By the end of my first week in Trinidad, I've settled into a nice routine. I sit down for pancakes and orange juice every morning beside the pool at around 8AM, (sometimes I have a veggie omelet). I greet the early risers, and around ten minutes later, the others join me. We eat together and chat. What are your plans for today? What time did you go to bed last night? How's your project coming along? I slowly get better at rationing out the syrup for each pancake. We relax in the warm morning air, (the humidity moderate but pleasant), and sip on hot coffee and tea, listening to the parrots squawking over the shaded outdoor patio that houses the dining table. The dining table has become an unofficial communal gathering space—the site of many late night and early morning talks about our work, lives, and families—not unlike the dynamics of the dining table in my own home. [1]

One morning, I find myself talking with Olivia. She's the writer-poet in our merry band of cross-disciplinary creators, mismatched from OCAD University's rather comprehensive selection of under- and post-graduate level course offerings. This iteration of OCAD's "Global Experience Project" invites students from varying disciplinary backgrounds to participate in a two-week artist residency with Christopher Cozier at Alice Yard in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad. The course, Defying the Margins, was led by Ésery Mondesir from OCAD University and aimed to dislocate the center and periphery as immutable points for understanding art and culture. Guided by the words of Black feminist scholars bell hooks and Toni Morrison, the idea of Defying the Margins embraces simultaneous and multidirectional flows of knowledge. [2]

The nine of us (participants) form an eclectic group of emerging artists, designers, writers, curators, and filmmakers. For many of us—myself included—this trip presented a rare opportunity to travel to another country with full financial support, pre-arranged accommodations, and a built-in care network dedicated to ensuring our safety and comfort while enabling us to focus on creating art. A truly rare opportunity, indeed, which I anticipate I will be forever grateful for. 

Olivia and I sit across from one another at the dining table and Madeline (Collins) sits to my right. Both Madeline and I, (Madalyn), are writer-researchers in the Contemporary Art, Design, and New Media Art Histories (CADN) master’s program at OCAD University. [3] Of the nine artists in residence, we three share a similar cultural background as members of the Caribbean diaspora. That morning, we debate the tropical aesthetic. Specifically, in discarding the vocabulary of the tropical aesthetic, how do we approach feelings of trepidation, excitement, and longing in the "return" to the Caribbean as diasporic people? How do we, as outsiders (to Trinidad), come to understand our own hyphenated identities as Jamaican-Canadian-American, Guyanese-Canadian, and Tobagonian-Canadian? And in exchange, how do these positionalities shape our understanding of the Caribbean? Amid the broader objectives of Defying the Margins as a course, we three artists explore ideas of diaspora, embodiment, place, and identity.

In addition to participating in Defying the Margins as an artist, I also held the role of curator for the culminating open-studio exhibition, due in large part to my research into exhibition histories of Caribbean art. My aim was to learn how contemporary Caribbean art and the region itself have been framed and understood conceptually by curators within the last two decades. I compared the exhibition catalogs from Wrestling with the Image, which opened in 2011 at the Art Museum of the Americas in Washington, DC, Relational Undercurrents, at the Museum of Latin American Art in 2017, and the Brooklyn Museum's 2007 exhibition Infinite Island, to determine how the region has been organized geographically, historically, and culturally. In a review for Wrestling with the Image—curated by Christopher Cozier and Tatiana Flores—Jerry Philogene praises the critical stance of the curators who reject the coherency of "the Caribbean” or "Caribbean art exhibition" as rife with stereotypes, and instead foreground diasporic Caribbean artists to address "the specificity of the 'local,' while contemplating the abstraction of the 'displaced' and the practicalities of 'home.'” [4]

This was my challenge as well, of how to address the specificity of the local but as someone who was raised outside of the region and was “returning” as a tourist. During my time in Trinidad, I found these complex cultural dynamics difficult to articulate verbally but tried to capture them in my work. Social scientist Lauren Wagner’s incisive text “Diasporic visitor, diasporic tourist,” fittingly examines the intersection of diaspora and tourism through the experiences of post-migrant diasporic Moroccan communities on holiday in Morocco. She argues that the displacedness that diasporic members experience results from the lack of a fixed concept of "home,” as "both the diasporic centre and the place of residence are equally definable as home, and are equally places of location and dislocation for diasporic individuals." [5] Therefore, the "return" to the diasporic point of origin evokes the doubled sensations of familiarity and strangeness, or the feeling of being a partial outsider. The intersection of the diasporic center and diasporic community "forces the recognition of difference," as well as sameness, within post-migrant constituencies.

