INTERVIEW: A SCHOLAR ON WRITERS, BOOKS, RESISTANCE

Resilience and resistance have long been major themes in the work of writers and artists of African descent, and now these issues are increasingly the focus of research by scholars who have had to forge similar qualities in their own careers.

Dr Suzanne Scafe, a British-Jamaican professor and literature expert, is one such academic, exploring these concepts in her engrossing new book Reading to Resist: Contemporary Black British Women’s Writing.

The volume is the first of its kind to focus on writing by black British women authors “using an approach that highlights the potential of this fiction to intervene into discourses that shape the worlds in which it is situated,” according to publisher Routledge.

Examining a range of concepts that include freedom and agency, moral understanding, and history, Scafe also delves into “issues of importance to the contemporary period such as well-being, success, and achievement”. She offers insights on how literature can help readers to make sense of their experiences and even to inspire activism, fortitude, or understanding.

Reading to Resist covers texts by both celebrated black British-born (or based) writers and those who are less recognized on the international stage. They include Buchi Emecheta, Diana Evans, Nadifa Mohamed and Zadie Smith, as well as Yvvette Edwards, Jacqueline Roy and Jacqueline Walker.

Scafe’s prior research has equally explored Caribbean literature, culture, and gender issues, and she has taught these and other subjects at various institutions in the UK - after beginning her career as a high school teacher in Jamaica. (Born on the island, she moved with her family to the UK as a child, and returned to the Caribbean for several years when she was a young adult.) She is currently an Associate Senior Researcher on the research project MERLIT at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Belgium.

In the following edited interview, Scafe discusses her work with SWAN’s founder Alecia McKenzie.

SWAN: Reading to Resist has a very personal feel, especially since you discuss your own coming-of-age as a reader in a colonial (or postcolonial) context. Could you explain / expand on your motivations for writing this book?

Suzanne Scafe: I formulated the idea for the book as I began reflecting on past experiences and thinking about what reading and literature had meant to my students over the years. 

For the most part, I think that literature opened up new worlds for the readers I’d taught: it opened other worlds across time and geographical space, and it created spaces within which they could reflect on their own worlds. Of course, and this has been important for black and minoritised students, and students in ex-colonial settings, literature also provides insights into the unfamiliar or unknown in an already familiar world.

As I explain in the introduction, I’ve shared the experiences of reading that I witness in my students, but those experiences - of connection and recognition - are quite far removed from some of the ways we teach now, particularly in higher education. So, I began to think about why literature mattered to me and to my students. 

During [Covid] lockdown, I gave some online presentations about this subject to universities, in response to the Black Lives Matter protests. Issues around literature’s relevance are particularly urgent now that humanities departments in the UK are shrinking and the study of the humanities is being presented as increasingly irrelevant and self-indulgent. As a result, fewer black and working-class students are opting for degrees in this field. Cultural conversations, not just in educational institutions but in the wider world, are in danger of being once again dominated by white, middle-class voices and perspectives.

SWAN: What are some of the effects you’ve seen?

Scafe: These closures, the whipping up of fake culture wars, and the general attack on the humanities serve to limit our participation in the production and reception of culture. If, and when it is taken seriously, black British literature, which is the focus of the book, can work to challenge structures of exclusion, and counter many of the prejudices that have become legitimised in popular and academic discourse. In other words, it can intervene in discourses about history, culture, illness and well-being, education, success and so on, and at the same time, the act of careful reading, of paying close attention to language and meaning, facilitates a critical reading of all texts and all media.

SWAN: The idea of “resisting voicelessness” is one of the themes in your book. How much of this is a leitmotif in your own academic work?

Scafe: ‘Resisting Voicelessness’ is the title of the first chapter, which focuses on black British women’s autobiography. In this chapter, I trace contemporary black autobiographical writing to nineteenth-century slave narratives authored by women, and I connect their demand to be heard to the same demand in the autobiographies I analyse.

Black women auto-biographers across the centuries wrote to counter their own invisibility and the invisibility of their communities: they wrote as individuals but also on behalf of others. They gave voice to their own, otherwise silenced or marginalised experiences, and in the process spoke for others who could not speak. While I wanted to highlight the lived experiences about which these contemporary authors wrote, I also wanted to draw attention to the aesthetic complexities of their work. As with the slave narratives, these contemporary writers are not just documenting the ‘and then … and then’ of a life: they are turning their lives into stories and creating, from their life experiences, a lasting work of art. This focus on form, or what I term in the book ‘aesthetics’ is often missing in the analysis of black British texts - we assume that the experiences depicted in the work are ‘real’ and unmediated. 

In terms of my own writing practice, I’ve always wanted to draw attention to authors whose work has not gained critical or popular attention. I remain surprised by the fact that the work of so many black British women writers continues to be undervalued or ignored.

Pilgrim State, as its author Jacqueline Walker has said, is or was used in Health and Social Care Studies. It’s an incredible account of the author’s childhood, her mother’s experience of mental ill-health and the failure of State institutions, here and in North America, to provide care and support both for herself and her young family. It was written in 2008 and as far as I can see, it hasn’t been republished.

The same is true for In Search of Mr McKenzie, also included in this chapter. Yvvette Edwards’ novels, which I discuss in the second chapter, have received little or no critical attention, despite the fact that her first novel,  A Cupboard Full of Coats, was longlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize, and was republished shortly after.

I write in the first chapter about Charlotte Williams’s autobiography, Sugar and Slate and I was heartened to see that it has been republished as part of Penguin’s Black Britain Writing Back series, initiated by the publisher in collaboration with Bernardine Evaristo. In my conclusion, I write about the importance of this collaboration, which has brought so many important works back into focus. It has meant that some of the work I’ve included, such as Jacqueline Roy’s The Fat Lady Sings, is now easily available.

