Creole Madonna
Title
Creole Madonna
Year
2002
Medium:
Pencil
Acrylic
Hardboard
Dupioni silk
Dimensions:
Variable
Photo Credit:
Dan Christaldi
Collector:
Two sections of the suite -
The Serena and Ron Jones Collection
Creole Madonna asserts a current hybrid Caribbean where identity is plural and interior space multi-cultural. The simply defined self cannot ever fully contain who we are - thus the need to evoke a multiple identity. This work opposes a fragmented status and insists that despite racial, ethnic, religious, generational and all other diverse specificities, there is a shared identity - a hybridity, unconsciously "lived" by millions, both in and outside of the region.
The Creole Chant
I am the complex Creole
My context is the Caribbean
An archipelago crocheted into a crossbreed
Of carnival, class and comess
Cognizant of Columbus
And the Commonwealth
That created these confused colonies
Correctly criticized for the callous treatment
Of the Amerindian
And the reconstitution
Of a Caribbean caste system
Several centuries later
My coronary artery crackles
When I think of the creatures
That created this cacophonous confusion
And although we collide
There is more chaos than community
Some feel like foreigners
As though uncharacteristic
Of these now ex-colonies
Our natural native islands
I celebrate the chorus of the Creole Chant
But I have a creed that I wear
Like a crest on my chest
My credentials are that I am created equally
Credible from my cranium to my coccyx
I cleave to no church, temple nor country
I sing the canticles
And practice a yoga
I chant
I breathe
I made my jappa and wrote a creed
I owned a crucifix
And acknowledge the crescent
I anoint myself with a communion of
Cinnamon, coffee and cumin
Cocoa, cotton and cane
It is with composure and compassion that
I conceive my compatriots as compatible
Whether Cuban or Guyanese,
Christian or Muslim, Hindu or Jew
I contemplate a Caribbean conservatory
That is a consanguineous conscious community
Confidently confirming a conglomerate
Who speak patois, Papiamento, Spanish and Creole
I celebrate the chorus of the Creole Chant
As a complex Creole
Confronting this crossroads of centuries
I cannot condone the corruption
Nor those who configure the conflict
I outcast them from community
I contradict the unicursal way
And commemorate the cobweb we have become
I come to you
Not as a comedian
Nor as a clown
I come to you as a coalition
Of combustible matter
A civilized collective
Sometimes caustic, but never counterfeit
I am a cordless creator of culture
Conveying my codes
To a community that isn’t convinced
Of the credit of cultural producers
And now I wear coronet
A continuous circular
In my cipher
I chuckle
I weep
I celebrate the chorus of the Creole chant
