Visual Work
VISUAL
WORK
The book has pictures. The pictures have weight. Pictures are another vocabulary in the same project. The prose tells you. The bars play it back. The image holds you there.
Lineage
Another vocabulary, same project.
The work sits inside a long Black tradition: from Jackie Ormes’ Torchy Brown in the 1930s, through Friday Foster in the 1970s, to the Black Comix Day generation now. Black creators making serial visual stories about Black life on their own terms.
The sensibility here is hip-hop. The page as a verse. The panel as a bar. The gutter as the breath between. Same posture as the records. Same voice as the books. Same project.
Current Practice
Enemies of God, the chapter art.
The visible visual work right now lives inside the book. Enemies of God ships with a per-chapter art bible, fourteen chapters of cinematic, painterly images keyed to specific scenes.
Zurara on the dock at Lagos, August 8, 1444. Al-Maghīlī arriving at Touat. Saharan Jewish goldsmiths at their forges. Mezuzahs on mud-brick doorposts. The fatwa being written. The Voyages Database gap, rendered as a map.
Oil-painting tone. Chiaroscuro. Specific geography. Specific clothing. The brief is Kehinde Wiley meets Rembrandt meets the Sahara.
Roughly fifty illustrations across the manuscript. A visual essay sitting inside the prose, the pictures arguing the same case the words argue.Art Prompt Bible
1444 Zurara on the dock. The first chronicle. The first scene.
Selected Plates
Six scenes from the manuscript.
Ch. 1 · Plate 01
Lagos, August 8, 1444.
Gomes Eanes de Zurara on the dock. 235 captives offloaded. Portuguese crowns gleam under cathedral light. Oil-painting tone, Rembrandt shadow.
Ch. 6 · Plate 12
Tamantīṭ, 1490.
Al-Maghīlī arrives at the Touat oases. The fatwa, mid-composition. Mud-brick walls, dusk light, ink on parchment. The order is given.
Ch. 4 · Plate 08
The forge.
Saharan Jewish goldsmiths at their work. Fire-light on dark skin, on hammered metal. The craft that funded the trans-Saharan economy, in the hands of the people erased from it.
Ch. 7 · Plate 17
The doorpost.
A mezuzah on a mud-brick threshold. Specific geography. Specific scripture. The smallest possible artifact, the largest possible argument.
Ch. 9 · Plate 24
The Daggatoun.
A North African Jewish community, photographed in oil, claiming descent from the trans-Saharan exiles. The 1870s testimony, painted forward.
Ch. 12 · Plate 38
The thread, recovered.
A Lemba elder. The Cohen Modal Haplotype rendered as a strand of light. The thread the chroniclers tried to cut, photographed at the moment it is picked back up.
Coming Next
Beyond the book.
A graphic-narrative project drawing from the same archive is in development. Long-form sequential art on the trans-Saharan story, told the way a record album is told: side A and side B, intermissions, deep cuts, no filler.
It is forthcoming, not announced. Subscribers get the first reveal. Everyone else gets it when it ships.
Stay close
First look.Volume Two.
Chapter-art reveals. Cover reveal. Plate previews. The forthcoming graphic-narrative project. Subscribers see it first.