And finally on the topic of voicelessness, I’ve brought some of my own voice into my reading of these texts, and I hope that readers, black readers in particular, will be encouraged to bring their voices to the critical table.

SWAN: Focusing on Walker’s Pilgrim State and other books, you discuss the “corrective function” of certain texts. Can you expand on this, and describe how it also relates to your scholarly writing?

Scafe: This is an interesting question and gives me pause for thought. I think all black and minoritised writers or writers from the “Global South”, in the global majority, however you want to describe us, are aware that we are writing against the grain. We write to counter popular myths about our lives; to correct historical misconceptions and untruths; to reveal the nuance, complexity and plurality of “black lives”, and so on. We do this because there is a relative absence of stories told about us in our own words.

In the book, I’ve tried also to focus on nuance and complexity. In the sentence that you quote, I write that Walker’s subtitle, “‘How It Really Was’ suggests a corrective function”; however, as well as “telling the truth about an individual life”, the autobiography presents a text that relies on storytelling structures - characterisation, a carefully structured plot, felicitous use of imagery - that is both the “truth” and a work of art. The writing is not intuitive or careless: the corrective function of criticism is to draw attention to the artistry of black British authors such as Walker.

SWAN: Linked to “corrective function” is the idea of “moral repair”. Does this concern go beyond black British women writers? Is it a common theme in writing from the “Global South”?

Scafe: Yes, and you’re right: these ideas are linked. Like the idea of a corrective, “moral repair” is particularly resonant for writers and readers in the “Global South”. I’d originally intended to frame the whole book around ideas of moral repair and reparation, but because this is one of the first books to focus specifically on black British women’s writing, I felt I should widen my critical lens so that readers could see that this writing is available for analysis from a range of different perspectives.

I’d been influenced by what I describe as the “ethical turn” in literary criticism and had written a couple of articles/book chapters that took this approach. I had started to read and think about “moral repair” as a concept that is different from justice, or even from conventional notions of reparation. In the second chapter of Reading to Resist, I look at four novels that focus on murder, two by Yvvette Edwards, A Cupboard Full of Coats, that centres on the murder of a woman by her partner, and The Mother, that depicts a mother’s quest for justice for the murder of her son. The work by Zadie Smith and Nadifa Mohamed, also included in this chapter, is centred on historical murders: Kelso Cochrane and Mahmood Mattan. All these texts address “wrongs as wrongs” but also focus both on the structural conditions for wrongdoing which include the blinkered partiality of justice. I try to show that the novels themselves, in asking us to think about generations of systemic oppression, offer the possibility of hope through a practice of remembrance. 

SWAN: You discuss the “complex issues” of “reparation, remembrance, and recovery”. In what particular ways do some of the selected texts address these issues, especially in a historical context?

Scafe: Reparation is now commonly associated with historical injustice and linked to tangible or economic methods of recovery and repair. The first four chapters of the book do look at “repair” as something that representation participates in. When fiction requires us to look again or look differently at injustice and to see wrongdoing and subjugation as practices performed by humans, within systems of oppression that are perpetuated by humans on victims who are also human, then that work becomes an active participant in the conversation about memory, remembrance and recovery.

SWAN: Violence is equally a theme in many of the texts discussed, bringing to mind Véronique Maisier’s book Violence in Caribbean Literature: Stories of Stones and Blood. What do you see as the link between historical trauma and the depictions of violence in the texts, and what is the message from these writers / writings?

Scafe: I’m not familiar with Maisier’s book, though I have touched on the historical roots of contemporary violence in Reading to Resist. Colonialism and historical and contemporary racist practices are also the historical root of violence in contemporary black British contexts. As well as looking at representations of contemporary violence, I analyse novels about slavery. In the fourth chapter I discuss Laura Fish’s Strange Music and Sara Collins’s The Confessions of Frannie Langton. These novels use historical archives and do indeed represent the traumatic effects of the violence of slavery and its aftermath on their characters. 

These two novels return to the past in order to animate the everyday lives of historical figures  who were inserted into the margins or footnotes of the records of the enslavers. Both novels foreground the lives of women and the particular practices of violence and subjugation meted out to women in the eighteenth and nineteenth-century Caribbean.

More than simply bringing the stories of women to life and light, focusing on their agency as well as their victimisation, I suggest that these novels ask readers to think about what is involved in re-writing the past; I think that’s the intention of both novels. And like most historical novels, these two works of fiction are about the relation between history and the imagination: about the imaginative component of history and the historical frameworks that often constrain fictional work that seeks to overwrite history.

SWAN: A question that we have asked other scholars is this: do you see violence as more of a topic, theme or trope in “Caribbean” or black British literature than in other “regional” writing, and, if so, could you summarize some of the reasons for this, according to your research?

Scafe: I agree that it’s both a theme and a topic of much recent writing in the Anglophone Caribbean. It is central, for example, to the work of Marlon James and it dominates recent writing by Caribbean women such as Lisa Allen Angostina’s The Bread the Devil Knead or Cherie Jones’s How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps her house, or Claire Adam’s Golden Child, all amazing novels. However, black British literature tends to be read in relation to themes and tropes of migration and displacement, belonging, separation and identity.

We have all written about how these ideas shape or define black British writing but in Reading to Resist I wanted to avoid those topics altogether. For example, in the third chapter of the book, which examines representations of mental illness in Jacqueline Roy’s The Fat Lady Sings and in three of Diana Evans’s novels, I’ve tried not to treat madness as a “topic” connected to displacement, un/belonging and colonial trauma, which is how this theme is sometimes presented, and to look instead at how the texts’ language is used to evoke the “madness” of their characters: how do these writers use language to represent a condition of being that is outside the logic of language?

