NIC[O] BRIERRE AZIZ

Maroon, Mawòn (2 Sides II A Book) 2023. Diptych, collage; graduation tassel fibers, cowrie shells, Dogon Tribe beads, and silkscreen on American Target Company shooting range target posters, colonial maple pine.

Creatively interprets the experience of Jy’Harin:

“The system is broken, it’s really broke, if you can’t prove your point without lying that means there is no point to prove! All a person got is they word but you not listening.”

Depending on which of history’s sides you resonate with most, “maroon” as we know it today has French and/or Taino roots. According to one book, the word comes from the French “marron” which meant “feral” or “fugitive.” Another book would state that maroon as we know it originates with the Spanish “cimarrón”, via the Taino people, meaning “untamed.” This layered multiplicity is a microcosm of the construct of Blackness—especially within a country such as the United States.

When I hear the word maroon, I think of enslaved people who escaped and liberated themselves to establish their own communities in countries such as Haiti, Brazil, Jamaica and the United States. This term and color, which has these varied meanings and relationships to “freedom,” instantly came to mind when I familiarized myself with Jy’Harin’s story. With that, I intended to create a piece influenced by some of his specific feelings and desires—his love of football, his desire to go to college and be an air traffic controller, his eight sisters. I also sought to illuminate the Black body, expression and image’s relationship to aspiration, captivity, control and capitalism.

In 2019, I found and purchased these original arrest reports featuring Black men from the 1930s–1960s and their eyes were, ironically and eerily, listed as maroon. The composition of these arrest reports juxtaposed with Black men from Morehouse College from the same time period, all screen printed onto a Black body silhouette produced by the American Target Company, intend to question the ways we might continue to be “targets” in our respective quests for liberation. The presence of elements such as the Dogon tribe beads, the cowrie shells and the loosely strung Black and Maroon fibers within the Colonial Maple Pinewood frame additionally reference the fortitude and eternality of African aesthetics along with the tensions that those of the diaspora must navigate within an imperialist based world.