Currently browsing: Editorial

The Miseducation of Cameron Post: A much-needed education in empathy for the region

February 11, 2019

By Kevanté A.C. Cash. NAGB Correspondent. The storyline of the film The Miseducation of Cameron Post (2018)—the Grand Jury Prize Winner at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival—is one not too far-fetched to imagine for a queer person living in the Caribbean today, especially when considering the theme of malicious religious manipulation coming to the fore throughout the film. Given the recent polarizing conversations via social media and other channels among Bahamian LGBT rights activist Erin Greene and Jamaican singer-songwriter Buju Banton, whose 1992 hit Boom Bye Bye inspired controversy among the Bahamian people just last month, the timing of this film’s showing at the third annual Island House Film Festival (TIHFF) seems rather fitting and almost intentional, as a move towards a step in a much progressive direction.

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A Botanical of Grief: Yasmin Glinton and Charlotte Henay connect with ancestors voices and put mother tongue to poetry.

February 6, 2019

By Natalie Willis. In much of cultural studies, the Caribbean region has been discussed as a place where people feel an uneasy, tense tie to landscape due to our history of people being displaced here. Paradise or purgatory, whether these islands were viewed as restorative or a place of exile – and truthfully, we have had both stories ring true throughout time, it’s all in the branding. Tourist narratives aside, this space is a difficult one to feel truly close to, the landscape feels at once that it is ours and that it is without of our reach given the fact we are all “from elsewhere”, as Stuart Hall (the late Jamaican scholar and father of cultural studies) stated. Poetry in visual art can also be a difficult fit – is it language? Is it visual? Is it both? Problematising our ties to the land and the neat boxes that traditionalists might wish to shove the vast world of poetry into, are the unapologetic works of Yasmin Glinton and Charlotte Henay. “A Botanical of Grief” (2018), displayed in subtle silver script bearing powerful words of great weight, exists between – like so many of us in the Caribbean. The work is between voices: of the authors, of their ancestors, of poet and of artist, but it also exists in a liminal space physically as it spans the high walls of the stairwell of the 1860’s old bones that make up the Villa Doyle. Stairs are between places, and so are we as children of the Caribbean. We are between Africa and Europe, between India and China, we come from Arawaks, Tainos and Caribs with difficult access to those mother tongues – and most importantly, we are an amalgam of any and all combinations of these continents.

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Under Attack: Averia Wright’s Elevating the Blue Light Special  and the Dualities of Bahamian Identity

January 29, 2019

By Ethan Knowles. War for much of the Caribbean is a remote idea – a thing of books, films and faraway lands. In a region characterized by calm waters, light breezes and laidback locals, the notion seems oddly out of place. But the idea is not just a distant one. It’s also awfully dangerous. War necessarily conflicts with what Caribbean nations like The Bahamas ‘should’ be, that is, a peaceful escape for the worn and overworked. Put simply: conflict in the Caribbean is off-brand. And in our Bahamaland, where at least sixty percent of the GDP and half the workforce rely on a carefully manufactured and embellished brand image, being off-brand can be about as deadly as armed conflict. As the daughter of a straw vendor in a family of straw vendors, Bahamian sculptor and expanded practice artist Averia Wright is well-acquainted with the brand of paradise we manufacture here. Her work, which grapples with issues affecting both The Bahamas and the region at large, is particularly concerned with tourism and its role as a neocolonialist system in the country today. Elevating the Blue Light Special (2018), Wright’s submission for the “NE9: The Fruit and The Seed,” addresses just this concern, exposing and critiquing the commercialisation of identity which is so central to the contemporary tourist economy.

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A Garden: Letitia Pratt creates new folklore in response to the biblical patriarchal storytelling surrounding women and their sexualities

January 28, 2019

By Kevanté A.C. Cash, NAGB Correspondent. Amid the cacophany of fragile male egos, speaking ever so loudly over the voices of the most vulnerable, the question arises: where can the disenfranchised go to feel safe and protected? To feel comfortable in one’s own skin? To be loved for themselves entirely, and not be used, abused, mistreated or abandoned? Organised religion, for years, has done a superb job in keeping the marginalised on the outskirts of the conversations that seeks to give them liberty. The marginalised meaning ‘the backbone of society’, the movers, makers, shakers and doers, the ones who are made to feel ashamed for how they express themselves and their sexualities. These people–women–I argue are the most disenfranchised group of individuals within society.

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“Water: The giver and the taker of life”: Edrin Symonette’s “Salt of the Earth”

January 23, 2019

By Dr Ian Bethell-Bennett, The University of The Bahamas. Salt: pressed into flesh, brines and cures, drying left on lines, as flies land and enjoy a feast of decaying flesh; a colonial resource extracted from the spaces of the once far-flung regions of empire. Salt is a way of life; a natural resource abundantly available in the islands; the pain of enslaved Africans who laboured tirelessly in its corrosive briny suspension as they raked salt under hot sun. Their skin ulcered, backs bent and minds steeled against the dehumanisation of exploitation and enslavement.

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“I ga’ gee’ you what you lookin’ for!”: Tamika Galanis gets to the heart of the Caribbean’s history of “looking”

January 7, 2019

By Natalie Willis, The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas. Who gets to write history? And, better still, who gets to interpret it, present it, share it to the masses? It’s a slippery question for the Caribbean, and arguably for most post-colonial countries. Much of what makes it so difficult to grasp is how the gaze is problematised in this region. In art and history in particular, “the gaze” as a concept is the way that our history, experiences and dominant narratives shape the way we see – in short, it is how our conditioning as a society influences the way we view ourselves and others. In particular, film and cinema capitalise on this with the way they place certain visual cues. At its best, it can be a way to build suspense and intensity in film, at worst – and as so often happens with Caribbean history – it can drive in a singular narrative on what is a very nuanced experience. Tamika Galanis’ Returning the Gaze: I ga gee you what you lookin’ for (2018) explores just that: representations of Blackness outside of a dated, colonial gaze.

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The Architecture of Loss: Memorials, Memento Mori, and the Man from Milton Street

November 12, 2018

By Natalie Willis. “i learn urgently | the architecture of loss | then find you again.” ― Warsan Shire. Lavar Munroe’s “Memorials” series is an exercise in the architecture of loss, of remembering, and the residue of life we leave long after we are physically gone from this world. A parachute, a hand-made urn, and flowers are an unlikely pairing but help to braid together the strands of the story of a man’s life, but they also offer us a thread between worlds, between countries, between lives, and between times.  Munroe–proud of his upbringing and regular reunions with the Grants Town community where he still holds a studio–spends much of his time these days travelling. Not unlike the parachute shown in “Return: The Magic Flight” (2018), he is uprooted, but he often finds his way back to the solid soil of this historic settlement in Nassau. The “nation’s navel” that is Bain and Grants Town have produced a number of historically significant figures in Bahamian history, and Lavar is well on his way to being a key fixture in Bahamian art history for years to come, if his current 10 year survey at the NAGB (with the proud and proclamatory title “Son of the Soil”) is any indication.  

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