Three Image-Makers Envision Home
By Nalini Mohabir
Roshini Kempadoo, Keisha Scarville, and Sandra Brewster are women with roots in Guyana who currently reside outside of the country’s geographical borders, though not its imagined ones. Their images remind us that we are all situated — in relation to particular peoples, places, and histories that walk with us. This is the fact of the diaspora. Taken together, the work of these artists reflects the ghostly presences that linger over the concept of “home” for the Guyanese diaspora. For all (formerly) colonized and racialized diasporas, home remains a very complicated project.
Roshini Kempadoo
Born in Guyana, Roshini Kempadoo is a London-based photographer, digital image artist, and academic who works across archives and contemporary digital photography. In light of the recent revelation of troubling migrated archives spirited away to London from decolonizing countries including Guyana, it’s timely to revisit two images from her Virtual Exiles (2000) series. As Kempadoo states, this series is about migration: “the experiences of individuals who have left their country of origin and who are now at ” ‘home’ in another.” These images reflect the relative silence of the stories left behind, experiences little known, imaged or imagined in their new ‘homes.’
At first glance, Going for Gold (pictured at the top) is an image of a solitary fisherman in a wooden boat along Guyana’s waters. Upon closer gaze, the fisherman leans his head onto his hand, a gesture of deep thought, weariness, or perhaps sorrow. Our own certainty about the tranquility of the image is troubled. As our eyes refocus in search of the source of his emotions, we are drawn to the shadows upon the water. Gradually the curve of a shoulder, the crook of a neck, the torso with a long scar down the middle becomes visible underneath the waves: it is a dead body upon which he floats.
Nobel laureate Derek Walcott penned the poem “The Sea is History” (1979), which suggests that the sea is not emptied of history:”Where are your monuments, battles, martyrs?/ Where is your tribal memory? Sirs,/ in that gray vault. The sea. The sea.” The sea, as Walcott writes, is a site of mourning. Soaked into the sediments of the ocean floor are layers of history, from the bodies of enslaved Africans thrown overboard, to the faded dreams of anti-colonial struggles, to this unknown death in the recent past. This is a history unwritten, but nonetheless capable of being read in the seascape.
