It was a real experience utilising the paintings and the work in order to write the poems and to
get that out. This is the resurrection of Christ, we see Christ in the middle, see three gentlemen, two
of them are almost in disbelief, and then you just see, you see Christ, chilled, looking calm.
He's like, 'Yo, folks, here I am.' I'm a big fan of tension, and how tension is used, and I think, in just that
one move of how we see this fruit basket that's about to fall off, you can tell that tension is happening.
I've lost friends. I've lost friends. The idea of a group of men that have recently lost someone,
and the idea of that person coming back, and sitting at a table, I think that's an amazing thing.
There's a celebration of the fact that this person is returned, but, there's also the sadness
in thinking, how long are you here for? I think there's a universal thing when it comes to grief.
I think if you've lost someone that you truly love, and if they return, irrespective of race, gender, or
how one identifies, if that person returns, I, think the mannerism will still be the same.
I use Yoruba, often in my work, I use colloquialisms in my work, whether it's slang, with my mandem,
with my friends, you know, codes, that we use as a community, those things are important to me.
In the same way, for the majority of Caravaggio's paintings, you have the dirty feet, for example,
that's important to him. His life interests me, his work interests me. In doing some of the
research of his upbringing, to a certain degree, it's no different from what I'm having,
the upbringing of young Black boys and Black men whose fathers wasn't necessarily around,
and all these different things, of absent fathers, and I've read many articles, heard many theories of
people that have not necessarily grown up within a Black experience talk about, 'Oh, of course they're
going to be in gangs, because they grew up with no father, and they had no father figures around.'
And when you kind of consider an artist like Caravaggio, who, for the most part did not have as
many male figures around him, even though he killed someone, he's still lauded. Caravaggio is like a
representation of any kind of glorified white person, to a certain degree, in the creative field
that have basically been given grace. In an interview that I saw, the historian was
like, 'We have to understand that, back then, that's just what you've done, you killed people.'
What? You can't necessarily use that same thing. You can't just excuse it as, 'Oh that's just what you do.'
It's not just as easy as like 'That's just what you do then, it was just, it's just of his time.'
And I think I've heard different versions of this same thing over time. From the poem, it
speaks about a community of people that escaped slavery, and as a result, they built a Lake Village
that has markets, churches, schools, homes. It's an incredible story that I wasn't aware
of as a history, you know, I mean, there was several stories I hear in Black History
Month, but I don't necessarily hear about this in relation to Black history, and, for me, it's a story
of resilience, and it's a story that that is etched in the memory of the community of the people there.
And on the flip side of all of that happening, because you have to kind
of, it's almost like it's running parallel, while all of this was happening, in terms of
enslaved Africans being shipped to Europe and the Americas, on the flip side, Caravaggio was
just living his best life. You see what I mean? He's chilling, he's, he's fighting people on one
side, he's painting on one side, he's, he's in a bar, flipping a plate of artichokes in the face of
a waiter on one side. He is, for the most part, being, he's just living. So, for me, it's just those
two things, I just really wanted to pull out of the poem, to a certain degree. Again, I have no
answers, but I will write poems, should it create discussions, hey, I guess I've done a good job.
The Tofinu did not look back as they fled into the ocean.
They trusted the myth and tepidness of water more than man,
guided at night by crocodiles, fatigued, their feet swollen.
The Tofinu built a lake village in Ganvie.
As they built, they prayed for the others. The breathless, and the captured.
I'm watching an art historian being interviewed. The news anchor asks the expert
about Caravaggio, the painter and the murderer. His chapters of violence, and troubled upbringing.
The historian, like witchcraft, mouths an enchanting response:
'He was a man of his time.' A denial of Caravaggio's foul behavior. An erasure spell passed on
through generations; one that's excused the crimes, privilege and power of white people.
Ganvie has since swelled in numbers: the Venice of Africa now holds 20,000 people on stilts.
Here, there is no forgetting. Its memory's in-built.