Tamika Galanis, Returning the Gaze: I ga gee you what you lookin’ for (2018)

Tamika Galanis is a Bahamian documentarian and multimedia visual artist, with a particular interest in documenting ‘aspects of Bahamian life not curated for tourist consumption to intervene in the historical archive.’[1] She describes her work as seeking to counter ‘the widely held paradisiacal view of the Caribbean, the origins of which arose post-emancipation through a controlled, systematic visual framing and commodification of the tropics.’[2] These interests are configured in rich, imaginative and politically-engaged ways across Galanis’s work, from issues of labour and tourism in her photographic series, The Constituency, to reflections on climate change and the capitalist extraction of human and nonhuman resources in Hacking the Narrative, a multimedia project encompassing photographs, film and sculptural objects.

Galanis’s video, Returning the Gaze: I ga gee you what you lookin’ for (2018) – my focus in this post – unfolds a Black feminist approach to the ‘controlled, systematic visual framing and commodification of the tropics’ that she describes. In this video, Galanis places archival footage of Caribbean women, filmed by Thomas Edison in the early 1900s, alongside contemporary reconstructions of the footage. Running below these twinned scenes are the lines of a poem, ‘Woman Unconquerable’, by the Bahamian poet Patricia Glinton-Meicholas, to whom Galanis’s video is dedicated. Framing and activating the video’s Black feminist politics of resistance, the poem evokes Bahamian women suffering and rebelling:

assigned voiceless subordination, relegated to the role of sidekick, servant to penile supremacy, daily peeling the mazorca, jaw frozen in rictus, knees locked in genuflection of unnegotiated servitude. Yet, here I am, refusing reduction, head unbowed, tongue unchained; resisting devaluation of self-forged new coinage.

In the restaged scenes (each one twinned with Edison footage depicting a similar or related event), one woman washing clothes gets up to threaten the camera with a machete; another woman, who is bathing her child, scowls at the camera, eventually scooping up her child and escaping the frame. Galanis’s video is without a soundtrack, echoing the silence of the original Edison footage, and perhaps recalling the ‘voiceless subordination’ evoked by Meicholas’s poem. Yet, in many ways, the video is far from silent, not least through the use of the poetic text accompanying the images, rich in Bahamian vernacular: Like a loa-duppy-jumbie-sperrit, I’ll haunt your dreams. Dis me nah! Caribbean Buttercup, colonizer of roadside ditch […]. And the video is also full of visual moments that simultaneously disclose and withhold sound. As the woman bathes her child in the contemporary footage, we see her talking to him throughout, enveloping him in words and touch, in gestures of maternal care. But these words are not for us; and this intimate scene will eventually elude the camera’s grasp, in a further gesture of maternal protection.

Registering yet withholding sound again, a third sequence features a woman dancing, looking directly at the camera. As Meicholas puts it in her commentary on the video: ‘In turning and shaking her “boonggy” to the camera, she is exhibiting an iconic Bahamian gesture of contempt.’[3] In all three sequences, the women in the contemporary footage are surrounded by lush vegetation, as Galanis’s video critiques not only a generalised voyeuristic logic at work in the Edison footage but the particular ways in which ‘picturesqueness’ and ‘tropicality’ became central to the construction of the Bahamas’ touristic image from the late nineteenth century onwards, as Krista A. Thompson has shown.[4] Edison’s vignettes of the Caribbean would have been shot to cater to Western tastes for touristic and travel-related films, which were regularly screened in vaudeville theatres in North America and elsewhere at the turn of the twentieth century.[5] To this curation of Caribbean life – and of Black women in particular – for touristic consumption, Galanis’s video responds with feminist resistance, anger and archival reworking.

