THE ARTS

Art and Emancipation in Jamaica

ISAAC MENDES BELISARIO AND HIS WORLDS
PETRINE ARCHER

The exhibition Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and his Worlds, organised by the Yale Center for British Art to commemorate the bicentenary of the abolition of the British slave trade, reects the most rigorous art historical research ever developed for images of Jamaica, especially those focusing on slavery and emancipation in the eighteenth century. On view at the Yale Center for British Art in SeptemberDecember 2007, the exhibition was mounted in a revised format at the National Gallery of Jamaica in MarchApril 2008. For those not fortunate enough to have seen either display, there is a handsome companion book, complete with catalogue entries, that documents each work extensively. The exhibition includes paintings, sculptures, prints, costumes, music and dance instruments selected by Gillian Forrester, Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings, Yale

Center for British Art; Tim Barringer, Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art, Yale University; and Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz, Assistant Professor, Department of Art and Art History, Stanford University. Comprising art works not just from the Caribbean but also from public and private collections in Europe and North America, especially from the Yale Centers own rich holdings, it is an international exhibition promoting collaboration, and truly shows how colonial communities were globalised in centuries past. In addition, the catalogue boasts essays by the worlds leading researchers and commentators on slavery, emancipation and its cultural and artistic history including Stuart Hall, Catherine Hall, Robert Farris Thompson and Verene Shepherd. With such wide parameters, spanning what Paul Gilroy has recongured as the Black Atlantic

I. M. Belisario, French Set Girls, 18378

and examining both high and low culture, the project would appear to be theoretically sound, employing postmodern perspectives alongside solid academic scholarship. Both the exhibition and publication suggest discursive authority: the exhibitions almost awless (if cramped) display, and the tomes 592 pages, bound between hard covers, took more than ve years of scholarly research to come to fruition. I viewed the exhibition at the Yale Center while attending a conference in November. It is hard not to be intimidated by the scope of this project and the quality of the Yale presentation, but such a critique is necessary, not just because this is a project that reintroduces the benevolent hand of our past colonisers in a new and seductive guise, but more importantly because

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the narrative that this project stands to establish as being exhaustive and denitive is disturbingly vacuous. Belisarios worlds as highlighted in the exhibitions title, rewrite the British presence into contemporary theories of the creole Caribbean in a manner that subjugates and diminishes the black presence. Although purporting to be an exhibition that equally explores African retentions in Jamaican society, Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and his Worlds actually exploits and delineates it, even as it reestablishes its own European cultural and art historical canon. Meanwhile, the Africa displayed too closely resembles that seen by the ethnographer and anthropologist, mediated through masks, drums and tribal rituals, while New World Africa, the Africa of slavery, resistance, marronage, revolution and Haiti, is missing. As titled, the book and exhibition explore Jamaican society on the cusp of Emancipation through the prism of Isaac Mendez Belisario whose print portfolio Sketches of Character forms the centrepiece of the exhibition. A Jamaican Jewish artist, Belisario lived an itinerant life between Jamaica and England in the 1820s before settling in Kingston. Belisarios own hybrid background is represented in the exhibition, with numerous period prints and drawings offering a visual exploration of race and class distinctions in Jamaica even as they highlight differences between the genteel and vulgar classes. Belisarios sketches, reproduced in their entirety as a set piece in the published volume, depict everyday people as they celebrate Christmas and New Year masquerades. Together, the twelve prints that range from documentary portraits to stereotypical caricatures tell a vivid story about urban and rural popular culture that was a blend of British and West African street life. Although much is made of the thesis that his collection of prints was fashioned off the Cries of London, Sketches of Character offers a rare glimpse of the lives of slaves outside the connes of the plantation, while ironically suggesting Belisarios

ambivalent patronage of his models. The portfolio was rst published in 1837 on the eve of Jamaicas Emancipation. From this portfolio, the exhibitions curators tease out a complex and layered visual narrative that moves effortlessly between the Old World of Europe and the New World Caribbean. Certainly, the choice of Belisario as an artist to explore this world was an opportune one. His Jewish background brings an additional layer to our understanding of the ethnic and racial diversity that existed in the Caribbean during the eighteenth century while still affording him atypical outsider status that adds artistic credibility and authenticity to his vision. And, as we peruse the original sketches and his corresponding text, there is everything to suggest that Belisarios intention, aside from commercial gain, was to provide a graphic record of the habits, manners and costumes of the black people he saw daily, but whose lives were mutating in response to slavery, emancipation and growing urbanisation. Originally, Belisario planned to publish the series over a period of a year; in the end the project ran on longer, and there is a distinct difference between his beginning and end as the later prints veer away from being sketches of character towards caricature. We can only guess what might have prompted this shift, and the curators suggest that this pejorative style was adopted in response to the growing popularity of ethnological theories that questioned the humanity and morality of Africans. The curators reluctance to view the rest of Belisarios images racially, however, reect their more general avoidance of issues related to race and resistance throughout the whole exhibition. This oversight is most obvious in their documentation of French Set Girls, a key image in Belisarios portfolio that might have been a perfect opportunity to explore the black world of resistance and revolution. Appearing in Belisarios second series alongside the popular Koo Koo Actor Boy prints and the portrait Lovey, the French Set Girls

