healer’s hand

I
must be given words so that the bees
in my blood’s buzzing brain of memory

I
will make flowers, will make flocks of birds,
will make sky, will make heaven,
the heaven open to the thunder-stone and the volcano and the un-folding land.

Kamau Brathwaite,  “Eating the Dead / Negus”[1]

I

The world today feels unfamiliar from what it was mere weeks ago. The COVID-19 pandemic is a remarkable moment, in that it offers the Caribbean an opportunity to transform our reasoning and usher in more humane policies to benefit the collective. Rather than assume that it is only our leaders who have the best ideas or that we abdicate responsibility to the free market, we might use this opportunity to agitate for and contribute to more progressive thinking in shaping our societies. As this crisis unfolds across the region, the very real threat to food sovereignty and the fragility of our economies is glaringly apparent, patterned as it has been for centuries on shortsighted modalities that have not always served our best interests. 

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