Abstract
Scottish-Barbadian artist Alberta Whittle continues to develop a rich, urgent, and far-ranging creative practice that combines elements of installation, film, sculpture, written word, and performance. Her work is preoccupied with the reverberating afterlives of slavery and colonialism, with our relationship to the natural world and to the imminence of environmental catastrophe, with the dynamics of kinship and intergenerational testimony, and with the radical possibilities that reside in expressions of care and compassion, for self and others. This article considers a recent digital video work by Whittle, between a whisper and a cry (2019). In her video, Whittle approaches the shifting waters of the Atlantic Ocean in part as a fluid repository or archive for the traumas of the Middle Passage. Responding particularly to influential critical formulations found in the work of Christina Sharpe, Whittle also explores how the wake left behind by such violent histories continues to buffet the Caribbean, exposing the region and those who live there disproportionately to the intensifying effects of extreme weather. Against a backdrop of accelerating ecological crisis, Whittle's work urges us to consider a worsening climate in which forms of antiblackness flow from past to present to uncertain future, but, crucially, she also asks how this storm might potentially be weathered.
Vocabularies of Weather
As a point of entry into the work of an artist so deeply preoccupied with the position of the self within the wider contexts—be these cultural, political, historical, linguistic, geographical, even meteorological—that surround it, I open this text on an autobiographical note. I lived for many years in the city of Glasgow. I always liked the fine, expressive attunement of Scottish dialect (particularly as found along the country's West Coast) to gradations and variations of weather. Rain that is stoating, for instance, is rain so heavy it bounces off the ground, while, at the lighter end of the precipitation scale, smirr describes a fine, drifting rain or drizzle, so light it resembles mist or smoke. Among the many such weather words encountered in Scotland, perhaps none is quite as widely recognized or indeed as affectionately and emphatically used as dreich—a term that originally meant slow or tedious but that, by extension, has come to designate damp, dull, or gloomy meteorological conditions. But even dreich, named by the Scottish Book Trust in 2019 as the most “iconic” of all Scots words, is possibly beaten in sheer emotive force by yet another contemporary weather term that has firmly anchored itself within the country's cultural and behavioral vernacular. 1
For within Scottish vocabularies of weather, “iconic” terminology coexists with the noticeably more ironic. The phrase “taps aff,” for instance, describes weather that—far from the dreich, the smirr, the stoating—is instead potentially conducive to removing layers and exposing skin to the elements.2 It is the resolutely tongue-in-cheek Scots phrase heard on the lips of inhabitants or in media headlines every time spring or summer sunshine banishes (variously named) forms of precipitation and lightens Glaswegian skies. There is even a website—taps-aff.co.uk—that is exclusively dedicated to providing rolling updates on weather-appropriate levels of shirtlessness.3 For reference, as I type, today's weather in Glasgow has merited a much more cautious edict of “taps oan.”
In February 2019, bathed in unseasonably tropical sunshine, Glasgow was experiencing decidedly “taps aff” weather conditions. Artist Alberta Whittle (b. 1980, Bridgetown, Barbados), a longtime resident of the city whose work I discuss in this text, has recalled how odd and unsettling it felt to hear people jokingly embrace the effects of climate crisis when presented with this bout of unexpected and unseasonal weather: “It was balmy in February, and people were loving this heat. They were so excited about this heat and they were like, ‘Yes! Bring on climate change!’ ”4 Thinking back to this time, Whittle describes the jarring contrast she couldn't help but find between scenes of people “revelling” in a winter heatwave, and the more serious consequences she knew shifts in delicate climate chronologies would inevitably produce in Barbados, where much of her family live, and elsewhere in the region. Indeed, Whittle recalls, in 2019 the Caribbean hurricane season started earlier than usual.
Now, as anyone who has ever lived through a Glaswegian winter in a drafty tenement flat will assuredly tell you, when faced with the prospect of months of dark skies and damp weather, you take your pleasure wherever you can. From this perspective, momentary enjoyment on an anomalous peak in seasonal temperatures cannot automatically be taken as an explicit and conscious endorsement of climate emergency or of the devastating effects wreaked by changing weather conditions elsewhere on the globe. Invested as it is in the importance of seizing restorative moments of pleasure wherever these arise, Whittle's work is fully receptive to this nuance, but it is also insistent in decrying the readiness with which people so often choose to forget wider realities when they are not the most immediately or most damagingly affected by them—whether these realities relate specifically to climate change, as here, or otherwise.
