Gone are the days when we could pigeonhole most books – fiction or nonfiction – into one specific genre. Authors and editors are crossing and blending genres often to encourage wider and more challenging readings. It’s been happening regularly in fiction, and more often now in nonfiction – particularly with biographies and history – but a December visit to Waterstones bookstore in Glasgow, Scotland showed me this is happening in art books too. There I bought Thunderclap: a Memoir of Art and Life and Sudden Death by Laura Cumming. The author’s memoir juxtaposes the story of her artist father’s unexpected death with that of a Dutch painter, Carel Fabritius in Delft, Netherlands, in 1654. So there’s history, culture, art, and memoir all blending together.
The recent launch of a local book, Black Light Void: Dark Visions of the Caribbean edited by Marsha Pearce, a lecturer in visual arts with a PhD in cultural studies, offers a far different experience. Pearce has curated pictures of paintings by artist Edward Bowen and creative work by six writers: Kevin Jared Hosein, best known for his critically acclaimed, internationally popular novel Hungry Ghosts; Barbara Jenkins, author of the novel De Rightest Place and her recent memoir The Stranger who Was Myself; Sharon Millar, award-winning author of The Whale House; Amilcar Peter Sanatan, poet and PhD candidate in cultural studies; writer and artist Portia Subran; and Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw, UWI professor of French literature and creative writing. Together they offer imaginings on a selected few of Bowen’s dark acrylic paintings.
In the book’s foreword, Pearce puts the paintings and stories in perspective and offers some art critiques and summaries of the writers’ stories. Her background in cultural studies shapes her interpretation of them. Cultural studies is a wide-ranging discipline that includes history, literature, art, and cultural expression such as folklore, all blending in a specific social context shaped by a community. This all makes challenging reading, more academic on Pearce’s part, but the stories too are rich with literary interpretation and enjoyment.
Probably the best way to approach this book is to study the paintings, come up with your own interpretations or imaginings and then read the short stories, comparing the authors’ imaginings to your own. Paintings can often evoke a variety of themes, moods, and tones, and there is no real right or wrong interpretation. Instead, art is meant to move you aesthetically and hopefully spark interpretation.
The title of the book sets its theme and captures the space in which to enjoy or study these paintings. “This book, with its focus on the Caribbean, attends to what it means to see in the dark,” says Pearce. “It considers darkness or, more specifically blackness as a critical epistemic space for seeing place and identity.” This requires some awareness of the philosophical term epistemology, which is basically determining how we know what we know. It establishes some semblance of truth in intuition
