In the Castle of Our Skins: Who Am I?

I’m really, really thrilled to have Luis Vasquez La Roche join the conversations inside the castle of our skins. His work surrounding questions of identity, nationhood, and the self is exciting and it interrogates what it means to “be” in ways that offer no one pathway or one single reckoning but a beautiful and interesting examination of the complexities inside these various spaces that I think we can all relate to. According to his statement:

My project came through my recent body of work called the search, in which I deal with identity, cultural and some other issues pertaining to belonging within a certain space. I started using teeth because it is a way in which a person can be definitively recognized, apart from DNA, or finger prints. So when I use the word “recognize”,  I don’t only refer to your identity by name. Because names, at the end of the day, are just names. Just like everything else has a name to be recognized. What I really was trying to do was consider whether I can pin point who I really was in essence, which I found difficult because I am not one thing but many.

All this came about as I got to Trinidad and all these issues of identity came about.  My race was questioned (I was no longer considered black, which for years, I thought I was),  so I started looking for something inside of me that I can feel comfortable with using to claim and identify who I am.  In having conversations with another artist called Nikolai Noel, he explained to me that in a certain way, everyone has a way how they see themselves and is not necessarily related to race or gender; they use many other ways to describe themselves: personality, career, emotions, nationality, religion — whatever makes everyone comfortable and at ease.

The answer always comes with the context you’re in. So, what if there is no context (there will always be one), what then, will your answer will be? What is that thing that will describe you? So I drew probably 15 or more dentures (same type of denture, different surroundings) and made people take one and tell me what one thing they think they are.

In the Castle of Our Skins: Untitled

By: Tanya Marie Williams

Untitled

by Kim

Everyone called him Massa, my father says nonchalantly to me with eyes narrowing on the tight turn ahead of us,
he is talking about his father, my grandfather
the white plantation owner who raped my grandmother, a strong-jawed woman from Dominica.
This is how my history is transmitted to me, in fragments that ambush me every time I return to the land I call home,
mi abuela es de Venezuela, taken as a child by her father to become the property of his new family. My grandfather, son of indentured workers, a proud man, with a penchant for stoic silences.

I am from a stock that wields irons like hand grenades
mouths that unleash and inflict, leaving rings of fire that keep love away,
but make lovers stay. Yielding forgiveness, needing to nurture, heavy from field, house, hard, heartwork.
Scotch bonnet peppered speech, rich smells of island flowers reach and tug
and swing so gently from your heartstrings. We can see it now, you are falling in lust with us.

I am from a stock of full-bodied women, hips wise, eyes deep, young smiles
that belie the centuries that we live in each everlasting moment. Young smiles, playful and wild that belie the effortlessness with which we lie.
Lies that come far too easily, rolling off tongues, slipping into ears, coming hot
and hard, weightless, rocking like fucking on swings, like fingers intertwining.
Truth remaining only as whispers humming, as feelings lingering fading memories, like walking, waking, dreaming.

It is heartbreaking, that granny, my aunty, my mama, my women, heart first lept in, and then left him, heart withdrawn after time too long of hoping that tragedy don’t win, that penises stuffed in don’t just end up producing girl after girl destined to love unrequited.