The ekphrastic mode

Nick Makoha on how a painting by neo-expressionist artist Jean-Michel Basquiat inspired a moment of intense self-discovery

Untitled (Cadmium) is part of the High Museum of Art's permanent collection in Atlanta, US

Recently, my work has been in the exploration of the black ekphrastic mode. In other words, my poetry praxis has been in response to the haptic temporalities of black portraiture, black story, black history, black music, black myth and the surrealism that connects them. Not as a banal exploration into black identity but rather a creative experiment to centre the black experience within the human experience. I realise now my viewing of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s 1984 painting 'Untitled (Cadmium)' helped breach a lack of confidence I had about taking such a risk.

Cadmium comes from the Latin cadmia, named after the Greek mythological character Κάδμος, Cadmus, a Phoenician and the founder of Thebes who sowed the ground with dragon’s teeth to bring forth its first inhabitants.

His purpose was not to find Thebes but rather to save his sister Europa from the immortal Zeus. Thebes is also the birthplace of the stoic Zeno of Citium, who once said, 'Man conquers the world by conquering himself.'

Cadmium is also a soft, silvery-white metal with the symbol Cd. I studied biochemistry as my undergraduate degree, and I remember that in the process of cadmium plating, it is often electroplated onto alloys such as steel, iron, and copper to protect it from corrosion making said metals resistant to alkali attack. Cadmium’s atomic number is 48. The same age I was when I travelled to the United States to view Jean-Michel Basquiat’s painting Cadmium at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta in 2022 for the first time. It was just after the pandemic. I was a little anxious about flying by myself even though I had done this often as a child between one parent and the other, between one country and another, between one life and the other. It almost didn’t happen. The overnight Greyhound that was supposed to get me from Pittsburgh to Atlanta was delayed, so I missed my connecting bus in Charlotte.