Towards Opacity
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Opacity is not transparency.
Opacity is not an imposition from the West.
Instead, it is an inward turning engagement with self, a knowing that allows space and being to be rendered with the past, present and future simultaneously.
“The opaque is not obscure, though it is possible for it to be so and be accepted as such. It is that which cannot be reduced, which is the most perennial guarantee of participation and confluence.”
As a cultural agent and curator working across linguistic divides and within historical, atemporal realities in the Caribbean for the last decade, I am interested in the current political constructs operating between Latin America and the Caribbean which can be seen as polemical in terms of erasure or the diminution of the Afro-Caribbean experience.
Historically, the region has been subsumed by Latin America, and thus existing in cycles of canonical negation. My curatorial lens is nurtured by decolonial methodologies, which means that I am particularly focused on breaking the myth of the monolith and continued reduction of the region that birthed Empire and the New World.
While this curiosity is connected to language and representation, the broader umbrella of identity politics, while in some realms passé, remains of great import. When one makes space for the execution of renderings, this adds to the dimensionality and fluidity of contemporary practices. Therefore cultural producers working within diasporic sensibilities and cosmologies need to be at the table during discussions around regionality and indigeneities from the Global South.
Postcolonial theorist Édouard Glissant’s work on relationality suggests a widening of approaches to how one considers the physical landscape and human-scape of the multicultural Caribbean. The region’s plantation history and its syncretism have allowed for the evolution of subterranean thought, a radical approach to transgression. We come from a space whose unique stories keep on informing the world about its philosophies and consensus.
“Opacity is not transparency. Opacity is not an imposition from the West. Instead, it is an inward turning engagement with self, a knowing that allows space and being to be rendered with the past, present and future simultaneously.”
My writing and curatorial practice engages with these poetics in subversive but tangible ways, bringing to the fore linkages that speak to the broader implication of being seen. Opacity is not transparency. Opacity is not an imposition from the West. Instead, it is an inward turning engagement with self, a knowing that allows space and being to be rendered with the past, present and future simultaneously. It is in these scenarios that the hybrid and creole become templates and avatars of the future.
In this archipelago, a playground reveals itself not as black or white, but as a kaleidoscope. We move into a garden of delights where diversity is not a checked box, but rather inclusion and bearing witness to how one emerges.
To theorise the Afro-Caribbean aesthetic space is to welcome a range of senses and various ways of being. It is multiple dualities, perspectives and axes. It is a consciousness of self, surroundings and parallels that continue to reshape and evolve our traditions and societies. I am invested in contested histories, coloniality and how these have affected African spiritual practices, ancestral technologies, literature and myth-making. Drawing inspiration from the dangers of historical ethnographic perspectives, and how they have essentialised praxes, is of growing concern to makers and thinkers in the region.
I have worked diligently to re-frame, re-cast and re-present the nuances of our imaginations, curiosity and very essence in socially inquisitive ways. Elements of the sublime and supernatural exist in orbit of each other, connections between the (M)Otherland and her offspring are nurtured rather than exhausted.
Like the landscape on which we live and the seas that delineate our nations, our imaginative geography bears a vital and vulnerable signature; a timestamp out of time, lineages twisted into roots and lumps, the polyrhythmic cacophony sending an alarm deep into the cartography of our existence.
In it, we stand present.
In it, I am ready to sit at the table.