SOURCE: Brathwaite, Edward Kamau. “The African Presence in Caribbean Literature.”¹ In Africa in Latin America: Essays on History, Culture, and Socialization, edited by Manuel Moreno Fraginals, translated by Leonor Blum, pp. 103-44. New York: Holems & Meier Publishers, Inc., 1984.

[In the following essay, Brathwaite examines African influences on Caribbean folk traditions, stressing that although highly focused on religion, African cultural practices and norms not only survived periods of slavery and colonization, but that they continue to influence Caribbean folk culture in form, literature, and rhetoric.]

in december to about april every year, a drought visits the islands. the green canefields take on the golden deciduous crispness of scorched parchment. the blue sky burns muted. the dry air rivets the star nights with metallic cold. it is our tropical winter. this dryness, unexplained, is put down to ‘lack of rain.’

but living in st lucia at this time, i watched this drought drift in towards the island, moving in across the ocean from the east, obscuring martinique, obscuring sails beating towards castries and i suddenly realized that what i was witnessing—that milky haze, that sense of dryness—was something i had seen and felt before in ghana. it was the seasonal dust-cloud, drifting out of the great ocean of sahara—the harmattan. by an obscure miracle of connection, this arab's nomad wind, cracker of fante wood a thousand miles away, did not die on the sea-shore of west africa, its continental limit; it drifted on, reaching the new world archipelago to create our drought, imposing an african season on the caribbean sea. and it was on these winds too, and in this season, that the slave ships came from guinea, bearing my ancestors to this other land. …²

Even before the first slaves came—bringing, perhaps, Precolumbian explorers³—there was the wind: an implacable climatic, indeed, geological connection. Along its routes and during its seasonal blowing, fifteen to fifty million Africans were imported into the New World,⁴ coming to constitute a majority of people in the Caribbean, and significant numbers in the New World.

TRANSFERENCE AND ADAPTATION

Now there is a persistent, established theory which contends that the Middle Passage destroyed the culture of these people, that it was such a catastrophic, definitive experience that none of those transported during the period from 1540 to 1840 escaped trauma.⁵ But modern research is pointing to a denial of this,⁶ showing that African culture not only crossed the Atlantic, it crossed, survived, and creatively adapted itself to its new environment. Caribbean culture was therefore not “pure” African, but an adaptation carried out mainly in terms of African tradition. This we can determine by looking at what anthropologists have called its culture-focus. This concept posits that each culture has a distinguishing style or characteristic; it may be sun-centered or acephalous, ceremonial or casual, materialistic or contemplative. And everyone agrees that the focus of African culture in the Caribbean was religious.

The anti-African argument claims, however, that it was only religion that the slaves brought with them, and a religion already tending more to fetish and superstition than to theology and ethics, and therefore weak and unviable. They claim (and their twists of evidence would fill a whole paper in itself) that the slave had no philosophy, no military organization, no social life, no family structure, no arts, no sense of personal or civic responsibility.⁷

I fundamentally disagree with this view which I consider based (and biased) on (1) mistaken notions of culture, culture change, and culture transference; (2) untenable, sometimes ignorant, concepts of African culture; (3) a lack of intimacy with traditional African culture (most of those who have written on Africa have been European scholars, with both intellectual and interpersonal problems relating to Africa); and (4) an almost total ignorance of Afro-American folk culture.⁸ Until sensitive African scholars begin to contribute to the study of New World and Caribbean folk cultures, the presence of African elements within this subculture is bound, for fairly obvious reasons, to remain obscure. How can we explain the success of the Haitian Revolution, for instance, unless we consider it a triumph of Afro-Caribbean folk arts and culture over European mercantilism? Toussaint was a slave (a coachman) and an herbalist, not an academy-drilled, socially motivated vaulter like Napoleon.

RELIGIOUS FOCUS

The story really begins in the area of religious culture-focus already mentioned. A study of African culture⁹ reveals almost without question that it is based upon religion—that, in fact, it is within the religious network that the entire culture resides. Furthermore, this entire culture is an organic whole. In traditional Africa, there is no specialization of disciplines, no dissociation of sensibilities. In other words, starting from this particular religious focus, there is no separation between religion and philosophy, religion and society, religion and art. Religion is the form of kernel or core of the culture. It is therefore not surprising that anthropologists tell us that African culture survived in the Caribbean through religion. What we should alert ourselves to is the possibility, whenever “religion” is mentioned, that a whole cultural complex is also present. Of course we have to take into account the depredations and fragmentations imposed upon African culture by the slave trade and plantation systems; but this should not alter our perception of the whole.

EMANCIPATION

This African culture, focused upon a religious core which survived and flourished under slavery, came under very severe attack at emancipation. Under slavery, it had been possible for plantation slaves—those not immediately or always under the surveillance of the master—to continue practicing their religion and therefore their culture, or at least those elements of it that had survived under the conditions—elements signaled by things like drum, dance, obeah,¹⁰ song, tale, and herb. At emancipation, however, all this came under attack from a number of quarters.

In the first place, the missionaries were naturally against African or African-oriented religious practices among their ex-African adherents. Hence the banning of the drum (voice of god or worship: nyame—one of three Akan names for the Supreme Being); the gradual replacement of African foods and foodstyles (nyam¹¹/yam) by European or Creole substitutes, and the Christianization of names (nommo—Bantu for the Word) and ideas (nam). It was possible after emancipation to do this more and more effectively because there was no longer the legal restriction on missionary activity that had existed under slavery. Slowly the ex-slaves began to lose or disown the most crucial elements of their culture in the very area where it was most important and venerable. They began, in other words, to go to churches and chapels rather than to beat their drums.

Second, the process of education began—first clerical, then secular, but always colonial. Depending on who owned the territory, the ex-slaves were to be molded into the British or the French or the Spanish system. They began to learn to read and write so that they were diverted from the oral tradition of their inheritance; they became literate in a language which was foreign to them, “liberated” into a culture which was not theirs. They began, in other words, to read about Versailles and cake and Lord Nelson and Robin Hood and all those frescoes which, some time ago, the Mighty Sparrow¹² de-celebrated in his calypso, “Dan Is the Man in the Van.” At the same time, there was no countervailing influence to help them learn about their own tradition. This of course did not “have to” happen. It is conceivable that this education could have been truly bicultural, so that, who knows, we might have struggled through Asante Twi and the Zulu epics as well as French, Latin, and Anglo-Saxon. However, under the dictates of mercantilism, education had a more monolithic and materialistic aim: control of the ex-slaves for the profit of their labor.

Third, since the object of the plantocracy was to retain its wall of social and political authority in the Caribbean, it supported these two “missionary” drives with social legislation designed to prevent the former slaves from achieving very much in the community. Their voting rights were restricted, their socioeconomic mobility curtailed, and their way of life brought under subtle but savage attack. Shango, cumfa, kaiso, tea-meeting, susu, jamette-carnivals¹³—all had to go.

The situation has been very slow to change. The law banning cumfa in Suriname was only rescinded in 1971,¹⁴ and it is not unlikely that, technically at least, laws against shango, bongo, poco,¹⁵ and obeah are still in force in the region. Recently, for instance, Dr. Eric Williams, Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago and author of the radical antimercantilist dissertation, Capitalism and Slavery,¹⁶ remarked with sardonic disapproval that he didn't think it would be long before the obeah man would be rehabilitated in the Caribbean.¹⁷ Such is the success of the Europhone establishment at devaluing African culture in the New World. Not surprisingly then, the teaching of African history at the University of the West Indies has been, to say the least, spasmodic. The subject's most distinguished native scholar, Walter Rodney, was cashiered from Jamaica in 1968¹⁸ and there has been no continuity of instruction since then. African culture is not “taught” or even thought of at all, a fact reflected in the dearth of books, records, films, and lectures on these matters available to the public. Moreover, when an individual or group protests about this or tries to do something about it, a multiracial howl goes up. The protesters are accused of overemphasis on Africa (!) and asked to remember that they are Dominicans, Bahamians, or what have you, with their own distinctive (!) and locally rooted (?) cultures. In August, 1973, for instance, a Bajan cultural group, Yoruba House, commemorated Emancipation/Freedom Day by issuing a number of awards in the arts—the first such recorded in Barbados or indeed in the Anglophone Caribbean. These were not awarded on the basis of annual competition/performances but in consideration of contributions to the discovery, recognition, and status of the African presence in the community. On this, the island's (then) only newspaper felt it necessary to editorialize:

Our heritage is the result of exposure to many cultures, with some having a greater influence than others. It is because of this greater influence which has been mainly of British origin in Barbados, that much of our African heritage has become submerged or even diluted to the extent that it can no longer be identified as such. …¹⁹

With Africa, then, diluted, even submerged, and certainly safely out of the way, the article goes on to salvage from the cultural wreck the multiracial (Creole) notion of “Caribbean”: “not totally European, nor is it pure African.” It also referred to extremists who “become fanatical in their thinking about things African” (one wonders where or when!), warns against “emotionalism” sweeping into the discussion, and finally concedes that Yoruba could play “a big part in bringing into proper perspective what we owe to the African side of our heritage.” My contention is that the creation of this “proper perspective” requires more than lip service from the establishment. It requires information, and an educational program based on a revolutionized value system.

RELIGIOUS CONTINUITY

On the eve of the Morant Bay Rebellion, thirty years after emancipation, there was a “strange” movement in Jamaica which, significantly, took the form of a religious revival. Social and political unrest centered in the Baptist churches, which the slaves had always preferred, mainly because of the “African” nature of their adult baptism and the comparative freedom of their communal worship.²⁰ Especially militant were the Black or Native Baptist churches, started at the time of the American Revolution when loyalist colonists fled from what was to become the United States with faithful slaves or ex-slaves, some of whom (George Leile, Moses Baker) were helped or encouraged by their masters to spread the gospel of Christ on the island.²¹ As a result, certain churches shifted away from a Euro-American kind of organization into congregations that were not only run by Blacks, but included African religious elements into their services. In 1865, on the verge of the Rebellion (in fact a symptom and symbol of it), there was a sudden proliferation of these churches.

This was followed by an even more “startling” phenomenon—the public reappearance of myalism,²² which had no connection whatever with Christianity. Myal²³ is a fragmented form of African religion expressing, through dreams, visions, prophesying, and possession dances (kumina²⁴), what the establishment called “hysteria” and later pocomania: “a little madness.”²⁵ Thousands of black Jamaicans became involved in this revival which ranged from “left wing” Christian (Baptist) to Afro-Jamaican radical or anarchic (myal). The Rebellion itself was a militant political movement closely related to these. The leaders, Mulatto George William Gordon and Black Paul Bogle, pastors of Baptist and Black Baptist churches respectively, worked in close alliance. Bogle (like Toussaint, and Sam Sharpe later) probably carried the myal title of “Daddy” (Dada) as well, although more research will have to be done to confirm this. At present we know next to nothing about him,²⁶ but there is evidence²⁷ that some of his followers took oaths and drank rum and gunpowder, leading some contemporary observers to speak of “the supernatural workings of Satanic temptation.”²⁸ There was also an emphasis on color (“We must cleave unto the black”)—all of which suggests that a radical Afro-myal movement underlay the more liberal/reformist Creole concern with justice and land.²⁹ Elements similar to this were present in the ferment surrounding Cuffee in Guyana (1763), Dessalines in Haiti (1799 to 1800), Bussa in Barbados (1816) and Nat Turner in the United States (1831), so that we witness again and again a chain reaction moving the ex-African's core of religion into ever-widening areas. It is this potential for explosion and ramification that has made blackness such a radical if subterranean feature of plantation political culture; for the African “phenomenon,” continuously present, like a bomb, in the New World since the abduction of the first slaves—a phenomenon subsisting in bases deep within the Zion/Ethiopian churches of the United States³⁰ and in the hounforts³¹ of the Caribbean and South America—triggers itself into visibility at each moment of crisis in the hemisphere: 1790 in Haiti, 1860 in Jamaica, 1930 in the West Indies, and 1960 in the New World generally.

