Canvas, Gold Thread, Golden Frame

30 x 40 inches

Among the inheritors of Queen Nanny’s defiance, many Black people refuse the terms of surrender because the battle against European colonial conquest is not complete. Beyond Nanny Town in Jamaica, Grandie Nanny’s lore spawned an army across the generations and across geographies of women and femmes with their heads held high in defiance. The Black gaze challenges the viewer by saying, “No!” There is a Jamaican inflection of a type of “No!” that cuts differently than how “no” is said in other languages. Queen Nannies is a statement about how the legacy of the revered Akan warrior queen multiplies. Her “No!” echoes outward across the archipelago.

Jamaican women know how to say, “No.” Part of saying “No” is the art of survival, which Queen Nanny practiced for her people with West African horticultural and religious ritual practices including Obeah that continue across space and time. Petals of the pumpkin blossom in Queen Nannies form the bell of her dress. The figure with its back turned to us, walks into the far future gripping a machete. The war between West Africa and Western Europe is not over and there are many generals who continue to follow Nanny’s battle plan of resistance. Through gran and petit marronage, people of the African diaspora across the Americas from the Blue and John Crow Mountains to the Great Dismal Swamp to the interior of Suriname’s rainforest continue to fight in major and minor acts of refusing European colonialism.

Though Grandie Nanny died in 1733, in this painting she is invoked as continuing to recruit battalions. Those who in their everyday lives are underestimated stand tall situated here as healers, herbalists, gardeners, domestics, military strategists, and commanders. They are the global workforce of nurses, nursing home workers, and nannies who have migrated from the Caribbean for over a century. An exploited labour force paid meagre wages, their job is to care for others. Queen Nannies depicts the collective power of these workers and their knowledge in cultivation, raising children, and caring for the dying. Pictured are photographs of migrant domestic women workers from the French Caribbean in the 1910s who form a collective. Black women’s labor circulates across the globe while their mobility is limited.

The twin mountain structure connects the Black geologies and bedrock of the Caribbean archipelago and the history of women maroons in Jamaica and Dominica. The tartan patterns associated with both sovereign nation's form the backdrop for the women’s figures layered on a mountain that forms an island. Mountainous terrains and the hinterlands were a sacred and lush spaces of refuge and ceremony for Maroons in Jamaica and Dominica.

I founded the creative technology studio called Dark Laboratory in 2020 with the ethos of exploring what has been stolen from Black and Indigenous people and honoring the many creative ways we continue to survive. European colonialism pitted Amerindian and Black lives against one another in the crossroads of the Western hemisphere. Camouflaged are deep histories of Maroon and Taíno coalition that we taste in our cuisine. The darkened backdrop represents the dark of night, illuminated by the moon. A colonial era text from a slave registry is faintly imprinted as a backdrop evoking the night sky. Parrots, threatened endemic species in Jamaica and Dominica, stand guard to the Queen Nannies for what is to come regarding the future of Caribbean sovereignty.