Sitting in the stairwell of the Guest House Hotels' No. 124 Brighton property, is the graphite on paper sketch Jab Jumbie Recoil by Trinidadian artist Richard Rawlins.
Rawlins' Moko Jumbie series - of which this is one - is a set of drawings which examine themes of blackness as represented in the media and through popular and carnival culture, intertwined with racism, forced or intentional migration, and the legacy of Atlantic slave trade and British colonialism. Through his work Rawlins seeks to trace histories and connect the past to the present within the form of the moko jumbie and to capture on paper a spirit that sees multiple realities at once.
The totemic drawings resemble a stream of consciousness meditation between the pencil, the paper, and the artist's thoughts. He combines the written word, line art, sketching, doodling, comic illustration, cartoons, gestural mark making and erasing, juxtaposing and deliberately appropriating archival researched images, Caribbean literature, dancehall, reggae and calypso music lyrics, poetry, personal essays, comic book characters, adinkra patterns, homages to Caribbean intellectuals, history, and marking contemporary current headline-making news, intertwined with the themes of Trinidadian carnival and folkloric mythology within the form of the moko jumbie, a spirit that allegedly walked across the Atlantic on stilts following enslaved Africans to the Caribbean. For the artist, the moko jumbie is a restorative figure. "Moko" means healer in Central Africa and "jumbie" is a colloquial Caribbean term for a ghost or spirit and the moko jumbie represents an ancestral spirit which continues to watch over, and protect, the children of the African diaspora.
This particular moko jumbie has been merged with another iconic Trinidadian carnival character: the jab molassie, a terrifying, devilish figure which roams the streets on the first day of the island's carnival celebrations.
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