II

I cannot maintain that African continuities are as easily traced in our literature as in the social/ideological world I have so far described. This does not mean there is no African presence in Caribbean/New World writing. It simply means that because of its almost inevitable involvement with the establishment through education, communication and sales processing (mercantilism), much of what we have come to accept as “literature” is work which ignores, or is ignorant of, its African connection and aesthetic.

Until, therefore, our definition of “culture” is reexamined in terms of its totality, not simply its Europeanity, we will fail to discover a literature of negritude and with it, a literature of local authenticity.³² Likewise, the African presence in Caribbean literature cannot be fully or easily perceived until we redefine the term “literature” to include the nonscribal material of the folk/oral tradition, which, on examination, turns out to have a much longer history than our scribal tradition, to have been more relevant to the majority of our people, and to have had unquestionably wider provenance. In other words, while a significant corpus of “prose” and “poetry” has been created—and read—by a few persons in the major Antilles; folk song, folk tale, proverb, and chant are found everywhere without fear or favor and are enjoyed by all. It is from “the guitars of the people,” as Nicolás Guillén recently put it, that the “son went to the salons of the aristocracy,”³³ With this re/vision in mind, we see an African literature in the Caribbean beginning to reveal itself.

SLAVERY

On the eve of emancipation, at a crise de conscience, when the European planters in the West Indies were becoming aware of the plural society³⁴ developing around them and conscious of the need, if they were to retain their hegemony, to destroy, subvert, psychologically control the Black majority, a few books began to appear which described slaves in terms of their own culture.³⁵

The most outstanding example in English is a novel, anonymously written called Hamel the Obeah Man (1827), which for the first time describes a slave, Hamel, as a complex human being. In order to do this, the author had to give him a cultural context, and, significantly, he chose a cultural context based on his obeah—obeah seen not as a debasement but as a form of African religion of which he was a priest. Hamel was placed in ideological opposition to a white missionary. The plot of the book is, in fact, designed as a struggle between the white missionary and the African priest. Out of a personal sense of loyalty, Hamel uses his obeah to support righteous planter against subversive missionary. Nevertheless, Hame's intransigent opposition to the institution of slavery is clearly established. It is suggested that, had he, rather than the missionary, fomented the slave revolt which climaxes the novel, it would have been practically uncontrollable. The book, in other words, is an antimissionary tract. But it is also a remarkable act of fiction (for its genre) in that Hamel is seen “whole,” with real doubts and passions, and so provides some insight into the West Indian slave experience.³⁶

After emancipation, due to the sociocultural disengagement between Black and White, there were no further works by White/Creole writers, even approaching the standard of Hamel. Since 1900 there has been a certain reappearance of the White writer: H. G. DeLisser (Jamaica), Alfred Mendes and Ian McDonald (Trinidad), J. B. Emtage and Geoffrey Drayton (Barbados), Phyllis Shand Allfrey and Jean Rhys (Dominica), and Christopher Nicole (Guyana), to name perhaps the most important.³⁷ But with the exception of DeLisser in Jane's Career, none of these writers has (yet) become centrally concerned with Caribbean Africans (or Indians); most of them (again with the exception of Jane's Career) seem romantic, while a few are the opposite—callous (Mendes in Pitch Lake) or just plain boorish (Emtage)—and betray what Kenneth Ramchand, using a phrase of Fanon's, has called “terrified consciousness.”³⁸

INDIGENISM/NEGRISMO

The above, however, is not intended in any way to exclude White West Indian writers from our literary canon. In fact, in another study,³⁹ I have attempted to show how the work of Roger Mais, a “White” Jamaican, could in many ways act as a model for our developing critical aesthetics. But the majority of White West Indian writers, it seems to me, are not yet prepared to allow their art to erode the boundaries set up around their minds by the physical/metaphysical plantation, and so do not yet recognize that their world has become marginal to the majority sense of local reality; or rather, that the plantation has transformed itself into other, new mercantilist forms, in which they are enslaved as surely as the descendants of their former bondsmen. It is only when this comes to them as crisis, it seems to me, that the White West Indian writers will find their voice.

The postemancipation period, therefore, has been one of literary hiatus. Caribbean (written) literature, as truly native enterprise and expression, does not begin, in fact, until, in response to the American occupation of the Greater Antilles,⁴⁰ certain artists in Cuba and Puerto Rico began to develop distinctive literary, and creative forms that have come to be called indigenism and negrismo. This is interesting because the populations of these two territories are predominantly ex-Spanish, rather than ex-African. Unlike those in the rest of the Caribbean, the majority in Cuba and Puerto Rico is “White” rather than “Black” Creole. Nevertheless, the literary expression which came out of these White Creoles (and Mulattoes) was Black-based; they recognized that the only form of expression which could be used as a protest, or an authentic alter/native, to American cultural imperialism, was ex-African. This is at least part of what the Cuban thinker Juan Marinello had in mind in the 1930s when he said that due to the extinction of the Amerindians and the fact that they had left “no architecture or literature,” the Negro had assumed a “specific significance.” “Here the Negro is marrow and root, the breath of the people, a music heard, [an] irrepressible impulse. He may, in these times of change, be the touchstone of our poetry.⁴¹

CRISIS/RESPONSE

The best way to understand this in its fullest literary sense—one, that is, which includes the oral tradition—is to see it and the other expressions of the African presence which followed as responses to White cultural imperialism. During slavery, White cultural imposition was responded to with worksong, gospel, blues, the spiritual, mento (a secular Jamaican folk song form), shanto (the word in Guyana for mento), shango hymn, a folk tale. The postemancipation crisis saw a certain erosion of folk tales, especially in the more urbanized areas, but it saw the entrenchment of the literature of the hounfort. Urban immigration, from the end of the nineteenth century, saw the formation of Black ghettos and the emergence of a new urban folk art—the dozens, urban blues, new urban shouter churches, the Harlem Renaissance, Garveyite creative work,⁴² Rastafari,⁴³ the Nation of Islam, and Carnival.

The crisis of American imperialism brought us Price-Mars and Hippolyte and Jacques Roumain in Haiti, José Martí and negrismo in the Spanish Antilles and, in a way, the international emergence of the calypso in Trinidad.⁴⁴ The crisis of European imperialism, as reflected in World War II, produced the negritude of the French-speaking expatriate colonials as well as a more locally based tigritude⁴⁵ literature in the Black colonies of Africa and the Caribbean. The recent crisis of neocolonialism and indigenous disillusionment has seen the Black Power movement and its various ramifications, the explosion of urban folk in Jamaica and the United States, the reemergence of “native” churches, a certain revitalization of calypso, and a generally increased awareness of the authenticity of folk forms. And as the Carifesta Revolution (1972) in Guyana clearly demonstrated, these Caribbean folk forms continue to be uniquely, vitally, and creatively African in form, rhythm, and soul.⁴⁶

III

There are four kinds of written African literature in the Caribbean. The first is rhetorical. The writer uses Africa as mask, signal, or nomen. He doesn't know very much about Africa necessarily, although he reflects a deep desire to make connection. But he is only saying the word “Africa” or invoking a dream of the Congo, Senegal, Niger, the Zulu, Nile, or Zambesi. He is not necessarily celebrating or activating the African presence. There are also elements of this romantic rhetoric within the other three categories. The second is what I call the literature of African survival, a literature which deals quite consciously with African survivals in Caribbean society, but without necessarily making any attempt to interpret or reconnect them with the great tradition of Africa. Third, there is what I call the literature of African expression, which has its root in the folk, and which attempts to adapt or transform folk material into literary experiment. Finally, there is the literature of reconnection, written by Caribbean (and New World) writers who have lived in Africa and are attempting to relate that experience to the New World, or who are consciously reaching out to rebridge the gap with the spiritual heartland.

RHETORICAL AFRICA

Tambour
quand tu résonne,
mon âme hurle vers l'Afrique.
Tantôt,
je rêve d'une brousse immense
baignée de lune,
où s'echevellent de suantes nudités.
Tantôt
à une case immonde
où je savoure du sang dans des crânes humains.
Drum
when you make sound
my soul curls back to Africa.
Sometimes
I dream of a great moonlit forest
alive with leaping nudes.
Sometimes
there is a simple hut
where I drink blood out of human skulls.(47)

Carl Brouard

There are many such poems in this category, among them work by Daniel Thaly of Dominica/Haiti, Pales Matos of Puerto Rico, Claude McKay and George Campbell of Jamaica, and E. M. Roach of Tobago. Perhaps the most famous, a romantic/rhetorical poem as distinct from but still connected to the primitive/rhetorical tradition of Brouard and Pales Matos, is the Black American Countee Cullen's “Heritage”:

What is Africa to me:
Copper sun or scarlet sea,
Jungle star or jungle track,
Strong bronzed men, or regal black
Women from whose loins I sprang
When the birds of Eden sang. …(48)

In the Anglophone Caribbean, this is echoed in poems like Philip Sherlock's “Jamaican Fisherman”:

Across the sand I saw a black man stride
To fetch his fishing gear and broken things,
And silently that splendid body cried
Its proud descent from ancient chiefs and kings. …(49)

It is this kind of concern, persistent from the earliest days of Black New World expression, which finally feeds into and influences the literature of rehabilitation and reconnection:

C'est le lent chemin de Guinée
La mort t'y conduire. …(50)

Jacques Roumain

In general, however, rhetorical literature is static, wishful and willful in nature. Although it betrays a significant instinct for Africa, the instinct is based on ignorance and often, in the case of Brouard and his generation and class, on received European notions of “darkest Africa.” Louise Bennett was quite right in humorously rejecting that kind of reconnection:

Back to Africa Miss Matty?
Yuh noh know wha yuh dah-say?
Yuh haffe come from some weh fus,
Before yuh go back deh?(51)

From this attraction/ignorance too, springs the sense, as in Leon Laleau⁵² and Derek Walcott,⁵³ that the two cultures present a dichotomy and that one must choose between them. Dantès Bellegarde, a leader in the early 1940s of one of Haiti's anti-Africanist groups, held that “We belong to Africa by our blood, and to France by our spirit and by a significant proportion of our blood.”⁵⁴ In Andrew Salkey's novel, A Quality of Violence, the debate is expressed as follows:

We not frighten by white fowl talk or Africa or slave power! We don't belong to them things. … We is people who live on the land in St Thomas, not Africa. … We is no slave people, and there is no Africa in we blood the way you would-a like we to believe. …

But you wrong, Miss Mellie. Me and you and the rest-a-people in St Thomas all belong to the days that pass by when slavery was with the land. Everybody is part of slavery days, is a part of the climate-a-Africa and the feelings in the heart is Africa feelings that beating there, far down. …⁵⁵

In contrast, we have the acceptance of this dual cultural inheritance by a poet like the Cuban Mulatto Nicolás Guillén.

We have been together from long ago
young and old,
blacks and whites, all mixed,
one commanding and the other commanded,
all mixed;
San Berenito and another commanded,
all mixed …
Santa Maria and another commanded,
all mixed
all mixed

But always there is the refrain with its positive recognition of Africa:

I am yoruba, I am lucumi,
mandingo, congo, carabali. …(56)

THE LITERATURE OF AFRICAN SURVIVAL

The literature of African survival inheres most surely and securely in the folk tradition—in folk tale, folksong, proverb, and much of the litany of the hounfort. Here, for example, is a marassa (spirit twins) lament from a vodun⁵⁷ ceremony:

Marassa élo, I have no mother here who can speak for me
Marassa élo
I have left my mother in Africa
Marassa élo
I have left my family in Africa
I have no family to speak for me
I have no relations to speak for me
Marassa élo(58)

The connection between this and African elegies is obvious; as is the connection with African lamentations in “New ships,” “Tano,” and “Wake” from my own Masks and Islands.⁵⁹ There is also, in the hounfort, the use of language based upon what are often only fragmented phonetics of an ancestral African tongue, as in this shango hymn to Ajaja:

Ay ree ah jaja
Ay ree leh
Ah jaja wo goon
Ajaja way geh

which has been interpreted to mean

We are searching for you
Wherever you are
Show yourself
We want to see you
We are searching for you
Come let us speak to you
We call you, we speak to you
Wherever you are(60)

Similarly from Jamaican kumina comes this poem in which so-so means water, and kuwidi means “call (ku) the dead widi).”

