From left Vagabondaj Mawon: Sitadel (2019)
Europe Supported by Africa and the Americas: A Prophesy (2014)
Maroon Vagabondage: Blaenavon (2019)
This work was commissioned for 'The Kingdom of This World, Reimagined', curated by Professor in Art History in Texas Tech University Lesley A. Wolff, (Ph.D.) & organized by Marie Vickles, which celebrates the 70th anniversary of Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier’s historical novel, The Kingdom of This World (1949). The story follows the trials and tribulations of Ti Noël, an enslaved labourer on a colonial sugar plantation in Saint Domingue at the end of the 18th century. During this volatile era of revolution and change, Ti Noël struggles to find a place for himself as a free man on an island where he was once enslaved.
The Haitian Revolution, possibly one of the most important and overlooked, revolutions of the world has been written out of Western history. As Michel-Rolph Trouillot wrote, “The silencing of the Haitian Revolution is only a chapter within a narrative of global domination. It is part of the history of the West.” In ‘The Kingdom of This World’, Alejo Carpentier presents this history in a poetically magical form which gives this novel the chance to echo the multifaceted triumphs, failures, loyalties, treacheries and, most of all, ambiguities involved in creating a new nation from the often-fractious stakeholders of the revolutionary ideal.
I find it meaningful to respond to ‘The Kingdom of This World’ currently as I believe that the turbulences of the epochal capitalist accumulations of the 18th and 19th centuries; including the colonial plantation system, the industrial revolution and the creation of a European working class; help me to gather an internationalist understanding of where we find ourselves in the 21st century.
This work is a triptych with a prophetic photographic reconstruction of William Blake’s illustration of ‘Europe Supported by Africa and the Americas’, from a book used by the British abolitionists, at its centre. The new image entitled ‘Europe Supported by Africa and the Americas: A Prophesy’ is flanked by two new constructed portraits based upon a John Thomas Smith’s illustration from his 1817 book, Vagabondiana which depicts an injured black British former sailor begging in Whitechapel’s streets with a ship on his head to denote his former employment. There is a creativity and surreal aspect to this costume which echoes the end scenes of Ti Noel’s life in ‘The Kingdom of This World’. But on another level this book of illustrations as a whole by John Thomas Smith, a colleague and friend of William Blake, depict a swathe of British people who chose the life of the vagabond or beggar rather than the intense misery of working in the Northern factories. This is a similar approach to the mental ‘maronaj’ of Ti Noel after his years of renewed slavery building the Citadelle. In this project I have used John Thomas Smith’s illustration as a starting point to construct these two images; one of a black man with a ship on his head in front of the Citadelle and the other of a white man with a ship on his head in front of an iron Foundry from the 1800s. In this triptych my historical reflections hope to reveal the involved histories between the disenfranchised British working class, the ironic complications of the abolition movement and the complexity of the Haitian Revolution.
