Carolyn Cooper | Emancipation Park monument a naked disgrace

The 21st anniversary of the unveiling of the Emancipation Park monument is an appropriate occasion to reflect on the persistent trauma of enslavement that this work of artifice exposes. Two naked figures, male and female, standing apart, hands at their sides, heads uplifted, without eyes, thighs partially amputated, trapped in a pool of water! The overwhelming message is impotence. A truly perverse representation of Emancipation!

David Paulin’s coy wordplay in the headline of his report on the monument, published in the Miami Herald in 2003, fails to acknowledge the racist stereotyping of the black body, stripped of clothing and dignity: “Emancipation sculpture uncovers conservative streak in Jamaicans.” Objection to the depiction of supposedly emancipated African-Jamaicans is not conservatism. It’s an assertion of traditions of adornment of the body that Africans brought to Jamaica.

The monument was featured in a 2004 Playboy Forum report headlined, “Bust of Freedom.” It seemed to arouse the familiar desire for Jamaica as a sex tourism paradise. Kingsley Thomas, chairman of the Emancipation Park Trust, is quoted in defence of the monument: “Anyone who sees two naked bodies and the first thing that comes to their mind is sex is sick. It’s two people washing away the vestiges of slavery and human subjugation, looking upward and forward to a future of freedom, hope and prosperity.”

NO ISSUE WITH THE ARTIST

In all my critiques of the monument over the last two decades, I’ve made it absolutely clear that I have no issue with the artist Laura Facey. She did the best she could, given her limitations as a white Jamaican, apparently out of touch with black culture. She should have known that only mad people bathe in public.

In her artist’s statement, Facey gives this vision of the monument: “My piece is not about ropes, chains or torture; I have gone beyond that. I wanted to create a sculpture that communicates transcendence, reverence, strength and unity through our procreators – man and woman – all of which comes when the mind is free.” Broken chains would have been a far more effective representation of freedom than naked passivity.

I hold the panel of judges entirely culpable for selecting Facey’s problematic design: then vice-chancellor of the University of the West Indies Rex Nettleford; chief curator of the National Gallery of Jamaica David Boxer; and the architects Marvin Goodman and Guila Bernal. Hope Brooks, dean of Visual Arts at the Edna Manley College, should have participated in the judging, but did not. The public was not invited to give our opinion on the sixteen entries in the contest.

I simply do not understand how these distinguished judges failed to recognise Facey’s completely inadequate conception of Emancipation. There is none of the epic grandeur of Chief Takyi’s rebellion against enslavement. Before the American Revolution in 1765 and the Haitian Revolution in 1791, Chief Takyi’s heroic war against British imperialism and slavery erupted in Jamaica.

On Easter Monday, April 7, 1760, Chief Takyi and his followers killed enslavers on the Frontier and Trinity plantations in St Mary. The uprising lasted from 1760-1761. Though it was eventually put down by the colonial forces, the war was a terrifying manifestation of the powerful desire for freedom that ultimately led to the emancipation of enslaved Africans in Jamaica.

The fearless spirit of Nanny/Nana of the Maroons is not evident in the Emancipation monument. Nor is Sam Sharpe’s unwavering determination to become a free man. He courageously led the 1831 rebellion, which started on the Kensington Estate in St. James. As he faced execution for his role in leading the war, he fiercely declared, “I would rather die upon yonder gallows than live in slavery.” Where in Facey’s monument is the daring of Paul Bogle who recognised that Emancipation without true freedom was a scam?

TRAPPED IN NEGATIVE STEREOTYPES

Our distinguished poet and novelist Claude McKay wrote a disturbing poem, “Cudjoe Fresh From De Lecture,” which appears in his 1912 collection, Songs of Jamaica. Colonised Cudjoe gratefully declares:

“Yes, Cous’ Jarge, slabery hot fe dem dat gone befo’:

We gettin’ better times, for those days we no know;

But I t’ink it do good, tek we from Africa

An’ lan’ us in a blessed place as dis a ya.

Talk ‘bouten Africa, we would be deh till now,

Maybe same half-naked – all day dribe buccra cow,

An’ tearin’ t’rough de bush wid all de monkey dem,

Wile an’ uncibilise’, an’ neber comin’ tame.”

After he left colonial Jamaica, McKay wrote this militant poem:

“If we must die, let it not be like hogs

Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,

While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,

Making their mock at our accursèd lot.

If we must die, O let us nobly die,

So that our precious blood may not be shed

In vain; then even the monsters we defy

Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!

O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!

Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,

And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!

What though before us lies the open grave?

Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,

Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!”

That was the war cry of enslaved Africans in Jamaica and oppressed peoples across the globe. Why are we now satisfied with Facey’s flaccid representation of Emancipation? Are we afraid to confront the complex truths of our history? Do we believe that enslavement emancipated Africans from savagery and turned us into the tame creatures of Facey’s fantasy? Like Chief Takyi, Nanny/Nana, Sam Sharpe, Paul Bogle and so many other freedom fighters, we must fight back against naked racism and claim true-true Emancipation.

Carolyn Cooper, PhD, is a teacher of English language and literature and a specialist on culture and development. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and karokupa@gmail.com