Within the context of diasporic tourism, Wagner notes that Moroccan diasporic visitors are not immune to the Orientalist ideologies that influence the experiences they choose to ‘collect’ to prove that they have “correctly ‘done’ the place;” however, the motivation for collecting these experiences differs from that of the traditional tourist due to their innate connection to the locale. [6] My “First Impressions” assignment during the Defying the Margins residency was exactly this attempt at collecting an experience to show I had “done the place.” I created a short looping video out of a recording I took of calm, gently moving waters at the Temple in the Sea with the caption, “Find It,” (the “it” being the strange-yet-familiar point of difference that marks the return). The fact that I had trouble “finding it,” simultaneously frustrated me and assuaged me of the fear I had of being too foreign to relate to anything.

The production of my final work, a video installation titled CAR RIDE (2023), seemed to unconsciously develop from the desire to find this point of difference. I initially began with the idea that I was going to map the movement of people throughout the Caribbean islands. This would be historically grounded yet focused on the geography of the Caribbean and networks of inter-island migration. I soon realized the enormity of this task given my two-week time frame and gradually shifted to searching for a way to map my own movement on the island of Trinidad. I decided to photograph locations that I had been to but challenged myself to do so whilst shedding a touristic gaze. I did not want to photograph surveillance images of the landscape so instead I chose close-up shots of seemingly innocuous elements such as the corner of a doorframe or the sky through the branches of a tree to convey my location. Ridding myself of a touristic gaze proved to be nearly impossible however, as any photograph I took was necessarily indicative of my positionality and what I was drawn to collect. I was disappointed by the type of work this produced, (not very interesting at all); my mapping appeared to be reductive and disembodied.

A simple solution of how to trace my movements appeared after a spontaneous trip downtown– that is, through a car ride. I began recording videos of my various trips to and from Alice Yard, driving around downtown, and to the hotel and back again. On the surface, CAR RIDE is about tracing movement based in the local context of Port-of-Spain. Sarah Cullen’s project, The City as Written by the City (2005-2007), also enacts this performative gesture of capturing the trace of walking around the city of Toronto using a homemade pendulum drawing device. Her ‘maps’ are abstract networks of lines drawn on paper. CAR RIDE splices together multiple drives into one five-minute long film. Two videos run at the same time but capture different moments of each drive. The film is both familiar and strange as it creates a fictional drive out of real footage. The strangeness is twofold due to the circumstances of my own positionality; the landscape was unfamiliar to me but the conditions under which I was seeing it were not. The familiarity of experiencing a car ride contrasts with the environment where the drive takes place.

Ultimately, CAR RIDE expresses my desire to connect to Port-of-Spain. From the perspective of the drivers who facilitate the trip, the ease with which they navigate the roads indicates their level of familiarity with the place. Here, I am reminded of my own hometown and how my knowledge of and comfortability driving on those roads is part of what makes me feel like I am from there; driving is part of the experience of what makes the place home. A car ride also has the potential to be a social experience, involving a “search for a human presence,” [7] whether one drives alone or with passengers. Drivers negotiate space and time with blinkers, horns, and sometimes hand signals. The road sets the stage for this social interaction. Furthermore, a car ride can generate a liminal space of in-betweeness in the journey from one point to another and in the variable routes that journey might take. The idea of a liminal space mirrors the in-betweenness of diasporic migration which occurs between the diasporic center and diasporic host land. 

As I ride through Port-of-Spain with the windows down and music playing, I feel affirmed in my presence there. There is a strange pull within me to learn this place, yet I am secure in the knowledge that my experience of it cannot be separated from an outsider’s perspective. I think of Jamaica and the roads I might’ve driven on had I grown up there. What would become familiar to me? Can a car ride write the idea of home? As a diasporic artist and tourist, I collect these drives to know what it means to be at home in the Caribbean.

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[1] The dining table: an innocuous yet protean centerpiece, useful in staging profound personal transformations, participatory community building exercises, and birthday celebrations—of which we had two.

[2] "To be in the margin is to be part of the whole but outside the main body," (from the preface of hooks’ book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Centre), and "I stood at the border…claimed it as central…and let the rest of the world move over to where I was," (from an interview with Toni Morrison), respectively.

[3] We are also the same age and look a little too alike, but she is disqualified from being my doppelganger because she has an identical twin.

[4] Jerry Philogene. Review of Wrestling with the Image, exhibition curated by Christopher Cozier and Tatiana Flores, Art Museum of the Americas, The Caribbean Review of Books 25 (January 2011): http://caribbeanreviewofbooks.com/crb-archive/25-january-2011/belonging-to-in-between/.

[5] Lauren Wagner, ”Diasporic visitor, diasporic tourist,” Civilisations 57, (2008), https://doi.org/10.4000/civilisations.1396.

[6] Ibid.

[7] A quality Jerry Philogene attributes to Richard Fung’s video Islands (2002) in her review of Wrestling with the Image.