Notes Preface 1. Caribbean and West Indian appear herein as synonymous terms, but the latter is preferred when referencing the people rather than the place. Introduction 1. Samuel Asein s The Concept of Form: A Study of Some Ancestral Elements in Brathwaite s Trilogy in African Studies Association of the West Indies 4 (1971): 9 38, and Maureen Warner Lewis s Odomankoma Kyereme Se... in Caribbean Quarterly 19.2 (1973): 51 99 discuss such residues. 2. Crusoe s Journal and What the Twilight Says articulate this ideal. 3. A mythic corpus of heroes that includes Orpheus and Odysseus undertakes similar journeys of the nekyia; consulting the souls of the dead, they complete their own spirit passages. The vodun loa s submarine descent also typifies this adventure. 4. Jung s archetypes map a psychic geography Barbara Walker also explores, regarding the idea of death as interval in mythic structure: an intuition that material life moves between two poles as in initiatory processes where mock deaths reduce matter to its skeleton condition. An essential ascetic and metaphysical value is prioritized, reducing life by thought to what it really is, an ephemeral illusion in perpetual transformation. Tantric Buddhism, Walker adds, proposed that the death world or intermediate state could be controlled if one were prepared through carefully guided fantasy in life to retain memory, consciousness, and the goal of choosing for one s self the right womb-door for a better reincarnation. Living and dying were only complementary aspects of the same cycle (214). 5. Smith outlines the facets of this conviction: (1) there is a cosmic order that permeates every level of reality; (2) this cosmic order is the divine society of the gods; (3) the structure and dynamics of this society can be discerned in the movements and patterned juxtapositions of the heavenly bodies; (4) human society should be a microcosm of the divine society; (5) the chief responsibility of priests and kings is to attune human order to the divine order (126). 6. Vodun is also spelled voudou or voodoo. The vodun god is spelled as loa or lwa. 7. Esu (also Edsu or Edshu) is represented as both male and female; androgyny signified wholeness and the self-creative (parthenogenetic) origin of the primal organic
192 Notes matter associated with Mother Earth. Jamake Highwater discusses this principle (42). This view of life is articulated also through the Bakongo concept of x-self. 8. Catalina Castillon offered the English translation via private correspondence on September 8, 2008. 9. John S. Mbiti details this worldview in African Religions and Philosophy (15 28). 10. Phonetically, mboro. 11. Capitalist praxis as agency of evil, initiating an underworld descent, informs the Jamaican tale Bluebeard and Charles Chesnutt s The Goophered Grapevine. In the former, the colonizer is a sorcerer, an agent of Hades, taking life for the apparent sadistic joy of doing so. In the latter, the ritual of capitalist exploitation is imagined as a mock death or perverse rite of passage Henry s apparent rebirth (revaluation) made to concur with profitable appraisals of Henry as commodity. A parallel of the gothic abnormality in Bluebeard, this story plots a pattern of human illness, crisis, convalescence, and relapse, following a rhythmic outline that for Evans Smith typifies the Persephone complex (28). The rite of capitalism sanctions the predatory instincts of impersonators of Hades, themselves imprisoned, or corrupted by their own riches. Chapter 1 1. See the introduction, note 6, for Jonathan Smith s interest in this vector of humandivine radiations. As social death (Patterson 5), slavery inverted this vitalism. 2. Scurvy was attributed to idleness. 3. Heinrich Heine s The Slave Ship (R. S. Gwynn s translation) lampoons this capitalist fetish. In self-reflexive awe, the captain presides over human sacrifice. The slaves but eucharistic offerings to sharks, he finds it curious the way they dine upon the dead. He petitions God to prioritize his rapacity on the food-chain: Spare three hundred, for Jesus sake, he pleads, else his business will surely go under. Such vulturine indulgence Melville too indicts. Carving his whale dinner on the Pequod, Stubbs apes the sharks feeding-frenzy in the water: Were you to turn the whole affair upside down, it would still be pretty much the same thing. Melville adds that sharks also are the invariable outriders of all slave ships... in case a parcel is to be carried anywhere, or a dead slave to be decently buried. The cook, evocatively, embraces these feeders. Belubed fellow-critters, he calls them; Stubbs himself finds their voracity familiar, remarking that that s Christianity (Moby Dick 245 47) the Puritan zeal that sanctioned slavery analogous to the sharks predation. 4. Individuals understand themselves in relation to sociocultural norms: the ontogenesis influenced by the sociogenesis of knowledge, as social psychologist David Hamlyn explains in What Exactly Is Social about the Origins of Understanding (17 31). 5. Herein, these interstitial states, are not in conflict as Barbara Babcock positions them; marginal signifies physical displacement, while liminal signals psychic or spiritual uncertainty, correlating to the limbo Babcock describes as betwixt and between fixed points of classification and, therefore, structurally if not physically invisible. 6. Particularly significant are The Arrivants, Rights of Passage, Sun Poem, X/Self, polyvalent images linking experiences of time, space, and psyche.
