sixteen bars

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Alexia Arthurs’s anthology of short stories, How to Love a Jamaican (Ballantine Books), is host to these nuances. Her characters negotiate who they were, are and aspire to be as they confront and traverse their problems with proverbs and parables of their nation’s past. Arthurs creates a world that reminds us that though we have the ability to engender entirely different realities than the ones that we are currently acquainted with, distance does little to sever ties to the places, people and practices of a life now foregone, especially when love is involved. She breathes life into common experiences of immigrants, refugees and people who leave their homeland for unfamiliar grounds. But using Jamaica as a backdrop offers a unique perspective into what makes Jamaicans’—diaspora included—collective realities so distinct. To live in Jamaica is to exist in a paradox. A story, typically passed down orally, speaks to the island as a place, during the era of the transatlantic slave trade, where the most unruly and resistant slaves were sent to be “seasoned,” or broken down, into slavery. Centuries later, that same badniss is an element of our collective identity that we shoulder with pride. It’s evident in our music, our fashion, our language and our dancing but is juxtaposed by the remnants of a religious, colonial past that creeps its way into contemporary institutions and widely held beliefs. The land of wood and water is duly known for having the most churches per square mile in the world, and the influence of Christian values permeate nearly every aspect of our lives, both overtly and insidiously. What this means for many is a limitation of one’s actions and a silencing of desires for fear of reprisal, or being sequestered into the fringes of their communities. Whether it be alleviating or even amplifying parental pressures, having the space to explore sexuality or stepping out of the confines of tradition, for many Jamaicans on the island and in its far-reaching diaspora, the idea of living in the Global North—though accompanied with its own particular challenges—offers a chance for rebirth or at the very least an opportunity to step into a different kind of truth in a foreign utopia, sans the anticipation of judgements that lurk in the shadows of our subconscious.

‘It’s More Complicated Than the Grass Being Greener’: An Interview with Alexia Arthurs by Sharine Taylor 

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Making art from archives is very much a part of Mr Gates’s oeuvre. An African-American sculptor, musician, university professor and community activist, now aged 44, he first gained recognition through an ambitious programme of social and cultural regeneration. In 2006, having taken a post at the University of Chicago, he moved to the South Side and began turning abandoned properties into community centres. When Dr Wax Records and Prairie Avenue Bookshop, much-loved local businesses, collapsed, Mr Gates bought their stock and created libraries of art, architecture, black music and black cinema. He staged soul food dinners and musical events, often performing with his band, the Black Monks of Mississippi. Mr Gates is eager to do more than just celebrate the Johnson Publishing archive. To add to his multiple identities, the artist is now a publisher: he has created Black Madonna Press to give the Johnson images a future in book form. If the “Ghetto Madonna”, his Virgin sculpture and the prints count as three Gates Madonnas, the printing press is his fourth. It’s yet another way Mr Gates can spread his gospel

“Theaster Gates and the art of the Black Madonna” - The Economist (June 2018)

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“The art world was angry — they were angry that I was there, and that the realtor had leased me the space,” says Bryant. “Dealers would say nasty things to me in the elevator. But, hell yeah, we succeeded on a lot of levels.” JAM became an interdisciplinary community of artists and curators, including Lowery Stokes Sims, the first black curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and multimedia artists Howardena Pindell and Lorraine O’Grady, fostering, Bryant says, “an appreciation for what was possible, not those little boxes we had contained ourselves in.” What these art dealers understood is that the gallery, as an entrée into the art market, is the sole platform for an artist to make a living. And in many ways, galleries are where the hierarchy of power in the art world begins and ends. They discover an artist’s work and promote it to both collectors and institutions; the work rises in value once it enters a museum, and this ultimately leads to more gallery shows. It is an unchanging cycle that for decades artists of color, lacking a commercial outlet, “couldn’t even attempt to break into,” according to Bryant.  CONTRARY TO THE assumption that society moves toward equality on its own, the ascent of black artists into the status quo has been a result of diligent actors. It has been helped enormously through a dedicated group that includes Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels, a director at Jack Shainman, New York gallery with a roster of largely black artists including Nick Cave, Carrie Mae Weems and the estate of Gordon Parks; Mariane Ibrahim, who founded her Seattle gallery in 2012; the San Francisco-based Karen Jenkins-Johnson, who recently expanded to Brooklyn; and a rising population of black staffers, who for so long were not present in most galleries at all.

