Riffing on Omeros: The Relevance of Isaac Julien to Cultural Politics in the Caribbean

Jane Bryce

Filmmaker and video artist Isaac Juliens artistic practice has always been inextricable from its political context. In all his work to date, whether documentary, feature film, or video-art installation, Juliens concern with questions of memory, history, and diasporic identity has taken a resolutely dialectical form. His own position growing up in Londons East End the child of St. Lucian immigrants, attending St. Martins School of Art, and founding the film co-op Sankofa in the 1980s embodies this dialecticbetween the autobiographical and the social, establishment and oppositional, marginal and mainstream, metropolitan and West Indian, paternal and maternalwhether the focus is constructions of race, place, or masculinity. In realizing this multiply oriented visualization, Julien developed a method that has evolved as a kind of transverse optics, by which I mean a way of reframing the familiar so as to mobilize new lines of questioning. He does this by playing to our desire as an audience for pleasure and recognition, while simultaneously challenging us to accommodate new meanings that arise from defamiliarization. Another way of expressing this might be the creolized phrase looking with an askance, denoting the way not only perception but the object itself changes according to the perspective from which it is viewed. As someone who has run a film festival in Barbados, I have been very interested in the reaction of Caribbean audiences to Juliens work on the Caribbean, in particular his critique
small axe 32 July 2010 DOI 10.1215/07990537-2010-006 Small Axe, Inc.

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of homophobia in dancehall and hip-hop in the documentary The Darker Side of Black (1994), which has met with resistance on the various occasions it has been shown in Barbados. This is conspicuously at odds with Juliens reputation as an artist on the gallery circuit in North America and Britain, and formerly as a radical independent filmmaker with Sankofa and after. The explicit addressing of issues of ritualized machismo, misogyny and homophobia (to quote Juliens Web site) in The Darker Side of Black elicits reactions ranging from disgust to anger to reasoned discourse on the subjects in the film itself, and a corresponding range of attitudes in Caribbean spectators and commentators.1 The dominant reaction in the Caribbean, however, to the question of why black popular culture vilifies homosexuality is one of uncomprehending rejection. This raises the question of whether Isaac Julien, as a London-based artist of West Indian parentage and with an interest in representing the implications of that heritage for himself, is relevant to a Caribbean audience, or whether his work remains exclusively within the purview of black British cultural agendas and/or an elite artistic community. Does the challenge it poses to regional pieties of nationalism, gender, and creole identities mean that its voice resonates only with the metropole? If not, in what ways does it cross the boundary between metropolitan and regional constructions of selfhood to intimate new linkages? As a way into thinking about these questions I begin with an establishing sequence, as it were, of his work to date, followed by a close-up on one short film, Encore: Paradise Omeros Redux.

Setting the Scene: Julien as Filmmaker

Juliens work as a filmmaker is deliberately intertextual with popular culture, in such a way as to tease out previously unrevealed subtexts; in Young Soul Rebels, he situates gay politics in counterpoint to the constructions of masculinity mobilized through soul music; in Badasssssss Cinema, he explores the implications of the parodic overstatements of masculine and feminine stereotypes in blaxploitation cinema; while in The Darker Side of Black his concern is with the homophobia of dancehall and hip-hop. It is worth noting that here he seems to part company with Paul Gilroys espousal of black musical forms as in themselves empowering. Paige Schilt, in a highly nuanced and revealing examination of The Darker Side of Black, borrows from The Black Atlantic Gilroys idea of the doubleness of black musical forms and their unsteady location simultaneously inside and outside the conventions, assumptions, and aesthetic rules which distinguish and periodise modernity to apply this framework to the modus operandi of Juliens film.2 But she equally takes issue with Gilroys exclusive treatment of gender and sexuality in terms of the community and identity they offer, especially his failure to recognize that certain formulations of identity might be both compelling and productive (in the
1 2 Isaac Julien, official Web site, www.isaacjulien.com/home (accessed 6 April 2010). Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (New York: Verso, 1993), 73. See Paige Schilt, Queering Lord Clark: Diasporic Formations and Traveling Homophobia in Isaac Juliens The Darker Side of Black, in John C. Hawley, ed., Postcolonial, Queer: Theoretical Intersections (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 182.