SWAN: Your book also addresses “mobility, achievement and failure”, and you’re involved in a research project on meritocracy. Do black British writers from different personal / geographical backgrounds deal with these issues in different ways?

Scafe: Thanks for this question. Yes, the ideas for this chapter were formulated in 2018, at the first conference on meritocracy and achievement. Readers can access the conference papers online:

https://books.ulb.hhu.de/index.php/hhu_books/catalog/book/21. 

I had begun thinking about how, in the early, canonical writing of pre- and early post-independence Caribbean and Africa, individual achievement was represented as problematic. The examples I mentioned in my presentation were No Longer at Ease, by Chinua Achebe, In the Castle of My Skin (George Lamming) and Merle Hodge’s Crick Crack Monkey, though of course there are many others.

In these novels, social ascendency into colonial settings and institutions and a world defined by colonial values produced, for their protagonists, cultural, social and existential conflicts that were sometimes insurmountable. In some cases, however, the culture of the characters’ childhood provided an alternative way of seeing and knowing the world and an anchor that rooted them in this culture. 

I see a similar pattern in some black British writing, where success and achievement are represented as causing similar feelings of conflict or ambivalence. The novels I used for this chapter included Natasha Brown’s Assembly and Zadie Smith’s NW and Swing Time: all three are explicit meditations on the proximity of failure to success, where failure is, in these novels, a kind of haunting. I also used Buchi Emecheta’s autobiography Head Above Water, because, for all her apparent success, as the title suggests, her achievements often felt tenuous. She faced similar crises as those expressed in the writing of the younger authors.

SWAN: Are black British male writers addressing similar topics, or is there a gender divide / distinction?

Scafe: I think there are a lot of overlaps in the themes and topics addressed by both male and female writers but of course writing that uses women protagonists or uses its woman characters’ point of view tends also to address the particular kinds of oppressions or obstacles and challenges women face. Both Jacqueline Roy’s characters experience misogyny or sexual abuse but the novel uses forms of cultural expression by women to counter these experiences of subjugation. There is certainly a generational difference, and I find that representations of women in some of the now canonical, critically acclaimed, black British male authored texts, contain traces of misogyny. Even the recent work of these authors can still rely on negative stereotypes or silenced women characters.

10: What do you hope readers (including writers and scholars) will gain from your book?

Scafe: I hope to introduce readers to novels by black British women writers which haven’t gained much critical attention. I hope that the approaches I’ve used suggest the possibility of analysing and using black British writing differently. I’d like to see literature used across disciplines, and I think the topics I’ve used to structure the chapters point to that possibility. - SWAN

Photos (top to bottom): The cover of Reading to Resist; Dr. Suzanne Scafe; images of various books mentioned in the interview.

BOOKS: A PEEP INTO CLAUDE MCKAY’S ‘LETTERS IN EXILE'

Nomadic Jamaican-American writer Claude McKay probably never dreamed that 21^st-century readers would be delving into his private correspondence some 77 years after his death. But that’s probably part of the professional hazard (luck?) of being a literary luminary, or, as Yale University Press describes him, “one of the Harlem Renaissance’s brightest and most radical voices”.

The Press recently released Letters in Exile: Transnational Journeys of a Harlem Renaissance Writer, edited by Brooks E. Hefner and Gary Edward Holcomb. This is a comprehensive collection of “never-before-published dispatches from the road” with correspondents who have equally become cultural icons: Langston Hughes, W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Pauline Nardal, Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, Max Eastman and a gamut of other writers, editors, activists, and benefactors. The letters cover the years 1916 to 1934 and were written from various cities, as McKay travelled extensively.

His daughter Rhue Hope McKay, whom the writer apparently never met (perhaps because British authorities in the 1930s prevented him from returning to Jamaica or because he had no inclination), sold and donated his papers to Yale University from 1964 on.

The papers include his letters to her as well, and cast a light on this “singular figure of displacement, this critically productive internationalist, this Black Atlantic wanderer”, as a French translator has called him. But reading another’s correspondence, even that of a long-dead scribe, can feel like an intrusion. It’s a sensation some readers will need to overcome.

Born in 1890 (or 1889) in Clarendon, Jamaica, McKay left the Caribbean island for the United States in 1912, and his wanderings would later take him to countries such as Russia, England, France and Morocco, among others.

His acclaimed work includes the poem “If We Must Die” (written in reaction to the racial violence in the United States against people of African descent in mid-1919), the poetry collections Songs of Jamaica and Harlem Shadows, and the novels Home to Harlem, Banjo, and Banana Bottom. Years after his death in 1948, scholars discovered manuscripts that would be posthumously published: Amiable with Big Teeth (written in 1941 and published in 2017) and Romance in Marseille (written in 1933 and published in 2020). McKay also authored a memoir titled A Long Way from Home (1937), as well as short stories and essays.

While he’s considered a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance, McKay was a cosmopolitan intellectual - an author ahead of his time, writing about race, inequality, the legacy of slavery, queerness, and a range of other topics. He wrote in a sharp, striking, often ironic or satirical way, and Letters in Exile reflects these same qualities. The collection “reveals McKay gossiping, cajoling, and confiding as he engages in spirited debates and challenges the political and artistic questions of the day,” according to the editors.

Some of the most interesting letters deal with France, the setting of a significant part of McKay’s oeuvre and a place where his literary stature has been rising over the past decade, through a rush of new translations, colloquia, and even a film devoted to his life: Claude McKay, From Harlem to Marseille (or in French, Claude McKay, de Harlem à Marseille), directed by Matthieu Verdeil and released in 2021.

McKay was the “first twentieth-century Black author associated with the United States to be widely celebrated in France,” write editors Hefner and Holcomb in their introduction. They say the letters show that France shaped McKay’s world view, and that he considered himself a Francophile as well as a perpetual étranger.