The artwork by Whittle that interests me in this essay, the 2019 digital video between a whisper and a cry, is concerned precisely with the variable stakes of precarity, privilege, and willful amnesia that the anecdotal incidents described above potentially highlight. Whittle's video is an essential component of the ongoing and deeply personal inquiry the Scottish-Barbadian artist has developed throughout her work to date into the reverberating afterlives of slavery and colonialism and into the dense, entangled relations that continue to link Britain to its former colonies. Situating itself in relation to a range of scholarly and literary influences, but most prominently in relation to terms and frameworks loaned from English literature and Black studies scholar Christina Sharpe, the video particularly considers how the far-spreading wake left behind by histories of racial violence and exploitation continues to buffet the Caribbean, exposing it disproportionately to the intensifying effects of extreme weather. Whittle's video finds in this situation one symptom of a broader, pervasive climate of antiblackness that renders Black life on either side of the Atlantic precarious, exposed, and disposable. Whittle's video plunges deep within this worsening climate and lays bare the pains it brings; but, importantly, it also continually moves in search of possible sites and practices of resistance, resilience, and reprieve—sources of healing and hope amid the horror.
Repair Work: Collage and Assemblage
Combining elements of moving image, sculpture, printmaking, installation, performance, and written word, Whittle's creative practice is rich and multifaceted. When between a whisper and a cry was exhibited at the Dundee Contemporary Arts gallery in 2019 as part of How Flexible Can We Make the Mouth,5 Whittle's first major solo exhibition in a UK institution, it was surrounded by a vast array of materials and forms that testified to the pronounced variety that animates and characterizes the artist's work. Screened in front of tight rows of plastic garden chairs that had been laced together by rusted metal chains, between a whisper and a cry was flanked across the successive rooms of the Dundee exhibition space by a life-size, multicolored model of a Barbadian chattel house; by gilded, woodblock-printed reworkings of sixteenth-century engravings by Theodore de Bry; by sculptural works variously combining textiles, masks, braided hair, afro picks, sea shells, and a wooden limbo frame; by poetic texts printed onto the gallery's windows; and by other examples of Whittle's work in digital video.
Writing in the journal Wasafiri, Whittle presents her creative practice explicitly in terms of “strategies of collage and assemblage.”6 In bringing elements together in productive and sometimes unexpected combinations, as perhaps exemplified in the Dundee exhibition, these strategies function, Whittle suggests, “as a means of deliberately unsettling images and ideas in order to manifest something new outside of the original frame.”7 In ways that are profoundly influenced by the artist's own experiences of growing up in Barbados before settling in Britain as a teenager, the “something new” that Whittle seeks to foreground often entails disarming the “active forgetting” and forms of convenient disavowal that so define Britain's relationship to its own imperial past.8 Seeking to turn “active forgetting” into “active remembering,” Whittle's collaged art participates in what she presents as a form of “repair work”: “a process of disassembling, reframing, unlearning, and manifesting anew different images to repair how ideas of race, power, and gender have been narrativised under white supremacy.”9 Whittle's approach to collage and assemblage brings her work into interesting proximity with that of other contemporary African diasporic and Afrofuturist-inspired practices, such as those of Annalee Davis and Wangechi Mutu. It also reflects a conscious engagement on Whittle's part with recurring elements of Caribbean cultural production: interviewed by curator Ekow Eshun in connection with the exhibition “We Are History,” held in 2021 and 2022 at London's Somerset House,10 Whittle presents the use of collage in Caribbean art as the make-do expression of a culture and infrastructure where materials can be unavailable or unreliable that also speaks to a desire to make something meaningful, something beautiful out of very little.11
The hybridized assemblage of forms and formats that characterizes so much of Whittle's creative practice is replicated in the structure and composition of the artist's individual videos. The varied elements that make up the potent collage of between a whisper and a cry are held within a carefully controlled compositional logic. Footage produced by Whittle is combined with elements gleaned and borrowed from elsewhere, with assembled fragments reframed and networked by proximity to other components, brought into complex conversations. Through juxtaposition, contact, contrast, counterpointing and callbacks, connections are teased out between textual quotation and intertitles, voiceovers of varying kinds, archive imagery, contemporary news footage, extracts of the music of Sun Ra or Odetta, time-lapses of opening and closing dandelions, CGI animation, extended sequences of dance and of the thrusting movements of engine parts, or scenes from the very different coastlines of Barbados, Senegal, and the Scottish island of Arran.
