Maroon stories artfully etched in wood

Paul H. Williams, Arts & Education Writer

Stories of the struggles by the Jamaican Maroons against the British are well told in books and audio-visual media. But one man has chosen to tell them with a very unusual mural.

Colonel Frank Lumsden, leader of the Charles Town Maroon in Portland, was not trained to be a carver, but he has created images that are as poignant as the stories they are telling. "I have no training. I certainly didn't attend any art school. The talent I have is God given," Lumsden told Arts and Education, recently.

His intuitiveness is now engraved into the discarded wood planks that make up parts of the enclosure of Asafu Yard, the headquarters of the Charles Town Maroon.

UNEVEN EDGES

The planks are not evenly placed beside one another because of their uneven edges, but on them, Lumsden has engraved various two-dimensional images from the Maroons' history, telling a story of sort. He's an intuitive artist as well, so before the etching was done, in detail, he sketched the images in pencil. "My ability to draw is what directs my art," he said.

A sculptor was supposed to etch the images into the wood, but that person was not etching in accordance with the sketches. "He was not following the lines that I laid down, and so I decided to do it myself," Lumsden explained. It took a little while to be completed, but once finished, the images have given some artistic flavour to the fence, which would have been very
bland without them.

To emphasise the images, Lumsden
painted them with raw linseed oil, which gives the impression that the
images were burned into the wood. From afar they look burnt, but they
were not, and at night, the contrast between the black images and the
lighter uncarved parts is more pronounced. The linseed oil also
preserves the wood from termite infestation and
weathering.

The most striking of the images, though,
is the Sankofa bird etched into the doors of the Charles Maroon Museum.
In the Akan language of Ghana, where many of our ancestors are from,
Sankofa means 'reach back and get it'. The image of the Sankofa bird
with its head turned back stretching to its tail feathers depicts just
that. It's a very appropriate image for the door of the museum, which is
replete with slavery and post-slavery-days
artefacts,

The storytelling, by way of art, will
continue inside the yard itself, as Colonel Lumsden has plans to etch
more Maroon historical images into a newer section of the complex. What
Lumsden is doing is not art for art's sake, but a preservation of our
history and heritage through art.

Photos by
Paul Williams