Notes 193 7. The Genesis creation myth imaginatively concretizes the coming of consciousness as an objective event, Jung says. Within the primitive worldview, he remarks, essence was typified as a sensuous projection (106). 8. The dancer enters a realm of death synchronized as a birth passage where, as in Hindu ritual, the ceremony of baptismal rebirth often involved being drawn bodily through a giant yoni. Those who underwent this ceremony were styled twice-born. Geometrical symbol like the cross, the Yoni Yantra, a Primordial Image representing the Great Mother of all life, emblematized access to the creative center. Triangular in form, it signified the genital focus of her divine energy (Walker 1097 98). 9. It is the metaphysical double or soul that separates from physical being at the point of death, Maya Deren explains, that the loa ceremonially recovers (33). Hurston, in Tell my Horse, observes similar rites in Jamaica meant to control wandering spirits after death (42 52). Similar principles influence Wakes and Myalists rites. 10. Christ s divine love, associated with sexual energy, identifies him with Osiris paired with Isis, both mother and sister (Finch 74 75), and the Nummo paired with his sister (Fox 450 51). Moral adjustment in the world is a function of religious interests in avatars of creation divine powers linked to the life-giving energy of the sun and to cosmogonical emphases on androgyny. 11. In Conversations, Brathwaite defines this self-projection through art in the Caribbean, through word / sound / power, as process of... rebirth... the second birth out of death (278). 12. This reservation, notwithstanding, slaves flexible accommodation of African symbolic behavior within European iconographic systems has been observed by Michael Laguerre and Joan Dayan, among others. Acts of naming were often strategies for camouflaging customs that masters frowned upon and for masking the politically subversive implications of these practices. 13. Methods of procuring slaves guaranteed tribal mixes on plantations (Courlander 1). Denoting specific cultural formulae purports not to deny accretive processes. African groups often shared beliefs and customs, as John Mbiti observes. 14. Hegel s concept posits a deterministic view of history. Dialectical capitalism fixes master and slave in an unalterable groove of domination and subordination. Since this paradigm makes no provision for coexistence through mutual human recognition, ontological choices are marked by inevitable confrontation, by an apocalyptic life-and-death struggle (Spirit 178 90). 15. Brathwaite speaks for a humanist project of social reconstruction: European intellectual tradition (with honourable exceptions)... allowed itself to become debased in its attempt to justify slavery and racism, or was unable or unwilling (after the damage had been done in the 18 th century) to re-examine itself ( Love 54 55). 16. Rafael de Leon s Calypso from France to Trinidad asserts that calypso derives from French medieval troubadours, failing thus to account for its iconoclastic spirit, incisive social critique, and proliferation in non-french diasporan settlements. Conversely, R. S. Rattray, Lawrence Levine, Richard M. Dorson, among others, trace the calypso s formal characteristics to traditional Africa. Begging the question by limiting calypso to music created in Trinidad, Naipaul too misrepresents the development of this form. In evidence are efforts to ignore local variations
194 Notes and interconnections of a shared and pervasive legacy. To reject historical realities thereby to fancy one specific locale as the birthplace of common African-influenced innovations is to honor the casuistry of special pleading and confound evidence of the many threads of the common inheritance that run through disaporan music and literature. Equally strong borrowings from the West do suggest, as Courlander observes (6 7), that juxtaposing these different formative traditions may refine our perceptions, accounting, thereby, for the acculturative currents within history. 17. The evident commodification fetish that under colonialism normalized the insatiable appetite appears in Walcott s Ti-Jean as a form of evil activated by the Planter/ Devil s cannibalistic indulgence. 18. Jonathan Smith explains such archetypal implicitness. The desert and the sea, he notes, are the all but interchangeable concrete symbols of the terrible, chaotic openness ; the boundless is seen as the chaotic, the demonic, the threatening (128) the death landscape the dancer transcends. 19. His aunt s brutalization awakens Fredrick Douglass to slavery as a disabling Inferno a reductiveness that evinced no threshold of self-realization. This labyrinth of terror was a vista of a profane grail: It was the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery, through which I was about to pass (42). His plight the hottest hell of unending slavery, a dark night a wretched condition, Douglass seeks redemption through the word; but as he says, It opened my eyes to the horrible pit, but to no ladder upon which to get out (61). 20. A corresponding ethic informs Matthew: Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God (4:4). 21. The vertical and horizontal trajectories configure historical and religious significations into an icon of totality, replicating the cross, which, as Jung remarks, is the earthly site of torture and sufferings of the incarnate God, and as a quaternity it expresses the universe, which also includes the material world (99 100). This ritual of self-making in Brathwaite s Sun Poem is schema of contests between Adam and Batto, divine Son and his counterpart Devil which the Son must fight, according to cosmological archetype, en route to becoming man. The limbo dancer crosses this initiation threshold when he passes successfully beneath the bar, arena of subterranean ordeal. 22. Marshall s To Da-Duh, in Memoriam explores this underground theme: rebirth activated when the narrator s consciousness enters the subconscious. This encounter references Carl Jung and M. L. von Franz, et al. s psychoanalytic theory: Man and His Symbols positing mythical links between the personality components of ego and shadow. The shadow is the darkness through which the ego is constituted, yet with which it is in conflict (168). Marshall similarly recognizes that memory of the grandmother, activating tensions between dying traditions and modern responsibilities, redirects consciousness to the circular pattern of regression and advance that ensures creative continuity. 23. Deren regarding Haiti and Hurston regarding Jamaica describe the dessounin, ritual for safe passage of the dead through the underworld. In Barbados, Marshall s fictional setting, similar protocols supposedly kept dead spirits in the grave. Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen recognize related rites among the Dogon (54).
