The featured work is The Healing Stream — a book that unfurls like a scroll to twelve feet in length. This piece finds its title in a famous Jamaican folk song: “Dip dem, Bedward, dip dem. / Dip dem in the healing stream. / Dip dem deep, but not too deep. / Dip dem to cure bad feeling.” This piece commemorates the agency of preacher Alexander Bedward, whose assertion of Blackness was deemed a threat to the establishment. Drawn on black paper (“Cleave to the black,” as Paul Bogle said), its unfolding format pays homage to the 1926 book The Royal Parchment Scroll of Black Supremacy, by Reverend Fitz Balintine Pettersburg, which was a “stream of consciousness polemic against the white colonial power structure—a palimpsest of Afrocentric thought brimming with rage and energy.” This text was the blueprint for Howell’s book, The Promise Key. The Healing Stream is presented suspended so its narrative can be viewed from both sides.

The second of my works in the exhibition, The Promise Key—Deluded Creatures, is a small, sculptural work that draws directly from life of Leonard Howell (1898–1981), a man widely considered by many to be the “First Rasta.” In 1926 he published the pamphlet The Promise Key under his Hindu pen name, G. G. Maragh, and was subsequently arrested, tried for sedition, and imprisoned for his beliefs, along with several of his followers. Despite this, the Rastafari movement grew, as did its call for the promotion of positive Black racial identity, which would eventually take hold globally.

The third and final work is a drawing about the 2020 killing of George Floyd. Not only did pressure literally eliminate his life but the pressure arising from the incident caused the eruption of a movement. This was also a moment for global self-reflection and change—through this incident that happened in foreign, we Jamaicans were forced to confront how we bear and perpetuate negative pressures in our own daily lives.

The complete overview of Jasmine Thomas Girvan’s featured work can be found in the Kingston Biennial 2022: Pressure Catalogue, which is available for sale in the NGJ Gift Shop.