One Island, Two Worlds
Borders, Art, and Social Change: A Gallery Review
On a misty Friday evening, within the walls of Bay Shore’s Second Avenue Firehouse Gallery, Kompa music plays vivaciously, and meringue-style jazz pulses through the space, weaving through the sculptures and paintings adorning the white wooden walls. Upon entering, I am greeted by an optic brainteaser in full color. The Grinder, it is called.
Texture plays melodically through the room— darkly stained wooden frames house deeply animate forms, multimedia works that so clearly emerge from earth and magic. Punctuating the dark contemplation of sculptures, two vibrant and provocative paintings bookend the space— The Grinder situated facing the entrance and Ubuntu mounted at the head of the room.
As the clock hands reach in opposite directions, bodies flow through the doorway. A man modestly clad in a knit cap, sweater and jeans, introduces himself to each attendee individually. Dió-genes Abréu is his name, and each handshake he gives connects its receiver to the sculptures watching from the walls. A few more well-dressed men float about the room and I recognize one as Djyno Jacques, the constructor of the captivating canvases. The gallery we walk is centered on one island’s experience, aggressively perforated by a historical border, and named thusly in two: Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
As the lively music wanes, Margarita, founder and director of Teatro Experimental Yerbabruja, gives thanks to attendees and assistant curator Jimmy, then introduces our artists, Dió-genes and Djyno. Expressing first the irony of their told time together, and the extent to which they feel akin, Jimmy, Dió-genes and Djyno reflect on their closeness. Jimmy and Dió-genes both identify as Dominicanos, however not without frequent anthropological and philosophical disagreements. Djyno is Haitian, and finds rooted common ground with los dos Dominicanos, having known Jimmy for quite a time now, and having met Dió-genes just that same day. Jokes are exchanged, words slip, and a real discussion begins.
Dió-genes provides elucidation on the origin of his own works: the multimedia altars mounted throughout the space, gnarled, imposing, and framed with great depth. He describes nkisi with care, and without using the oversimplified term “talisman”. He discusses nkisi as a concept found in, but not limited to, traditional Haitian voudou, defining it as a physical object constructed and displayed publicly as a kind of social accountability contract. If members of the community make an agreement, the nkisi object is a tangible reminder of that agreement. Real world reinforcement transcending the literate limits of a written contract, using the intricate nuance offered by artistic craft and handiwork. Abstractly, nkisi is the earthly embodiment of spirited intent or covenant, and what I could rationally define as emotive objects acting as brokers to verbal commitments, a physical attempt to bind the integrity of word. It is where will fuses with matter. Djyno nods gently towards his own work, supplementing Dió-genes’s points with articulate clarification, emphasizing balance and unity as a crucial tenet of voudou. And so, the imbalances inevitably surface, manifesting through injustice.
One young woman raises a voice from her seat, reflecting on the blatant and toxic classism she had too often witnessed within the Dominican Republic. She demanded answers with a firm hand, challenging our artists to denote some kind of real action item to address “the bullshit”, given the understanding that we can’t simply “walk into someone else’s house and tell them to change their rules.” The eloquent ire expressed por este mujer Dominicana mirrors the hopeless frustration we all must feel at the injustices that we face. An older man stands, similarly commenting on that which can can feel futile, and asks our artists for their interpretation of identity and its importance. Our artists are deeply united as they discuss the value of knowledge, and how each individual’s pursuit of it weighs heavily on the scales of social change. They emphasize that history as accurately contextualized information must be actively sought, and that it cannot be assumed by default of proclaimed identity.
A young man in the back of the room coolly reinforces their point with warranted conviction, providing that it is not the duty of nature to satisfy human entitlement. “What you think you deserve? Nature don’t recognize that.” Eyes float forward assigning well-deserved pride to the front of the room, directed towards the young man’s mother, Margarita.
By recognizing the systemic injustices that continue in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and by identifying the island as the first hub of established slave labor during the age of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, it becomes increasingly clear how deeply-engrained prejudice as a divisive weapon can be subtly sharpened on the whetstone of distracted complacency.
Dió-genes praises the work of Julia Alvarez, which through organized initiative The Border of Lights, focuses on the context and impact of the 1937 Haitian Massacre, (commonly known as the Parsley Massacre, but more accurately referred El Corte, El Desalojo, or Koutkouto-a) when Trujillo’s army and conscripted civilians were positioned to eradicate Haitian people from the Dominican population by murdering them. The massacre was portrayed by officials and popular media to be an isolated incident— Trujillo, purportedly validated by a certain German nationalist literature published between World Wars, asserted in official statements that Dominican citizens were simply protecting their private property from Haitian thieves. In addition to farmers killing with machetes, civilians wielded shotguns provided by military officers. The corpses of Haitian people were then systematically disposed of, and so no mass graves have ever been found. With hope to escape with their lives, Haitian people rushed towards the border, towards the only spaces of safety that were sure, aside from relative asylum found within US-owned sugar mills, which were their own micro-economies of systemic oppression.
The brutal killing persisted, and unconfirmed estimates of the number dead range from 1,000 to 30,000, proof of effective efforts to obscure the true nature of the crime. Neither Trujillo nor any government official was ever held accountable for the atrocities committed. The dictatorship strategically achieved global alignment and “the massacre remains a historical footnote, seen as an uncomfortable reminder of a brutal past.” Still, we must bear witness to history giving way to the present.
Quisqueya is one of the names the native peoples gave centuries ago to the island now shared by the nations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. It can be translated to “mother of islands” or “cradle of life”. As I look around the broad hall of the Second Avenue Firehouse Gallery, the podiums are dismantled, the music picks up softly, and the conversations continue. Through the meaning of nkisi, with full gratitude for the many hands behind Two Worlds One Island, Teatro Yerbabruja offers life to ancestral tradition, nourishing surviving stories of indigeneity, delivered through time in art.