Nom Fwigè “is a short film by Pierre Deschamps and Paul Crask about a day in the life of a tree fern mask carver who lives with his family in the Kalinago Territory village of Mahaut River, Dominica.” I can’t embed, so click here to watch it on Vimeo.
I regretted missing the Edinburgh International Film Festival last year (I was in Dominica). This year I’m planning to see:
I also wanted to see Superhero Me (Mild-mannered documentary filmmaker Steve Sale sets out to become a bona-fide superhero, with absolutely hilarious results…) because I saw a promo for it being filmed on the Mound yesterday and was intrigued by the grown man running around in a yellow, red and blue superhero costume, tights, cape and all. But it’s screening a bit too late at night for my comfort, so I’ll give it a miss. And I’m sad that I missed Thunder Soul (Straight out of a high school in Texas, the electrifying Kashmere Stage Band was the brainchild of gifted music teacher Conrad Johnson. Johnson’s dynamic arrangements transformed the idea of the high school band, and brought his students worldwide recognition.); I’ll be looking for that one on DVD.
I thought I was scheduled to leave Barbados on the 15th. Turns out I was scheduled to arrive in Scotland on the 15th, i.e. departing Barbados on the 14th. When did I realise this? Six hours before flight time. Lovely.
Am in Edinburgh now. It’s 18ºC outside. I had forgotten what it’s like to live in a place where 18ºC is considered warm.
Perspectives of Poverty is a photographic project in progress by Duncan McNicholl, a development aid worker in Malawi:
We’ve all seen it: the photo of a teary-eyed African child, dressed in rags, smothered in flies, with a look of desperation that the caption all too readily points out. Some organization has made a poster that tells you about the realities of poverty, what they are doing about it, and how your donation will change things.
I reacted very strongly to these kinds of photos when I returned from Africa in 2008. I compared these photos to my own memories of Malawian friends and felt lied to. How had these photos failed so spectacularly to capture the intelligence, the laughter, the resilience, and the capabilities of so many incredible people?
…
This is not to say that people do not struggle, far from it, but the photos I was seeing only told part of the story. I thought that these images were robbing people of their dignity, and I felt that the rest of the story should be told as well. Out of this came the idea for a photography project, which I am tentatively calling “Perspectives of Poverty”. I am taking two photos of the same person; one photo with the typical symbols of poverty (dejected look, ripped clothes, etc.), and another of this person looking their very finest, to show how an image can be carefully constructed to present the same person in very different ways. I want to bring to light some of the different assumptions we make about a person, especially when we see an image of “poverty” from rural Africa.
Click to see some of the photos in the project.
One of my aunties on my dad’s side participated in the National Geographic Genographic Project. About 100 people from Barbados participated as part of a sample organised by (I think) the Barbados Museum and Historical Society. (My aunt is disappointed that the Society seems to have done little to try to collect and analyse and publicise the results of that sampling, to help people understand them, and to have discussions about what they mean scientifically, historically, culturally… But I digress.)
Her results, based on samplings of mitochondrial DNA placed her in haplogroup L3 and specifically sub-haplogroup L3e1, which according to Wikipedia is of
Central Africa origin and is found in Algeria, Cameroon, Mozambique, Sudanese and Kikuyu from Kenya as well as in Yemen.
We dug a bit more and found this article, from The American Journal of Human Genetics, which says:
L3e … is the most widespread, frequent, and ancient of the African L3 clades, comprising approximately one-third of all L3 types in sub-Saharan Africa. This haplogroup has recently been dissected in some detail by Bandelt et al. (2001), who suggest an origin for the haplogroup in the Central Africa/Sudan region ~45,000 years ago. As they recognized, L3e1 in particular is common amongst southeastern African Bantu speakers, along with some L3e2 and L3e3 lineages. L3e also represents approximately one-third of all African mtDNA lineages in Brazil. Alves-Silva et al. (2000) therefore hypothesized that it might be a common component of the (as yet unsampled) Angolan mtDNA pool, from where it may have been carried to Brazil during the slave trade.