Notes 195 24. Made satellite also on the basis of the power of imperialist symbols to possess and imprison, Antoinette in Rhys Wide Sargasso Sea becomes particularly traumatized, her marriage to Rochester confirming her creole status as property annexed by the hegemonic European center. Fulminating against being thus colonized and robbed of soul by this extortionate freebooter, she cries, Bertha is not my name. You are trying to make me into someone else, calling me by another name. I know, that s obeah too (147). 25. Ellison correlates double-vision, a holistic engagement of knowledge and self, to the Blues irony that strategizes living creatively even in potentially negative situations (131 32). 26. Similar religious observances informed The Rapture (a Barbadian rite of possession). Like Myalists, pentecostal candidates were seized by spirits invited into ritual arenas through syncopated music, singing, clapping, and dance. 27. Because Europeans are unbiased by prejudices, Coke remarks, by opening intercourse with distant regions, we... have an opportunity of estimating the extent and diversity of the human intellect, in all its progressive stages of improvement, from perfect barbarism to mere civilization, and from mere civilization to the exalted refinements of polished life (17 18). This view of himself as detached observer outside society and history subscribes to what Clifford Geertz calls the cognitivist fallacy (12). Disregarding Others and the imaginative universe within which their acts are signs, the researcher assumes that cognition works the same among them as it does among us (13). Coke s faith in the neutrality of his observations does not hide the fact that his we denotes the particular social group he considers normative white, literate, middle class. He presumes, however, that the West is superior and therefore divinely favored with inalienable liberties universally. 28. Human and divine composites and emblems of the cosmic ideal of wholeness, the Nommo (Dogon), Osiris (Egyptian), and Christ (Hebrew) are avatars of extraordinary powers; endowed with the life-giving energy of the sun, they die and resurrect. 29. Deren explains the crossroads in Haitian lore as symbolic of the totality of the earth s surface and congruent with the cardinal points on a horizontal plane. It is above all, a figure for the intersection of the horizontal plane, which is this mortal world, by the vertical plane, the metaphysical axis which plunges into the mirror. The cross-roads, then, is the point of access to the world of the Invisibles, which is the soul of the cosmos, the source of life force, the cosmic memory, and cosmic wisdom (35). Griaule and Dieterlen see similar correspondences between cardinal points and sacred space, geometrical polarities and mystical balance in Dogon thought (450 51). 30. Henry Dumas s Ark of Bones replicates such a soul boat, piloted by a primal Noah, incarnating the Nommo or Vodun loa, rescuing souls of the dead from an abyss detailed as the waters of the Mississippi. 31. Mystical formula for a conceptual cosmological structure, the triangle integrates god, human, and earth. Anthropological and mythic traditions have drawn on this association Babcock relates to Van Gennep s three-phase process of ritual (155). Identified with the circle and wholeness in mythic formulation and a basis of limbo expressivity, the triangle is associated in Brahman rebirth ceremonies with the yoni
196 Notes or vulva, a primary Tantric object of worship... symbolized variously by a triangle, fish, double-pointed oval, horseshoe, egg, fruits, etc. (Walker 1097). 32. Divine spirit forces inspired other insurrections such as Tacky s in Jamaica and Nat Turner s in Virginia. As Mbiti also affirms, African groups eschewed Western distinctions between political and religious activities. 33. The gods dumbness references the historical negation of Caliban s voice and the inner power that preserved the sanctity of self. Chapter 2 1. Barbara Walker discusses the mythic resonance of birds: mediators between heaven and earth. Walcott s image recalls also Charon s soul boat that, charting the waters of the Styx, links the spheres of life and death (101). Important too is cultural hybridity, literally and imaginatively realized through history and art, respectively, translating the Atlantic into a bridge between present and past, Europe and Africa. 2. Walcott in Origins reactivates such mythogenetic vitalism by delving into the subconscious depth of self he seeks to resurrect from psychospiritual shipwreck, the death rattle of history. The artist covets the parthenogenic life-process at work in the natural landscape: The mind, among sea-wrack, sees its mythopoeic coast. The imaginative journey of this imperiled seafarer moves inward or seeks, like the polyp, to take root in itself. It is in the rattle of receding shoal, that the poet seeks his name and a man, and as the crab s claws move backwards through the surf, memory grips the putrefying flesh (Collected 14). Consciousness enters the underworld of the subconscious self to anchor the soul adrift, that is, to resurrect a new vital loam of self-confident being. 3. British imperialism was promoted as the three C s: Christianizing, civilizing, and commerce. 4. Barbarity, sport, and piety were fused, Coke remarks, in conquering these lands. The Spaniards would burn or hang, thirteen Indians every morning for a given time as a token or devotional gratitude to God... [and] as an honorary compliment to the Lord Jesus Christ and his twelve apost1es. They hunted escapees by bloodhounds, forcibly baptized them, and cut their throats to prevent their apostasy from that religion, into which they had been so cruelly initiated (129). 5. The Catholic Church associated public name-giving rituals with rescuing evil souls from demonic states. It had decreed all children damned automatically through sexual conception or original sin unless baptized (Walker 90). 6. In The Middle Passage, Naipaul declared that the brutal legacy of Caribbean history had confounded any hope of creative recovery. 7. The church did ordain slavery. In 1452, Pope Nicholas V decreed that Christians had the right to enslave pagans and unbelievers. Indeed, transatlantic slavery began with Bartholomew Las Casas s petition to import Africans to the New World for the economic welfare of Spanish settlers who had almost decimated the indigenous peoples under the encomienda. 8. A syncretic Caribbean form, the calypso is rooted in the Apo and Deble carnival ritual ceremonies. The music s association with African traditions of lampoon brought it under the suspicion of the ruling planter classes as a venue for
