It is indeed fantastic that we can celebrate those from among us who leave for greener pastures, “make it”, as we say, then return, however temporarily, for perhaps refuelling or grounding. I think of a certain guy who sang of electric avenues and a certain gal who, as I began to write, was exciting the hearts and imaginations of so many, young and old in Guyana. I don’t normally pay attention to pop culture celebrities but I have to with this young woman. How could I not? And when I do pay attention, this one causes me to smile, a natural smile; a smile from my heart.
Where do I begin? The image of the Africa-descended woman in the West has been so denigrated for centuries that it has been phenomenal to watch this young woman’s deportment – a powerful counter narrative to denigrated black femininity. Equally phenomenal has been our reception of her, detractors aside.
I confess, I only know her in one role in two movies. And indeed, the character she portrayed was fantastic and inspiring in both. Her fictive character proposed endless possibilities for black girls and women. But so too does the person, the actress herself. Regal. Elegant. Spirit-guided. Spirit-purposed. I am overjoyed because unlike so many of our pop icons, some call them queens, this Western – specifically Caribbean – black female body presents in that realm of the imagination and the ‘real world,’ covered with cloth and not sexualised. In both the imaginative realm and the ‘real world’ this black female Caribbean body presents as guided by intellect and of a humanity that is not tethered to a sexualised or hypersexual femininity. Thus, this body is not subsumed and made another victim of a burdensome history and an unfortunate legacy of slavery.
Slavery?! Indeed, I wrote slavery. We in the Caribbean continue to play out modes of thinking, of being, of occupying space that are tethered to our ancestral experiences on the rural plantations and in the urban spaces of forced labour in the colonial West Indies. Behaviours learned over centuries continue to plague us and we toss aside criticism of them sometimes with, “Is we culture.” (A simple example is our tendency for a salty diet. Salted fish from the Scottish Highlands were part of our ancestral diet.) But culture is a thing that should experience flux, especially in times of enhanced knowledge. It should not stay static. It should experience shifts and transformations – be a thing that is breathing and living.
More to the point, the drawn, painted, photographed (however which way visual) image is important. Images have power! I think of images concurrent to African enslavement in the lands referred to as the Americas. The images of Italian itinerant artist Agostino Brunias (1730 – 1796) while he worked in the British West Indies come to mind. Brunias’s images have been frequently read by scholars as pro-slavery, for use by holders of enslaved people to justify the institution of slavery. While his images centred the African/Africa-descended free and enslaved bodies he likely encountered, the bodies carrying markers of enslavement do not toil the land or labour under the watchful eyes of the enslaving whites. Instead, Brunias’s enslaved black bodies which are overwhelmingly female, dance and flirt and enjoy life. Brunias’s black female bodies bathe and launder clothes in pools of natural water, they mother children, and some engage in commercial economic activity. And all this ease of carefree non-violent existence in plain view of colonial whites who watch on with interest.
I think of Brunias’s Dancing Scene in the Caribbean (1764 – 1796) in the Tate (UK) collection. A small unassuming image that requires you stand closely to see it well. Surveying the image, one sees a curious thing. Four women who, despite the profusion of cloth covering them, have their breasts fully exposed. They are indifferent to their display although other women around them and the few men in their company are fully dressed, of course without shoes – a marker of their enslavement. This baring of breasts is disturbing. What could it mean? The breasts belong to the darker chocolate complexioned women in the cast. Perusing Brunias’s body of work (his oeuvre) a frequent thread of sexual appeal is evident in his renderings of the non-white/mixed-raced female bodies. But Brunias was not the only artist to sexualise these Caribbean bodies. And these projections are all part of our legacy.
Therefore, I am heartened to see someone so young and with such a global platform as the recently conferred Honorary Doctor Letitia Wright recognise the importance of the space she occupies as a Caribbean woman and her evident willingness to offer a different projection of Caribbean black femininity in popular culture. As black/ Africa-descended women in the West, we have long known we are capable of more than the limits placed on our bodies – mammies, prostitutes, vixens of song, temptresses in dance, partnerless mothers with babies from indifferent fathers, poor and in need of handouts. With the latter, I am thinking of the painting which created deserved outrage two or so years back by a young Guya-nese painter. As black/Africa-descended women in the West we knew too, that the beautiful women of our group who had distinguished themselves in science, technology, politics, and even in film for rejecting roles that furthered the stereotypes of black femininity were not anomalies, although the image and culture makers would have us think differently.
Thankfully some creatives on both sides of the film camera have grown savvy to the ‘culture industry’, perhaps its most powerful sector. Quite a lot has been produced in the realm of film and television recently to restore dignity to the black, the African, and the Africa-descended peoples of the world. However, adjacent to correcting the falsifying projections on this human collective has been (in my estimation) an even slower correction of the European construction of a particular subset within this body – black Caribbean womanhood. While as black Caribbean women we live our humanity daily, the projections of ourselves in global cultural spaces continue to point to black female hypersexuality. This is where Letitia Wright comes in. I am immensely proud that my nieces and their friends – male and female – have her to look up to; a true Queen who clearly knows the power of the image to transform, inspire, give dignity, restoration, and healing.
Akima McPherson is a multimedia artist, art historian, and educator
