The project aims to transform two Caribbean neo-slave narrative poems into a multisensory experience using vocal and abstract sound and textured visual art pieces. Going through the process of decoding and reassembling based on my own literary analysis and interpretation, this project ‘reads’ representations of Black humanity and the nonhuman world in the selected poems. The artistic elements work to inform our understanding of interspecies collaboration during slavery in new ways but also, more broadly, engage our embodied experience as living, breathing creatures profoundly embedded in a shared natural world. I will create two large-scale visual art pieces and two sound clips alongside the original written form of the selected poems through my perceptible interpretation. The triangular relationship between the text, the images, and the sounds, where each element is informed by the other, is an attempt to encourage others to think about how we can indulge the sensory dimensions of our intellectual understanding of literature. The project also widens access for an audience of differing physical abilities. Furthermore, a multi-sensory experience of Caribbean neo-slave narratives can provide a powerful tool for examining the limitations and possibilities of written literature in re-presenting the intimacies and enigmas of embodied contact with our complicated world.

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Readings of the poems in Caribbean creole languages will be layered with sounds and music that reflect some of the distinct images in each poem. Visual art is incorporated into the project to demonstrate how we can manipulate the written word by visually illustrating the mental images that are evoked. As the pieces work to engage the body, they intend to make the audience feel like an integral part of the art rather than passive observers quietly inspecting its content from a comfortable distance. We gain a creative licence for the sake of interpretation as readers but also as part of an audience (considering literary and cultural texts are themselves artefacts). Ultimately, this research project aims to encourage reflections on the ways we can deepen and disrupt how we engage with literature or, more specifically, how we come to understand Blackness and the nonhuman world in Caribbean neo-slave narratives.