‘Why Have There Been No Great Black Art Dealers?’ by Janelle Zara for The New York Times Magazine (June 2018)

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I am with the white woman who once again is not the same white woman. It seem an obvious thing to say, but sometimes we must say the obvious: not every white woman is the same white woman; and not every black man is the same black man. Our racial identities matter, but plenty times it is the personalities behind those identities that matter even more. It is our personalities that make us use our black-man-ness or our white-woman-ness in such different ways, as shield and as spear. Now it is a well-known phenomenon that when the turtles come onto land they seem to cry – not no cow-bawling mind you! The beach isn’t suddenly full of the wailings of turtles. It is just a polite drop of water moving down their eyes as if these mothers are experiencing all the pain and joy of homecoming. We are told now that there is no emotion attached to this eyewater. It is just biology – the removing of excess salt from their bodies, and also a way to protect their eyes from the sand. The white woman beside me however is really crying. Real tears. Real emotion. She is upset by a man who is not me, but it may as well have been. The man had written this thing about the white woman and his words had moved like a cutlass, but it was many years ago and I am surprised that the white woman is still so upset by it. She cries as if this thing had happened yesterday. I know I do not have the right to say how long pain should last, or what we have the right to be upset about, but these days I find it harder and harder to extend sympathy to the white woman. I cannot find in me the tongue to say, Daughter of Zion, lift up thine head, because –Lord forgive me – I do not think of her as a Daughter of Zion. I think she is Daughter of another place. Like the sea turtles, she too had migrated. And then she started writing these books, and they were very good books. She had been back before – often – but now she came back as a writer and seemed to discover so many things about the self same place where she had been born. The white woman wrote an article about this coming back, about finding out to her great surprise that on these rocks that we call islands that we call home that there were actually writers. Who would have believed such a thing? Writers who live on rocks! And not only that – some of them were actually quite good! He thought about this white woman who was born on these rocks but who had become a writer elsewhere and so did not seem to know things. He could not forgive the white woman for her naiveté. His annoyance grew and became its own article. His article was many times larger than the small stub the white woman had written. In the man’s article he calls the white woman a modern-day Columbus, for she had discovered what was already there. Upon reading this the white woman had cried for days and days, and even years later sitting on a beach and watching the turtles, she is still crying. She tell me again how the wicked man has ruined her. She tell me again that what the wicked man has written is libellous. She tell me again that she was tempted to file a big fat lawsuit gainst the man, but I think whichever lawyer she did talk to and who tell her that such a case was winnable was a samfy man, a merchant of snake oil, who did only want to take away what little money the white woman did have in her pockets. In any case, I glad she did not sue, for how would that have looked? A white writer from foreign sues a black man in the Caribbean – for what? Forgetting his place? Because he had the audacity and was renk enough to roll up all his smallness and blackness and use it as a weapon against her? She would not have survived the backlash. There was a time when I did sympathise with the white woman who is also my friend. I used to tell her yes, yes, the man’s words were harsh…because they really was harsh, but then I would add softly…even though they were true. You understand that, right? There was truth in his words. She didn’t ever hear the last part. I suspect now, she could hear little beyond the sound of her own heart breaking. Every year I would try to say it a little bit louder: there was truth in the man’s words. You hurt him too! Do you understand that? You hurt him. You hurt me! But she would never hear that sentence. She did not know how to. Always, it was as if she needed me to see her pain, but never the place beyond it.

‘THE WHITE WOMEN AND THE LANGUAGE OF BEES’ by Kei Miller for PREE Lit (May 2018)

