Afro Caribbean Poetry and Ritual

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Afro-Caribbean Poetry and Ritual

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Paul Griffith: “Space, Time, and Interval: Charting Routes through Myth and Mythos in Selected Works of Kamau Brathwaite and Derek Walcott” from On andOffthePage: Mapping Place in Text and Culture appears in excerpts from the Introduction, chapter 1, and chapter 2, published with the permission of Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

First published in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe, and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.

Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world.

Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.

ISBN: 978-0-230-62364-4

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Griffith, Paul A., 1952–

Afro-Caribbean poetry and ritual / Paul A. Griffith. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-230-62364-4 (alk. paper)

1.Caribbean poetry (English)—Black authors—History and criticism. 2. Caribbean poetry (English)—History and criticism. 3. Ritual in literature. 4. Caribbean Area—In literature. I. Title.

PR9205.2.G75 2010

811.009’896098611—dc22 2009036197

First edition: April 2010

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.

Design by Scribe Inc.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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Their fathers, shadowy creatures, your creatures were but dead souls; . . . to you only did they dare speak, and you did not bother to reply to such zombies. . . . They dance; . . . and then the dance mimes secretly . . . the refusal they cannot utter and the murders they dare not commit. Formerly this [possession by spirits] was a religious experience in all its simplicity, a certain communion of the faithful with sacred things; now they make of it a weapon against humiliation and despair.

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Preface

This project examines literary production in the Caribbean against the back-ground of conflicting attitudes argued by V. S. Naipaul in TheMiddlePassage

and Reinhard W. Sander in “The Thirties and Forties.” “In the pursuit of the Christian-Hellenic tradition, which some might see as a paraphrase for white-ness, the past has to be denied, the self despised. Black will be made white,” says Naipaul, in measuring the impact of Eurocentrism on social, psychic, and aesthetic expression in the Caribbean (67). The challenges of “living in a bor-rowed culture” saddled Caribbean writers with the responsibility of shaping an indigenous identity, but they failed this assignment, Naipaul remarks (68–69).

Conversely, literary creativity, Sander observes, evolved from an inchoate cultural and nationalistic consciousness in the region (45). The “pioneering efforts to stimulate a West Indian theory and practice of literary and cultural criticism,” he notes (48), were channeled with remarkable success under the sponsorship of such regional forums as Bim, Beacon, Picong, Kyk-over-al, Focus, and CaribbeanQuarterly.1

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x ● Preface

of black humanism, the folklore took shape as channels through which fears, dreams, hopes, and an abiding wisdom flowed.

Symbolic reconstitutions of marginalized lives replicate redemptive themes across the diaspora. Seemingly unaware of this vibrant folk aesthetic, however, Naipaul accepts Caribbean middle class predispositions to “metropolitan fantasy” as pervasive and as a precondition for sterility and stasis in the region. The folk, nevertheless, draw on symbols surcharged with ideals of human wholeness, pro-moting thus the bond between physical form and sacred essence. Such tropes expose the extravagation whereby capitalism is decked out as the incontestable standard of human behavior and culture. The radical politics rooted in self-reconstructive folk gestures gave birth to the literate conventions that Sander catalogues. In other words, the written art traces deep roots to the oral traditions.

Focusing thus on orally transmitted cultural media in the Caribbean, this book reaffirms the importance of myth and symbol in folk consciousness as modalities of imaginative conceptualization meant to give insight into the way in which people think about the world and represent themselves in it. Reli-gious attitudes and philosophical ideas of a traditional Africa continued to be operative in the daily lives of slaves and their descendants in the Caribbean. Most slaves prudently transformed or camouflaged these residues in order to avoid persecution. Plantation authorities forcibly discouraged African derived myths and rites that they regarded as uncivilized codes of conduct or as bases of insurrectionary behavior. In many instances, as Melville J. Herskovits in The MythoftheNegroPast and Harold Courlander in Afro-American Folklore have noted, survivals of African customs and belief systems remain visible beneath the veneer of European cultural behaviors. Noteworthy among the residues, Courlander observes, are baptismal and death rites, “group work conventions, music and music making, dance (posture, movement and concept), . . . African motifs in religious activities, and, of course, in stories and storytelling” (2).

Central to this conceptual tradition is belief in the creative influence of the utterance; this logocentric principle established an anthropological basis for cru-cial perceptions of reality that Africans transplanted in the New World. Ritual transitions, ceremonial masks, proverbs, spells, tales, music, and other artistic and mythic expressions evolving from the oral context elucidate this psychology. The written literature emerged from this symbolic tradition; the art functions as a medium through which the constantly changing world and the human sense of place within it are evaluated and codified spiritually and politically.

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Preface ● xi

modes of cultural perception and behaviors in the region—especially the persis-tence of particular beliefs carried on in daily rituals and magical practices. Oral literature and customs, Courlander reminds us, are products of environment and history, an inheritance that is cultural rather than genetic.

Sensitivity to one’s needs as human is an ontological and psychological given. It is this impulse that has driven, in Courlander’s words, the countless “ways in which humans have sought to adjust to their environment, create institutions, [and] develop art and literature in some kind of social equilibrium” (6). Hybrid innovations detailing conscious and unconscious borrowings, the residually oral constructs emblematize such adjustments. Contrary to Courlander’s position, though, knowing these forms’ origins equips us with more than “academic and incidental” detail; such knowledge elucidates traditions that help to clarify aes-thetic formulae and extrapolate overt and covert meanings.

At work in these residues are structuralist formations, a geometry of symbolic patterns, that often overlap in particular compositions as vehicles of abiding the-istic cum humanist essence. This intrinsic literary attribute is worthy of acknowl-edgement despite Western inclinations to balk at accepting, as genuine art, texts produced by groups whose cultures have historically been marginalized. Privileg-ing such ethnocentric bias, Saul Bellow declares his perplexity vis-à-vis what he perceives as the ambitions of the nonliterate to usurp claims to literacy: “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans?” (Santari).

Iconic continuities in African diasporan residually oral art reappear as con-stituent networks of a uniform cultural tableau, synchronizations of invisible essences and visible forms. The triangle is the central graphic outline traced by the limbo, typology of the ritual passage evident in many songs, verbal rituals, and tales. The cross, evoked especially through the vodun ceremony, traces the descent and ascent of the loa (spirit intermediary linking divine and human spheres). The god’s horizontal and vertical, physical and spiritual trajectories and manifestations are signified too in the landship’s interpenetrating maritime and terrestrial motifs. The landship, however, is also prominently signified as the completeness of the earth and identified thus with the cardinal points of the square mythologized through the Nommo’s totemic ark. The circle relays Africans’ conception of history as cyclical rather than as an apocalyptic linear design. This icon is prominent in children’s ring games—a symbolic heritage of the visual organization of African villages, understood as complexes of social and cosmic harmony.

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xii ● Preface

creative work investigate the impact of residually oral forms as fundamental cultural constructs and modalities of vision in diasporan people’s imaginations. Aesthetic content, structures, and themes communicate black groups’ icono-graphic interests in art as vehicles of psychic adjustment to the new landscape. Herein, the journey into slavery is mapped as a chronology of spirit passages closely identified with the nekyia, archetypal descent to the underworld.