Notes 197 coordinating rebellion (Shaw 117). Lawrence Levine in Black Culture and Black Consciousness, William D. Piersen in Puttin Down Ole Massa: African Satire in the New World, and Douglas Fraser in African Art highlight this tradition. 9. Piersen speaks of this satirical folk tradition directed at the colonial hierarchy as puttin down ole Massa ( Puttin Down 1977, 20). It is also essence of Signifying described by Henry Louis Gates Jr. in The Signifying Monkey. It is clearly evident in several Caribbean folk masks, examples of which are Jonkonnu, Tuk, and The Bull Play. 10. Negroes... born out of Africa, according to Naipaul, have no language of their own.... They have no idea of country, and no pride of race. They have no religion of their own, yet they have not hitherto any country of their adoption. Slavery s greatest damage, he adds, was that it taught the Negro self-contempt (66, emphasis in original). He detects a similar alienation among Indian populations a peasantminded, money-minded community, spiritually static because cut off from its roots, its religion reduced to rites without philosophy, set in a materialist colonial society (82). 11. This bias reveals the charm of moral polarizations inscribed in myths of Western imperialist cultural hegemony underwritten by a stubborn resistance to oral art as a legitimate form of literary performance. 12. This nightmare derives from what historian James Millette outlines as the social and psychological conflicts mounted by colonial capitalism (49), the Caribbean reduced to an enclave in a larger international society for whose advantage it existed (51). Chapter 3 1. These forms bear recognizable similarities, suggesting that they ritualize fundamentally related religious attitudes. Jonkonnu, for example, is performed with variations in different locations. In addition, the dance some identify as jonkonnu elsewhere has alternative names: tuk or gombey, for instance. Predominantly cultural hybrids, these masques share common African mythic ideas they mix with European details. 2. Though Christianity was used to defend their bondage, slaves assimilated Western religious ideas they cross-referenced with African phenomena. Dogon creation iconography chronicles Amma s (God s) creation of Amma s egg. Its four parts are the elements water (di), air (ono), fire (yau), earth (minne) (Griaule and Dieterlen 81), constituents, also, of the Nommo s Ark. 3. Totemic illumined houses reappear in Senegambia the name gombey originating, perhaps, from this site of the earliest trans-atlantic slave trade. Creighton Pencheon traces many Afro-Caribbean customs and practices to this region (1). Other models appear in Senegal, Sierra Leone in some Islamic celebrations. Bettelheim speculates, though, that since written records of the dance first appeared in Jamaica, it is not unlikely that the custom may have travelled from Jamaica to Senegambia (98). Bettelheim overlooks the fact that oral cultures are not known for written documentation of their cultural activities. Thus logistical problems inhere in her privileging writing as the basis of her assumption regarding the dance s origin.
198 Notes 4. This ship-house symbol is a prominent form of the Nommo s totemic Ark. Frank Collymore explains the role this structure plays in the landship dance, whose organized history in Barbados he delineates. This masque has evolved from the middle, and probably earlier, years of the last century, he says, as a friendly society which frequently holds organized parades of its members all dressed in naval uniform. Crowning the symbolic house are two poles he interprets as a wireless aerial (59 60). George Bernard s Wayside Sketches further elaborates on this ritual synthesis of European and African traditions. 5. Bettelheim reveals that the ship-house symbol, found too in Haiti, is known as the Fanal. The effigy of the horse is represented as a donkey in tuk in Barbados: hence its variant name donkey man. 6. Herbert M. Cole notes the centrality of the mounted horseman in African cosmology. This icon, he says, represents the fusion of human intelligence with animal strength ; when catalyzed by motion and speed, it unleashes superhuman power (116). Central to Dogon myth, the horse, upon the ark s landing, incarnated the Nommo spirit and pulled the ark to a pond where it floated... like an immense canoe (Griaule and Dieterlen 471 72). This horse is called amba suru, or Amma s power which brought forth the word (484 85). The transformation of the Nommo, Griaule and Dieterlen observe, is directly associated with the moving of the ark, an act seen as analogous to god s spirit on earth taking possession of the four directions of space (486). A horseman is therefore symbol of Amma. 7. The variant spellings of jonkonnu derive from confusion over the origin of the name, which apparently derived phonetically from some lost anthropological detail. However, the canoe/ boat/ ship image seems persuasive, especially given Griaule and Dieterlen s direct identification of this vessel with the ark. Phonetically intriguingly also the ark was represented as aduno koro tonu: a ritual figure called tonu of the ark of the world (459). 8. It is not a stretch of imagination to detect in the shared religious symbolism an implicit identification between the Greek myth and the ritual discovered in contemporary history but dates back to the ancient Egyptian death rite connected to the Khufu soul-boat. 9. These words from Jamake Highwater s comments on Joseph Campbell aptly describe the folk attitude. 10. The Akan myth of the descent of the Golden Stool (Warner-Lewis 76), like the Nommo s ark represents God s covenant, a divine blueprint for human life on earth, an idea replicated in Hebrew myth of the Ark of the Covenant. The two totems bear similar iconic form, both miniature replicas of the universe, and both triangular conceptions of heaven, human, and earth, and of sun, moon, and earth. Further translated, on high is the universal radiant energy that is the creative force of life; human life constitutes a formative influence of this power. Man is a composite of material and divine substances: made, mythically, from earth and infused with the life-giving breath of God. 11. Variations of pink and white face masks appeared in tuk, gombey, and jonkonnu. The relationship of these colors to race and the satirical intentions of the actors are played up also in that the masquerader would sometimes also wear the brown safari hat members of the plantocracy generally wore.
