"Attack of the Sandwichmen"
Installation and video collaboration between Christopher Cozier & Richard Fung.
A-Space Toronto
Curated by Andrea Fatona ( Jan 2004)
The Work of Art in an Age of Neocolonial Production
Aaron Kamugisha
Though they often do not realize it, the West Indians of today cannot afford to go on regarding this region as a tropical estate to be exploited for its economic returns. Whether they like it or not, this is their home. So, we need to face the problems of making the West Indies a more acceptable physical and social environment for ourselves and those who may come after us. Even now, we often have only the vaguest understanding of the true nature of our present ambiguous situation.
Elsa Goveia, Past History and Present Planning in the West Indies (1966)
While delivering the inaugural Walter Rodney Memorial Lecture at Warwick University in October 1991, Stuart Hall made the point that “one of the perplexities of the independence movement certainly in the British Caribbean islands is that … in the early phases of those movements so-called political independence from the colonial power occurred, but the cultural revolution of identity did not.” This apt comment strikes at the heart of the Caribbean post-colonial condition, and questions our periodisation of this era as one of ‘independence’, ‘neocolonial times’, or a ‘postcolonial’ epoch. In what follows, I hope to locate the artwork of Christopher Cozier within a larger problematic – which can be described as the crisis of postcolonial citizenship and identity in the contemporary Caribbean.
Aaron Kamugisha
Anxieties of Influence, or, tradition and modernity in the Caribbean
With the advent of independence, Caribbean state managers turned towards what we might term the “guarantee of culture” as a means of legitimizing their new authority over the nation. This can be seen in the practice of establishing national heroes, particularly amusing in the case of the Jamaican state’s nervous embracing of the legacy of Marcus Garvey, and nearer to the subject that commands our attention, the establishing of national galleries of art in some territories. This rush to co-opt Caribbean culture can be linked to other ruses of the Caribbean post-colonial elites, which include clientelism in politics and the need for a basis of legitimacy to authorise the charismatic appeal of politicians like Eric Williams, Errol Barrow, Michael Manley. The increasing turn to tourism as a means of securing small open economies vulnerable to the predations of globalization has also been critically important in the increasing commodification of Caribbean culture, much of it directly sponsored by the state, though in Trinidad, Christopher Cozier’s home, a powerful oil-based economy distinguishes it from much of the rest of the Anglophone Caribbean. I wish to propose, however, that many debates about culture in the contemporary Caribbean turn around a central divide which all countries grappling with the legacy of colonialism face – the debate around “tradition” and “modernity”.
Caribbean people often mobilize the discourse of tradition in a number of different ways, which are of considerable interest to the critic. On one hand, tradition is sometimes mobilized to speak fondly of the colonial past, often thinly disguised as a nostalgia for particular social institutions (the old school tie being one of the most popular tropes here) and way of life. This stance on tradition is a profoundly invented one, which blithely ignores the oppressive nature of the past, or believes that certain ‘positive’ features of it can be easily abstracted from its context, and used to fashion a postcolonial future.
The second manner of speaking of ‘tradition’ is to refer to a cultural heritage that has existed since the time of slavery, or can be traced to Africa or Asia. The validity of this tradition, its presence as a vital part of the anti-colonial movement, and the tremendous spaces it has opened up for Caribbean people in their ability to imagine an existence free of Eurocentric domination cannot be glossed over or minimized. The difficulties with this conception of tradition arise when this perspective is used to bracket off other experiences, and when the idea of “Africa” or “Asia” is itself ahistorical, and becomes used to justify hegemonic practices within the Caribbean state from patriarchy to homophobia.
Modernity as concept is often no less problematic, as in its traditional western sense it comes with such a tissue of elaborately crafted lies about the west’s preeminence in its creation, and can only consign non-western cultures to the role of providing the raw material for western progress, or locate them outside “History” altogether. While scholars of the Caribbean from C.L.R. James and Sidney Mintz have powerfully demonstrated the falsity of these claims, and have indeed suggested that the project of modernity has its genesis on the slave plantations of the Caribbean, (a connection that well demonstrates the terror and subjugation at its heart) a hegemonic western understanding of the tradition/modernity divide still holds sway in the region. As the Caribbean scholar Paget Henry has put it, “African-Caribbean thinkers have…countered the arguments that legitimated colonialism and African slavery…By contrast, the critique of the modern/premodern dichotomy has neither been sharp or consistent”.3
Comprehending the way that discourse around tradition and modernity works in the Caribbean context is vital to understanding the nature of the debates around society and culture in the Caribbean. It helps us explain the allegedly radical, but on investigation quite deeply conservative posturing against globalization by Caribbean state-managers, in which “foreign” influences in art and the wider realm of culture must be monitored and often denounced, while the crudest forms of western materialistic decadence are accepted without a murmur. The “anxieties of influence” felt in the Caribbean surrounding foreign presences in many spheres of public life are legitimate, but are too easily used to silence criticisms that the powerful within the state do not wish to hear. It creates often unprofitable tensions and uncertainties in diasporic communities who consider the Caribbean a vital part of their multiple homes, but under this dispensation, are not “authorized” to comment on contemporary Caribbean society and culture.