Tange lange Jeni di gal eva
Wang lang mama o
Di le kuwidi pange le
So-so lange widi gal
So-so lange mama o
Dance tall Jenny gal
Walk tall mama o
The dead come to greet you
Water long like the dead, gal
Water long, mama o(61)

In “William Saves His Sweetheart,” the folk imagination is again concerned with water,⁶² but this time its expression is entirely in intransigent non-English or, as I prefer to call it, nation-language, since Africans in the New World always referred to themselves as belonging to certain nations (Congo, Kromantee, etc.)⁶³ Here there are no African wordfragments or phrases as in the hounfort, but the tonal shape of the language, its rhythm changes, structure, contours of thought and image, eruption into song/dance/movement, make it clearly recognizable as African speech-form:

an a so dem doo. dem kal de gal, an she kom. an im seh, yu nyaam mi peas tiday? him seh, nuo ma, me no heat non. Him seh, aa'right, kom, we go doun-a golli-ya. we wi' faen out. him tiek di gal an im go doun-a di golli, an when going doun too di golli, im go op pan im laim tree, an im pick trii laim. im guo in-a fowl ness, im tiek trii eggs … an im staat, an haal im suod … an im go goun-a di golli. im pu-doun di gal in-a di lebble drai golli, an seh, see ya! tan op deh. mi de-go tell yu now, ef yo heat mipeas, yu de-go drounded, bot if yu nou heat ih, nottn wuon doo yu. so swie, yu bitch! swier! seh yu no heat ih, while yo nuo yu heat ih. an she lik doun wan-a di laim a-doti so, wam! an di drai golli pomp op wata, kova di gal instep. de gal sah, mai! puo mi wan! a-whe me deh go-do tiday? him seh, swie! swie! yu bitch! an im lik doun wan nedda laim so, wam, an di wata mount di gal to im knee. di gal seh

                                                                                     laad ooi! mi wilyam ooi!
ih im sweethaat im de-kal
                                                                                     mi wilyam ooi!
                                                                                     puo mi wan ooi! peas ooi!
                                                                                     oo, mi dearess wilyam oo
                                                                                     rin doun peas oi ai! a rin doun!
                                                                                                         oo, rin doun(64)

There is also considerable metaphysical life and symbolic association contained and hidden away in some of the folksongs and poems that have been preserved, often accidentally. Take this French Creole song, for instance, “Three Leaves, Three Roots,” about change and timelessness:

Trois fé trois ci-tron oh!
Trois fé trois ra-cine oh!
Moin dit, rwo, youn jour ou wa be-soin moin!
Trois fé trois ra-cine oh!
Moin dit oui, youn jour ou wa be-soin moin!
Gain'-yain bas-sin moin
trois ra-cine tom-bé la-dans
Quand ou wa 'bli-é
fau' ra-mas-sé chon-ge(65)

Similarly, there is a fragment of a charm, collected by the Jamaican historian, H. P. Jacobs, which reads:

Bear up, mi good tree, bear up!
Mi father alays cut a tree,
The green tree falls and the dry tree stands!
Shemo-limmo! mi toto! beng! beng!(66)

The paradox dry tree stands and green tree falls is yet another illustration of the levels of expression possible within the folk tradition. This fragment is especially interesting because the folk/metaphysical mind can be seen working in concert with African symbolism. For Shemo-limmo, which is the secret name of a bull in certain Afrojamaican folk stories,⁶⁷ is also connected to lemolemo, the Yoruba for “locomotive”; and the locomotive has become one of the guises⁶⁸ of Shango, god of thunder and creativity, in the New World.⁶⁹

There is very little in the written “educated” tradition which offers anything approaching these insights into our collective psyche. Seldom do our writers reach beyond descriptive rhetoric when they treat “hounfort-happenings.”

Most of the people on the veranda and some of those who squatted on the stones in the front yard formed a group round the three women and waited for Mother Johnson to make a statement. She asked for her bandana which she wrapped round her right forearm. She knotted it. Everybody watched her as she tucked in the loose ends and patted the bulky parts of the folds into shape.

She said: “I hope everybody see how I just tie up the bandana?” There was a chorus of muttered affirmatives. “Well,” she continued, “I telling you, now, that that is the same way that somebody tie up poor, innocent Doris brain. That somebody is well beknown to all of us in St Thomas. That somebody is a selfish, class-warring, sort of house-enemy. Is a person who looking to destroy Miss T happiness and peace-a-mind.” She paused for breath. She again patted the bandana, and pointing to it, she continued: “As the dead body of my husband, Dada Johnson, who everybody here did well know and like as a great prophet/'mongst us … I telling you, once and for all, that Miss T gal pickney, Doris, is under a spell that she can't budge from, without plenty working of the good Lawd work on her, to bring her round again.”

The gathering muttered: “Oh! Jehovah! Yes, Lawd!”

Mother Johnson cleared a space on the veranda steps, and sat down.⁷⁰

The descriptive/dramatic power of this passage is typical of the excellence of A Quality of Violence, but as Salkey approaches the central and most sacred experiences of the tonelle,⁷¹ his knowledge and involvement falter, to be replaced by passages that ring more of melodramatic brass than responsive silver:

Dada Johnson held a cutlass high above his head, sliced the air in wide circular movements and threw it in front of the deputy. It landed blade first. The deputy dropped the white rooster, grabbed the cutlass and also made slicing movements in the air. The chanting sisters started to gyrate once more, pummelling their stomachs with clenched fists. …⁷²

No matter how apparently violent (and not all possessions are violent), there is nothing in the choreography of Afro-Caribbean folk religion that is uncontrolled: flung hounsis⁷³ are softly caught; no one, except them, ever touches another, despite the complex movements and the limited space; and there is never a pulled muscle or a cricked neck.

Salkey's verbs—“grabbed,” “gyrate,” “pummel”—are all suddenly wrong. Or, to put it another way, the description of possession demands of the writer a choice of words, of traditions. Salkey, in the heart of the tonelle, opts for the Eurorational/descriptive and therefore fails to celebrate with his worshipers, which in turn leads to the alienation of “In one action, they gathered up their calico gowns, stooped lower to the body of the deputy and urinated on him.”⁷⁴ But such is the thirst of Salkey's literary ear that fragments of litany, of powerful enigmatic metaphor soon appear and give his work a new dimension in passages like the following (which gains in power when we know that in vodun, and Afro-Creole religion generally, the crippled [lame] god of the crossroads, Legba, is the first to be praised in the hounfort):

The chanting sisters had stopped chanting but were still standing in front of Dada Johnson who was saying a silent prayer. The deputy had crawled under the meeting-table. Suddenly, the chanting sisters sprang back and cried out: “And Jonathan, Saul's son, had a son that was lame of his feet!” There was about five seconds' silence and the deputy crawled from under the meeting-table. He stood erect and raised his right hand towards the chanting sisters who screamed: “Him have the sacrifice in him hand! See God dey!” The deputy sprang around and faced Dada Johnson who bowed and snatched the white rooster out of his right hand. Dada Johnson said: “Cock blood pour down like rain water! Cooking fowl is cloud! Cloud burst open and blood bring rain!”⁷⁵

The surreal images here (italicized) could hardly have been conceived outside the hounfort. And yet Salkey, like so many others caught up in the tradition of the Master, remains ambivalent in his attitude to the African presence in the Caribbean.⁷⁶ Vera Bell, in “Ancestor on the Auction Block”⁷⁷ betrays an even more direct uncertainty of response:

Ancestor on the auction block
Across the years your eyes seek mine
Compelling me to look.
I see your shackled feet
Your primitive black face
I see your humiliation
And turn away
Ashamed.
Across the years your eyes seek mine
Compelling me to look
Is this mean creature that I see
Myself?

Philip Sherlock in “Pocomania”⁷⁸ betrays this psychic dichotomy in a crucial choice of work—namely, the use of grunt, instead of trump, to describe the deep rhythmic intake/expulsion of breath which precedes possession:

Black of night and white of gown,
White of altar, black of trees,
Swing de circle wide again,
Fall an' cry, me sister, now.
Let de spirit come again,
Fling away de flesh an' bone
Let de spirit have a home.
Grunting low and in the dark,
White of gown and circling dance.
Gone today and all control,
Here the dead are in control,
Power of the past returns,
Africa among the trees,
Asia with her mysteries. …

Earlier in the poem, the loss of “control” under these Afro-Asian mysteries (why “Asia” isn't clear) is even more pejoratively stated:

Black Long Mountain looking down
Sees the shepherd and his flock
Dance and sing and falls away
All the civilised today. …

No wonder Fola, the young Black educated sister in George Lamming's Season of Adventure, was afraid to enter the hounfort.⁷⁹ But what is really surprising, given the Caribbean psychocultural inheritance, is not really the fear/avoidance response with regard to the African presence in the New World, but the persistent attempts, at all levels, to deal with it. No writer in the plantation New World can, in fact, ignore “Africa” for long, though it is interesting to note that outside of literary negrismo circles, there has been more active and public interest in this area of our culture from historians, sociologists, and social anthropologists than from writers and artists generally.

MAROONS⁸⁰

One area of African survival is that of physical and psychological marronage. From the moment of arrival in the New World, the people of Africa were concerned with response: suicide, accommodation, escape, rebellion. Escape/rebellion often led to the setting up of African communities outside of and often in opposition to, the great Euro-Creole plantations. In Suriname, for instance, the Njukka, Saramaccar and other groups, usually blanketed under the term “Bush Negroes,” established independencies along the rivers and waterways of the forested Guyanese hinterland from the middle of the seventeenth century. In Jamaica, Maroons quickly established themselves in five independent towns in the inaccessible Blue Mountains and Cockpit country, fighting the British almost to a standstill in two highly organized guerrilla wars during the eighteenth century. There are militant Black Caribs (Afro-Amerindians) in the Windward Islands, particularly St. Vincent, and significant Afro-Maroon groups in most of the other slave islands, especially Saint Domingue (Haiti). The most spectacular maroon community, however, was that established at Palmares, in Brazil, in 1631, which was able to maintain its independence (with ambassadors, traders, etc.) for over seventy years.⁸¹ And yet there are only two novels in English, known to me, which attempt to come to terms with even one aspect of this experience; and I suspect that the story is very much the same in the rest of the region. This, again, is a tribute to European brainwash. Many Caribbean writers don't even know that these communities existed and that some still exist;⁸² and the few who do are too cut off to conjure line or metaphor from this matrix. Of the two Anglophones who have attempted imaginative fiction in this field, one, Namba Roy, was himself a (Jamaican) Maroon. Unfortunately, he did not attempt, in the only novel he ever wrote,⁸³ more than a romantic tale of “brave warriors” and internecine conflict. Wilson Harris, on the other hand, uses in The Secret Ladder the presence of an ancient Black chieftain of the swamps to initiate a whole series of perceptions into the question of marronage, ancestry and filiation.

I feel I have stumbled here in the Canje [writes Fenwick, the persona through whom we perceive the interests of “progress” in this novel] on an abortive movement, the emotional and political germ of which has been used in two centuries of history. … What will you say when I tell you I have come across the Grand Old Man of our history … ?⁸⁴

But Harris' vision is too ecumenical for it to allow him to accept too easily this celebratory gift of an ancestor.

