Desmond Alli: How I became a rebel artist

By Desmond Alli

I was born in the colony of British Guiana, on the South American coast, at a time of great change and great upheaval. The year of my birth, 1953, coincided with the first election held under universal suffrage in British Guiana. An important step for a small, multi-ethnic country in its struggle for independence, which would eventually come in 1966. The day of my birth, August 3rd, occurred during the celebrations of the anniversary of the Emancipation of slaves of African descent in British Guiana. The capital city of Georgetown where I was born was built on a swamp; the land had been reclaimed and made inhabitable by slave labourers. History and politics would go on to shape my experiences from childhood into adulthood, from an innocent child into the man I am today: an Artist in Resistance.

I was the last of three children born to a Muslim father and a Roman Catholic mother. My father, Ivan Alli, was a descendant of East Indian indentured servants who had come to British Guiana in 1838. My Roman Catholic mother, Stella Elisabeth Gonsalves, was of mixed Portuguese and indigenous South American ancestry. The ethnic and religious diversity in my home reflected the diversity of my country, which is known as ¨the land of six peoples¨. Although I was born in the heart of the city, at the age of four, my family moved to a housing scheme in East Ruimveldt, Georgetown that had been built on an abandoned sugar estate.

As a child growing up, I was a member of the Pius X altar servers. I learned mass in Latin and took it as a subject in High School, at the Guyana Oriental College. Later on, the Jesuit priest Father Michael Campbell Johnson SJ, founder of the Guyana Institute for Social Research and Action (GISRA), a linguist, instructed me in Spanish and Portuguese languages and introduced me to Latin American history and geography. Guyana (the name of the independent country) is the only English-speaking country in South America. As a youngster, I always questioned what I was taught. One textbook, that I vividly remember using in school, was Nelsons´ West Indian Reader, which showed illustrations of indigenous people as cannibals and pagan worshipping people.

My father died as I was preparing for the General Certificate of Education (GCE) exams in high school. His passing would bring an abrupt end to my education and my childhood as I knew it. My two siblings got married shortly after and left home, they were both teenagers. After that, it was just my mother and I who remained in our home. To provide for ourselves, my mother did domestic jobs and washed clothes, and I did odd jobs in the neighborhood.

As the 1960s grew to a close, Guyana gained independence, but there was massive electoral rigging in the first post-independence election in 1968, known as the ¨Fairy Tale¨ election. This was followed in 1969, by a secessionist insurrection organized by some indigenous people and ranchers and became known as the Rupununi Uprising, which was cruelly crushed by the military. By 1971, to avoid being drafted under the ¨Every citizen a soldier¨, policy of the dictator Forbes Burnham, I obtained a passport, and with the help of friends and family, flew to the border town of Lethem in the Rupununi, in a small aircraft. I had to leave my mother behind which I deeply regretted. From there, I crossed over to Brazil on foot and commenced a journey of 10,000 miles that would last seven years. During these years, apart from Brazil, I would also travel to Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, and French Guiana.

My orientation to being a sculptor and painter was fated, even though I was never formally trained. My travels throughout Latin America made me more sensitive to the plight of the poor and powerless. I was deeply impacted by the tortured life of poverty that I saw people living, not as some maintained due to their isolation, but to the direct or indirect exploitation by the old colonial powers that had now been converted to industrial powers. This eventually led to my commitment to revolutionary change. Along the way, I read books like Open Veins of Latin America, by Eduardo Galeano, and How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by acclaimed Guyanese historian Walter Rodney.

I traveled through the Amazon jungle and spent time with the Anaconda people. In their community, there was a large totem in the form of a carved Anaconda snake. The young men would sit under it and carve small pieces made of hardwood that I later recognized as Banya. I learned to carve wood from them, and I learned fast. The tribal leader took a liking to me and said that one day I would be a great sculptor. He believed I had gained this skill from my indigenous ancestors. The time I spent with my friend, Brazilian artist Homero Amazonas, taught me to be versatile in the use of color.

During this time, I rejected ideas that had been planted by European historians and artists about how history and art should be interpreted because it was taken from their world and their aesthetic. They instilled in us an inferiority complex. I felt that whether in my native Guyana or in Latin America, it has all been to the detriment of our culture and way of life, the destruction of our indigenous peoples had been replaced by the Atlantic slave trade.  The style that I developed for my art during these years was deliberate, and entirely my own, taken from the study of the jungles, the terrain, and the archaeological ruins that I encountered during my travels. I wanted to use art to reinterpret the history of the region from our local perspective. I wanted to be an Artist in Resistance.

I returned to Guyana in the late 1970s because I wanted to become engaged in the struggle to overthrow the dictator, Forbes Burham. My work as an artist developed alongside my political activism. In early 1979, I met Walter Rodney who had now involved himself in Guyanese politics. He, along with two colleagues, had come to my neighborhood to share a political newsletter called ¨Dayclean¨, and we struck up a conversation about art. I had just finished carving a map of Africa out of the bark of a jamoon tree trunk. He would later return on his own to visit me and eventually hold political meetings in my neighborhood. The government´s thugs would often stone and heckle the speakers at these events. Walter Rodney´s presence brought out many young men like myself, and my area became a major unit of his party: the Working People´s Alliance. I headed the ¨brigade¨ or the unit, for my neighborhood of East Ruimveldt along with Gary Saul, known as Rastaman.

Dr Walter Rodney was assassinated by a car bomb on 13 June 1980. In 1988, I left Guyana after several threats were made to my life, and I returned to the Andean countries in South America, where my knowledge and art developed further along with my commitment to change. I returned to Guyana in the late 1990s, got married, and started a family. General elections were held in Guyana in 1992. They were the first free and fair elections since 1964.

Today, I still live in the neighborhood of East Ruimveldt where my parents moved to when I was four, and where I met Walter Rodney, who continues to influence my art. I continue to dedicate my life to the idea that art can play a transformative role in society. I continue to use my art and my voice for this purpose. I continue to paint under the banner of ¨Art in Resistance¨.

Welcome to the grapa blog!

THE GRAPA is (for now) a contemporary art gallery without a physical presence, we are a virtual gallery. Since we opened our electronic doors in June 2023, we have embraced this fact and we have relied on social media to find and connect with the political art community globally. We have been active in posting and sharing on social media, particularly Instagram, where we have our largest online presence. We have been overwhelmed by the positive response, support, and encouragement that THE GRAPA has received. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

The social media posts that have generated the most interest tended to overwhelmingly be informational or ideational; about which political art exhibitions you should visit in 2024, issues that women artists have championed, ideas that can change the world, incarcerated artists, posts about political artists, and in our increasingly popular political art bulletin: #thegrapagram!

Like many things at THE GRAPA, we would like to have the gallery evolve organically and be responsive to the needs of the political art community of which we are a small, and proud part. But most importantly, we would like THE GRAPA to make a difference, and to reflect our values. We have therefore decided to start ¨the grapa blog¨; intentionally uncapped, intentionally humble, but very determined to make this space one that is useful, and which we hope, can meaningfully contribute to driving the type of change that we would like to realize in this big, beautiful and complex world of ours.

It is our hope, that this space will be a blank canvas of sorts, for those on the frontline of the political art scene to connect, to share ideas and knowledge openly and safely, on a wide range of relevant and topical issues. It has the added benefit, of providing more space than the average 30-second social media post! To date, GRAPA artist Desmond Alli´s artwork is our most viewed post on Instagram, 1,000,000 times over, so it seems fitting that we should start this blog series with a post by him.

We hope that the grapa blog, will be a place for you to find information, inspiration, useful connections, and impactful interactions!

Thank you for dropping by, do stay connected.