Rex Dixon's new work, Jane Eyre: Caribbean Draw­ings fo­cus­es on mi­gra­tions and us­es two nov­els by two fe­male writ­ers to en­act his sev­er­al forms of jour­ney­ings: there are voy­ages across wa­ter and across time; move­ment from re­al­i­ty to imag­i­na­tive re­con­struc­tion and from writ­ing to draw­ing.

Dixon reads Char­lotte Bronte's nov­el Jane Eyre through Jean Rhys' Wide Sar­gas­so Sea and finds cor­re­spon­dences in his own life and ca­reer. In adding his own per­son­al read­ing Dixon adds an­oth­er lay­er to the many read­ings and imag­in­ings that have been in­spired by a fe­male nov­el­ist who nev­er vis­it­ed the Caribbean, but whose nov­el evoked a pow­er­ful re­sponse by a Caribbean writer.

The draw­ings speak of Dixon's move­ment from Eng­land to North­ern Ire­land and to Ja­maica and then Trinidad. They are al­so ex­cur­sions in­to his ear­ly ca­reer as de­sir­ing writer and teacher. They are il­lu­mined by his read­ing of the nov­els and his re­search in­to the lives of these writ­ers. But they are al­so about mem­o­ry or even child­hood night­mares that sur­face like the ants crawl­ing across the pa­per in these draw­ings. Such mem­o­ries are sug­gest­ed by the re­peat­ed re­frain on p 33 'Char­lotte Char­lotte hold on tight in the mid­dle of the night'.

The draw­ings in Dixon's work sig­ni­fy the de­sire to go be­yond the bound­aries of ac­cept­ed re­al­i­ty and to do so by ex­plor­ing the in­ter­stices or the in-be­tween shad­ow shapes of ex­is­tence through a form of dream work; and read­ing is one form of dream­ing. Fig­ures dart out from the cor­ners of ex­pe­ri­ence as they be­come nudged in­to new mean­ings by epiphan­ic mo­ments of recog­ni­tion on read­ing a lit­er­ary text.

Phan­tas­magor­i­cal shapes that come from the artist's mus­ings crowd the bound­aries of the page and here fem­i­nist schol­ar Pa­tri­cia Mo­hammed's in­ter­pre­ta­tions and gloss of the work pro­vide fruit­ful points of en­try.

The ship is key—hark­ing to the jour­neys of the au­thor Jean Rhys who left Do­mini­ca to trav­el to Eng­land, and that of the artist Rex Dixon who left Eng­land to trav­el to the Caribbean. But it is al­so about the Bronte sis­ters who are claimed by both Ire­land and Eng­land, and whose writ­ings are very much about mind jour­ney­ing.

Dixon asks us to ques­tion the na­ture of re­al­i­ty and how we are ma­nip­u­lat­ed in­to see­ing one par­tic­u­lar ver­sion of a sto­ry. For Jane Eyre, on one lev­el, as the sketch­es point out, is about how a mind can be co­erced in­to be­liev­ing what is not true. Hence sev­er­al pages are giv­en over to the rev­e­la­tions by Ma­son and to Jane Eyre's recog­ni­tion of some part of the lie told to her by Rochester, whom Dixon calls a 'chancer'. And is Wide Sar­gas­so Sea not about ad­dress­ing how such un­truths might be un­pinned?

Christophine, the black Mar­tini­can nurse who in WSS un­will­ing­ly gave An­toinette (lat­er to be re­named Bertha by Rochester), the love po­tion for her hus­band, casts doubt on seem­ing­ly con­crete re­al­i­ty. Through her scep­ti­cism Dixon opens the door to the con­fu­sion be­tween re­al­i­ty and dream.

Eng­land and Thorn­field are trans­formed in­to card­board hous­es in these draw­ings, which means that Dixon is in­ter­pret­ing the core of WSS. More specif­i­cal­ly 'Eng­land is a dream' and 'they tell me I am in Eng­land, but I don't be­lieve them. We lost our way to Eng­land' (p 88). This hits at the very heart of colo­nial fan­ta­sy of Eng­land as the moth­er coun­try; a lie ex­pe­ri­enced by em­i­grants to this day.