To misconceive the African [Fenwick's letter continued] … is to misunderstand and exploit him mercilessly and oneself as well. For there, in this creature Poseidon, the black man with the European name, drawn out of the depths of time, is the emotional dynamic of liberation that happened a century and a quarter ago. … Something went tragically wrong then. Something was misunderstood and frustrated, God alone knows why and how. … Maybe it was all too emotional, too blinding, this freedom that has turned cruel, abortive, evasive, woolly, and wild everywhere almost. …⁸⁵

It is a salutary caveat, although Harris is himself guilty of misconceiving the African—certainly the Maroon. For the cruel abortion of freedom he speaks about, the over-“emotional” negritude, was and is not only a function of maroonage, it was and is even more certainly the consequence of opposition to the plantation. How else can we interpret the fate and history of Haiti, the greatest and most successful Maroon polity of them all? But Harris, ambivalent like most of us, finds “West Indian [protest] politics and intellectualism” sterile,⁸⁶ so that, as with the cultural pessimists we referred to earlier, he concludes that the African slave, originator and conditional body of Caribbean militance, must/could have come here equipped with very little—with very little to offer:

One must remember that breath is all the black man may have possessed at a certain stage in the Americas. He had lost his tribal tongue, he had lost everything except an abrupt area of space and lung: he possessed nothing but the calamitous air of broken ties in the New World.⁸⁷

And yet, whereas with Naipaul,⁸⁸ Patterson,⁸⁹ even Derek Walcott,⁹⁰ this nothing yields nothing, with Harris this ruin/vestige, shred of breath, vital possession of the dispossessed, becomes the survival rhythm from which transformation may proceed.

THE LITERATURE OF AFRICAN EXPRESSION

Limbo [is] a dance in which the participants have to move, with their bodies thrown backwards and without any aid whatsoever, under a stick which is lowered at every successfully completed passage under it, until the stick is practically touching the ground. It is said to have originated—a necessary therapy after the experience of the cramped conditions between the slave decks of the Middle Passage. Now very popular as a performing act in Caribbean night clubs.⁹¹

And the limbo stick is the silence in front of me
limbo
limbo
limbo like me …
long dark night is the silence in front of me
limbo
limbo like me
stick hit sound
and the ship like it ready
stick hit sound
and the ship like it ready
limbo
limbo like me. …(92)

Limbo then reflects a certain kind of gateway or threshold to a new world and the dislocation of a chain of miles. It is—in some ways—the archetypal sea-change stemming from Old Worlds and it is legitimate, I feel, to pun on limbo as a kind of shared phantom limb which has become a subconscious variable in West Indian theatre. The emergence of formal West Indian theatre was preceded, I suggest, by that phantom limb which manifested itself on Boxing Day, when the ban on the “rowdy” bands … was lifted for the festive season. … I recall performances I witnessed as a boy in Georgetown … in the early 1930s. Some of the performers danced on high stilts like elongated limbs while others performed spreadeagled on the ground. In this way limbo spider and stilted pole of the gods were related to the drums like grassroots and branches of lightning to the sound of thunder.⁹³

The power and progress of image in these quotations illustrate what I mean by transformation. In terms of literary craftsmanship, they represent a shift from rhetoric to involvement. The beginning of this is evident, for example, in the poem “Pocomania,” by Philip Sherlock, which we have already considered. Note its new rhythmic emphasis:

Black the stars, hide the sky,
Lift you' shoulder, blot the moon

and the appearance of dialect:

Swing de circle wide again,
Fall an' cry, me sister, now

The most significant factor in this process, however, is its connection with the hounfort: the heart and signal of the African experience in the Caribbean/New World. We have already witnessed the operation of this in Salkey's A Quality of Violence, and in the limbo quotations, above. But the Caribbean writer who has been able to move fearlessly/innocently into this enigmatic alternative world and has therefore been able to contribute most to the literature of African expression is George Lamming. In Season of Adventure we watch a young girl dance toward the gods at a vodun ceremony. As she dances, we become involved, until we find that Lamming's language has become an image of the child's possession:

The child was wide awake. … The dance was an instinct which her feet had learnt. … The women's chant was broken by applause. The child heard the voices competing in her praise. She became hysterical; wild, light as air and other than human, like the night clouding her eyes. Her voice had cried out: “Hair, hair! Give all, all, all, hair.” And she clapped until there was no feeling in her hands.

And the voices came nearer than her skin: “Dance, Liza, dance! Dance! Dance! Liza, Liza, Liza, dance! Dance, Liza, dance.”⁹⁴

The only time Lamming falters in this astonishing participation in Afro-Caribbean worship is with the word/perception hysterical. It is similar (and present for similar reasons) to the false notes already noted in Salkey, Bell, Brouard, and Sherlock. But the faltering is only momentary. As Liza/Lamming dances to incarnation, Caribbean literature, through this encounter with the loa, begins its transformation into a new species of original art:⁹⁵

Fire of the spirits in her eyes, and no longer a child as she watched the shadows strangled by her wish for hair blazing from the summit of the bamboo pole! She trampled upon the circle of maize, exploding shapes like toys under her feet, dancing the dust away. For the gods were descending to the call of voices: “Come! Come! in O! In O spirit of water come! Come!”

Now: gently, stage after gentle stage and feather-wise as if now orphaned of all sound, the voices were dying, second by full measure of second: then died on the gentlest of all sounds, “come, come, in O spirit of water come, come, come. …⁹⁶

NOMMO

The process of transformation which Lamming so remarkably undertakes here—the art of the hounfort into the art of the novel—has its roots in a certain kind of concern for and attitude to the word, the atomic core of language. This is something that is very much present in all folk cultures, all preliterate, preindustrial societies. Within such cultures, language was and is a creative act in itself. Think of our love for the politician or the word of the preacher. Indeed, it is one of the problems of our political life how to separate the word and the meaning of the word.

The word (nommo or name) is held to contain secret power. Monk Lewis, who was a novelist himself, visited Jamaica (where he had some estates) in 1815-1816 and described this kind of attitude among his slaves:

The other day … a woman, who had a child sick in the hospital, begged me to change its name for any other which might please me best: she cared not what; but she was sure that it would never do well so long as it should be called Lucia.⁹⁷

People feel a name is so important that a change in his name could transform a person's life. In traditional society, in fact, people often try to hide their names. That is why a Nigerian, for example, has so many names. Not only is it difficult to remember them, it is difficult to know which is the name that the man regards or identifies as his. If you call the wrong name you can't damage him.⁹⁸ Rumpelstiltskin in the German fable and Shemo-limmo in the Jamaican tale above are other examples of this. In H. G. DeLisser's Jane's Career, there is an interesting variation in which an earthquake, a natural divine phenomenon, becomes an aspect of nommo:

… many persons talked of the recent [1907] earthquake as something that could hear what was said about it, and take action accordingly. To Sampson and many others like him, the earthquake was a living, terrible force. …⁹⁹

Aimé Césaire takes this a stage further with:

I would recover the secret of epic speech and towering conflagrations. I would say storm. I would say river. I would say tornado. I would say leaf. I want to pronounce tree. I want to be soaked by all the falling rains, dampened with all the dews. I would roll like frenzied blood in the slow current of the eye of the word's mad horses' newly born formations of the fire. …¹⁰⁰

This is a kind of conjuration/divination, or rather, it comes from the same magical/miracle tradition as the conjure-man. Vibrations awake at the center of words. From the pools of their nommo, onomatopoeia and sound-symbols are born: banggarang, boolooloops and boonoonoonoos (Jamaica); barrabbattabbattabba and bruggalungdung (Barbados); umklaklabulu (“thunderclap”: Zulu); dabo-dabo (“duck”), munumm (“darkness”: Twi); pampam, primprim, prampalam (Bajan/Twi sounds of contact/movement); patoo (“owl”: Asante/Jamaican); felele (“to blow in the wind, to flutter”: Yoruba). In Black America it lives in the preacher/signifying tradition and the dozens, and surfaces scribally in areas of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain. It is apparent in Ishmael Reed's Yellow Back Radio Broke-down:

A terrible cuss of a thousand shivs he was who wasted whole herds, made the fruit black and wormy, dried up the water holes and caused people's eyes to grow from tiny black dots into slap-jacks wherever his feet fell. …¹⁰¹

and in Imamu Baraka's (LeRoi Jones') “Black Art”:

Poems are bullshit unless they are
teeth or trees or lemons piled
on a step. Or black ladies dying
of men leaving nickel hearts
beating them down. Fuck poems
and they are useful, wd they shoot
come at you, love what you are,
breathe like wrestlers, or shudder
strangely after pissing. We want live
words of the hip world live flesh &
coursing blood. Hearts Brains
Souls splintering fire. We want poems
like fists beating niggers out of Jocks
or dagger poems in the slimy bellies
of the owner-jews. …
… we want “poems that kill.”
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. …(102)

Similarly, the Surinamese word see-er or seer Robert Ravales (Dobru) tells us

write no words
write grenades
to eradicate poverty
write no sentences
write guns
to stop injustice(103)

This concept and use of word is found throughout the entire Black/African world. It is present in modern as well as traditional African literature.¹⁰⁴ In the Americas, it reveals itself in our love of courtroom scenes (both factual and fictional), the rhetoric of yard quarrels,¹⁰⁵ “word-throwings,”¹⁰⁶ tea-meetings, and preacher/political orations.¹⁰⁷ The whole living tradition of the calypso¹⁰⁸ is based on it. But it goes deeper than this, as the metaphysical and symbolic qualities of some of the Afro-Carribean fragments we have already discussed, indicates. Language, as we saw in the discussion of names, may be conceived as having the power to affect life. And again it is Lamming who exposes us to an interior view of the process:

The words seemed to come like the echo of other voices from outside: “is so, same so. …” Syllables changed their phrasing; words showed a length that had suffered by the roughness of an accent uttered in haste. Surfacing slowly … [they] seemed uncertain of their alliance. At every stage of awareness she could feel the change, until the rules of college speech gave way completely to the private dialect of her own tongue at home: “is same ever since and it been the same, same so ever since. …”¹⁰⁹

This way of using the word depends very much upon an understanding of the folk tradition out of which it comes. This folk tradition has received (not surprisingly) very little attention from scholars. There has been work by Nina Rodrigues, Renato Mendoza, Arthur Ramos, and Donald Pierson in Brazil; Fernando Ortiz in Cuba; for Jamaica there has been Martha Beckwith and more recently Ivy Baxter; for Trinidad, Errol Hill and J. D. Elder. For the Caribbean generally, there has been the work of the Herskovitses and Roger Bastide.¹¹⁰ But even where these studies are comprehensive, they seldom attempt to describe the sociology of nation-language. Few of them, certainly, attempt a critical/aesthetic appraisal of the word, as found in its Creole context, or as illuminated in the work/thought of say, Kagame, Ogotemmêli, St. John of the Gospel, Father Placied Tempels, or Jahnheinz Jahn, within the African “Great Tradition.”¹¹¹

TECHNIQUES

In addition to sound-symbols, nation-language sets up certain tunes, tones and rhythms which are characteristic of the folk tradition, and are often essential features of its expression. The overall space/patterns of this language, we might say, are controlled by a groundation¹¹² tendency, in which image/spirit is electrically conducted to earth like lightning or the loa (the gods, spirits, powers, or divine horsemen of vodun):

Mr. Frank
my gentleman, de Lord know
is you dat did show de way
nourish we spirit
when we did nothin, nothin.
Like a fowlcock
early pon a morning
jooking in de straw
scratchin de rockstone
nastyin up 'e beak
in de muddy gutter water. …(113)

Notice how, since what we see is in fact the speaking (seeking) voice, pause and cadence become important:

'e eye ball sharpen
to catch de teeny weeny bit …
before it loss away
okra sauce slippin through de gullet
hot, quick gone 'long for ever/ /
An' is you dat did dey …(114)

Bongo Jerry's sound-system poetry is instinctively quicker—urban ghetto—but the cadence/pauses are still there, as in “Learning Rhymes”:

I want to know the truth.
But they tell me to wait.
Wait till when?
Till I'm seventy.
Or eighty and eight.
I can/not/wait …
To them truth is when you don't tell lie or when you face
                                                  don't show it
Hoping that they could hide the truth and I would never
                                                  know it./ /
Dem cold.(115)

