“Shi Deh Deh” doesn’t smoothly translate into “There she is.”
Shi… a female pronoun. Deh… a general location. No verb. Something is missing, or rather, something refuses to show itself, a residue of meaning that averts discovery. The phrase, like many in Jamaican, carries a surplus, rhythm, deh deh, a riddim, if you like, the element that makes any language singular, and poetry untranslatable, something that falls on dead ears if you’re not attuned. This bit of untranslatability carries its history on its surface. English, reshaped to suit the needs of the colonized. A way to establish privacy, to hold something of one’s own in plain sight, the master’s tongue, bent into counter-poetics, as Édouard Glissant notes of Creole languages. “Shi Deh Deh” reserves the right to opacity. It refuses to overdetermine what is on view, refusing to overload, to overbear folks, for postcolonial memory is weighted heavily enough. “There she is,” isn’t something we can say for certain. We don’t know who she refers to. To say it’s the artist would be a conclusion too hastily made. We’re meant to stay with this question. The image is underexposed. The frequency too low. Shi deh deh. In the exhibition, fluorescent white light, so ubiquitous in display, subsides, letting black light take over. The viewing habit breaks and the visual regime loosens, therewhile giving way to other light frequencies, favoring other colors than white light.
The artist writes: “Black light does not ask you to understand it. It asks you to stand in it. This is an invitation into inner geography—the kind that has no map because it was never meant to be mapped. Only felt. Only entered. Blackness holds frequencies that dominant light cannot reach. Not because they are hidden, but because they require a different kind of listening—like my meta dub prayer. Come without your explanations. Come without your frameworks. Come as a body willing to glow. Something has always been written on these walls. I am simply changing the light and providing sound.”
Providing sound. A bass drone oscillates in and out. Voices and tones layer sporadically, reverberating through the space. Sound arrives in delay, the body feels it first, only then the mind. Frequencies meet frequencies, sound with light, enveloping the installation. Ceramic tiles: fragile, site-specific. Prints layered, material on material, strata to move through. Don’t underestimate paper, paper cuts deep, as bureaucratic force, seals, stamps, envelopes, mail moving from A to B, from Gabon to France. Lines drawn across a continent. The scramble, the carving of the continent, the cutting of soil into borders, so many lines without depth, without width. What’s left to do but heal the cuts?
B-side. Dub side. Lee Perry leaves a trace, a blessing, an image, vibes, you might call it. Here the dub prayer commences and finds it manifestation in Jasmine’s meta-dub prayer. Shi deh deh. Frequency tuning in, Dubbing out unconsciousness, dubbing in consciousness.
Attempt not to over-intellectualizing your feelings. Shi deh deh.