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Foucauldian sense) in part because they operate through the othering of queer and female bodies.3 This queering of black musical forms is one example of the transverse optics by which Julien operates. Another of his preoccupations has been with revisiting iconic black cultural figures such as Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Mask (1996) or Langston Hughes in Looking for Langston (1989). In these films, Julien is less concerned with celebration or memorialisationin the style of other iconic treatments by black filmmakers, such as William Greavess Ralph Bunche: An American Odyssey (2001) or St. Clair Bournes Paul Robeson: Here I Stand (1999)than with interrogation and reappropriation. It is of interest that Juliens choice of subjectsFanon and Hughesmay well be guided by a quality of indeterminacy, their capacity for exceeding boundaries and for multiple interpretations, and this may apply, too, to his choice of Derek Walcott as interlocutor in Paradise Omeros. In The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation, described by its editor as an after-effect of a 1995 conference on Fanon,4 Homi Bhabha contributes the following to an artists dialogue:
Fanon is reluctant to collude with a representational art which brings the history of the people back to themselves in recognizable figures. ... He feels this is of limited value; that returning the past to the present as some essentialist image ignores all the symbols, all the metaphors in the writing. The poetics of emergence in the anti-colonialist struggle must recognize the fact that the colonizing period has also played its part in hybridising the culture. You cannot just go back to an original representational figurative or full notion of the past. ... It is only by entering into a discourse of complexity that you can build up a revolutionary solidarity.5

This statement seems to pinpoint what appeals to Julien about Fanon as icon: that his refusal of a one-dimensional ideological position and embrace of creolization afford a space for the generation of alternative meanings and reinterpretations beyond the context of his time and place. Juliens treatments of Fanon and Hughesand, I would suggest, Walcottnot only destabilize settled ideas of what constitutes a hero figure, but in the process deconstruct the icon itself as a central cinematic paradigm. In Juliens work, iconic figures are recontextualized within a format that manifests some of the familiar tropes of documentary (a forensic exploration or investigation of a specific problem through the building-up of a narrative, witness testimonies, a spoken or unspoken point of view articulated by means of editing and montage, and the arrival at some sort of demonstrated conclusion) while stretching the form in new artistic directions (the use of multiple points of view, the queering of normality, the unabashed appeal to the senses through the deliberately heightened beauty of music and visual images, especially the seductiveness of beautiful black male bodies, and a humor that ironizes even as it invites serious attention). By this means, he works to reveal the discursively repressed by asking previously unasked questions about the body and sexuality within a context of
3 4 5 Ibid., 18283. Alan Read, ed., preface to The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1996), 8. Homi Bhabha, Artists Dialogue, in Read, The Fact of Blackness, 164.

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postcolonial theorizing and debate. In his renarrativizations of black cultural movements and moments, what he looks for is what is missing in officially sanctioned versions of history notably, sexuality, but beyond that, the body as site of performed identities. In this sense, Julien provides a queer portal through which he offers the spectator access to new readings and alternative perspectives. To offer one example by way of illustration, in his film Black Skin, White Mask Julien-thedirector performs a dual role. On the one hand, he is the reliable narrator, the archeologist who painstakingly uncovers the past by slowly assembling historical facts and human testimonies in the service of recovering a partially lost narrativethat of Fanons family and origins in the Caribbean; on the other, he is the gay black metropolitan artist and intellectual who takes Fanon to task for his disavowal of alternative sexualities, invoking the very discoursepsychiatryby which Fanon himself uncovered a pathology of colonial oppression and repression. This askance reexamination of Fanons importance to a later, postcolonial generation of black artists and intellectuals reaches its apotheosis in the moment when the actor playing Fanon kisses another man on screen, releasing, as it were, the repressed of Fanons discourse of resistance. This moment, which asks the question What if? as well as Why not? resituates Fanon within a queer normality, not only acknowledging him as anticolonial thinker but liberating him for appreciation as gay icon. By this means the artist embraces a mainstream, canonical hero-figure of black liberation, refusing, as a gay man, to be excluded from that narrative; by queering it he extends its potential meanings to a whole new discursive arena. Julien achieves this sleight of hand by above all centering the body, in particular the black male body, as a nexus of sensual delight and visual allure. Chris Darke, in an essay discussing Juliens move to gallery installations as a strategic intervention in fine-art culture, says, Pleasure is at the heart of the politics of this work, beauty a quality of criticism.6 Julien himself tells us, I use the construction of iconic figures as a way for me to seduce audiences into witnessing something that may surprise them.7 A highly conceptual artist, he consciously works within the history of the gaze as constitutive of the self/other dialectic, in a continuum from Hegel to Fanon to Sartre to Lacan, and turns it back on the spectator, so that we are constantly made aware of looking and of being looked at, of desiring and of the object of desire. In his recent work, this has taken the direction of doubling, tripling, or otherwise multiplying the image, using three-screen projection, and creating a deliberate dissonance between image and sound, as in the installations Vagabondia (2001), Paradise Omeros (2002), Baltimore (2003), True North (2004), and Fantme Afrique (2005).