Within the Wake
An introductory quotation from Christina Sharpe's In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016) about the back-and-forth, crisscrossing movements of Atlantic slave vessels provides a unifying frame for the seemingly disparate elements of Whittle's filmic collage. In a voiceover, the artist carefully and calmly reads Sharpe's words as the text scrolls over images of open water:
In all kinds of weather, the ships came and went from Saint Louis, Bristol, Rhode Island, New York, from Senegambia and offshore Atlantic, from West Central Africa and St. Helena, from Southeast Africa and Indian Ocean islands, from the Bight of Benin, from the Bight of Biafra, from Liverpool and Lisbon, from Bahia, Havana, Marseilles, Amsterdam, Port Antonio, Kingston, Rio de Janeiro, and London.
The ships set out one in the wake of another. Five hundred years of voyages of theft, pillage, and bondage.
Some of the ships made only one trip; others made multiple trips under the same and different names, under the same and different owners, under the same and different flags, and under the same and different insurers.
The ships kept going and coming; over thirty-five thousand recorded voyages.12
Throughout the monograph from which Whittle's introductory quotation is taken, Sharpe investigates the long wake left behind by such vessels moving human beings for profit over five centuries. In the Wake represents one of the most influential texts in Black studies published in recent years—one that, in addition to Whittle, has also been engaged with in varying ways by visual artists such as Torkwase Dyson, James Allister Sprang, Cauleen Smith, and the Otolith Group. Focusing particularly on the United States, though in ways that remain receptive to complex transnational dialogues, Sharpe's text scours literary, televisual, cinematic, journalistic, and archival sources to explore the extent to which contemporary Black life in the diaspora is still haunted by the specter of the slave ships enumerated in the quotation above, with the mechanisms of ongoing containment, surveillance, regulation, and punishment that this haunting entails.
Whittle and Sharpe share an insistence on personal and familial experience as the starting point for a broader activist politics, an unwavering attentiveness to the multiple registers of contemporary antiblackness, and a devoted search for glimmers of hope and joy amid the violence of negation. As signaled by its use of the above quotation, between a whisper and a cry unmistakably situates itself in relation to Sharpe's wider attempts to track manifestations of that “past not yet past” in the present and her deployment of the wake as a conceptual lexicon and framework for understanding how individual lives continue to be swept up and submerged in the still unfolding, still deathly aftermaths of Atlantic slavery.13 Indeed, the prominence of the quotation Whittle borrows from Sharpe in many ways serves as an invitation or challenge to view the elements that follow in these same terms.
The elements Whittle assembles in between a whisper and a cry draw attention to multiple aspects of the wake that Sharpe diagnoses—the wake within which Black lives are rendered precarious, exposed, excluded, foreclosed, policed, confined, written off, ended. This is the case in a glimpse of an army helicopter in the Barbados sky, in which it is possible to find echoes of the militarization imposed by foreign powers on the region, or of antimigration surveillance and expulsion regimes that are also echoed elsewhere in the video, in images of piles of empty life jackets, for instance. Such images resonate both with what Sharpe presents as the continuation of slave ship semiotics within the wake (“from the forced movements of the enslaved to the forced movements of the migrant and the refugee”)14 and with accounts offered by scholars such as Elizabeth Deloughrey of the technologically assisted policing of the borders between normativity and disposability that takes place today with deadly results within the oceanic crucible of Atlantic modernity.15 The wake is discernible equally in panning shots of cruise and container ships, emblems of the touristic commodification of the Caribbean or of the ravages produced by international trade networks that—as Sharpe acknowledges when she locates “that trade” as the key point in the development of global capital16—are inextricable from histories of the Middle Passage. The wake is similarly discernible in Whittle's images of what appears to be an English Defence League (EDL)17 march in London, with the supremacist violence such far-right configurations vehicle in the United Kingdom of the twenty-first century. The wake makes itself felt in Technicolor images of a limbo competition—a dance tradition that reportedly traces parts of its historical origins to the cramped conditions of slave vessel holds. It is also found in the extract Whittle takes from an unnamed black-and-white plantation film during which laboring bodies are quite literally crushed and ground down. Often teased out and amplified by effects of soundtrack and shot length, a queasy, haunting charge imbues these images, with the past exerting a disorienting pressure on the affective textures of the present.