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As the writer Derica Shields notes in an upcoming book, black panther is not a species of cat; it is a designation for a black cat of any type. “The melanistic color variant of any big cat species” is how Wikipedia puts it. The word panther also means “black cat,” so black panther is a tautology, a black black thing. Blackness pushes the animal out of its category, perhaps even out of the category of the animal. Blackness cleaves—as in joins and splits—the human and the animal. What a magic property! I HAVE NOTICED many times in public and private life that people often hesitate for a beat before enunciating the word black, as if the simple syllable were too hard to pronounce, too much to say. As if they wanted to prove Wilderson—who is often accused of being too emo or dramatic in his Afro-pessimism—right. The idea that death is preferable to bondage, and, relatedly,that those held in bondage are in a sense already dead, animates the political violence that Wilderson (following Sylvia Wynter) sees as emerging from the fact that white society positions Black people outside of the Human, in the ontological position of the Slave. Wilderson writes, “The question of political agency began to go something like this: What kind of imaginative labor is required to squash the political capacity of the Human being so that we might catalyze the political capacity of the Black?” Blackness opposes humanity insofar as humanity, as it’s politically constructed today—a partial allocation, easily forgotten at the border or in a wrong neighborhood—opposes life. For Wilderson, Black death-in-life opposes white-capitalist life-as-death, whose poison seeps into the tiniest particles of the world.

‘SUPERPOWER’ by Hannah Black on Black Panther for Art Forum (May 2018)

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The world seems upside down and back to front. For your own eyes tell you that your people, like all people, are marvellous. That they are—like all human beings—beautiful, creative, godlike. Yet, as a child, you couldn’t find many of your gods on the television or in books; they were rarely rendered in oil, encountered on the cinema screen or in the pages of your children’s Bible. Sometimes, in old reruns, you might spot people painted up, supposedly to look like your gods—with their skin blackened and their lips huge and red—but the wise black child pushed such toxic, secondary images to the back of her mind. Instead, she placed her trust in reality. But here, too, she found her gods walking the neighborhood unnoticed and unworshipped. Many of them appeared to occupy lowly positions on a ladder whose existence she was only just beginning to discern. There were, for example, many low-wage gods behind the counters at the fast-food joints, and mostly gods seemed to shine shoes and clean floors, and too many menial tasks altogether appeared to fall only to them. Passing the newsstand, she might receive her first discomforting glimpse of the fact that the jail cells were disproportionately filled with gods, while in the corridors of power they rarely set a foot. Only every now and then did something make sense: a god was recognized. There’s little Michael Jackson and grand Toni Morrison, and, look, that’s James Baldwin growing old in France, and beautiful Carl Lewis, faster than Hermes himself. The kinds of gods so great even the blind can see them. But back at street level? Too many gods barely getting by, or crowded into substandard schools and crumbling high-rise towers, or harassed by police intent on clearing Olympus of every deity we have. And, for a long, innocent moment, everything about this arrangement will seem surreal to the black child, distorted, like a message that has somehow been garbled in the delivery. Then language arrives, and with language history, and with history the Fall.

‘Deana Lawson’s Kingdom of Restored Glory‘ by Zadie Smith for The New Yorker (May 2018)

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It’s (A Woman's Work) a group of people coming together to help us all think about something we should be thinking about, which is: How do we create altars in society for black female genius? And not just the women who are artists or authors. But the women who contained art and who were never afforded the space to express it. It’s not about me as a writer, it’s about: Who authored my life? It is fascinating how so many artists of color often feel as if we are a processional of legacy, and often we enter into these rarefied spaces of art through familial or localized bonds. And yet, outside our intimate memories, who knows the names of these women who made us? In my mind, the idea of bringing these stories into a space like MoMA is a glorious way of sealing a fissure, filling a lacuna, acknowledging the oversight and remedying and readying ourselves for a fuller, more luminous future where we refuse to leave those women behind.

‘Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah‘ by Chloe Wayne Sultan for Creative New York (April 2018)

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The Undercommons” has become well known, especially, for its criticism of academia. “It cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge, and it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment,” Moten and Harney write. They lament the focus on grading and other deadening forms of regulation, asking, in effect: Why is it so hard to have new discussions in a place that is ostensibly designed to foster them? They suggest alternatives: to gather with friends and talk about whatever you want to talk about, to have a barbecue or a dance—all forms of unrestricted sociality that they slyly call “study.” The book concludes with a long interview of Moten and Harney by Stevphen Shukaitis, a lecturer at the University of Essex, in which Moten explains the idea. We are committed to the idea that study is what you do with other people. It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice. The notion of a rehearsal—being in a kind of workshop, playing in a band, in a jam session, or old men sitting on a porch, or people working together in a factory—there are these various modes of activity. The point of calling it “study” is to mark that the incessant and irreversible intellectuality of these activities is already present. Moten maintains that this kind of open-ended approach can be brought to bear everywhere, and can address even those subjects that might seem most traditionally academic.