Through the selected correspondence, we see McKay experiencing France in a variety of ways - dealing with winter insufficiently dressed, participating in the community of multi-ethnic outsiders in Marseille, rubbing shoulders with various personalities during the Années folles, or observing French colonialism in Morocco. And nearly always short of funds.

In Paris in January 1924, after a bout of sickness, he wrote to New York-based social worker and activist Grace Campbell that he’d had the “bummest holiday” of his life: “I was down with the grippe for 10 days and only forced myself to get up on New Year’s day. I suffer because I’m not properly clothed to stand the winter. I’m wondering if anything can be done over there to raise a little money to tide me over these bad times.”

A month later, he wrote to another correspondent about the “cold wave” numbing his fingers and of having to sleep with his “old overcoat” next to his skin, while still not being able to keep warm. He also found the “French trading class” to be “terrible”, complaining that “they cheat me going and coming”.

During his early time in France, he called Marseilles a “nasty, repulsive city”.  But a few years later, writing to teacher and arts patron Harold Jackman in 1927, McKay stated: “I am doing a book on Marseille. It’s a tough, picturesque old city and I would love to show it to you some day.”

Apart from references to his work, McKay discussed global events in his correspondence, made his opinions known, and described relationships. His letters, say Hefner and Holcomb, are at the very least “an essential companion to his most revolutionary writings, from the groundbreaking poetry he produced after he left Jamaica through his trailblazing novels and short fiction and into his extraordinary memoirs and journalism.”

While this may well be true, and as insightful as the correspondence proves, many readers will still have to reckon with the uncomfortable sensation of being a literary voyeur. – AM/SWAN

Photos (top to bottom): the cover of Letters in Exile; a French newspaper article about Claude McKay; a montage of the writer's work. 

AKAA: A DECADE SHOWING ART FROM AFRICA, DIASPORA

Paris hosts hundreds of art events each year, and it can be tough for participants to stand out on a crowded cultural calendar, or even to survive amid the competition. But one of the most interesting art and design fairs is celebrating its 10th anniversary this autumn, presenting a remarkable range of works by artists from Africa and the African diaspora.

AKAA – Also Known As Africa – brings together some 44 galleries and more than 80 artists, exhibiting Oct. 24-to-26, “under the glass roof” of the Carreau du Temple, a striking 19^th-century building that once served as a covered market, in the (now trendy) 3rd arrondissement of the French capital.

The fair’s themes this year include inter-regional creative fusion and cooperation, according to new artistic director Sitor Senghor, a long-time collector, former investment banking expert, and current independent curator.

Calling AKAA 2025 a “journey”, Senghor said visitors would “walk in the footsteps of visionary artists, those who understood art as an act of freedom, a resistance through beauty, a celebration of life”.

The fair forms part of Paris Art Week, when galleries throw open their doors, street artists create murals, and collectors go hunting for valuable artwork – all taking place against the backdrop of the recent Louvre heist.

But the robbery at France’s world-famous museum earlier this month has not dampened the mood of art enthusiasts, who have been flocking to various exhibitions (Art Basel Paris is also taking place this week).

AKAA, however, attracts a special group of visitors, who include African art connoisseurs and fans of the cutting-edge work for which many of those featured are recognized. As the fair states, its objective since launching in 2015 has been to offer an “exceptional platform for the artists and galleries shaping the contemporary art landscape”.

This year, the aim is not only to celebrate the 10-year milestone, but also to “reaffirm its commitment to the future of African and Afro-descendant art scenes,” according to the organizers. As such, there is an expanded scope, comprising a wider programme of talks, screenings, and performances alongside the gallery exhibitions

(More on AKAA’s background:

https://southernworldartsnews.blogspot.com/2017/12/galleries-fairs-offer-african-art-feast.html)

The 2025 display of artwork begins outside the Carreau du Temple, with a sculpture by the illustrious Senegalese artist Ousmane Sow (1935 - 2016). Titled “Sitting Bull en prière”, the effect is to make visitors stop and wonder at this majestic personage, who paradoxically appears to be entreating the heavens. Represented in vibrant hues of umber and ochre, the figure has his face turned to the sky, with his hands held up in supplication. Its impact is one for which Sow is known, having created acclaimed (and sometimes controversial) “larger-than-life” public sculptures in France and other countries.

From this work, visitors head to a monumental installation inside the capacious building, right after the entrance.

Here, a dramatic series of sculptures by Cameroon-born Serge Mouangue demands an extended pause for observation and awe. At first glance, the work seems to be of Japanese origin because the artist “merges the formal elegance of the Japanese kimono with African textiles and visual rhythms”, as the curators put it.

In the first part of the installation (which overall is titled “The Third Aesthetic”), a meandering row of female figures appears to be heading out on a journey, dressed in traditional “kimonos”, their hair in buns with kanzashi, or “hair chopsticks”, as decoration. But even as their “faces” appear Japanese, one can see on closer inspection that these are African masks, and the clothing is made from African textiles that recall Japanese indigo dyeing.

“This is called Seven Sisters, and it’s a procession of fourteen women walking towards Mount Fuji,” explained Mouangue, who lived in Japan for five years and maintains close links with the country. He told SWAN during the exhibition preview that he acquired the masks from Gabon, used original kanzashi from Japan, and chose fabric for the intercultural resemblance – deliberately creating a fusion of elements with the structures.

“I want people to question what they’re seeing,” Mouangue said. “I want them to think about cultural reflections and links because living and working in Japan brought me closer to Africa.”

He added that as an artist, he wanted to “delve deeply” into topics such as identity and spirituality, and for this, he works with craftsmen and women who “embody excellence” and who “respect traditions”. 