A “critical Africana modernism” (to co-opt Lewis Gordon’s phrase in describing the project of Sylvia Wynter) has never been allowed to develop in the west, due to the consistent denial of the humanity of people of African descent under chattel slavery, anti-black racism and imperialist white supremacy. An attempt to develop a critical Caribbean modernism has been further hampered by its links to a discourse of creole nationalism, which is on examination profoundly elitist in its premises; the reality of the existence and perpetuation of white privilege in the post-independence era; and the relationship of both to anti-black racism. Furthermore, Caribbean scholars like Percy Hintzen have pointed out that nationalism is in its essence a discourse of race, and that Caribbean creole nationalism has been perfectly compatible with elite domination. It is little wonder that Caribbean critics affirm that the contemporary Caribbean nation-state faces a serious crisis of legitimacy, whether they dub it a postcolony, or suggest that it exists under conditions of neo-colonialism, or re-colonization. The question becomes – what discursive practices might help us in an attempt to inaugurate a critical Caribbean modernism, that refuses the blandishments of a selectively chosen, dubiously invented and officially authorized ‘tradition’? This is one of the heady problems that faces Caribbean people who dare to imagine a different Caribbean.
Attack of the Sandwich Men
Born in 1959 in Trinidad of Barbadian parents, Christopher Cozier’s life coincides with that of the first post-colonial generation in the Anglophone Caribbean, as Jamaica and Trinidad & Tobago, the first islands in the English-speaking Caribbean to gain their independence, achieved it in 1962. A middle class child whose parents were members of the civil service, Cozier’s work occupies a fascinating space of ambivalence with respect to its critique of the overlapping discourses of ‘modernity’, ‘progress’ and ‘nation’, as, ironically, this is precisely the milieu in which he was raised. It is appropriate that his work on return to Trinidad in the late 1980’s from travel and study overseas would be concerned with a critique of the Caribbean present, at different times playful and teasing, powerful and evocative. Titles like “Cultural Mixer posing arrogantly as phallic symbol ejaculating nationalist icons” from his aptly named 1998 exhibition “Migrate or Medal/Meddle” illustrate well the intersectionality of nationalism, patriarchy and discourses of culture in the post-colonial Caribbean. It also suggests, by means of a number of important performative gestures, a way around what David Scott has called a “too tightly scripted” nationalist narrative, which has been shown to be manifestly inadequate for our contemporary times.
“Attack of the Sandwich Men” is not by any means Cozier’s first innovative use of the flag in his artwork. In a painting called “Bend Over”, part of the 1996/97 “Flag Series”, Cozier depicts a figure on hands and knees (male or female?) with four flags sticking out of his/her shoulder-blades. The flag, once a symbol of a nationalism that posited itself as the inclusion of everyone, had now began to attack the people. “Attack of the Sandwich Men”, however, represents an even more sophisticated crafting of Cozier’s meditations on nationalism, patriarchy, and the tradition/modernity divide in the contemporary Caribbean.
In commenting on Cozier’s “Attack of the Sandwich Men”, Annie Paul and Tejaswini Niranjana have noted the importance of bread in post-colonial India as a symbol of modernity. The type of bread that one ate became important here, as manufactured bread from outside the home became, according to Niranjana, not only synonymous with upward mobility, and consistency (compared to the uneven charm of home made loaves) but also with women increasingly working outside the home, and as a result a “substitute for female labour”. Thus bread, according to Paul, is indicative of “the way our modernity is formed and packaged”. Sliced, manufactured bread became a symbol of progress, a word that was constantly on the lips of state-managers in the immediate post-independence era.
The flag needs no introduction, as perhaps the best known symbol of nationhood. Val Carnegie has suggested that “Attack of the Sandwich Men” strikes him as an “ironic decentering of nationalism,” the means by which it is produced and packaged like any other product of modernity. I would suggest that the “conquest” of the sandwich bread by the flag on the surface suggests that western modernity has been “tamed” by independence, and it is a distinctively Caribbean modernity at work and in charge, particularly of providing for the nation’s physical needs.
The fact that the sandwich men are on the attack points to the illusionary nature of this perspective, serves as a critique of the nationalism which could only lead to what Walter Rodney rightly derided as “flag independence”, and reminds us that the nationalist posturing of the Caribbean elites continues a generation after independence, and is easily compatible with repression at home. This repression often expresses itself through a stylized form of behaviour that is a curious amalgam of colonial patriarchy, authoritarianism, other forms of corrupting colonizing power and Caribbean cultural mannerisms, making it even more difficult to assess and critique. What is indisputable is that the spectre of colonialism haunts the “independent” nations of the Anglophone Caribbean, and can be seen behind state-managers prescriptions of policy in the social, political and cultural arenas.
Conclusion
I have deliberately used the word “gesture” in describing Cozier’s work as I think it well describes the space of ambivalence his work occupies – and one that might be fruitful for Caribbean state managers to seriously consider. Chris does not seek to offer an integrated different vision for the Caribbean, which for some may lead his work open to the attack of mounting an effective deconstruction of the Caribbean state without positing any substantial alternative. The error in this reasoning is that it misses the point of the critique of exclusion – which is that no culture is a monolith – nor does it need the appearance of a monolith to acquire legitimacy.
In his celebrated 1936 essay “The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, Walter Benjamin stated that “one of the foremost tasks of art has always been the creation of a demand which could be fully satisfied only later”. The same applies to the critical trajectory which can be found in Cozier’s art. Rather than replace one hegemonic narrative with another, it gestures towards alternative futures for the Caribbean.
1Elsa Goveia, “Past History and Present Planning in the West Indies,” New World Quarterly 2, 1 (1966)
2Stuart Hall, Myths of Caribbean Identity. The Walter Rodney Memorial Lecture, October 1991. Centre for Caribbean Studies, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK.
3Paget Henry, Caliban’s Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy (London & New York: Routledge, 2000), 49
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