Category: art

macandal

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Cameron Rowland, macandal, 2023 Oxalic acid 37.5 x 30.5 x 67 cm Packets of materials that could invoke spirits, protect against punishment, and poison slave masters were called macandals. They were at the center of a plot in 1757 to poison all the white people in Haiti. The plot was organized by hundreds of enslaved and free black people. All macandals were subsequently outlawed. Their trade and use continued despite their criminalization. Enslaved people throughout the Atlantic world used arsenic, manioc juice, ground glass, and oxalic acid to poison overseers, masters, masters’ children, and livestock. Oxalic acid is a stain remover and household cleaner.

Cameron Rowland: Amt 45 i

Museum MMK für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany
10 February 2023 – 15 October 2023

Negations of accumulation manifested in theft, fugitivity, praise meetings, and plots.[53] Stealing the crops, eating the livestock, and refusing to work diminished the output of the plantation.[54] The formation of fugitive communities emptied the plantation of its value.[55] Sharing information evaded supervisory control.[56] Coordinated poisonings of masters and overseers instilled fear of the slave population.[57] Arson destroyed sugar mills, masters’ houses, and entire fields, inflicting property damage and halting production.[58] These black negations are unwritten losses. They are neither failed nor successful. Their impact is incalculable. They operate beyond the rubrics of value and production. Rather they were grounded in “the shared sense of obligation to preserve the collective being, the ontological totality” of blackness.[59]

Cameron Rowland: Amt 45 i

Maxwell Graham / Essex Street. Image via C&.

AG2023_1033326a or as it comes

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AG2023_1033326a

Aubade: East

Harlem, a.m.

Today’s the day, I can taste it.

Got my gray sweats pouting in a breeze

so soft, I feel like I’m still wrapped for sleeping

as I head uptown in my undercover power-suit,

bitch sunlight fingering the spaced-out tenements.

This morning there ain’t nothing I can’t do.

This is my territory, I know all of it—

ten long blocks flanked by mighty water.

Walking any Avenue is like riding

a cosmic surfboard on the biggest wave

of the goddam century, the East River

twerking her bedazzled behind

while sky spills coin like a luck-crazed

Vegas granny flush at the slots. Today

I’m gonna make out like a bandit myself:

hook up with my buds to drop

a few shots on the courts, ogle the ladies,

then play the rest of the day

as it comes                see where it goes

feeling good

feeling good

somewhere over the Hudson

the sun                      heading home

Rita Dove, via The Georgia Review, Spring 2016 and Playlist for the Apocalypse: Poems.

““Aubade East,” is set in Harlem, N.Y. The cocky speaker, out for a walk, squints into the “bitch sunlight fingering the spaced-out tenements.” This is a hat-tip to Toni Morrison, who famously — famously in my house, anyway — wrote in “Sula,” “The sun was already rising like a hot white bitch.”” Dwight Garner, Houston Chronicle.