The next series of paintings that I am compiling and working out required reading texts about OBEAH. Getting down to the truth of the matter of what OBEAH actually is and the narrative that was forced upon the Caribbean people is crucial to creating this series of paintings. The TRUTH has already been unraveled by several persons in their research, and also several artists. I am actually doing this to unravel the truth in my mind, for me; based on certain narratives that were programmed into my head as a youth. More on that later.
Trinidad's population collection and growth was different to Jamaica and Barbados in the 1700's. Indeed the authorities then struggled to bring together a cohesive population which could make Trinidad as profitable a colony as Jamaica.
Chapter Two of this book: LET THEM HATE AS LONG AS THEY FEAR speaks to how black bodies were controlled by laws set for them and them only. Trinidad had slaves, obviously, but they also had free black and free coloureds brought into the island by various attempts to increase the population.
Much of the laws which PICTON introduced feel similar to some ideas which successive governments try. I wonder if our government even realize that they are borrowing from the past.
To be black in those times, was to be automatically criminal, and treated as such.
To be black, whether slave or free, meant that you were confined to movement for certain hours of the day, and not out after 9pm.
To be black, meant you had no rights, and evidence shows different punishments metted out depending on your skin colour; mutilations, whippings, whether slave or free; colour dictated sentence for crime.
And all AFRICAN spirituality was demonized:
For both European colonists and the accused Africans, Obeah represented a “hidden communication,” concealed exchanges with the spirit world that assumed multivalent materializations across the social landscape.61 Historian Vincent Brown specifies that “as far as colonial officials were concerned, the ban on Obeah was a ban on alternative authority and social power.”62 Thus, Africans criminalized through obeah allegations suffered greatly in Trinidad. Indictments for sorcery, poisoning, and spiritual fraud broadly collapsed as obeah and the “black arts” resulted in severe punishments that ranged from solitary confinement and permanent banishment to bodily tortures, floggings, mutilation, and physical dismemberment. Under Trinidad’s autocratic and slaveholding governor, Thomas Picton, “behind all these severe punishments lurked the constant fear of slave rebellion and the dread that the slaves would become more afraid of the obeah man than of their master.”
I am now getting into the subject matter and the contextual background so bear with the frazzled brain and unmeshed ideas.
The book is available here : file:///C:/Users/saman/Downloads/9781478092780.pdf
Or you can purchase it as I did on AMAZON.
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