L3e1 is distributed throughout sub-Saharan Africa, but it is especially common in southeastern Africa. This clade appears to have a west Central African origin and is rare among West Africans, although it is well represented among African Americans. Several southeastern African types are shared with East African Bantu-speaking Kikuyu from Kenya. This suggests that L3e1 may have spread into Kenya via the eastern stream from a Cameroon source population (best represented in this data set by Bioko and São Tomé) or from some Central African source. It subsequently dispersed into the southeast (although, with so little data, back migration into Kenya cannot be ruled out). The African American types may be the result of direct transportation from Mozambique, given the lack of West African representatives.
and this one, from the same journal, which says:
American [meaning all the Americas, North, South and Central, including the Caribbean] L3e1 lineages, however, largely match southeastern Africans, implying a likely origin either there or somewhere on the west-central coast of Africa, between Cameroon and Angola.
The proportion of L3e in the Angolan sample is 14%, of which 5/6 are members of L3e1, the subclade that is also particularly frequent in Mozambique, where the frequency is similar (Salas et al. 2002). On the basis of the phylogeographic distribution (see fig. 9 of Salas et al. 2002), L3e2 appears to be more northern and to have spread into western Africa, where the derived subclade L3e2b predominates, possibly accounting for its greater prevalence in the Caribbean. The minor subclade L3e4 seems to have a similar distribution. The wide distribution of L3e1 and L3e3 is likely to be due mainly to Bantu dispersals (Salas et al. 2002). However, the 18th-century transfer of slaves from Mozambique and Angola to work in the sugar plantations of São Tomé and probably also Bioko (Iliffe 1995) and their subsequent transfer to the Americas may also help to account for the sharing of mtDNA types across this wide area.
My aunt was talking to me about these findings and said, “So maybe she came to the Caribbean from Angola or somewhere in that region, on a Portuguese ship…” And the use of the word “she” was powerful for me, because it made the whole thing less abstract. It suddenly hit me that with all this talk about haplogroups and clades and subclades and source populations, in a way what this comes down to is that “she” refers to a real, flesh and blood, living, breathing woman (and we know it was a woman—or perhaps she was still a girl—because mtDNA traces ancestry back along a continuous maternal line) from somewhere in Africa (Angola? Cameroon? Mozambique?) who was taken from her home and packed onto a ship and transported across the ocean to a strange New World, where she was almost certainly made to live and work under deplorable conditions, being seen and treated as something less than completely human. And she, that woman, that real live woman, my great-times-whatever-number-grandmother, went through all that and survived. And because of her, here I am. Give praises to the ancestors, for real.
This photo (taken at the American Museum of Natural History, found via kottke) reminded me of the time I went to see a special exhibition at the National Museum of Scotland and came face to face with a spectacularly preserved Sisserou Parrot.
At the time, I had recently returned from Dominica, where I had seen and heard live parrots (both in captivity and in the wild) and parrot emblems were everywhere and the bird was a living, lively valued piece of the country’s culture and natural heritage, so seeing this particular specimen, beautiful as it was, stuffed and displayed behind glass, as a museum piece, an isolated item of exotica… it was jarring. I stood there for a while looking at it and thinking Bird, what on earth are you doing here, in a glass box in Scotland? This isn’t where you belong; you are out of context. And that’s what I see when I look at that photo, hundreds (maybe thousands?) of tropical birds, collected, preserved, and out of context.
There is a place in my thesis for that anecdote about encountering the Sisserou in Scotland, somewhere in my discussions of colonial relationships to, and treatments of, Caribbean nature. Now that my fieldwork is finished, I’m really looking forward to spending the next few months piecing those discussions together.
The Night Shift is a blog by VH McKenzie, who is an American artist, married to a Jamaican, living in New York City’s East Village. She also has an Etsy shop where you can buy original artwork and high quality prints.
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