Notes 199 12. Over time, these symbolic acts came to lose their sacred significance, were renamed wukking-up, and raised complaints from puritanical segments of the society for whom these gestures signaled intolerable forms of lechery and wanton obscenity (Shaw 117). Similar class revulsion dismissed gombey as a savage and nonsensical exhibition (Bettelheim 91). 13. One gombey song ironically connects the Nommo s ark to the inversion politics targeting the plantation as the center of order: Oh turn that house upside down,/ Simon Taylor, high-lo, / Hy-lo, and away we go (Bettelheim 94). The performers warning of the high brought low targeted the hubris of their traducers they saw flouting the sacred order. Go Down Moses and Coolie Man (in Barbados) also evaluate human arrogance on the basis of a principle Walker explains as an ever-turning turning cosmic wheel, an existential limbo form that orchestrates cycles of fate. 14. In mid-twentieth century Barbados, the context of the satire was determined more by class than race. 15. While these texts carry powerful sociopolitical messages, they also are styled through characteristic elements of play, the kinds of frivolous language use evident in several other residually oral forms. 16. Kingly authority is often, in primal cultures, connected with divine governance and the institution of sacred order on earth. 17. John Mbiti observes that African groups assumed that evil was not an a priori condition in the universe (38); neither nature nor spirit forces were innately malevolent but could be made such through human agency (204 5). Luther Standing Bear, Chief of the Oglala makes this same sociocultural critique. His ontological disidentification from the West states: We did not think of the great open plains, the beautiful rolling hills, the winding streams with tangled growth, as wild. Only to the white man was nature a wilderness and only to him was it infested with wild animals and savage people. To us it was tame. Earth was bountiful and we were surrounded with the blessings of the Great Mystery (1). Chapter 4 1. This song questions British cultural forms propagated as universal behaviors. In Lamming s Castle, Boy Blue scrutinizes imperialist self-referential symbols, asking if the queen s bloomers was red, white and blue (44). 2. In religious paradigms of genesis, the breath of god animates the dust of the earth. 3. Jean Rhys too examines ideas of time (history) and psyche as spatial correlates in Wide Sargasso Sea: the Atlantic is seen as a void associated with colonial strangulation but also as a site of vibrant life-potential. 4. Equiano s Narrative illustrates this self-elevating trope (64) that Gates explains in The Norton Anthology (xxxvii). 5. Douglass, too, deems his infernal battle with Mr. Covey a threshold experience a metamorphosis configured in language. His chiasmus diagrams his resistance or spiritual exaltation as ironic inversion: You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man (75).
200 Notes 6. Self-actualization, utmost expression of consciousness, Hegel says, bears a desire to assimilate others to service the self. Masters cannibalized slave-life they converted to nonbeing, to substance they ate and digested. For Equiano, such predation mirrors the ugliness, corruption, and decay mythologically associated with the activity of the Goddess of Death (Walker 216). 7. Rogers remarks: The true spirit of jazz is a joyous revolt from convention, custom, authority, boredom, even sorrow, from everything that would confine the soul of man and hinder its riding free on the air.... It is a release of all the suppressed emotions at once, a blowing off of the lid as it were. It is hilarity expressing itself through pandemonium: musical fireworks (137). 8. Claude McKay, similarly, in Outcast, deems himself a ghost, a thing apart an invisible or marginalized exile. African casualties of history are out of time, out of rhythm with life s progressive march essentially thus, shadows in an underworld of death. Without refuge of soul, the drifting zombie faces homelessness as a religious experience of nothingness; he resurrects, however, through the imagination, through art. 9. Integrating individuals spiritually and responsibly into themselves, their communities, and the cosmos, the true ritual passage affirms life, contesting, thus, the rite that led to slavery. 10. Ishmael Reed s Flight to Canada brilliantly plays on the illusory nature of the plantation myth he compares to the legendary King Arthur s kingdom of Camelot. Reed s spoof on masters as parasitic satirizes their self-gratulatory illusions of paternalism and chivalry and their serfs contented inheritors of the virtues of a superior civilized coterie. Reed s obverse impression of plantation society as spiritual bankrupt brings historical reality into incongruous relation with representations of the plantocracy as a bastion of noblesse oblige and human generosity. 11. The fire at the center of the wheel is associated mystically with the evil eye (emblem for narcissistic capitalism), but also resurrecting agency fire is source of destruction and creation. 12. Propagating what historian Joseph Harris calls Western culture s internationalization of the concept of black inferiority (15), Georg W. F. Hegel contends that sub- Saharan Africa was without self-conscious history and formed no historical part of the world (History 196, 199). 13. Paul L. Dunbar s The Sport of the Gods examines the harmful prejudices generated by the Plantation myth that glorified racist abuse as the defense of civilization. 14. Preiswerk and Perrot declare that the rules and concepts sanctioning ethnocentric bias limited Western history s ability to portray what men of all cultures and all ages have done so far (xxi). 15. Exphrasis is a rhetorical term designating all manner of decription, in word, of persons, natural things, and human-made objects, including works of art (Barricelli 309). 16. See Equiano s version of such haggling as a scene of great alarm and terror (discussed earlier in this chapter). 17. One grim irony is that ships escorts were not mythic dolphins which elevated souls but sharks that devoured slaves bodies.
