The Enigma of Survival: traveling beyond the expat gaze

This is what the postcolonial present demands. Rather than the anticolonial problem of overthrowing colonialism (or the West), or the decolonization of the West's representation of the non--West, what is important for this present is a critical interrogation of the practices, modalities, and projects through which modernity inserted itself into and altered the lives of the colonized.

David Scott, Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality, 1999

Modernity in Trinidad can be defined by the extreme susceptibility of people who are unsure of themselves and, having no taste or style of their own, are eager for instruction. In England and America there are magazines for such groups; in Trinidad instruction is now provided by advertising agencies, which have been welcomed by the people not only for this reason but also because the advertising agency is itself a modern thing.

There was a time when Trinidad had no agencies and the nearest we got to copy--writing was Limacol's "The Freshness of a Breeze in a Bottle" and Mr. Fernandes's "If you don't drink rum that is your business, if you do drink rum that is our business." For the rest we made do with each store's list of bargains and the usual toothpaste sagas about bad breath. This has now changed. It has been said that a country can be judged by its advertisements, and a glance at Trinidad advertising is revealing. A man with a black eye-patch is used to advertise not Hathaway shirts, but an alcoholic drink. Bermudez biscuits are described as a "Family of Fine Crackers," with the "Mopsy" biscuit for "the young in heart," which is as puzzling as the slogan for Trinidad Grapefruit Juice: "The Smile of Good Health-In a Tin." "Crix" (of the Bermudez family) is a meal in "itself." One examines the copy for the point; and it seems that this is to persuade Tinidadians that Bermudez biscuits are really 'crackers." American things, which Americans in films and comic strips eat. Old Oak Rum was introduced with a Showdown Test...[in which] a number of laughing, well-dressed 'I'rinidadians, carefully chosen for race, stood at a bar. None was clamorously black. A genuinely black man was used far the garage--hand in the "I'm going well, I'm going Shell" advertisement; black faces are normally used only in advertisements for things like bicycles and stout.

This is the work of expatriate advertising agents, and Trinidad is grateful and humble. At a time when the whole concept of modern advertising is under lire elsewhere, Trinidad offers a haven: it is officially recognized that Trinidadians are without the skill to run advertising agencies.

V. S. Naipaul, "Trinidad," The Middle Passage, 1962

My title "The Enigma of Survival" is taken from Trinidadian artist Steve Ouditt's book Creole In-Site. (1) But I want to focus here primarily on the work of Christopher Cozier, another Trinidadian artist, curator, and critic. (2) Both Cozier and Ouditt represent a category of artists from the Caribbean whom I want to think of as the "alterNATIVES." AlterNATIVES are the illegitimate children of the nation who by virtue of differing race, class, gender, or sexual variables find themselves on the wrong side of nation stories in opposition to majority groups that assert ownership of the national or Caribbean spece. Alternatives are a kind of internal refugee and suffer a double illegitimacy when they go abroad because metropolitan critics see their artistic practice as too elevated above or irrelevant to the realities of third-world countries. What, conceptual art in the periphery? Perish the thought. And thought does perish, under the circumstances.

Sarat Maharaj, art history professor at Goldsmith College in London, who is informed by an intimate knowledge of South Africa's apartheid system, has usefully theorized the problem of cultural translation "as 'outsiders' came to write themselves 'inside' the Western cultural space." What are the theoretical models that orient us in "sites of cultural swap" in different parts of the world? Maharaj is adamant that beyond a point, the "other" almost always remains inherently untranslatable, irreducible to transparency by neat exchanges of meaning. Too often, rather than acknowledging and allowing for the fluidity and "rawness" of cultural translation, Maharaj warns, we establish "a spectrum of convenient, fixed categories of essential identities. The 'culturally different' have to be pinpointed, labeled, rendered visible, given representation--perhaps, up to a point, a crucial, quite inescapable task. But its troubling spin-off is that it tightens into a pigeonholing logic." (3)

This pigeonholing logic is very evident in Caribbean narratives about art. Traditionally historians and critics of Caribbean art have been preoccupied with identifying and categorizing Caribbean artists according to received canonical ideas of art and art history. Thus artists might be described as neo-Expressionist, Minimalist, or "intuitive," a euphemism for "primitive" and so on. I have little interest in doing this. Apparently Wole Soyinka said that "a tiger does not announce it is a tiger; it leaps." an art writer I am interested in studying the leaps being made by artists in the Caribbean and comparing and linking them to leaps being made by artists elsewhere.