He has collaborated with a group called Nawawaseya, for instance, to provide “sacred rope” (used at shrines) for a second sculpture in the installation. In this, kendo masks are decorated with African beads from the west Cameroon region where Mouangue grew up, again combining African and Asian aesthetics.

A third section of the installation features fertility figures, constructed from a transparent resin in varying shades of scarlet, with Japanese Noh masks as the foetuses. The statues are mounted on a stand containing water that reflects their colour. 

“This is about fertility and giving birth,” Mouangue told SWAN. “It took me seven years all together to make this because there is lots of complexity in the material, which is a specific resin, and in the shaping for the mould.”

In addition to Mouangue’s spectacular sculptures (represented by “space Un” gallery of Tokyo), the fair offers a wide array of memorable works through the participation of European galleries as well as those based across the Atlantic.

For the first time, a gallery from Puerto Rico (REM Project) is present this year, showcasing the work of artist Gadiel Rivera Herrera from the island, as well as that of Victo’ Nyakauru from Zimbabwe.

Rivera Herrera creates surrealist ceramic forms, while Nyakaura produces bold pieces using leather. The latter told SWAN that his aim with the AKAA exhibition was to recall and highlight Négritude, the movement formed by black intellectuals and artists during the 1930s to raise black consciousness.

He said he wanted to relaunch this philosophy through his work – a fitting aim perhaps for the 10^th anniversary of an innovative fair in Paris, a city that played such a key role in the movement. - SWAN

Photos (by AM / SWAN, top to bottom): AKAA's artistic director Sitor Senghor; Sitting Bull en prière by Ousmane Sow;  Seven Sisters (The Third Aesthetic) by Serge Mouangue; the artist Serge Mouangue with his work; Victo' Nyakaura at the REM Project stand. 

GERMAN TOWN HOSTS ‘MUSICAL’ EXPO OF JAMAICAN ART

As music fans groove to the sounds of reggae in summer festivals around the world, a small town in Germany is focusing on Jamaican visual art, alongside the famous rhythms.

Bersenbrück (Lower Saxony) is known for its annual Reggae Jam Festival, one of the most popular music events in Europe, but this year the town is also hosting a special Jamaican art exhibition, highlighting modern and contemporary art from the island, while paying homage to its musical genres.

Running until Aug. 24 at the Museum im Kloster - housed in a picturesque pastel-coloured building - the show comprises artwork by revered pioneers such as Osmond Watson and Edna Manley as well as by acclaimed contemporary artists including Gavin Jordan, Joshua Solas and Barbara Walker.

The official exhibition poster features reggae singer Koffee, from a painting by Richard Gayle, while other works, for example, depict the iconic music producer Lee Scratch Perry, or honour the ground-breaking film The Harder They Come - with its venerated soundtrack by Jimmy Cliff and other reggae legends. Those attending the Reggae Jam Festival (Aug. 1-to- 3) will be able to view the artworks freely.

The exhibition is the brainchild of Karl Olaf Kaiser, a German engineer, deejay, and art lover who has forged close ties with Jamaica and artists over the years. As a first-time curator, he worked with museum director Katharina Pfaff to bring the show to fruition, overcoming a range of challenges such as shipping artwork from the Caribbean and obtaining relevant loans of paintings. Along the way, he received assistance from artists, art collectors, and from the German art historian Claudia Hucke, who has lived and taught in Jamaica.

In the following edited interview, Kaiser discusses the road to Bersenbrück with SWAN.

SWAN: What was the inspiration for the exhibition?

Karl Olaf Kaiser: The inspiration was to highlight to Germans that Jamaican culture "not only" consists of reggae music (with its entirely different genre), but that it is very rich in many other fields, e.g. literature, performing arts, and fine arts. Often, and all over the world, cultural reception is influenced by clichés: "German music culture is the Oktoberfestmusic and Lederhosen", "the typical Frenchman wears a beret, a red scarf and a sailor shirt”, etc.

Since my first journey to Jamaica in 1992, I have always visited the National Gallery - although I didn't dip deep into the fine arts scene of Jamaica. But in the last 8-to-10 years, the interest in Jamaican art has increased tremendously.

Besides the NGJ, I started to visit other galleries in Kingston, MoBay, Ocho Rios, and also attended “underground” pop-up exhibitions, etc. That led to the publishing of several articles about the arts scene of Kingston in a German Reggae magazine (RIDDIM).

Then the final inspiration was the wonderful exhibition Jamaica Making: The Theresa Roberts Art Collection, which was curated by Dr Emma Roberts, in Liverpool at the Victoria Gallery & Museum in 2022. There I thought: “Oh it would be wonderful to present Jamaican art in such a setting in Germany”.

At that point in time the idea was more a dream, and quite vague. From there to the opening event on 27 June 2025, several other lucky coincidences were necessary, namely the request of music writer Helmut Philips in 2023 for me to be the MC at the opening of his DUB-Music exhibition in the Museum im Kloster in Bersenbrück. Afterwards Helmut and myself discussed the possible interest of the Museum im Kloster in a “Jamaican art” exhibition.

Later that year we had a first meeting with Katharina Pfaff, the director of the Museum. Several potential exhibition contents / concepts were introduced and discussed. It was obvious that - since the special exhibition would also be during the Reggae Jam - it should have attractions for music fans. Different concepts were presented, for example to bring the exhibition of “50 Years: The Harder They Come” [celebrating the iconic 1972 film] to Germany, an exhibition I visited in June 2022.

Another idea was to show a selection of an exhibition, which was held at the Übersee-Museum in Bremen years ago, but which would be limited again to, let’s say, so-called “Rasta art”. However, from the beginning my intention was always to give the visitor a broad overview and idea of “classic” and contemporary Jamaican art and not to limit it to a specific art genre, which - in the case with “Rasta art” - would be again to feed a German/European cliché. Katharina was on the same page.