My method incorporates features of cultural analysis, new criticism, and structuralism. To theorize, and explain cultural and aesthetic motifs and config-urations in support of the thesis, I rely on knowledge of the roots of philosophi-cal and religious ideas plumbed chiefly from mythic and anthropologiphilosophi-cal studies by Evans Lansing Smith, Joseph Campbell, Barbara Walker, Marcel Griaule, Ruth Finnegan, John Mbiti, Joseph Adjaye, Dominique Zahan, among others (interests in Western and African traditions of consciousness). I decode the texts in contexts of resonant cultural traces. Nevertheless, in that it contextualizes sig-nifiers in contiguous relationships, structuralist analysis is the favored exegetic tool; the framework in which it operates proves useful for conceptualizing and negotiating crucial formal relations of eidetic import with regard to the graphic expressiveness that informs oral performances.

No previous study I know probes a grammar of mythic forms to delineate a theory pertaining to archetypes of the Caribbean folk imaginary. In fact, there is no extensive analysis of residually oral art that brings to the fore evident struc-tures of a mythic geography concerning psychocultural processes in the region. To isolate this grammar of psychomythic relations by which the folk organize and clarify their reality is to identify also operational constructs pertinent to studying a deeply connotative language system. This imaginative architecture has been significantly influenced by two major semantic conventions. First are the inverse—Brathwaite’s tidalectic (Conversations 30)—diagrammatic ten-sions or reversals simultaneously synthesized into the kind of rhythmic identity Antonio Benitez-Rojo explains as “repetition” or “Chaos” (3). This new identity formation is both “torn” and “new,” according to Brathwaite (Arrivants 270). Second, morphology of the acculturating force of history, improvisation (corre-sponding to Henry L. Gates’s concept of signifying) orchestrates analogous and homologous conjunctions or modes of syncretic interparticipation. History is reimagined or redeemed in visionary frameworks of sacred reference.

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Preface ● xiii

contemporary popular culture. My analysis looks backward at the psychohis-tory of prominent oral patterns that groups marginalized under colonialism had drawn into their liberating struggle. Interested in the religious or mythic consciousness through which these ethnopoetics are energized, it takes a notice-ably different departure from Best’s formalist study.

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Acknowledgments

I am greatly indebted to a number of persons who, at various stages and in different ways, contributed to the making of this book. Particularly, I want to express thanks to:

Dr. Dan Walden who insistently championed intellectual growth as a feat worthy in itself and as a warrant, more so, for the democratic vistas on which so much of our progress relies.

Jestina Griffith, my grandmother whose wisdom and inspiration were couched as much in the indomitable faith with which she pursued life as in the proverbs and anecdotes though which she stamped her passionate spirit and virtues on the hearts and minds of many whose lives touched hers.

Doris Griffith, my mother, for her inspiration and the memories she too passed on.

Su Griffith, my wife, who has been a beacon of strength offering ready sup-port and patience despite the length of time and energy I had to devote to this project.

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Introduction

So perhaps we shy from confronting our cultural wholeness because it offers no easily recognizable points of rest, no facile certainties as to who, what, or where (culturally or historically) we are. Instead, the whole is always in cacophonic motion. Constantly changing its mode, it appears as a vortex of discordant ways of living and tastes, values, and traditions.

—Ralph Ellison, “The Little Man”

A

s Gordon Rohlehr has observed, “Caribbean literature since the 1930s . . . has been a deepening and prolonged exploration of Carib-bean society, politics, and the inexhaustible recesses of the psyche of Caribbean peoples” (“Spiritual” 187). Both the oral and residually oral expres-sive forms initiate clear streams of thought requisite to this visionary tradition that can be traced back to slave orature, music, and dance. These were chan-nels of heightened joy and relief from routines, and instruments, moreover, for investigating the past as a crucial determinant of cultural and aesthetic lineages—essentially, as marker of mappable spirit passages. The folk thereby invested the imagination with the burden of healing psychic wounds even as their lives tossed in the hurricane swirl of the devastating colonialist history.

Continuing to reflect pivotal philosophical and structural components resi-dent in African typologies of myth, song, oratory, tale, and legend, these syncretic, imaginal media reveal, as African American author Bernard Bell observes, that oral conventions remain “active in the cultural process.” The tendency is to stress formulaic modes, “performance, mnemonics, and improvisational skills” while positing values in “the group or type” and in the known world (20–21).

Arguably the most prominent Caribbean writer to cultivate this tradition of awareness, Kamau Brathwaite shifts vision across the fragmented diaspo-ran landscape, holding past and present together in creative tension.1_{In major}

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2 ● Afro-Caribbean Poetry and Ritual

history and psyche. In terms of the embattled subjectivity at issue in The Arriv-ants, for example, slavery is reenacted as analogue of the exiled soul.

Instrument of rupture and terror, imperialist teleology assumes significance as a primordial force of evil; it shatters human wholeness, cauterizing psyche and community with the devastating effects of a holocaust. Herein, neverthe-less, distress is overcome through the vital desire Brathwaite associates with the imaginative journey of art as hallowed pilgrimage. History bleeding behind his “hollowed eyes,” the exile returns through “burnt- / out streets,” his “brain limp- / ing pain” (148). The soteriological vision of art he articulates purports an imaginative plunge beneath the painful erosions of history. In his reversal of the Middle Passage (reentering “Elmina”) he undertakes a search for roots as ritual search for sacred space; he supplicates the gods so that he may “traverse / paths” that map out a new soul passage thus to shield “the new dead” from the dismay that “time was evil” (132)—effectively, so that souls languishing in history’s Inferno will reawaken purged of past horrors.

Brathwaite finds new and exciting potential for self-realization in ancestral ideas and forms that his poetry underwrites as media for ritualizing history. Because it facilitates cooperation between the conscious and the subconscious, memory is called up through poetic word. Ritual for inaugurating new self-awareness and consecrating psychic realization, this act of mediation maps for the enervated exile a path to a second birth—the cosmic resonance, in essence, an anagogic reference for the ethical or creative reversal of the history of disfig-urement and desolation.

This religious objective correlates, as Benjamin Ray explains, to traditional African ritual practices meant to empower human beings to countermand cos-mic energy forms. He declares, “The use of ritual to demarcate and control the passage of time is the central theme of Gogo rituals of purification” (98). In this society, dance is employed to ritualize, reverse, “and thereby change the ‘bad’ condition” (99). The reversal is reinforced through reversed gender roles, women taking over duties normally performed by men so that “the women’s [rite] symbolically restructures and reverses the inauspicious alteration of time. . . . Disordered time is reordered and the temporal situation is restored according to its proper archetype” (99–100).

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Introduction ● 3

living diviners. . . . the bridge of my mind now linking Atlantic and ancestor, homeland and heartland” (“Timehri” 33).

Derek Walcott, too, in works such as InaGreenNight (1962), TheCastaway

(1965), TheGulf (1969), DreamonMonkeyMountainandOtherPlays (1970),

Another Life (1973), Sea Grapes (1976), Pantomime (1978), The Star-Apple Kingdom (1979), and Omeros (1990), approaches art as consecration against a similar existential emptiness bequeathed by history. In contrast to Brathwaite, however, Walcott voices distrust in the idea of history as ground of inspiration. Declaring “the sea is History” in an eponymous poem, Walcott sees submarine depth as metaphor for the flux of human life: the perpetual motion of this fluid sphere stirring vibrations of psychospiritual loss and cosmic energy. A complex of spatial, historical, and mystical matrices, this fluidity is analogue for a crucial stage of soul. Perilous waste and mythological origin of life, the Atlantic pas-sage, for the migrant, became transformational space, or liminal interval.

