Negotiations of Obeah Material Memory: The Denigration of Material Belief Systems
Toynbee Studio, Arts Admin
chalk, moringa, white husk, pickaxe, string, bottle, water, flour, sorrel, tree bark & wood
Photography by James Jordan Johnson, Naima Hassan & Florenza Incirli
Negotiations of Obeah Material Memory: The Denigration of Material Belief Systems is a research project that will consist of performance to video and archival research which will then be composed into a video essay. The research project will centre Jamaica’s passing and consecration of laws, sanctions and reviewing cases of prison sentences related to Obeah practices and its practitioners throughout the 1800s and early 1900s. By carrying out this research, I aim to explore the role of ritual and materiality throughout and after Jamaica’s formal colonial period. This project will act as a contribution to the canon of Afro-Caribbean art, specifically performance art, and Afro-Caribbean artists in order to engage with the materiality of ritual practices in making Jamaica’s national and cultural identity.
In Melanie Klein’s Essential Papers of Object Loss, she writes about mourning and its relationship to manic-depressive states, or what she specifically calls the “infantile depressive position”. She references Freud's writing on the loss of an object in which he writes “Each single one of the memories and hopes which bound the libido to the object is brought up and hyper-cathected, and the detachment of the libido from it accomplished.” Cathexis, as understood, in the process whereby ideas, feelings and memories are transferred or tethered to an object. Freud also writes that “We do not even know by what economic measures the work of mourning is carried through; possibly, however, a conjecture may help us here. Reality passes its verdict – that the object no longer exists – upon each single one of the memories and hopes through which the libido was attached to the lost object, and the ego, confronted as it were with the decision whether it will share this fate, is persuaded by the sum of its narcissistic satisfaction in being alive to sever its attachment to the non-existent object. We may imagine that, because of the slowness and the gradual way in which this severance is achieved, the expenditure of energy necessary for it becomes somehow dissipated by the time the task is carried through”.
I wanted to focus on this paper as a departure point because it speaks to how we relate to the attachment and detachment of objects. This is seen in Klein’s mentioning of detachment, she writes about cathexis from a viewpoint that she proceeds to establish a “normal” versus “abnormal” process of mourning in which she believes the person suffering a manic-depressive state “fails in the work of mourning” because they have not overcome and/or remedied the point of loss, unlike the normal mourner. I think about Klein’s statement on the abnormal mourner in which the possibility of reparation, to restore a sense of triumph, of elation in both loss and separation from the object is an immobilizing void, totaling in its manifestation. In both Klein and Freud’s statements about loss and the separation from an object, the concept in which they both present about cathexis and death is one predicated on the ground of a direct individual relation [to an object or person]. By this I mean their theories of death are between a present life lost, such as a mother, daughter, or a brother and sister. This is of serious importance to me as I think about the constant reification of loss and death beyond the nuclear or linear idea of family and how loss is spoken of as an isolated event. What would it mean to think about cathexis beyond what the individual self has witnessed or what the self has come into experiential proximity to, or with? In Essential Papers of Object Loss, I find it exemplifies the ways in which western modernity nullifies any convergence between philosophy and race, as is apparent in the theory of cathexis.
By using this critique I intend to think through cathexis in relation to trans-Atlantic slavery and how it can be utilized for Negotiations of Obeah Material Memory: The Denigration of Material Belief Systems. The documentation for this work in progress is to demonstrate the undying, non-linear, and indirect production of imbued memory through Obeah material history. I want to see the idea of material or corporeal mourning beyond the self or individual, and that this psychological state that Klein call’s “abnormal mourning” is a place which is subjective when considering the implications of race.
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