Several years ago I thought about making a show about the great Dominican-born writer Jean Rhys. I had been rereading her work and was struck, again, by the vividness of her descriptions, her internal worlds filled with colour and despair and wit. Re-reading her troubling novels and short stories reminded me of how much they frightened me when I first read them many years ago. Back then - I was a teenager - I knew, instinctively, that I did not have enough life to understand her brilliant work about dissolution, about being set adrift in the world and being, as James Wood once wrote, 'five pounds from the gutter.' But eventually life catches up with all of us, and it was in 1980, when I was twenty, that I began to understand her - through another writer's lens. That's the year the Nobel Prize-winning poet Derek Walcott published his poem 'Jean Rhys' in The New Yorker. The poem is a statement of fact about empathy. You can't be a truly great writer, I don't think, unless you engage in the discipline of imagining someone else's life, how they might feel, what might make them them. In this and other poems, Derek's greatest writing is a marriage of his 'I' - the poet's 'I' - and the novelist's ability to see society for what it is, while imagining what it could be. I wondered what it would be like to try and create what Walcott had devised on the page: an exhibition about understanding a great artist. What tools could I use? Other artists, such as Francis Picabia, Kara Walker, and Hurvin Anderson, also made work that touched on, variously, Rhys's fascination with women, her legacy of colonialism, and the beauty and violence of her native Dominica.
Read more at: Jean Rhys: A Conversation Between Hilton Als and Peter Huhne, Luncheon Magazine No. 20