His poem, “Mabrak,” is in itself, a brilliant example of groundation:

Mabrak:
                                        NEWSFLASH!
“Babylon plans crash”
Thunder interrupt their programme to
announce:
BLACK ELECTRIC STORM
                                                                                                              IS HERE
How long you feel “fair is fine
(WHITE)” would last?
Hog long calm in darkness
                    when out of BLACK
come forth LIGHT?
[the dry tree stands and the green tree falls]
Every knee
                                        must bow
Every tongue
                                        confess
Every language
                                        express
                                                                      W
                                                                      O
                                                                      R
                                                                      D
                                                                      W
                                                                      O
                                                                      R
                                                                      K
                                                                      S(116)

Again, in the ballad tradition of Sparrow's “Dan is the Man in the Van” and “Parables,” or a Jamaican ska like “Salaman A Grundy,” Jerry trans/fuses weather forecasts, (“fair to fine”), Christian liturgy (“Every knee / must bow”), and children's game songs (“ringing rings of roses”) and whatever other significant demotic of the moment he can find; (Babelland/Babylon into his African vision:

SILENCE BABEL TONGUES; recall and
recollect BLACK SPEECH.
Cramp all double meaning
                                                  an' all that hiding language bar,
for that crossword speaking
                                                  when expressing feeling
is just English language contribution to increase confusion in
                                                  Babel-land tower—
delusion, name changing, word rearranging
                                                  ringing rings of roses, pocket full of poses:
“SAR” instead of “RAS”(117)

IMPROVISATION

Some time ago, I wrote an exploration into West Indian literature in which I tried to use jazz¹¹⁸ as an aesthetic criterion for understanding what certain of our writers were trying to do. My assumption was that all African-influenced artists, whatever their individual styles, participated in certain modes of expression, and that understanding the patterns of one could lead to an understanding of how the work of all relates together in a mutual continuum.¹¹⁹ I also found in that study that just as a cardinal element in jazz was improvisation (rhythmic and thematic), so were similar features clear in Black/African literature. Bongo Jerry's “Mabrak,” above, is one example of this. Nicolás Guillén's well-known “Sensemayá” is another:

!Mayombe-bombe-mayombe!
!Mayombe-bombe-mayombe!
!Mayombe-bombe-mayombe!
La culebra tien los ojos de vidrio
La culebra viene y se en reda en un palo
Con sus ojos de vidrio, en un palo
Con sus ojos de vidrio. …
The snake has eyes of glass
The snake appears and winds itself round the post
With eyes of glass round the post
With eyes of glass. …(120)

The same strong rhythmic pulse, leading to variation, is present in Césaire:

Au bout du petit matin
un grand galop de pollen
un grand galop d'un petit train de petites filles
un grand galop de colibris
un grand galop de dagues pour défoncer la poitrine de la
                                                                                terre(121)

and throughout the word play in Leon Damas' Pigments

Sans nom
sans lune
sans lune
sans nom
nuits sans lune
sans nom sans nom
ou le degout s'andre en moi. …(122)

and in Jamal Ali:

Rocket up to the moon
Living up to the moon
Cost of living up to the moon
Death toll sky high, twisting, up to the moon(123)

and in my own “Negus” which begins as a raindrip or drum beat and develops into cross rhythms:

It
it
it
it is not
it
it
it
it is not
it is not
it is not
it is not enough
it is not enough to be free
of the red white and blue
of the drag, of the dragon
it is not
it is not
it is not enough
it is not enough to be free
of the whips, principalities and powers
where is your kingdom of the Word?
It is not enough
to tinkle to work on a bicycle bell
when hell
crackles and burns in the fourteen-inch screen of the Jap
of the Jap of the Japanese-constructed
United-Fruit-Company-imported
hard sell, tell tale tele-
vision set, rhinocerously knobbed, cancerously tubed. …(124)

CALL/RESPONSE

But rhythm is not the only feature of improvisation in the literature of the African presence. It can also involve chantwell and chorus, as in spiritual, secular soul-litany, gospel, and above all, worksong:

Cayman ah pull man,
                                                            timbakay,
Cayman ah pull man
                                                            timbakoo,
Cayman ah pull man,
                                                            timbakay,
Cayman ah pull man
                                                            timbakoo.

“Timber Man” (Traditional Guyana)

and in calinda calypso:

SPARROW:
Well they playin bad,
They have me feeling sad;
Well they playing beast,
Why they run for police?
Ten criminals attack me outsideof Miramar
CHORUS:
Ten to one is murder!
SPARROW:
About ten in de night on de 5th of November
CHORUS:
Ten to one is murder!
SPARROW:
Way down Henry Street by H. E. M. Walker
CHORUS:
Ten to one is murder!
SPARROW:
Well the leader of the gang was hot like a pepper
CHORUS:
Ten to one is murder!
SPARROW:
And every man in de gang had a white handled razor
CHORUS:
Ten to one is murder!
SPARROW:
They say I push de girl from Grenada
CHORUS:
Ten to one is murder!(125)

It will be found in sermons like this Spiritual Baptist's from Silver Sands, Barbados:

I can say what troubles …
have we seen …	oh yea
an' what conflicts …
have we passed. …	oh yeas
There were many walls without …
and fears within …	oh yeaa
but God has preserved us by His power Divine	oh yes
the sun shone on our path sometimes	oh oh!
sometimes it was very rainy	oh yes
But there is no captain …	[humming begins]
if he only rows …
near the shore	uh!
and still waters	uh!
we've got our glory …	hello!
we've got our shame …	oh yes!
some have said this …
and some have said that …
but regardless to what happened …
we are still moving on!	ah yes!126

A folk-poet like the Barbadian Bruce St. John captures all this, and, significantly, the very essence of the Bajan psyche with:

Stokeley like he mad	Da is true
He outah touch wid de West Indies	Da is true
He ain't even discreet!	Da is true
He can't be pon we side	Da is true
He mussy working fuh de whites!	Da is true
Dem thrives pon we division	Da is true
So they wouldn't let 'e talk!	Da is true
Suppose he right though?	Whu da?
Suppose he right though?	Da is true
	Da is true127

TRANSFORMATION

Improvisation can also invade and erode the shape/sense of the word as in my “Mother Poem”:

Muh
muh
mud
me mudda
coo
like she coo
like she cook
an she cumya to me pun de grounn
like she lik mih
like she lik me wid grease like she grease mih
she cum to me years like de yess of a leaf
an she issper
she cum to me years an she purr like a puss an she essper
she lisper to me dat me name what me name
dat me name is me main an it am is me own an lion eye mane. …(128)

It is evident also in the “surrealism” of Césaire's:

that two plus two makes five
that the forest meows
that the tree gets the chestnut out of the fire
that the sky strokes its beard
etcetera etcetera(129)

and in the passage in George Lamming's The Pleasures of Exile where a plough/slave is transformed into a plough/sword, omen of revolt:

Imagine a plough in the field. Ordinary as ever, prongs and spine unchanged, is simply there, stuck to its post beside the cane shoot. Then some hand, identical with the routine of its work, reaches to lift this familiar instrument. But the plough escapes contact. It refuses to surrender its present position. There is a change in the relation between this plough and one free hand. The crops wait and wonder what will happen next. More hands arrive to confirm the extraordinary conduct of this plough; but no one can explain the terror of those hands as they withdraw from the plough. Some new sights as well as sense of language is required to bear witness to the miracle. … For as those hands in unison move forward, the plough achieves a somersault which reverses its traditional posture. Its head goes into the ground, and the prongs, throat-near stand erect in the air, ten points of steel announcing danger.¹³⁰

THE LITERATURE OF RECONNECTION

The literature of reconnection has become an active and fairly widespread concern, particularly in the Black United States, since the Black Power Revolution of the mid-1960s. Writers and jazz musicians began leaving their slave names and taking on African nommos and poets like Don Lee, Marvin X, and Alicia Johnson, developed a certain concern with Africa, at least as a source of inspiration/validation. Among the younger Anglophone Caribbeans, Elizabeth Clarke's poem “Mudda Africa” and Tito Jemmott's “A Tale” are indicative of this new orientation.¹³¹ But the solid work was really done before this phase, by poets like Melvin Tolson (1898-1966)¹³² and Robert Hayden¹³³ in North America; and by Guillén, Roumain, Césaire, and Damas in the Caribbean. My own trilogy¹³⁴ is another effort in this direction.

But the example I should like to close with is Paule Marshall's novel The Chosen Place, The Timeless People.¹³⁵ I have developed my comments on this remarkable piece of work in the Journal of Black Studies.¹³⁶ The following excerpts illustrate quite unequivocally what I mean by the “literature of reconnection”: a recognition of the African presence in our society not as a static quality, but as root—living, creative, and still part of the main. Take, for instance, this passage describing the famous Bathsheba coast. The people of Barbados know this coastline—wild, Atlantic, and rocky. But how many, looking down on that surf, those reefs, from Horse Hill and Hackleton, realized that there was nothing but ocean and blue between themselves and the coast of Africa—that Barbados, the most easterly of the West Indies, is in fact the nearest to Africa. Certainly no major Barbados writer known to me had ever made the point. Marshall, whose parents are Bajan and whose childhood was divided between Barbados and Brooklyn, saw the connection immediately:

It was the Atlantic this side of the island, a wild-eyed, marauding sea the color of slate, deep, full of dangerous currents, lined with row upon row of barrier reefs, and with a sound like that of the combined voices of the drowned raised in a loud unceasing lament—all those, the nine million and more it is said, who in their enforced exile, their Diaspora, had gone down between this point and the homeland lying out of sight to the east. This sea mourned them. Aggrieved, outraged, unappeased, it hurled itself upon each of the reefs in turn and then upon the shingle beach, sending up the spume in an angry froth which the wind took and drove in like smoke over the land.¹³⁷

And from nature to the people who inhabit and inherit the landscape, Paule Marshall uses the word, her words, not to say “it is so,” but to say, as the conjuror says, this is how it could/should be. So her Bajans become more than Bajans: they develop historical depth and cultural possibility—Fergusson, the cane factory mechanic, for instance:

[A vociferous] strikingly tall, lean old man, whose gangling frame appeared strung together by the veins and sinews, standing out in sharp relief beneath his dark skin. … His face, his neck, his clean-shaven skull, had the elongated intentionally distorted look to them of a Benin mask, or a sculpted thirteenth century Ife head. With his long, stretched limbs he could have been a Haitian Houngan man.¹³⁸

It is Fergusson who, like an Ashanti okyeame, kept the memory of the ancestral dead alive with his interminable rehearsal of the tale of Cuffee Ned, the slave rebel. Cuffee Ned becomes the ancestor of the whole village, and it is his memory and the whole African tradition which depends on it, that keeps these people inviolate under the pressures of commercialization and progress.

Then there was the Ashanti chief himself, Delbert, the shopkeeper and truck owner:

He was lying propped up on a makeshift bed amid the clutter behind the counter, a broken white leg in a cast laid up stiffly in the bed. He was huge, with massive limbs. … He was the chief presiding over the nightly palavering in the men's house. The bed made of packing cases was the royal palanquin. The colorful Harry Truman shirt he had on was his robe of office; the battered Panama hat … his chieftain's umbrella, and the bottle of white rum he held within the great curve of his hand, the palm wine with which he kept the palaver and made libation to the ancestral gods.¹³⁹

It is rhetorical, even romantic. But Paule Marshall's intention is crucial, and in it she unquestionably succeeds: to transform the Afro-Bajan out of his drab, materialistic setting with meaningful correlates of custom from across the water in ancestral Africa.

