Jamaica collectively held its breath as reports confirmed that Melissa had made landfall. Then a torrent of media: homes washing away in mudslides, death, people clawing at walls, screens from Jamaican, British, American and French news showing floods, people fleeing the sinking homes they had built.
The only memory I had of my mother — the earliest memory I had at all — was a good one. I was 5 years old and must have run out onto the bus route, because I remember being snatched up from the chaos of the road as a Maxi screamed past, and my mother whisking me away to the pavement, where she held me tightly in her arms and comforted me. In the only memory I have of my mother, she saved my life. At least in that moment, she loved me.
My father was so proud of his accomplishments that they had their own tower, set to be visible upon entering the house. They were sales awards mostly, with a few semi-professional sports trophies in the mix. My baby picture was tucked beside a plastic gold cup awarded to the 2nd runner up in the 2009 D&G golf tournament. I knew a picture of his own father, Senior, was framed somewhere on the top shelf, too high for me to see. Candy was nowhere.
In the book, I show my mother being a victim of domestic violence. I show her being mistreated in the worst ways by my father. Given that domestic violence, many people would say rubbish like, ‘well, she did her best’ or ‘be more empathetic’. I wanted to show the knife edge of someone who is abused and is a worse abuser. If you have been or are the victim of abuse and you turn around and abuse your own children, you are a monster.
PREE is proud to present a series of stellar essays to accompany Andil Gosine’s Nature’s Wild, which opens at the Paul Petro Gallery in Toronto on October 10.
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.
