Making Four Days in May

Abstract

In this essay I discuss a collaborative process of creating a series of visual representations of the 2010 State of Emergency in Kingston, when Jamaican security forces, supported by the United States, entered their community in search of Christopher “Dudus” Coke, who had been ordered for extradition, resulting in the deaths of at least seventy-four civilians. Since 2012, I have been working with Deanne Bell, Junior “Gabu” Wedderburn, and Varun Baker to record narratives with West Kingston community members in order to provide a public platform through which they can name and publicly memorialize loved ones they lost. The film (Four Days in May), as well as the installation (Bearing Witness: Four Days in West Kingston), draws from these recorded narratives, and from additional visual and textual materials, to exhibit the diversity of archives of state violence in their many structural, symbolic, and material guises. I discuss the dilemmas of producing visual work in a context saturated with (national and international) sensationalist media images of Tivoli Gardens, and of Jamaican organized crime more broadly, and the limits of what is possible to represent within a context in which violence is ongoing. I also think through the relationships between visual and textual work. Ultimately, I reflect on how placing different archives of state violence in dialogue with each other might evoke the affective entanglements these forms of violence produce, and how they might also generate visions of justice and political futures.