There is an­oth­er form of trans­mu­ta­tion in the pages of this book and that is the kind that comes when the artist al­lows his medi­um to wan­der in­to dream­scapes. Ink al­lows such jour­ney­ings in­to the sub­con­scious where shapes emerg­ing at the edges or shad­ows of a work take on pow­er­ful sig­nif­i­cance and beck­on to spir­it pres­ences or deeply buried mem­o­ries, al­low­ing lines to move in­to new cor­re­spon­dences. Look for ex­am­ple at page 31, where three ships ges­ture to Christo­pher Colum­bus the nav­i­ga­tor who sailed to the Amer­i­c­as by mis­take. But the tex­tu­al ref­er­ences point to a pe­ri­od spent by the artist in Belfast 'just 200 yards from Belfast Lough'.

The draw­ings speak of hid­den psy­chic spaces. The lives of Char­lotte, Emi­ly and Anne Bronte on the sur­face were re­strained and con­tained and yet their imag­i­na­tions led to works deemed at the time to be coarse and un­la­dy­like. So 'she dreamed of wild beast­ies' is the script on p 36 where fig­ures ap­pear fe­line and fierce en­chained yet flee­ing. These and oth­ers seem to beck­on to an else­where. But these places are dis­parate and not con­tained by time, by one mem­o­ry or one read­ing.

A nov­el, says Dixon, is made up of frag­ments that the nov­el­ist tries to put to­geth­er and his draw­ings are an at­tempt to put to­geth­er an­oth­er set of frag­ments. These fo­cus on how time changes our per­spec­tive, but al­so how a tran­si­tion from one cli­mate to an­oth­er al­so changes how we see. P 39 is sig­nif­i­cant here since it brings to­geth­er the pe­ri­ods 1839 and 2018 the time of the com­ple­tion of this book and re­minds us of the long ges­ta­tion of Jean Rhys' book by fram­ing them with­in an idea and im­age of chrysalis. In­sects flit­ter, a but­ter­fly emerges from its co­coon. One tiny crea­ture peers in­quis­i­tive­ly at a large but­ter­fly mor­ph­ing in­to a face. And, at the bot­tom of the page like an­oth­er sig­na­ture, 'I did these draw­ings in Trinidad'.

In­ter­est­ing­ly, from this mo­ment on shapes be­come al­most plain. They emerge as por­traits of the artist as we see on pages 42 and 43, where colours grad­u­al­ly be­gin to ex­plode from the pages and seem even to at­tempt a ca­coph­o­ny of sound (p 45). Yet the man who is new­ly ar­rived from Eng­land feels on­ly si­lence (p 47). Is it Rochester of Wide Sar­gas­so Sea or Dixon who can­not bear the si­lence and the heat?

On these pages colour at times sig­ni­fies the heat of an­oth­er's opin­ion and the sear­ing ef­fect of Rochester's con­dem­na­tion of his Caribbean life. Sec­tion four is an ex­pres­sion­ist ren­der­ing of the con­fu­sion and treach­eries ex­pe­ri­enced by both Jane Eyre and An­toinette/Bertha. The leap through fire be­comes a sign of the dou­ble re­al­i­ty that both women live.

The book clos­es with An­toinette/Bertha giv­en the last word in full colour. Her 'long black hair stream­ing against the flames as she stood'. The great Caribbean nov­el­ist and philoso­pher Wil­son Har­ris read this last event as record­ed by Jean Rhys as a leap in­to the tree of life of pre -Columbian lore. It is apoc­a­lyp­tic there and here. It is a leap to life.

These pages have al­so tak­en leaps. They bring to­geth­er writ­ing and draw­ing. This hy­brid form emerges from close in­ter­tex­tu­al read­ing and a form of art that seeks new av­enues for the artist as he nav­i­gates past and present and the many lay­ers of ex­pe­ri­ence that shape how we see.

BOX:

Rex Dixon's book Jane Eyre: Caribbean Draw­ings was launched to­geth­er with some of the draw­ings from the book at the James Wray Gallery in Belfast on Au­gust 29, 2019. The book is joint­ly pub­lished by Mara­cas Val­ley Stu­dio Pro­duc­tions, Trinidad and Han­sib Pub­lish­ers, Lon­don. It was re­viewed by Trinida­di­an lit­er­ary schol­ar res­i­dent in the Re­pub­lic of Ire­land, Dr Jean An­toine-Dunne at the open­ing.