Imperialism brought forth, in fact, moral and epistemological confusions typified in Olaudah Equiano’s bewilderment in chapter 10 of his autobiog-raphy. Via ritually and narratively ordered forms or collective and personal rites of redemptive intervention, displaced individuals sought to explore this experience as a new cycle of enervating pressures and creative impulses—sche-matizations of a double vision that situates the Caribbean as limbo field. The “Prelude” to Brathwaite’s RightsofPassage underwrites these dialogic or media-tory schemas that hold primordial insights regarding the earth as the nucleus of organic energy in tension with Western perceptions of the physical world (people included) as corrupt—an outlook that serviced colonialist annexing initiatives. Caribbean space becomes a blueprint of this psychospiritual crisis; ambience of liminal agon, it is home of the “castaway,” the marginalized subject Walcott personifies in Crusoe. The temporal and spatial disorder is coordinated symbiotically with the felt diminution of the value of self. Walcott reimagines here, too, the human reduction as a principle of an inevitable “fall” that is com-mensurate also with the sacred experience of transition.

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Thus evoking postmodernist (new historicist) skepticism concerning the accessibility of history, he declares that “the Muse of History is not that of the creative writer” (“Parody” 4). The “revivalists,” he argues, “respect only incoherence or nostalgia” (“The Muse” 2). Identifying an irretrievable void in Caribbean history, Walcott suggests that “we are deprived of what we cannot remember, or what, when we visit its origins never existed the way we imag-ined” (“Pivotal One” 23). He then adduces that “amnesia is the true history of the New World.” Given this “inheritance” of severance, he proposes, the Carib-bean artist must, as the “second Adam,” recreate “the entire order” (“The Muse” 5). The pose is both Christlike and Promethean, the poet conveying the divine spark (or “simple flame” as he phrases it in “The Figure of Crusoe” and Another Life) into the dark gulf of history.

Though Walcott endorses postmodernists’ “historical schizophrenia” (or his-toricist skepticism), he eschews their mock of grandnarratives’ faith “in their capacity to emancipate humanity.” Postcolonial insistence on the ethical force of art resonates through his work.2_{Aligned in temperament thus to Wilson}

Harris and Alejo Carpentier, Walcott’s work, in Barbara Webb’s phrase, illus-trates “the dialectics of culture in the process of literary creation.” Narrative as genesis of self-making comprises instructive ritual transactions pertinent to diasporan artists’ initiative as mythic guardians of a humanist sensibility. Folk-lore offered these artists an ethical gauge for “the specific forms of that human-ity,” Ralph Ellison points out, in that “it describes those boundaries of feeling, thought and action which that particular group has found to be the limitation of the human condition. It projects this wisdom in symbols which express that group’s will to survive” (Shadow 170–71).

Relatedly, Alan Dundes has remarked that to the extent that “history is cru-cial [to the study of black life], so is folklore” (xi). This lore, comprising tale, song, myth, and dance, is a source of cultural or ethnographical detail from which we gain the kind of insight Lawrence Levine describes as the history of a people thinking (ix). The folk art constituted pivotal symbols and interre-lated beliefs adapted from conventions African peoples had used to explain how things came to be and to probe issues of life and death. Contrary to Walcott’s impressions of “amnesia,” it provided coherence to the incoherence the coerced migrants felt in the New World.

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Introduction ● 5

Incidentally, these modes of thought and feeling happen, generally, to be surviv-als of the peasant sensibility developed through agricultural activities in Africa and the Caribbean and while impacted by the West have been filtered through African religious and secular ideas and rituals concerning human efforts to grapple with the forces of good and evil. Such philosophical continuities or seminal cultural influences Levine detects in the carryovers of African song style and dance.

The difference in the forms through which Brathwaite and Walcott articu-late their shape-shifting philosophies does not hide their common interests in myth as a germ of living inspiration in Caribbean cultural manifestation. For both, the pervasive legacy of brutal conquest, slavery, and cultural and psy-chic fragmentation exists in tension with restorative traditions in which music, dance, and religion fuse. Myth, seen to channel activities of the human body and mind, is a medium both artists explore thus to privilege certain typologies that emerged from the folk art, recognized as a field of primary symbols that mirror the folk psychology. The envisioned metamorphoses informing these performances point to the adaptations human beings develop across time, space, and cultures. Crucial adventures of mind and imagination, such forms as the calypso and the limbo, for example, delineate, as the artists recognize, the self-constitutive value of aesthetic and religious behaviors in diasporan con-sciousness.3_{In essence, they explore ways in which human beings draw strength}

and chart direction by seeking to tune in to the inexhaustible energies of their traditions and heritage.

This mythological engagement of history demands clarification of the use of the word “myth.” A mode of psycho-religious awareness, Maya Deren states, myth “is the facts of the mind made manifest in a fiction of matter.” An “adven-ture for the mind,” myth is composed, she notes, “from the specific physi-cal conditions which circumstance imposes and the particular processes which time composes for each individual race. . . . It is as if the mind, by-passing the particularities of circumstance, the limitations and imprecisions of the senses, arrived, by paths of metaphysical reason, at some common principled truth of matter” (21–22).

The mythic imagination orchestrates impressions of cosmic order defined by the forces of evil and good, sin and redemption. Whatever the details, myths of human genesis and spiritual progress proclaim the entry of evil into the world corrupting matter, nature, and the human body. Cosmic dualism reassures against this destiny of defilement, nevertheless, divine promise of redemption pledging ultimate defeat of evil.

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Passage is the decreed site of a tantalizing religious experience. Failing to offer sustaining anchorage, this passage unfolds within the imagination as symbolic site of brokenness. The instability of the sea, a labyrinth of transformations and an analogue of limbo in-betweenness or morphology of severance, is a basis on which the passage to slavery translates into a processural schema of initia-tion. Counteracting this perverse adventure, ritual as art and art as ritual stage imaginative incursions into the enigmatic, alienating void—word and masque channeling the potential for humanist reenactments.

Thus inverse conceptual designs of death and rebirth or variant manifesta-tions of descent to the underworld unify the folk forms around an associa-tive organic principle. This paradigm appears as the most impressive mythic structure organizing Caribbean orally expressive and residually oral cultures. This rudimentary formula (a basic pattern informing ritual masques such as the landship, the bull play, and the myal dance; spells such as “A Bird”; and fables such as “Cocka Raja”) channels a tradition of religious awareness—that fascinating bond of all humanity Jung articulated.4_{These rhythmic forms}

convey currents of energy like that Harris, speaking of vodun, describes as “a highly condensed feature of inspiration and hallucination within which ‘space’ itself becomes the sole expression and recollection of the dance” (Tradition 50). Endorsing this symbolic conflation in which the concrete or anatomical appears indistinct from spirit essence, Jamake Highwater echoes W. B. Yeats’s “Among School Children”: “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” The folk forms appear likewise as graphic manifestations of conjoined form and essence, locative and valuational ideals realized through rhythm, sound, and word— imaginal energy forms that, as Evans Smith explains, plot mutations “from ego to soul, individual to archetype” (17).

