Travels with a Husband

Travel literature has existed ever since people began occupying new territories and conquering foreign lands to expand empires.

The travel document in the form of writing, songs and the visual - paintings and photographs - became media through which the chroniclers of empires created and spoke the nation into being.

The conqueror and the conquered, the migrant and the native claimed, reclaimed and re-imagined their spaces through these works.

The Trinidadian voice within the travel-writing genre is perhaps limited mainly to VS Naipaul and it is therefore with great anticipation, that we welcome the latest addition to the negligible repertoire.

On November 29, the book launch and art exhibition, entitled Travels with a Husband took place at Soft Box Studios, St Clair. The exhibition curated by Nisha Hosein was developed from an idea that she had brought to Patricia Mohammed and Rex Dixon over two years ago and which happily coincided with their idea to pull together their jottings in book form.

In Travels with a Husband, Patricia Mohammed, well known film-maker and Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine and Rex Dixon, British- born, Trinidad resident painter, take up the lighter side of a global education in a life together of companionship and travel that spans over two decades. In the book, they curate memories with humour and pathos, combining text, sometimes nonsense rhyme, with Rex’s illustrations, of encounters from Australia, Japan, India and Namibia, Canada and the United States, from the Caribbean – Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados, Cuba and Haiti, and from Northern Ireland, London and The Hague. Each entry in the book, whether visual or text, is an idiosyncratic experience and aesthetic feel of place, giving the reader a snapshot of that moment in travel time.

Professor Elizabeth Walcott- Hackshaw, in her remarks on the opening night of the exhibition and book launch, described the book as a ‘quirky’ collection. Indeed it is. One is reminded of the work of Will Self and Ralph Steadman at first glance. While we receive humour, we are also treated to a studied observation of the spaces and cultures through Mohammed’s eyes. Complimenting the essays, are not only Dixon’s intriguing illustrations, but poems and postcards in his handwriting. These pieces add a feeling of intimacy, as if one is privy to a personal journal. Though Dixon comes across most times as an unwilling traveller in Mohammed’s narrative, his poems suggest a personality that finds humour through the darkness. ‘Exhibition Blues’ is a particularly frank and humorous piece on the artist’s view of the academy and audiences that attend the exhibitions. Another, ‘Hotel Inglaterra’, pulls past and present together in the manner of a time-traveller – the traveller out on the sunny streets of Seville conjuring through memory the ghostly presence of the Moors. These are well-read travellers and, while the places that they visit, come to life through people, events and personal observations, the books that they have read also contribute to the shape of their vision and experience of space.

Most of the text is Patricia Mohammed’s.

In her introduction to the book she notes that ‘One of the perks of a fairly successful academic career is the opportunity to see the world through relatively privileged circumstances…” These are not casual vacationers, though some travels are vacations.

The pair usually enters new spaces through work-related activities.

Travel is a means of exploring their respective disciplines. The momentum of each country – its cultures and sights – is brought back to Trinidad where memory becomes a medium through which the small, island space is expanded. In the artist’s studio in Maracas Valley, a painting comes into being. In the study up the hill, a text begins to take birth. We get peeps into locations like Oxford and Haiti, Namibia and India. Yet even uneventful days in Mayaro have something to offer.

On her process, Mohammed says, “The way that I’ve worked is organically. I go where the work is taking me. You do a piece of history and that history reveals gaps and that gap moves you on to fill that gap. I’m constantly filling in blank spaces. That is where I think and try to imagine ‘what does it do for me as a person and how do I make that knowledge available to others? I keep hoping that any gaps that I leave out, someone will fill in. I’m also telling stories as part of a conversation with others.’” The exhibition Travels with a Husband runs at Soft Box S t u d i o s Ga l l e r y, 9 Alcazar Street, St Clair until De cember 30.