‘Fred Moten’s Radical Critique of the Present‘ by David Wallace for The New Yorker (April 2018)

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Corned beef isn’t particularly healthy, as it’s super high in sodium and fat, but it was affordable — although not so much now — and one can could be stretched among at least three people. I imagine that it would have been an ideal, easy, and cost-efficient way to feed yourself and two children in the ’70s, as was the case for my grandma who newly immigrated to Toronto. From my grandmother’s hands, I enjoyed bully beef on a plate of white rice, with fried dumplings, or alongside steamed cabbage, and from my mother’s, it made for a quick lunch sandwiched between two slices of hardo bread. As a student living on the margins, these were meals that were both easy to prepare and within my means, but I had always thought about whether our preference toward it was exclusive to my family or was a statement of something much larger. Cork, Ireland, had been manufacturing and exporting corned beef during the 1600s right until 1825. The corned beef was sent in cans to feed an international demand, which proved to be useful for the British Navy, who sustained themselves on this cured meat throughout the Napoleonic Wars, and to overseas colonial powers, much like the one that existed in pre-independent Jamaica, who needed cheap food to feed slaves. Cabbage and sliced corned beef is still considered a traditionally Irish(-ish) dish, which is a whole other story, but in our household, it was served hashed and seasoned with spices, tomatoes, green peppers, and scallions."

‘Plantains, Corned Beef, And Home’ by Sharine Taylor for Buzzfeed (May 2018)

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I work a lot with scraps of the archive. I work a lot with unknown persons, nameless figures, ensembles, collectives, multitudes, the chorus. That’s where my imagination of practice resides. That’s where my heart resides. I think that there’s a certain notion of the intellectual capital “I.” It’s not that I’m not an intellectual, and I certainly want to produce work that people find valuable and of use, but I guess I already feel so fortunate and so rich to be in the company of thinkers and artists that I’m a part of. That just feels like an incredible gift. ---- While I think that each space can be a context for the production and dissemination of ideas, what’s different about the university, at least for me, is that I think of my classroom as a laboratory in thought. In the classroom, I try not to have an audience, even as I might, in the case of a lecture, sometimes lead and direct the engagement with ideas. I really enjoy being a part of this collective exploration of thought, one that feels open-ended and exciting.Not that museum spaces can’t do that. I think that’s what I really enjoy, the sense that there’s something at stake, and we’re all a part of that, as opposed to I’m speaking and there’s an audience observing. I really enjoy the collaborative process. At its best, the classroom can be that.

On working with archives: An interview with writer Saidiya Hartman with Thora Siemsen (April 2018)

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That’s what languages and dialects do, really; they sort, organize, and, most effectively, segregate speakers. And that’s in part why the proud use of patois, which has thousands of speakers across once-colonized lands all over the world, can stoke such an impassioned — or, in the case of Hall, awed — response. In the Caribbean, patois languages were formed by the economic stress and social control of slavery and colonization. Patois in the Americas, sometimes called creoles, contain elements from four linguistic backgrounds: Romance languages, Arabic, West and Central African, and indigenous American languages. Many patois are mutually intelligible because of shared root languages, but from island to island, patois are distinct: Barbados has its own, as does Martinique, Haiti, Jamaica, and so on. One fundamental commonality of patois is grammar, which has no tense for time. And notably, patois are “unlettered,” meaning they aren’t written down, though you often hear spoken languages rudely categorized as “illiterate.” The features of patois, generated by the resourceful genius of enslaved West Indians, make them the most disparaged languages in the world. For much of the history of the study of linguistics, patois weren’t considered “real” languages at all; at most, they were seen as well-developed rural slangs, Darwinian subordinates of the European languages from which they’d sprung. Renowned European linguists like Albert Dauzat and Charles Bruneau approached the study of “popular languages” with a mix of curiosity, condescension, and fetishization. Even the name is a demonstration of supremacist judgment: “Patois” emerged in 17th-century imperial French, derived from “patter,” meaning “noise produced by two objects making contact.” The word is loaded with the flat, permanent sentiment of Enlightenment-era racism.