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Introduction ● 7

convolutions informing the life chronology, these binaries scrutinize the claims to human prototypicality on which imperialist aggressions were arrogated.

These seminal units, displays of structurally ironic and iconic pairings or homologous constituents, parade conflictual identities alongside the comple-mentarity or balance of forms and forces the art orchestrates as the inverse and transverse rhythms of a vital gestalt. These forms signify differently from the Cartesian conflation of self with consciousness. Implicitly decentered, herein, also, is poststructuralists’ critique of identity: namely, that lacking a unified consciousness, the human subject is structured by language. Positing a coherent metaphysic in which unconscious psychic forms dissolve into consciousness, the art investigates structure and shaping subject as interdependent categories and archetypal radiations as issues of the comprehensive constituents inhering in and (as Jung recognizes) independent of the cultural subject.

These discursive forms suggest that awakening to the influence of spirit potentially frees these actors to interact without the centrist limitations impe-rialists plotted as the universal norm. Jonathan Z. Smith’s concept of sacred space helps explain this radical revaluation whereby marginalized communities imaginatively relocated to ethical provinces of meaning. Cornelius Loew’s five typologies of this episteme may be coordinated with the three subsystems the folk art indexes as normative measurements of productive human affiliations with god and nature—the creative mystery that ought to shape human inter-course in social environments. 5

These semantic domains, modeled through Caribbean masques like the limbo and landship and innovative integrations of musical forms are channels through which the fragmented consciousness intuits coherence within nascent vibrations of spirit. Media of revolution and revelation, dance and music chart epiphanies of soul—visionary infusions of the sacred into the material world. Illustratively, the vodun dancer bridges matter and spirit or mediates the critical juncture of cosmic dualism.6_{This intercession is figured in the cross:}

intersec-tion or interval at which the vertical pole of spirit animates the horizontal, material plane or body.

This symbolic evocation of bifurcation and fusion is reaffirmed through the “landship,” the name signaling the penetration of terrestrial and aquatic units. This totemic form, iconic expression through word, music, and dance, mani-fests a deeply engaging metaphysical marriage: the visionary infusion of mat-ter by spirit. Via this symbolic schema, Wesmat-tern song-games are coordinated with the enigma of wholeness metaphysically incarnated in the Yoruba god Esu, who, Douglas Fraser notes, is completeness as well as uncertainty principle. Esu is avatar of potentiality, compounding, freedom, otherness as well as chaos.7

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wherein oppositional forces interpenetrate as creative conjunctions of energies to reveal, as Fraser observes, “the transcendental balance that the Yoruba, as a political, religious, and personal man seeks” (115).

Identity and History

This resistant energy activated in the mythic imagination as mode of aesthetic as well as ideological expressivity would appear to align itself alongside Fredrick Jameson’s theory of “the political unconscious.” Jameson links literature to reli-gion as strategies of social as well as self-legitimization. These social myths, he explains, define the symbolic space in which “the collectivity thinks itself” (70). The limbo aesthetic underwrites this capacity of the symbol to reconstitute this moral obligation; it participates in the “dialogue between facts and myth,” that, as Ariel Dorfman observes, “is the essence of humanity,” affirming thus the ethical and psychical appeal of the mythical through which disparaged groups erect barriers against oppressive realities (qtd. in Carpentier 143).8

In a converse of the folk artist’s visionary openness to the philosophical memory, some critics insist upon the historicity of our being and its corollary problems regarding the understanding we naively premise on “the accessibility of history.” Hans-Georg Gadamer privileges Heidegger’s beliefs to defend the idea that the past is “closed” and that from our present perspective we are denied access to history (149). Defending such relativism, Jameson indicts “nostalgia mode” art as cultural appropriations saturated with postmodern desires for images of “commodity reification,” or “simulacrum”—a term he borrows from Plato to describe the “weakening of historicity.” Through our acts of “aesthetic colonization,” we conjure images of what never existed except in our imagina-tions, he says; “the past as ‘referent’ finds itself gradually bracketed, and then effaced altogether, leaving us with nothing but texts” (Postmodernism 18–20).

The hermeneutic Brathwaite intuits as tidalectics posits a counter to this conceptual impasse. Its organic tenet positions tidalectic theory differently with regard to new historicists’s inquiries into the nature of knowledge and the relation of epistemology to historical change. Art that speaks from this vital-ist position eschews hvital-istorical “schizophrenia,” the skepticism with regard to bridging past and present, secular and metaphysical domains. The imagination is understood as a function of memory, a crucial constituent of self as under-lined through the temporal fluidity that informs African perceptions of time and identity. 9

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Introduction ● 9

reveals, traditional African thought accepts the past as a source of “redemptive and soteriological power” and that through “ritual, the mythical past is . . . constantly recoverable” (41). The capacity for reflection is essentially therapeutic, Thomas Greene too is convinced, reminding us that “the amnesiac is considered sick and unfortunate because he doesn’t know who he is. When he recovers his memory, he recovers his identity” (10).

Mechanism of this empathetic construction of subjecthood, ritual is a pri-mary architect of wholeness. As Paul Ricoeur declares, it “opens up and dis-closes a dimension of experience that without it, would have remained closed and hidden” (165). Modeling this illuminating play of energy forms, the limbo synthesizes space and spirit, time and timelessness; expectation synchronizes with psychic remigration and ascent with descent to inaugurate what Harris calls a spirit “gateway.” The dance as inverse act of mind and culture maps the freeing of spirit: the ritual transit also ethical realization.

Chapter Outlines

Part I comprises Chapters 1 through 3. Chapter 1 centers on the psychological and political relevance of the African-influenced dance form the limbo. Limbo is an inversion rhythm through which, in the work of Brathwaite, the coerced migrants ritually reorganize visions of self and society. This dance enacts the power of the mythic impulse to plumb the depths of possible existence—a con-verse of the reality defiled under capitalist pressures and that it seeks to restore to sacred space.

Chapter 2 traces similar limbo symbology in the works of Walcott and Naipaul. While Walcott’s castaway’s amnesiac loss or limbo drift is also tabula rasa and condition for rebirth, for Naipaul, Caribbean lost souls remain, with-out hope of creative recovery, suspended in the underworld agony that is the region’s history.

Chapter 3 stresses this soteriological ideal ritually intuited through the landship, jonkonnu, gombey, tuk, the bull play, scrubbing, and myalism. The remarkable coherency of meaning in this repertoire of residual masques derives from their identity as exegetic codes: idiomatic forms that seek to reassess Carib-bean social ordeal in terms of the existential possibilities also coordinated with the sublime trajectory of the soul passage. Resonant with historical, social, and psychic dimensions of archetypal journeys of loss and recovery, these ceremo-nies synchronize “rites of self-mastery,” chronologies of spirit, with typologies of creative cosmic balance. Part II (Chapters 4–7) focuses on the self-constitutive force of image and word. The assortment of residually oral genres here corre-sponds to the comprehensive unit Ruth Finnegan identifies as the mbɔrɔ.10_This

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Intimately related to definite webs of social and cultural networks, these perfor-mances also tune into the self-constitutive mythic project—the art intricately interweaving a politics of resistance.

