“Ode to Dreads”
Collaborators’ Q&A
What inspired you to bring your work to Broadsided?
Poet Amílcar Peter Sanatan: Rajiv Mohabir’s poem “The Mud Says to the Potter” brought me to the work of Broadsided. This literary platform beautifully includes literary works, visual art, and interviews with writers and artists. Broadsided makes it easier for the public to engage with our work. I love collaboration and public engagement. People in our communities have the right to beauty. Art helps deliver beauty to our lives and spaces.
There is something more personal and political about the opportunity that Broadsided provides to the writer and artist from a small place in the Caribbean. We want to share our creative imagination with the world, a wider one beyond our island or territory, to spaces that are “international” (what some RastafarI refer to as ‘”outernational”). We want to do this while grounding our words and art in our communities where we and our dreams reside.
What drew you to create a visual response to this poem, in particular?
Artist Daniel Esquivia Zapata: I found it to be a sincere and succinct poem, and that inspired me to engage with it visually.
How did this poem come to be?
Poet Amílcar Peter Sanatan: “Ode to Dreadlocks” was written as part of a larger body of work reflecting on my experiences in Helsinki, Finland. I am from Trinidad and Tobago. So far, my writing has taken on the form of poetic memoir. I write about my experiences moving between Europe and the Caribbean. In Finland, I am very much a stranger to the language, landscape and history. I travel through several airport terminals, take long walks in cities and forests, note the patterns of hope and tarnish around me. I am the flâneur. I am the Flâneur Noir in Nordic Europe, making sense of place and my personhood across white spaces. At the same time, this process is happening in the other direction; people are making sense of me in their place, their understandings of it, and their identities. While these reflections and understandings are ever-present and existing in my mind, a lot of the time I am reduced to my aesthetic. My hair becomes a marker for my history, humanity, status, and worth. But, dreadlocks are not neutral. They are political. They have agency. They are in resistance.
How did this image come to be?
Artist Daniel Esquivia Zapata: In making this visual response, I wanted to explore the themes of spatial transitions found in the poem. I noticed ideas about navigating constrictive spaces and the intrusion or disruptive invasion of outside comments, as well as themes of growth and free movement. The visual response is simple and I believe truthful to my experiences and how these experiences resonated with the poem; I aimed to connect the concept of growth with moments of feeling out of place, balanced by a sense of security and rootedness that can be expressed through our hair. This movement through space represents a risk and a dare—an expression of freedom, sometimes a difficult freedom, or a freedom with dread, especially for those of us who carry our Afro-descendancy in our hair and navigate white spaces.
What did you think an artist would pick up on from your poem? Does the artist’s response make you see the poem differently?
Poet Amílcar Peter Sanatan: Dreadlocks conjure a very clear image. I was interested in the artist’s attention to subjectivities. How could the artist move beyond popular representation to restoring the humanity, embodiment, politics, and history of the “Dread subject”? I appreciate Daniel Esquivia Zapata’s vision. The dreadlock is imposed on a personal note or diary entry. There is feeling. There is a voice behind the separated, detached “dread” (in both senses of the term). There is an introspective voice in the poem. The poem, “Ode to Dreadlocks,” confronts curiosity, prejudice, exoticising the Caribbean, and even cultural confidence and bravado dressed in machismo’s clothes.
Did anything shift for you or come into new light as you began working on your visual response?
Artist Daniel Esquivia Zapata: Yes, the notion of growth through difficult spaces–the movement of roots and our movement through social spaces–is very similar, and the idea that Afro hair could be this notion of growth of our roots, or more precisely, it roots us. That has been part of getting to love my hair; it’s an action that every time you do it ( grow it, take care of it, dare to style it) could root you. Strengthen who you are.
What question would you like to ask your collaborator? (we will print your answers, too!)
Poet to Artist: What inspired you to use the text and visual in this art work?
