From Caribbean Quarterly; A Journal of Caribbean Culture, June – September 2012, 58. 2 & 3, pp. 101 – 115

‘Tony’s Oldies’: Visualising Vincentian Diasporic Memory.

Philip Nanton

I was beginning to see that this could be a photographic museum in cyberspace and a way of connecting Vincentians and keeping Vincentians connected with the homeland. (Tony Hadley, ‘Tony’s Oldies’ Webmaster)

If you Google the phrase ‘Tony’s Oldies’, you will access a website portal to 156 pages of photographic images. The access icons to the individual pages are designed to look like so many miniature shoe boxes where old photographs might be stored. On the left of the page is a roll call of over 300 deceased Vincentians, many with obituaries, from around the world. The site, which also contains a guest book section and commentaries on Vincentian history and lifestyle, is built around a core consisting of an independently run museum of Vincentian photographs, mastered by the Vincentian-born photographer, Tony Hadley.

After completing his secondary education in St. Vincent, Tony Hadley emigrated to Canada in the late 1960’s and settled in Montreal. In August 2001, after many years as a professional photographer, he registered his tonyoldies website at www.tonyoldies.homestead.com1. This was the start of ‘Tony’s Oldies’, where he began by making available his collection of 1960s black and white photographs of fellow secondary school pupils, mostly from the Boys’ Grammar School in Kingstown, St. Vincent. He describes the start-up as follows: after obtaining a scanner he ‘sent some of these old images …that no one else had seen to a school friend who sent them out to others…the reaction was fantastic…and soon I was getting requests from other people. I was beginning to lose track of what I sent to whom.’ (Personal communication, November 2011) The site sprang spontaneously out of popular interest, and soon a form of horizontal comradeship was being practised among those who had images to offer and memories to share, as many visitors commented on and supplemented his collection.

By October 2011 the site had over 500 photographs covering a wide range of St. Vincent island topics. In a ten year period the site had accumulated a total of 406,665 visits. For the first ten months of 2011 the site received a total of 13,454 hits from 29 countries of which 70 per cent

1 See also www.tphotos.homestead.comAnd www.tonyhadley

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were from Canada and the USA, 10 per cent from the United Kingdom, 10 per cent from St. Vincent and the Grenadines and the remaining 10 per cent from the rest of the Caribbean (4.1%) and 16 other countries. In an email interview, Hadley explained that as the number and range of images he received began to increase, ‘I started to think about a vision for this site…I was beginning to see that this could be a photographic museum in cyberspace and a way of connecting Vincentians and keeping Vincentians connected with the homeland. Adding the Guestbook and the Obituaries were important tools in the connection business. I also added links to local news.’ (Personal communication, November 2011)

Hadley’s website has three objectives: recording memory through photographs, museology and Vincentian connectedness. The images in the museum comprise commercial postcards that offer an outsider perspective on the society as well as historical photographs contributed by Vincentians located in St. Vincent as well as those Vincentians located in the diaspora. However, although the objectives of the cyber museum could be read as ‘tropicalization’, as defined by Krista Thompson in An Eye for the Tropics; Tourism, Photography and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque, I will argue that the style and content of ‘Tony’s Oldies’ present a challenge to this form of nostalgia. Not only does the site provide an alternative to the touristic gaze as embodied by postcard images, it actually subverts the outsider view, replacing it with a nuanced insider perspective, that is, one that falls between insider and outsider. This perspective presents a challenge to the conventional idea of a national museum by challenging the national (insider) idea of the meaning of heritage. In addition, it complicates the conceptualization of diaspora by offering alternative priorities for the recounting of memory and history.

Tony Hadley’s diasporic cyber-museum comes closest to James Clifford’s description of diaspora as a reflection of those people who ‘live within another culture with a difference’, that is, they do not necessarily wish to return. (Clifford, 1994).

