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Gardening in the Garrisons, You Never Know What You Will Find: (Un)Visibility in the Works of Ebony G. Patterson

2016; Feminist Studies; Volume: 42; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.15767/feministstudies.42.1.98

2153-3873

Saunders,

American Literature and Culture

98 Feminist Studies 42, no. 1. © 2016 by Patricia Joan Saunders Patricia Joan Saunders Gardening in the Garrisons, You Never Know What You Will Find: (Un)Visibility in the Works of Ebony G. Patterson At three in the afternoon you landed here at El Dorado (for heat engenders gold and fires the brain) Had I known I would have brewed you up some yellow fever-grass and arsenic but we were peaceful then child-like in the yellow dawn of our innocence — Olive Senior, “Meditation on Yellow”1 One of the ways contemporary art has been an effective tool for social justice is through its capacity to entice viewers into a more considered mode of looking. In other words, it can revise the grammar of visual literacy away from its disciplining model toward a mode of visual engagement that encourages more critical ways of looking, allowing us to see the people we are looking at. Despite advances in technology, how we see (socially and politically) has not necessarily improved. We can see more, but this does not necessarily mean that our visual literacy, or 1. Olive Senior, “Meditation on Yellow,” in her Gardening in the Tropics (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1994), 11. Patricia Joan Saunders 99 the critical perspective needed to interpret the value and meaning of what we are seeing, has improved. For generations, Caribbean artists have been engaged in a concerted effort to change the way the Caribbean region is seen, interpreted, and interpolated. More often than not, their efforts involve moving beyond the clichéd blues of the beaches, the golden sunshine, and the colorful landscapes. Recently, however, several artists have decided to couch their efforts within the exact same vibrant landscape that some would argue has limited the possibilities for seeing the Caribbean in more complex ways. This essay, which is an introduction to the work of Caribbean artist Ebony G. Patterson, borrows its title from Olive Senior’s collection of poetry Gardening in the Tropics.2 Senior’s recognition and appreciation of both the beauty and the entangled menace just beneath the surface of Caribbean landscapes is particularly useful as a framework for thinking critically about how contemporary Caribbean artists appropriate neocolonial tropes of landscape in their aesthetic practices. Caribbean landscapes have long provided the backdrop for slave revolts, labor riots, romances, fantasies, and nightmares in a wide range of Caribbean art.3 Senior returns to the metaphor of the garden in order to highlight the historical lessons that are buried in Caribbean flora and fauna, making the garden a curiously pedagogical space. Her “gardens” are not simply or purely ornamental; they include sugar and plantations, jungles filled with life-sustaining weeds and plants, large trees that provide shelter as well as weapons of resistance. Moreover, the diverse landscapes of the Caribbean have always been as critical to literacy in the Caribbean as 2. The use of the term “un-visibility” in the title derives from Ralph Ellison ’s introduction to the 1981 edition of his book Invisible Man (1952). As Krista Thompson explains, Ralph Ellison “describes blacks in US society as so hyper-visible that they have been rendered un-visible. . . . Un-visibility describes the state of not being seen or not being recognized, as well as the ‘moral blindness’ toward the ‘predicament of blacks.’” Krista Thompson , Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Disaporic Aesthetic Practice (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 40. 3. A few examples are Alejo Carpentier, El reino de este mundo (1949); Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966); Wilfredo Lam, The Jungle (1943); and, most famously, Michel-Jean Cazabon’s nineteenth-century paintings of Trinidadian landscapes. For a more thorough account, see Krista Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 100 Patricia Joan Saunders any textbook, political treatise, or newspaper. Artists have always had a keen sense of what the landscape yields, what it withholds, its healing powers, legacies, and, most importantly, its metaphorical terrain for mapping political and social changes.4 To truly appreciate Patterson’s visual art, it is important that readers understand the context and tradition out of which her work emerges. Although...