Ancestral Parlour
Text © Roberta Stoddart

The Jamaica of my 1960’s childhood was heavily colonial in tone and experience. I remember big long taxis parked in rows at the Sheraton Hotel in New Kingston where my Father worked as a musician. Across Jamaica, Western tourists consumed the best of what Jamaica had to offer. Ghosts from our slave past re-appeared as tourists in our post-independence reality. We smiled, but for us history remained traumatic and unhealed.

I experienced my country’s rigid adherence to patriarchal amoral hierarchies: vicious and pernicous racism towards others and towards the self; a rigid, brutal class system institutionally and multi-generationally imposed; religious bigotry; misogyny and homophobia -- malevolent beliefs about women and homosexuals. For many Jamaicans, the belief endured that England, not Africa, was our Motherland. England held the light. Jamaica was our Beloved, yet she was “lesser than”. We were second-class people inhabiting an inferior, dangerous and unpredictable landscape. We held the shadow. It obscured every view. These were the “Days of Snow”.

All of us in Jamaica are many truths at once. Colonised by an imperial country, our slave history continues to haunt every present moment. My ancestors and I have faults, human vulnerabilities and frailties. We embody glaring contradictions, prejudices, pretentions and hypocrisies. From birth to death, disturbing questions and connections arise because of where we were born. Unease flickers in broad daylight. Apprehension whispers in the foliage. Fear, not love, determines many of our thoughts and actions. Shame and guilt penetrate deeply into everything good. Truths are banished to the periphery of memory or suppressed forever. Dread is always in the calm. We navigate life with difficulty, as best we can.

 Yet my ancestors also had light qualities. They were kind and gentle. They were polite and respectful. They had physical bearing and style, and dressed impeccably. They were generous, gracious, and gave their time to others.

Painting my ancestors is not just a nostalgic endeavor. Painting them deepens my appreciation and acceptance of them. It is a way to honour the passing of time, to explore death, and loss. It is a way to feel close to those who have gone before me. As I ponder my positive and negative ideas about myself, my ancestors and my country, I am open to new insights. These paintings are imbued with love and light. They present my ancestors as beautiful, young, loving, happy people, starting out in the world before their trauma and wounding emerged and became consequential. My paintings reveal my need to connect deeply and meaningfully with them. My ancestors continue to live in me. I love them.