The Death Throes of Compé Anansi — Exhibition by Zavier Foster ’26

The Death Throes of Compé Anansi is an exhibition of recent works by Princeton senior and politics major Zavier Foster.

Video Tour

Zavier Foster ’26, a Politics major who is pursuing a minor in visual arts takes us on a tour of his exhibition.

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Admission & Details

The exhibition is free and open to the public.

Gallery hours

Lucas Gallery is open Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. – 6 p.m.

Directions

Get directions to the Lucas Gallery, located on the second floor of 185 Nassau Street in Princeton.

Accessibility

The Lucas Gallery is an accessible venue. The best accessible entrance to the Lucas Gallery is via a first-floor central elevator. Visit our Venues and Studios section for accessibility information at our various locations. Guests in need of access accommodations are invited to contact the Lewis Center at 609-258-5262 or email LewisCenter@princeton.edu at least one week in advance of the event date.

 

Artist’s Statement

Zavier describes his work/exhibition as follows:

I have grown to love my art practice as a mode for storytelling. In the past, I have explored themes of Black diasporic lineage and representation, and the cacophonic and chaotic process of trying to define that. Merging those themes with storytelling has encouraged me to experiment with different narrative methods including pseudo auto-biographical documentaries, multimedia drawings, and hand drawn animation. Since my stories are rooted in Blackness, I wanted to build this theme through the metaphor of the Caribbean Trickster God of Stories, Anansi. Anansi is the embodiment of stories from the diaspora’s culture and I imagine his continued existence in the minds of Black storytellers is a result of not succumbing to a fatal wound to his being caused by slavery.

Exhibition Photos

Death throes are the painful and chaotic convulsions of a living being, idea, or political regime before its demise. Literally, this would include a man’s dying breath and the dead bird posture of dinosaur fossils. In reference to the death throes of something like democracy this could include extreme polarization, voter suppression, invalidation of election results, increased tolerance for violence, censoring of media, weaponized misinformation, administrative purging of federal employees, dismantling watchdog organizations, federally sanctioned paramilitarism, normalization of aggressive language, institutional erosion, high wealth inequality, overall executive aggrandizement, insurrections—you get the idea.

As a monumental change occurs (life to death or democracy to fascism…), there are signals of struggles for or against it. I imagine that these struggles could go on for a long, long time, turning the death throes into a continually straining state of being. This definition resonated with me as a way to describe an act of rebellion against erasure. I know convulsions are still frantic and desperate, but they also have been directed chaotically to endure and allow the body a stubborn refusal of its impending death. I interpreted it this way because I fear the death that comes with being forgotten. This fear is less about forgetting myself or an individual and more about forgetting the whole. For example, the millennia-old N|uu language of South Africa is virtually extinct with only one fluent speaker left: 90 year-old Katerina Esau. However, vehemently opposed to the death of her language, Katerina wrote “!QHOI N|A TJHOI” or Ostrich and Tortoise, a children’s storybook. Stories work to combat a complete death because they do at least these two things: inform and inspire. They give different perspectives of a current, past, altered, or totally imagined world. Katerina Esau’s efforts to preserve her culture through folktales reflects the importance of stories to a people’s longevity.

My parents used children’s storybooks of Jamaican nursery rhymes and duppy tales to introduce me to Compé Anansi. He is known as the spider god of stories, originally Ananse (meaning spider) in the Akan religion of West Africa. As a trickster deity, he wrested ownership of all the world’s stories through his cunning against the Akan God of all creation, Nyame. Therefore, the visual metaphor often depicts Anansi as a spider spinning webs of both lies and stories to reach his goals. Anansi is one of the few African deities to fully permeate the Black diaspora, a testament to the power he holds as the embodiment of storytelling. His epithet, Compé, is derived from Caribbean Patois and Creole, translating to “companion” or “friend.” This title—alongside Bra and Bredda—reflected the intimacy storytellers felt toward his character and symbolism. In her book, Anansi’s Journey, Emily Zobel Marshall explains this as a survivalist function: “The Anansi stories were a means of maintaining a sense of community and humanity in the face of an institution that sought to strip both away.”

I imagine that the onset of racial slavery, and the traversing of the Middle Passage, was a fatal wound to the ontological wholeness of Anansi and his pantheon. I personify him as a character facing the end of his existence as his people were forced through their ordeals—one whose hard-headed passion and anger prolonged his dying moments and allowed him to endure. Thus the willful success and proliferation of his stories, from the Maroons of Jamaica and revolutionaries of Haiti to the books in my basement bookshelf and animated YouTube videos, is a byproduct of his stubborn throes. Wracked by the sorrow of loss and fear of erasure, Anansi plays his role as the conduit of stories.