A Cut Above Dystopian Terrains
Barbara Earl Thomas’ Geography of Innocence: Truth in the Shadow of Doubt captures a community of naïve and disquieted pre-teens whose identity in 21st century society presents unique challenges while they are evolving toward selfhood, maturity, and success. She distinctly approaches this inquiry with materials that assist as a metaphor for how society slices – bit by bit - with a surgeon’s precision, through black people’s humanity, with every intent to pierce the human soul.
© Barbara Earl Thomas
Through colorful lines and cut-out silhouettes, she thinly trims and peels black paper skins to create portraits of a generation’s hope and future. Thomas encapsulates the subjects trust and innocence, simultaneous to bearing witness to its spiraling decline to extinction. She asks what will this generation’s future be, and will the loss of innocence harden the human heart and soul? Her work proclaims, that a paper cut does not kill, unless there is an infection that spreads throughout the body and festers within the spiritual core of humanity. Is the geography of innocence turning into a lush topographical landscape for justice and truth or is it becoming a wasteland? Is it too late to help ourselves and the youth of today?
Thomas examines the toxicity of societal norms and mores that hinder inalienable civil rites of passage that develop character, integrity, honesty, and honor. She urges viewers to protect the innocence of youth as a Divine and mortal covenant. Communities, that continue to uphold accountability and a moral and ethical compass, are being threatened. What has changed within the human psyche between the end of the 20th century and the first two decades of this new century?
Constitutional ideals like individualism, democracy, liberty, equality, and opportunity are slowly being eroded during a Trump era presidency. And, unfortunately, novelist George Orwell’s ideological concept of Ingsoc - doublethink, memory hole, unperson, thoughtcrime, Newspeak, Thought Police, room 101 and Big Brother - have now become recognizable signs of a contemporary and persistent nightmare gleaned from his novel 1984.
There is no greater imperative for Thomas than to map the geography from Divine purity to innocence lost. The Geography of Innocence: Truth in Shadow of Doubt is born from a community of young people whose joie de vivre, deep smiles and joyful laughter are shaped by great love, until forced to violently collide with a Black Lives Matters Movement. At this nexus, innocence is lost and the muscle of ‘weaponized whiteness’ is thrust upon them.
The origins of the relationship between policing and people of African descent evolved from Southern economics and the institution of slave patrols that drove the creation of police forces in 1704. Patrollers whose task was checking passes, chasing down runaways and preventing and quelling slave revolts, were specifically committed to preserving the slavery system economy. Throughout the years after Reconstruction, many local sheriffs functioned in a way analogous to earlier slave patrollers, enforcing segregation and the disenfranchisement of freed enslaved Africans and their descendants.
The continuance of this legacy in the 19th century, during the Civil War and Reconstruction, was theatrically masked and performed as menacing black men as beasts in D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. In this film historic Southern Republican Party strategists preyed on white fears of black people to justify having them stopped, frisked, questioned, and shot for driving, walking, or breathing while black.
This heritage continued well into the mid-20th century as a catalyst for adolescent, and future Congressman, John Lewis to become a civil rights activist when he realized that the 1955 murder of his 14-year-old peer, Emmitt Till could have easily been him. And despite his careerlong efforts to uphold the American ideals he was unable to change the brutal trajectory of America’s disgraceful heritage to stay the advent of Trayvon Martin’s murder in 2012.
This repugnant legacy continues under the Trump administration’s misuse of the National Guard to perpetrate a savage misrepresentation of Black Lives Matter protestors in Washington, DC, in the wake of the recent murders of David Mcatee, Louisville, KY, George Perry Floyd, Minneapolis, MN, Dreashon “Sean“ Reed, Indianapolis, IN, Michael Brent Charles Ramos, Austin TX, Breonna Taylor, Louisville KY, Manual Elijah Ellis, Tacoma, Washington, Atatiana Koquice Jefferson, Fort Worth, TX and Emantic “EJ” Fitzgerald, Hoover AL. This is a significant short list from 144 black teenagers, men and women since 1968 who were wrongfully murdered in the wake of ‘weaponized whiteness’ against brown and black people.
Thomas raises questions about what the future holds for young black lives in the United States in Geography of Innocence: Truth in the Shadow of Doubt. Classic good versus evil, light versus darkness, and especially, life versus death realities, raise pointed questions about the delicacy of an age of innocence in an era where all that is good and true seem to hinge on a thin thread of hope. Throughout her work light is symbolized by colorful hand cut lines that articulate the silhouettes of members of a striving community. Light, by definition, is what makes things which are hidden in the dark manifest.
Like Kara Walker, Thomas works in silhouette. Unlike Walker she couples the use of line and silhouette to guide the viewer to specific narratives through paper cutting within the silhouette. Thomas uses color line as a source of light to articulate it to symbolize hope. Conversely Walker uses silhouette like a Rorschach test, whereby the audience is given an image to see what she wants them to see, while relying on what they bring to interpret the work.
