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Tout Moun Caribbean Journal of Cultural Studies

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The Surgical Suture and the Embroidered Stitch – A Visual Project 1

Tout Moun ▪ Vol. 2 No. 1 ▪ October 2013

The Surgical Suture and the Embroidered Stitch – A Visual Project

KWYNN JOHNSON

These images come out of a larger body of work created in 2009 for a solo exhibition titled Red,

appropriated. The exhibition was made up of seven interconnected strands: 21 embroidered texts

on linen, 48 embroidered images on linen, 60 watercolours, 24 screen prints, 3 newspaper collages,

a short documentary on the Port-of-Spain General Hospital’s A&E room titled At a theatre near you,

and an installation of red roses. This thematically connected exhibition departed from our universal

association of red with blood, in order to visualise notions of violence/trauma and mixed-raced

identities in Trinidad. This visual project locates societal traumas and racial hegemonies as features

that not only have constructed the Caribbean in the world, but also continue to find a place in

Caribbean modernity (Figs. 1, 2 and 3).

Fig. 1: Screen Print



2 Kwynn Johnson


The colour red, the embroidered stitch, and suggestions of surgical sutures operate as both literal

and metaphorical strategies. These strategies visualised the political economy of “red” as a racialised

construct, alongside the imaging of societal trauma/violence, both of which continue to manifest

and be normalised in Trinidad and other parts of the Caribbean (Figs. 4 and 5).

Fig. 5: Embroidery on Linen

Fig. 4: Embroidery on Linen

The mixed-raced category (African and European) which exists in the Caribbean and elsewhere,

has had numerous and definitive fictional evocations in West Indian literature. In locating this

racialised identity or category, the works of art sought to explore Paul Gilroy’s notions of the

“symbolic currency of race” (14) in the many race-colour hegemonies evokes in literature, which

rehearse the covert contestations and contradictions which play out in Caribbean societies. Kamala

Kempadoo’s feminist scholarship on the historicization of “the exotic and the erotic” mulatta, (35)

illuminates how the “red woman” identity has been constructed and is being replicated in the

contemporary scenario (Figs. 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11).

Fig. 6; Embroidery on Linen

Fig. 7: Embroidery on Linen – The Mighty Cypher



Fig. 8: Shalini Puri

Fig. 9: Embroidery on Linen - Jestina’s Calypso (20). A line from the play by Earl Lovelace’s when his red-skinned Laura character is privileged over the dark-skinned Jestina.

Fig. 10: The Dragon Can’t Dance, Lovelace

Fig. 11: Lamming, 227

‘Red’ bodies are understood as exoticized and eroticized constructs, in the ‘hot’ Caribbean, or as

Mohammed postulates: “the desired” (22-48). These constructs are imaged to make a visual

comment on the commercialisation of such identities and their associations with the nationalism

project. Outdoor advertising banners which present taxonomies of red and redness, underscore

the currency of the ‘red’ man and the ‘red’ woman, and interpellate red embodiment in a sexed,

racialised and nationalistic discourse. The commoditization of ‘red’ bodies which continue to be

reproduced in contemporary Trinidad, have not displaced old categories, it has reproduced and

normalized them for a new social, cultural and political context (Figs 12, and 13 Photographs, Fig.

14).

4 Kwynn Johnson


Fig. 12: Destra

Fig. 13: Kes

Fig. 14

The red seal is used in the Red, appropriated exhibition to convey authority and authenticity. It

denotes the tenacity, fixity and rule of these racial labels and stereotypes which have been deeply

embossed into the fabric of Trinidadian and broader Caribbean identity. The photograph of an

embroidered seal was used to create a series of screen prints which incorporated other texts that

displayed ways in which red has been appropriated and ascribed meanings. This use of analogy is

explored in a large percentage of the overall exhibition.

“If yuh eh red yuh dead” was embroidered to represent not only a common saying in Trinidad, but

also how it can become a problematic motto in 21st century Trinidad. The act of stitching’ is a

metaphor for idealised hybridization as an all-encompassing social practice that does not always

hold. Similarly stitchery tied into Puri’s notions of discourses of hybridity: “Racial and nationalist

discourses in the Caribbean frequently offer contradictory instances of tearing apart and stitching

together “the people’, and discourses of hybridity offer a crucial means of managing those

contradictory tendencies” (Puri 48). While historically and politically Trinidadians have cited red as

the national colour and a ‘red flag’ as evoking a sense of national unity, this notion is subject to

contestation in the socio-political arena since red is the color of a single political party and is

projected as a reflection of its right of political ascendency. While, in another context, the use of a

red-beret by the then leader of Trinidad’s opposition party, drew on global associations to support

his awkward attempts at self construction as a revolutionary, anti-establishment, freedom fighter.

