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This is the photo which my sister Alicia took in New Kingston, Jamaica of Laura Facey Cooper's bronze sculpture "Redemption Song." It inspired me to create the painting above. Much to the artist's surprise, the unveiling of her sculpture gave birth to waves of controversy. My sister Alicia noted, "When we were in Kingston there was a makeshift fence around the sculpture. They were altering the size of the women's butt because
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of complaints about its size. That's an interesting commentary on the representation of the African female body." For more on the controversy of this statue, click on these articles:
Jamaica Gleaner, "The Eye of the Beholder"
The Guardian, "Size Does Matter, Jamaicans Decide"
For Laura Facey Cooper's comment on the inspiration behind her sculpture, click here or on the photo above.
During their visit to Jamaica, in the summer of 2004, my sister Alicia, her family, my brother Dan and our dad did extensive research on our Jamaican family lineage. Alicia is pictured here (to the right) beside Ms. Taylor, of the Registrar General’s Department in Twickenham Park, Jamaica, near to Kingston. There, they found records on our Jamaican ancestors dating back to the 1700's.
There was no information to be found regarding any slave ancestors of ours who may have entered Jamaica via Port Royal, as I had imagined in my painting. My father learned that, in 1692, a terrible earthquake virtually obliterated the entire city of Port Royal, wiping out much of its recorded history. Some considered the natural catastrophe divine punishment for the decadence and slave trade of which Port Port Royal enjoyed fame.
My father, José, is pictured here, conducting research on our family history at the Registrar General’s Department in Twickenham Park, Jamaica.
Recently, my dad emailed to me some very informative articles on the devastation of Port Royal by the earthquake in 1692. You may click on the link below to read those articles:
1692 Earth Quake of Port Royal, Jamaica
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"Homage to My Afro Jamaican Ancestors "
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Oil on Canvas 48 “ x 48 ”
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Original & Gliceé Prints Available for Purchase
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Branding slaves was a common practice in the Caribbean. Often, slaves would be branded by slave traders upon capture in Africa and then again upon purchase by their new slave owners in the Caribbean. Some were branded on the chest, others on the shoulder blades. The Royal African Company was a notorious slave trader in Jamaica. They first disembarked their slave cargo in Port Royal and later in Kingston to avoid repeated assaults from pirates. Both of my grandmothers were born in Kingston. They later migrated to Cuba, where my parents and I were born.
In 2004, my dad José, my brother Dan, and my sister Alicia and her family went to Jamaica to research our ancestry. Alicia took brilliant photographs. Several snapshots were of a controversial bronze statue of a nude man and woman. The sculpture, called "Redemption Song," (after Bob Marley's song title) was created by Laura Facey Cooper. It graces the entrance of Emancipation Park in New Kingston. According to Ms. Cooper, the male and female bronzed figures represent emancipated slaves. The sculpture sings the songs of the physically emancipated slaves and hums the hymns of those slaves yet in physical bondage, whose souls experience liberation through the mind. Below the figures appear words from the lyrics of Bob Marley's "Redemption Song." The words, inspired by the teachings of the legendary Jamaican, Marcus Garvey, read, "...none but ourselves can free our mind."
When I saw my sister Alicia’s pictures of this wonderful bronze sculpture, I imagined the male and female subjects prior to their emancipation. I imagined them at the point of their forced entry into Jamaica. Instead of standing in newly liberated nudeness, free from the rags and chains of their enslavement; I envisioned them bound naked in iron. I saw them in my mind, being inspected on the auction block in Port Royal Jamaica, where inevitably my father's African forefathers were sold in bondage to slavery. From my imagining was born this painting, from beginning to end, during six hours on one Sunday afternoon in May, 2006.
The slave ship, visible on the horizon is a homage to all the slaves who's bodies, festered with disease, where held quarantine on the ships at bay for days, after weeks-long journeys across the middle passage under the most horrific conditions. I illuminated the slave ship in a cloud of pink, white-washed red. The pink dissolves into a gloomy blue, brightening as it reaches upward. Under the branches of the palm tree, on the poster, I painted the name William Bernard who is the white ancestor of my father. I cut off half of the poster, leaving much information unknown. The poster holds liable the traders of the Royal African Company whose initials are branded on the man's chest.
I painted more tears on the man's cheek than on the woman's to emphasize the human frailness often hidden within the muscular walls of black masculinity. My husband asked me, "OK, but couldn't you have stopped the painting above his penis?" I said, "That's the whole point, Franklin. I want the viewer to sense some of the discomfort that our ancestors felt as, in naked humiliation, they were prodded, poked, tortured and sold on the auction block." It is in humility, empathy and respect that the man's eyes turn away from the naked woman. His chin is held up heavenward, his heart holding fast to faith.
I turned the woman's face toward mine and painted her eyes gazing at mine, as if she were searching my maternal soul for some sisterly support, as if beckoning me for help. While I circled the fine brush around her pupils, I felt her eyes implore, "Where you there? Where you there?" I answered to her, "I am here. I am here."
I made the woman pregnant and being violated in the mouth in public by the white man's cane as a homage to all the enslaved African women who sheltered precious souls in their wombs as they were raped across the middle passage. I heard the cries of my female slave ancestors who bore and loss their infants on the dark, dank slave ships. I did not want to imagine how I would have felt to have bore any of my five sons on a slave ship, to have gone into contractions and spilled my water on a greasy auction block, to have struggled in vain as my child, whose eyes I would never again behold, were torn from my strong arms and sold far away into slavery. Would I have been strong enough to have survived all of that and more? I cried as I painted, felt the souls of my ancestors fill the room where I covered the canvas with colors, stroked with tinted oils the greased, bronze skin of my ancestors on the auction block. I envisioned their souls sliding through their slippery skin, soaring high in the sky, where they beheld their bodies being bartered below. I flew in my room with them.
The seven seagulls in the painting represent the seven archangels and the hosts of angels who escorted so many millions of souls through the trials of slavery. I placed the seventh seagull beneath the buttocks of the pregnant woman as if it's ready to catch, nestle and escort the slave child onto a lullaby of redemption.
You may click on the image of this painting to view an enlargement.
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