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Geri Augusto
Historical Spaces, Hierarchical Gods and Whispering Waterside
The images gathered here come from two of my ongoing projects. The first is an extended photo-essay entitled Historical Spaces, Hierarchical Gods, a translocal interrogation of the ways in which African and African diasporic histories, expressive cultures, sacral arts, and ways of botanical thinking are often denied spaces in public parks, gardens and memorial sites. Those same public spaces frequently memorialize emancipation and independence struggles in which African, African-descended and indigenous peoples took integral part, and the gardens are decorated with plants central to their lifeways, but shorn of their knowledge and culture. I ask, as I take what I have come to call epistemic walks in these parks and gardens, what knowledge and memories are silenced here? What are the architectural structures, the trees and plants, the waterways and watersides saying, nonetheless? And then, in contrast, how can we perceive the quietly defiant, fugitive and mostly ephemeral uses and displays of artworks, graphics and plant offerings that my camera has captured in off-hours, in these parks and gardens? The second project is tentatively entitled Whispering Waterside. In it, I use photographs where the real subjects are absent, but their histories, lives and struggles may be discerned at the water's edge, and just out of the camera's framing.
If trees could witness, if waters could see, if construction-sites could speak...Don't they? My photos seek to capture landscapes and architectures, some ephemeral and ever-changing, some deeply rooted but contested, listening and watching for the human stories they impart, even as I shy away from capturing people in their frames.
Neg Mawon looks to the hills. Trois Ilêts, Martinique, January 2019. Digital photo taken on iPhone.
There just across and below a potter's workshop at the Village de la Poterie in Trois-Ilêts, at the edge of the old 18th century Martinican sugar plantation-turned-tourist attraction, were the very ruins of enslavement, unretouched. Nearby, I imagined, had been the small house-yard gardens which the women and men had kept, when they could snatch a moment’s time from even harder labor. Some few became “libres de Savane”—a kind of “bush freedom” which was conditional: still enslaved but able to garden, raise small stock, and be given token pay for much-needed skilled labor around the plantation.[1] Sun and shade chased each other, all the way out to the vista that the enslaved laborers must have looked out on every dawn and dusk: the way to the hills, the dangerous path to a self-liberated mawon (maroon) community.
[1] Gilbert Larose. L’Histoire de la Martinique des Arawaks a l’abolition de l’esclavage. (2015). Fort de France: La Savane des Esclaves, p. 24. For an account of enslaved Martinicans as early as the beginning of the seventeenth century growing both cotton and tobacco in their gardens for market sales, and despite a ban on selling sugar dictated by the Code Noir, selling sugar, cotton and spices, see also Handler, J. S., & Wallman, D. (January 01, 2014). Production activities in the household economies of plantation slaves: Barbados and Martinique, mid-1600s to mid-1800s. International Journal of Historical Archaeology, 18, 3, 441-466.
Listening to Baobabs. Northern Senegal, August 2019. Digital photo taken on iPhone.
Baobabs grow across much of continental Africa and Madagascar, venerable, truly long-lived, drought-resistant, and famously thick and broad.[1] They are valued as sources of water in dry times, the abode of ancestral spirits and sometimes the burial places for griots (poetic historians), bearers of a health-bestowing astringent fruit, cattle fodder, and the source for a bark with medicinal uses. Senegal has baobabs in abundance, and it is here that one can catch a sight otherwise rare: a very young baobab, taking root in light, sandy riverside soil, like this one encountered some distance from the city of Saint-Louis. In nearby villages and settlements, one can hear histories told by women descendants of fugitives from enslavement, whether to powerful local West African elites or as part of the voracious Atlantic slave trade. For these women, the social and personal health-giving qualities of the baobab are part of a tradition of resistance and refusal, one that complicates histories of marronage which are often more masculinist and focus only on the Americas.[2] Groves of mature trees stand as brown and green monuments to their hard-won liberation. But this little one seemed to bear a tale of renewal, as well.
[1] In West Africa the trees are known by many names, including guy (Wolof), boki (Pulaar), and sito (Mandinka,); Europeans who learned of them from the Africans, bestowed baobabs with the Linnean classification of adansonia digitata. [2] Today a network of associations called Endam Bilaali (descendants of Bilal, after the companion of the prophet Muhammad who was born a slave), comprised of formerly enslaved people across West Africa, advocate for an end to still-enduring cultural prejudices as well as for access to land, education, jobs, and more political power. Self-representations of this movement may be found on YouTube.
The Fisherwoman's Chair. India Point, Providence, USA, September 2019. Digital photo taken on iPhone.
In 1784, leading Rhode Island colonist John Brown constructed a new harbor on Narragansett Bay, where the Moshassuck (neck or peninsula) and the Seekonk River meet, and Providence's first port had lain for a hundred years before. This same spot had been a fishing site of the indigenous Narragansett, with their canoes of birch, oak and pine, for tens of thousands of years before the settlers came. The new structure was erected for ships sailing between New England, the East Indies, and the West Indies, and hence became popularly known as India Point. The nearby area of Fox Point quickly evolved, during New England's industrial revolution, from Native farmland into a transportation and manufacturing hub. Its residents, over the next 100 years and in overlapping waves, included families of free African-Americans, as well as those of immigrants from Ireland, Portugal, Italy and Cape Verde, and dwindling numbers of Narragansett. They made a living in factories, dock-work, fishing, sailing, whaling and artisan trades, until various "urban renewals" and modernization efforts displaced many of them.[1] Throughout much of fall 2019, this wooden chair sat at India Point, now a popular Providence waterside park, right at the water's edge, sometimes the seat of a determined but relaxed fisherwoman, other times empty, but seeming to speak...of ancestors and settlers, of palimpsest constructions, of ways of fishing and reasons for sailing.
[1] For more on one aspect of Fox Point's contested history, and the struggles to have earlier residents' memories inscribed on this land- and waterscape, see: “Some Kind of Funny Porto Rican”: A Cape Verdean American Story. Directed by Claire Andrade-Watkins. SPIA Media Productions, 2006.
Chokeberries at the Waterside. India Point, Providence, USA, November 2019. Digital photo taken on iPhone.
Before the European settlement of North America, various types of berries, some of which grew in bogs and wetlands, or at watersides, were an important part of the cuisine of Algonquian nations, including the Narragansett, Wampanoag and Pequot living in what is now Southern New England. One such fruit, the chokeberry (or chokecherry), could be stored in a partly dried or frozen state to be eaten throughout the winter, alone or pounded into mixtures with other ingredients. The flowers give rise to abundant red fruits in late September and early October, which remain firm and glossy through December. Berries and water still are neighbors along Narragansett Bay. But what has happened to the celebrations they once made possible, and what do the new ones in this lovely park symbolize, or hide?
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