Exhibition Review – Life Between Islands

Featured image: “Ghosting” by Roshini Kempadoo (2004)

3 Dec 2021

First thoughts, right after the exhibition…

Feel a bit of a husk, turned inside out, introspective, considering my role in this legacy, not as Windrush descendant but as a ‘modern’ Caribbean immigrant. How do I keep the joyous resistance going? How do I carry the narrative beyond the brutal history into a new position where we have the solution, we are the solution and this time, we own the solution? We are creating the next evolutionary step – Caribbean people as harbingers/designers of the world’s future? Ambitious maybe, but highly plausible…

4 April 2021

Second thoughts, a few months later…

Life Between Islands was a hard exhibition to write about. I suppose you can tell. It took me months to come back to this. I felt so triggered for most of it. Still, I knew these stories had to be told. Equally, I felt so happy to see our Caribbean resilience and joy so bold and bright! I think maybe poetry might be the way forward here. Full sentences still aren’t coming to me, so here goes…

Life Between the Islands

There needed to be a little Black boy being manipulated by white adult police officers on a tv screen

– McMillan’s Front Room

There needed to be the curio case of phallic looking bullets promising violence with their round blunted heads

– Locke’s Trophies of Empire

There needed to be multiple stop and search reports for a mother to draw how many times she nearly lost her son

– Walker’s Series 3

There needed to be the story of how a father left home and never came back, because he couldn’t

– Atille’s Dreaming Rivers

These stories needed to be told.

They needed to be heard.

They needed to stop being buried

By misinformation and deliberate misinterpretation

Buried beneath the enormous fear

Of different

Of immigrant

Of ‘ethnics’

But I tell you,

As a different ethnic immigrant

My soul took a battering.

I find the older I get, the less I can stand

This ‘trauma porn’, as Aisha calls it.

This…

Tell me how its racist

Show me evidence you were discriminated against

Prove that you were harmed

How? What would be sufficient proof?

Me running screaming naked through the streets?

Me falling down on the ground sobbing and bawling?

Well this exhibition was proof, eh

Everywhere you looked was

Dignified, creative, clever documentation of experiences

Told by the people who lived it.

It was powerful

               And painful

                              And raw

But chile,

When I bent the corner and saw Ove’s La Jablesse and Hairy Man in rope

When I saw Ada Patterson’s urchins move through the streets of Barbados, making children laugh and run away

When I saw the sultry mischief of Lisa Brice’s Blue women

And Boyce’s Crop Over in the plantation house

And the glistening cocoyea fan from Curry

Oh yes!

Thank you, ancestors!

Thank you, sweet baby Jesus!

I exhaled.

My whole body unwound and released

Tension seeping out of every pore

With the speed and desperate relief of

That first gasp

As you break the surface

Of water that has held you for too long.

I was born in the sun

Beside the Caribbean Sea

I didn’t know this pain like this.

I know this pain with joy.

My people have mastered the art of creating joy in the midst of pain

But raw un-joyed pain?

Just so, just so?

Unrelenting

Skin-stripping

Soul-shrivelling

Heaps of pain upon pain.

No bredds.

I was born in the in-between.

Between…

….Historical trauma and modern-day crime sprees

….Middle-class oil wealth and Working-class recession

….Emotional genius and emotional distress

Is the UK that pop my in-between bubble

Lancing it with generational, systematic, institutional pain

So yes,

I inhaled that beautiful soul in the golden headpiece

The grandiose steelband men in full regalia

The fine white sand on the airline seats

All the celebrations of our resilience

All of it!

I greedily gasped it in.

After that…

I think there was more.

I vaguely remember an afro-futuristic film

Some quilted fabric… maybe?

By that point

I was too emotionally wrung out and

Mentally worn down

To focus.

So maybe there was too much

For me anyway

But tell me,

I would be curious to hear

White people, how did you experience Life between the Islands?

That experiential gap is where the learning lies.

by Leigh,
05 May 2022

In Summary –