Richard Mark Rawlins. A Dragon Moko. 6 min read time.
I make work from the position of someone who is always already inside the image and outside the frame at the same time. That tension between visibility and erasure, celebration and critique, sits at the core of Dragon Moko. This work emerges from my continued engagement with Carnival as a site of resistance, satire, and truth telling, and from my lived experience of navigating Blackness through colonial, postcolonial, and American imperial media landscapes. I am interested in how images circulate, how they accrue power, and how they discipline bodies.
Dragon Moko is from a larger series called Carnival Doudou. The conceptual grounding of this work begins with the word “Doudou.” In French, doudou suggests affection, intimacy, a comfort object, or something soft, even a pacifier. In parts of West Africa, however, the term operates very differently, functioning as an insult, a way of naming foolishness. The same word that soothes can also belittle. This slippage mirrors the way political language functions in contemporary America, where words such as “freedom,” “security,” and “law and order” are repeatedly deployed as reassurance while doing real and measurable harm. Language, like imagery, is never neutral; it comforts and disciplines simultaneously.
As I write this, I am sitting with one eye on the clock as they say, preparing to catch a flight home to Trinidad for Carnival in a few days’ time. Speaking of clocks, the Doomsday clock as referenced in the piece is now 85 seconds to Midnight as announced a few hours ago by the Atomic scientists who track this sort of thing. When I created this piece last year it was 89. Carnival here is not an abstract reference point; it is a lived, cyclical reoccurrence that we can’t get away from as Trinbagonians, some would say a be all and end all. And yet, even as the costumes are being prepared and the rituals rehearsed, Canboulay reenacted, the news from home reminds me that celebration and violence are never neatly separated. In local Trinidad reporting, questions are being asked about the killing of a 24-year-old man who was shot during a confrontation with police near a bar along Morne Coco Road, Maraval—one of three police-involved fatal shootings within a 24-hour period. We’ve also just come out a period of uncertainty with the US abduction of Nicholas Maduro the president of Venezuela amid fears that the region would be plunged into the fallout of a war. That proximity between festivity and state violence is not incidental. It reinforces why the dragon figure in Dragon Moko cannot be read as purely celebratory. Writing this work while moving excitedly toward Carnival sharpens an awareness: the masquerade does not erase violence, it exposes it, dances with it, mocks it, and refuses to look away.
The dragon in Dragon Moko is drawn from Carnival traditions, but it is not nostalgic. Carnival characters have always functioned as political parodies, exaggerated, coded, humorous, and dangerous. The dragon carries threat and spectacle at the same time. Here, it becomes a symbol through which contemporary anxieties are brought to life, particularly around borders, policing, migration, and the ongoing criminalization of Black bodies globally. Its open mouth, exposed tongue, and alert eye suggest appetite, surveillance, and performance all at once. It is not immediately clear whether the dragon is celebrating, warning, or devouring, and that ambiguity is deliberate. Is it avenger or avenged?
The use of moko in the title is conceptual rather than literal. The moko jumbie’s elevation offers perspective. From that height, patterns become visible where others see only incidents. We are doomed to repeat ourselves, are we not? American political life, viewed from a diasporic-news cycle-social media -vantage point, reveals itself not as a sequence of isolated crises but as a recurring structure: episodic outrage, recycled fear, and the constant rehearsal of control. The comic book phrase “NEXT ISSUE: THE FINAL CHAPTER,” embedded in the work, speaks to this condition, America endlessly promising resolution while remaining addicted to spectacle.
The surface of Dragon Moko is organized through a tight grid of hand drawn squares, each containing symbols, glyphs, and colour fields. This grid operates as a visual language system: part quilt, part archive, part DNA coding. It references systems of categorization and surveillance, borders, paperwork, data collection. I guess the type of thing that sorts bodies into boxes and determines who belongs where. At the same time, every square is handmade, irregular, and resistant to uniformity. Every story is an individual one, and most are not just cut and dry.
Fragments of mass media interrupt this patterned field: newspaper headlines referencing immigration enforcement, Time magazine’s cover of a melting political face, snippets of dialogue that read like street check ins or vernacular speech. American political life is mediated through headlines and covers, through spectacle designed for consumption. Crisis becomes serialized. Fear becomes branding. I am interested in how these images travel, how they embed themselves in Caribbean and diasporic consciousness, and how they are translated through humour, picong, and mother tongue.
Picong is central to how this work operates. Humour is not decoration; it is strategy. It allows difficult truths to pass through hostile realities. Carnival has always understood this. Mockery, exaggeration, and laughter destabilize power without asking permission. In a moment where protest is often met with suppression and dissent is reframed as threat, Carnival’s sideways language becomes increasingly relevant. It unapologetically says what cannot be said plainly.
Materially, the work balances urgency and control. Acrylic paint allows for speed, saturation, and immediacy, echoing the velocity of contemporary media and political discourse. Graphite introduces restraint and structure. It is the slow process of drawing and studying. It holds the work together and resists becoming ornamental.
My broader practice has long involved re appropriation, pattern, and image manipulation as acts of decolonization. Dragon Moko does not offer solutions or closure. Instead, it offers a way of seeing, one that recognizes repetition, calls out performance, and insists on going beyond the surface. It is not an easy read, and you must sit with it.
This work is not about America in isolation. It is about how American power circulates globally and how its narratives embed themselves in other bodies and other places. From my position, I encounter America as both spectacle and system, absurd and deadly serious at the same time. The dragon understands this duality. It dances and it threatens. It entertains and it exposes.
Ultimately, Dragon Moko is about agency: who gets to speak plainly and who must speak in code; who is comforted by political language; who is told that they are on the wrong side of history, or told that they are not seeing something the right way. If anything, Carnival teaches us that masks can tell the truth more effectively than bare faces. And when all else fails, as the Ultimate Rejects said in the Full Extreme (2017) soca song, “the city could bun down; we jammin’ still.”