Writing in her Wasafiri article, Whittle acknowledges that the influence she takes from Sharpe's enterprise of “wake work” is as much formal as thematic: “[In my films] I developed editing and collage strategies based on Christina Sharpe's scholarship that names strategies of deeper reading and opacity as ‘Black annotation, Black redaction.’ ”18 In between a whisper and a cry and in multiple other videos, Whittle actively participates in the reparative labor encouraged by Sharpe—one that consists of resisting a violent optics of concealment and confinement, elision and invisibility, to render the fullness of Black life visible. Specifically, in the development of her own deeply subjective formal language, Whittle responds to Sharpe's call for the invention of those “new modes of making-sensible”19 that living within the wake of slavery necessitates. Throughout between a whisper and a cry, Whittle pulls together multiple, often very different, manifestations of Sharpe's wake at once, arranging them into a dense audiovisual continuum of antiblackness. But within an approach to montage that is explicitly presented in terms of collage, where contrasts and conflicts are deliberately emphasized, these manifestations of the wake are continually brought into collision with attempts to resist, to imagine otherwise. In such a way, the mechanics of oppression that seek to impose a delimiting frame on what we can see and imagine are highlighted to then be immediately disrupted. Within the complex, endlessly shuffled and reshuffled collage she creates, Whittle continually moves back and forth between, on the one hand, manifestations of Sharpe's wake, where past and present seem strangely, hauntingly to mingle; and on the other, varied attempts to conceive of possible alternate futures. Through the collage of contrasting elements she assembles in between a whisper and a cry, Whittle provides visible form to what Sharpe describes as the affective, practical, and cognitive realities of life in slavery's aftermath: “an ongoing present of subjection and resistance.”20
The Rest Is Weather . . .
Within the multiple articulations it draws together, between a whisper and a cry is particularly concerned with one manifestation of Sharpe's wake before all others, and it is here that Whittle embraces the most literal aspects of Sharpe's presentation of antiblackness as “total climate.”21 Alongside many other elements, between a whisper and a cry is filled with images of rainwater flowing through Barbados storm drains, of trees bent almost double by high winds, of the writhing of Atlantic waves, of meteorological visualizations of hurricanes as they grow in destructive power and touch land. The video is regularly punctuated by the successive lines of a poem offering a mnemonic of the traditional hurricane season calendar (fig. 1):
This is a mnemonic timeline that, with the intensification of extreme weather events, is rapidly becoming out of date. Through the assemblage of disparate parts and their framing, between a whisper and a cry echoes those increasing numbers of accounts that trace the origins of our current geological epoch back beyond the techno-social changes of the Industrial Revolution, to the beginning of European colonialism and slavery, and that in so doing find common roots for racism and climate emergency.