In early 2024, it was finally agreed to organize an exhibition about and with a wide range of Jamaican art in the summer of 2025 and at the Museum im Kloster.

SWAN: What were some of the challenges in acquiring the artwork?

KOK: The preliminary concept of 2023 / early 2024 became more specific as we found a lender who had some contemporary Jamaican artwork and was willing to lend it - free of charge. Moreover, I was in contact with several persons in Germany whom I knew owned Jamaican art. Many telephone calls and visits followed, and in late summer 2024, we had a decent potential small collection with which we could proceed. Still my - in hindsight - naïve idea was to borrow art in Jamaica to bring it over to Germany.

Some background: that summer I spotted five Jamaican art pieces at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin at the 2024 Quilomboso exhibition, which they’d got from the National Gallery of Jamaica. If they could manage it, it’s generally possible, I thought. And where there’s a will, there’s a way – if makka nah jook you … and you have a budget, team and background like the HKW.

In October 2024 I introduced the idea of a Jamaican art exhibition at the annual conference of the Deutsch-Jamaikanische Gesellschaft [a friendship organization] in Königswinter. There I asked the audience about the idea and whether attendees knew potential - honorary pro bono - lenders of Jamaican art, located in the EU.

It was striking that most people I spoke to loved the idea and concept of the planned exhibition and encouraged us/me to continue; but many also were hesitant to lend their art, for individual reasons.

During my regular “snow bird” time in Jamaica during winter 2024, and while researching and doing the conceptional preparation for the exhibition, I became aware of a Jamaican art exhibition, held in 2017 in Stuttgart. Through the list of artists, who were showcased at that time, I realized that many of them would fit into the concept of our exhibition. The curator of that exhibition was Miss Petra Schmidt [an art collector and former diplomat].

From Jamaica, I contacted her, and after I explained the concept and told her about the many challenges (a very, very small budget, no fees for lenders, the relatively short exhibition period and that it wasn’t the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn but the lovely “Museum im Kloster in Bersenbrück”… “Where??”), she immediately said she loved the idea.

She agreed to lend pieces from her art collection. This, and also the generous support by the painter Judy Ann MacMillan, the art historian Dr. Claudia Hucke from Germany, the Jamaican author and painter Alecia McKenzie, who is based in France, and sculptor Barbara Walker, who’s based in Berlin - all helped to shape the possible collection more and more.

Moreover, in Jamaica I contacted the estates of several artists, for example Barrington Watson, Osmond Watson, Edna Manley, John Dunkley, Mallica Kapo Reynolds. Everybody was willing to give support - but at the end, it was also a matter of time and budget. Then the cost for transport, insurance, custom fees and on top of that, the “cherry on the pie”: the whole bureaucratic process in Jamaica to export the art for an exhibition and to import it into Germany.

Please keep in mind that the mission of the small Museum im Kloster is to focus on local heritage and history. The special exhibition during the two months around Reggae Jam is a heavy, heavy burden for the small staff, namely Katharina Pfaff, who has also many other important duties in the county of Osnabrück. So, it was always a levelling of my expectations regarding this exhibition - not only for me but also for many artists, who might have liked to be included with their art.

That was one of the main sad experiences: The disappointment of some artists who couldn’t be integrated, because there are so many exceptional artists in Jamaica, and the space we had was quite small, about 160 square metres. And we are just speaking about the artists in Jamaica and not touching on the broad field of Jamaican artists living in the European Diaspora. Furthermore, I did this whole project in my “leisure time”. It needed already a whole heap of passion, was time-consuming and, from the beginning of 2025, more or less a full time job - pro bono.

SWAN: That’s a massive undertaking. Will the show now travel elsewhere?

KOK: Personally, I would be happy if the show could travel and be exhibited in other museums - either in Germany and / or elsewhere in the EU. We definitely need adequate security and safety measures as well as proper conservation conditions. Moreover, it would require the continued generosity of the lenders, since all pieces are from private collections.

Or, we would need financial support from cultural funds, public foundations, etc. I can proudly state that we could exhibit much more Jamaican artists and pieces, and that it could also be showcased in a larger museum. So, any museum, institution and or foundation, which is interested in Jamaican art, the Jamaican art scene, background of Jamaican art history, etc. and have a passion for Jamaica and a project like this: please don’t hesitate to contact me.

SWAN: What has the reception been in Bersenbrück?

KOK: This question really has to be answered by the visitors to the Jamaican Art exhibition. From my prospective, the reception on the opening weekend was very good. I have to acknowledge that Bersenbrück and its people are very nice but - fair enough - it’s not located around the corner for many people. 

However, on a year-to-year basis, many thousands of reggae-music lovers pilgrim to Bersenbrück for a reason: That’s the Reggae Jam Festival. And likewise, I hope, at least hundreds of Jamaican art connoisseurs and those who want to see Jamaican art will be motivated to travel to this wonderful part of Germany. Definitely it’s worth it. The feedback from people I’ve spoken to, who visited the show, is that they love it.

Photos by AM / SWAN (top to bottom): The exhibition poster at the Museum im Kloster; Karl Olaf Kaiser speaks at the official opening of the exhibition; a view of the exhibition hall; Karl Olaf Kaiser moderates a panel with artists, art collectors and art historians; museum director Katharina Pfaff with art historian Claudia Hucke; a section of the exhibition featuring literature. 

