In Negro Aroused, the figure of a Black man rises. Carved in mahogany, he pushes himself upward elegantly, his hands placed one on top of the other before him. His figure is cut off right under the hips, at the base of the sculpture. The warm tones of the wood aid the illusion that he rises from the earth itself. His head is turned toward the heavens, his mouth set, his eyes wide and determined. Since its first public exhibition 1937, Negro Aroused has become an icon of the Jamaican nationalist movement and of Caribbean art history.
Edna Manley, Negro Aroused, 1935, mahogany wood, 63.5 cm high (National Gallery of Jamaica, Kingston) © the artist’s estate
A Caribbean arrival
The sculptor Edna Manley, née Swithenbank, was born in England to a Jamaican mother and an English father. Raised in the countryside, it wasn’t until the end of the First World War that she started her artistic education in London after moving there as a young woman. While working at the Pensions Branch of the War Office in 1920 she honed her interest in sculpture at the Saint Martin’s School of Art and at the Royal Academy. [1] It was during this period that she reconnected with Norman Manley, her Jamaican cousin who had traveled to England to study law. This sparked a romance that would bring Edna to her mother’s homeland. The couple married and moved with their first child to Jamaica in 1922.
Encountering Jamaica, then a British colony developing its nationalist and anti-colonial movement, would prove formative for the artist. Manley observed a country she had until then known mostly through others’ memories and would focus her interest on the Black working class, which made up most of the island’s population.
Edna Manley, Beadseller, 1922, bronze (National Gallery of Jamaica, Kingston) © the artist’s estate
She produced Beadseller in 1923, which represents a kneeling woman in bronze. The figure gathers her arms to her chest almost in prayer, a rosary-like string of beads clutched in her hands. There is no indication of her status as a bead seller beyond the title. Manley opted to focus on the pose and character of the market seller, capturing her hopes and desperation in her pose. The figure itself is also a study in the geometry of the body, as Manley focused on abstracting the anatomy, reducing the torso, arms, and legs to sharp lines and geometric shapes. This style seems tied to vorticism, a relatively short-lived English avant-garde movement that combined a Cubist approach to the fragmentation of body and space with an interest in industrial machinery and the modern city. Both Manley’s interest in the working and Black population of Jamaica and the stylization of the human figure would continue to be explored into the 1930s when she produced her most politically charged works, which include Negro Aroused.
Shaping Jamaica
Manley’s approach is informed by the growing economic and political tensions in 1920s Jamaica. The island, as with other British Caribbean possessions, was dealing with an economic crisis that would only deepen in the coming years. The boom experienced by the sugar industry during WWI had ended, affecting a considerable part of the population who could not compete with migrant workers arriving from Panama to purchase land. [2] The divide between classes widened and contributed to tensions that would ignite violent clashes in the next decade and reshape Jamaican politics with the formation of pro-workers political parties and influential labor unions.
Jamaica in the Caribbean (underlying map © Google)
The Pan-Africanism movement and anti-colonialist sentiments were also growing and promoting the reevaluation of Jamaica’s African ancestry and the calls for self-determination. Manley, a light-skinned English-Jamaican woman married to a mixed-race lawyer with a developing career in politics, did not remain indifferent. The privileged economic and social status provided by her husband’s work allowed her to continue her artistic production and to connect with different sectors of Jamaican society. Edna Manley involved herself in the development of a local art scene by teaching art and becoming editor of Jamaica’s first literary journal, Focus. [3] During the 1920s, she continued to travel to England to exhibit her work as she did not find spaces or an audience to do so in Jamaica, but by the early 1930s, she was strongly committed to the local art and culture sector.
Norman Manley’s political career and the development of the People’s National Party (PNP), which he founded in 1938, would also foster her interest in political change. The People’s National Party aligned itself with working-class struggles, promoting social democratic policies, universal suffrage, and the island’s independence from Great Britain. Edna Manley herself took part in promoting the PNP, its rallies, and community service. [4] It is in this charged political atmosphere that the artist felt the responsibility to develop a national aesthetic for a rising Jamaica.
Edna Manley, Negro Aroused, 1935, mahogany wood, 63.5 cm high (National Gallery of Jamaica, Kingston) © the artist’s estate
Negro Aroused is a product of this context. The work was sculpted in local wood in 1935 and exhibited to the public in 1937 at Manley’s first individual show in Jamaica. The reception was immensely positive, as the work responded well to the cultural nationalism budding at the time, leading to the purchase of the work by the Institute of Jamaica by public subscription. [5] The piece only measures 63.5 cm in height yet it encapsulates a strength and hope that clearly resonated with the artist and the nationalist movement. It has since also been regarded as an icon of the independence movement in its highlighting of the Black population as encompassing Jamaica’s nationhood.
The nude male figure lifts himself, his body seemingly sprouting from the wooden base (which is part of the sculpture). His arms and hands are disproportionately large for his torso. They are posed in front of his body, framing him and the space between them, in a manner graceful and dancelike. Their thickness emphasizes their shape and power. The lines of his arms lead our gaze to his upturned head, his neck stretched, and his face is set in profile when viewed from the front. The wood is dark and polished, with the careful use of texture to provide depth and interest. The skin is defined by small and very shallow grooves, while deeper and larger ones represent the figure’s short hair. Thin and precise incisions in the wood define his features.
Carved grooves demarcate the skin and hair (detail), Edna Manley, Negro Aroused, 1935, mahogany wood, 63.5 cm high (National Gallery of Jamaica, Kingston) © the artist’s estate
The rounded forms of the body mark a difference from Manley’s interest in the sharp geometry that characterizes Beadseller. In Negro Aroused, the lines are curved, and the tubular quality of the arms adds mass when contrasted with the flatness of the torso. This approach to the human body is not dissimilar to the style found in much of British modernist sculpture, like that produced in the 1920s and 1930s by Alan L. Durst, work she likely knew from her trips to England during that same period. Manley’s work focuses on more than technical experimentation and the study of anatomy through a modernist lens. She was consciously designing an image in response to the political and cultural climate in Jamaica, as she explained: “[I] was trying to create a national vision … trying to put something into being that was bigger than myself and almost other than myself. It [took] me weeks to stop being the Negro Aroused.”[6]
Edna Manley, Negro Aroused (bronze cast), 1982, 78 cm high (The David Boxer/Oynx Foundation Collection National Gallery of Jamaica, Kingston) © the artist’s estate
Manley’s commitment to Jamaican culture and politics would remain steadfast in the coming years. She organized art classes in the Institute of Jamaica in the 1940s which would be the seed for the Jamaica School of Art and Crafts. [7] The school was officially founded in 1950 and is now known as the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts. She would continue to support her husband’s career; Normal Manley would become Chief Minister in 1955 until 1959 and served as Premier from 1959 to 1962. Their son Michael Manley would also follow his footsteps, becoming Prime Minister of Jamaica for the first time in 1972.
Edna Manley, Negro Aroused, Kingston, Jamaica, bronze, 1991 (photo: Kevin Fraser, CC BY-NC 2.0) © the artist’s estate
Edna Manley’s own work would turn more personal and retrospective from the late 1940s onward, exploring emotional themes like grief and the role of women in society. The popular legacy of Negro Aroused as an icon of Black empowerment in an independent Jamaica would also continue, culminating in the commission of a monumental version in bronze to adorn a public space. The bronze version was finished posthumously in 1991 and has since presided over the Caribbean Sea in the Kingston waterfront.