Finally, at the end of the book, there is a carnival. It is not a particularly typical Bajan happening, but Paule Marshall does not intend it to be. She links the Afro-Caribbean experience of Bajan (Chalky Mount) Maroons with Trinidad carnival and Montserrat masquerades.¹⁴⁰ Every year the people of Bournehills put on the same mas'—the same pageant—The Legend of Cuffee Ned. They will not change a single iota of their metaphor. There is of course an outcry against this from other parts of the island: “Oh you poor people from the slave days, every year you doing the same thing.” But Bournehills is making a point: until there is a change in the system, we will always be slaves, and until there is change, we must continue to celebrate our one, if brief, moment of rebel victory:

They had worked together!—and as if, in their eyes, this had been the greatest achievement, the thing of which they were proudest, the voices rose to a stunning crescendo that visibly jarred the blue dome of the sky. Under Cuffee, they sang, a man had not lived for himself alone, but for his neighbour also. “If we had lived selfish, we couldn't have lived at all.” They half-spoke, half-sung the words. They had trusted one another, and set aside their differences and stood as one against their enemies. They had been a People! Their heads thrown back and the welded voices reaching high above New Bristol's red-faded tin roofs, they informed the sun and afternoon sky of what they, Bournehills People, had once been capable of.

Then abruptly, the voices dropped. … They sung then in tones drained of their former jubilance of the defeat that had eventually followed … in voices that would never cease to mourn … for this too, as painful as it was, was part of the story.¹⁴¹

Notes

1. This is an edited transcript of a talk given at the Center for Multi-Racial Studies, Cave Hill, Barbados, in February, 1970; revised and extended in October and December, 1973.

2. Edward Brathwaite, Rights of Passage, Argo DA 101 (1968), sleevenote.

3. The most detailed examination of this possibility is the almost ignored Leo Wiener, Africa and the Discovery of America, 3 vols (Philadelphia: Innes and Sons, 1922). More recently, there has been Harold G. Lawrence, “African Explorers of the New World.” The Crisis (June-July 1962). For a useful bibliographical essay, see Floyd W. Hayes III, “The African Presence in America,” Black World, 22, No. 9 (July 1973), pp. 4-22.

4. The latest estimates/discussion are in Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969); Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (London and Dar-es-Salaam: Bogle-L'Ouverture, 1972), pp. 103-112.

5. See, for example, the work of E. Franklin Frazier in the United States, Orlando Patterson in the Anglophone Caribbean. M. G. Smith's “The African Heritage in the Caribbean,” Caribbean Studies: A Symposium, ed. Vera Rubin (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1960), pp. 34-46, is perhaps typical.

6. See, for example, M. J. Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1941) and the work of the Herskovitses generally. Then there are the works of W. R. Bascom, George E. Simpson, Alan Lomax (in cantometrics), R. F. Thompson (“African Influence on the Art of the United States”), Pierre Verger, Janheinz Jahn, and Maureen Warner (on the Yorubas in Trinidad) to name a few, and my own The Folk Culture of the Slaves in Jamaica (London and Port-of-Spain: New Beacon Books, 1970). A summary of work and ideas in the field appears in my Introduction to M. J. Herskovits' Life in a Haitian Valley [1937] (New York: Doubleday, 1971), revised in African Studies Association of the West Indies Bulletin No. 5 (Mona: 1972). A detailed consideration of the entire question is the subject of my Africa in the Caribbean (forthcoming).

7. See, for example, Orlando Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery (London: Macgibbon and Kee, 1967).

8. For more on this, see my review of Patterson's Sociology which appeared in Race, 9, No. 3 (1968). My own position is set out in The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1971).

9. Studies of African culture are now so easily available and in such quantity that a listing here would be pointless. I would like to draw attention to the following, however: M. J. Herskovitz on Dahomey; R. S. Rattray on the Ashanti; M. J. Field on the Ga; Afolabi Ojo on the Yoruba; John Mbiti, J. B. Danquah, Marcel Griaule on African religion and philosophy; and the collection edited by S. and P. Ottenberg, Cultures and Societies of Africa (New York: Random House, 1960).

   The question of the unity of African culture, or at least of those areas of Africa involved with or contingent upon the slave trade, is obviously one of the critical assumptions of this paper, permitting me to speak of “Africa” instead of, say, Senegal, the Gold Coast, Dahomey. For discussions on this point, see, among others, Cheikh Anta Diop, L'Unité Culturelle de L'Afrique Noire (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1959); Melville J. Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past, esp. Ch. 3; and Alan Lomax, “Africanisms in New World Negro Music,” Research and Resources of Haiti (New York: Research Institute for the Study of Man, 1969).

10. The African religious complex, despite its homogeneity, has certain interrelated divisions or specializations: (1) “worship”—an essentially Eurochristian word that doesn't really describe the African situation, in which the congregation is not a passive one entering into a monolithic relationship with a superior god, but an active community which celebrates in song and dance the incarnation of powers/spirits (orishá loa) into one or several of themselves. This is therefore a social (interpersonal and communal), artistic (formal/improvisatory choreography of movement/sound) and eschatological (possession) experience, which erodes the conventional definition/description of “worship”; (2) rites de passage; (3) divination; (4) healing; and (5) protection. Obeah (the word is used in Africa and the Caribbean) is an aspect of the last two of these subdivisions, though it has come to be regarded in the New World and in colonial Africa as sorcery and “black magic.” One probable tributary to this view was the notion that a great deal of “prescientific” African medicine was (and is) at best psychological, at norm mumbo-jumbo/magical in nature. It was not recognized, in other words, that this “magic” was (is) based on a scientific knowledge and use of herbs, drugs, foods and symbolic/associational procedures (pejoratively termed fetishistic), as well as on a homeopathic understanding of the material and divine nature of Man (nam) and the ways in which this could be affected. The principle of obeah is, therefore, like medical principles everywhere, the process of healing/protection through seeking out the source or explanation of the cause (obi/evil) of the disease or fear. This was debased by slave master/missionary/prospero into an assumption, inherited by most of us, that obeah deals in evil. In this way, not only has African science been discredited, but Afrocaribbean religion has been negatively fragmented and almost (with exceptions in Haiti and Brazil) publicly destroyed. To properly understand obeah, therefore, we shall have to restore it to its proper place in the Afroamerican communion complex: kumina-custom-myal-obeah-fetish.

11. West African (Mende, Ashanti, etc.) and Afrocaribbean for “food,” or “to eat.”

12. The name used by Slinger Francisco, the most talented and popular calypsonion of recent times. Sparrow has dominated the calypso art form since the 1950s.

13. Shango: an Afrocaribbean form of worship, centered mainly on Shango, the Yoruba god of thunder and creativity, and most closely associated with the island of Trinidad.

    Cumfa: one of the possession dance/ceremonies of the New World found under this name mainly in the Guianas. In Jamaica, it is known as kumina.

    Kaiso: an early form/word for calypso.

    Tea-meeting: a speech contest and exhibition, at which syntactical logic is increasingly abandoned or transcended. A kind of possession by the Word.

    Susu: Yoruba/Caribbean word for cooperative group.

    Jamette-carnival: Jamet, supposedly French Creole for diametre (literally, “the other half”), was a term applied in Trinidad to the underworld of prostitutes, rudies, and, by extension, the black poor. The jamette-carnivals were obscured by the establishment on grounds of “obscenity” (first routes, then hours of performance were restricted, until these “ole mas” bands could appear only in the foreday morning—jou'vert—of the first day), and thus became a maroon feature of the culture—a dark area of celebration where the folk expressed themselves without much reference to middle-class inhibitions and styles. Moko-jumbies, jonkonnus, calindas (stick-fight dancers) and nation-bands (Shango, Congo, etc.) were other features of this carnival.

14. “Appreciation for Cumfa,” Evening Post (Guyana), August 29, 1972.

15. See George E. Simpson (for Trinidad) in Religious Cults of the Caribbean (Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico: Institute of Caribbean Studies, University of Puerto Rico, 1970), pp. 82-85. Until the advent of “Papa Doc” Duvalier, vodun in Haiti also found itself under pretty regular attack from church and state, starting with the Liberator himself, Toussaint L'Ouverture. See Simpson, pp. 254-256. The news that Guyana was to abolish its obeah laws came in November of 1973. The reverberations from church, press and other states (fear, ridicule, caution: when Prime Minister Forbes Burnham of Guyana visited Jamaica soon afterwards, he was met by at least one anti-obeah demonstration) indicate the revolutionary depth of the announcement.

16. Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944).

17. Eric Williams, Some Historical Reflections on the Church in the Caribbean (Port-of-Spain: Public Relations Division, Office of the Prime Minister, 1973), p. 11.

18. During this “October Crisis,” the entire Jamaican mass-media apparatus came out against Rodney, Black Power, and “Cave Mona” (a punning editorial pejorative for the University of the West Indies at Mona), and clearly had little time for analysis or facts. The best and perhaps the only “Diary of Events” was therefore the students' publication, Scope—in the excitement, undated, but with a picture of Dr. Rodney on the cover. Rodney's own comment is in The Groundings with My Brothers (London: Bogle-L'Ouverture, 1969), pp. 59-67. It is interesting to note that the nonestablishment newspapers that appeared as a result of this crisis carried African (Abeng, Moko) or Amerindian (Tapia) names.

19. “Yoruba and Our African Heritage,” Advocate-News (Barbados), August 20, 1973. In addition to Yoruba House in Barbados, mention might be made here of Maureen Warner-Lewis' Omo Ajini (Children of Africa) at Mona. Mrs. Lewis has been teaching her group Yoruba songs she recorded in Trinidad during her research into the Yoruba presence there, and restoring them to life (movement and setting), using Yoruba dances she learned while living in Nigeria. But it must be borne in mind that before Yoruba and Omo Ajini, there were several folk/survival groups, most of them ignored by the establishment.

20. Philip D. Curtin, Two Jamaicas (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955), esp. pp. 158-177.

21. W. H. Siebert, The Legacy of the American Revolution (Columbus: Ohio State University Bulletin, April 1913); Curtin, Two Jamaicas, pp. 32 ff.; Brathwaite, Creole Society, pp. 253-255 and passim.

22. Myal: divination aspect of Afrocaribbean religion. The term is most commonly associated with Jamaica.

23. For discussion, see Martha Beckwith, Black Roadways (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1929); Curtin, Two Jamaicas; and the F. G. Cassidy/R. B. Le Page, Dictionary of Jamaican English (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), pp. 313-314.

24. Kumina: Afrojamaican possession/dance ceremony, similar to cufa in the Guianas.

25. For this and Afro-Jamaican religion generally, see J. C. Moore, “The Religion of Jamaican Negroes …,” Ph.D. thesis, Northwestern University (1953); Edward Seaga, “Cults in Jamaica,” Jamaica Journal, 3, No. 2 (June 1969), pp. 3-13; and Simpson, Religious Cults.

26. See, for instance, Sylvia Wynter's Jamaica's National Heroes (Kingston: Jamaica National Trust Commission, 1971).

27. Facts and Documents Relating to the Alleged Rebellion in Jamaica (Anonymous) (London: 1866), pp. 12, 13, 38, 57.

28. Curtin, Two Jamaicas, p. 174.

29. Noelle Chutkan, “The Administration of Justice … as a Contributing Factor [in] the Morant Bay Riot of 1865,” unpublished History Seminar paper, University of the West Indies, Mona, 1969.

30. The names of the churches are significant: First African Baptist Church (Savannah), African Baptist Church (Lexington), Abyssinia Baptist Church (New York), Free African Meeting House (Boston), etc. For full list, see St. Clair Drake, The Redemption of Africa and Black Religion (Chicago and Atlanta: Third World Press and Institute of the Black World, 1970), p. 26. Closely connected with these were the “Back to Africa” movements—militant under slave rebels; religious/secular with people like Paul Cuffee, Martin Delany in the U.S., Albert Thorne in Barbados, and George Alexander McGuire in Antigua, through Bishop Henry Macneil Turner, Alfred Sam, Edward Blyden, DuBois, to Marcus Garvey with the grito: “Africa for the Africans at home and abroad.” For a discussion of these see, among others, Edwin S. Redkey, Black Exodus (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1969); Vincent Bakpetu Thompson, Africa and Unity: The Evolution of Pan Africanism (London and Harlow: Longmans Green, 1969); and St. Clair Drake, op. cit. The Garvey bibliography, needless to say, is an industry in itself. In addition, there was the presence and influence of literate (slave) Africans like Phyllis Wheatley, Ottobah Cugoano, and Ignatius Sancho, some of whom, like Mahammedu Sisei, Mohammed Bath, Olaudah Equiano, actually returned to Africa. See Paul Edwards' “Introduction” (p. lx) to Equiano's Travels (London and Ibadan: Heinemann Educational Books, 1967); Janheinz Jahn, A History of Neo-African Literature (1966), trans. Oliver Coburn and Ursula Lehrburger (London: Faber & Faber, 1968), p. 40. Sisei and Mohammed Bath are treated in unpublished papers by Carl Campbell, Dept. of History, University of the West Indies, Mona, 1972-1973.