‘NEW TONGUES: THE POLITICS OF PATOIS IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM’ by Doreen St. Félix for MTV News (August 2016)

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Influential art has always spawned second lives that appear to contradict their origins. And yet there are quiet convergences even between Hill and Cardi B—two figures who might appear to be opposites in tone, attitude, dress, and everything else. Last year, with “Bodak Yellow,” Cardi B became the first female rapper since Hill to have a No. 1 single on the Billboard Hot 100. On last week’s episode of “Saturday Night Live,” as Cardi performed “Be Careful,” the camera slowly zoomed out to reveal her pregnancy. Women artists are still criticized for the false choice of motherhood over career; in the defiance of Cardi, I couldn’t help but recall the defiance of Hill, who sang in“To Zion” about finding joy in the new life of her son. As I watched Cardi B on Saturday night, I imagined her younger self, captivated by Hill as a child, taking from her what she needed, as she began charting her own path.

‘Cardi B, Drake, and the Art of Sampling Lauryn Hill’ by Doreen St. Felix for The New Yorker (April 2018)

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Y⁠— got as much of the real me as I was capable of showing. She lived with my depression and my no-writing fury and with the rare moments of levity, of clarity. The other women saw primarily my mask, right before I ghosted them. The mask was strong. But no mask is that strong. No one’s G that perfect. No one’s love that dumb. One day Y⁠— didn’t like an answer I’d given her about where I’d been. I’m sure she’d been having doubts for a while—especially after one woman showed up at a reading of mine and burst into tears when I said hi. Y⁠— decided to go snooping through my e-mails, and since I wasn’t big on passwords or putting old e-mails in the trash it took her less than five minutes to find what she was looking for. A heartbreak can take out a world. I know hers did. Took out her world and mine. Another woman might have shot me dead on principle, but Y⁠— simply printed out all the e-mails between me and all my other girls, all my bullshit seduction attempts, all the photos, had the evidence of my betrayals bound, and when I came home from one of my trips handed them to me. When I realized what she’d given me I blacked out. Which is what tends to happen when the world ends. A few months later, I won the Pulitzer Prize for a novel narrated by a Dominican brother who loses the Dominican woman of his dreams because he can’t stop cheating on her. When I found out I’d won the prize my first thought wasn’t “I’m made” but “Maybe now she’ll stay with me.” She didn’t. A few months later Y⁠— got her head together and kicked me out of her life completely. She kept the apartment, the ring, her family, our friends. I got Boston. We never saw each other again.

The Silence: The Legacy of Childhood Trauma by Junot Díaz for The New Yorker (April 2018)

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In the gallery, a white woman swaddled in a dark winter coat turns to face Diallo. She glances up at the word cloud, carefully reads the description and then angles herself to read Okri’s poem. Her concentration lapses and when she feels my eyes on her, she scuttles away towards the permanent collections. Maybe like me she’s irritated by these abstractions that tell us little about Diallo. Perhaps she wants to know: Did he stoop to say his prayers in the tobacco fields of the Maryland plantation where the British slavers shipped him? Did he meet other West Africans in London? If so, how did he greet them? When he boarded the ship to Gambia, was he afraid that beneath the jubilation of his homecoming there would be shame too? Can the British ever truly reckon with this history if it is always held apart and discussed always in relation to black bodies and not in relation to whites? I imagine a word cloud surrounding Elizabeth I’s coronation portrait: “Pioneer of chattel slavery” and “early proponent of British border enforcement” and wonder if, in fact, it is my presence the woman cannot face. My phone buzzes and I make my way to meet my friend in the gallery shop. On my way I pass a portrait I would spend hours staring at as a child, on summer holiday visits to Central London. The subject is a young woman with opaque white skin and hair worn in copper ringlets. She has the kind of hair that really knows how to hold a curl. I think about the brazen memory of black hair, which, however it is pulled and pinned, knows how to revert, how to return. Her smile pinches her lips so firmly that each corner of her mouth is a full stop. I remember my English teacher’s thumbs pressed firmly into the corners of my desk as she insists that the Dark Lady of Shakespeare’s sonnets is not dark in that sense. What was I looking for when I searched these white faces for a “touch of tar?” The truest face of British history, its blackness elliptical and submerged?

