Occramer Marycoo – Naming, Identity, Reliquary, and Resilience

“The simple act of wrapping cloth around a stone, an idol, or a person transforms them into a manifestation of the Gods.”

The name "Occramer Marycoo" embodies identity, memory, and resilience, marking his forced entry into the New World. Far from imposed, Marycoo intentionally retained this name to anchor himself to his origins and the traumatic transatlantic journey. "Occramer" likely derives from the Ewe name Nkrumah (“ninth-born” or “bringer of hope”), while "Marycoo" may reference the slave ship Brigantine Marigold. His name served as a reliquary—a vessel preserving his heritage, survival, and story within the dehumanizing context of enslavement.

As Newport Gardner, Marycoo’s life intersected with that of Caleb Gardner (and family), his enslaver, whose household reflected the oppressive structures of slavery. Yet Marycoo’s name identifier “Occramer Marycoo” revealed resilience that transcended those conditions.

In West Africa, boys undergo rites of passage at 13 or 14, learning survival skills and community responsibilities before establishing independent lives. Marycoo’s forced separation at this pivotal age and the trauma of enslavement shaped his life and decisions in the new world, including keeping his name as a memory reliquary, buying a home on Pope Street, marrying, naming his children, becoming a music teacher, and ultimately returning to Africa at the age 80. Each act reflected a deliberate reassertion of cultural identity and legacy.

Sika Foyer is a Togolese-American, multidisciplinary research-based and conceptual artist who explores the aesthetic abstraction in her West African Oral tradition, rite of passage ceremonies, and music and dance rituals, to create narratives that examine all forms of social injustice. Foyer exposes the process of becoming through iconographic symbols with tireless gestural motions and micro-repetitive layering, which she refers to as the Trickster’s materiality of wrapping, and its cross-cultural rituals. She examines the powerful impact of such materiality of wrapping through body movements and sounds to formulate a new language made of sacred geometric figures and forms, signs and symbols echoing those evidenced in ancient pictographic languages such as Adinkra, Nsibidi and Egyptian hieroglyphs. Foyer’s artworks have been shown internationally and nationally in museums, galleries and alternative art spaces. Some of Foyer’s works are in private collections.

Host or Publisher The Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice at Brown University