FILM: FANON’S ARC FROM THERAPIST TO REVOLUTIONARY

By Dimitri Keramitas 

Franz Fanon, Chroniques fidèles survenues au siècle dernier à l’hôpital de Blida-Joinville au temps où le Docteur Franz Fanon était Chef de la cinquième division, entre l’an 1953 et 1956 (Franz Fanon, Faithful Chronicles from the Last Century at the Blida-Joinville Hospital when Dr. Franz Fanon was Chief of the Fifth Division, between 1953 and 1956) - a film by Abdenour Zahzah

Sixty-four years after his death - and during the centenary of his birth - the great psychiatrist, polemicist and revolutionary Frantz Fanon seems to have fully returned to the public consciousness, with his ideas being used to address current societal divisions.

Fanon has been the subject of bios, studies, graphic novels, and several films (documentaries and features). Now, a new biopic, directed by Abdenour Zahzah, focuses on his professional experiences at the Blida-Joinville hospital in French Algeria in the 1950s, when l’Algérie Française was giving way to decolonization. (Algeria was divided into fifteen French departments until it won independence following a brutal war.)

As a historical document, the film is fascinating, and even important. Fanon’s hugely influential thought and writings about the effects of colonialism on the psyche of the colonized germinated in the Blida hospital. He would later apply his ideas in political action.

Originally from Martinique, Fanon was educated in elite schools and joined the French Resistance when WWII broke out. (He was awarded the Croix de Guerre, by Colonel Raoul Salan, who as a general would lead a right-wing terrorist group that tried to keep Algeria French.) After completing his medical studies in Lyon, he was sent to the colonial hinterlands of the Maghreb to work with mentally ill patients. At the Blida-Joinville hospital he found wretched conditions and patronizing doctors (one ascribed the mental dysfunctions of Arab patients to racial differences in the brain).

Fanon immediately began trying to reform and humanize the hospital environment with early versions of group encounter sessions. He realized that racism and colonial oppression played a strong part in mental illness. Eventually he became an opponent not only of the imperialism victimizing his patients but of that found in Algerian society in general. He joined the revolutionary FLN (National Liberation Front) and after independence served in the Algerian government.

Fanon would later become associated with the Third World and Black Power movements with his ideas of the “false consciousness” imposed on the oppressed, an idea taken up by many others, including famous writers and academics. He attracted controversy by stating that violence could be a legitimate way for victims of racism and imperialism to break out of their psychic straitjackets. In some "Western" countries, he was accused of championing terrorism. It’s difficult to ascertain how literal this was, how much the overheated product of the times (as with the theories of Wilhelm Reich and J.D. Laing). So perhaps it was a good idea to take a look back at Fanon’s clinical work with mentally ill people.

Zahzah himself is from Blida, and he gives us an assured sense of place, mostly of the hospital grounds (which included staff housing), also of a bucolic mountain where orderlies take patients on an outing. He has chosen to film in low-contrast black-and-white, which is pleasant but feels too sedate for the setting, and the context. The hospital is, after all, a “madhouse” as the patients themselves say, with some very extreme cases. This becomes even more the case when the independence war begins. The Algerian War was a violent, often gruesome conflict, and the soft grayish tones somehow seem evasive. We feel that a more extreme style, on the order of Milos Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or Sam Fuller’s Shock Corridor, would be more appropriate.

Alexandre Desane as Fanon is brilliant, and he has Fanon’s physical presence (at least as expressed in photos). 

He possesses just the right balance of humane empathy, outrage at the conditions patients are subject to, and assertiveness. Unfortunately, we don’t get a convincing character arc – of his transformation from hospital psychiatrist to revolutionary. The transition seems too smooth, as if Fanon had simply gravitated to a social movement, as opposed to political revolt. This may not be completely inaccurate: To Fanon, joining the Algerianh independence struggle wasn’t all that different from joining the French Resistance. (The Resistance too was a proscribed, violent movement opposing what had been termed Free France until it became known as Vichy.)

The supporting actors do serviceable work, but not much more than that, and some secondary characters seem to be played by non-actors. Fanon’s own son plays a small part (as an old friend of Fanon). This adds to the distancing effect of Zahzah’s mode of filming. Perhaps Fanon himself would have wanted his story to be told in an “objective” fashion, except that there’s a contradiction between his portrayal (as well as that of the French characters), and that of the Arab-Algerian patients and staff. This is ironic given that one of the themes is French Algeria’s segregation of French and Arab citizens.

The director trenchantly shows how mental illness was induced by cultural and social forces. This was exacerbated by the war, as we observe both victims of the French army and traumatized perpetrators of torture. The policies applied by the hospital itself become oppressive. In a way reminiscent of the theories of Michel Foucault, Fanon’s notions about colonialism’s damaging impact on the psyche could be extended to other institutions: school, workplace, government bureaucracy, culture.

Regrettably, in delineating this theme, the narrative structure breaks down. While multiplying case studies, the film is desultory and diffuse. Zahzah doesn’t develop and dramatize his cases sufficiently, and then overcompensates with set-pieces in which characters present overwrought monologues about past trauma.

There’s something telling about the film’s long, rather curious, official title. It sounds like self-parody, or something Brechtian, or like Peter Weiss’s play (adapted to film by Peter Brook), The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade - it implies taking literal fact into surreal territory.

Before making this film, Zahzah had made a documentary about Fanon (Frantz Fanon, Mémoire d’Asile, 2002, also about his experiences at the hospital). The director obviously felt a need to get beyond a discursive approach, but he doesn’t quite manage the leap from documentary to dramatic fiction.

In addition, the director misses opportunities to explore his subject’s contradictions. Fanon’s own personality had an authoritarian streak, reinforced by the discipline of serving in a military capacity and by the French education system. His marriage with a Frenchwoman is portrayed as conventional and dominated by his vocation. Fanon tries to “liberate” the patients by imposing Beethoven (shades of Clockwork Orange) and having them put out a newspaper. Another of his methods is to establish that most French of institutions, a café, in the hospital. A couple of times he takes patients into his own household in what might seem a patronizing manner. If all this was for the benefit of the patients, it perhaps indicates that his views on imperialist influence were sometimes tempered with pragmatism.