31. Name given in Haiti to the compound (courtyard and buildings) where vodun services are conducted.

32. For a development of this point, see my “Foreword” in Savacou 3/4 (December 1970/March 1971).

33. Nicolás Guillén, “Interview with Keith Ellis,” Jamaica Journal, 7, Nos. 1 & 2 (March/June 1973), p. 78.

34. The concept derives from M. G. Smith's classic, The Plural Society in the British West Indies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965).

35. See, for instance, Abbé Raynal, Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des européens dans les deux Indes (1770); and Thomas Southey, Chronological History of the West Indies (1827). These works are examined in Elsa Goveia's A Study on the Historiography of the British West Indies to the End of the Nineteenth Century (Mexico: Instituto Panamericano de Geografia y Historia, 1956). On the other hand, works like the anonymous Jonathan Corncob (1787), J. B. Moreton, Manners and Customs (1790); and Edward Long, History of Jamaica (1774), no matter what their other qualities, were little more than travesties of Black reality. See my “Creative Literature of the British West Indies During the Period of Slavery,” Savacou, 1 (June 1970), pp. 46-73.

36. This novel, probably written by an Englishman with some knowledge of the West Indies, is discussed in detail in my “Creative Literature.” The most imaginative insight into slavery from the Anglophone Caribbean is perhaps James Carnegie's unpublished novella, Wages Paid, a long extract of which appeared in Savacou 3/4 (December 1970-March 1971), as “Circle.”

37. DeLisser published ten novels in the period 1913-1958, including Jane's Career (Kingston: The Gleaner Co., 1913; London: Methuen & Co., 1914) and the well-known, The White Witch of Rosehall (London: Ernest Benn, 1929). Jean Rhys, who left the Caribbean c. 1912, when she was sixteen, and has never returned, has written at least six novels, only one of which deals with the Caribbean: Wide Sargasso Sea (London: André Deutsch, 1966). Nicole, who also makes his home outside the Caribbean, has written many novels, including a whole series of detective tales under a pseudonym. Among his books dealing with his native land are Off-White (London: Jarrolds, 1959) and White Boy (London: Hutchinson, 1966). The contribution of the other writers listed in the text is as follows: Mendes, Pitch Lake (1934), Black Fauns (1935); McDonald, The Humming-Bird Tree (1969); Emtage, Brown Sugar (1966); Drayton, Christopher (1959), Zohara (1961); Allfrey, The Orchid House (1953). I have not included the work of Roger Mais here, because his novels deal almost exclusively with the Black proletariat and peasantry. See note 32.

38. Kenneth Ramchand, The West Indian Novel and Its Background (London: Faber & Faber, 1970), pp. 223-236.

39. “Jazz and the West Indian Novel,” Bim, 44-45 (1967-1968).

40. Cuba and Puerto Rico were occupied by U.S. forces in 1898 as a consequence of the Spanish-American War. The Dominican Republic and Haiti were occupied during the First World War.

41. Juan Marinello, “Sobre una inquietud cubana,” Revista de Avance (February 1930); and Poética, ensayos en entusiasmo (Madrid: 1933), p. 142, quoted and translated by G. R. Coulthard in his Race and Colour in Caribbean Literature (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 29. Coulthard's book is an invaluable and still, after more than ten years, unique source of information about literature in the French and Spanish Caribbean.

42. Marcus Garvey was one of the first Black leaders to begin the resuscitation of self-help folk entertainment, especially in the urban ghettos.

43. The Rastafari are a dynamic and distinctive (“dreadlocked”) group in Jamaica, who consider themselves Africans, recognize the Emperor Haile Selassie as the Living God, and declare it their certain destiny to return to Africa (I-tiopia). As such—a kind of modern maroon group—they refuse to acknowledge the materialistic governments of Babylon. Rastafari art (including song, dance, drum, music, poetry, painting, carving, craftwork, and above all word/symbols) is revitalizing Jamaican folk culture, and their philosophy and lifestyle are already beginning to reach Black communities elsewhere.

44. The first big “hit” was a song, delivered by a White American group, the Andrews Sisters, called fittingly, “Rum and Coca-Cola.”

45. “A tiger is not conscious of his stripes, he pounces.” A statement, attributed to the Nigerian writer, Wole Soyinka, and indicative of a general Anglophone reluctance to accept the theoretical apparatus of negritude. The term also suggests something of the postcolonial difference between French and English-speaking African writers: the former tended to be expatriate, the later lived and worked, on the whole, in their own countries.

46. See my series of articles on Carifesta in the Sunday Advocate News (Barbados) (October-December 1972).

47. Carl Brouard (Haiti), “La trouée,” La Revue indigène (October 1927), my translation.

48. Countee Cullen, “Heritage,” Color (New York: Harper & Bros., 1925).

49. Philip Sherlock, “Jamaican Fisherman,” Ten Poems (Georgetown, Guyana: Miniature Poets Series, edited and published by A. J. Seymour and Kykoveral, 1953).

50. Jacques Roumain, “Guinée,” La Revue indigène (September 1927).

51. Louise Bennett, Jamaica Labrish (Kingston, Jamaica: Sangster's Book Stores, 1966), p. 214.

52. And this despair, equal to no other
    for taming, with words from France,
    this heart which comes to me from Senegal

    Laleau, “Trahison,” Musique negre (Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie de l'Etat, 1931) trans. Coulthard, op. cit., p. 43.

53. Derek Walcott's preface to Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970) and his play Dream on Monkey Mountain are explicit explorations of this theme and “problem,” memorably crystallized in his poem, “A Far Cry from Africa,” In a Green Night (London: Jonathan Cape, 1962), p. 18.

    I who am poisoned with the blood of both,
    Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?
    I who have cursed
    the drunken officer of British rule, how choose
    Between this African and the English tongue I love?

54. Dantès Bellegarde, Haiti et ses problèmes (Montreal: 1941), pp. 16-17, quoted in Coulthard, op. cit., pp. 73-74.

55. Andrew Salkey, A Quality of Violence (London: New Authors Ltd., 1959), p. 151.

56. Nicolás Guillén, “Son Numero 6,” from El son entero (Buenos Aires: Editorial Pleamar, 1947), trans. George Irish in Savacou 3/4 (1970/1971), p. 112.

57. Vodun is the largest and most public African-derived (Dahomey: vodu) religious form in the Caribbean, centered in Haiti. See also shango (in Trinidad), poco (in Jamaica), santería (in Cuba) and the candomblé or macumba (in Brazil). Often, in this text, the term vodun is used to apply to Afro-New World religions generally. In the culture of Dahomey, from which Haitian vodun is derived, twins are held in special reverence. In vodun, they are apotheosized as marassa (spirit twins).

58. In Alfred Métraux, Le vaudou haitien (Paris: Gallimard, 1958), trans. Hugo Charteris as Voodoo in Haiti (New York: Schocken Books, 1972), pp. 152-153.

59. Edward Brathwaite, Masks (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 38-39, 68-69; Islands (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 51-53.

60. George Simpson, The Shango Cult in Trinidad (Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico: Institute of Caribbean Studies, University of Puerto Rico, 1965), p. 45; reprinted in his Religious Cults of the Caribbean, p. 40.

61. Moore, op. cit., pp. 174-175, reprinted in Brathwaite, Creole Society, pp. 224-225, 329-331.

62. In Cuba and Brazil, Yemajaa, the Yoruba goddess of the sea, dominates ceremony and dance. In Haiti, important customs surround Agwe, the saltwater power, whose boat is annually sent drifting back to “Ibo.” In folktales, fair-maids and water-mammas play important roles. In songs originating from the hounfort, we are always crossing the river, and the importance of the Baptists has already been mentioned.

63. See “Jazz and the West Indian Novel,” Bim, 45 (1967), p. 41.

64. Adapted from R. B. Le Page and David De Camp, Jamaican Creole (London: Macmillan, 1960).

65. In Harold Courlander, The Drum and the Hoe (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1960), p. 248.

66. “The Little Boy Who Avenged His Mother,” in H. P. Jacobs, “An Early Dialect Verse,” Jamaican Historical Review, 1, No. 3 (December 1948), pp. 279-281.

67. See Walter Jekyll, Jamaican Song and Story (1907; New York: Dover Publications, 1966).

68. For an account of some of these, see Tony Harrison, “Shango the Shaky Fairy,” London Magazine, New Series, 10, No. 1 (April 1970), pp. 5-27.

69. The “rock-and-roll” base of Black American music is another aspect of Shango, as is “boogie-woogie” (piano imitation of the train), and the innumerable spirituals and gospel songs that not only sing about trains, but become possessed by them. Listen, for example, to use recent examples, to Aretha Franklin's “Pull-in’” (Spirit in the Dark: Atlantic SD 8265) or the Staple Singers' “I'll Take You There.”

70. Salkey, A Quality of Violence, p. 109.

71. The tonelle is the inner area of the hounfort. On the floor or ground are to be found the vèvè (symbols) of the gods to be welcomed, and at the center of the tonelle the poteaumitan: stick, whip, or ladder of god.

72. Ibid., p. 61.

73. The hounsi are servitors, usually female, of the vodun complex. The religious leader (invariably male) of the hounfort is the houngan, his chief female assistant, the mambo.

74. Ibid., p. 66.

75. Ibid., pp. 60-61.

76. This applies not only to writers, but to Caribbean critics as well. See my commentary on this in “Caribbean Critics,” New World Quarterly, 5, Nos. 1-2 (1969), pp. 5-15; Critical Quarterly, 11, No. 3 (Autumn 1969), pp. 268-276. Salkey and Sherlock particularly, however, have developed significantly during the Black Consciousness period of the 1960s. Salkey's collection of stories, Anancy's Score (London: Bogle-L'Ouverture Publications, 1973) is an especially fine example of the new writing.

77. Vera Bell, “Ancestor on the Auction Block,” The Independence Anthology of Jamaican Literature, ed. A. L. Hendriks and Cedric Lindo (Kingston, Jamaica: The Arts Celebration Committee of the Ministry of Development and Welfare, 1962), p. 85. For a detailed analysis of this poem, see George Lamming, “Caribbean Literature: The Black Rock of Africa,” African Forum, 1, No. 4 (Spring 1966), pp. 32-52.

78. Philip Sherlock, “Pocomania,” Caribbean Quarterly (Federation Anthology of Poetry), 5, No. 3 (1958), pp. 192-193.

79. George Lamming, Season of Adventure (London: Michael Joseph, 1960), pp. 44-50.

80. Maroons is a term springing from historical marronage to connote areas of African cultural survival, or isolated resuscitation, resistant to the blandishments of the plantation.

81. For details of the various Maroon groups see, among others, Philip J. C. Dark, Bush Negro Art (London: Alec Tiranti Ltd., 1954); Jean Huraul, Africains de Guyane (Le Havre and Paris: Editions Mouton, 1970); R. C. Dallas, The History of the Maroons [of Jamaica], 2 vols., (London 1803); Sir William Young, An Account of the Black Charaibs in the Island of St. Vincent (London, 1795); Douglas C. Taylor, The Black Carib of British Honduras (New York: Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, 1951); Edison Carneiro, Guerras do los Palmares (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1946).