6 7

Chris Darke, Territories: The Tell-Tale Trajectory of Isaac Julien, in Kobena Mercer and Chris Darke, eds., Isaac Julien (London: Ellipsis, 2001), 81. Ibid., 8 (emphasis mine).

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Reciprocal Seductions: Julien and Omeros

To illustrate further the method underlying Juliens repertoire, I will perform a close reading of one short emblematic piece, Encore: Paradise Omeros Redux (2003), which embodies in a compressed poetic form Juliens distinctive style and preeminent themes, shorn of the narrative imperatives of a longer, more discursive form. Made for the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, Encore is an outtake from the parent work, Paradise Omeros (2002), itself an outtake, as the title signifies, from Derek Walcotts epic poem Omeros. The long title of this short work is host to a range of significations. First, an encore, as the critic Dan Cameron, who interviews Julien on the DVD, points out, implies the protagonist taking a bow after the main performance is over.8 An encore gives an artist or performer the opportunity to represent their performance in a defined, truncated space, which precisely defines Juliens method in this piece. As Julien explains, making the piece for the gallery series afforded him an opportunity to salvage parts of Paradise Omeros which didnt make it into the final cut, including, most crucially, fragments of an aria specially commissioned and sung by the St. Lucian tenor Hansil Jules, which Julien deemed incongruous in the larger work. As a result, he says, I had a certain freedom because this piece could be completely poetic, ... not so narrative-based but translating poetic ideas in Omeros into a mosaic impression of the text by Derek Walcott.9 Second, the term paradise, signifying on older cultural association like Paradise Lost, denotes an edenic space from which one has been cast out; a space of dream and the unconscious, where what is lost can be recovered through the imagination; where the symbolic order gives way momentarily to the Imaginary, the law of the father can be eluded and the maternal dyad temporarily re-created. This project of recovery and reconstruction is self-consciously utopian, in the etymological sense of utopia as nowhere; but in its provisionality and contingency what the work points to is the provisionality of identity itself. The third term in the title, Omeros, deliberately references the St. Lucian poet Derek Walcott as mythmaker, as the poet who names and so brings into view another history, another world. But behind him is that other poet, Homer, and the whole process of revisioning that has already been undertaken by Walcott himself before Julien arrives on the scene. Juliens take, therefore, is a further revisioning, a further contamination of two already contaminated master narratives. In claiming that Paradise Omeros is his mothers story, Julien puts the emphasis on maternal rather than paternal genealogical lines of descent, placing Walcott as the father in the Oedipal struggle between separation and identification. If, like Plunkett in the poem, Walcott has decided that what the place needed/ was its true place in history,10 Julien comes along to queer his pitch through the suggestion of multiple alternative (hi)stories
Dan Cameron, interview with Isaac Julien, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, accompanying material to Encore on the DVD (New York: Bick Productions and New Museum of Contemporary Art, 2003). 9 Isaac Julien, Cameron interview. 10 Derek Walcott, Omeros (London: Faber and Faber, 1990), 64; hereafter cited in text. 8