Photography, Postcards and the Tropics

In Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire, James Ryan demonstrates how colonial geography was imagined through the camera. Typical strategies were exploration: a form of ‘hunting with the camera’; classification of, for example, botanical specimens, textures and tastes; and using the camera as witness to picturesque views and the manners and style of local people. In sum, the camera was an instrument that demonstrated the ‘civilizing’ influence of colonialism. In an effort to explain how such strategies worked specifically in the case of the Caribbean, Krista Thompson draws on the notion of ‘tropicalization’, which, she says, ‘describes the complex visual systems through which the islands were imaged for tourist consumption and the social and political implications of these representations on actual physical space on the islands and their inhabitants’2. (Thompson, 2006, 2 Thompson draws on the notion of ‘tropicalizations’ as used by Frances Aparicio and Susan Chavez-Silverman and ‘tropicality’ as coined by Hayden White and discussed by Michael Dash. Between them the terms convey the idea of a system of ideological fictions in cultural exchanges which appear objective and realistic in their representation and discussion of objects although the perspectives held are previously informed by a dominant world view. Thus

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5.) Using The Bahamas and Jamaica as case studies, she demonstrates how an externally controlled postcard and photographic industry informed ways of seeing, remembering and imagining, both in the colonial and postcolonial Anglophone Caribbean. She concurs with Ryan that postcard images represent a tamed ideal of tropical nature (both land and sea) as well as an ordered society. She demonstrates by using commercial photographs how the landscape was ‘tamed’ and made ‘consumable’, for example through images of tropical fruit and feasting. This picturesque image making, she argues, was central to the creation of a tourist industry and in its emphasis on the depiction of order and decorum played a part in maintaining colonial hegemony. She suggests also that as social and economic circumstances have deteriorated in these post-colonies, the reproduction of old postcards has encouraged a misty-eyed nostalgia for ‘the good old days’.

I want to take up Thompson’s concern with the power of the outside observer in projecting the meaning of images, and to see how this works in the context of Tony’s Oldies website. The website contains a number of colonial era postcards, which, because they depict an outsider perspective on St. Vincent, might be subject to the charge of ‘tropicalization’. I want to suggest, however, that the website in fact displaces the outsider perspective by undermining the picturesque formality of the colonial camera’s eye. It does this by means of subtle changes or additions, often in the form of a comment or a refocusing of the image to disturb the balance of power it apparently embodies. For example, one picturesque image that Thompson represents as commonplace in colonial postcards is the plantation crop, with the black or Indian worker as visual prop (57). In such images, she suggests, the landscape is presented as ‘consumable’ (58), a form of tropicality that conflates oral and visual consumption.

An example of this kind of tropicalized image is afforded by Tony’s Oldies in the form of a small black boy holding a large stem of ripe bananas. (Figure 1) The central subject - the ripe fruit – is supplemented by the figure of a smiling black child to indicate the size of the produce. Conspicuously absent from the photograph is any sign of the worker who grew and harvested the fruit. However, Hadley’s caption: the words “Figs Sah!” alongside the photo, provides a kind of meta-commentary not intended by the original photographer or perceived by the recipient of the postcard. This small playful insertion disturbs the image by making the black child speak, addressing both the photographer and anyone else viewing the image. No longer merely a part of the backdrop, he uses his own language and botanical knowledge –“Figs Sah!”- to signal his complicity in the game of representation. This retrospective caption therefore unsettles the monolithic colonial gaze, reappropriating power over the image and reinscribing its meaning.

Thompson observes tourism promoters used photographic tropes of tropicality which ‘purported to be realistic representations of the islands when ideals of the tropics had long transformed, indeed constituted, the environment featured in the photographs’. (Thompson, note 5,.307)

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(Figure 1)

A second tropicalised image in Hadley’s collection is a postcard dated around 1910 of a colonial bank in the island’s capital, Kingstown. (Figure 2) The bank, representing authority, wealth and security, dominates the composition, and is identified within the image as the “Colonial” Bank. However the website invites the visitor to place the curser or mouse over the image so as to bring into view a hitherto insignificant detail: four small figures in the lower right foreground. In the now- enlarged image these four small characters become the focus of attention, shown to be at least as important as the bank. They are revealed to be four respectably-suited black gentlemen, who appear to be perfectly aware that they form part of the subject of the photograph. (Figure 2a) The shift in focus afforded by the website implicitly places them as customers, suggesting that it is the bank’s job to serve them and not the other way round, thus reversing the ‘natural’ order signified by the colonial institution.