Chapter 4 examines diasporan variations on the death-rebirth theme and the extent to which these designs proliferate through a variety of art forms. Ritual and mythic innovations consistent with the folk typologies orchestrate forms of play that hold up to scrutiny the intrinsic humanist violations in the supposedly normative ethos marked by slavery, capitalism, sexism, and other reductive centrisms.

Chapter 5 examines lullabies, spells, frivolous rhymes, and songs—music and word powerfully informed by the parodic tradition of proxy diatribe Law-rence Levine, John Szwed and Roger Abrahams, and William Piersen identify as typifications of the plantation discourse of resistance. Media of moral valua-tions, improvisational language formulas correspond to the disruptive categories of African American Toasts and Signifying. These iconoclastic forms act out para-doxes of separation and identification, mediational behaviors characteristic of the outsider-insider ambivalence personified in the social bandit and the trickster.

Chapter 6 examines the symbolism of song and dance as rituals of human searches for a sense of place. The highly analogous and homologous techniques here are functions of syncretic but subversive architectures whereby the coerced migrants evaluate the plantation as a nonnormative site. The proliferating inter-texts destabilize the temporal, spatial, and psychic signifiers radiated through Western conscriptive narratives.

Allegorical insights into psychospiritual and political adjustments individu-als make under duress (seriously and farcically), the fables and tales are the subject of Chapter 7. Events in history and crises in society are reexamined as forms of confrontation with evil the characters initially fail to detect. The for-est settings are used to structure these encounters as psychic dramas as well as mythic journeys of the nekyia—the new landscape reconfigured as a transform-ing primordial underworld.11

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Introduction ● 11

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This pa

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PART I

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This pa

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CHAPTER 1 The Limbo

Ritual Reentry into History

T

he limbo is a dance Ryuta Imafuku describes as a test of the human capacity for adaptability, courage, and skills to surmount obstacles that can oppress the spirit. He sees in the dance the power associated with the trickster god Ananse in that it imitates the spider’s crawl, memorially configuring the history of the Middle Passage as metamorphosis of the slave’s body (“Music”). This mutation is consonant with the iconic activity Benjamin Ray sees as “the primary function of African ritual,” that is, “to ‘control’ the world according to symbolic archetypes. In this way, the world is repeatedly renewed by bringing it into conformity with reality as imagined in symbolic paradigms” (100). Corre-spondingly, the dance is entertained as a mythic subgenre that reverses the agon of slavery, symbolic condition of death, and orients consciousness toward the realm of superconscious spirituality Jonathan Smith names sacred space.1

Ideographic symbol of the ritual passage, the limbo is operative in the residual psychoreligious system as a valuational index of sacred space. Its kinetic activ-ity coordinates ethical energy forms that permeate all levels of realactiv-ity (divine, human, and natural). One such didactic attribute pertains to the dance’s role in evaluating and regulating the human order according to the divine society of the gods. Imposing moral correctives upon the outline of history, this imagina-tive gesture restores metaphysical constitutionality to defiled lives.

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David Wade clarifies as the li. The li structurally acknowledge, he says, the symbiosis in “all living things” and the transformational potential inherent in the “central awareness of invisible energies” that infuse matter (2). Third, in that this interplay ideally projects human society as “a microcosm of the divine society,” maintaining the divine configuration in social space becomes a funda-mental responsibility of the artist—counterpart of the priest who, in African cosmologies, attunes the secular world to the divine order.

Secular Disorder and Cosmic Order

The descent-ascent inversion pattern in the dance configures the first ethical formula, schematizing, as Gordon Rohlehr observes, the redemptive energy of ritual. Reenacting history’s protracted contortion, the limbo exorcizes “the death-in-life in which the New World sensibility hovers” (Pathfinder 206). Because the long trail of trials and losses had not delivered their promise land, the wanderers staged their stasis as tragic crisis and catharsis. These dancers reentered the void, the “ordeal already endured in order to emerge triumphant and purged of past horror”—an iconic drama of struggle and therapy that Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s art explores, Rohlehr adds (207).

The dance (in words Evans Smith employs in a different context) is an epiphany of the underworld as a mythogenetic field. It investigates the Mid-dle Passage as ritually disordered space and time: the submarine depth of the disease-ridden slave ship represented as literal and symbolic labyrinth of death: a god-abandoned space. Keith Sandiford aptly recalls that slavery set the stage on which the Atlantic became a grave for “jettisoned bodies” (25), a perverse initiatory passage that the dance replicates.

Daniel P. Mannix culls details from slavers’ logs that seem to skew Ryuta Imafuku’s hypothesis that slaves devised the limbo in competitive exercises. Chained (at the legs) in twos in coffinlike spaces, slaves experienced difficulty moving, rising, or lying without injuring themselves or their neighbors (106). They lay in their own filth and, moreover, were whipped, raped, and weakened from being poorly fed. On this grim passage, some captains would institute rituals to lighten the slaves’ mood as therapy against suicidal melancholy and scurvy.2_{These “joyless ceremonies,” called “dancing the slaves,” extenuated the}

“useless torture,” the shackles turning their ankles to bleeding flesh (114).3

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The Limbo ● 17

public gestures of defiant self-assertion (98–100). The ideographic remonstra-tion memorializes the underdeck as an infernal labyrinth from which the dancer emergence as one reborn.

Wilson Harris theorizes this resistance in terms of Ananse’s protean identity, his flexibility a polyvalent alterity that counteracts ruthless intolerance. Adapt-ing the trickster god’s mutability and resilience, the limbo dancer elevates from a state of reified reduction to celebrate his spiritual amplification. The spider’s mercurial guises make manifest the irrepressible resources of spirit that defy colonialist predatory restrictions. The literal and figurative burial in the ship’s belly is declared a death the slave endured and vitally transformed.

These inverse images destabilize the “transcendent signifiers,” in Terry Eagle-ton’s phrase (131), the West called on to propagate the universality of its cul-ture. To create and express their own meanings and signal their full possession of themselves, the folk draw on the reversal rite, mapping time spatially in so doing. The journey in history is imagined as a route between spiritual poles— epistemological registers or ethical binaries of defiled and sacred space. These cardinal points carry polemic significations of mythic descent to an infernal abyss and ascent to the illumined sphere of God. The dancer elevates from the ship’s polluted underbelly to the consecrated “burning ground”; via this imagi-native play on the hallowed ascent whereby Moses received the covenant of God (Exodus 19:18–21), Brathwaite conflates social and metaphysical conditions. He imagines the dance ritual as saturated with the inverse dynamics pertain-ing to slavery as inferno and the psychical recovery that cauterizes the polluted space. This religious geometry in the art is basic to the migrants’ search for moral consideration in their immediate surroundings: an aim to transform the plantation and its legacy, that is, the disordered space that the oppressed groups compared to a noxious underworld.

Pertaining to his recognition of locative images as cues to psychological ini-tiatives, Jonathan Smith advances productive schemas for a structuralist analy-sis of the moral figurations centered in the Caribbean folk aesthetic. “Social change is preeminently symbol or symbolic change,” he affirms. “At the heart of the issue of change are the symbolic social questions: what is the place on which I stand? what are my horizons? what are my limits?” Such compass pos-its assumptions regarding aesthetic perspective, says Smith; but more so, he declares, a “total world-view is implied and involved in assuming these postures, one that has to do with a culture’s or an individual’s symbolization of the cos-mos and their place within it” (124–25). “It is through an understanding and symbolization of place that a society or individual creates itself,” adds Smith.4

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participates in human culture—‘the creation by man of a world of meaning in the context of which human life can be significantly lived’” (140–41).