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waiting to be brought into view. Rather than a straightforward telling of those stories, however, Paradise Omeros offers a fragmentation, a poetic reordering and intertextualization with other narratives. A review in Small Axe of Patricia Ismonds book on Walcott helps us to identify one way Julien performs this maneuver: In the act of reclaiming a regional icon ... [Ismond] explores the extent to which Walcotts current stature is grounded in and informed by issues of Caribbean identity and self-definition.11 Juliens film, by contrast, interrogates that ground by interpellating himself or, to put it another way, by placing Juliens own image alongside Walcotts self-definition so as to query the specificity, the representativeness, of that definition. At the same time, Julien implicitly acknowledges that he can do this only because of the gesture Walcott has performed in sweeping away the dead metaphors ... that have come to define a normative humanity.12 Walcott thus becomes the latest of the icons Julien himself has reclaimed as a way of seducing audiences into witnessing something that may surprise them through the creation of metaphors which stress the performativity of identity and challenge heteronormativity.13 Walcott, genealogically Juliens predecessor in the sense of being an artist whose origin is St. Lucia but who has transcended his origin, affords Julien the historically revisable possibility of a name that precedes and exceeds [him] but without which he cannot speak.14 While I have identified fragmentation, poetic reordering, and intertextuality as key elements of Juliens method, the art critic Paulette Gagnon goes further: Paradise Omeros, Baltimore and True North propose a new approach to metaphor. ... The impression of temporality is based on the cohesion of the universe constructed by the imagination, so that the elements of fiction and historical memory seem to respond to another possible universe, to the gaze of an assumed reality.15 How does this work? This group of works, made between 2002 and 2004, was designed to be shown in an art gallery, with triple split-screen projection, a way, according to Julien, of contaminating all those different spaces of cinema, television, and art galleries.16 Richard Dyer traces the history of split-screen projection in the introduction to his interview with Julien and concludes, Julien uses the technique in a far more inventive way, not only as a means of disrupting a purely narrative reading of content, but also as a visual trope for a non-hierarchical, non-Western and radicalized scopic encapsulation of a phantastical and poetic imaginary.17 The question of setting is paramount, because it brings into view the economics of productionthe fact that Julien has been enabled to make these works partly
11 Harold McDermott, Localizing the Aesthetic Search: Walcotts Caribbean Poetics in Abandoning Dead Metaphors, Small Axe, no. 13 (March 2003): 177. McDermott reviews Patricia Ismonds Abandoning Dead Metaphors: The Caribbean Phase of Derek Walcotts Poetry (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2001). 12 Ibid., 179. 13 Kobena Mercer, Avid Iconographies, in Mercer and Darke, Isaac Julien, 8. 14 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993), 226. 15 Paulette Gagnon, Isaac Julien, exhibition catalogue, Muse dart contemporain de Montral, 8 October 20049 January 2005, 76. 16 Richard Dyer, Isaac Julien in Conversation, Wasafiri, no. 43 (Winter 2004): 29. 17 Ibid., 28.

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through being commissioned by galleries. Paradise Omeros, for example, was commissioned by the Bohen Foundation in New York and is now in the Guggenheim Collection, while Encore: Paradise Omeros Redux is part of the permanent collection of the Tate Modern in London. By resituating himself outside conventional cinema, in the alternative spaces available to art installation, Julien resists and evades the pressure of cinematic narrative form. He calls this alternative practice, which draws on and refers to but is not cinema, the cinematisation of art: One of the problems with cinema is that there are certain expectations, so making a work for a gallery or museum freed me up to really explore things in a way that one wasnt perhaps quite able to in a more conventional space.18 The certain expectations by which Julien feels constrained are both narratological and psychological: the experience of pleasure by means of both narrative coherence and heteronormative sexual identification afforded by mainstream cinema. Yet by cinematization, he admits his reluctance to give up on pleasure. Rather, he problematizes it by ironizing the identificatory pleasure he offers, requiring of the audience that we resituate ourselves in relation to mainstream cinematic conventions by adopting a measure of self-reflexivity and distance.

Bringing It All Back Home

The possible limitation of Juliens positioning of his gallery work as not-cinema was articulated when Julien showed Paradise Omeros during the 2004 Barbados Festival of African and Caribbean Film at the Frank Collymore Hallone of the most elite venues on the island. Julien had come straight from a major one-man exhibition of three of his gallery installations, including Paradise Omeros, which had opened four days before at the Muse dart contemporain in Montreal. A member of the audience commended him on Paradise Omeros, meanwhile regretting that because of the venue, it was not being shown to the real Barbados. This was interesting and unexpected, considering that the question of what constitutes the real, in the sense of an already-constituted object self-evidently accessible to apprehension, is already anticipated and to an extent dismantled by the work itself. The audience members criticism implicitly invokes what Judith Butler terms performativity: a special modality of power as discourse whereby certain utterances invoke a structure of power relations that normalize and naturalize power relations in the interests of a specific group.19 In this instance,the real Barbados invokes a cultural nationalist orthodoxy, signifying the nonelite, black working class, or alternatively, an oppositional rhetorical point of view that forecloses any options for dissent, perhaps as a way of flagging an insider/outsider dichotomy. Its assumption of transparency and its appeal to a sure or coherent identity is exactly what Juliens aesthetic method works against.20 In reply, he himself pointed out that gallery audiences were also real,
18 Ibid., 29. 19 Butler, Bodies That Matter, 187. 20 Ibid., 188.