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(Figure 2)

(Figure 2a)

A third postcard image from this period, falling into the tropicalized category of tamed landscape, shows a rolling plain – part of a plantation (known as Argyle) on the Windward coast of the island - with the sea in the background. (Figure 3) A thin strip of road runs across the entire image with, at the centre, a small automobile. The comment on the photograph diverts attention from the landscape to the model and make of the tiny car at the centre (a Model-T Ford), suggesting pleasure and pride in ownership and/or technological knowledge, and thereby subverting once again the implicit meaning of the picture.

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(Figure 3)

The significance of these small acts of subversion is the way they encapsulate resistance to the over determination of images by an externally positioned ideological perspective synonymous with tourism. The interventions, indeed, by embodying local agency, present an alternative view of an Anglophone Caribbean society to the tropicalized images Thompson discusses. This shift of meaning comes more clearly into focus where images other than postcards are concerned, specifically the personal photographs which form the overwhelming majority of images on the web site. For example, where Thompson draws attention to the scarcity of signs of urbanisation in many early twentieth century postcards, among the 500 photographs Hadley displays, Kingstown, the island capital, is prominent. Again, where Thompson identifies the absence of native men from colonial images, one of the earliest photographs in Hadley’s collection is of the 1893 all-male Kingstown Orchestral Society, with their conductor and musical instruments. (Figure 4) All the members are named. As well as images of the male choir, there are photographs of operatic groups, as well as members of male organizations like Foresters (Figure 5) and Odd Fellows, as well as male sports teams and athletics meetings. This statement of masculine confidence through group activities and visibility is at odds with the idea of subalternity central to colonial discourse and visualised through tropicalisation.

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(Figure 4)

(Figure 5)

The colonial context of most of the images is not ignored or glossed over, but rather shown to be an integral element of collective memory and experience. For example, besides formal pictures of members of the island’s Legislative Council and local government (Town Board), as well as representatives of the business elite on the steps of their social club, there are also white elites, both local and colonial, as well as scenes of extreme poverty, predominantly featuring black subjects. The photographs, in other words, acknowledge and display the discrepancy of class positions and the diversity of cultural backgrounds which characterised the colonial experience from a native perspective. Far from being voiceless, Tony’s Oldies testify both to the actual expressive power of the colonial subject and the retrospective re-appropriation of meaning by the website itself. This calls into question the conventional notion of subaltern experience as uniformly powerless and deprived of the means of expression. Bringing personal photographs into the same frame as touristic postcard images opens the way to a more nuanced account of the colonial visual archive.

Another way in which the website subverts conventional expectations of colonial subalternity is through its participation in technological modernity. In effect, the website functions as an

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informal, democratic, interactive cyber-village. Most importantly, by assuming the centrality of a black subjectivity it personalizes the viewer’s engagement with the photographs, which collectively tell the story of a wide cross section of black Vincentian society. The high number of hits from Western metropolitan countries suggests that the site speaks predominantly to a geographically widespread Vincentian diasporic interest group. Many respondents go to considerable lengths to identify and name the subjects of the photographs, using proper names as well as occasional nick-names – ‘Bridge-boy’, ‘Sweet-Boy’. Naming is therefore a key signifier of subjectivity which is seen to function in different ways. The principle of providing full names wherever possible is applied throughout the site and, of course, is central to the obituary list. The attribution of forename and surname confers a certain formality, as well as recognising genealogy and relationship. The process creates a sense of involvement, combats amnesia and maintains the presence of the departed, as when a photographic caption notes: ‘Not everyone in the picture is still with us.’ Meanwhile, the bestowal of a nickname is a common Caribbean social practice that often originates in school and may linger for most of one’s life. The nickname is a marker of familiarity, signifying the intimacy of subject and interlocutor; it designates a magic circle of privileged knowledge, epitomising insiderness.