This rite responds thus to colonialists’ moral apprehensions of alien topog-raphies as wild spaces. It is an attitude British historian Thomas Coke pro-pounded via his uncharitable and tautological self-defense to indict Caribbean peoples for, in Edward Said’s phrase, “lying outside the boundaries of European society” (Orientalism 67). The region’s “occasionally insalubrious climates,” Coke says, impairs mind and spirit, “and makes the soul less susceptible of impressions than in other more favorable regions” (178); the Caribs could not, therefore, but live “in a savage state” (178).

As Said explains, self-serving visionary cosmologies of this sort sanctioned desires to box in “individuals, groups, nations, species, each to its own proper place in the universal pattern” (Orientalism 70). Yet Said corroborates this evi-dent tendency to “impose corrections upon new reality, changing it from free-floating objects into units of knowledge” as a natural reaction of “the human mind to resist the assault on it of untreated strangeness” (67). Such spontane-ous self-defense does not excuse, however, imperialist discourtesies. Therein, as Said notes, receivers translate their subjective benefits into what they believe are benefits for those whose reality their metaphors appropriate and their actions oppress. They constantly aim at converting Others “from something into some-thing else” (67).

Conversely, self-mastery, pivotal in Bambara, Dogon, and Fon’s self-concepts, ratifies the symmetry between space and psyche through ritual in order that individuals be nourished by resources in their environments (Zahan 112). Brathwaite finds this symbiotic mediation reassuring and a vital dimension of spirit maintained through ritual: “Man, emerging out of his landscape, devel-ops a certain relationship to that landscape. . . . The . . . concern of the group was to . . . fashion tools out of it in order to live out of it; to find words to name its features” (“World” 53). While marginalization synchronizes, there-fore, with liminal insecurity and fluidity,5_{“home,” informed by a nexus of}

wholeness, becomes valuational correlate of identity. As religious ritual sug-gests, “home” is earthbound and otherworldly: complex of space and spirit, time and timelessness.

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The Limbo ● 19

perception appear as matrices of inner and outer realities Wade links to the hylozoistic archetype, the li—visionary designs of human equilibrium within schemas of social unity and metaphysical harmony. Their song signifying such agonized yearning and euphoric marriage between earth home and spirit home, African American slaves celebrated, in “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” the crossing of Jordan as both ordeal and transcendent spirit passage.

Initiatory resonances in well-chosen eponymous sign systems in Brathwaite’s work highlight this vital confluence between identity and sense of place.6_Such

symbiosis as agency of productive energy in oral cultures informs the concept of the symbol (rite and utterance) as mythic germ of life. Native American author Lawrence J. Evers draws attention to this principle: “A sense of place derives from the perception of a culturally imposed symbolic order on a particular physical topography.” Such a visionary exchange informs Brathwaite’s concept of tidalectics, the precept the poet sees played out in incarnate form as a “tradi-tional early morning old woman of Caribbean history” every morning “sweep-ing the sand of her yard away from her house” on a cliff overhang“sweep-ing the ocean. He speculates that she “believes that if she don’t do this,” her “‘poverty-stricken’ household . . . would have somehow collapse” (29–30). Trope for a refiguring of space, time, and interval (the radical imaginative scope), structural irony here posits ground of freedom. Tidalectics is Brathwaite’s conception of such antinomies: a rhythmic pattern defined by both concord and discord in relation to natural, psychological, and political progressions. This visionary outline is epitome of the cultural form Lévi-Strauss describes as a double-structured event “altogether historical and ahistorical” (51). Brathwaite detects in the drama a figuration of present and past, immediate and remote, temporal and timeless, synchronic and diachronic pressures.

The whole or fulfilled personality is synchronized through ritual, in word and action, with the unbroken or timeless cycles of regeneration. It is in accor-dance with such organic and cosmic rhythms that the Caribbean folk imagi-nary productively reassessed psyche and community—exile recognized therein as paradox: as entropic void and nucleus of energy. The realm of silence within which Caliban’s limbo dance moves, for example, appears as abyss and cre-ative center, recalling the pre-Genesis chaos.7_{Joseph Campbell, who has drawn}

attention to the transcultural symbols that inform human religious experience, offers pertinent insight into this psychocosmic process, positing destruction as a prerequisite to creation since perfection thwarts invention. Every creative pro-cess involves “breaking something up,” he proposes (qtd. in Osbon 18–19).

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endeavor, the absence or silence of God unveils the transposition and inter-diction of a troubling existential hollowness. It is this symbolization Jonathan Smith explains: namely, that “the meaning of life is rooted in an encompassing cosmic order in which man, society and the gods all participate” (125–26). The limbo death-rebirth structure endorses this composite formula, its self-consti-tuting drama, in Patrick J. Quinn’s words, “ritual of space-making.” Identity transformation, Quinn remarks, is tied to the realization “that people by taking possession of a place ritualize that place.” The space-maker knows that “space becomes a ‘place’ only through this ritual transformation” and “that ritual move-ment transforms not only the place but also the participant” (116–17). Thus at the end of Brathwaite’s “Bosompra” in Masks, the candidate’s thrice repeated invocation “asuomerensen” ritualizes his river crossing: the magical utterance an image of the speaker’s reverence before the perilous passage, that is, the trans-formational field into which he is about to enter. The incantation is essentially a mantra, an act of ritualizing space and self—the physical (horizontal) crossing consecrated as a spirit (vertical) passage.

A circuit of such metamorphosing energy, the limbo is, effectively, “mythol-ogy made visible” (Highwater 204), or anagogic expression of the slaves’ living participation in history and life. Brathwaite correlates the iconic morphology of the dance to the migratory activity and propensity for resurgence whereby the mudfish is construed as prototypical survivor. An ideographic symbol of resur-rection, the fish demonstrates a dynamic spirit energy the speaker incarnates in “Bosompra.” Seeking refuge from “the wind’s anger,” the exile returns to his roots insisting that, like a mudfish, he eats time. Facing the mortification of being “lost” and “tossed among strangers,” he recovers germinal ground where “stones / give lips to water” (136–37). To “eat” time is to ingest spiritual nur-turance, the act of remigration disburdening the exile of the defiling history. Moses’s extraction of water from desert stone (Numbers 20:11) complements the mudfish’s penchant for locating the life-giving power of terrestrial and subterrestrial water. The imaginal journey corresponds to the hallowed pas-sage of the Hebrew leader. The supernatural act and the natural phenomena regarding the fish (that traverses dry land to new pools and aestivates, appear-ing thus to die and resurrect) are close to divine achievements among the Benin who link water to healing, rebirth, newness, and purity—figurative components of order (Fraser 10).

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The Limbo ● 21

forward, essentially, also, wrestling with those counter forces that weigh down and stymie this energy. The mythic schematism inflecting both literary and oral modes conducts the dislocated migrants across the exacting thresholds of inevi-table human transformations. The religious character of the conversion points to the actors’ awareness that conscious as well as unconscious life patterns under capitalist repression had, thereby, to be adjusted.