features a band of four women dancers and three musicians performing in a closed courtyard. In his accompanying notes, Belisario describes these women and their distinctive dress at length, informing the reader that their carefully wrapped heads, attention to nery and genteel manner marked them as exiles from Ste Domingue, the prerevolutionary name for Haiti. Belisario categorises these exiles as belonging to a hierarchy of three classes recently arrived from Haiti whom he identies as Royalists (creoles), Mabiales (Africans), and Americans (possibly a racial mix?). The set he depicts are black and we presume Mabiales. Belisario tells his readers that, unlike other bands, the women of this set took great care to select and colour-code their dress. It is therefore surprising that in the Yale catalogue, scant attention is paid to the fact that these women are wearing red, green and gold head ties colours that have represented the Solomonic dynasty of Ethiopia since the seventeenth century and which remain the distinctive colours of todays Rastafari movement. Belisarios description of their private performances involving drumming and dance bring to mind the ritual practices of Rastafaris Nyabinghi and were most likely evidence of the inuence of Ethiopianism, the African worldview popular amongst Protestants and secret society adherents in the eighteenth century. Such colour blindness begs a question about whose world Yales exhibition really represents and what were the forces shaping change in Belisarios day. In the same way that 9/11 impacts our contemporary world in far-reaching ways, the Haitian Revolution rocked the New World of the eighteenth century. Even in 1837, Belisario could still describe the revolution that led to the establishment of the rst black republic in vivid terms such as horrors of rebellion and appalling scenes. The fear this event struck in the minds of European colonisers and slave owners alike set in motion the events that would lead to the abolition of slavery and emancipation throughout Europes colonies, along with a re-

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evaluation of black intellect and black competence to govern. The revolution also had an impact on New World enslaved persons who viewed the Haitian victory as a model for resistance. Haiti joined Egypt and Ethiopia in the black imaginary as spaces of liberation and spiritual salvation. The Bible played a signicant role in justifying rebellion, while the revolutions instigators, Maroon warrior Francois Makandal, Jamaican Dutty Boukman (trans. Dirty Bookman?), Toussaint LOuverture and Jean Jacques Dessalines became its spiritual and military heroes. Although Christian missionaries used the Bible to support notions of black inferiority and slave submission, other black preachers and intellectuals such as Phyllis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, Absolom Jones and Prince Hall made alternative readings of the Bible informed by freemasonry and Protestant evangelism. Both Egypt and Ethiopia as referenced in the Old Testament were used as symbols of pride, while the biblical Psalm 68:31, Princes will come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall stretch forth its hands unto God, was viewed as a prophecy related to the emancipation of enslaved Africans and redemption. In 1829, just eight years before Belisarios publication and two years before the start of the Baptist Wars (now referred to as the Emancipation War) in Jamaica, the free black abolitionist David Walker, inspired by his reading of the Bible, the Napoleonic expeditions in Egypt and a sense of pride in African history, rationalised that violence was a justied route to freedom, writing,
I. M. Belisario, Koo Koo or Actor Boy,

They want us for their slaves, and think nothing of murdering us in order to subject us to that wretched condition therefore, if there is an attempt made by us, kill or be killed. Now, I ask you, had you not rather be killed than to be a slave to a tyrant, who takes the life of your mother, wife, and dear little children? Look upon your mother, wife and children, and answer God Almighty; and believe this, that it is no more harm for you to kill a man, who is trying to kill you, than it is for you to take a drink of water when thirsty . . . 1 It was this kind of message that would inspire Jamaicas own national hero, the Baptist preacher Sam Sharpe, to lead the Emancipation War of 1831 that pre-empted Jamaicas Abolition of Slavery Act in 1833 and emancipation in 1838. Although Yales exposition on Belisario provides a wealth of evidence about African cultural retentions in the form of ethnographic text and material culture, the show and its catalogue tell us little about this tradition of resistance and revolution with a lineage that can be traced from our present-day

Rastafari back to Marcus Garvey, Paul Bogle, Sam Sharpe, Dutty Boukman and Makandal. It is as if abolition and emancipation were granted to the enslaved by their colonisers as a generous gift rather than being wrenched from their hands through struggle and revolt. Recognition of this difference ensures that we do not confuse Yales privilege in documenting this history with Jamaicans right to that legacy, as inheritors and agents of change. An abridged, retitled and amended version of the show opened at the National Gallery of Jamaica in early March 2008. The difference between both exhibitions is more than curatorial style, but rather to do with perspectives on the past. Yales curators documented the colonial art of eighteenthcentury Jamaica rigorously, leaning more towards Europe and a British art history. As a counter and complement to the Yale narrative, the National Gallery retained its Materialising Slavery exhibition, thereby allowing a juxtaposition of Yales imagery with reections of contemporary artists on issues related to slavery, memory and identity. Both displays raise questions about the right to reinterpret the past, especially when histories of the Caribbean are so interwoven and complex, and both beg the question about who, if anyone, has the greater claim to this history.

Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and his Worlds was mounted at the Yale Center for British Art from 27 September to 30 December 2007, and at the National Gallery of Jamaica from 2 March to 28 June 2008.

NOTES
1 David Walker, Walkers Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America. Pamphlet (Boston, 1929), .2930.

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OPPOSITE PAGE

RIGHT I. M. Belisario, Band of the Jaw Boned JohnCanoe, 18378

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