Notes 201 18. Lawrence L. Smallwood Jr. called slavery a process designed to break the person, to strip him of his actual and spiritual freedom, to subjugate and humble him (196 97). Rukudzo Murapa calls this most debasing fact about slavery a Negrofication process designed to strip the slave of his pride and confidence as a person and as a people (7). 19. Stothard s implicit parallel with Botticelli s Venus becomes an inadvertent travesty. 20. Coke, who uses the term civilization to validate the West s cultural self-defense also mistakes it for a scientific truth; thus his moral indictments beg the question. Slaves, he says, show little more than mere animal sensations (26) and the Caribs manifest human nature sunk to the lowest state of degradation (157). Underlining Coke s moral astigmatism, a Carib he calls a savage sought to humanize the genocidal invaders: If... you... believe with us that everyone is to be rewarded in a future state according to his conduct in the present, you will do no hurt to those who do none to you (117). Proclaiming that they alone were civilized, Europeans deemed such genocide morally unquestionable. 21. Here the soul enacts a purifying dance or initiatory passage. Astraddle on the dolphin s mire and blood, it crosses that gong-tormented sea of apocalypse to the divine realm. Here blood-begotten spirits metamorphose by dying into a dance,/ An agony of trance (lines 26 29). 22. Rudyard Kipling s The White Man s Burden exalts ethnocide, exhorting Westerners to steer toward the light sullen peoples,/ Half devil and half-child. Conrad s Marlow indicts this apotheosizing of narcissism as the West s propensity to bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to... belief in the idea (Heart 20) its romance of imperialism. Chapter 5 1. In Sparrow s Lion and Donkey, a duel for kingship, for example, the underdog conquers through language. Donkey signifies on Lion who gets mad; his recklessness affords Donkey the chance to use his secret weapon (his penis) to pin and emasculate Lion. Significantly, cheerleader for Donkey is Monkey the prototypical trickster. Donkey s triumph climaxes as reinforcement of subversive language play ; against the referee s cry of foul (rule violation), Donkey, revealing that he operates according to a different symbolic system, replies, This is one fowl that can crow. Illustrated is the empowering ethic Ellison expresses thus: Change the joke and slip the yoke. 2. Benjamin Ray examines this ideal of spiritual adaptation in traditional Africa (187). This ontological rhythm, the old signifying on the new (vis-à-vis Henry L. Gates s theory of signifying ) informs, too, K. K. Bunseki Fu-Kiau s philosophy of Vital Time. 3. This is a rite of exclusion or ostracism found in British and Caribbean folklore. 4. Frank Collymore describes this iconoclastic form in Barbadian Dialect; its name registers, like Afro-Americans Toast, its signifying (improvisational) intentions. 5. Afro-Americans were said, initially to play the guitar with a heavily percussive sound. Jive talking roots in this aesthetic, a valuational trope in Invisible Man, it carries Peter Wheatstraw s folk wit, improvising on America as a den (134). Plastic
202 Notes Bag s calypso Ragga Ragga exploits such tonal dynamics for burlesque his apophasis a subterfuge. The antiphonal vocal-musical exchange designed as self-reflexive caricature (the deviation held in tension with the apologetic lack of intelligence) is essentially a deconstructive mime. 6. The Jamaica Christmas Hurston records is such a hybrid (Horse 4). Didn t My Lord Deliver Daniel? translates Christian redemption in terms of the sacred cosmos the infusion of nature with divine immanence (Mbiti 16). Vodun also situates Western religious rites in African-derived liturgies. Finnegan explains too that the Limba assimilated biblical stories into their indigenous narratives (99). 7. Notions regarding the magic of mimicry derive from representations of language as mysterious and magical a power explained thus: One of the basic laws of magic is that a picture or a symbol does not merely refer to the thing it represents; it actually is the thing (Cavendish 69). 8. The Dozens is an insult targeting someone s mother, sister, or wife. 9. Ride a Cock-horse, carrying symbolic and political signification in seventeenth century England (Oxford Dictionary 66), unlike other versions, bore the moral suggestiveness of the Barbadian version (65). 10. The Barbadian rendition is sensitive to exploitation, following Had I an Ass that spoofs advocacy for handling animals gently (Oxford Dictionary 154). Echoed also is I had a Little Pony, the animal whipped, lashed, and driven through the mire (143). This ethical perspective is relayed too via a Barbadian rhyming proverb in which moral conscience is signified as heightened compassion: Ah give you an inch / You take an ell / Ah give you an old horse / You ride it to hell. 11. In Tell My Horse, Hurston highlights religious and social values of Afro-Caribbean dances as African carryovers values Finnegan recognizes too in Africa (26 27). This Barbadian proverb harks back also to an English rhyme: Harry Parry (Oxford Dictionary 199 200), suggesting that some African values and behaviors found parallels in Western culturally expressive forms. 12. This correlation of secular images and numinous essence runs through Griaule s Conversations with Ogotommêli and G. Niangoran-Bouah s The Akan World of Gold Weights. 13. Drawing on James Frazer s concepts, John Mbiti calls this contagious magic and homoeopathic magic (200). A defense against such magic was to reject ritually a stranger s request for one s name: My name? / My name is Pudding n Tame / Come back tomorrow / And I ll tell you the same. 14. Similar symbolic references to birds as guides from profane to the sacred orders inform Toni Morrison s Song of Solomon. Milkman whose birth Pilate anticipates as herald of a bird, turns the base element of self into pure or spiritually realized being; learning to fly, he transcends the materialistic ( dead ) ethos he inherited. 15. British disdain for Caribbean culture fostered an indigenous self-alienation Naipaul satirizes as the conduct of a people unsure of themselves, and having no taste or style of their own (Middle 47). He describes the economic consequences of this apparent psychological trait. Large numbers of middle and upper-class islanders... avoid regular consumption of many local roots or ground provisions, and prefer imported items of corresponding food value (an usually higher cost) (46). He quotes Trollope s 1859 discovery in Jamaica: But it is to be remarked all
