Petrine Archer [.com]

Diary Pages 1980-90

This article looks at diary entries accompanying my art work created between 1980 - 90. Whereas the art work under discussion is irrevocable, the journal lends itself to reinterpretation. In this paper the journal entries are layered with readings guided by seminal feminist writings. These ideas could not have been articulated as clearly when the paintings were first made. Feminist discourse was then little known in Jamaica.

The paintings referred to in the entries are not consciously feminist but their imagery is gendered. With patterned and decorative surfaces they fit easily into a feminist genre. Their central theme is about female patterns and life cycles, but no other methodology or guideline for interpreting them is obvious. To view this body of work from an entirely feminist perspective is erroneous, however, because they are the product of a complex set of social and personal factors.

The decade represented in the journal saw dramatic political and economic change in Jamaica. In the early 80s, certainly, debates about Democratic Socialism vs. Capitalism, International Monetary Fund directives, foreign exchange shortages, and especially pocket book issues of rice, flour and salt fish shortages, all had greater impact on the Jamaican publics' consciousness than Feminism.

Artists engaged with all these issues. Jamaica's young, male, so called 'avant-garde' artists such as Robert Cookhorne alias Omari Ra, Douglas Wallace and Stanford Watson, demonstrated their social awareness and tackled these realities through their painting. A loosely interpreted Marxism, black separatism and anti-Americanism held the greatest sway over the artistic imagination.

When women artists addressed social concerns in their paintings and sculptures, their imagery was less direct. Instead, it was allegorised and framed by nature. Their anxieties took the form of doorways (Merilee Drakulich View From the Study 1983), windows (Hope Brooks Window Series 1983), tunnels (Marguerite Stanigar Journeying 1985) and caverns (Laura Facey Hunters 1983) that seemed to provide escape routes into interior spaces, far from the cacophony of the outside world. The paintings discussed here fall within this genre of escapist imagery.

Since the excerpts are taken from a journal, the authorial voice, the subjective 'I', dominates in a way that might not be so prevalent in other texts. That 'I' represents a denial of 'otherness', the possibility of visibility , of existence outside the male domain, or, for that matter, within it. Yet, it is not used in a combative sense to distinguish the self from other women. Feminist writer Julia Kristeva recognised the use of 'I'...

"In this weird feminine seesaw... swings 'me' out of the unamenable community of women into single combat with another woman. It is perturbing to say 'I'. The languages of great civilisations that used to be matrilinear must avoid the use of personal pronouns: they leave it up to the context to distinguish the protagonists , and take refuge in tones of voice to recover submerged, transverbal correspondence of bodies."     (1)

Yet 'I', written in the most intimate of settings, the female journal, might read more like 'we' in the recognition that there is commonality within women's experiences. If the art works appear shrouded in silence, however, it is because there was no clearly defined feminist movement in Jamaica during the eighties. Then, feminism was a luxury and 'female bonding' was not encouraged. That tacit code of silence that seems to be an inevitable aspect of middle class morality also pervaded the arts. Perhaps one visible manifestation of this was the prevalence of textured and collaged surfaces, visual poetry, graffiti, and layered surfaces that obscured the viewer from a clear reading of a paintings' content. This veiled imagery though enigmatic, was often little more than a smoke screen for disquiet. Many could read beneath the troubled surfaces, but we kept each others' secrets safe.

Gayatri Spivak has exposed the existence of class and race concerns within gender discourse. She suggests that American women dominate feminist issues, and their concerns are removed from the post-colonial realities of "Third World Women". (2). Certainly during the eighties in Jamaica, any Jamaican female artists who indulged feminist tendencies was seen to be following a marginalised fashion, imposed from outside rather than within our island politic. Feminism was read as being external to the more urgent needs that 'structural adjustment' within the Jamaican economy necessitated. Feminism was something one read about in magazines like Cosmopolitan, extraneous, frivolous, and alien to Caribbean culture that still enjoyed a strong matriarchal focus.

Class also dictated visual concerns. During the 80s, those women who managed to continue creating artwork despite economic hardships were usually from middle or upper class backgrounds where their financial contribution to a household was not essential. Women who fell outside this privileged category but still continued to be productive, managed to stay afloat by diversifying their work, by making it more commercially appealing, by creating craft items or by moonlighting.

So text, context and class need to be considered when deconstructing the diary entries that follow. My 'not so hidden' voice, is that of a thirty -something' woman, married, 'mothered' and divorced within the decade. I was middle class, career led, and, to a certain extent, privileged, since I continued to paint, despite certain hardships.

The following excerpts seem to follow a repeating pattern of death and rebirth. They begin within the shadow of marriage, at that time an unrecognised death.