Brathwaite, invoking ghosts of history, and Walcott, magically naming spirit-essences of the land, create out of or find meaning in the formal exer-cise of severance. The interval in which the candidate’s mind is significantly cut off from predispositions that characterize the discarded life phase becomes site of mediation. This interval is coordinated with the dancer’s passage under the limbo bar, symbolic boundary between defiled and sacred spaces. The bar defines the point at which the radical, self-creative act of the imagination puts the coerced adventurer in touch with the proper forms and attitudes requisite to survival at this critical life station. The dance memorializes the magic of the ritual passage as pathway to the miracle of divine knowledge. Thus exploring the journey in history as ordeal through which the self is renewed, the initiate emerges from the colonialist crisis with the attributes of a soul reborn.8

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as a cosmic totality,” man as “half matter, half metaphysical.” Deren notes that vodun centers on the “concept of the Marassa, the notion of the segmentation of some original cosmic totality” (38), privileging, as in the Dogon cosmogony, the “simultaneous physical and spiritual constitution of a person” (Griaule and Diertelen 56). This gestalt concept drives Dogon “rites which accompany and follow the individual’s death” (56). In the Caribbean worldview, basically, this metaphysic is adapted to service the political demand for liberation; the death from which the soul resurrects is the abyss of colonialist history.9

Such cyclical or renewal energy informs the symbolic subsystem whereby Brathwaite’s Caliban, prototype of the limbo dancer, ritualizes the ground of thralldom. Mythologized as mediating and mutinous spirit, he reenters the underworld of slavery and converting perilous crisis to creative interval champi-ons a humanist order. He renegotiates labyrinthine mazes of history and alien-ated self, suggestive vortices of death figured as his drowning in the Middle Passage. This imaginative journey inaugurates a creative self-scrutiny whose goal is the redeemed or illumined soul.

Overlooking this schema of creative inversion demarcating Caliban’s vision-ary spirit passage, Margaret Paul Joseph decries the lack of a redemptive motif in “Caliban.” She indicts Brathwaite’s entire work she proclaims but a telescoping of “slavery and its effect on the African-Caribbean psyche, of the amnesia that hinders any attempt to construct a realistic line of continuity.” “Brathwaite’s political satire,” she adds, “turns Caliban into a pathetic rather than a positive figure, an impression carried on in his latest book X/Self. . . . Brathwaite’s desire to construct an alternative world—preferably African—into which Caliban can fit with ease, only perpetuates the notion of exile and rootlessness” (14–15).

Both the “Rights of Passage” and the “X/Self” identities that Joseph censures imply loss but within allusive contexts of initiatory mythic conventions. Cali-ban is characterized by organic, not static, principle; his “drowning” pertains to cyclical cosmic processes linked to death as threshold of generational energy. This metaphysical principle reassures the wanderer in the uncharted forest of Brathwaite’s “Techiman,” metaphorical site for history’s disorienting drift; he affirms faith in his recovery of sacred space, declaring that “the way lost” antici-pates being “found / again” (Arrivants 119).

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The Limbo ● 23

planetary forms correlated to the earth’s self-creating rhythm of night and day that conceptually unify Brathwaite’s second trilogy. While MotherPoem

(lunar current) is juxtaposed against solar energy in SunPoem, the two cen-trifugal forces amalgamate in the final volume X/Self. This generative complex is informed by the Bakongo philosophical ideal that articulates cosmological, biological, and ideological correspondences related to the fourth and climactic era called “Luvemba time.” This evolution phase follows “Tukula time,” “high-est level of creativity” or maturity of the organism, a fertility motif progressively relating X/Self (the trilogy’s climactic volume) to SunPoem, icon of the Son— Osiris, Nummo, and Christ, for example, avatars bearing the divine spark of regenerative potency. The myth states that “Maghungu,” who emerged in this auspicious era as an “androgynous being, complete by x-self” was a sacred agency for reorganizing the world. Through him a new stage of time began.10

Effectively, the space the colonizer sanctions as a zone of marginality and death, the colonized reverse ritually as axismundi. Interrogating the reifying capitalist code, these artists privilege creative alternatives; the life principle embodied in the x-self codifies ideals of balance that liberate from the stasis of in-betweenness or limbo. Ideographic unit for a distinct law of nature, the “x-self” is an ethical critique of the life-negating influence of capitalist hege-monies that ruptured human creative identification with cosmic energy forms. Remarkably, the titles that Joseph deems impressions of teleology and sta-sis Brathwaite evokes for their resonances regarding the creative manifestation the human will is capable of bringing into being. He represents ritual and art as conscious forms that unify matter and the infinite ideal of spirit. This psy-chospiritual awareness he sees in the limbo dance that realigns the ego to the magical and mysterious life-force. In fact, Brathwaite prods Caribbean artists to sound out ethical bearings posited on visionary marriages of natural life cycles and mythic stages of soul. This empathetic awakening he calls act of “com-munion with: which is the essence of any religious feeling” (“Tree of Time” 111).11_{Rohlehr describes this motif, the rhythmic, regenerative principles}

man-ifested in nature and myth, as Brathwaite’s vision of the folk “constantly recre-ating themselves with each new violation” and promoting the idea, he adds, of “the psyche as a self-renewing organism, capable of several deaths and several rebirths” (203).

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reciprocity between marginality and liminality in the Caribbean imaginary— the physical and spiritually in-betweenness that characterized the sense of dis-placement enslaved Africans felt. Webster’s New Twentieth Century Dictionary

offers intriguing pointers relative to the gnosis of the dance despite obvious question regarding the extent to which the African inflected rite was originally named in accordance with European etymology.12_{Being “in limbo” is related to}

“a margin,” to being “in or on the border.” It is physical site of dislocation: “a prison or imprisonment”; “a place or condition of neglect or oblivion to which unwanted things or persons are relegated.” “Limbo” is also a spiritual condition, referring in Christian theologies to the abode for the souls of good men or of unbaptized infants not accepted into heaven but not bad enough to be sent to hell; in the Catholic religion, the limbo is recognized as such a “way station, a kind of middle passage.”

Basil Davidson describes this archetypal outline as a crucial identity marker in traditional African cultures. Therein, migrant groups espoused a survival spirit by constantly revising their identities they chronicled as journeys in space, time, and consciousness. This idea of a fluid universe, its perpetual motion pro-gramming the flux of human life in it informs architectural metaphors in Rights ofPassage. Via a ritual demand of self-making, to “build / again the new / vil-lages,” the nomadic group seeks a stable order in the face of nature’s inexorable law: namely, that “square frames / crack,” “wood / rots,” and “mortar” “remains mortal” (7). Self constructs were ritualized, Davidson explains, as “resistance to disturbance or upheaval” which went “hand-in-hand with an absorptive flex-ibility of adaptation” by formative communities in tenuous landscapes. The tra-dition of Afro-Caribbean folk forms that Brathwaite echoes can be understood in this conceptual context. John F. Szwed and Roger D. Abrahams stress that Africans on the plantations endured processes of “desocialization rather than deculturation.” While deemphasizing wholesale carryovers, they locate a set of “shared expectations, attitudes, and feelings” whose “cultural continuities are obvious and long-lasting.” Thus they follow Richard Price in probing “beneath the relatively superficial level of form” where there is to be found “a significant, non-conscious level of psychological function,” a deeply embedded mode of “cultural tenacity” remarkable for “its basic commonality with West African religious behavior.”13

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The Limbo ● 25

upset one’s conception of the world and one’s place in it and so the person who sojourned in a new landscape was “no longer himself.” Travel inspired fear and required protective rites; the return, too, was “celebrated as an event intimately tied to the life and ‘resurrection’ of the traveler” (90).

