Sebastien boncy
October 7th - December 2nd, 2022
Sebastien Boncy, born in Haiti and shipwrecked in Texas, is all six members of the Pugilist Press collective. In the last decade, he’s maintained a hyperlocal practice centered around an online photographic archive of the city: Purple Time Space Swamp. Sebastien is currently doing the adjunct shuffle in the City of Syrup. He takes pictures daily, distributes them freely, does it for the culture.
Sebastien Boncy was also a Visiting Artist in Residence at Visible Records from September 25th to October 7th, 2022. During his residency, Boncy offered a two-session workshop called “Pictures Every Day.” Participants “look at art as a practice that prioritizes discovery and healing. A daily, meditative practice of image making that invites the world in with minimal a priori understandings, and that opens doors for the image maker to be affected by the way they are processing the world, by their own photographs.”
I’ve Never Held A Rifle
By Sebastien Boncy
Laroche calls me from the cordless. He’s on the roof, looking through his father’s binoculars at the American choppers hovering near the port. Haiti is being invaded, again, but I’m just glad to have the day off. Just a soft, petit bourgeois kid on surprise holiday from the tedium of Catholic high school. My parents would often point out that many of the brothers who ran the school were veterans of the Algerian war, but the significance wouldn’t register for years. The only white men I see that day are on television, and they’re geared up for Ragnarök. Absolute overkill, since nobody cares enough to shoot back. On the news, the camera lingers on the only two casualties, victims of heat stroke. Beet-red Abbott and Costello, in their Caribbean début, are stripped of their armor and laid out on a Humvee; the pair are being delicately hydrated by their comrades in green. If war is a joke, it’s a good one.
I wonder what kind of day Thébaud is having. All through middle school, he was the kid who, daily, leveled twin index fingers at the clouds and shot down imaginary combatants. And all through high school, dreamt of the Air Force. Go Joe! Did he jump gate to get a closer look? Probably. Ten years in the future, my brother tells me about a friend that jumped gate to abscond to a party. But, by this point, the Island is meaner, and everyone shoots back. The poor kid gets his right hand blown off trying to sneak back home. His father hired a security guard, and dude did his job, I suppose.
Two years on from the invasion, my bags are packed, and I’m headed the other way. The writing is on wall about the hardening of Haiti, and I have no interest in becoming a Jacques Roumain protagonist. I come to the States knowing nothing of MOVE, or Stonewall or Kent State, but I’ll learn soon enough. In the meantime, I go clubbing with my Arab friends. The Towers won’t burn until 2001, and for now, we can afford to be loud, and obnoxious, and act like we’re free. But we don’t overdo it; horsing around at Metropolis, we see the rent-a-cop rest his hand on his firearm. We chill, and we leave. The next week, driving home from Coco Loco, we see a kid bleeding out in the street. They tell you it doesn’t look like the movies. They lie. That poor kid is slumped over on the median, dramatically light by crossing headlights, as the claret stain eats away at the bright white of his shirt. In the sober early morning, Tareq come to my room to say that it was just on the news that the ambulance did not make it in time.
My beard is grey, husband and father, I’ve been here so long that mother tongue sounds like a second language. It’s the Days of Fire now, by all definitions, at all times. In the midst of almost daily mass shooting, in the midst of an epidemic of state-sanctioned murder, Texas, in the zenith of its hold-my-beer epoch, passes Open Carry. I think about dying in the road, like the kid, over nothing special. I think about the dead body I refused to look at on the side of the road in 1995 on my way to Saint-Firmin’s house. I think about all of the times I looked at the wrong person the wrong way. How soon before I get shot? My first open carry sighting is some Asian dude at CVS, another middle-aged schmo buying Q-tips, and the sight of him triggers no fear. This day is no different from any day, and the potential for sudden, life-ending violence is the same as it ever was. Me, I’ve never held a rifle. But I’ve never known peace either, not in the 28 years since the invasion, and not anytime before that.