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and moreover necessary to an artist like himself, who seeks to challenge conventional visual expectations of genre in both film and art. In a strikingly similar argument, Julien has provided another riposte on the real in the essay De Margin and De Center, cowritten with Kobena Mercer, in which the authors invoke Paul Gilroys distinction between representation as a practice of depiction and representation as a practice of delegation and go on to say: Representational democracy, like the classic realist text, is premised on an implicitly mimetic theory of representation as correspondence with the real; notionally, the political character of the state is assumed to correspond to the aspirations of the masses in society.21 This statement is important because of its recognition of the way questions of the real reference official state-sanctioned notions of a range of ideological concernsnationalism, race, sexuality, whos in and whos out, who belongs and who doesnt, and on what basis. It offers a useful frame for us to ask whether what Julien does is relevant to a Caribbean audience, or whether the challenge he poses to the pieties of nationalism, gender, and creole identity pushes his work beyond the limits of Caribbean self-recognition and into an exclusively metropolitan cultural purview. To address these questions in a concrete way, I shall discuss the four-minute, thirty-eightsecond work Encore: Paradise Omeros Redux as a visual and verbal poem. This method, I believe, offers a form of archaeological uncovering of the many layers of Juliens style, and through these layers the possible avenues of meaning by which it may speak to different audiences. The brevity of the piece heightens and intensifies the effect of image and sound, both of which are used in a cut-up montage fashion, which veers from disjointed to kaleidoscopic. The overall effect is one of intense lyricism, a succession of moments whose flow of significations follows the action of the sea, perpetually folding over on itself in an endless process of reiteration. In Juliens words: It mirrors the poetic ideas in Omeros and tries to translate those visually and to make a sort of mosaic impression of the text.22 In other words, Julien seems to imply that his method is already prefigured by that of Walcott in Omeros; as a poet alive to the visual possibilities of language and with an abiding interest in film, it may not be too far-fetched to suggest that Walcott was aware of the cinematic potential of his epic. Although not sharply demarcated, we can identify four movements in the piece, built around a series of juxtapositions in terms of sound, image, use of color, place, and text. Two sectionsfragments, reallyof Omeros constitute the verbal text, spoken and sung: in the first movement, the lines are taken from chapter 25, section 2.
Because this is the Atlantic now, this great design of the triangular trade. Achille saw the ghost of his fathers face shoot up at the end of the line.

21 Isaac Julien, with Kobena Mercer, De Margin and De Center, in Houston H. Baker, Manthia Diawara, and Ruth Lindeborg, eds., Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 197 (emphasis mine). 22 Julien, Cameron interview.

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Achille stared in horror at the bound canvas and could not look away, or loosen its burial knots. Then, for the first time, he asked himself who he was. He was lured by the swift the way trolling water mesmerizes a fisherman who stares at the fake metal fish as the lace troughs widen and close. (130)

Because this is the Atlantic now. Of the thousands of lines in Walcotts Omeros, this is the one Isaac Julien chooses as his point of entrystepping into the middle of a line, the middle of a journey, following the swift not to Africa but across the sea to that other island, England. The ear is drawn to the end of the line, the word now. What is the chronological moment to which it refers? And the demonstrative thiswhat is it? Does it denote a place, or an ontology, no longer African or Caribbean but something else, a transitional point between the two, defined by movement? For Julien, as for Paul Gilroy and black modernism in general, it is the Atlantic not the Caribbean that is the point of reference, a space that he envisages as circular, the circum-Atlantic of continual movement, of how one movement contaminates another, and vice versa.23 Encore: Paradise Omeros is an embodiment of this contaminating process: an intertextual riff on or translation of the Walcott poem, first into a visual medium, and second, into a narrative of diaspora. Juliens experimental method ensures that what emerges is not just a literal translation of text to image, or an homage to a Caribbean metanarrative, but a meditation which functions dialectically. In Walcotts version, the signal moment of the hero-figure Achilles self-questioning occurs in a boat being pulled toward Africa. Julien places him instead on the St. Lucian shoreline, in the perspectival position characteristically inhabited by Walcott himself, whose face in close-up indeed appearsgazing out to sea. This is the Atlantic now connects the figure of Achille with what we will see further onJuliens parents migration to England, along the third axis of the triangular trade. The tidal movement of the sea is conveyed by reversing the film, metonymically reversing the meaning of the lines by playing the film backward, so the water rushes away from rather than toward the viewer. The sensation of disorientation and doubleness this creates is further heightened by the vertical division of the screen, achieving a mirroring effect. The twin peaks of the pitons, simultaneously part of the imagistic structure and of the landscape, that is, both virtual and real, signify the way that doubleness is embodied by the terrain itself. This opening scene introduces us to Juliens method: the emphasis on the materiality or realness of the image, placed within a conceptual framework that invites us to enter an imaginary world where the real is infused with multiple potential meanings; the insistence, in all his work, on the metaphysical relationship of place, space, and the human body. Paradise Redux is punctuated by the use of extreme close-ups, the first of these being Walcotts face over the
23 Gagnon, Isaac Julien, 83.