Both texts and images show with ‘redness’ in its diverse, clashing and evolving cultural

manifestations (Figs. 15, 16 and 17).



Fig. 15: Vote for Me

Fig. 16: Vote for me too

Fig. 17

Trinidad and the rest of the Caribbean have created mechanisms for addressing and forgetting the

memories of their history of trauma. We cope by sedating our deep-seated unrests, conflicts,

tensions and confusions. This metaphorical suture - a stitching together of wounds, is a mechanism

of masking trauma (Figs. 18, 19, 20, 21, 22). The evocation of the surgical suture, points to the skin

as a signifier which is marked with a multiplicity of meanings. Our skin is vulnerable; it is not

impenetrable or immune to damage, aging and commodification. We endure its battering,

bleeding and stitching-together: “The stitches close the wound or cut in the subject imperfectly,

leaving the scar as the trace of the bodily trauma” (Ahmed 47).

Fig. 18: Sea Lots

Fig. 19: West Indies Cricket

Fig. 20: Middle Passage

Fig. 21: Walcott’s Fragments

6 Kwynn Johnson


Fig. 22: Free in Cuba

Fig. 23: The Shape of Rohlehr’s Hurt

These 60 watercolours looked at how contemporary Trinidad makes them invisible in all-inclusive

fetes, curfew-fetes, and in the ‘gifts’ sent from New York in a barrel to children (Figs. 23, 24, 25, 26,

27).

Fig. 24: Attach with full force

Fig. 25: Curfew Fetes

Fig. 26: Caroni 1975

Fig. 27: ‘Hart’ attacks

In investigating how violence infiltrates and intersects the social fabric, Gordon Rohlehr’s

instrumental essays, “The Shape of That Hurt” and “My Strangled City’ were instructive as they

addressed how we continue to manifest and normalize our hurts. The Jamaican themed

watercolours entitled ‘Ska/Scar’ and ‘The harder they come” as explored by Rohlehr, also brought



consideration of Jamaica’s woundedness and trauma into this discourse on violence. The collages

of press clippings which informed the research, also informed the 60 watercolour paintings’

imaging of how Trinidadians inflict as well as survive trauma, and seek to close these wounds as

seamlessly as possible, or find mechanisms to hide their scars (Figs. 28, 29, 30, 31, 32).

Fig. 28: Chop

Fig. 29: By-pass

Fig. 30: VIP Treatment

Fig. 31: Fete Remedy

Fig. 32: Carnival Remedy

8 Kwynn Johnson


This work is a visual questioning of the constructs, contestations, traumas and wounding which

occur within the social relations in Trinidad. It elicits the question: what happens when those

superficial ‘sutures’ do not hold? This visual project sought to demonstrate the possibilities for an

interdisciplinary practice of art skills including domestic crafts, videography and installations to

create representations of the complex subject matter of race and violence. The range of techniques

demonstrated several ways of seeing the colour red as colour, as cultural construction, as national

energy, passion and woundedness, as vital life blood and as gore, red as pain and red as pleasure.

LIST OF IMAGES

3 Screen prints

9 9 Embroidered texts on linen

2 2 Digicel Banners

3 3 Embroidered images on linen

6 6 Newspaper headlines

16 Watercolour paintings with nylon-coated fishing wire

REFERENCES

Ahmed, Sarah. "Animated Borders" Skin, Colour and Tanning." Vital Signs. Feminist

Reconfigurations of the Bio/logical Body. Ed. Margrit Shildrick and Janet Price.

Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1998.

Gilroy, Paul. "The Crisis of "Race" and Raciology." Culture beyond the Colour Line. Mass:

Harvard UP, 2000.

Johnson, Kwynn. Red, Appropriated. Cultural Studies Exhibition. Trinidad: Soft Box Studio

Gallery, 2009.

Kempadoo, Kamala. Resistance, Rebellion, and Futures. Sexing the Caribbean. London and

New York: Routledge, 2004.

Lamming, George. In The Castle of My Skin. The University of Michigan P, 2005.

Lovelace, Earl. Jestina's Calypso and other plays. London: Heinemann, 1984.

Mohammed, Patricia. “But Most of All Mi Love Mi Browning: The emergence in Eighteenth

and Nineteenth century Jamaica of the Mulatto Woman as the Desired. Feminist

Review. No. 65: 2000.

Puri, Shalini. The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equality, Post-Nationalism and Cultural

Hybridity. New York: Palgrave MacMillian, 2004.

Rohlehr, Gordon. The Shape of That Hurt. Port of Spain: Longman Trinidad Ltd, 1992.

Rohlehr, Gordon. My Strangled City and other essays. Port of Spain: Longman Trinidad Ltd, 1992.

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