82. The Maroons of Jamaica, the Black Caribs of Honduras, and the Suriname groups.

83. Namba Roy, Black Albino (London: New Literature Press, 1961).

84. Wilson Harris, The Secret Ladder (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), p. 23.

85. Ibid., p. 39.

86. Wilson Harris, History, Fable and Myth in the Caribbean and Guianas (Georgetown, Guyana: National History and Arts Council, Ministry of Information and Culture, 1970), p. 29.

87. Ibid., p. 28.

88. “History is built around achievement and creation; and nothing was created in the West Indies,” V. S. Naipaul, The Middle Passage (London: André Deutsch, 1962), p. 29.

89. “This was a society … in which all forms of refinements, of art, of folkways were either absent or in a state of total disintegration,” Orlando Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery, p. 9.

90. those who remain fascinated,
    in attitudes of prayer,
    by the festering roses made from their fathers' manacles,
    or upraise their silver chalices flecked with vomit …
    crying, at least here
    something happened—
    they will absolve us, perhaps, if we begin again,
    from what we have always known, nothing …
    while the silver-hammered charge of the marsh light
    brings towards us, again and again, in beaten scrolls,
    nothing, then nothing,
    and then nothing.

    From Another Life by Derek Walcott (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973), p. 144-145.

91. Brathwaite, Islands, pp. ix-x.

92. Ibid., p. 37.

93. Harris, History, Fable, pp. 9-10.

94. Lamming, Season of Adventure, p. 29.

95. The only other Caribbean writer who has been able to enter the hounfort in this way, it seems to me, is Alejo Carpentier in El reino de este mundo (Mexico: EDIAPSA, 1949). But Wilson Harris, in a remarkable passage in a public lecture, demonstrates that he too (as one would expect) is fully aware of the implosive links between vodun and the folk literature of the New World:

    All conventional memory is erased and yet in this trance of overlapping spheres of reflection a primordial or deeper function of memory begins to exercise itself. …

    That such a drama has indeed a close bearing on the language of fiction, on the language of art, seems to me incontestable. The community the writer shares with the primordial dancer is, as it were, the complementary halves of a broken stage. …

    “The Writer and Society,” Tradition, the Writer and Society (London and Port-of-Spain: New Beacon Books, 1967), pp. 51-52.

96. Lamming, Season of Adventure, pp. 29-30.

97. M. G. Lewis, Journal of a West Indian Proprietor (1834; London: G. Routledge & Sons, 1929), p. 290.

98. For more on this, see Placide Tempels, Bantu Philosophy (1946), trans. Colin King from the 1952 French edition (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1959), pp. 69-74.

99. DeLisser, Jane's Career, p. 120.

100. Aimé Césaire, Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (1939; Paris: Présence Africaine, 1956), p. 40, my translation.

101. Ishmael Reed, Yellow Back Radio Broke-down (1969; New York: Bantam Books, 1972), p. 9.

102. LeRoi Jones, Black Magic Poetry (Indianapolis and New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1969), p. 116; which should be heard on Sonny's Time Now Now (Jihad 663), with Sonny Murray (drums), Albert Ayler (tenor sax), Don Cherry (trumpet), and Henry Grimes (bass).

103. R. Dobru, Flowers Must Not Grow Today (Paramaribo, Suriname: Afi-Kofi, 1973).

104. The presence and use of nommo is too pervasive and evident in modern African literature for us to do more than refer, among many others, to Gabriel Okara's The Voice, Wole Soyinka's The Road; the plays by Robert Serumaga (Renga Moi) and Duro Ladipo (for example, Oba koso), based closely on traditional ceremony; Camara Laye's L'enfant noir, the novels of Amos Tutuola and the long poems of Okot p'Bitek. For traditional African literature and thought, see, among others, William Bascom, Ifa Divination (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969); Ruth Finnegan, Oral Literature in Africa (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1970); S. A. Babalola, The Content and Form of Yoruba Ijala (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1966); J. H. Nketia, Funeral Dirges of the Akan People (Achitoma, 1955); Marcel Griaule, Dieu d'eau: entretiens avec Ogotemmeli (Paris: Editions du Chêne, 1948); Tempels, Bantu Philosophy; and Chinua Achebe “Foreword” to A Selection of African Prose, ed. W. H. Whiteley (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1964), pp. vii-x.

105. See Minty Alley [1936] (London and Port-of-Spain: New Beacon Books Ltd., 1971), pp. 21 and 23.

106. See DeLisser, Jane's Career (reprint London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1972), p. 79.

107. Listen, for example, to Message to the Grass Roots from Malcolm X (Afro Records, AA 1264); Martin Luther King (Mercury 20119). Writing about oratory has not been particularly successful (c.f. Marcus H. Boulware, The Oratory of Negro Leaders (Westport, Conn.: Negro Universities Press, 1969). Although Roger Abrahams' work on this aspect of Afro/New World folk art should be specially mentioned: “The Shaping of Folklore Traditions in the British West Indies,” and “Traditions of Eloquence in Afro-American Committees,” Journal of Inter-American Studies and World Affairs, 9, pp. 456-480 and 12, pp. 505-527.

108. In this paper I have concentrated on the religious aspects of Caribbean folk culture. There is, however, an important secular development, magnificently expressed in the carnival and calypso of Trinidad especially. This secular aspect of our culture is as comprehensive (life-centered) as the religious art-styles being discussed. See Errol Hill, The Trinidad Carnival (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1972).

109. Lamming, Season of Adventure, p. 91.

110. From the work of the writers cited in this paragraph (themselves a selection), the following may be noted: Nina Rodrigues, Os Africanos no Brasil (1905; São Paulo: Cia Editora Nacional, 1932); Renato Mendoza, A influenca Africana portugesa do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: 1934); Fernando Ortiz, Hampa Afrocubana: Los Negros Brujos (Madrid: Editorial-America, 1906); Arthur Ramos, O Negro Brasileiro (Rio de Janeiro: Civilizacão Brasileira, 1934); Donald Pierson, Negroes in Brazil (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942); Ivy Baxter, The Arts of an Island (Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press, 1970); Errol Hill, The Trinidad Carnival; J. D. Elder, Evolution of the Traditional Calypso of Trinidad and Tobago. … (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms, 1966, 1970); Roger Bastide, Les Amériques noires (Paris: Payot, 1967).

111. See Alexis Kagame, La philosophie bantu-rwandaise de l'être (Brussels: 1956); Griaule, Dieu d'eau; Tempels, Bantoe-Filosofie; Jahn, Muntu (1958), trans. Marjorie Grene (London: Faber and Faber, 1961) and A History of Neo-African Literature. In the New World, studies of the African word in Creole speech include Lorenzo Turner, Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect of the Southern United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949); J. J. Thomas, The Theory and Practice of Creole Grammar [in Trinidad] (Port-of-Spain, 1869); F. G. Cassidy and R. B. Le Page, Dictionary of Jamaican English; F. G. Cassidy, Jamaica Talk (London: Macmillan, 1961); Mary Jo Willeford, “Africanism in the Bajan Dialect,” Bim, 46 (1968), pp. 90-97, and Fernando Ortiz, Glosario de Afro-negrismos (Havana: 1923). But the really illuminating studies, often providing a meaningful context for understanding the presence of the Word, are (among others), Mervyn Alleyne, “The Linguistic Continuity of Africa in the Caribbean,” Black Academy Review, 1, No. 4 (Winter 1970), pp. 3-16; LeRoi Jones, Blues People (New York: Grove Press, 1972); Sylvia Wynter, “Jonkonnu in Jamaica,” Jamaica Journal, 4, No. 2 (June 1970), pp. 34-48; and Jean Price-Mars, Ainsi parla l'oncle (Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie de Compiégne, 1928).

112. Groundation or groundings (verb: to grounds) is a term for a rap session. But since the word/idea (contributed by Rastafari) comes from the experience of religious possession, its ripples of meaning reach further than the idea of simple, secular “grounding.”

113. Monica Skeete, “To Frank Collymore on His Eightieth Birthday,” Savacou 7/8 (January/June 1973), p. 122.

114. Ibid.; my notation.

115. Bongo Jerry, “The Youth,” Savacou 3/4 (December 1970/March 1971), p. 13. My notation.

116. Bongo Jerry, “Mabrak,” Savacou 3/4, pp. 13-14.

117. Ibid., p. 15.

118. Edward Brathwaite, “Jazz and the West Indian Novel.”

119. I have developed my ideas on this still further in my “Introduction” to Roger Mais, Brother Man (1954; London: Heinemann Educational Books, forthcoming in 1974).

120. Nicolás Guillén, “Sensemayá” from West Indies Ltd (1934), in El son entero, pp. 60-61.

121. Césaire, Cahier (1956 ed.), p. 50.

122. Leon Damas, “Il est des nuits,” Pigments (Paris: Guy Lévis Mano, 1937), p. 24.

123. Jamil Ali, “Dimensions of Confusion,” Savacou 9/10 (forthcoming in 1974).

124. Brathwaite, Islands, pp. 65-66.

125. The Mighty Sparrow, “Ten to One is Murder,” transcribed in his One Hundred and Twenty Calypsoes to Remember (Port-of-Spain: National Recording Co., 1963), p. 37. Errol Hill in The Trinidad Carnival, p. 70, comments on the calinda-style performance as follows: “The form seems simple enough on paper, but it is highly effective and dramatic in performance. The rapid alternation from solo voice to chorus creates a feeling of tension. Sometimes the leader will anticipate the end of the chorus line and come in over it; at another time he will appear to drop behind the regular meter in starting his verse, then suddenly spring forward on a syncopated beat. He improvises not only with his lyric but also with the melody; he ornaments his short passage[s] in subtle ways, but is always constrained to return to the original tune by the insistent power of the chorus. It is as though leader and chorus complement and contradict each other simultaneously.”

     SPARROW:

     Well I start to sweat,

     An I soakin wet,

     Mamma, so much threat,

     That's a night I can never forget

     Ten o' dem against me with fifty spectator

     CHORUS:

     Ten to one is murder!

126. Pastor Williams and Spiritual Baptist Congregation, Silver Sands, Barbados. Transcription of cassette tape recording: October 15, 1972. We could also refer to the second preacher in the Jamaican film, The Harder They Come, and recordings such as the Reverend Kelsey (Brunswick OE 9256) for the United States. Examples could also be cited for Haiti, Brazil, Africa.

127. Bruce St. John, “West Indian Litany,” Savacou 3/4 (December 1970/March 1971), p. 82.

128. Unpublished manuscript.

129. Césaire, Cahier (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1971 ed.), p. 72.

130. Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile (London: Michael Joseph, 1960), p. 121.

131. See Elizabeth Clarke, “Mudda Africa,” New Writing in the Caribbean, ed. A. J. Seymour (Georgetown: National History and Arts Council of Guyana, 1972), p. 60-62; Tito Jemmott, “A Tale,” Savacou 3/4, pp. 60-64.

132. Melvin Tolson, Libretto for the Republic of Liberia (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1953).

133. Robert Hayden, “Middle Passage,” A Ballad of Remembrance (London: Paul Breman, 1962), pp. 60-66.

134. Brathwaite, Rights of Passage (1967), Masks (1968), Islands (1969), published under single cover as The Arrivants (London: Oxford University Press, 1973).

135. Paule Marshall, The Chosen Place, the Timeless People (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1969).

136. Brathwaite, “West Indian History and Society in the Art of Paule Marshall's Novel,” Journal of Black Studies, 1, No. 2 (December 1970), pp. 225-238.

137. Paule Marshall, Chosen Place, p. 106.

138. Ibid., p. 121.

139. Ibid., p. 123.

140. For the close connection between the Montserrat masquerade bands and their counterparts in West Africa, see the articles by Simon Ottenberg, Phillips Stevens, Jr. and John C. Messenger in African Arts, 6, No. 4 (Summer 1973), pp. 32-35, 40-43, 54-57.

141. Marshall, Chosen Place, p. 287.