 ‘Face Me, I Face You’ by Derica Shields for The New Inquiry (June 2014)

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The astronomic bail amount was placed under the assumption that Bobby’s virtual visibility reflected his net worth. Like most digital content creators with prolific followings, there is a disparity between this level of visibility and its financial pay-off. Several attempts were made to lower the bail amount but they were rejected. Bobby remains in jail pending his trial date in September (postponed for the second time since his original trial date of February 22, 2016). While his virtual representation acquires cultural capital, Bobby remains invisible. His image and gestures remain in circulation, propagated within and outside the confines of the internet. The device of a looped gif is not exclusive to Vine but is made explicit by its UI, which counts revolutions as content is looped across all devices in which the vine is being accessed. The visual accumulation of loops on Bobby’s dead body (in a Barthes-sense) can operate as a metaphor for the process of his digestion within the cyclic mandibles of the Internet. The dance is performed by a disembodiment of Bobby that operates as a jester to entertain and generate a mimetic cultural trope for those who access the video. Though Bobby is integrated into the lifestyle, even he can perceive that the odds are stacked against him and those like him. Even though he has distanced himself from the gangster lifestyle after gaining fame, he feels that he’s ‘guilty for where he lives’, because where he’s from “you don't have to be in a gang to be in a gang, you just grew up in the neighborhood.“ If Bobby receives the full punishment of his charges he may be added to the list of up-and-coming rappers taken out of the game prematurely. For now, Bobby remains consumed by the virality of the internet meme, cannibalized by the the court system—a politically invisible man.

Bobby Shmurda: Viral and Invisible by American Artist for New Criticals (May 2016)

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From Moten, she gained a sense that “blackness itself could fluctuate and circulate and levitate in a way that is not always attributed to it,” Edwards said. “He made it a multiplicity.” The notion of blackness as multivalent figured in “Blackness in Abstraction,” an enterprising group show that Edwards curated for Pace Gallery in New York in 2016 around the premise of “black as a material, a method, a mode, and/or a way of being in the world.” Many artists in the exhibition were black, but race was only one of many matters considered within a purview that also covered blackness as a color and an enigmatic conception of either presence or absence—with all connotations coalescing into an oblique and elusive but also intuitive and consciousness-raising whole. Moten situates blackness similarly, with as much a sense of suggestion as of declaration. “He writes about it in a way in which blackness is not stable,” said Mark Anthony Neal, a professor of African and African-American studies at Duke University, where Moten once taught. “And there’s a way in which Fred’s own writing is unstable. If you’re looking for stability, you’re not going to find it—his is an active mind doing an active project, and you have to ride with him in order to deal with the work most effectively.”

‘Every and All: Fred Moten’s Oneness as a Poet, Theorist, and Artistic Muse’ by for ARTnews (March 2018)

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I want to move away from thinking about art writing. Not as an analytical tool, but as a relational one, and not as a review that explains the object in question, but as a way to extend the work by seriously confronting my love for it, why I love it. So instead of using theory, or theoretical/critical analysis as interventions into my own writing, I feel that I am stepping out for the third time, and sharing with you a multilayered daydream that I hope will resonate into a story, a narrative of sorts that you are able to follow. My intention is to practice being in the work. Which, for me, means I am in the process of writing a love note to these beautiful and moving videos by Ruanne Abu-Rahme and Basel Abbas. I am really thinking about this process as a correspondence. This experiment of mine that I am going to share with you is really coming from thinking about love. I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to fall in love with art and how to communicate this expression into writing. As a curator and writer, I am often moved by the capacity in which a work changes me, and I find that is the hardest to articulate. I want to engage with this process of relation in a more rigorous, but also vulnerable, way.  I am moving out of what some would call theoretical writing into memory/daydream writing, to contend not only with the experience of grief and how it is felt in the everyday, but also through a personal and familial way– thinking about my grandparents who have died, and who are dying, and what it means to lose embodied knowledge in that way. I will no longer have access to my history, and that the stories of lineage, of migration, of struggle will be lost. And I am linking all of this to thinking about creating my own personal decolonial methodology. To integrate what I feel, what I image as dream or memory, to consider this as knowledge in its own right: what does it do to write this out as practice, to bring it into articulation for the public?

‘For Many Returns’ by Nasrin Himada for Contemporary (March 2018)