1 TWO HUNDRED YEARS.

Why does it seem that the European cities whose growth and modernity were fuelled by profits from the slave trade are doing more to commemorate the abolition than the sites of former plantations? Why is Europe so intent on remembering while the Caribbean, by and large, seems to be trying hard to forget? Is Europe thankful? Sorrowful? Why this suspicion? Is it still all about them? And if it is, how did this happen – again? Some islands have been planning events for years. But why aren’t the activities in these places consuming the overall sense of the region’s ambivalence to this anniversary? No words seem to fit the occasion and it is difficult to pinpoint the roots of the unspoken attitude that pervades. Should the region be grateful? Happy? Celebratory? Can Europe understand why two hundred years may not seem so long ago in the Caribbean?

2 TWO HUNDRED YEARS.

It is no longer easy to say “us” and “them”. Slavery overstated those neat divisions of civilized and savage, human and dray animal or machine, free and enslaved, black and white, Europe and the ‘New World’. And now in the Glasgows and Kingstons, Bristols and Montego Bays, culture has moved and muddied identities. Parts of us are in them and them in us, yet in the Caribbean time is still not a comfort or creator of distance. Joy Gregory’s photographic work in the region captures a sense of this postcolonial disease in the perpetual retelling of the past through the eyes and skin of Caribbean people.

3 TWO HUNDRED YEARS.

Graham Fagen? Who are his people? Is he related to dancer and choreographer Garth Fagan? Why do I want to know? Fagen lives in Glasgow and Fagan was born in Kingston, albeit Kingston, Ohio, to Jamaican parents. They might be cousins, but they wouldn’t know. Fagen was drawn to Jamaica through reggae music. Maybe so. It has been two hundred years.

4 TWO HUNDRED YEARS.

In 2006 Graham Fagen completed a body of work called Closer. The narrative dimension of the work was based on events in the life of Scottish icon and poet Robert Burns, author of The Slave’s Lament and Auld Lang Syne, and Burns’ curious relationship with Jamaica. Robert Burns’ story has provided Fagen with a pulse point for his very personal explorations of connections between Scotland and Jamaica, of the dissolution of difference between places and identities in the contemporary culture, and of the simultaneous re-inscription of these differences through narratives of history, homeland and their accompanying iconography in national culture.

In Closer Fagen exhibited screen-prints of three ships on which Burns booked passage to Jamaica in 1786, the Roselle, the Nancy and the Bell. Of humble birth, Burns had had dreams of becoming a successful writer but instead found his life becoming increasingly troubled. Though morally opposed to slavery, he had decided to take a job as a bookkeeper on a plantation in Jamaica. Each ship sailed without him. Several days before the first ship was scheduled to leave port, Burns had published a book of poems. By the time it sailed, he was a folk hero.

Growing up in Scotland Fagen learnt to recite Burns’ poems, committing them to memory alongside lyrics penned by Reggae poets such as Gregory Isaacs, Bob Marley and Peter Tosh. Music was making the distance between Jamaica and Scotland seem less fixed and hopeless. The concerns expressed in the poetry and the lyrics had similar urgencies that challenged assumptions of ideological if not spatial difference.

At first the photographic images in Downpresserer appear to be re-inscriptions of Fagen’s outsider’s eye, visual shorthand for places like Jamaica and the Caribbean found in countless tourist brochures: the musical hucksters in the Bob Marley T-shirts with fake or real dreadlocks laughing with the tourists, golden sunsets, and endless blue seas.

However, a closer inspection of Fagen’s expansion of narrative in these works dissolves their essentialist face. The photographs and prints are textual images that possess a spare quality akin to poetic form. Because of this, Fagen is able to loosen and strip the constraints of genre and cultural iconography on the images, extending not only their narrative possibilities, but also their moral and ethical intent.

The images redress, rewrite and re-imagine what is accepted and known about connections between Jamaica and Scotland and the African Slave Trade, from Fagen’s particularity. The band he photographs is not a typical tourist band, but one chosen by him to perform Burns’ Slave Lament to a reggae beat. They do not laugh with him, but with each other. He is not a part of them, but maintains a conscious and unpretentious formal distance. The link being made is not visual but ideological and cultural.

In the print Plans and Records below the central image of the slaver is a list. On the left are the names of songs such as Slave, Slave Master, Slave Call and A Slave’s Lament. On the right are the writers of those song lyrics, Derrick Harriot, Gregory Isaacs, The Ethiopians and now Robert Burns. For Fagen, Downpresserer is a subtle suturing of histories, moral centres and identities. It takes shape beyond the perceived boundaries of body and nation, and incorporates both images and language. For Fagen, it becomes a personal and political narrative, two hundred years in the making.