Barbara Walker expounds the psychopolitical imperative of this archetype, pointing to the limbo as sacred structure also informing Brahman rebirth cer-emonies. A person “expelled from his caste may be restored to it after passing several times under the belly of a cow” (181). This parturition ritual stood for the initiate’s restoration from exile—liminality a “death,” necessitating a ritual of “return” or “resurrection.” Jung, declaring this principle a structura-tion of the unconscious mind, traced its pattern through the symbolism of alchemy he saw as a concern for the integrated personality. The alchemists’ maxim solveetcoagula (“dissolve and combine”) spoke of reducing substance to first matter and building a new substance by adding desirable elements to this base. In psychological terms, the elements of consciousness surrounding and obscuring one’s basic self were destroyed so that a new integrated person-ality could be reconstructed.

This death-rebirth rhythm projects an organic or magically compensatory view of the world. The dawn climaxing Masks suggested this insight: discern-ment of a primary archetype of the living universe. Attaining such illumina-tion signaled the creative energy that reversed the descent. The limbo stages the migrants’ experience as perception of this transitory ideal: their fixation in consciousness on a metaphysic of the cyclical. Death and rebirth, that which falls and renews is understood thus as the truest and most reassuring expression of the nature of the displaced groups’ reality. Thereby reenacting the crisis of history as configuration of the life cycle, a pattern of psychic breakdown and recuperation, the art dramatizes the exile’s inner reassurance against outer chaos. According to this faith in a gestalt of natural, human, and divine essences, life was to be approached as “both suprasensible and material in its terms of refer-ence, within a society both ‘right and natural’ in that it was ‘godmade’ as well as manmade” (Davidson 55). Diasporan peoples, unable to address their crisis of identity through what Davidson calls traditional processes of negotiation with the host community, thus explored new rituals to adapt past to present, outer to inner truths.

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and therefore it has the ability to join past, present, and the future in one space of supreme valuation.” The holistic validation of self in the Caribbean mani-fests this tidalectic energy. This ideal concerns the constant circulation of the life-force coterminous with the cosmic principle John Mbiti explains as an “indestructible, rhythm of nature” and a concept of history that “moves ‘back-ward.’ . . . In traditional African thought, there is no concept of history moving ‘forward’ towards a future climax, or towards the end of the world” (23).

It is this synchronicity of ethical and cosmic forces that Brathwaite represents also in visionary reciprocities of temporal and spatial, religious and sociopoliti-cal identities. The binary infrastructures “ecosystems” and “biospheric cultures” exhibit these homologies positively and negatively, respectively. These ideolo-gies correlate to “the circle (traditional) and the missile (expansionist)”—the latter inclined “to imperialist civilization” (“World” 54). Attuned to nature’s progressive cycles of reversal rhythms, the former economy gives scope to the holistic life energies that initiate the visionary synthesis or thrust toward creative reconciliation informing Brathwaite’s art: “There might be slavery, yes: but lib-eration also; it might be schistosomiasis, dungle, the kiss of alcohol: but never-theless growth: process out of that: a constant transformation. So that my own aesthetic formulation for ourselves begins with rhythm: survival rhythm, eman-cipation rhythm, transfiguration rhythm; and how the one, the ego, comes to this, comes out of this, relates to this and us and others” (64–65).

Brathwaite’s tidalectics thus interrogates Hegel’s dialectics.14_{Insisting on}

regenerative rather than apocalyptic rhythms, this theory codifies the life cycle as a crucial chart for evolutionary and revolutionary stages of soul.15

Coordinating Psyche and Living Landscape

In mediating integrated psychical and geographical fulfillments, the ritualist reenacts the primal supposition that survival must be affirmed publicly in the face of cosmic insecurity. The limbo thus assumes moral and religious signifi-cance of the sort that, as Paul Ricoeur says, recounts “the final victory of order over chaos.” The movements of descent and ascent in the dance are twin aspects associ-ated with the redeemer, whether Nommo or Christ. The archetype of redemp-tive agency, Jung explains, is “the descending, incarnate God, and the ascending Gnostic Christ who returns to the Father.” This trajectory of submission and elevation, death and rebirth is a fundamental principle too of vodun and myalist masques. Deren explains this ritual morphology: “The hero of man’s metaphysical adventure—his healer, his redeemer, his guide and guardian—is always a corpse. He is Osiris, or Adonis, or Christ” (23), or Nommo, or loa, it is pertinent to add.

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The Limbo ● 27

distinguished from the slaver (the marine ship) the slaves saw as medium of death. The iconic penetration of terrestrial and marine currents in the name refers to the concept of balance or regenerative pairing Fraser declares a fun-damental epistemological ideal in African cosmology (20). According to this reference, the dance comes out of and reorders the critical limbo condition of in-betweenness. It converts fragmentation and incoherence to a complex accul-turated identity.

The amphibious or hybrid subjectivity of the dance connotes the same fluid-ity that Brathwaite implies in the titles RightsofPassage and TheArrivants—the eponymous chronologies processes of initiatory metamorphoses and markers of protean adaptability. The “chaos” or “repetition” that Antonio Benitez Rojo has in mind is evoked in these allusions. They point to the disorder that factors into the formative influence of the interval or in-betweenness, locative tropes for the psychic and cultural dislocation Sylvia Wynter positively theorizes. She observes, regarding the Caribbean, that “in the interstices of history we see glimpses, evidences of a powerful and pervasive cultural process which has largely determined the unconscious springs of our being” (35). Wynter is speak-ing of time as actspeak-ing on the imagination to shape the ground of the miraculous and prophetic transformation of self and society. Ritual and verbal art, imaginal or symbolic form, was the means whereby the exile imposed familiar structures of mind upon the unfamiliar reality, converting demoralizing waste to “mans-cape” or mythogenetic source.

The Middle Passage assumes meaning in frameworks of traditional presup-positions surrounding (1) the genetic principle and (2) the synchronization of human activities and natural phenomena. Diagrammatic web separating and bridging Africa and the Caribbean, the seascape assumes mystical significance as homologous complex (presence/absence, contiguity/hiatus). Ratifying the violence inscribed in an organic process, the principle that renews while it destroys (an ambiguity informing the opening fire leitmotif in TheArrivants), the Atlantic mirrors the life chronology codified according to the African eco-logical and social calendar. The sea passage, interval between spatial markers, appears also to separate temporal cycles that, correspondingly, must be bridged ritually; thereby the marginal expanse will transform to safe harbor.

Afro Caribbean Poetry and Ritual

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Afro-Caribbean Poetry and Ritual

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Contents

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Preface

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Acknowledgments

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Introduction

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PART I

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CHAPTER 1

The Limbo

Ritual Reentry into History

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