Amendment DigitalGriots as Trace of Resistance

small axe 28 � March 2009 � DOI 10.1215/07990537-2008-014 © 2009 Roshini Kempadoo

Amendments: Digital Griots as Traces of ResistanceRoshini Kempadoo

Entering the gallery space, screen characters invite us to join in playing a game of dominos—

as laid out on the table beside the screen. As we place the domino tiles, different characters

appear on the screen, some acknowledging the game players, others more concerned with

telling us their stories. They introduce us to a series of individual stories and tell us of events

involving resistance and survival associated with living then, now, and in the future—in the

reimagined places of Trinidad, London, and elsewhere.

The media artwork Amendments is a series of imagined narratives drawn from contemporary

Caribbean and British landscape photographs, sound recordings, and materials from the

archives. It raises questions and creates dialogues—not only critiquing what went on before

but noting what remains and what may exist in the future spaces of Trinidad, England, and

other ex-colonial spaces.

I conceived the work from researching the archives and the legacy of radical anticolonial

politics and culture that have been such an integral part of the Caribbean, particularly since

the 1930s. The work is framed and informed by the work of Caribbean historians, critics,

and artists who have critiqued Eurocentric history, have developed postcolonial Caribbean

perspectives, and have asserted the importance of historical groundings as integral to the

Amendments: Digital Griots as Traces of Resistance182 |

formation of Caribbean nationhood.1 The central character of the narratives is

“Venezuela,” an illusory and mythical woman seen from a number of perspectives

by relatives, friends, and others. Her imaginary life-experience encompasses sto-

ries that critique and query the predominance of heroes in African- and European-

centered anticolonial narratives.

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ers’ history: the absence of their individual, personal, and everyday life experi-

ences; the absence of the slave quarters and the indentured burial grounds; the

absence of women characters and their stories.

Amendments continues the use of montage, layering, and multiple media

(ambient sound, animation, imagery, writing, music, and voice) associated with

my work.2 I extend documentary photographs through the addition of imag-

ined interventions. A series of present-day storytellers perform in the image—as

“digital griots” who evoke events against a backdrop of imagery that might have

happened, is occurring in the present moment, or may occur in the future. As

short video sequences triggered through domino playing, they are set in various

locations—from modern day rural Trinidad, through the memories of slave and

indentureship journeys, to the urbanscapes of London.

The following screen images are taken from a selection of the video

sequences. A series of gestures and attitudes become instrumental to the way in

which a person endures, protests, resists, outwits, and outmaneuvers her or his

given situation, performing in the past, present, and future to survive the planta-

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tourist, the American soldier, and the über-rich tourist seeking refugee in the safe

places of the picturesque.

1 For some of this recent work, see Verene Shepherd, Maharani’s Misery: Narratives of a Passage from India (Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2002); Hew Locke’s art installation Cardboard Palace (2002); Nalo Hopkinson, The Salt Roads (New York: Warner Books, 2003); Shalini Puri, The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equality, Post/Nationalism, and Cultural Hybridity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Krista A. Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Chris Cozier’s artwork, Tropical Night (2006–present); Michel-Rolph Trouil-lot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon, 1995); Marcel Pinas’s installation, “G.L.O. School te Pelgrimkondre” (2005); and Rhoda Reddock, “The Indentureship Experience: Indian Women in Trinidad and Tobago, 1845–1917,” in Shobita Jain and Rhoda Reddock, eds., Women Plantation Workers: International Experiences, Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Women (Oxford: Berg, 1998).

2 For additional portfolios of my work, see http://www.roshinikempadoo.com.

28 March 2009 ��Roshini Kempadoo | 183

Amendment DigitalGriots as Trace of Resistance

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