Conjunction: street posters/Ravi Rajcoomar

By Nicholas Laughlin




Battle of Hispagnola posters along Kleine Waterstraat, Paramaribo, 28 June, 2009; photo by Nicholas Laughlin


An urban landscape is defined not only by buildings and squares and streets, but also by the people who inhabit and pass through them, their vehicles and equipment and merchandise, and the ephemeral traces they leave behind in the form of signs, graffiti, and posters.

Walking around Paramaribo, I noticed there were specific locations — the walls of abandoned buildings, temporary fences and hoardings — where event promoters advertise their parties, concerts, or sports tournaments, sticking up posters in overlapping dozens or even scores to achieve maximum visibility. In late June 2009, three events dominated this urban wallpaper: a "Battle of Hispagnola" boxing tournament, pitting Surinamese fighters against a team from the Dominican Republic; a concert by the visiting Congolese performer Djouna "Big One" Mumbafu; and the Lustig Festival, a big party organised by private promoters at a river beach inland from Paramaribo.




Djouna Big One and Lustig Festival posters along the Waterkant, Paramaribo, 24 June, 2009; photo by Nicholas Laughlin


Of the three, the Lustig Festival posters were the most arrestingly surreal. They emphasised the white sand of the beach location, and the event's tagline — "A Caribbean Fusion of Fantasies" — achieved visual form in a montage of stock photos. A flamingo, an alligator, three pots of gold, a monkey, colourful tree frogs, a bottle of Champagne, a toucan, and a young woman with Latin features — wearing a tiny bikini — burst forth from a pirate's treasure chest. You could write a whole dissertation on what this assemblage of images in this context says about Suriname's relationship to the Caribbean, or to ideas of "Caribbeanness".




Behind the Mask (mixed media, 120 x 145 cm, 2008) by Ravi Rajcoomar; image courtesy the artist


Ravi Rajcoomar's recent paintings, with their bold colours, graphic deployment of text, stencilled silhouettes, and palimpsestic collages, make explicit reference to street posters, graffiti, and the accidental, evolving "murals" created by layers of paint, paper, and glue on Paramaribo's urban surfaces. Their mirror-reversed text fragments and ambiguously gesturing human figures suggest stymied communication: a dream diary, a narrative without a key, a map missing its legend. He writes that these works explore "the mystery, the unknown, the untold, the unspoken, and the unsaid" of human interaction.

More immediately and subtly than a traditional topographical view — a rendering of a picturesque building or bustling market scene — Rajcoomar's paintings record the city of Paramaribo, close up and at street level. Words depicted as graphic forms overlap like voices from a crowd. Chaos plays against order, energy against melancholy, as in urban landscapes anywhere in the world, but letterforms hinting at Afaka script ground these works in Suriname, in Paramaribo.




Rajcoomar at work in his studio during his recent residency in Rotterdam; image courtesy the artist


See more of Rajcoomar's recent works at his website.

Document: Afaka's first letter

ke mi gadu | mi masa | mi bigi na ini a ulotu | fu a papila di yu be gi afaka...


It's estimated there are 25,000 to 30,000 speakers of Djuka (or Ndyuka), one of the Maroon languages of Suriname and French Guiana. Derived from English and several West African languages, Djuka has three distinct spoken dialects as well as a written form, called Afaka script after its creator.

Afaka Atumisi was a Djuka from the Tapanahony region of south-eastern Suriname. Circa 1910 -- inspired, he said, by a dream or vision -- he invented a syllabary of 56 characters which allowed Djuka texts to be recorded and transmitted in writing. Afaka died in 1918, but by 1920 it was reported that over a hundred people in the Tapanahony area could read and write his script.




Detail of one of Marcel Pinas's Kibi Wi totems, made from oil drums decorated with aluminium Afaka characters; Fort Zeelandia, Paramaribo, April 2009. Photo by Nicholas Laughlin


In later decades, the number of fluent readers and writers declined -- an article in the Suriname Museum journal in 1975 estimated that "most probably there remain only five." But more recently Afaka script, like other elements of Maroon culture, has been increasingly adopted (and adapted) as a symbol of Surinamese national identity, and the script is not an unfamiliar sight in Paramaribo. Afaka characters are a recurring and assertive motif in the work of Marcel Pinas, a member of the Djuka community in Moengo, but Surinamese artists from other ethnic backgrounds -- including Roddney Tjon Poen Gie and Sri Irodikromo -- also use the script in their exploration of the country's ethnic intricacies.




Air Borne (acrylic on canvas, 67 x 100 cm, 2009), by Roddney Tjon Poen Gie; photo by William Tsang, courtesy Readytex Art Gallery.


"Tjon Poen Gie is well known for using his own visual language, which is based upon the letter symbols of his ancestors," says the Readytex Gallery website." He draws the characters and symbols three-dimensionally and thus produces a playful abstraction of Chinese letters and Afro Surinamese Afaka symbols in his artwork."

The document reproduced at the top of this post is one of the earliest surviving texts written in Afaka script -- a letter by Afaka Atumisi which reports on his unsuccessful trip to the hospital in Paramaribo in search of treatment. Read a full translation here.