In another subversion the website avoids the essential romanticism of ‘tropicalisation’ by recognising the colonial tension between St. Vincent as simultaneously a ‘sweet place’, where there are fruits to pick and girls with whom to ‘lime’, and as a site of racial dystopia. An example of the latter can be found in two photographs of the island’s one-time whites’ only club, the ‘Aquatic Club’. (Figure 6) The first of these images shows a view of the Aquatic Club from the sea, while below it the second shows a line of bathing-suited white teenagers on the Club’s pier. This image is given context by Hadley’s caption describing his father’s experience of attempting to enter the Club building with himself as a babe in arms: ‘It seems that he was confronted by a ‘friend’ at the entrance of the St. Vincent Aquatic Club who was blocking his access because he had me – a black adopted baby – with intentions of bringing me in as a “member”. It seems that CVD (his father) became so enraged that he struck the first blow and was consequently fined’. The caption strikes a chord with those of his generation who also experienced colonial racism in the Vincentian context, and infuses the image of smiling white teenagers with quite a different meaning. (Figure 6a)

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(Figures 6 and 6a)

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Nostalgia and Museology

Nostalgia is an important feature of the web site. Around one third of the images are a combination of photographs of school days as well as images of Kingstown from the turn of the twentieth century to the 1960’s. Thompson argues that the nostalgia created by colonial postcard images has resulted in an un-theorised and misleading romantic amnesia about the colonial Caribbean. The result of this nostalgia, she suggests, is either a mistaken reading of history – the good old days were not so good for many in the society (hiding repression, discrimination and segregation); or it is an evasion, a reliance on misleading images of the past (an ordered and disciplined society) which results in avoidance of the modern realities of economic decline and racial and social tension. For Thompson (and a number of historians of the Caribbean with whom she appears to agree: Kevin Farmer, Barry Higman (168 -169), nostalgia is represented as an unproductive backward-looking activity unsupported by the historical record which therefore contaminates the retrieval of a usable history.

However, as Janet Hutchinson observes, another way of viewing nostalgia is that it exists on the liminal ground between history and the production of memory. The production of memory is organized through various formal mechanisms, notably through the museum. In her review, ‘Caribbean Museums and National Identity’, tracing the development of museums in the Anglo-phone Caribbean, Alissandra Cummins identifies a shift from select and privileged - essentially colonial - interest groups, who controlled the type of museum displays, to post-colonial professionals who use the museum as an ‘instrument of national identity’ that aims to be representative of the wider history, culture and development of each society. ‘Caribbean museums’, she writes, ‘should function as sites of questioning and not merely of didactic expression, they should identify ways to allow the country to engage more directly in the construction of national histories through interactivity and the elimination of boundaries and controls.’ (Cummins, 240) Thus, in Cummins’s view, wider participation and social inclusivity were missing from history as depicted by the colonial museum and what was required was ‘a rational process of distillation and selection of knowledge that was inclusive of the general public’ (Cummins, 238). This, she argues, can be achieved by incorporating a range of ‘heritages’. Such a process forces the region to confront what is meant by ‘indigenous’ and how this notion challenges or validates national identity within the Caribbean context.

Central to Cummins’s concept of the post-colonial museum’s relationship with history and memory is the time line; in essence, the relationship between where we are at present and where we came from – that is, our heritage. It is a form of what Svetlana Boym calls ‘restorative nostalgia’ (Boym, 2002). This form of memory seeks to reconstruct the lost home and so provide a sense of a coherent master narrative that can be understood as a progressive time line of development that leads to the present day and beyond. In contrast, ‘Tony’s Oldies’ diasporic cyber-museum, although focused on offering a connection with the homeland, is less concerned

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with an attempt to reconstruct a coherent sense of home. Instead, it offers ‘reflective nostalgia’, which Svetlana Boym considers a more ambivalent form of nostalgia, mobilised by means of a creative dialogue based on collective memory (implicitly partial), rather than an attempt to reconstruct a coherent sense of home through a national metanarrative of linear progress.

The relationship that the website’s ‘museum’ traces with Vincentian history and memory is necessarily fragmented. It presents hundreds of discrete ‘events’ or photographs, each held in a particular chronological frame. The wide range of contributors offers a history with gaps that remain open, a history that accumulates through the contribution of each small addition by each individual visitor. It is neither heroic nor singularly nationalistic. The older the photograph the more it is revered and the more it is open to speculation. Furthermore, early Caribbean photographs carry a financial value. Pictures of St. Vincent and the Grenadines from 1880 to 1910, Hadley suggests, can fetch up to $400 US apiece on the internet.

