Years ago, I saw a work by the British-Jamaican artist Donald Rodney that I have never forgotten. It was a house of dark shadows on a wall, configured out of hospital X-rays. In front of it sat a faceless figure, not much more than tattered clothes held up by a broken tree that rose like a spine – or a lynching – out of its frayed shirt collar.
Scissors, words and hands appeared in pale silhouette against the X-rays, intimating the past like a silent movie. Rodney referred to his Black family tree, his ancestral home. The House That Jack Built was made, quite literally, from medical evidence of the disease that would eventually kill him, as it had been fatal to the 75 million Black souls remembered here: Caribbean victims of sickle cell anaemia.