Notes 203 through the island that the people are fond of English dishes, and that they despise, or affect to despise, their own productions (47). 16. Outside of family circumstances, less scrupulously polite singers would supply a cruder reference asshole at the end of line six in a wry, jeering tone. 17. Bearing a living coal he also calls a soul in my hand, Makak in a shamanistic ceremony restores life to the dying Josephus even as he exhorts the group, Now sing in your darkness /... Faith, faith! / Believe in yourselves (Dream 248 49). This symbolic evocation of coal as elixir is literalized in that Makak monkeys in Zanzibar chew on coal as an antidote to the toxic leaves they live on. This medicine also enhances their fertility. 18. Some conjurers relied on a Black Heart Book to summon the devil chiefly to obtain wealth or vengeance. For compensation, the spirit would demand a human sacrifice and challenge the reader to a fight. This belief exists too in Limba culture where the bad spirit s price for his help was the life of a relative; to refuse payment was to forfeit one s life (Finnegan 22). 19. Another similar exercise in verbal pyrotechnics is the rhyme One Morning whose first two lines go thus: One bright morning in the middle of the night / Two dead men wake up and start to fight. 20. William D. Piersen carries out a more elaborate analysis of the politically subversive character of many of these New World songs in Puttin Down Ole Massa (21 34). 21. Harry Hoetink rightly observes that the Caribbean is strongly influenced by non- African traditions and creole innovations (31). The mix has led to confusions. While Alan Dundes African and Afro-American Tales in African Folklore in the New World identifies several direct translations from African languages into English, Daniel J. Crowley in the preface to this edition references Dorson s revision of attributions of certain African-derived behaviors to Europe. Dorson also dismisses E. Franklin Frazier s skepticism regarding Herskovits s findings on African cultural residues (337). 22. The symbolic signification of the fingers is also a component of cultural understanding in Dogon mythic lore. See Marcel Griaule s Conversations with Ogotommêli (54 55). 23. The array of sociological intrigues related to the Curse, especially obeah conjurations is omitted from this discussion. Chapter 6 1. Michael Gilkes examines Harris s preoccupation with the divided consciousness in Wilson Harris and the Caribbean Novel. 2. Marcel Griaule too identifies mystical significances in Dogon village arrangements (Conversations 91 122). 3. Piersen identifies the serious nature of slave antics and songs on Caribbean plantations. This interpenetration of moods is a practical, survival strategy among disempowered groups, often masking their critiques and finding catharsis in humor as puttin on massa and the laughing-to-keep-from-crying blues irony explain.
204 Notes 4. Griaule and Dieterlen explain this philosophical attitude in chapter 5 of The Pale Fox regarding the Nommo s ark s descent. 5. These songs, prominent in the early twentieth century Caribbean, worked against the history of sexual prohibition under slavery and missionary orthodoxy. The Journal of Sir Henry Fitzherbert (1825) records slave s emotional well-being as peripheral to planters economic initiatives (175 76). Frederick Douglass chronicles his aunt s brutalization over a forbidden affair (42); masters bred slaves as matters of economic pragmatism. 6. Boiling Soup goes: Mother monkey was boiling soup / Father monkey says I want a foop / Mother monkey ask what is that / Father monkey says that big fat cat. The Cabin lyricizes raunchy abandonment to the delights of sex. 7. Mbiti details puberty rites that provide social control of the emotions and direct energies to social responsibilities of family. The Chi Wara ritual, Fraser notes, organizes man s relationship to woman. The young male under threat of punishment was to be guardian of the female s virginity until marriage, a union philosophized as man achieving renewal through procreation (27). 8. V. S. Naipaul s Miguel Street touches on this angst and Jean Rhys s Wide Sargasso Sea suggests that both black and white women were casualties of this disorder. 9. An alternative version of the refrain goes: For she loves sugar/ Like a plum. 10. Ignoring Africans religious and social traditions, Naipaul parades the West s insistence on its human protypicality and refusal to acknowledge its role in destroying others social institutions. He extols Trollope s prejudice that the Negro addicts himself to religion for the sake of appearances, and delights in aping the little graces of civilization. Married couples receive sneers for supposedly daring to imitate their moral superiors: These people marry now, a white lady said to Trollope in Jamaica (66 67). 11. This restlessness is ridiculed in Millie Gone to Brazil. 12. This stylization was a feature of the zoot-suit era, coterminous with the hip 1940s be-bop age when this mannerism seemed to reach its greatest height. Rohlehr recalls Malcolm X s vivid capturing of this fantastic livery in his autobiography. The dress expressed a psychology, Rohlehr explains, of substituting style for face, clothes for self.... It was... a symbol of the universal disguise, role-playing and self-evasion... which [Brathwaite s] Tom rejected on his death-bed as the badge of false consciousness (Pathfinder 36). 13. An interesting ethnographical detail is that Opie and Opie record the entry of this form which follows the English clapping game tradition as entering England about 1972 (Singing Game 448). I played this game in the 1950s in Barbados. It appears logical to assume that this transference was occasioned by the boom of Caribbean immigration to England in the 1950s and 1960s. 14. Stan to duh wuk is a cryptic dialect form for stay in the field and do their work. 15. Pickney is abbreviation for picanninny. White indentured children also performed this service. See Ann W. Yates s reference in Bygone Barbados (7). 16. In evidence is the workers awareness of the potential economic value of these songs; the parody consciously berates the exploitation. In The Islands in Between: Essays in West Indian Literature, Louis James remarks on masters diligent campaigns to prevent a group consciousness forming among slaves. Cultural activities were discouraged unless, as work songs, they increased productivity (3).
