Tessa Whitehead’s Caribbean hauntology of the feminine

“Sister, 

find me. Pierce

the wasp-netting that masks me, sternum to swollen lids

with your goddess tongue. Haunt me; say

my name and hoard me - fold my bones, fit me thimbled, docile - 

I will breathe into the welts, endure it.

Save me” 

- “Duenne Lilith” by Shivanee Ramlochan, in “Everyone Knows I am a Haunting” (2017)

Women have spent and continue to spend their lives in the battle of instinct versus conditioning, of what is expected of them and what we heartbreakingly, fervently desire in the depths of our spirit. Not unlike Lilith of Judeo-Christian biblical lore we have, on the one hand, the feral, free, indulgent nature of our feminine humanity, and on the other, the constant swallowing of our own being for the ultimate sake of being deemed agreeable and acceptable women. To deviate from the latter often means navigating a sort of social wilderness for survival and forging new paths. Tessa Whitehead’s practice puts this duality and double-consciousness of womanhood onto the canvas. Her art ontology serves as a way to confront the spectres of our other selves and lives, ancestry, and the legitimacy of memory itself. 

A Bahamian-Jamaican artist, with paternal links to Austria, Whitehead received the majority of her schooling in the sparse brush of the Bahamian landscape before getting her formal art training in a more concrete-jungle setting, namely London at Central Saint Martin’s and Slade School of Art for her BA and MA respectively. Our limestone islands have always lacked the dense, deep, dark, frighteningly verdant lushness of the volcanic isles of the Caribbean like Jamaica. In this space we are not birthed from magma and the violent cooling of hot tempers, we are a haunting of a long-gone, prehistoric coral reef that once sustained those floating ghosts of the water, archaic, mythical and genealogical. Whitehead’s practice gives us this volatile reaction: memories, matrilineal lines, and questioning of current and long-gone identities which do not gently simmer to the surface or coexist neatly, they sizzle and pop into splatterings of leaf and acid-yellow rememberings-cum-nightmare. These works boil and blister into becoming, and the questioning is largely left unanswered because it is this inquisition into self that holds the most firm rooting. 

Though Lilith’s origins are as largely up for debate as her perceived moral standing, this feeling of being in question is a familiar case with most Caribbeans, though Whitehead’s lineage is perhaps slightly easier to trace than many of us. A woman of her own choices, unbound by the roles decided for her by the powers that be, these paintings can feel like insight into a decision-making process of sifting through this lineage. We see the Slade-trained, cerebral decisions in oil, making nods to works by brilliant “master” painters, yes; but Lilith has no master, and so we see feral, hair-shaking, teeth-gnashing bravery in doing away with the “broughtupsy” of painting. Instead, we are given something beyond the conventional intellectualism of painting, we are shown the gut-brain, which some may argue holds infinitely more knowledge, though it might be difficult to articulate in words, rather taking surfaces to thread together.  

The thread itself is perhaps one of the things that bind this practice together in its witchcraft-cum-obeah woman investigations - summoning spirits of self and historical lines, fighting monsters and darkness, becoming one with the landscape. Be it the thread of canvas or the umbilical tendrils of her mop sculptures finding themselves renewed as sinister spectres in her paintings, there is a maddening kind of cycle within the imagery. Elements of our lived experience find themselves surreal and, at times, deeply saddening in her painting world. And though they might not be entirely of our reality, they become all the more real for the sheer sensory nature of them, the humanity in their making indulgently appeals to the love and loss of living in the region.. 

The brushstrokes are erratic at times to denote dappled and dark foliage, and at other times they are slick, almost slimy in their smoothness - making mushroom-skirts out of leaving and dark spaces. They are ways of re-interpreting what we feel in mind, body and spirit. They are a look into the emotion of loss, lost-ness and grounding all at once, of the way we use our bodies to feel our way through this world when we might not know our place. The blurred lines of figures and faces give voice to those souls we know of our bloodlines, housed in our DNA, but whom we have never met though they live within us. 

These paintings are hauntings. 

Jacques Derrida, the famed French philosopher born in Algeria, spoke to the idea of hauntology in his “Specters of Marx” (1993) - a pun on the French homophone of hauntology and ontology, and these ghosts of modernity, and as Stuart Hall spoke of Caribbean people as the “conscripts of modernity”, who build the modern world but do not benefit from it, it seems a fitting marriage of concepts. The Caribbean itself is a paradox of living in the past, present and future all at once, and this feeling is inescapably part of its  identity. To live here is to be haunted, to exist between the materiality of the corporeal and the histories housed within it, knowing that part of us at some time was an egg in our mother’s fetus housed inside our grandmother’s womb, collapsing time and three generations into one. Whitehead’s work thinks through this shivering between temporality, almost always out of reach but always present. How does one begin to articulate the experience of being oneself and being others (and indeed Others), of many voices at once contained within the fabric of your body and lived reality?

Whitehead’s critical corpus, which works to develop its own language or “sound”, are in this way something of a square-off to the “civilised”, privileged, eurocentric way of thinking about painting by bringing back into focus the body-brain in making work, with unabashed feminine experience at the forefront. Whitehead reminds us that we are not just those things we learn to do, our conditioning, our spoken and unspoken rules, but we are also those pieces of knowledge distilled down the family branches in us before our birth. These works that speak to our key feminine, Caribbean experiences are written into our genome from our greatest grandmothers - and one of Whitehead’s is a Black woman. Race and gender have always been complicated in our region, and while Whitehead has an awareness of and acknowledges her social position, there is also something to be said for the honesty of her paintings that allows her to express her chronicle in its own authority. When the voices of women have been so silenced for so long, does it not make sense to let our great-grandmothers use us as their mouthpiece? 

Though oftentimes it may seem that she - Whitehead, Lilith or the Caribbean woman - walks alone or feels intense loneliness, like a ghost in her life, the women she surrounds herself with make this far less hopeless, almost giving a contentedness in the process. She puts flesh to her memories, with the series of paintings becoming a body sacrifice to their own blood. This is a ritual of a woman becoming, of Lilith owning her pain, sorrow, and most importantly her hard-won freedom of self.