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line where Achille sees the ghost of his fathers face, an explicitly oedipal moment which emphasizes the metaphoricity of the paternal relationship. Walcott, most especially since the Nobel Prize (1992), has achieved the status of a Caribbean icon and thus has become a sign, as it were, of a particular type of Caribbean masculinity and power. I will briefly summarize the trajectory of the piece. Achilles questioning of his identity in the opening movement takes us by way of answer to a small wooden house, an idyllic scene placed full-square in an apparently stable frame, which abruptly breaks down into multiple fragments featuring a gallery, a rocking chair, a banana grove, with distorted camera angles and multi-imaging. This is accompanied by sounds of extreme violencebattering at a door, a dog barking, discordant noises denoting an eruption of energy that might be read variously as a birth, a breaking away, or an expulsion. We glimpse a running figure bursting forcefully through a stand of banana trees, then a still shot of Achille against one of the pitons, before Walcotts text (chapter 37, section 2) comes in again by way of the aria and the sound of the piano:
I saw how my shadow detached itself from them When it disembarked on the wharf through a golden haze Of corn from another coast. My throat was scarred From a horizon that linked me to other, when our eyes Lowered to the cobbles that climbed to the castle yard, When the coins of the olives showed us their sovereigns face. My shadow had preceded me. How else could it recognize That light to which it was attached, this port where Europe Rose with its terrors and terraces, slope after slope? (191)

Again here, Walcotts lines are translated into a different medium, not spoken but sung, invoking a different kind of performance that highlights the body as source of sound. It is not difficult to work out why Julien selected this piece of text: the shadow detaching itself, the real object and its virtual double, the self as doppelganger, the landscape as mirror image, the nature/city dialectic are all translated from Walcotts poem to a soft-focus long shot of the Thames and the London skyline, divided in the same way as the opening scene so that the figure in the foreground and the landscape are split in twoMy shadow had preceded me. The terrors and terraces are imaged as an anonymous concrete buildingit could be a parking garage, it could be an apartment buildingas the figure of Achille strides toward the camera until he overwhelms the screen. We glimpse a still life of a woman and two men by a piano, denoting the immigrant generation that preceded Juliens with its nostalgia for a creole past embodied in the music they share, which again is different from the aria. The sound of the aria in the fourth and final movement reprises the line about terrors and terraces, while, in contrast, an extreme close-up of a tropical flower again fills the screen, irresistibly suggestive of fecundity/sexuality/passion. The end.

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Multi-imaging, montage, doubling, dissolves, camera angles, and color combine in this piece to mesmeric effect. Yet it makes no sense to talk of the techniques separately, so intricately are they woven into the overall poetic texture. For example, the colors of each of the four movementsblue, green, grey, and redthough distinct are part of a sensual interplay of light, music, voice, and words, offering a lush surface to seduce the spectator into being surprised by new readings of a familiar text. It has been said that Walcott writes only of himself, while simultaneously generating myriad subjectivities. Here, the relationship of Juliens work to Walcotts words is parasitic, in the organic sense of the wordas a tree orchid adheres to the bark of its host, in a symbiosis by means of which words and ideas are made flesh. Reappropriation is the device characteristically used by Julien to interpellate an alternative point of view, specifically, a black gay point of view. And this point of view is always, inevitably, embodied (made flesh). To ask what Walcott is to Julien returns us to the ineluctable facts of genealogy, to Juliens parents, to his inheritance through them of a sense of place and space other than where he grew up, of his place in St.Lucia as being just what all territorial possession isan act of willed imagination. What brings Julien to Walcott is what returns us all, ultimately, to our own parent-figures and to the figure of the father as cultural (national, racial, sexual) determinant. Juliens response to Walcotts generation of subjectivities is to take advantage of this plurality to say, Me, too. In inserting himself into Walcotts narrative, Julien not only makes visible the black gay body but brings about a formal metamorphosis from epic grandiloquence to lyric compression, as though to underscore the very otherness that has been overlooked.