Looking insistently to a UK context marked by Home Office deportation flights, the Windrush scandal, the “Go-Home” vans of Operation Vaken,22 frontline COVID losses, stop-and-search police tactics, police killings, custody deaths, anti-immigrant policies and rhetoric, and experiences of everyday racism, throughout her videos Whittle places many things within the wake of violence, negation, and deathly repetition that Sharpe describes. Within UK political discourse as well as in everyday speech, such repressive phenomena are often presented as successive components of what is commonly referred to as the “hostile environment”—the evolving series of government policies, enacted from 2012 onward, that originally sought to prevent people living in the United Kingdom without documented immigrant status from accessing services and necessities such as public health care, employment, and housing. Whittle's between a whisper and a cry foregrounds a further, more meteorological, parsing of the term “hostile environment,” though, one that is shown to exist in the same violent portfolio of “dehumxnising practices.”23between a whisper and a cry inscribes in Sharpe's wake the fact that, while the Caribbean may be far from the greatest contemporary contributor to climate change, it experiences its painful effects particularly acutely. The video compels us never to forget the fact that sunbathing in Glasgow can entail devastation and loss thousands of miles away on the other side of the Atlantic—devastation and loss dismissed as just how things are and have always been in regions buffeted by disasters distractingly described as “natural.” In framing climate emergency in these terms, Whittle opens a space for Blackness within UK environmental debates, discourses, and activism so often formulated through media representation as the preserve of middle-class whiteness.
Crisis Rhythms. Breathtaking Spaces
Maintained particularly through variations to shot duration and soundtrack, the sonic and visual rhythms in between a whisper and a cry expand like rising sea levels, enveloping and subsuming the viewer. Throughout much of the video, Whittle seems intent on plunging her viewer directly into the heart of the anxious horror, preventing them from forgetting or looking away. But there are also, importantly, points where Whittle allows the viewer (and herself) to come up for air. The video opens with the sound of slow breathing, accompanied by on-screen instructions to:
Such words exemplify a tendency found throughout Whittle's work, whereby the artist actively seeks to generate moments of pause and peace even amid ongoing emergency. This search again bears Sharpe's imprint: specifically, her emphasis on the necessity of finding or forging “breathing space” and “breathtaking spaces” within an oppressive climate that conspires to forcibly evacuate air from lungs.24
Interestingly, throughout Whittle's work, this search for peace and pause so often entails deliberate immersion in the very waters that were once scarred by the wakes of slave ships and that are today churned up, heated, and corrupted with ever greater violence by the effects of climate change and environmental pollution. These encounters with water speak to a desire to reinscribe and reclaim a fluid archive, to tap into the resources and alternate forms of knowledge this liquid ledger might contain, to mobilize its potential as a vector of cleansing and anointment. Such watery possibilities seem particularly live in an extended sequence of between a whisper and a cry (fig. 2). Occupying the position of a figurehead at the prow of a boat, Whittle here faces the gently rippling surface of open water. Contorted as if in sensuous ecstasy, Whittle bends her spine backward and raises her arms in slowly flailing motion, seemingly seeking to draw toward herself everything that this body of water can offer. In a pleasing instance of ongoing call and response between theory and practice, Sharpe writes about between a whisper and a cry in the collection of short texts published to coincide with Whittle's 2019 Dundee Contemporary Arts exhibition, highlighting the artist's frequent returns to the waters of the Atlantic Ocean in the video: “not only,” she suggests, “as a space of transubstantiation—that space where African persons were and are made into things—but as a space of learning, immersion, possible generation, communion and refusal.”25
Across her video works, there is a ritual, almost liturgical quality to many of Whittle's encounters with water, with the ocean seemingly venerated, apostrophized, sanctified, and brought into human/nonhuman communion. Ritual in Whittle's video works often offers a means through which communities and forms of kinship are reinforced, with people dear to Whittle in the present and those who have gone before brought together in an ethics of care for others across time. In between a whisper and a cry as in Whittle's other videos, contact with water speaks equally of an ethics of self-care, with oceanic immersion appearing restorative, reparative, and calming. In the video's scattered moments of calm, images of water fill the screen and the percussive, often glitchy beats heard on so much of the soundtrack suddenly and unexpectedly abate. Such moments of calm never last, however, held as they are in Whittle's collaged videos in a rhythm that continually builds before suddenly crashing into stillness and quiet then steadily building again (like a swelling wave, like . . . a hurricane season). Her work is all about staying with the horror, while drawing upon moments of reprieve, however brief, to replenish those vital stocks of strength, joy, pleasure, and sensuousness needed to imagine differently, even as the storm continues.