While all three sequences unsettle the asymmetries of power that structure the Edison footage, the final sequence adopts a still more emphatic decolonial gesture. Alongside Edison’s film of ‘Native women coaling a ship at St Thomas, D.W.I.’ (1903), the video stages what Meicholas describes as ‘the take-over of Nassau’s most colonial space’, Parliament Square, with its statue of Queen Victoria and surrounding Georgian architecture. As Meicholas puts it: ‘Here is the most visible remnant of the pre-independence era, of which the principal ethos was the subjugation of the indigenous people, ritual, value system and landscapes.’[6] In reckoning with this history of subjugation, the video’s final sequence sees Bahamian women, ‘[d]ressed in white and engaging in Yoruba tradition’, occupying and repurposing this space of imperial power, reinstating indigenous ritual and tradition, and dancing joyfully.[7] Natalie Willis reads this sequence in terms of ‘a West African spiritual cleansing of the space’, suggesting that the Ifa practitioners seen here figure ‘a proud proclamation of the heritage of Black Womanhood in the Caribbean and wider Diaspora.’[8]

Adding a further layer to its Black feminist politics of resistance and rebellion, the video enacts a warping of linear, colonial time. Jennifer DeClue writes of Black feminist avant-garde filmmaking engaging with archives as ‘conjure work’, as a channelling of ‘visitations that defy dominant impositions of temporality.’ She reads such film work and its attachments to ‘nonnormative time’ as ‘not invested in recovering knowledge from the archive, or in recuperating from the deepest, most immense losses’ but rather as involved in processes of ‘reckoning and witnessing’.[9] In Galanis’s video, alongside the title card of the first Edison film, ‘Native women washing clothes at St. Vincent, B.W.I.’ (1903), we see contemporary footage of a woman washing clothes. As the video strategically allows Edison’s title – and its ethnographic logic – to attach itself temporarily to the contemporary footage, the temporal relation seems dizzying, almost hallucinatory; any clear division between ‘then’ and ‘now’ comes undone. The colonial past is not past. It is conjured forth – now – in the present, yet also reconfigured, in a process of witnessing, reckoning and becoming otherwise.

In its transtemporal pairings, Galanis’s video seeks to imagine – in fleeting yet suggestive terms – cross-generational bonds between Caribbean women past and present. Referring to the women in the Edison footage, Willis writes:

Galanis takes women who historically had their personal and political space invaded, taking their discomfort and giving them new voice and agency through their modern-day ancestors who live through the evolved vestiges of that time. The way the film speaks through time, from great great great grandmothers to great great great granddaughters is one of the many ways she opens up the nuance of Black womanhood in the work.[10]

As Saidiya Hartman, DeClue and others have shown, to engage with archives of Black women’s lives is to attend to histories of invisibility yet also overexposure, violation and dispossession.[11] In grappling with these histories, Galanis’s video stages forms of escape, resistance, insurrection and anger (an anger that resonates with Audre Lorde’s reflections on Black feminist rage).[12] Yet there is also the imagining of connection, of solidarity, across time and space – a feminist genealogy, a matrilineal inheritance, that reaches beyond the colonial, patriarchal, touristic vision of the Caribbean found in the Edison footage.

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[1] https://www.tamikagalanis.com/about

[2] Ibid.

[3] Patricia Glinton-Meicholas, ‘The National Exhibition 9 (NE9) – An Opportunity for Reflection (Part 1)’ (2019), National Art Gallery of the Bahamas,https://nag-bahamas.squarespace.com/mixedmediablog/2019/2/21/the-national-exhibition-9-ne9-an-opportunity-for-reflection-part-1

[4] Krista A. Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque (Duke University Press, 2007), p. 93.

[5] Dylon Lamar Robbins, ‘War, Modernity, and Motion in the Edison Films of 1898’, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 26:3 (2017), 351-375.

[6] Glinton-Meicholas, ‘The National Exhibition 9 (NE9) – An Opportunity for Reflection (Part 1)’.

[7] Natalie Willis, ‘“I ga’ gee’ you what you lookin’ for!”: Tamika Galanis gets to the heart of the Caribbean’s history of “looking”’ (2019), National Art Gallery of the Bahamas, https://nag-bahamas.squarespace.com/mixedmediablog/2019/1/7/i-ga-gee-you-what-you-lookin-for-tamika-galanis-gets-to-the-heart-of-the-caribbeans-history-of-looking

[8] Ibid.

[9] Jennifer DeClue,Visitation: The Conjure Work of Black Feminist Avant-Garde Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022), p. 2; p. 5; p. 18.

[10] Willis, ‘“I ga’ gee’ you what you lookin’ for!”’.

[11] Saidiya Hartman, ‘Venus in Two Acts’, Small Axe, 26 (June 2008), pp. 1–14; DeClue, Visitation, p. 20.

[12] Audre Lorde, ‘The Uses of Anger’, in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (London: Penguin, 2019), pp. 117-127.