Chapter 7 Notes 205 1. Discussed in Chapter 2. 2. This Barbadian tale I heard in the 1950s reappears in Tembo s Legends of Africa (1997). The former s domestic theme also indicts the sterile materialist reductionism in colonialist culture. Similarly, in Oba s Ear: A Yoruba Myth in Cuba and Brazil, William Bascom records disporan adaptations of African myth. 3. Douglas Fraser declares the bird (transcendent spirit) and the serpent (netherworld agent) binary cosmic forces in African cultures. 4. In Song of Solomon, Ruth is an incestuously clinging parent whose protracted nursing inhibits Milkman s psychospiritual individuation. Initiatory passage, his psychic exit from necrophilia problematizes Terry Otten s reduction of his flight to callous abandonment (61). 5. St. Augustine s denunciation of sexuality as corrupting human innocence and sacredness found favor with Philo in the first century B. C. Proclaiming sexuality an animal residue in humans, Darwin offered scientific basis for such religious taboos on sex. Similarly, Freud declared human beings civilized only to the extent that they repress their sexual instincts. Promulgating this sex-negative heritage, Methodists introduced cricket to Papua New Guinea in 1903 intending to curtail a ritual the missionaries deemed erotic. In an act of ironic inversion, the Trobrianders wove the exogenous gesture into their dance ( Trobriand Cricket ). 6. Live burial of children and adults in Christian society, Barbara Walker explains, was also a religious act. Sacrificial victims were placed under building foundations to ensure structural stability (245 46). 7. Metamorphosing into a bird, Isis descends on Osiris s penis while, as a swan, Zeus copulates with Leda. 8. The Alazon (senex iratus), a comic archetype, is manifested through this sinister version whose threats impede the love of the heroine. His counterpart, the Miles Gloriosus, is Monkey in Monkey Wedding. Here, the absoluteness of the father s will declares him a fiendish underworld god who reduces the daughter to a state of desolation. This product of a vast hideous darkness that seems to threaten the entire human family, Walcott s Ti-Jean personifies as the planter-devil. Such networks of allusions diagram the folk forms as symbolic complexes. 9. John Mbiti s chapter Initiation and Puberty Rites discusses the initiation sexrituals traditionally linked to nature s processes and symbols (121 32). 10. Walker explains this vital balance of surface and depth. As a reminder that death was integral to life, she notes, Roman triumphal processions showed military heroes partnered with surrogates of Death. Homer dramatizes this tension in Book 24 of the Iliad when, kneeling before Achilles, gray-haired Priam requests Hector s body. Telling ironic reversals structure this scene where fearless youth and care-worn humility meet. Priam carries a heart... made of steel and Achilles, ponderously philosophizes: This is the way the gods have spun their threads for poor mortals! Our life is all sorrow (292). The contemplative moment fills the dashing warrior with a glimpse of soul, a deeper self-awareness. The Orpheus story, its theme the mythic mind, affirms also the quiet contemplative power of the creative imagination as a vital underside of active life. Orpheus tragic end suggests, however, that to
206 Notes seek to live entirely in the realm of the imagination or the subconscious is in itself a mode of death. 11. In Ethiopia the Goddess s image was placed in the center of a wheel of flames, like Indian images of Kali. She was called an old woman with the power of the evil eye. Her alleged powers included a capacity to resurrect (Walker 1072). 12. This form Finnegan names a basic mythic structure in Limba culture is evidently also an intracultural archetype. 13. This syncretizing was common. A Barbadian woman repeatedly moralized discipline though the tale of a mother who indulged her son s delinquency. When sentenced to die for a serious offense, the son bit off her ear for failing him. As an adult, I discovered that this was probably an Aesop fable, not a local occurrence. Finnegan too highlights embedded European lore in Limba narratives. 14. The dramatic appeal of Raja s chance defeat of evil (like Ti-Jean s calculated strategy) also inheres in the underdog motif the wonder Finnegan explains as that a child beginning from such well-known disadvantages should yet achieve success (56). 15. In Things Fall Apart, for example, Chinua Achebe imaginatively replays the psychic toll on families compelled by Umuofian law to discard twins in the evil forest. 16. Coke, for example, declares that Amerindians were omitted from the divine schedule and allowed for reasons inscrutable to us to wander in a state of intolerable darkness, while we have been favored with the light of the glorious gospel (175). Having surrendered to non-christian gods, to blind, maleficent forces that were only faint resemblances of the more hideous images of his mind (114 15), the native, Coke remarks, was inalienably earmarked for divine wrath: God preferring European genocide over pestilence or earthquake (124). 17. This monkey parallels the Signifying Monkey celebrated in Afro-American lore and the picaresque bandit of the Toast a form that climaxes with a boast as in Wedding. He figures also as the Alazon or braggart in Greek comedy a self-deceiving impostor who inhibits the romance of hero and heroine. His counterpart, the senex iratus appears in Strange Fruit. 18. I find no evidence that this tale describes a natural phenomenon. Blackbirds often build nests in trees even in dense human populations. Gaulins are rarely seen except in remote natural settings. 19. The Barbadian tale The Traveling Companions treats this theme of cooperation; it is not included here. 20. Eating is often presented as an amusing topic, especially surrounding men with legendary appetites such talents exhibited in competitions in Hillaby. 21. Archetypes linked with this fertility principle include the Yoruba Àjé, the Egyptian Isis, the Greek Gaia and Demeter, the Zuni Indians Awonawilona, and the Mexican Ilamatecuhtli.