Caribbean Beat — January/February 2019 (#155)

Patterson sees the sea urchin’s long, sharp spikes as fantastical
forms of self-protection, letting the creature hunker down
into its own landscape, drawing sustenance from its own territory
as it keeps away outside negative influences, unconcerned
by the projections, fears, and concerns of others. The whole
idea of being looked at, judged, and interpreted according to
somebody else’s desires or needs is something Patterson rejects,
and fights against. He expands the meaning of the judgmental,
categorising gaze of the “other” to the stereotypical way too
many foreigners choose to see and define Caribbean people.
Last year, Patterson performed a macabre mas art piece called
Mangrove Village in a fellow artist’s studio in Bridgetown. In
this performance, he appeared as a ghoulish monster in thick
layers of shaggy sargassum seaweed, like some sinister denizen
of swamp hell. As he lumbered slowly across the studio space, he
Monstrous masquerade forms, queer
selfhood, and neocolonial angst and
resistance all bubble up in Adam
Patterson’s performance works
Hydar Dewachi
Bikkel (2018, performance,
London). Commissioned for
Jerwood Staging Series,
supported by Jerwood
Charitable Foundation
uttered a speech bursting with imagery of rot, stasis, and decay,
launched with the opening salvo, “They found my body bloated in
the mangrove.” But the creature was not totally dead: just paralysed
by fear of change, and immobile with the “pride of stagnation-hood.”
The Mangrove Village character borrows costume elements
from the Shaggy Bear folk character who accompanies musical
tuk bands at Crop Over and Christmas time in Barbados. Shaggy
Bear dances in a costume made of long strips of cane trash,
banana leaves, or cloth, and he is a jolly, acrobatic, lively character.
Patterson’s shaggy sargassum figure, however, is slow and
halting, a collective miasmic being in danger of “being broken by
the mangrove, if we do not move towards revolt.”
The performance can be read as a call to more active,
self-aware, self-confident forms of creating and asserting our
collective cultural selves in our own Caribbean spaces, even
as it critiques stagnation in too many aspects of island life. The
performance speech, Patterson says, was inspired by his reading
of novelist George Lamming’s Sovereignty of the Imagination, and
issues of decolonisation and freeing the mind were very much
part of his creative process.
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