Caribbean Crossroads of the World Art Pieces

Caribbean Art

Competing Visions of the Caribbean

When we look at art, it is looking back at us. More than this, it is reflecting who we are and who we would like to be -- and who we think that other people are. The current exhibition Caribbean: Crossroads of the World provides a complex view of the people of the Caribbean and, just as importantly, a view of these peoples as they have spread across the world in their own historic and cultural diaspora, taking with them their unique experiences and outlooks even as they became the subject of fascination to other people. The people of the Caribbean, whether looked at from the outside when they remained at home in the islands or looked at by new neighbors when they had relocated abroad, have served as a mechanism for people to understand their place in the world.

I have selected two works of art from this exhibit to anchor an analysis of the role that representations of the Caribbean people as seen in the works that were selected for this exhibit. Arnaldo Roche Rabell's oil painting We Have to Dream in Blue and Enrique Grau Araujo's La Mulata Cartagenera, also an oil painting, can be seen as encapsulating the two most popular representations of "island life." While these might seem at first to be exclusive, in fact they both exist simultaneously. Araujo's painting presents us with a classic image of the relaxed life of the Caribbean: The "native" life is here depicted as a loose woman, opening herself sexually for anyone who shows the slightest bit of interest in her.

His subject reclines in a throne of sexual imagery, including fruit so ripe that it seems as if it would split open to expose its inner sweetness, leaning back against rich soil that has been just plowed by a man -- with the furrows of his work still clearly to be seen. The woman is clearly delighted in being able to offer her body, her breasts clearly visible under a clinging dress, her head holding a red-berried branch over her lap as if it were a sort of reverse fig leaf: She appears to be concealing her sexual availability when she is in fact highlighting it. In her other hand she dangles an open bottle of rum, another form of intoxication that the islands can grant. The painter's subject tells her viewer that any pleasure that he may want is his for the asking.

As clearly as she is available, the viewer of this painting is clearly a man, for the history of the way in which the islands have been presented is invariably as a woman who will accommodate her man. The mulatta represents the union between a white man (the face of colonial power) who has taken all that he wants from the fertile islands of his desire. This image summarizes centuries of sexual "commodification" of the human body that extended from the beginnings of the slave trade through the end of slavery but the continuation of colonialism and from formal colonialism through the current day of poverty and political disenfranchisement. The Caribbean people, in the form of a woman raped and forced to give birth to a child who is estranged from her people but who will go on to be sexually possessed herself, look out from the eyes of this painting.

Finally, the painting suggests the many ways in which Caribbean sexuality is currently exploited as one of the many tourist attractions that the islands have to offer up, as Smith (2011) describes as being "the present day package deals or trade-offs" in which foreign tourists are offered as much sexual license as they can tolerate. The Caribbean islands as painted in this portrait of this woman, place all people of Caribbean descent (both on the islands and in the many diasporas) as the providers of "of particular services that cater to "foreign" tastes."

While this commodification of sexuality (as seen in this painting as well as in a thousand ads for the pleasures of the islands) can be seen as "Faustian bargains with apocalyptic consequences." But it also seems to many Caribbean people as the only thing that they have to sell and thus a matter of survival (pp. 8-11). The fact that the subject is a resident of the Caribbean diaspora (as indicated in the painting's title) emphasizes that the way in which Caribbeans are seen by the rest of the world is not diminished even when the people leave the islands. To fall back upon a very-much tried-and-true cliche: It remains the case when considering the ways in which Caribbeans are represented by the world that they take the island with them wherever they go since their "islandness" is a part of their flesh.

Arnaldo Roche Rabell's oil painting We Have to Dream in Blue is very different in style: It trades the post-Impressionist easy-on-the-eye style for a ragged depiction of a "native" that borrows from Expressionism as well as more recent trends in painting. The subject of this painting, whose gender is ambiguous, although more male than female, suggests a depiction of the Caribbean that appears to be more native than outsider. While the subject of Mulatta seems more than anything else to be a critique of the ways in which Caribbeans understand the way in which they are seen by people from other parts of the world, We Have to Dream in Blue is a more aggressive view, one that is far less accepting of the ways in which outsiders view the Caribbean people and the islands themselves. This is not yet an entirely native viewpoint, as the painter suggests by the inclusion of the word "have" in the title. Who is forcing the Caribbeans to dream in a certain way? Could it be the Caribbeans themselves whose most intimate possession, the very expression of their souls and selves at night, who have become the enforcers of their own colonization? Or are those who compel the islanders to assume the burden of specific dreams and visions still those whose representations of the islanders still takes precedence over all others?