Another distinguishing feature of Hadley’s website as an informal museum is the various ways in which it memorialises and celebrates time. The first of these is time as static rather than dynamic. Photographs of 1960’s secondary school pupils comprise the largest number of images, alongside a roll-call of some 300 deceased Vincentians, many with obituaries. Schooling and obituaries represent forms of closure, time periods that have run their course. Hadley, the website operator, also anticipates another form of closure for the site as a whole. When I asked how he saw the site developing in the future, he wrote: ‘Unfortunately, on my death, this site is likely to die also since I don’t think anyone will make the financial and time commitment to keep it going unless there is a financial angle.’ (Personal communication, November 2011) These features of closure, registered both in content and management, contrast with conventional museum practice posited on ongoing conservation. The Barbados Museum’s Mission Statement of 1991, for example, refers to a commitment to ‘collect, document and conserve’ evidence of the island’s heritage as an essential element of national identity. By contrast, Hadley implicitly accepts the desuetude of the colonial past and the inevitability of change, though not necessarily commensurate with conventions of progress.

Another way in which the site conceptualises time is through a chronology that is non-linear, ironic, fragmentary and inconclusive. The commentary on the images often involves questions that encourage speculation, so as to open a creative dialogue between the site master and those who participate in the site. For example, an image of a Kingstown market scene (Figure 7), dated around 1910, is captioned with the following site master’s question: ‘Seems like almost everyone was wearing white. I wonder what the dress code was in those days and if it was Sea Island Cotton?’ In response, Elma Gabriel a contributor to the site, speculates: ‘Is it possible they were bleaching the flour bags by means of the sun and then ma(king) clothes? Remember, in those days our people used their creativity for survival. It would have taken two to three bags to make an outfit for the average size woman and one and a half bags to make a simple shirt for a man.’ Here, the metanarrative provided by the website vacillates inconclusively between a more

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idealized interpretation (Sea Island Cotton), and an alternative reality, signifying poverty, creativity and survival.

(Figure 7)

Thompson has produced a substantial body of evidence to suggest that ‘tropicalized’ West Indian postcards contributed historically to what can be described as subaltern silences. She concurs with Ralph Trouillot that these silences are ‘an active and transitive process’ (295). Early postcards she claims ‘did not just evade subaltern narratives, they also produced silences’, while in more recent times the postcolonial use of postcards added to speechlessness because they used ‘sources blacks never authored’(295) and such accounts silenced the voices that protested in the past.

I am suggesting that ‘Tony’s Oldies’ photographic website offers an alternative way of viewing subalternity by focusing on a different source of images from the same period. These personal photographs demonstrate that, in representing itself to itself and thereby constructing an alternative social narrative to that of the colonial or external perspective, the local population did indeed exercise agency. The website enables this story to be told, while helping it along with the aid of retrospective recalibration. Out of this process, a new form of historical documentation appears to be developing. What emerges from the cumulative contributions from the society and its diaspora, is less a univocal history than a growing collective narrative that each visitor can dip into, and in so doing break the illusion of subaltern silence.

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References

Aparicio, Frances R., and Susana Chavez-Silverman, (eds) 1997. Tropicalizations: Transcultural Representatoions of Latinidad. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England.

Boym, Svetlana. 2002. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books.

Clifford, James. 1994. Diasporas, Cultural Anthropology, 9,no.3,302 – 338.

Cummins, Alissandra, 2004. Caribbean Museums and National identity, History Workshop Journal, Issue 58, 225 – 245.

Dash, J. Michael. 1998. The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context,. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.

Higman, Barry. 1999. Historiography of the British West Indies, London: Macmillan.

Ryan, James. R. 1997. Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Thompson, Krista A. 2006. An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque. London: Duke University Press.

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Boston, Beacon Press.

www.tonyoldies.homestead.com Aquatic Club Incident, p. 106; Car and Landscape, p. 119; Colonial Bank, p. 122; Child and Bananas, p. 125; Forresters, 100th Anniversary, p. 140; Kingstown Orchestral Society, p. 153.

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