OK, but Is It Relevant to Us?

In the intensity and compression of its form, Encore: Paradise Omeros Redux provides a key to Juliens iconography throughout his oeuvre, a sort of condensed metaphor for his belief that race, like other essentialismsgender, or the diasporic nostalgia for Africais a fiction tied to stories about the past that can never be recovered whole, entire, and separate from discourse. Although his position as diasporic artist gives him the space to explore this theme, it is urgently applicable to a range of contextsregional as well as metropolitan, heteronormative as well as queer, fundamentalist as well as pluralist. It interrogates state-driven politics of memory as defined by the commemoration of heroic deeds or the nations suffering as a way of reformulating the moral boundaries of the social body.24 In Barbados, for example, the nations suffering is seen in terms of the legacy of slavery, with one of the six designated national heroes being the leader of a slave revolt. Intrinsic to that suffering is the loss of a homeland, as well as the conception of Africa as site of an originary identity that remains fixedunchanging and constituted by the marker of race. The
24 Alessandro Triulzi, Public History and the Rewriting of the Nation in Postcolonial Africa (paper presented at international workshop The West and Africa, University of Bologna, 5 October 2005), 4.

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Metropolis/Island: Counterpoised landscapes from Paradise Omeros, 2002. Isaac Julien

96 | Riffing on Omeros: The Relevance of Isaac Julien to Cultural Politics in the Caribbean

effect of this state-driven politics of memory is to naturalize one specific form of raced and gendered identity of the many that circulate within the society, leading to the comment that arose at the Film Festival about the real Barbados. Behind such a comment lie ideas of diaspora that have in common some idea of a shared, collective African identity in opposition to European identity, reproducing as in a mirror image the racial and gendered exclusivity of colonial categorizations.25 The metaphysics of difference thus produced, combined with the compulsory support of heroic liberation struggles, can lead to some strange anomalies. In Barbados, it has led to the spectacle of a Pan-African march in support of Robert Mugabes policies at the height of the ZANU-PF land reclamation program in Zimbabwe. It has also seen nonblacks thrown out of the African and African Descendants World Conference Against Racism in October 2002. In Jamaica, in the name of heteronormative African sexuality, it has underwritten the publicly sanctioned persecution of gays and the degradation of womens bodies in the dancehall practice known as daggerin. Elsewhere, a prime minister repeatedly accused of rape is not called to account in any public or legal way for his behavior. Examples proliferate throughout the region; but what has all this to do with Julien and the question of his (ir)relevance? By shifting the focus of identification from an essentialized Africa/Caribbean to an individualized process of reclamation, Julien refuses the naturalized communality of a shared, collective African identity in opposition to European identity. Working with and through nostalgia, he redefines the work of memory in the form of a conundrum: while we are shaped by our parents stories we are forced to inhabit our own, which only we (i.e., not the state, not official culture) can represent. Acknowledging the seductiveness of Paradise Lost, he brings it into a new relation with a restless, multiple, and ever-shifting present. It is our decision: is the post-slavery, postcolonial art he offers us, embodying racial and sexual inclusivity, relevant to us or not?

25 Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, Imagining and Inventing the Postcolonial State in Africa, Contours 1, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 4.

1 Riffing on Omeros: The (Ir)Relevance of Isaac Julien to Cultural Politics in the Caribbean Jane Bryce When St. Lucian-descended Black British artist Isaac Julien presented his avant-garde triple-screen video work Paradise Omeros at a Festival of African and Caribbean Film in Barbados, a member of the audience commended him on the work but regretted it was not being shown to the real Barbados. To this, Julien retorted that gallery audiences were also real, and moreover necessary to an artist like himself who seeks to challenge conventional visual expectations of genre in both film and art.By performing a close reading of his short film Encore: Paradise Omeros Redux (2003), while referencing those of Juliens works that directly address the Caribbean, this article asks if they are relevant to a Caribbean audience. Or does their art gallery provenance and anticonventional form, along with the challenge they pose to the pieties of nationalism, gender, and creole identity, push them beyond the limits of consensual meaning?

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