A Sailor’s Valentine Reconsidered,
1/5, mixed media assemblage, 11 x 11 in, 2023
The image in the center of this piece is a woodcut titled, Cannibals on the Caribbean Island. I first came across this ethnographic illustration at the Museum of Us(1), in the RACE: Are We So Different?(2) exhibit.
The text panel in the museum reads:
1525 Monsters from afar. The German Lorenz Fries engraves this image for an Atlas, depicting native Caribbean people as dog-headed cannibals who live in European style houses and ride llamas. In the 1500s, Europeans are encountering unfamiliar people as they conquer and colonize North and South America. Images such as Fries' are commonplace during the early years of European contact with the New World.
As a second-generation West Indian (my mother is Trinidadian), I noted this image is one of the earliest depictions of my ancestors by Europeans. I learned Fries was influenced by travel narratives from Amerigo Vespucci (c.1454-1512) and Christopher Columbus (c.1451-1506), who Fries cited as having recently discovered the Americas.
An English translation of the text associated with this image reads:
Cannibals are a grim, slit-eyed people; dog-heads sit right on their heads, so that one gets scared when one looks at them. And they have an island which Christopher Columbus recently discovered. This island is very large and has a lot of other islands around it. The cannibals all go naked except that they adorn themselves with parrot feathers of all kinds of colors, strangely woven together. Their houses are upright standing pieces of wood and covered with palm leaves on top. These people prefer most of all to eat human flesh, and therefore, often in the year they go to surrounding islands in order to capture people. And they grab boys, beef them up all the hours the way we do it to camels, so that they will become fat and strong and all the better for being eaten. They kill the old ones and eat their entrails. They hang up the other meat the way we do with pork. But if they grab women, if these are young, then they keep them, so that they make a lot of children, just the way we do with hens on account of the eggs. If they are old, then they keep them as prisoners for their service and work. Besides that they also eat geese, ducks, and parrots, which are very large and pretty; they keep them in their forests.
The personal impact of this early European interpretation of native Caribbean people led me to explore other historical contact points, including the romantic mythology of the 19th-century craft of sailors' valentines(3). Homeward-bound British and American merchant sailors brought these intricate shell valentines back home to their wives and girlfriends. The idea was that the sailors far away from home on long voyages made these labor-intensive seashell boxes as a declaration of love and dedication. This was a lie.
I made my Sailor’s Valentine in the spirit of Calypso. I grew up understanding Trinadianan culture as speaking to power and history through the arts. Be it through the mass bacchanalian defiance of Carnival or through the potent resistance of the island's music. To quote my family friend, Trinidadian poet René Martin:
Calypso(4) is uncomplimentary truth-telling. The calypsonian is the equivalent of the court jester of old who was the only person free to tell the king any truth, however uncomplimentary, publicly– without the risk of losing his head.
If I could speak to my ancestors, If I understand where I come from, I say:
CANNIBALS, CANNIBALS - STAY ALIVE!!!
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Museum of Us (formerly known as the San Diego Museum of Man), the cultural anthropology museum in Balboa Park
Race: Are We So Different? was created by the American Anthropological Association and the Science Museum of Minnesota in 2007. In 2015, the Museum of Us purchased one of the traveling versions of the exhibit and installed it as a core offering.
From the Encyclopedia of American folk art by Wertkin, Gerard C; Kogan, Lee; American Folk Art Museum: Sailors Valentines are ensambles of small seashells of various colors mounted on an octagonal wooden backboard in a mosaic-like arrangement and enclosed in a frame of mahogany or cedar with a glass top. Typically they vary in diameter from about eight to twenty inches.The mosaic is usually a geometric, floral or heart motif often accompanied by a sentimental motto or slogan (hence the appellation Valentine). Contrary to popular belief, sailors' valentines were customarily produced for sailors, rather than by sailors. In the West Indies, sailors valentine making was a cottage industry that began as early as 1830 and flourished during the second half of the 19th century.
Is Mighty Sparrow speaking back to this history of being depicted as a cannibal in ‘Congo Man’? Created in 1964 but banned from local radio until 1989. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFEcD4eta5w
Is Harry Belafonte telling the truth about sailors' romance on the islands, in ‘Brown Skin Girl’? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUDjeqqUnsg