The Dublin where I lived between 1999 and 2002 was a place of contradictions. Deeply religious but proudly secular, piously conservative but drunkenly liberal, fantastically racist but disarmingly welcoming. That’s how it seemed to me, at least, as a 15-year-old boy who had just arrived from London.
Nothing was exactly what it seemed. At school, my English teacher was also my basketball coach. He was fantastic in both. In the classroom, he instilled in us an appreciation of poetic precision. He would approach a line, break it down, encourage us to consider its meter, musicality, cadence, syntax, and its contribution to the entire verse. On the basketball court, he was equally precise, explaining the cross, how to stand, where to place your feet, when to bounce the ball to send the opponent in the wrong direction. He demanded excellence, everywhere, from all of us.
I took advantage of his teachings as much as I could, creating universes in my imagination, expanding and practicing until, in my penultimate year of school, I developed asthma and could no longer play the game I loved. So I left the court behind and gave what was left of me to our English class.
We were studying the poems of Elizabeth Bishop, who, I discovered, was a contemporary of Robert Lowell and Marianne Moore. She was an American raised in Nova Scotia, Worcester, Boston and Florida. We could call her a nomadic “third culture kid” – a term that describes those who were raised in countries (and cultures) other than their parents’ homeland – like I am.
We were reading Bishop’s poem “The Bight,” which she published in The New Yorker in 1949 with the subtitle “On My Birthday.” In it, she studies a bay at low tide—the “crumbling marl ribs,” the chicken wire, the gangly pelicans falling into the water “like pickaxes, / rarely finding anything to show.” At the end of the poem, there is a suggestion that all of this – 36 lines of vivid description of an ugly entrance – is actually about her desk. The line “The bay is full of old correspondence” elevates the poem from pure literal description to a vast, intricate metaphor of her life and work, as if she were taking stock of it all on her 38th birthday.
The last two lines of the poem speak to both concepts: “All the disorderly activity continues, / horrible, but joyful.” When reading the poem, I never considered it possible that by describing objects and scenes, someone could express their most intimate thoughts and feelings. Near the beginning of the poem, Bishop mentions the name Baudelaire, who, I discovered, was a French poet who believed deeply in the idea that the external material world can describe and correspond to the inner human life.
Years later, delving into my third culture childhoodtrying to accept the so-called nomad in me, I read Alain de Botton’s book The art of traveling. In the book, he explores the idea that a traveler can feel uncomfortable when isolated in an unfamiliar landscape, and that this same isolation and strangeness can allow him to reflect on and strengthen his connection to his own identity, in a way he might otherwise not feel. wouldn’t happen. be possible.
I’m a poet and playwright and I travel a lot for work. Whenever I’m traveling, if I’m not hunched over my laptop, I often find myself staring out the window for hours, thinking about myself and its possible connections to the passing landscape. I keep in mind the objects that attract me and ask myself why.
And then when I visited Landscapes of the soul, an exhibition of landscape art at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in south London that opened this spring, I played this. I wandered from room to room, studying the works on display, looking for myself.
Curated by Lisa Anderson, Landscapes of the soul is a major piece of research that aims to expand and redefine the landscape genre. Brings together contemporary artworks in a variety of mediums ranging from painting, photography and film to textile art and collage by artists such as Hurvin Anderson, Phoebe Boswell, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Kimathi Donkor, Isaac Julien, Michael Armitage, Mónica de Miranda and Alberta Whittle. . They are all from the African diaspora, and we are invited to understand the world through their eyes, through their particular concerns of belonging, memory, joy, transformation. Concerns that were shaped by the tangled histories of colonialism, slavery and migration.
It was only when I stood in front of these comprehensive and investigative works that I considered that everything I knew, everything I thought about my relationship with the landscape, had been inspired by white artists and thinkers. Only then had I considered that Elizabeth Bishop, Alain de Botton, and many of the other writers who shaped my thinking would have a very different relationship to their environments than I did to my own. No matter how much they traveled, adventured, I imagine they managed to focus on their world, on their landscapes, in a way that I cannot.
I am a first-generation immigrant, born in Nigeria, raised in Dublin and London, who came of age devastated by England’s hostile environmental policy and the nationalist and racist rhetoric that underpinned much of the discourse around Brexit. And there is a wound in me. Those difficult years created a specific wound that I wasn’t aware of before. I didn’t know that I never focused on any European landscape. In my mind, I’m always off center, a blur, traveling through places, because I never felt safe enough to stay still. I built a career around travel because I feel safer when I’m on the move.
Landscapes of the soul it is full of photos of black people in stillness, contemplation, repose. It brought the startling realization of this scar I carry – and offered healing, a glimpse of other ways of being, of who, if I were brave enough to try, I could still become. In Kimathi Mafafo’s embroidery “Unforeseen Journey of Self-Discovery,” for example, we see a black woman emerging from a cocoon of white muslin, looking out over a verdant field of flowers and foliage. In “Onyx Cave” by Isaac Julien, a photo from a film shot in a giant ice cave in Iceland, a single black figure. . . stands, overshadowed by the scenery.
But the work that touched me most deeply, a work that confronted me and left me stupefied, was “Sunrise” by Mónica de Miranda, a three-panel photograph of three black figures with their backs to a vast sea, on their knees. deep in the water. Behind them, a horizon stretches as wide as the curve of the Earth, and a wave advances toward them, invisible. They use neutral expressions, neither happy nor sad, neither at ease nor uncomfortable. They are simply present.
But everything implied in the photograph is clear. The Mediterranean migration crisis, the Windrush Empire, the transatlantic slave trade, the souls of black people thrown into the sea. And perhaps also, the Afro-futurist mythology of Drexciya and the Yoruba water deities Oxum, Oya and Yemoja. Standing there in the gallery, it was as if all these otherworldly people, souls, and beings were calling me to bear witness. And looking at them I started to see myself in the landscape too.
“Soulscapes” will be at Dulwich Picture Gallery until June 2
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