Artist Daniel Esquivia Zapata: I usually incorporate text into my drawings, mixing poems, newspaper articles, historical references, and more. I had always been interested in the power of language and the power of giving a name, of naming things. When I include a poem or song in my drawings, I repeat words (especially verbs) or sentences, scratch out some, or sometimes erase them, leaving a faint ghost of the word. In that way, I can draw the action of reading aloud words and the different volumes, etc, that can come out. I realized, by answering your question, that what I aim to do sometimes is draw a spoken word, and how we can remember it when it’s spoken. For this drawing, I repeated the following parts of your poem:
have my backI’ll let themWhite spacesLet them gothey thinkthey grow
Artist to Poet: Do you have more poems like this one by you or other authors that you would like to share with me? I would love to read more.
Poet Amílcar Peter Sanatan: Of course, I would happily share more of my poetry with you, Daniel. Themes of identity formation, belonging and dis/connection have long been explored by Caribbean writers and artists. There are many new voices from our region do the same. I firmly believe in the power of artist collaboration and exchange. Here’s a video of one of my poems, online.
When you consider the full folio of work from this issue (see the “related broadsides” links on the left), what questions, observations, or connections arise for you?
Poet Amílcar Peter Sanatan: Many of the poems involve movement. Across the poems, nature, people, and feelings are in motion. I find this interesting. Poetry does not always have to be a “snapshot.” It does not have to be a still portrait. There is room for motion blur and moving parts.
Artist Daniel Esquivia Zapata: Many of the poems and visuals imply this notion of moving through spaces or ideas, of what remains and what continues.
Describe your ideal “Vectorization”—where, in your wildest dreams, would you most like to see this broadside posted in the world?
Poet Amílcar Peter Sanatan: I have love for many places! Naturally, I am interested in sharing this work on a major sign at bus stands in Caribbean cities, particularly in Kingston and Port-of-Spain. However, if I had only one opportunity for this poem to be shared in public, without resource constraints, I would love to have this broadside in Helsinki Art Museum next to a portrait of the inimitable Tove Jansson. Tove Jansson’s humour, flare, brilliance, and her passion for life inspire me. The relationship I developed with Jansson’s words and art brought me closer to Finland. There is an eye-catching portrait of Tove Jansson, against a blue sky, mass of water and neat horizon line. She is smiling and wearing a flower crown. The flower crown is made of several types of flowers—full of red, yellow, blue, pink petals. The flowers are wild. The portrait is bright. With my love for bright colours, wearing gold, and singing as I walk in public, I truly felt out of place in Finland. She brought that light, colour, flare and smile to me. I felt at home when I first saw that portrait.
Artist Daniel Esquivia Zapata: I would like to see in public transportation spaces.
If this Broadsided collaboration were a type of weather, what would it be?
Poet Amílcar Peter Sanatan: Sunny with showers, moderate seas.
Artist Daniel Esquivia Zapata: Cold and sunny morning in ones of these countries in the global north.
Do you have a favorite, generative prompt for artists or writers you’d like to share?
Poet Amílcar Peter Sanatan: Lately, I have been writing and working with “anthro-poetry” methods for community interventions. We enhance techniques and skills of ethnography and creative writing for people in communities, especially marginalized spaces, to creatively speak about their realities, insights, and futures. This is a generative approach for artists and writers. Through immersion in spaces, prompts for art and writing naturally emerge. We do not just observe communities; we are present in them.
Artist Daniel Esquivia Zapata: Not really at the moment.
Read any good books lately?
Poet Amílcar Peter Sanatan: I read works simultaneously. I am re-reading Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, translated by Joan Pinkham. I am also reading Elias Lönnrot’s Kalevala: The Epic of the Finnish People, translated by Eino Friberg, and Tove Jansson’s and Tuulikki Pietilä’s Notes from an Island, translated by Thomas Teal.
Artist Daniel Esquivia Zapata: Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe.
Seen any good art lately?
Poet Amílcar Peter Sanatan: In Trinidad and Tobago we recently hosted our annual carnival celebration. Our celebrations are rich in popular art and street theatre. Without question, this year I was moved by the aesthetic, performance, and vernacular of Moko Jumbies. I don’t know why I was drawn to a character and performance I’ve seen all my life, but there was something majestic about them when I was in their presence. I envied how far they were above us and their closeness to the heavens.
Artist Daniel Esquivia Zapata: I was looking for an artist to include in one of my class projects as a reference for a project about drawing Place. I had the wonderful moment of encountering Tacita Dean’s and Do Ho Suh’s work.