between a whisper and a cry, like so many of Whittle's videos, thus heeds Sharpe's call to remain within the wake, to inhabit it, to use it as a position of consciousness,26 as an epistemology from which to potentially carve out resistant ways of being in and of the world; to develop strategies of care, repair, and attentiveness; to stage powerful acts of refusal. Such refusals are found, for instance, in the artist's decision to overlay footage of the flags and shaved heads of EDL marches with detailed instructions for kissing teeth. Further refusals are found in depictions of bodies wrapped in billowing tarpaulins that seem strangely to pull at the margins separating one being from another, or even human from nonhuman. Acts of refusal are found equally in one of the video's longest and most striking sequences: an extended presentation of the movements of a dancer in Glasgow's Clydeport building (a plush emblem of Scottish maritime and mercantile might) against the brassy strains of Sun Ra's “Enlightenment” (fig. 3). Throughout this sequence, Whittle mirrors, multiplies, reframes, and refracts the dancer's movements, disrupting them through sometimes stuttering editing or through shifts in focus between foreground and background, in ways that prevent them from settling into a singular, stable, or consumable image. Here, as elsewhere, we witness Whittle extend Sharpe's techniques of Black annotation and redaction through the audio-visual resources of film, choosing her own frame for the images she brings together.
In such ways, between a whisper and a cry performs the work of multiple refusals. In the sequences described above or in others, Whittle's video issues a refusal of the enforced precarities of geography; a refusal of the privilege of professed amnesia; a refusal of willful ignorance surrounding sources of comfort and wealth; a refusal of the forces that would seek to negate, constrict, and forcibly define Black being; a refusal of those vested interests that naturalize “natural” disaster. But Whittle's art also issues a call to accept self-love, self-care, self-affirmation as indispensable parts of this ongoing labor of refusing.
I opened this text by listing multiple ways of talking about the weather. In many ways, the work of Alberta Whittle is an experiment with multiple modes and vocabularies of weathering. It is a search for those resources and forms of strength that might allow Whittle to hold tight and keep occupying the storm. It is an exercise in exposing herself to the elements, an exercise in asking how these elements bear the imprint of the past that simultaneously issues a spur to imagine them differently for the future. between a whisper and a cry participates in the ongoing search for those tools and resources that might permit Whittle to fulfill the promise she finds in words from Saidiya Hartman that, she suggests, continue to exert such a generative influence on her art: “The everyday struggle to live free.”27 In such a way, Whittle's video simultaneously explores the possibility the artist finds in the work of Edwige Danticat: “that creative practices can conceive imaginative zones for healing.”28
Notes
The phrase “taps aff” is Scots vernacular for “tops off,” used to designate temperatures that are warm enough to permit the removal of shirts and outer layers of clothing. The phrase's antonym is “taps oan” (“tops on”).
Colin Waddell, Taps-Aff (website), https://taps-aff.co.uk (accessed July 10, 2023).
Alberta Whittle, How Flexible Can We Make the Mouth, Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA), Dundee, UK, September 14–November 24, 2019, http://www.albertawhittle.com/how-flexible-can-we-make-the-mouth.html.
“We Are History: Race, Colonialism, and Climate Change,” multiple artists, Somerset House, London, October 16, 2021–February 6, 2022, https://www.somersethouse.org.uk/whats-on/we-are-history.
Onscreen quotation taken from Sharpe, In the Wake, 102.
The English Defence League (EDL) is a far-right social movement and pressure group founded in 2009 in the United Kingdom. It is known particularly for its street demonstration tactics and its anti-Islam stance.
Whittle, “Axe Forgets,” 63. Whittle is here quoting from Sharpe, In the Wake, 113.
Operation Vaken was the name given to a 2013 British Home Office campaign in which advertising vans with slogans recommending that illegal immigrants should “go home or face arrest” were driven through areas of London with high immigrant populations.
Hartman, Wayward Lives, 227. In her video interview with Eshun, Whittle speaks about the importance Hartman's work to her own and particularly this formulation.
Whittle, “Axe Forgets,” 58. Whittle references Danticat, Create Dangerously.