Both artists use silhouette and hand cutting to narrate histories of being black in America using a medium whose birth parallels the era of American police patrols. Unlike the convenient view of the time, that black people are indistinguishable from one another, Thomas and Walker are distinguishable as black women and artists. Their approach to silhouetted narratives about black people is not monolithic. They are united by medium and address the same issues within America’s social landscape to underscore that absolutely nothing about the issues of identity, race, truth, and conflict has changed between the 17th and 21st centuries. Thomas draws our attention to the present, after America’s first president of African descent, and that impact of the vilest social disease – racism- robs the virtues of innocence from children in black communities.
The souls of black folks reflect W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1897 sentiment today: “It dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from others; or like mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil.”
In Holding Fire, flourishing vines and floral filigree surround a young lady whose hands are cupping black bodies whom she is protecting from gun fire. Like all mothers and sisters, we are the protectors of our children and communities. Symbolically she represents the original first responders who put themselves between danger and their family.
Book of Cures, is a reminder of how faith based realities can draw upon religious and spiritual books of knowledge to conjure African traditions for protection, healing and strength as a means to cultivate self-worth and empowerment Within the iconography the snake is a nod to African ancestral cosmology symbolizing rites of passage inherent to every struggle: fertility, birth and spiritual growth. Combined they reinforce strong creative life forces for spiritual transformation thorough healing, rebirth, and immortality.
Thomas juxtaposes contemporary mythology with human histories in which great dangers and adversities were faced with a fearless understanding not to lose oneself to fear, but to summon greater forces within seen and unseen realities. Such a consciousness has forced black American communities to sharpen their senses and keep alert.
More than 3.5 billion people log onto at least once social media platform daily. Keeping a keen mind in an era in which social media has become such a large part of our culture. Like a tsunami the naïve and disquieted are directly impacted by ideas and images of some form of physical, sexual, emotional, and psychological violence.
Incessant access to damaging social media, gossip blogs ‘fake news’ and reality shows, supersedes young people’s personal experiences. The result is false perceptions of beauty, sexuality, gender roles and normalcy. These manipulated distractions, from self, family, community, and the world cultivate a loss of innocence and adolescent anarchy.
In the first part of Orwell’s novel, 1984, he cites the slogan of the Party - War is Peace/ Freedom is Slavery/ Ignorance is Strength. This slogan represents doublethink in which it promotes two equally contradictory ideas simultaneously as correct in a distant social context. This is designed to confuse the minds of young and impressionable people through technology and puts pressure on them to create false personas that are encouraged by likes on their social media feed. Indoctrination is not new to retarding rational development. To this end, Orwell highlights the evils of a totalitarian government.
By placing a nation in a constant state of war, through War is Peace individuals are motivated to ignore their discontent with their government, thus ensuring an unending domestic peace. Freedom is Slavery refers to the fact that absolute freedom can easily lead to a life of pursuing pleasure. Ignorance is Strength can be understood as ‘ignorance is bliss’. If people remain ignorant of the facts, they cannot raise questions against the government. These ideas are dangerous because if one is not concerned with truth, ones’ existence assumes an unreflective contentment. For whom does War is Peace/Freedom is Slavery/ Ignorance is Strength a benefit in 2020 America?
Perhaps, this slogan allows Big Brother, or the current administration in the White House, to reign supreme, destroy the past and control the future sanctioned by the ignorance of the people. The justification is, “had ‘they’ been aware they would have understood Big Brother’s manipulations and would not let him rule.” Hence their ignorance blinded them and delegated their strength and power to the Party of Big Brother.
Thomas raises questions about the way her subjects are superficially perceived based on assumptions and presumptions of black guilt or black mischief. She queries how does one read the map of the black face? Does one bring preconceived notions about seeing brown or black skinned faces based on the limitations of the viewers experiences? Black youth are also distracted. Like any other cultural group if they remain distracted from themselves and the world in which they live through technology and social media, they remain in a blissful state of ignorance.
Unlike other youth there is no bubble for young black and brown adolescents in which to ponder their future. A future that continues to be pilfered from them by murder, sexual predators, sex trafficking, drugs, incarceration, poor education, and closed doors along the path of fulfilling ones potential, one slice at a time. Their parents, aunts, uncles, friends, and communities pray, worry and hope for their safety daily. All lives matter to God, but in the 2020 Orwellian enactment of the 1984 society, people have to be reminded that due to economic and political constructs of race and legal filibusters of ‘separate but equal’, that Black Lives Matter too, as part of a Divine imperative.
Unique to Thomas’s art making process is her invitation to young, gifted, and smart people into her studio to sit for her. Like a social scientist she engaged in conversations and observations that revealed their comfort in feeling safe with someone outside of their immediate family. The respectful boundaries reinforced the responsibility as a trusted adult, not to destroy or corrupt an innate trust that all human beings are born with.
When looking at this body of work inspired by a community of trust, we can see how the iconographic symbolism, lines, letters, and objects inform socio-political nuances. The cut out black silhouettes, with articulated color, are part of a visual ethos that reflect a double consciousness, or lack thereof, of a reality that becomes visible as maturity slowly strips away the veils of innocence. It also begs us to protect our youth and ourselves from the cloak of great evil and darkness. Those dark cloaked forces that steal innocence and hope from within the human spirit.
Perhaps Charles Dickens statement in a Tale of Two Cities most aptly encapsulates the message of Geography of Innocence: Truth in the Shadow of Doubt.
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”