The film ends with Fanon, now an FLN member, leaving his post to “await instructions” elsewhere. He doesn’t seem much concerned about his wife, young son, or the patient who’d become a member of the household. It’s a sort of grim foreshadowing: The FLN had the structure, and the ruthless methods, of a clandestine liberation movement fighting a more powerful enemy; the structure and methods were later used to remain in power undemocratically. Likewise, the film depicts the importance of the Muslim religion for the Algerian fellah, and this foreshadows the civil war in the 1980s pitting the authoritarian FLN government against Islamists.

At the Paris screening of the film, among the attendees was a woman who had worked with Fanon at the Blida hospital, and who has also written about him. Now nearing 90, she was then a young intern. Whatever her sympathies at the time, like many other Algerian Jews she left the country for France. She declined to speak of that period except to say that while the film was “good” it contained “historical inaccuracies”. She refused to say what they were.

One possible example: Fanon’s tenure at the hospital apparently ended when he was deported, not because of a James Bond-like escape. A life lived semi-underground would seem to guarantee murky historiography, and it’s clear that the life and legacy of Frantz Fanon will continue to provoke debate and controversy. But continuing the discussion is necessary. For that reason alone, Fanon is worth seeing.

Dimitri Keramitas is a Paris-based writer and legal expert.

Photos are courtesy of the film distributors. Fanon will be in cinemas in July.

AT UN, ARTISTS CALL FOR ACTION ON SAVING OCEAN

While government leaders, scientists and civil organizations gather in Nice, southern France, for the 3rd United Nations Ocean Conference (UNOC3) from June 9 to 13, artists across the Atlantic are equally sounding the alarm about the calamitous situation facing the world’s seas.

HOMO SARGASSUM is a contemporary art exhibition taking place at UN headquarters in New York to raise awareness about ocean pollution and other ills, through “the lens of the sargassum seaweed”. The show runs throughout World Ocean Month (June), until July 11, and admission is free upon online registration.

“It’s really about understanding our human responsibility in environmental disasters,” said the exhibition's curator Vanessa Selk. “If there’s a proliferation of sargassum seaweed, it’s because we contributed to it through the use of chemical fertilizers, through climate change, global warming… and we have to take full responsibility of this.”

Selk, a former diplomat who now directs the US-based non-profit TOUT-MONDE Art FOUNDATION (TMAF), told SWAN in a telephone interview that the exhibition aims to highlight the voices and work of contemporary Caribbean artists in a wide-reaching way, alongside the subject of the show.

She said that presenting the exhibition at the UN rather than in a museum is “not merely symbolic”, as the aim is to use art to “speak up on certain issues”, in addition to words and diplomacy.

“Museum audiences are great, but that is still a niche,” she added. “By showing the exhibition here at the UN, we’re totally targeting a different public, including international tourists that come to visit the headquarters. The artworks are right at the entrance, and it’s fabulous to see how everyone stops and engages with the show and the information.”   

First presented at the Museum of Fine Arts of Florida State University in Tallahassee from September 2024 to March this year, HOMO SARGASSUM brings together more than 20 artists in an immersive “multisensorial” exhibition – representing countries and territories in the Caribbean and elsewhere, including the French overseas departments of Martinique and Guadeloupe.

Through their work, the artists express concern and invite viewers to “reflect on what can be done individually and collectively to change our relation to the Ocean”, the exhibition states.

The public also learns about the history of the sargassum seaweed scourge, through scientific information showing how the “proliferation of the algae across the Atlantic and on Caribbean coasts since 2011 has wide-ranging environmental, economic, social and health-related impacts for coastal communities and ecosystems.”

Beyond this, the works address wider global problems of marine pollution and degradation, which is the focus of the Nice conference (co-chaired by France and Costa Rica). According to UN figures, some 12 million metric tons of plastic are put into the ocean each year, as images of floating “plastic islands” have graphically shown.

Li Junhua, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs, and Secretary-General of the gathering, told UN News: “The ocean is facing an unprecedented crisis due to climate change, plastic pollution, ecosystem loss, and the overuse of marine resources.”

The UN is hoping for decisive international action that will help to stem further deterioration, and representatives of small island developing states (SIDS) attending the conference are adding their voices to this call.

Jamaica’s Foreign Minister Kamina Johnson Smith, for instance, is highlighting the need for “innovative approaches to financing… that considers the special circumstances of SIDS” and these nations’ vulnerability.

Against the backdrop of the Nice conference, the HOMO SARGASSUM exhibition has included artist talks and curatorial tours to “engage with the public”, as Selk told SWAN.

But the striking works on their own are perhaps enough to spark reflection; included are a large-scale installation by Alejandro Duran, made of “recycled plastic found on Mexican coasts” over the years, as well as a dress by eco-designer duo Felder Felder using “alternative leather” made of Sargassum seaweed.

The overall HOMO SARGASSUM project, which was initiated five years ago, includes a short film launched in 2020; an artist residency curated by Matilde dos Santos in Martinique in 2021 (including virtual exchanges because of the Covid-19 pandemic); a comic book edited by Jessica Oublié, Marion Lecardonnel & Ulises Jauregu, published by Collection Alliance Française in 2022; and an experimental documentary film, according to the organizers.

The exhibition is “endorsed” by the Permanent Missions of France and Barbados to the United Nations, and supported by the Winthrop-King Institute for French and Francophone Studies. – SWAN

Photos courtesy of TMAF.

Further information: https://www.tout-monde-foundation.org/

Further reading: https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/06/1164026